by Stacy Schiff
Saint-Exupéry’s best-known encounter with the elements took place around the new year, when he regularly traveled the Patagonian route in a Laté 25. He was to remember the adventure as his most brutal, but while he held dinner tables spellbound with the tale for years he did not write it up until 1938, at the urging of his American publisher.* He had been flying south to Comodoro Rivadavia, long enough into his South American tenure to be on the lookout for the gray-blue tint in the sky that—past the marshes of Trelew—indicated he should brace himself for trouble. Generally this battle lasted about an hour; it was, claimed the pilot, an ordeal but not a drama. On this day, however, the sky south of Trelew was a disconcertingly pure blue. This was the sign of an invisible enemy; he would have preferred a good, black, ominous-looking storm, which he would have known how to circumvent. Moreover, to his right, on a level with the Andes, floated “a sort of ash-colored streamer in the sky.” Saint-Exupéry felt a tremor; minutes later the sky blew up around him. The Latécoère came to a dead stop in midair, then began to plunge to earth in an abrupt series of spins and shivers and slides. One image came to his mind: “I was a man who, carrying a pile of plates, had slipped on a waxed floor and let his scaffolding of porcelain crash.” One escape came to mind: he had to reach the sea, which was flat, and over which the wind would not be bottled up with the intensity it was in the valley.
Suddenly the aircraft—at this time only about 200 feet off the ground—was swept 1,500 feet into the air. Saint-Exupéry was indeed sent out to sea, but he was not himself at the controls: “I had been spat out to sea by a monstrous cough, vomited out of my valley as from the mouth of a howitzer.” Five miles from the coast he was again powerless to move; he felt as if he were single-handedly battling the whole sky. He worried that his wings would hold, that his hands, frozen to the wheel for forty minutes, would continue to obey him, that his gas pumps would continue firing; already his engine had begun to sputter from all the turbulence. Later he was to find that his storage batteries had been pried by the storm up out of the roof of the plane, that his wings had come unglued (only the forward part of the aircraft was reinforced with metal; the rear portion remained fabric-covered), that some of the Latécoère’s steel cables had been whittled down to single strands. (Later, too, he was to say that he was carrying a passenger with him on this occasion, an Argentine journalist who was so shaken he had tried to jump.) He attempted desperately but unsuccessfully to climb; each time he was thrown off balance by a new gust. He let himself be blown south, and in one hour managed finally to cover the five miles to shore. Using the coast as shelter he was able to continue toward Comodoro Rivadavia. He had seen the worst of the storm, and was able, at an altitude of about 900 feet, to reach the town’s airfield. A platoon of soldiers had been called out to meet him and to tame the Laté into its hangar, an operation that took an hour. Saint-Exupéry’s shoulders ached; his hands were cramped; he was exhausted; internally he felt as if he had been crushed; he must have looked a sight for having been lashed about by the wind in an open cockpit. In all of this he claimed there was no obvious drama of which to speak. He had been far too busy for emotion. “I climbed out of the cockpit and walked off,” reported Saint-Exupéry. “There was nothing to say.”
On the exoticism of the Argentine south he was far more loquacious. Patagonia proved a rich consolation for Buenos Aires and Saint-Exupéry succumbed to it immediately, finding in this wilderness an ample supply of the enchantment he so prized. In Buenos Aires culture was in its infancy; in Patagonia, civilization felt only weeks old. Over desolate towns fitted between glaciers and volcanoes he was able to reflect anew on the things that bring men together, on the “fragile gildings” of civilization. The sheer dimensions of the territory must have awed him—the five regions that make up Patagonia are alone one and a half times the size of France—and the virgin expanses of the place must have been a feast for the eyes, especially to a pilot who claimed to be familiar with every rock and dune that lay between Toulouse and Dakar. He was far from the first to appreciate the majesty of this uniformly gray region, a desolate, stony plain populated mostly by sheep, where all is somber and windswept and fantastically seductive. Charles Darwin had perfectly enunciated the riddle of the place a century earlier: “Yet, in passing over these scenes, without one bright object near, an ill-defined but strong sense of pleasure is vividly excited.” Bustling Comodoro Rivadavia did not excite Saint-Exupéry; the center of the Argentine petrol industry, around which more than 350 wells operated, was not to his mind a town in which one could live. Entirely devoid of trees, women, homes, it was a town “in which one traded ten years of one’s life for gold.… It was a settlement lost amid the winds and rejected by the earth.” Twelve miles away was a beach thick with seals, however (naturally he flew one back to Buenos Aires in the fall of 1929); farther on was one overrun by penguins. And in the towns huddled against the wind farther south he thought the miraculous nature of man, very much by contrast, abundantly clear.
If indeed there are different kinds of silence, one of the densest in the world hung over these outposts of Patagonia, the southernmost settlements on the globe. The dwellers of this region had not seen their families in years; until the arrival of Aéropostale, they had been connected to the capital only by an unreliable ten-day boat service and Morse code. When the aviators appeared they did so, then, as heaven-sent emissaries. Five minutes after a landing in South America, observed Saint-Exupéry, hands were held out; in Patagonia, whole towns opened their doors. “Imagine,” he wrote, “that just as you were to step out of the Dijon train station, a stranger were to accost you and say, ‘I welcome you, partly on behalf of the city of Dijon. Man cannot live without friendships; he can create nothing without assistance. You have a right to do both. Do not thank me.” ’ On one occasion—not in Patagonia but 500 miles north of Buenos Aires—the welcoming committee turned out, to Saint-Exupéry’s astonishment, to be French. These were not, however, the French of Dijon; this couple had been recast in the mores of their new land. Descending from a beat-up Ford, Monsieur and Madame Fuchs announced to a man on whom they had never before set eyes, whom they found in a meadow tinkering with a recalcitrant airplane, “We will come to fetch you for dinner.”
In Puerto Deseado, a coastal town of 200 low-lying houses situated at the mouth of a river, he got a hero’s welcome and a tour from the mayor. He was entirely seduced. “Nowhere have I encountered a more noble race of men than that of the Argentines of the south,” he wrote the following year in a passage that should have but did not become part of Wind, Sand and Stars:
Arrived to build cities on these deserted lands, they built them. A city in their hands became a living thing, to be shaped, to be protected, to be cherished like a child. These men did not dream of exploiting the land to return, enriched, to their paradises. They had come to establish themselves here for good, to found a race of men. It would be difficult to find elsewhere so developed a sense of society, of cooperation, so much serenity. Theirs was the serenity of men who address only the great problems. Once again I had here the opposite impression of that of Comodoro, a sense of brushing up against another era, one in which man settled himself on earth, chose his campsite, and lay the first stone of his new town’s fortifications.
These were towns so new they had built schools for a generation of children not yet conceived. Their cemeteries were empty; they were only just surviving their first brush with adultery. In Puerto Deseado Saint-Exupéry visited the spacious compound the town had designed for a leper; having had none of their own, they had gone to great lengths to import one from Buenos Aires. He made a lasting impression on the pilot, who watched over a barbed-wire fence as the sick man emerged from his house. Leaning heavily on his cane, he made a slow tour of his yard. After a quick glance at the ocean and without acknowledging his visitors, he disappeared again into his cheerful, red-tiled home. Saint-Exupéry felt that after his long separation from the affairs of men the leper oriented himself wit
h the natural world, turned to the sound of the ocean and not toward that of the town. He had lost a good deal along with his fingers and yet he had lost nothing at all: “Ambition, jealousy, honor—all of the emotions to which society entitles a man—none of these could stir him any longer. He had attained an inhuman peace.”
The night flying—of which he would do more this year than ever again—inspired Saint-Exupéry to rise to descriptive heights in his next novel, written in South America in 1930. He would expound at dinners on the oddities of Patagonia for the rest of his life: on Punta Arenas, “a town born of the chance presence of a little mud between the timeless lava and the austral ice”; on the Indians who wore only guanaco skins, which they turned fur- or hide-side out depending on the direction of the wind; on the sheep of Tierra del Fuego who, when asleep, disappeared in the snow, but whose frozen breath looked from the air like hundreds of tiny chimneys. What he mostly treasured and what he preserved for himself from his arduous exploration of the Patagonian route were the odd encounters in the primitive landscape, however; the balls held in the aviators’ honor in corrugated iron shacks, probably the only official banquets of his life at which he shone; the glow that humanity emitted in a cold climate. To his mother he wrote rhapsodically of the towns along the Strait of Magellan, towns farther south even than Río Gallegos, the offical terminus of the mail route. Here all suddenly became green. Saint-Exupéry was enchanted by “these men who, accustomed to being cold, to huddling around fires, had become so warm-hearted.” This new attempt to settle an ancient corner of the world was for him an advertisement for the fragility of all that glitters, for the essentials too quickly forgotten in Buenos Aires or Saint-Germain. Here earthly law still prevailed; Saint-Exupéry could feel the tug of nature. It was this corner of the world that led him, in a 1933 NRF article, to use for the first time the expression “la terre des hommes.” In the Patagonian context he did so ironically. Nowhere could it have seemed clearer that this was not “man’s own earth”; nowhere did man look punier. Yet Saint-Exupéry stood in awe of the modest race of men who settled here, a race to which he did not belong. They were the carpenters, the gardeners, the smiths, the creative and custodial men whose quiet heroism he lauded in all of his later writings. For him these frontiersmen were the true noblemen, tiny but seigneurial in a barren landscape punctuated by volcanoes, from the occasional crater of which rose—“as if from a cracked pot”—a green tree. Visions of the Little Prince danced in his head.
~
Garlanded in bulbs, dazzling, especially to a European eye, in its profligate nighttime display of electricity, boasting entertainments that did rival those of Paris, Buenos Aires moved to a different rhythm. So did Saint-Exupéry when he was at home. He saw as much as he could of the newly married Guillaumet, also based in Buenos Aires, although given both men’s travels these visits occurred less frequently than Saint-Exupéry might have hoped. He lit up visibly when reunited with his friend; he was clearly loath to leave him in the evenings, as Madame Guillaumet’s tales of Saint-Exupéry falling asleep in their elevator, or in the taxi on his way home, attest. In a piece he wrote later about Mermoz, Saint-Exupéry paid tribute to the traveling hearth of his professional family at which—in Casablanca, in Buenos Aires, in Dakar—he stopped to warm his hands and to finish a sentence begun long before, often on another continent, likely to be continued on a third. In Buenos Aires the exchange of tales of snowstorms and cyclones and hair-raising landings with Mermoz, Guillaumet, Reine, Étienne, Antoine, and Delaunay continued in congenial restaurants, over immense steaks, chased down by an abundant supply of Mendozan wine, until early morning.
Impossible as it was to take a leisurely stroll through Buenos Aires, it was agreeable to go swimming or boating at the city’s resort at El Tigre, the lush delta formed at the intersection of the Paraná and Uruguay rivers just north of the city, an area described approvingly by another Frenchman as “the delta of the Nile made to resemble the lakes of the Bois de Boulogne.” Probably Saint-Exupéry joined his colleagues here during the last months of 1929 and the first few of 1930. The Argentine summer is the only time of year when the Buenos Aires climate can be called disagreeable; toward February and March the humidity can be oppressive enough that a billiard cue will seem as if it has been retrieved from the bath. He reported regularly to the Aéropostale offices, not far from his apartment, on Buenos Aires’s international banking street; the bistro at the corner was a popular gathering place for all of the airline’s employees. A table was at all times reserved for the Aéropostale personnel at a small hotel called the Père Bach, much frequented by the French colony; for apéritifs the aviators favored the Richmond Bar, not far from Saint-Exupéry’s front door; the nightclub of choice was the Tabaris, where the rituals concerning the sexes were a little less elaborate than elsewhere and the floor show of fairly good quality. If he had not learned to enjoy this kind of nightlife, Saint-Exupéry had since Dakar at least come to appreciate some of its better-known attractions. His taste ran to the blonde and French-speaking.
Mostly, however, and to the point of exhaustion, he flew. He took his role as an inspector seriously and put a good deal of time into prospecting, outfitting, and supervising the mail lines to Patagonia and Paraguay. He reported having covered the 1,500 miles from Patagonia to Buenos Aires in one day. He might fly for eighteen or twenty hours straight, stopping only to refuel; he reported he could now pilot half-asleep; he had time to write mostly when back in Buenos Aires or, as he was renowned for doing when the weather was fine and the plane flying more or less of its own accord, in midair. His cockpits were littered with papers; passages of Night Flight were composed as well in the lobbies of some not very prepossessing backwater hotels a few hours before dawn. Although Saint-Exupéry had ascended to the administrative echelon he was still part of that well-coordinated, herculean race against the clock that would animate this next novel, and he flew the occasional mail as well. While there were fewer misadventures than there had been at Juby the life continued to be one of permanent adventure. The mail flights offered a full catalogue of hazards and their pilots demonstrated all kinds of bravado: Saint-Exupéry was forced down on narrow beaches bordered by impenetrable forests. He sailed neatly under electrical wires in order to avoid what some pilots might have deemed the lesser risk of landing long on a runway. He expertly treated a mechanic stung by a scorpion, making an incision around the bite with a penknife and sucking the venom from the mechanic’s shoulder. He enlisted the aid—after having landed hard in a field, with a heavily loaded plane—of a village blacksmith so as to get the mail through on time. Two of the rivets holding the cabin to the fuselage had given way, and one of the aircraft’s four longerons had cracked. The blacksmith had no trouble rebolting the cabin but was a little mystified by the longeron problem. He settled on a length of fence wire for the repair, attaching it to the two ends of the tubing and knotting it tightly, thereby forcing the two long metal supports back together. In flight the repair began progressively to give way, so that the radio operator—new to the South American line—was left to survey expanses of Argentine dandelions through the fuselage. By the time Saint-Exupéry reached Buenos Aires the crack was clearly visible from the ground; it sent Raoul Roubes, the chief Pacheco mechanic, running out to the airstrip to meet the Latécoère as it landed. Before Roubes could say a word, Saint-Exupéry had him up on the running board admiring the blacksmith’s handiwork. “But you’re sick,” Roubes informed the pilot, “the fuselage was on the verge of breaking in half!” “We would have got out our parachutes!” responded Saint-Exupéry airily, without a glimpse at his pale-faced radio operator.
In May 1930 he prepared to make a Buenos Aires—Asunción run in a newly arrived Latécoère 28, one which had not yet been entirely broken in. A troupe of actors from one of France’s national theaters was in town, and like most visiting dignitaries paid a visit to the terrain at Pacheco. Saint-Exupéry invited the nine men and women to join him on the trip to Asun
ción, an invitation that was readily accepted. Presumably because he had already filled the plane to capacity, he did not take a radio operator along on the flight. The trip north went off without a hitch but the next day, long after Asunción had announced Saint-Exupéry’s departure, the Latécoère had yet to return to Buenos Aires. The head of the Pacheco field began to pace nervously. When there was no sign of Saint-Exupéry the following day he sent out a search party; it turned up no trace of plane or pilot. Late that second afternoon Raoul Roubes looked up to see the Laté 28 come in for a landing. He ran to greet the pilot, who emerged from the cockpit unshaven, his shoes barely holding to his feet, covered up to his knees in mud, and entirely radiant. He had been caught in a violent storm and been forced down in the countryside, where he and his passengers had opted, after a long, muddy trek, to spend the evening in a rustic hotel. In the gift shop of this establishment they had each purchased a change of clothes. As they filed off the plane the actors looked more like the company of a traveling circus, outfitted in pajamas and bathrobes of every imaginable color. Monkeys and parrots rode on the women’s shoulders, to which hung their disheveled hair; a collection of bras and panties had been left to dry from the windows of the airplane. The travelers were in far better humor than the Pacheco chief, who had been worried sick for two days. He informed the exuberant pilot that if he had come to Buenos Aires “to play the fool” he could count on a speedy return to France.
