Senor Nice: Straight Life From Wales to South America

by Howard Marks

  I joined Raoul back at the table and told him the reasons for my obvious excitement. I asked if he would mind enquiring from whoever was in charge if there was any chance of buying the photograph. I would happily pay a good price. Raoul ambled off behind the bar. He returned shaking his head. No photographs were for sale, but if I had a camera I was welcome to take a close-up shot, as long as I didn’t remove the photograph from the frame. I had no camera other than the one in my mobile, which I still hadn’t figured out how to use. I’d have to buy one and come back.

  My problem was solved by another surprise appearance from Gareth, who seemed as if he had expected to meet me here.

  ‘The rest are at the Palaeontological Museum round the corner looking at models of dinosaurs. I don’t mind a bit of history, but that’s taking it back too far, in my opinion. Mind, I liked Jurassic Park.’

  ‘Do you have a camera, Gareth?’

  ‘I certainly do, and it’s a digital one at that. I’ve got it with me. It takes excellent pictures, excellent. Shall we ask your mate to take one of us two together? We could sit down by there, next to that poker table. I’m sure those Indians wouldn’t mind moving over for a minute.’

  After quickly introducing Gareth to Raoul, I explained to Gareth my discovery and need for a camera. Within a few minutes Gareth had taken several exposures of the priceless photograph.

  ‘I can download the photos and email them to you. Marvellous what they can do with computers these days, mind, isn’t it? Who would have thought it? So your great-great-grandfather was from round by here. What was his name?’

  ‘Patrick McCarty.’

  ‘Was he one of those original Welsh colonists that the preacher kept going on about today? Bethan was fascinated.’

  ‘No, he was Irish.’

  ‘I guessed that with a name like McCarty. But there were plenty who came from over the water to work in the Welsh pits. I used to court an Irish girl myself before I met Bethan. She lived in Merthyr Tydfil. Two years it lasted. Bethan still goes on about it. Was he one of those?’

  ‘No, my great-great-grandfather went over the water the other way, to America. Then he came here, learned Welsh, disappeared for several years and finally turned up in Kenfig Hill under the name Marks and led a quiet religous life. He changed his name because he was related to Billy the Kid.’

  ‘You’re kidding. I never knew that was Billy the Kid’s surname. I suppose he must have had one. Billy Marks. Well I never.’

  ‘No, Gareth. Billy McCarty.’

  ‘Right! Of course. Now I’ve got you. Well I suppose we’re all belonging to one another in some way or other. My father always used to say he was Bob Hope’s cousin, something I would have kept a bit quieter about if I was him. Well I’d better be off. See you again, I’m sure.’

  ‘OK, Gareth. Let me give you my email address.’

  ‘Oh dear. Almost forgot already. Thanks, Howard.’

  Meanwhile Raoul had been thumbing through the local phone directory searching for McCartys. He had found three MacKarthys, rang them, but none answered. He would try again tonight after he had driven me back to my Puerto Madryn hotel.

  *

  As arranged, Manolo, wearing the same T-shirt, turned up at the Hotel Peninsula Valdes just after breakfast.

  ‘All right, Mr Nice? Raoul called me before I left. He checked on those MacKarthy numbers in the phone directory, but the people insist they’re neither Welsh nor Irish and have no connection with either. So that’s not your family. They seemed a bit upset to be bothered. They’re probably Yanks. We don’t like Yanks much down here.’

  ‘I’m not that keen on them myself.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. What was it like in that maximum-security prison?’

  ‘Brutal and barbaric, but survivable. You just do your time until they let you out.’

  ‘I suppose so. Wouldn’t fancy it myself, though. Anyway, enough of that. Those days are over, I hope. Let’s get going.’

  I checked out of the hotel and asked to leave my bags with the concierge for a few days. Manolo got into his car, a red Mercedes much like the one I owned before I was busted, and arranged the soft drinks, snacks and ashtrays. I climbed into the passenger seat.

  ‘Nice car, Manolo. I used to have one of these.’

  ‘Not bad, is it? We like European cars in Patagonia. You’ll hardly ever see an American one. We’ll go to my place and pick up some CDs and blankets. It’s on the way. You can meet my missus, Olwen. She knows all about you and has even read your book in Spanish. Don’t mention dope in front of her, though. She’s nervous about all that stuff. Best to keep it quiet.’

  We traversed the now-familiar sixty miles of wilderness to the Chubut River, passed through Gaiman, and thirteen miles further west came to the seemingly unconscious tiny hamlet of Dolavon. Unlike Gaiman, Dolavon had preserved the character of an early pioneering settlement – whitened brick buildings and not a tea shop in sight. Manolo’s home was at the edge of the village, a quaint grey cottage with railway sash windows next to a municipal campsite. Boots and gardening tools lay next to the doorway, which exquisitely framed Olwen, a beautiful mix of Welsh, Spanish and Indian features.

  ‘Swt mai, Mr Nice? R’wyn falch iawn i cwrdda chi. Croeso i Dolavon. Dewch mewn.’

  We walked in and sat down on some antique chairs. The usual trilingual Welsh/Spanish/English conversation then took place, substantially aided by a nearby pile of dictionaries and some maté to focus concentration. After about half an hour Manolo picked up his CDs and a pile of blankets, and we said our goodbyes to Olwen, who insisted I see the garden before leaving. The simultaneous yellow blooming of the native thorny calafate and the imported daffodil, a common symbol of the Welsh nation, heralds spring in Patagonia. A Tehuelche legend relates how an old woman too feeble to travel was left behind by her tribe one winter and turned into a calafate bush to feed the small birds with her berries and provide them with shelter from the icy wind. In Olwen’s garden each calafate bush was surrounded by a carefully planted circle of daffodils in gratitude for its winter-long protection.

  Manolo and I drove into the centre of Dolavon and parked the Mercedes near a disused railway station, next to a stream. Weeping willows, curious irrigation waterwheels and other hydro-devices lined the stream banks.

  ‘Weird, aren’t they? These saved the original Welsh settlers and enabled them to be self-supporting after years of their harvests failing. They used the Chubut River to feed irrigation canals, pumping the water through with machinery like this. Soon, the valley was a blanket of yellow wheat. No one makes bread like the Welsh, do they? Lovely stuff. The Indians here learned that quickly enough and used to swap loads of ostrich feathers for a few loaves. The Welsh would flog the feathers to other European colonists and use the money to buy what they needed.’

  ‘Why didn’t the other Europeans buy feathers direct from the Indians?’

  ‘They’d be scalped if they tried that, wouldn’t they? Only the Welsh insisted on treating the Indians as equals. All the other Europeans, except for a handful of individuals, used to really fuck them over. Anyway, while all this bread-bartering was going on, a guy from Dolavon called Benjamin won first prize in the wheat contest at the Universal Show of Paris. I think it was in 1899, the one the Eiffel Tower was built for. Four years later Benjamin won the same prize at the Chicago National Show. Chubut wheat really took off then and was exported to Europe and North America. To stop the middlemen ripping off the profits, the wheat boys formed the Chubut Mercantile Company, which everyone called the Welsh Coop. There’s one of the old mills still working just around the corner. It’s a restaurant, too. Fancy lunch before we go? They do fantastic Patagonian lamb there.’

  After eighty years of use, Harinero Mill is still in working order with the original machinery. Manolo and I had to walk through the mill, where the noise was deafening, to get to the farmhouse-style restaurant. Bilingual Spanish/Welsh recipe books, jams, and bread were available to buy.

>   ‘How’s the lamb?’

  ‘As good as any back home. I suppose they brought the sheep from Wales.’

  ‘No. The first sheep here actually came from the Malvinas.’

  ‘Really! From the Falklands?’

  ‘Don’t use that word here, for fuck’s sake. What a stupid war that was – two bald men fighting over a comb. But yes. An Englishman, Henry Reynard, brought the first sheep over. The English do have their uses, sometimes.’

  Leek soup had preceded the stuffed shoulder of lamb. A selection of Welsh black cakes followed. The waiter topped up our carafe of red wine throughout the two-hour meal.

  ‘All right, Mr Nice. Let’s be off and do what the Welsh did over a hundred years ago – head west.’

  Manolo stuck a CD into the car’s sound system. ‘Your Mother’s Got a Penis’ by Goldie Lookin’ Chain, Wales’s answer to two decades of American hip hop, boomed out of the back speakers.

  ‘I love these guys,’ said Manolo. ‘I’ve got the whole album. The track about the soap bar really cracks me up.’

  The terrain gradually became more mountainous and punctuated with alien-shaped sandstone outcrops which looked as if they had transplanted themselves from Arizona’s Monument Valley. Coming into a small town named Las Chapas, Manolo turned up a lane towards a ranch house. He pointed to a gable.

  ‘Recognise that?’

  A white cement eagle proudly surveyed its domain.

  ‘Of course. It’s the insignia of the Free Wales Army. Are they out here too? Inside that ranch?’

  ‘It’s rumoured they are. Locals have heard rifle shots and sounds like people training, but I don’t know. One of my friends knocked on the door once. The people who live there are Welsh, sure enough, but they said the eagle was in honour of the Welsh name for Snowdon, Yr Eryri – Eagle’s Nest. Take your pick.’

  Next stop west was the small community of Las Plumas – Valley of the Martyrs – where we bought petrol. There had to be a tale attached to such a name.

  During the last years of the nineteenth century the Argentinian government had embarked on its appalling so-called Conquista del Desierto, the ethnic cleansing of the Patagonian wilderness. Indians were massacred, imprisoned in barbaric conditions or banished from their homelands, provoking an unsurprising upsurge of hostility and distrust towards white men. The twenty-year-long friendly coexistence which had prevailed between the Welsh and the Tehuelche Indians, whom the Welsh called their ‘brothers of the desert’, was threatened. On a day never forgotten in these parts a few Welsh settlers were mistaken by Indians for Argentinian government soldiers, brutally murdered and dismembered. One of the Welsh party, ex-Mimosa passenger John Daniel Evans, ‘Evans the Miller’, miraculously escaped and went on to found Trevelín – Mill Town – the westernmost outpost of Welsh Patagonia over 300 miles away. Although saddened to the core, the Welsh sought no vengeance and continued to refuse to join the government’s persecution and extermination of Patagonia’s indigenous population.

  Motoring further westward another fifty miles, this time accompanied by 2 many DJs’ remix of ‘Where’s Your Head At’, I noticed the sandstone outcrops were steadily increasing in size to massive mountains of rock, Grand Canyon-style. Plateaus capped cylindrical mountains as if expecting the onset of the next close encounter with a flying saucer. The red sun overtook us and headed for bed. Manolo noticed the scenery had grabbed me.

  ‘Something else, isn’t it? Straight out of Star Wars. We call this place the Altars. Forget California; this is the real Death Valley. Shall we stop here for a rest? We’re about halfway.’

  We smoked a joint Manolo produced from his pocket.

  ‘Do you recognise it?’

  ‘Recognise what?’

  ‘The dope you’re smoking.’

  ‘I can’t say I do, other than it’s extremely strong skunk. What is it?’

  ‘It’s Mr Nice Super Silver Haze.’

  ‘You’re having a laugh, aren’t you? How did you get hold of that?’

  ‘Do you know a girl called Polly from Kenfig Hill?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Well I got this skunk from her a couple of weeks ago. I telephoned her last night and told her I had met you here. She was gobsmacked. Small world, isn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose so. But you wouldn’t think so, looking at this bit of it, would you?’

  The horizon seemed infinitely further away than I had ever experienced. Monstrous rock altars filled my field of vision in every direction. Birds of prey, graceful and menacing, hang-glided among them. Visions of dragons and dinosaurs tickled my subconscious as I came to terms with my own insignificance. Bertrand Russell’s words jumped into my mind: ‘If the history of the universe were ever documented, it’s doubtful if the human race would be even mentioned.’ Night fell, switching on the lights of the Southern Cross. Its right arm, Mimosa, winked at me as I sought the solace of dream. Winds howled around the petrified pyramids. Beady eyes of curious foxes and guanacos – wild Andean llamas – glinted creepily in the starlight.

  ‘You take a blanket and lie on the back seat. I’ll wrap myself up on the ground – I prefer it that way.’

  I took up Manolo’s offer and immediately fell asleep. We both woke up after just a couple of hours.

  ‘OK, Mr Nice, let’s make a move and try to get to Tecka before daylight.’

  Manolo produced a plastic bottle of red wine and a Tupperware munch box, and we had a lively breakfast of home-made bread, hard sausage, pears, sharp cheese and walnuts before getting back on the road.

  Dawn broke as the monumental rock formations gradually gave way to fertile plains, lakes, hills and streams. The snowcapped peaks of the Andes shed their clouds of morning mist and announced their dominating presence. We stopped for petrol just outside the small town of Tecka. A roadside mausoleum lay nearby.

  ‘You’ve probably not heard of Incayal, but he was the greatest chief of the Tehuelche. Tecka was his favourite place to camp. When the Argentinian government started killing all the Indians, Perito Moreno, the guy who discovered the glaciers down south, persuaded the authorities to allow him to live in peace as keeper of a museum in Buenos Aires. After Incayal died, Moreno moved his body back here. It’s become a shrine now. There’s nothing else to see in Tecka, so we’ll keep going on this road. In a few hours we’ll get to Arroyo Pescado, and we don’t want to stop there either. It’s where a Yank murdered a Welshman, another event we don’t forget. It’s still full of Yanks. They come here for fishing holidays. I hate the place.’

  Manolo related how the Welsh colonists, having been deprived of the Tehuelche as commercial partners, badly needed to export their products. They planned to extend the railway, and a brilliant engineer, Dafydd ap Iwan, came to work on the project. Dafydd ap Iwan established rail terminals at Puerto Madryn and Trelew and then conducted feasibility studies and surveys from Trelew to the Andes. He also became manager of the Arroyo Pescado branch of the Chubut Mercantile Company. In December 1909, Dafydd ap Iwan was held up and murdered in cold blood by a North American bandit named Wilson. Plans to complete the Welsh Pacific–Atlantic railway died shortly afterwards.

  We drove for a few hours through gentle mountain passes past chuckling creeks until we reached the westernmost Welsh colony, Cwm Hyfryd, now split into the Andean foothill towns of Esquel and Trevelín. The colony boasted a police station and telegraph office. A hundred years ago its chief of police, Eduardo Humphreys, had made friends with his good neighbours Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Cholilo was only a few miles from Esquel.

  Plateaus and plains came into view. A short distance away small troops of gauchos in their full regalia of flat-topped black hats, colourful bandannas and handlebar moustaches were rounding up a herd of Herefords.

  ‘It’s a cowboy movie, isn’t it?’ said Manolo. ‘See those black rocks over there? That’s where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid murdered a Welshman for no reason. We’ll pass by their place in a little while.’ A lonely aba
ndoned shack lay rotting in a corner of a field. There were no notices and no visitors. ‘Good enough for them,’ said Manolo. ‘They did the place no good at all.’

  We entered the dusty town of Esquel. Posters and signs referred to the Old Patagonian Express, the Welsh Co-op’s downfall. Local wheat couldn’t compete in price with the grain the train bought down from up north. At the Cassis Restaurant we had a delicious lunch of trout carpaccio followed by roast lamb. Manolo went to the bar to make a phone call. He turned round, put his thumb up and put down the phone.

  ‘Got some news for you about your great-great-grandfather, Mr Nice. That was Raoul. He’s had a word with Tommy Davies, a good man who knows just about everything that’s ever happened here. My dad thought a lot of him. Tommy is pretty old. He’ll be a hundred in a year or two. Anyway, he said his father had often talked about an Irishman called Patrick who had come to live in Gaiman and who did learn Welsh at the school there. But for some reason he left to go to live in Ushuaia.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘It’s the end of the world.’

  ‘Which country?’

  ‘This country, Argentina. It’s right at the bottom of Tierra del Fuego. Next stop is the South Pole. I expect you’ll be off there now, won’t you? Why don’t you stay here and help me grow some weed?’

  ‘I’ve got to go there, Manolo, especially if it’s the end of the world.’