In Patagonia

by Bruce Chatwin

  He called them to stop work and they obeyed; they even flocked to join his march to celebrate the eleventh anniversary of the shooting of Francisco Ferrer, at Monjuich, Barcelona. (Soto said his Chilotes were honouring the Catalan educator as Catholics honoured the Maid of Orleans or the Mohammedans Mohammed.) Conceiving all life as a squalid economic struggle, he made no concessions to the propertied classes. He blackmailed the hotelkeepers, the merchants and sheep-farmers. He made them grovel as his price for lifting the boycott, and when they accepted his terms, he merely stepped up the pressure and the insults.

  Attempts to silence him failed: nor could the jail hold him, for his faction was too strong. One night a knife flashed on an empty street, but the blade hit the watch in his waistcoat pocket and the hired killer fled. His escape only confirmed his sense of mission. He called for a General Strike, to bring down the powers that governed Santa Cruz, not noticing that the base of his support had narrowed. The local Syndicalists patched up their quarrel with the employers and jeered at Soto’s wild impracticality. Soto countered that they were pimps for the brothel La Chocolatería.

  Isolated from the moderates, Soto started the revolution on his own. His allies were some propagandists by the deed, who called themselves The Red Council. The leaders were Italian: a Tuscan deserter; a Piedmontese who had once made shepherdesses in a Dresden porcelain factory. With a band of five hundred rough riders, the Red Council swooped on estancias; looted guns, food, horses and drink; freed the Chilotes from their inhibitions; left heaps of fire-twisted metal; and dissolved again on to the steppe.

  Ritchie sent a patrol to investigate but it fell into an ambush. Two policemen and a chauffeur were killed. A subaltern named Jorge Pérez Millán Témperley, an upper-class boy with a weakness for uniforms, got a bullet through his genitals. When the bandits forced him to ride with them, the pain permanently unhinged him.

  On January 28th 1921 the 10th Argentine Cavalry sailed from Buenos Aires with orders from President Yrigoyen to pacify the province. The commanding officer was Lt-Col. Hector Benigno Varela, a tiny soldier of limitless patriotism, a student of Prussian discipline, who liked his men to be men. At first Varela disgusted the foreign landowners, for his programme of pacification consisted of free pardons for all strikers who surrendered their arms. But when Soto came out of hiding and announced a total victory over Private Property, the Army and the State, the colonel sensed he had made a fool of himself and said: ‘If it starts up again, I’ll come back and shoot the lot.’

  The pessimists were right. All along the coast that winter, strikers marched, looted, burned, picketed and prevented officials from boarding steamers. And when the spring came Soto was planning his second campaign with three new lieutenants (the Red Council had fallen into an ambush) : Albino Argüelles, a Socialist official; Ramón Outerelo, a Bakuninist and ex-waiter; and a gaucho named Facón Grande for the size of his knife. Soto still believed the government was neutral and ordered each commander to seize a stretch of territory, to raid and take hostages. Secretly he was dreaming of a revolution that would spread from Patagonia and engulf the country. He was not very bright. His character was frigid and austere. At nights he went off to sleep alone. The Chilotes required a leader to share every detail of their lives and began to mistrust him.

  This time Dr Borrero was conspicuous for his absence. He was having an affair with an estanciero’s daughter and had taken advantage of depressed land prices to buy a place of his own. It then came out that, all along, he was on the payroll of La Anónima, the company of the Brauns and Menéndezes. The Anarchists noted his defection and sneered at the ‘degenerates who were once socialists, drinking in cafés at the workers’ expense, who today, like true Tartuffes, clamour for the murder of their old comrades’.

  President Yrigoyen called for Varela a second time and allowed him to use ‘extreme measures’ to bring the strikers to heel. The Colonel disembarked at Punta Loyola on November 11th 1921 and began requisitioning horses. He interpreted his instructions as tacit permission for a bloodbath, but since Congress had abolished the death penalty, he and his officers had to inflate the Chilotes into ‘military forces, perfectly armed and better munitioned, enemies of the country in which they live’. They claimed Chile was behind the strike and, when they caught a Russian Anarchist with a notebook full of Cyrillic characters, here plainly was the Red hand of Moscow.

  The strikers melted away without a fight. They were not well armed and couldn’t even use the arms they had. The Army filed reports of gunfights and arsenals captured. But the Magellan Times for once reported the truth: ‘Various bands of rebels, finding their cause lost, have surrendered and the bad element among them shot.’

  On five separate occasions, the soldiers got the strikers to surrender by promising to respect thier lives. On all five, the shooting began afterwards. They shot Outerelo and Argüelles. Varela shot Facón Grande at Jaramillo station, two days after he reported him killed in battle. They shot hundreds of men into graves they dug themselves, or shot them and heaped the bodies on bonfires of mata negra and the smell of burned flesh and wood resin drifted across the pampas.

  The end of Soto’s dream came at the Estancia La Anita, the prize establishment of the Menéndez family. He held his hostages in the green and white house, where, from the art-nouveau conservatory, you can see the Moreno Glacier sliding through black forests into a grey lake. His men were in the shearing shed but they began leaving in groups when they heard about the column coming up the valley.

  The hardliners, led by two Germans, wanted to pile up wool-bales, to turn the shed into a blockhouse and fight to the last man. But Soto said he’d run for it, said he was not made for dog-meat, said he’d continue in the mountains or abroad. And the Chilotes did not want to fight. They preferred to trust the word of an Argentine officer than the promises of air.

  Soto sent two men to Captain Viñas Ibarra to ask for terms. ‘Terms?’ he shrieked. ‘Terms for what?’ and sent them to make terms with Jesus Christ. He did not, however, want to expose his men to fire and dispatched a junior officer to negotiate. On December 7th the rebels saw him advancing cautiously in their direction: a chestnut horse, a man in khaki, a white flag and yellow goggles glinting in the sun. His terms: Unconditional surrender and lives respected. The men should line up next morning in the yard.

  The Chilotes’ decision let Soto off. That night he and some of the leaders took the best guns and horses and rode out, up and over the sierra, and came down to Puerto Natales. The Chilean carabineers, who had promised to seal the frontier, did nothing to stop him.

  The Chilotes were waiting for the soldiers in three lines, in homespun clothes smelling of sheep and horse and stale urine, their felt hats drawn down low, and their rifles and ammunition piled three paces in front, and their saddles, their lariats and their knives.

  They thought they were going home, thought they’d be expelled and sent back to Chile. But the soldiers herded them back into the shearing shed, and when they shot the two Germans, they knew what was going to happen. About three hundred men were in the shed that night. They lay in the sheep-pens and the light of candles flickered on the roof-beams. Some of them played cards. There was nothing to eat.

  The door opened at seven. A sergeant ostentatiously distributed picks to a work-party. The men in the shed heard them marching off and heard the chink of steel on stone.

  ‘They’re digging graves,’ they said.

  The door opened again at eleven. Troops lined the yard with rifles at the ready. The ex-hostages looked on. A Mr Harry Bond said he wanted a corpse for every one of his thirty-seven stolen horses. The soldiers brought the men out for justice in groups. Justice depended on whether a sheep-farmer wanted a man back or not. It was just like sorting sheep.

  The Chilotes were papery white, their mouths lowered and their eyes distended. The unwanted ones were led off past the sheep-dip and round a low hill. The men in the yard heard the crackle of shots and saw the turkey buzzards coming
in over the barranca feathering the morning wind.

  About a hundred and twenty men died at La Anita. One of the executioners said: ‘They went to their deaths with a passivity that was truly astonishing.’

  With some exceptions, the British community was overjoyed at the result. The Colonel, whom they had suspected of cowardice, had redeemed himself beyond expectation. The Magellan Times praised his ‘splendid courage, running about the firing line as though on parade ... Patagonians should take their hats off to the 10th Argentine Cavalry, these very gallant gentlemen.’ At a luncheon in Rio Gallegos, the local president of the Argentine Patriotic League spoke of ‘the sweet emotion of these moments’ and his joy at being rid of the plague. Varela replied he had only done his duty as a soldier, and the twenty British present, being men of few Spanish words, burst into song: ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow ... ’

  Off-duty at San Julián, the soldiers made for the brothel La Catalana, but the girls, all over thirty, screamed ‘Assassins! Pigs! We won’t go with killers!’ and were hauled off to jail for insulting men in uniform and so the flag of the nation. Among the girls was a Miss Maud Foster, ‘an English subject, of good family, with ten years’ residence in the country’. Requiescat!

  Varela did not return to a hero’s welcome but to graffiti reading ‘SHOOT THE CANNIBAL OF THE SOUTH’. Congress was in uproar; not that people cared too much for Soto and his Chileans, but Varela had made the mistake of shooting a Socialist official. The question was not so much what the Colonel did as who gave him orders. They pointed to Yrigoyen, who was embarrassed, appointed Varela director of a cavalry school and hoped the matter would simmer down.

  On January 27th 1923 Colonel Varela was shot dead, on the corner of Fitzroy and Santa Fé, by Kurt Wilkens, a Tolstoyian Anarchist from Schleswig-Holstein. A month later, on February 26th, Wilkens was shot dead in the Prison of the Encausaderos by his warder, Jorge Pérez Millán Témperley (though how he got there nobody knew). And on Monday, February 9th 1925, Témperley was shot dead in a Buenos Aires hospital for the criminally insane by a Yugoslav midget called Lukič.

  The man who gave Lukič the gun was an interesting case: Boris Vladimirovič, a Russian of pedigree, a biologist and an artist, who had lived in Switzerland and known—or claimed to have known—Lenin. The 1905 Revolution drove him to drink. He had a heart attack and left for Argentina to begin a new life. He got sucked back to the old life when he robbed a bureau de change to raise funds for Anarchist propaganda. A man was killed. and Vladimirovič earned twenty-five years in Ushuaia, the prison at the end of the world. Here he sang the songs of the Motherland, and for the sake of quiet, the Governor had him transferred to the capital.

  On Sunday, February 8th, two Russian friends brought him the revolver in a basket of fruit. The case was hard to prove. There was no trial, but Boris Vladimirovič disappeared for ever into the House of the Dead.

  Borrero died of T.B. at Santiago del Estero in 1930 after a gunfight with a journalist in which one of his sons was killed.

  Antonio Soto died of cerebral thrombosis on May 11th 1963. Since the Revolution, he had lived in Chile, as miner, trucker, ciné-projectionist, fruit-vendor, farm-worker and restauranteur. I am told that in 1945 he worked in the iron foundry of a Mrs Charles Amherst Milward.

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  At Río Gallegos I stayed in a cheap hotel, painted a poisonous green, that catered for migrants from Chiloé. The men played dominoes late into the night. When I asked about the revolution of 1920, their answers were mumbled and vague; they had a more recent revolution to think about. Then I asked about the sect of male witches, known on Chiloé as the Brujería. From what little I knew, I felt it might explain their behaviour in 1920.

  ‘The Brujeria,’ they smiled. ‘That’s only a story.’ But one old man went cold and silent at the mention of the word.

  The Sect of the Brujería exists for the purpose of hurting ordinary people. No one knows the exact whereabouts of its headquarters. But there are at least two branches of its Central Committee, one in Buenos Aires, the other in Santiago de Chile. It is not certain which of these is the senior, or if both are beholden to Superior Authority. Regional committees are scattered through the provinces and take their orders, without question, from above. Junior members are kept in ignorance of the names of the higher functionaries.

  On Chiloé the Committee is known as the Council of the Cave. The cave lies somewhere in the forests south of Quincavi, somewhere below ground. Any visitor to it suffers thereafter from temporary amnesia. If he happens to be literate, he loses his hands and the ability to write.

  Novices of the Sect must submit to a six-year course of indoctrination. Since the full syllabus is known only to the Central Committee, the island schools have a tentative character. When an instructor thinks his pupil is ready for admission, the Council of the Cave assembles and puts him through a sequence of tests.

  The candidate must submerge himself for forty days and forty nights under a waterfall of the Thraiguén River, to wash off the effects of his Christian baptism. (During this time he is allowed a little toast.) Next, he must catch, without fumbling, a skull, which the instructor throws from the crown of a tricorn hat. He must kill his best friend to show he has wiped out all trace of sentiment. He must sign a document with blood from his own veins. And he must disinter a recently buried male Christian corpse and flay the skin from the breast. Once this is cured and dried, he sews it into a ‘thieves’ waistcoat’. The human grease remaining in the skin gives off a soft phosphorescence, which lights the member’s nocturnal expeditions.

  Full Members have the power to steal private property; to change themselves into other animals; to influence thoughts and dreams; to open doors; to drive men mad; to change the course of rivers; and to spread disease, especially some new virus that will not respond to medical treatment. In some cases the Member scars his victim lightly and allows him to buy his life back by supplying the Council of the Cave with a quantity of his own blood (to be delivered in a conch shell). If anyone is so foolish as to mock the Sect, he is put to sleep and tonsured. His hair will not grow back until he has signed a confession.

  Among the technical equipment the Sect has at its disposal is the Challanco, a crystal stone through which the Central Committee surveys the minutest details of a man’s life. No one has yet described the device with complete accuracy. Some report it as a bowl of glass; others as a large circular mirror, which emits and receives penetrating rays. The Challanco is known as the BOOK or the MAP. In addition to spying on all members of the hierarchy, it is thought to contain an indecipherable copy of the dogma of the Sect itself.

  Only men can become members, but the Sect does use women to carry urgent messages. A woman thus employed is known as the Voladora. Usually a trusted member selects the most beautiful girl in his family and forces her into the role. She cannot, thereafter, return to normal life. The first stage of her initiation is a similar forty-day bath. One night, she is required to meet her instructor in a forest clearing. All she can see is a shining copper dish. The instructor gives orders but never appears. He tells her to strip and stand on tiptoe with her arms in the air. A draught of some bitter liquid makes her vomit her intestines.

  ‘Into the dish!’ he barks. ‘Into the dish!’

  Once freed of her insides, she is light enough to grow the wings of a bird and fly over human settlements shrieking hysterically. At dawn, she returns to the dish, redigests her intestines and recovers her human form.

  The Sect owns its own ship, the Caleuche. She has the advantage over other vessels in that she can sail into the eye of the wind, and even submerge beneath the surface. She is painted white. Her spars are lit with innumerable coloured lights and from her deck streams the sound of intoxicating music. She is thought to carry cargo for the richest merchants, all of whom are agents for the Central Committee. The Caleuche has an insatiable appetite for crews and kidnaps sailors from the archipelago. Anyone with less than the rank of captain is instant
ly marooned on a lonely rock. Sometimes, one sees demented sailors roaming the beaches, singing the songs of the Central Committee.

  The most singular creature associated with the Sect is the Invunche or Guardian of the Cave, a human being perverted into a monster by a special scientific process. When the Sect needs a new Invunche, the Council of the Cave orders a Member to steal a boy child from six months to a year old. The Deformer, a permanent resident of the Cave, starts work at once. He disjoints the arms and legs and the hands and feet. Then begins the delicate task of altering the position of the head. Day after day, and for hours at a stretch, he twists the head with a tourniquet until it has rotated through an angle of 180°, that is, until the child can look straight down the line of its own vertebrae.

  There remains one last operation, for which another specialist is needed. At full moon, the child is laid on a workbench, lashed down with its head covered in a bag. The specialist cuts a deep incision under the right shoulder blade. Into the hole he inserts the right arm and sews up the wound with thread taken from the neck of a ewe. When it has healed the Invunche is complete.

  During the process, the child is fed on human milk. After weaning, the diet is changed to young human flesh, followed by that of the adult male. When these are unobtainable, cat milk, kid and billy-goat are taken as substitutes. Once installed as Guardian of the Cave, the Invunche is naked and sprouts long bristly hair. It never acquires human speech, yet, over the years, it does develop a working knowledge of the Committee’s procedure and can instruct novices with harsh and guttural cries.

  Sometimes the Central Committee requires the presence of the Invunche for ceremonies of an unknown nature at an unknown place. Since the creature is immobile, a team of experts come and transport him by air.