In Patagonia

by Bruce Chatwin

  ‘Do you wish your pipe, Onkel?’

  ‘Bitte.’ And she brought a big meerschaum and filled it with tobacco from a blue and white jar.

  The old man poured himself a tankard of chicha. As the rain slammed on the roof, he talked about the Colonia Nueva Alemania. His uncles settled here in 1905 and he had followed after the Great War.

  ‘What could I do? The Fatherland was in a bad condition. Before the war, no family could have enough sons. One was a soldier. One was a carpenter, and two stayed on the farm. But after 1918 Germany was full of refugees from the Bolsheviks. Even the villages were full.’

  His brother lived on the family farm on the borders of Bavaria and Wurttemberg. They wrote letters once a month but had not met since 1923.

  ‘The war was the biggest mistake in history,’ Anton Hahn said. He was obsessed by the war. ‘Two peoples of the Superior Race ruining each other. Together England and Germany could have ruled the world. Now even Patagonia is returning to the indigenas. This is a pity.’

  He went on lamenting the decline of the West and, at one point, dropped the name Ludwig.

  ‘Mad Ludwig?’

  ‘The King? Mad? You call the King mad? In my house? No!’

  I had to think fast.

  ‘Some people call him mad,’ I said, ‘but, of course, he was a great genius.’

  Anton Hahn was hard to pacify. He stood up and lifted his tankard.

  ‘You will join me,’ he said.

  I stood.

  ‘To the King I To the last genius of Europe! With him died the greatness of my race!’

  The old man offered me dinner, but I refused, having eaten with the soprano two hours before.

  ‘You will not leave my house until you have eaten with us. After that you may go where you will.’

  So I ate his ham and pickles and sun-coloured eggs and drank his apple chicha which went to my head. Then I asked him about Wilson and Evans.

  ‘They were gentlemen,’ he said. ‘They were friends of my family and my uncles buried them. My cousin knows the story.’

  The old woman was tall and thin and her yellowing skin fell from her face in folds. Her hair was white and cut in a fringe across her eyebrows.

  ‘Yes. I remember Wilson and Evans. I had four years at the time.’

  It was a hot, windless day in early summer. The Frontier Police, eighty of them, had been hunting the outlaws up and down the Cordillera. The Police were criminals themselves, mostly Paraguayos; you had to be white or Christian to join. Everyone in Rio Pico liked the North Americans. Her mother, Dona Guillermina, dressed Wilson’s hand, right here in the kitchen. They could easily have gone over into Chile. How could they know the Indian would betray them?

  ‘I remember them bringing in the bodies,’ she said. ‘The Fronterizas brought them down on an ox-cart. They were here, outside the gate. They had swelled up in the heat and the smell was terrible. My mother sent me to my room so I shouldn’t see. Then the officer cut the heads off and came up the steps, here, carrying them by the hair. And he asked my mother for preserving alcohol. You see, this Agencia in New York was paying five thousand dollars a head. They wanted to send the heads up there and get the money. This made my father very angry. He shouted them to give over the heads and the bodies and he buried them.’

  The storm was passing. Columns of grey water fell on the far side of the valley. Along the length of the apple orchard was a line of blue lupins. Wherever there were Germans there were blue lupins.

  By the corral a rough wood cross stuck out of a small mound. The arching stems of a pampas rose sprung up as if fertilized by the bodies. I watched a grey harrier soaring and diving, and the sweep of grass and the thunderheads turning crimson.

  The old man had come out and was standing behind me.

  ‘No one would want to drop an atom bomb on Patagonia,’ he said.

  33

  WHO WERE Wilson and Evans?

  Anything is possible in the murk of outlaw history, but there are a few clues:

  On January 29th 1910, Police Commissioner Milton Roberts wrote to Pinkerton’s in New York with descriptions of Llwyd ApIwan’s murderers. Evans was about 35. Height 5ft 7in. Thick set. Colour of hair red but probably false. Wilson was younger, about 25. Height around 5ft 11in. Slight build. Fair hair. Tanned. Nose short and straight. Walks with the right foot turned out. (Remember also that Wilson was the crack shot, not Evans.)

  Roberts added that Wilson had been a companion of Duffy (Harvey Logan), in Patagonia and in Montana where they had done a train robbery. This can only be the Wagner Train Hold-up on June 3rd 1901. The composition of the gang was: Harvey Logan, Butch Cassidy, Harry Longabaugh, Ben Kilpatrick ‘The Tall Texan’, with O. C. Hanks and Jim Thornhill in charge of horses.

  Roberts’s letter assumes that Evans and Wilson and Ryan and Place were four separate individuals. But his descriptions tally exactly with those for Cassidy and the Kid, except in the matter of age. This is not an insuperable problem. The Welsh policeman never saw the outlaws face to face. And I found, in Patagonia, that people had the habit of underestimating age by ten to fifteen years.

  Yet the grave at Rio Pico is impossible to square with Lula Betenson’s account of her brother’s return unless the following is true: Butch Cassidy is said to have told friends in Utah that the Sundance Kid was gunned down in South America, but that he escaped and travelled with an Indian boy on a kind of Huck Finn idyll. Recently I had a letter from Señor Francisco Juárez in Buenos Aires, which appeared to support this conjecture. He went to Rio Pico after my visit and was told that Evans had got away from the Fronterizas, and that the man buried beside Wilson was an English member of the gang.

  34

  I LEFT Rio Pico and came to a Scottish sheep-station. The notice on the gate read ‘Estancia Lochinver—1.444 kilometres’. The gate was in excellent trim. On the post was a painted topknot in the form of a thistle.

  I walked the 1.444 kilometres and reached a house of corrugated iron, with twin gables and a high pitched roof, built in a style more suitable for granite. The Scotsman stood on the steps, a big, gristly man with white hair and black eyebrows. He had been rounding up sheep all day. Three thousand animals grazed in his paddock. He was expecting the shearers in the morning.

  ‘But ye can’t trust ’em to come when they say. Ye can’t even talk to people in this country. Ye can’t tell ’em they did a bad job or they’ll pack and leave. Ye tell ’em anything’s wrong and they’ll cut the beasts to ribbons. Aye, it’s a butchery, not a shearing that they do.’

  His father had been a crofter on the island of Lewis and came out when the big sheep companies were opening up. The family did well, bought land, learned a little Spanish, and kept Scotland in their hearts.

  He wore the kilt and piped at Caledonian Balls. He had one set of pipes sent from Scotland and another he made himself in the long Patagonian winter. In the house there were views of Scotland, photographs of the British Royal Family, and Karsh’s picture of Winston Churchill.

  ‘And ye know who he was, don’t ye?’

  A tin of Mackintosh’s toffees was placed reverently under the Queen.

  His wife had been stone deaf since her car collided with a train. She had not learned to lip-read and you had to scribble questions on a pad. He was her second husband and they had been married twenty years. She liked the refinements of English life. She liked using a silver toast-rack. She liked nice linen and fresh chintzes and polished brass. She did not like Patagonia. She hated the winter and missed having flowers.

  ‘I’ve a terrible time getting things to grow. Lupins do well, but my carnations never survive the cold, and mostly I make do with annuals—godetias, clarkias, larkspurs and marigolds—but you can never tell how they’re going to do. This year the sweet peas are a disaster, and I do so love them for vases. Flowers do improve the home, I think.’

  ‘Aagh!’ he muttered. ‘I care none for her damn flowers.’

  ‘What’s that you said, dear? H
e’s overworked, you know. Bad heart! He shouldn’t be riding round the camp all day. I’m the one who should be rounding up sheep. He hates horses. When I lived in Buenos Aires I always loved to ride.’

  ‘Bah! She knows bugger all about it. She rides round some fancy estancia and thinks she can round up sheep.’

  ‘What are you saying, dear?’

  ‘She’s right in one thing, though. I never liked the horse. But ye can’t get anyone to ride for ye now. This was a fine country once. Ye paid ’em and they worked. Now I’ve got the boy and he’ll be off any minute, and I’ve got the old peon, but he’s eighty-three and I have to strap him to his horse.’

  The Scotsman had lived forty years in the valley. He had the reputation of being very tight-fisted. One year, when the price of wool was up, he and his wife went to Scotland. They stayed in first-class hotels and were a week on Lewis. There he became familiar with the things his mother spoke of—gulls, herring boats, heather, peat—and he had felt the call.

  Now he wanted to leave Patagonia and retire to Lewis. She wanted to leave, but not necessarily to Lewis. She was in better health than he. He did not know how to get out. The price of wool was falling and the Perónistas were after the land.

  Next morning we stood outside the house and looked along the line of telegraph poles, watching for the shearers’ truck. In place of a lawn was a flat expanse of packed dirt, and, in the middle, a wire-netting cage.

  ‘And what do you keep in there?’ I asked.

  ‘Aagh! The bugger died on me.’

  Curled in the bottom of the cage lay the dried-up skeleton of a thistle.

  35

  GOING DOWN to Comodoro Rivadavia I passed through a desert of black stones and came to Sarmiento. It was another dusty grid of metal buildings, lying on a strip of arable land between the fizzling turquoise Lake Musters and the slime-green Lake Colhué-Huapi.

  I walked out of town to the petrified forest. Wind pumps whirled insanely. A steel-blue heron lay paralysed under an electric cable. A dribble of blood ran along its beak. The tongue was missing. The trunks of extinct monkey-puzzles were broken clean as if in a sawmill.

  A lot of Boers lived round Sarmiento, and met up at the Hotel Orroz for lunch. Their names were Venter, Visser, Vorster, Kruger, Norval, Eloff, Botha and de Bruyn—all descendants of hard-line Afrikaners who emigrated to Patagonia in 1903, sickened by the Union Jack. They lived in fear of the Lord, celebrated Dingaan’s Day and took oaths on the Dutch Reformed Bible. They did not marry outsiders and their daughters had to go to the kitchen if a Latin entered the house. Many went back to South Africa when Dr Malan came to power.

  But the town’s most distinguished citizen was the Lithuanian, Casimir Slapelič. Fifty years ago he found the dinosaur in the barranca. Now, toothless, hairless and in his middle eighties, he was one of the oldest flying pilots in the world. Each morning he put on his white canvas flying-suit, pottered down to the Aero Club in his Moskva and hurled himself and his antique monoplane to the gales. The risk merely increased his appetite for life.

  The wind had polished his nose and coloured it pale lilac. I found him at lunch ladling the bortsch into the ivory orb of his head. He had made his room cheerful, in the Baltic way, with flowered curtains, geraniums, diplomas for stunt flying and a signed photograph of Neil Armstrong. All his books were in Lithuanian, the aristocrat of Indo-European languages, and concerned his country’s plans for independence.

  His wife had died and he had adopted a young Indian couple, out of kindness and for company. The girl sat against the white wall, suckling her baby, devouring visitors with mica-shining eyes.

  Casimir Slapelič was a prodigy. Once he had tried to be a bird man. Now he would like to go to the Moon.

  ‘But I will fly you in the plane,’ he said.

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said.

  ‘I will fly you over the Painted Desert.’

  It was blowing half a hurricane. Driving in the Moskva I noticed that his legs, bowed to a pair of perfect arcs, had little control over the foot-pedals.

  ‘We’d better not go in the plane,’ I said.

  ‘Then I shall take you to my sister. She has a collection of Indian arrow heads.’

  We drove to a concrete bungalow and walked through a garden to the back door. A white phallus reared among his sister’s marigolds.

  ‘The tibia of a dinosaur,’ said Casimir Slapelič.

  The sister had a leathery face of great age. She was one of a tight group of Sarmiento ladies, the archaeologists. They were not proper archaeologists but collectors of antiquities. They scoured caves, killing-sites, and lake shores for the relics of ancient hunters. Each had her network of peons who brought objects in from the camp. The ‘professionals’ cursed them as looters.

  That afternoon the Baltic exile was ‘at home’ to a Welshwoman. The visitor watched her unworthy competitor unwrap her treasures from white tissue, but her envious eyes did not accord with her patronizing remarks.

  Casimir Slapelič’s sister knew how to feed her rival’s jealousy. She displayed cards covered with black velvet mounted with arrow heads, bright as jewels, and so arranged that they looked like tropical fish. Her fingers played over their faceted surfaces. There were flat knives of pink and green flint; boleadora stones; a blue idol, and some arrows fletched with eagle feathers.

  ‘But my collection is better,’ the Welshwoman said.

  ‘Bigger but less beautiful,’ said the Lithuanian.

  ‘I shall sell mine to the Presidenta and it will go to the National Museum.’

  ‘If she’ll buy it,’ said the older woman.

  Casimir Slapelič was bored. We went out into the garden.

  ‘Dead men’s things,’ he said. ‘I do not like.’

  ‘Nor do I.’

  ‘What shall we see now?’

  ’The Boers.’

  ‘The Boers are difficult but we’ll try.’

  We drove to the east side of town where the Boers had their bungalows. Slapelič knocked on one and the whole family came out into the yard, stared with set faces at the Englishman, and didn’t say a word. He called on another and the door slammed. He found the Welsh husband of a Boer woman who would talk but knew little. And then he found a fleshy Boer woman who leaned over her red garden gate and looked fierce. She also would talk, but for money and in the presence of her lawyer.

  ‘Not very friendly,’ I said.

  ‘They are Boers,’ said Casimir Slapelič.

  36

  AT COMODORO RIVADAVIA I called on Father Manuel Palacios, the comprehensive genius of the South. He lived in the Salesian College, a hulk of concrete, lurking between the cliff and the sea. The storm kicked up clouds of dust, and flares from the oil rigs lit them a lurid orange.

  A priest sheltered in the doorway of the chapel, chatting to two boys. He had the prettiest wreath of grey curls. Gusts ripped at his soutane and uncovered his porcelain-white, legs.

  ‘Where can I find Father Palacios?’

  His unwrinkled forehead puckered. He looked concemed.

  ‘You can’t.’

  ‘He lives here?’

  ‘But doesn’t receive visitors. He is working. Day and night he works. Besides, he is recovering from an operation. Cancer,’ he whispered. ‘He has so little time.’

  He outlined the accomplishments of the Patagonian polymath. Father Palacios was Doctor of Theology, of Anthropological Theory and Archaeology. He was a marine biologist, zoologist, engineer, physicist, geologist, agronomist, mathematician, geneticist, and taxidermist. He spoke four European languages and six Indian ones. He was writing a general history of the Salesian Order and a treatise on biblical prophecies of the New World.

  ‘But what to do with this writing?’ the father tittered. ‘What responsibility placed on our shoulders! How to protect this treasure? How to publish?’

  He clicked his tongue.

  ‘Why do you want to see him?’

  ‘I understand he’s an expert on the Indians.’
<
br />   ‘Expert? He is an Indian! Well, I shall lead you to him, but I can’t promise he will see you.’

  Undeterred by the dust-storm, the polymath sat in a grove of tamarisks, immersed in a North American manual of applied engineering. He wore a blue beret and a baggy grey suit. The tortoise folds of his neck craned from a celluloid collar. He offered me his footstool and begged me sit at his feet. He waved his colleague to a chair that someone had rescued too late from a bonfire, and consulted a silver watch.

  ‘I have half an hour at your disposal in which to outline the prehistory of Patagonia.’

  Father Palacios flooded me with information: statistics, radio-carbon dates, migrations of men and animals, marine regressions, upheavals of the Andes or the appearance of new artefacts. Possessed of a photographic memory he could describe in detail every Indian rock-painting of the South: ‘... in the Second Petrified Forest, there is a unique representation of a mylodon ... at Rfo Pinturas you will find a rodeo of palaeo-llamas, the men are wearing phallic caps ... a second fresco depicts the use of a decoy as described by Pigafetta ... at Lago Posadas there is a mortal combat between a macrauchenia and a smilodon ...’

  I took careful notes. The father, his soutane flapping, stood by the charred remains of the chair.

  ‘Qué inteligencia!’ he said. ‘Oh Padre! Qué sabiduría!’

  Father Palacios smiled and continued. I noticed, though, that he was no longer talking to me. Instead, gazing to heaven, he addressed his monologue to the lowering clouds.

  ‘O Patagonia!’ he cried. ‘You do not yield your secrets to fools. Experts come from Buenos Aires, from North America even. What do they know? One can but marvel at their incompetence. Not one palaeontologist has yet unearthed the bones of the unicorn.’

  ‘The unicorn?’

  ‘Precisely, the unicorn. The Patagonian unicorn was con temporary with the extinct megafauna of the Late Pleistocene. The last unicorns were hunted to extinction by man in the fifth or sixth millennium B.C. At Lago Posadas you will find two paintings of unicorns. One holds its horn erect as in Psalm 29: “My horn shalt thou exalt like the horn of an unicorn”. The other is about to impale a hunter and stamps the pampas, as described in the Book of Job.’ (In Job 38:21 it is the horse that ‘paweth the valley’, while in verses 9-10 the unicorn is found unfit to haul a plough.)