Mr Hobbs’s cottage lay on the flat land between a flamingo lake and an arm of the Strait. It looked like a gentleman’s shooting lodge, of clapboard painted a soft ochre, with white bay windows and a terracotta roof. White rambler roses tumbled over windbreaks enclosing the tiny garden. Some favourite English flowers lingered on long after the English had gone.
A Yugoslav widow had owned the place since land reform. She had put a peon in the house and let it go down. But the pitchpine floors were there and the curving banisters, and shreds of William Morris wallpaper adhered to the upper landing.
Mr Hobbs, from photos, was a thick-set man with wavy hair and a candid pink English face. He called his farm Gente Grande, ‘the Big People’ after the Onas who hunted here when he came. Even today the farm bore the mark of his taste for fine craftsmanship —the dog-kennels, the finials on the sheep-pens, even the pig-sty, which was painted the same colour as the house. It can’t have changed much since Charley was here in 1900.
About a month before his visit, the Chilean man-of-war Errazuriz was surveying the north coast of Tierra del Fuego and sent a boat crew ashore. Two sailors got separated from the rest and were killed and stripped by the Indians.
A search-party went out next morning, but it was several days before they found the mutilated remains of the men. The Captain sent a force to punish the murderers, but the Onas, who knew what to expect, had bolted for the mountains.
‘Tell me, Hobbs,’ Charley said. ‘What do you propose to do about the Indians? Now they’ve killed two sailors, they’ll get too big for their boots and someone else’ll suffer. Your homestead’s handy, and what with your wife and children and nurses and servants, I think you’ll be next to be honoured with their attentions.’
‘I don’t quite know what to do,’ Hobbs said. ‘The Government’s so horribly nasty nowadays if you kill an Indian, even in self-defence. I’ll have to wait and see what can be done.’
Charlie went back to the island a few months later and Hobbs asked him to look at some pigs he’d imported from England. On top of the sty was a fairly fresh human skull.
‘You remember when the Indians killed the men from the Errazuriz,’ Hobbs said.
‘I do. I even asked you what you were going to do about it.’
‘I said I’d wait and see. Well, now it’s done and that is the result.’
Charley begged him tell the story, but he clamped up. Two nights later, they were in the smoking-room after dinner, when Hobbs began, suddenly: ‘You were asking about the Indians. There isn’t much to tell really. They began coming nearer the house. At first they stole one sheep at a time, and then they got bolder and took thirty and forty. Then one of my shepherds barely escaped by galloping his horse. So I decided it was time to do something.
‘I sent out spies to report their strength and the exact place of their camp-site. I heard there were thirteen men, plus women and children. One day, when the women were not there, I gathered up my tame Indians, eight in all, and said: “We’re going guanaco shooting.” I armed them with old guns and revolvers. We started out a good party, but gradually I ordered my own men home, so when we drew near the Ona camp, we were only Indians, myself and one man.
‘We sighted the Ona camp and I told my tame Indians to ask the wild ones where the guanaco were. But when they saw my lot coming with firearms, they let fly with arrows. The tame Indians, greeted in this manner, retaliated with rifles and killed a man. After that, of course, there was no quarter. The wild men were beaten and among the dead was the man who killed the sailors from the Errazuriz. That’s his skull on the pig-sty.
‘I, as district magistrate, had to file a report to the Government. I wrote that the tame Indians had been fighting wild ones. There had been some deaths, among them the wanted murderer.’
86
THE PILOT of the air-taxi introduced me to a Yugoslav who flew freight to Dawson Island. He took me along. I wanted to see the concentration camp where ministers of the Allende regime were held, but the soldiers confined me to the aeroplane.
Charley had a story of the earlier prison on the island:
‘The Salesian Fathers established a mission on Dawson Island and asked the Chilean Government to send them any Indian who was caught. The Fathers soon collected a great many Indians and taught them the rudiments of civilization. This did not suit the Indians in any way, and though they had food and shanties to live in, they craved for their old wandering life.
‘By the time I am speaking of, epidemics had reduced their number to about forty. They had been giving a lot of trouble, trying to escape, being mutinous, and refusing to work. Then, suddenly, they became obedient and quiet. These signs did not escape the Fathers, who noticed that the men were always tired in the morning and would drop off to sleep in working hours. They laid traps for them and found that the Indians went out into the forest after having been placed in their huts at night. They tried to follow, but an Indian always knew it, and would simply roam in the woods for hours before returning to the settlement.
‘This went on for several months and the Fathers got no nearer the mystery. At last, one of them was returning from a distant part of the island and lost his way. As night came on, he lay down to rest—and heard voices through the trees. He crept towards them and realized he had found the missing Indians. He lay there all night, and when the Indians went back to resume their day’s labour, he came out of hiding. He found, hidden under branches, a beautifully constructed canoe, dug out of a solid tree trunk. They had made it so thin it was not too heavy to handle, even though it was of immense size. The Indians were tugging it to the beach about four hundred yards away, and the Father found they had cleared a track almost to the water’s edge.
‘He went back to the Mission with the news. The Fathers held a Council of War and decided to keep a sharp watch out and visit the canoe from time to time to see how they were getting along. The days passed, as the unsuspicious Indians dragged their craft to the beach. It was a long job; for the summer nights were short and they could only shift it a few yards each night.
‘The priests guessed that the Indians would wait till after Christmas Day, since they were promised extra rations. So while they were enjoying the Christmas festivities at the Mission, the Fathers sent two men with a cross-saw and newspapers. They cut the canoe through the middle, placing the newspaper on the ground to catch the sawdust, so the poor brutes would know nothing till all their provisions were aboard.
‘The great night came, after weary months of waiting. They all gathered at the canoe and tried to drag it to the water—and it came away in two halves.
‘That was the meanest trick I ever heard on these poor Indians, to find their canoe useless instead of carrying them away from their hated prison. It wouldn’t have been half so bad if the Fathers had destroyed it when they first found it. But to allow the work to go on till the canoe was provisioned and hauled down to the beach, struck me as the very height of cruelty.
‘I asked what the Indians did about it. I was told they went back to their shanties and carried on as if nothing had happened.’
87
I HAD one thing more to do in Patagonia: to find a replacement for the lost piece of skin.
The town of Puerto Natales was in sunshine, but purple clouds were piling up on the far side of Last Hope Sound. The roofs of the houses were scabby with rust and clattered in the wind. Rowan trees grew in the gardens and the red fire of their berries made the leaves seem black. Most of the gardens were choked with docks and cow parsley.
Raindrops smacked on the pavement. Old women, black specks along the wide street, scuttled for cover. I sheltered in a shop smelling of cats and the sea. The owner sat knitting socks of oiled wool. About her were strings of smoked mussels, cabbages, bricks of dried sea-lettuce, and trusses of kelp, coiled up like the pipes of a tuba.
Puerto Natales was a Red town ever since the meat-works opened up. The English built the meat-works during the First World War, four miles along
the bay, where deep water ran inshore. They built a railway to bring the men to work; and when the place ran down, the citizens painted the engine and put it in the plaza—an ambiguous memorial.
The killing season used to last three months. The Chilotes had their first taste of mechanized slaughter at the killing season. It was something like their idea of Hell: so much blood and the floor red and steaming; so many animals kicking and then stiff; so many white-skinned carcasses and spilled-out guts, the tripes, brains, hearts, lungs, livers, tongues. It drove the men a little mad.
In the killing season of 1919, some Maximalists came up from Punta Arenas. They told how their Russian brothers had killed the management and now lived happily. One day in January the English Assistant Manager contracted two men for a painting job and refused to pay because the work was bad. They shot him through the chest that afternoon and then the rest of them ran amok. They commandeered the railway, told the driver to get up more steam, but there was no more steam and they shot him too. They lynched three carabineers and looted stores and burned them.
The Governor of Magallanes sent a ship with troops and a judge. They took twenty-eight ringleaders away and work went on in the meat-works, just as it was before the Maximalists came.
In the Hotel Colonial, I asked the owner’s wife about the riot.
‘It’s too long ago,’ she said.
‘Then do you remember a man called Antonio Soto? He was the leader of the strike in Argentina, but he used to work here at the Ciné Libertad.’
‘Soto? I don’t know that name. Soto? No. You mean José Macías. He was in the strike. With the leaders too.’
‘He lives here?’
‘He did live here.’
‘Can I find him?’
‘He just shot himself.’
88
JOSÉ MACÍAS shot himself in his barber’s shop, facing the mirror in his own barber’s chair.
The last person to see him alive was a schoolgirl, who, at eight-thirty, had been walking up the Calle Bories, in a black dress and wide white collar, her shadow crinkling beside her along the corrugated housefronts. She looked at the windows of the house, painted a particularly arctic shade of blue, and saw—as she saw each morning—the barber eyeing her from behind the white blind. Shuddering, she hurried on.
At noon, the barber’s cook, Conchita Marín, left her house on the ragged edge of town and walked up the Calle Baqueano to get her employer’s lunch. She bought some vegetables in the corner shop and called in at the Restaurant Rosa de Francia, where she bought two empanadas for herself. When she saw the white blind drawn she knew that something was wrong.
The barber was a man of regular habits and would have told her if he intended to go out. She knocked but knew there would be no reply. She called on the neighbours but they hadn’t seen the barber either.
Conchita Marín set down her basket. She wormed her way through the palings into the garden, opened the faulty catch of the kitchen window and climbed into the house.
Using an old Winchester, the barber had put a bullet through his right temple. With reflexes still functioning he had fired a second shot which missed and hit a calendar of the local glacier. The chair swivelled to the left and the body slumped sideways to the floor. His fish-eyes gaped glassily at the ceiling. A pool of blood lay on the blue linoleum. Blood had clotted on his steely Indian-stiff hair.
Macías prepared for death with his habitual attention to detail. He shaved, and trimmed his moustache. He drank his maté and emptied the green sludge into the garbage pail. He polished his shoes and put on his best Buenos Aires suit of striped worsted.
The front room was bare and white. Flanking the plate-glass mirror were two cabinets of pale wood containing pomades and brilliantines. On the shelf above the basin, he arranged shaving brushes, scissors and razors. Two flasks of hair spray faced each other, their nozzles pointing inwards, their red rubber puffers apart.
The impact of the shot ruined the symmetry of his last composition.
Macías had the reputation of being tight-fisted, but of being correct in all his dealings. He left no will and very little money, yet he owned three houses with tenants in them; they had no complaints against their landlord. He was nervous about his health, was a bigoted vegetarian, and dosed himself with herb teas. He rose early and had the habit of tidying the street before anyone was about. His neighbours called him ‘El Argentino’, for his aloofness, the sharp cut of his clothes, his maté drinking, and for the once impetuous elegance of his tango.
Originally he came from the south of Chiloé, but left the island as a boy. He apprenticed himself to a gang of sheep-shearers, who worked the estancias of Patagonia. He got caught up in the peons’ revolt in 1921, was apparently close to the leaders and escaped with them into Chile. Settling in Puerto Natales, he started up as a barber, which was similar to shearing sheep but better class. He married and had a daughter, but his wife left for a bigamous union with a mechanic in Valparaíso. Over the years he forsook the Revolution and became a Jehovah’s Witness.
He shot himself on a Monday. The Sunday crowds had seen him out bicycling, for health they said, the old man in a beret and flapping raincoat, bent against the wind, zig-zagging street by street, then peddling out along the bay till he was swallowed up in the immensity of the landscape.
The townspeople had three main theories about the suicide: either his persecution mania had got the better of him since the Junta’s coup; or he had calculated the End of the World for Sunday and shot himself in the anticlimax of Monday morning. The third theory explained the death in terms of arteriosclerosis. There were people who heard him say: ‘I’ll finish it before it finishes me.’
Conchita Marín was a careless, spirited and heavy-breasted woman with two sons and no husband. Her lovers had fish-scales on their jerseys and came in fresh from the sea. The morning I called on her, she had on a pink jumper, jingly earrings and an uncommon amount of green eye-paint. A few plastic curlers were trying to establish order in her tangle of black hair.
Yes, she was fond of the barber. He was very correct and very reserved. And also very strange! An intellectual, she said. ‘Imagine, he used to lie on his back in the garden and gaze at the stars.’
She pointed to a drawing in coloured crayons.
‘Señor Macias made this drawing for me. Here is the Sun. Red. Here is the Moon. Yellow. Here is the Earth. Green. And this is the famous cometa . . .’
She pointed to an orange streak zooming in from the top corner of the paper.
‘Let me read what it says . . . Cometa . . . Ko . . . bou . . . tek. Well, Senor Macias said this cometa was coming from God to kill us for our sins. But then it went away.’
‘Did he have any political connections?’ I asked.
‘He was a Socialist. I think he was a Socialist.’
‘Did he have any Socialist friends?’
‘No friends. But he read Socialist books. Many books! He read them to me in the kitchen. But I did not understand.’
‘What were the books?’
‘I cannot remember. I could not listen when he read. But I remember one name . . . Wait! A famous writer. A writer from the North. Very Socialist!’
‘Ex-President Allende?’
‘No. No. No. Señor Macias did not like this Señor Allende at all. He said he was a maricón. He said all the government were maricones. Maricones in the Government! Imagine! No. The name of this writer began with an M . . . Marx! Could it be Marx?’
‘It could be Marx.’
‘It was Marx! Bueno, Senor Macias said that everything this Señor Marx wrote in his book was true, but others changed what he said. He said it was a perversion, a perversion of the truth.’
Conchita Marín was pleased with herself for having remembered the name of Señor Marx.
‘Would you like to see Senor Macias’s testament?’ she asked, and produced a colour print of a long-haired dachshund, which the barber had captioned: ‘THE ONE AND ONLY FRIEND OF MAN (the one
who bears him no rancour)’. On the other side I read the following:True missionaries assume the authority and concentration of the Apostle Paul.
No sociology without salvation
No political economy without the Evangelist
No reform without redemption
No culture without conversion
No progress without forgiveness
No new social order without a new birth
No new organization without a New Creation
No democracy without the Divine Word
NO CIVILIZATION WITHOUT CHRIST
ARE WE READY TO DO WHAT OUR MASTER ORDERS
(according to his express desires?)
Yes, Conchita Marín said, the barber was sick, quite sick. He had arteriosclerosis. But there was something else, something always preying on his mind. No, he never talked about the strike in Argentina. He was very reserved. But sometimes she wondered about the scar at the base of his neck. A bullet, she said. Must have gone clean through. Imagine! He kept the scar hidden always. Always wore a stiff collar and a tie. She had seen the scar once when he was ill and he had tried to hide it.
The barber’s daughter, Elsa, was a crushed spinster with sad skin and thinning hair, who lived in a house of two rooms washed the colour of cornflowers, and earned her living as a seamstress. She had seen her father once in the past year, but had not spoken to him for two. He had been an adventurer in his youth, she said. ‘Si, Señor, muy pícaro.’ As a child she remembered him singing to the guitar.
‘But they were all sad songs. He was a sad man, my father. He was not educated and he was sad because he had no learning. He read many books but he did not understand.’ And with a look that encompassed all his sufferings as well as her own, she pronounced him an infeliz.
She showed me a photograph of a man with a shock of swept-back hair, anguish-chiselled features and fearful eyes. He wore the Buenos Aires suit with pointed lapels, a high starched collar and a bow tie. When I asked about the scar, she was quite taken aback and said: ‘How could she have told you that?’
In Patagonia Page 22
