Tierra del Fuego

by Francisco Coloane

  “Why don’t we eat it?” Almonacid, the engineer, suggested.

  “It’s too small!” one of the divers said.

  “To me, this lamb is worth more than any dog or any otter skin.”

  “You went to all that trouble to get meat,” a fat diver muttered, “so why not eat it?”

  “The skipper asked for a sheep! I brought this lamb on my own account! I didn’t save its life to give it to you!”

  “Not that there’s much meat on it!” another diver said, adding slyly, “But I agree it’s not a good idea to leave evidence lying around! An otter hunting dog would be better!”

  Fuelled by the liquor, the conversation continued circling around the relative value of a dog and a lamb.

  “I remember when I worked as a coastguard,” one of the divers said, “we once had to find a settler we’d lost touch with, on Dawson Island in the Straits of Magellan. You wouldn’t believe the things that had happened to him! First, his wife had died in childbirth . . . Then his house burned down with his three little children in it . . . And we finally found him out in the snow, frozen to death! And you know what we found beside him? His two dogs! His two dogs, lying next to the corpse! What other kind of animal dies like that at its master’s side?” And the diver concluded sententiously, “Only a dog dies with its master!”

  “One time, coming out of the Trinidad channel,” the skipper said, “we came across a boat that had run aground on those rocks that stick out of the sea . . . The whole crew had abandoned her apart from the dog, which was still on board, standing in the bow and howling, as if calling the men back.”

  Outside, a gust of wind passed over the waters of Puerto Balladares, and the schooner turned around its anchor, making the chains creak in the hawsehole.

  “A dog helps man to hunt other animals,” Alvarez said. “And last but not least, if you’re short of food, you can always cook it.”

  “I don’t think I could eat dog meat,” one of the divers said.

  “It’s obvious you’ve never been hungry . . .” Alvarez replied.

  “Have you tried it?”

  “Yes, and it’s delicious . . .” He cast a sidelong glance at Villegas. “It’s as good as this lamb will taste when it’s a few months older!”

  Seaman Ruperto Alvarez was the oldest man on board, and yet he was the most youthful and talkative of them all. Tall and well built, with a nose broken in a fight, bright eyes and a permanent smile below his trimmed black mustache, he did not look his age and was “a jack of all trades.” Although sixty-three years old, he was the one who climbed the mainmast when the sail got stuck up there in the middle of a storm. No one ever saw him angry or sad. He was like a big, aged child, for whom life was a game.

  “A few years ago,” he said, “I went across the border to look for work . . . I remember it took me two months to walk from the Pacific to the Atlantic. I left Talcahuano, went up the Neuquén and came down through Comodoro Rivadavia in Argentina.

  “One afternoon, feeling tired, I came to a tavern near the border, and when the owner saw me he asked me, ‘Do you know how to kill a lamb?’ ‘How could I not know something like that?’ I replied. ‘Come inside, then,’ he said, and he took me to a shed where there was a black dog on a chain . . . ‘That’s the lamb,’ he said, pointing to the dog, which looked well fed. I felt a bit sorry for it, so I said, ‘Why do you want me to kill it?’ ‘Shhhh, it’s for them!’ he replied, and pointed inside the tavern at the seven priests I’d seen in passing, sitting at a table in their black cassocks!

  “‘I’m not killing this dog,’ I said . . . ‘All right,’ he said, ‘if I kill it, will you skin it for me?’ ‘Yes, I replied, ‘I can skin it!’ The man picked up a stick and hit it on the head. The dog fell dead without so much as a bark, he drained the blood, and I skinned it. Then he roasted it in a clay oven and served it to the priests . . . They polished off the whole animal, even licked their fingers at the end and said how tender the lamb was! I had some, too, and it really was delicious. The meat was as white as lamb! Just the way the cook’s lamb will be in a while!”

  And he gave Villegas a sidelong look and laughed. The cook’s eyes flashed for a moment, then he stooped and went through the door to the kitchen.

  The Huamblín continued sailing by day and putting in to harbor by night along the open coast of the Taitao Pensinsula, the cape of which, the Tres Montes, is the visible part of the deepest rock on the planet. At length, she crossed the dreaded Gulf of Penas, entered the broad, majestic waterway of the Messier Channel, made her way through the labyrinth of little islands of the Angostura Inglesa, which is so narrow that it is impossible for more than one vessel to pass through it at any one time, and finally dropped anchor in the waters of Puerto Edén, set deep in the northern shore of the Paso del Indio.

  The place surely owed its name to its beauty. After the oceanic plains of the Gulf of Penas, the Messier Channel is a broad waterway that advances between gray walls of rock. At the entrance to it, the current swells like a vein that has been squeezed, and then the somber pass opens out onto an untouched, primeval world, where everything seems massive and strange to human eyes. At the far end of this landscape of cosmic grandeur, the verdant islands of Puerto Edén on the western shore of the Paso del Indio form a veritable oasis of beauty, and, just as that surrounding world seems to have only recently emerged from the waters, the seafarer has the feeling here that he will encounter the first men on earth . . .

  The islands, however, are cold and damp, and the ground is covered with age-old peat, five feet thick and as porous as soft cork. From this blanket of moss and lichen rises a luxuriant forest of oaks, cinnamon, cypress and laurel. But the beaches and shallows are full of fish and shellfish, allowing an equally primitive race, the Alakaluf, to take refuge there.

  Where did these primitive men come from? Nobody knows! After crossing the deserted, stormy waters of the south Pacific, they were the first human beings to arrive in that cold oasis amid the Andean peaks formed by the sea. They are different than the other Magallanes Indians, and the Yaghans of Tierra del Fuego gave them the curious name of “men of the west with knives of shell,” which is the literal meaning of the word “Alakaluf.” The white man brought alcohol and syphilis to that virgin world, but the Indians, although now degenerate, have preserved the custom of cutting the umbilical cord of the newborn baby with a mussel shell.

  Other “men of the west” in that region regress to a level lower even than animals . . . That afternoon, when the Huamblín dropped anchor in Malacca cove, well inside Puerto Edén, the shame of one of the crimes committed by fishermen and hunters on the unfortunate Alakaluf—swooping down on their huts like bandits, attacking the men and raping the women and girls—still seemed to float in the air.

  “It isn’t only the mussel fishers who do that,” one of the divers said in defense of his profession, as they discussed this incident that night aboard the Huamblín.

  “They waited until the flight sergeant was away before they attacked the Indian women,” one of the men who had come on board from land explained. He was young, panted as he spoke, and described the attack on the women as if it were happening there and then, right in front of him. His eyes grew wider as he continued, and his gestures more gruesome.

  “Who were they?” one of the men from the Huamblín asked.

  “No one knows,” the young man replied. “We suddenly heard noises from the Indian tents during the night . . . Curses and struggling . . . Then women and girls screaming . . . But then the noise died down and everything was quiet again.”

  “And where was the sergeant?”

  “He’d gone to hunt otters with the young men . . . He gives them uniforms like sailors, and makes them march and raise the flag. Then he takes them out to hunt otters. He keeps all the skins, of course . . .”

  “Men are alone a lot of the time around here . . .” another mussel fisher who was on the Huamblín as a visitor remarked. “They see the Indian women an
d . . . well, an ugly Indian woman is better than other things.”

  “What do you mean?” Dámaso Ramírez cut in. “What the filthy bastards could get up to between themselves?”

  “Worse than that . . . Once I saw a group of seal hunters tying a female seal on the shore of an island . . . to relieve themselves . . .”

  “And I suppose you were one of them?”

  “I was with them, yes, but I wasn’t in the mood. One of them went crazy later . . . He’d wake up screaming, saying the skinned seal was pursuing him . . .”

  “What do you mean, skinned?”

  “The brutes skinned the seal afterwards, when she was still half alive, to sell the fur . . . But the next day, there was no sign of her on the shore. Even without her skin, she’d dragged herself to the sea . . . That was why she was pursuing the seal hunter and driving him crazy, like people who die in shipwrecks and torment those who did them wrong . . .”

  “Old wives’ tales!” the skipper cried.

  “Maybe so, but the fact is, they had to tie the guy down to stop him from jumping overboard . . . I’m surprised you don’t know about these things, being the skipper of a schooner!”

  “I was a whaler, not a seal hunter . . .”

  “Obviously, with a whale, it’d be a whole lot more difficult,” the mussel fisher said sardonically, and everyone laughed.

  The cook’s eyes flashed angrily at the group, and the skipper pounded his fist on the little table next to the mainmast, rose to his feet in disgust, and climbed up on deck, saying in a loud voice, “Animals, worse than animals!”

  Outside, the night was dark and cloudy. Dámaso Ramírez stood on deck for a moment looking out at the surroundings, as he usually did before going to bed. A lighthouse blinked from one of the dark cliffs of the Paso del Indio. The islands stretched away to the east, like a flotilla of darker shadows. On the second floor of the wireless station, there was a light at the window, which gave a strangely urban touch to the desolate area. Beyond the wireless station, on a slope that went all the way down to the shore, stood the sealskin tents of the Alakalufa. Another mussel schooner was at anchor at the entrance of Malacca cove, and in a shallow to the northeast, the lights of a camp of mussel fishers added a certain animation to the wild landscape.

  The skipper could hear the conversation still going on down below in the cabin. From here, it sounded like water coursing through an underground tunnel. He heard the cook bustling about in his kitchen in the bow, heard that long yawn of his, an annoying mixture of moan and sigh. All the same, there was definitely something different about him these days—he wasn’t as obstinate or as unapproachable as he used to be.

  Dámaso Ramírez was a man of about fifty, not especially tall, but well built, broad shouldered and muscular, as whaling masters often are. He had been reduced to commanding this mussel schooner due to the failure of the whaling concern for which he had worked, a Chilean-Norwegian company that had tried to establish itself in the region of the Gulf of Penas. They had had a factory ship and four hunting ships, and he had been the captain of one of these, the Chile. But even though these pioneers of whaling in the southern seas had given their ships names like that, the fledgling enterprise had incurred the wrath of certain government circles, due to the fact that it was competing with another whaling company from the north owned by a man of great social and financial influence who was a friend of the President of the Republic. Dámaso Ramírez still felt bitter about it. He remembered one of the owners of the Chile-Norway Whaling Company showing him a copy of a wire from the President’s office ordering the governor of Magallanes Province to make things as difficult as possible for the pioneers based in Punta Arenas. The company had been forced into liquidation and had had to sell its factory ship and the four whaling ships to that same powerful company from the north. And so Dámaso Ramírez had lost his job and his status as a whaling captain, but, more than that, he had lost his faith in men, especially those in government . . . As an expert whaler, accustomed to vanquishing that great monster of the sea, it seemed to him that, while man may have mastered nature, he had not yet mastered his own nature . . .

  In his long years at sea, he had seen and heard many things, but none that had left him as disoriented as the atrocious story he had just heard below deck from the lips of the mussel fisher who had been visiting the schooner. He looked at the sea, its waters becoming even blacker each time a squall came down from the hills to the west and eddied between the islands toward the wide channel. Then he looked at the mountains, their top halves covered in snow. They were the only things white in the darkness, that eternal snow of the mountaintops, but even their brightness had something hazy about it and merged into the blackness above. He searched in the sky, as he often did, for his guiding constellation, which so often at night on the high seas, during his time as a whaler, had told him his position on the planet and even indicated the course he should take. But he could not see a single star. Like the rest of them, the Southern Cross was hidden behind that low dark vault, as if a demonic hand had scrawled all over the sky in soot blacker than the coal-black night. He raised his fist threateningly toward that dark sky and said to himself two or three times, swallowing the words in his anguish, “Heaven, where is your salvation?”

  And then he went down below deck and through the door that led to his bunk, as if swallowed by a floating tomb.

  The heavy night rain was followed by a morning so luminous that Puerto Edén looked newly born. In the western channel, Grossover Island lay across the middle of the narrow Paso del Indio, green and motionless, like a great whale cast on the waters, and beyond it were vistas of blue, white and green, lining the channel that stretched ahead like a road leading to other worlds.

  The Huamblín landed the three divers with their rubber suits and diving bells, and they immediately took their places in the boats that were waiting for them. That same day, the schooner began its constant journeying through the adjoining seas, in search of the fifteen boats, each with its divers and assistants, which the owner in Puerto Montt maintained in the region all winter, along with the Huamblín.

  The boats—which had kept their whaling names from the days when they had hunted those great sea creatures, equipped only with handheld harpoons—plied those waters with their own sails, a mainsail and a jib. Sometimes, the crews allowed themselves the luxury of hoisting a foresail, which made them look like small sailboats with high bows and pointed stern posts. Each diver had two assistants whose job was to supply him with air from a pump that one of them worked with a wheel. When the diver at the bottom of the sea had filled his wire basket—the chinquillo—full of mussels, he would give two tugs on the rope, and the other helper would raise the ­basket.

  The heavy snowfalls of June made this work a lot more difficult. Everything was covered in a thick white mantle. The wind brought the snow down from the high peaks all the way to sea level, where the high tide gave it a beveled edge, like a cornice of glass.

  Morning often saw the vegetation on the islands also wrapped in white vestments, which gave the stunted oaks and capricious laurels and cypresses softly sculpted shapes held miraculously in place above the clear blue waters.

  Sometimes, the sea in the channels was covered with a sheet of ice, and the divers would have to break that fragile, glassy surface before stepping through into the vast underwater world as if through a window. With their white rubber suits and the great globes of their shiny copper diving bells, often streaked with green mold, screwed onto their necks, they would slowly descend, like ghosts, down the iron ladder hooked to the edge of the boat, and onto the sea bed, attached only by the red rubber tube that carried the air from the boat to their lungs.

  Below, in the greenish waters, they would look like big white frogs with bronze heads, or strange fish forcing their way through the seaweed.

  Slowly, the men on the boat would turn the wheels of the air pump, making sure the umbilical cord carried vital sustenance to the son of the earth
in the belly of the sea. Of the life that depended on them, nothing was visible except, every now and again, the ring of bubbles, like soap bubbles, that rose to the surface every time the man inside the metal helmet tilted his head to the side and pressed the valve to let out the stale air from his lungs and continue to live. The procedure was so slow and mechanical that the assistants sometimes forgot that in those bubbles of air life had gone down into the heart of a man, a life linked as always, tragically, to death.

  What do divers think as they walk on the bottom of the sea? Many of them say that all they think about is filling the wire basket with mussels as quickly as possible and tugging on the rope so that the assistant will hoist it. As far as what they see is concerned, they usually keep silent, with that tired, sphinx-like smile with which they breathe the air when they are half out of the water at the side of the boat and the assistants unscrew the copper helmet.

  It is said that walking underwater is like walking through heavier air, but that the body becomes as light as you could wish, since it only takes a movement of the head on the valve of the diving bell for more air to go in or out of that ­pneumatic suit floating beneath the sea.

  The surface of the sea bed is no different than the surface of the land, with the same passes, the same meadows, only calmer and more silent, since neither the motion nor the noise of the waves penetrates that far down. Through the great square eyes of glass, shoals of curious fish sometimes appear, swimming calmly around the metal head for a moment, then suddenly dispersing like the petals of a rose blown away by a sudden wind. Sometimes, a dolphin, the mammal with the heaviest brain, proportionately, after man, approaches to get a good look at this white creature, similar to itself, which swims in that strange vertical way.

  Some of the divers are superstitious, and have more faith in their amulets, which they carry on their belts along with the bottle for urine, than in the assistants to whom they have entrusted their lives, in spite of the time-honored law of the sea stating that in an emergency the life of the man down below comes before the life of the man up above.