Patagonia is one of those fertile territories of fantasy, like the Galapagos, which has scarcely advanced from its early maps showing blue unicorns, red centaurs and giants. It still likes to think of itself as a land of giants. “Not those giants referred to by Hernando de Magellanes,” wrote Tom Jones, “but those men and women, many of them British, who made this vast, bleak and windswept land, prosperous and habitable for civilised people.” Today, it remains scattered both with dinosaur bones and living relics who live 60 kilometres from the nearest pavement and talk of “leagues” and “chappies” and “t’other side”. Everyone seems seven foot high, an oddball. Dreams proliferate. “Patagonia is different from anywhere else,” says Teresita Braun-Menendez, of the family with whom Bruce had dined in Buenos Aires. “That loneliness, that grandiosity. Anything can happen.”
Bruce had come to Argentina with a fixed idea. “I always try and decide what I want and then I will try and find it,” he told the broadcaster Melvyn Bragg. He was keen to retrieve from his abandoned nomad book the idea of the Journey as Metaphor, in particular Lord Raglan’s paradigm of the young hero who sets off on a voyage and does battle with a monster. Such journeys are the meat and drink of our earliest stories, Bruce told the Argentinian journalist Uki Goni – an “absolute constant, a universal in literature”. He wanted to write a spoof of this form. Where Jason had sought the Golden Fleece, Bruce would seek the animal in his grandmother’s cabinet. Wishing to make it more of a spoof, he even harboured the notion of calling his book: “A Piece of Brontosaurus”.
The spoof was a protective device, concealing a desire to continue his serious exploration into wandering and exile. “Tierra del Fuego was the last place man had wandered to on foot,” he told Goni. “There is some way in which Patagonia is the ultimate symbol of restlessness for the human condition.” He intended to grapple with his theme not in the abstract terms which had suffocated his nomad book, but in concrete stories.
“Your fascination is people?” asked Goni.
“Yes, in the end. It took rather a long time to discover that.”
The people Bruce would meet in Patagonia were often rootless storytellers like himself. “My temperament is definitely towards the fantastic,” he told Goni. “The whole of this journey was like a pursuit – not only for this ridiculous piece of skin, which was a sort of fantastical enough quest anyway, but then as it developed it became chasing one story or one set of characters after another.” It was, he said, “the most jaw-dropping experience because everywhere you’d turn up, there, sure enough, was this somewhat eccentric personality who had this fantastic story . . . At every place I came to it wasn’t a question of hunting for the story it was a question of the story coming at you . . . I also think the wind had something possibly to do with it.”
On 18 December, he took the overnight bus to Bahia Blanca and at 8 a.m. reached the small town of Cabildo. His destination was “El Chimango”, the estancia of David Bridges. Bridges was the son of Lucas Bridges, who had written one of Bruce’s favourite books, Uttermost Part of the Earth. His grandfather, the first missionary to Tierra del Fuego, personified Bruce’s childhood fantasy of the abandoned orphan. Found on a bridge wearing clothes marked with a “T” and christened Thomas Bridges, he was at the age of 19 put in charge of a mission on Keppel Island and from 1887 he lived on the Beagle Channel at Harberton in a green and white house pre-fabricated in Devon. “His lack of roots in England forced him to establish new roots in Tierra del Fuego.” One reason for visiting David Bridges was to establish contact with Bridges’s relations in the far south.
Bridges picked up Bruce outside the chemist in Cabildo and drove him to the house he was building half an hour away. The brick bungalow lay on a hill, roofless, with a sweeping view over charlock fields to the Sierra de los Vascos. Bridges showed Bruce round the farm. He had worked on the maps of his father’s book and shared his blunt suspicion of travellers. “I think explorers rather than missionaries ought to be put in the cook-pot,” he says. He nevertheless found Bruce “distinctly positive” as a person.
Bruce’s book on Patagonia would upset many of the people who lived there. Bridges is not one of them: “If you haven’t ruffled any feathers you certainly haven’t written anything worth writing.” In the book, Bruce gives Bridges the name of Bill Philips. “I asked him to disguise me, although he didn’t put enough damn camouflage. No one likes being discovered. No one likes looking at their own passport photograph, but I found it accurate. It’s not flattering, but it’s the truth.” Bridges confirms the accuracy of other portraits. “I thought he was being extremely discreet down south and therefore you could think it was someone else’s passport. I’ve never known an author yet who’s left a happy stream behind him. Some get on their high horse, and what they get on their horse about is as ridiculous as a fish on the roof. They have illusions about themselves that a photographer hasn’t.”
“My business was to record what people said,” Bruce wrote of his time in Patagonia. The author would be the thinnest presence. “I’m not interested in the traveller,” he told ABC radio. “I’m interested in what the traveller sees.”
He described his odyssey to Colin Thubron in photographic terms. “I was . . . determined to see myself as a sort of literary Cartier-Bresson going SNAP, like that. It was supposed to be a take each time.” The comparison is instructive. Cartier-Bresson is popularly defined by his notion of the “decisive moment”, an instant when everything in the picture is in balance. Bruce sought the same reverberating image. He wrote quick snapshots of ordinary people among whom he passed a very short time: stay longer and the picture would fog. Few guessed what he was up to. (In the Residential Ritz hotel in Punta Arenas, Bruce wrote down his profession as estanciero, or farmer.) This, partly, is why many of his subjects resented him. Not telling them that the camera was rolling, he caught them unawares and condensed their lives into a few vivid details. The portraits were not untrue, rather an encapsulation and the effect was to heighten and intensify. In the process, some felt, he had made off with their intimate moments and preserved them behind the glass of his prose for strangers to look at.
Nowhere was this resentment more acutely felt than in the community of Chubut.
In 1865, a boat-load of Welsh settlers landed on a beach near what is now Puerto Madryn. They had come to the desert to be free of England. Today, the name Bruce Chatwin conjures up everything the original emigrants had sailed to leave behind.
On 22 December, Bruce walked along the beach among the seals. “I am feeling tired and fat and old, cannot bear to look down to see the rings of fat that have been added to my waist over the last few weeks . . . I must unburden myself and go where the tourists are not.” On Christmas Eve, travelling by bus, he reached the village of Gaiman, 20 miles inland.
Gaiman’s schoolteacher was Albina Zampini. Her father was a Jones who had arrived in 1886. She took pity on Bruce and invited him to a Christmas Eve party at the house of her sister, Vally Pugh. “Poor chap, he didn’t have any presents so I gave him a linen handkerchief. He was eating turron, a hard candy, which he said reminded him of the mylodon. The main subject on his mind was that giant sloth.”
Albina introduced Bruce to Enrique Fernandez, a young musician, who became his guide. In the book, Bruce calls him “Anselmo” and writes that when he played Chopin “you could imagine you were in the presence of a genius”. Enrique died of AIDS in May 1990, but a photograph kept by his mother shows a young man of 26 in a brown jersey with both hands on the piano. He has a long nose and a moustache. Bruce told at least two people that he seduced Enrique, although his notebook makes no reference to this.
On Christmas Day, Enrique took Bruce to the smallholding belonging to his friend Edmundo Williams. Edmundo and his brother Geralt showed Bruce the contents of the adobe house, a collection of Welsh relics which Bruce photographed, and afterwards Geralt drove him to church in a 1958 Dodge.
Edmundo took intense exception to the few lines Bruce
wrote about him. It is not too much to say that they changed his life. His resentment illustrates a sentiment widely held: whereas V. S. Naipaul insulted the important, powerful people when he wrote about Argentina (in The Return of Eva Perón), Bruce upset the little people, those who could not answer back.
Bruce called Edmundo “Euan” and suggested, subtly, that because he was single he was other things too. This infuriated Edmundo. He had received this stranger politely. He knew nothing about appearing in a book and suddenly, two years later, other strangers start coming to his door asking personal questions he does not want to answer. Through his fleeting appearance in In Patagonia, people have assumed an intimate knowledge of him he was rarely prepared to give anyone. It was Edmundo’s link with Enrique which was especially damaging and misleading, as the book recasts Edmundo in a role Bruce, off the record, later acknowledged as his own. He wrote to a friend: “What I took OUT of that story was the head falling backwards at the end of the mazurka . . . and lifting him off the piano stool into the bedroom.”
Bruce’s Patagonian notebooks contain few personal revelations or confessions of the sort he is adept at chiselling out of others. He told Uki Goni: “There are some people who go through the day and just write up what they’ve seen in the evening and I’ve tried that, but it’s absolutely no good. It goes dead on you. So what my diaries are is just constant notes. I’ll always have it in my pocket and just scribble down what’s happened that minute and how it’s struck me, fragments of conversation.” But the fragments, the confessions are never his own. He is teasingly absent.
On 4 January 1975, he arrived in Rio Pico. This village of German and Boer descendants is as remote as you get in Patagonia, 78 kilometres down a dirt road which comes to a halt near the Chilean border. The desolation draws from Bruce the remark: “Who would bomb Patagonia?”
He met in Rio Pico a Ukrainian nurse whose legs had been amputated. Alma Arbusova de Riasniansky is another example of Bruce seeing what he wanted to see. He changes her name, which protects her and also heightens his snapshot. He describes her shelves of Russian authors and says that the words Mandelstam and Akhmatova “rolled off her tongue”. In fact, Alma reads Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. She has not heard of Osip Mandelstam.
But in this snapshot he does not give us the full picture. When they meet she inveighed against homosexuality. Bruce quotes her as saying: “England in full decadence tolerating homosexuality.” In handwriting so small it is barely legible, he adds: “longing to tell/dare not”. Even at the end of the remotest road in Patagonia, he is unable to confess to his diary without betraying the anxiety that someone is looking over his shoulder. He still, at 34, resists the label of homosexual.
Bruce had spent four days in Gaiman, the longest he lingered anywhere in Patagonia. On 29 December he headed further inland, reaching Esquel at the foot of the Andes. For the next three weeks he zigzagged from the cordillera to the pampas, “spending nights in the grass, in caves, in peons’ huts, and sometimes between the linen sheets of an old-fashioned English estancia. On my back I carried a small leather rucksack containing a sleeping bag, a few clothes . . . and half a bottle of Vintage Krug to drink at the worst possible moment.”
This tantalising digest is typical. Paul Theroux, who reached only as far as Esquel, is not alone in wanting to know: “How had he travelled from here to there? How had he met this or that person? Life was never so neat as Bruce made out.”
His notebooks and letters provide some details. “Dying of tiredness,” he wrote to Elizabeth. “Have just walked 150 odd miles. Am another 150 from the nearest lettuce and at least 89 from the nearest canned vegetable. It will take many years to recover from roast lamb.” There are frequent references in his notebook to his stomach. “Difficulties of Patagonia. I want a salad. Cannot face any more meat. Dust in your eyes. Feeling rather weak of hunger . . . Have an overwhelming desire to eat canned peaches.”
He took trains and buses and hitched rides where he could, and walked a lot, as when he trekked from Harberton to Viamonte. “Basically, God is kind to people who walk on foot.” Once, beyond Rio Pico, he rode a horse but fell off, injuring his hand, and had to visit the clinic named after the Ukrainian nurse. He often found himself abandoned to the roadside. “Tourists always wave at the hitchhiker walking in the other direction; going in the same direction, tight-lipped they pretend he does not exist.” On 18 January, near Lago Posada, he managed to thumb a ride only for the lorry to break down.
“Day of disasters – wrecked my plans. Certainly well said that the internal combustion engine is the modern replacement of the Devil.
“Good subject for a story – the young camionero crushed by his own lorry – the one thing he loved.
“19th Sunday.
“How to describe the immense boredom, the inertia of waiting for the lorry to recover. We had another puncture last night coming too fast down the barranca . . .”
At last he gets a lift with a depressed gendarme who reminds him that “the tragedy of the semi-educated has yet to be written”. The gendarme turns out to be another storyteller. He believes the Vikings marched deep into the Brazilian jungle and that the Incas were in contact with the Martians. “How else to explain their intelligence?”
Sometimes he slept in the open, sometimes in cheap hotels, and wherever he could in the estancias of those he wrote about. At Viamonte in Tierra del Fuego, he is remembered by Bridges’s cousin Adrian Goodall as “the chap who brought his own cereal” (Elizabeth’s muesli). Estancias like Viamonte reminded him of the headmaster’s house in an English boarding school.
Usually, he arrived unannounced. “He felt he was welcome anywhere,” says Elizabeth. “He couldn’t imagine not being welcome.” This attitude caused friction further south. At Despedida, he appeared without warning while Jacqueline de las Carreras’s husband was shearing. “He was very arrogant, very sure of himself, very narcissistic,” she says. “He didn’t speak any Spanish and he didn’t make any effort to be understood. He was very ‘Me, myself and I’m the Queen of England’.” He appalled Nita Starling, a 60–ish spinster who looked after the garden, by asking if she would wash his clothes. She refused.
Bruce would reserve his prickliest comments for Natalie Goodall, who lived at Harberton, Lucas Bridges’s old house. He telephoned to say he had been given her name by David Bridges. “N. G. sounded quite gratuitously nasty on the telephone – hope she drowns.” Nor did their relationship mend when he reached Harberton. “The question of payment to Natalie Goodall rubs one completely up the wrong way by suggesting you are just another bum in search of a bed. Some maybe, but . . .”
On 21 January, in the small village of Baja Caracolles, Bruce wrote to Elizabeth. He was stranded in the middle of nowhere, but he had arrived.
“Dearest E.
I have begun letters I don’t know how many times and then abandoned them. Now I am stuck, for 3 days at least, because the justice of the peace, to whom I confided some of my things, has run off with the key.
Writing this in the archetypal Patagonian scene, a boliche or roadman’s hotel at a crossroads of insignificant importance with roads leading all directions apparently to nowhere. A long mint green bar with blue green walls and a picture of a glacier, the view from the window a line of lombardy poplars tilted about 20 degrees from the wind and beyond the rolling grey pampas (the grass is bleached yellow, but it has black roots, like a dyed blonde) with clouds rushing across it and a howling wind.
On no previous journey am I conscious of having done more. Patagonia is as I expected but more so, inspiring violent outbursts of love and hate. Physically it is magnificent, a series of graded steps or barrancas which are the cliff lines of prehistoric seas and unusually full of fossilised oyster shells 10” diam. In the east you suddenly confront the great wall of the cordillera with bright turquoise lakes (some are milky white and others a pale jade green) with unbelievable colours to the rocks (in the pre-cordillera). Sometimes it seems that the Almighty
has been playing at making Neapolitan ice cream. Imagine climbing (as I did) a cliff face 2000 feet high alternately striped vanilla, strawberry and pistachio in bands of 100 feet or more. Imagine an upland lake where the rock face on one side is bright purple, the other bright green, with cracked orange mud and a white rim. You have to be a geologist to appreciate it. Then I know of no place that you are so aware of prehistoric animals. They sometimes seem more alive than the living. Everybody talks of pleisiosaurus, or ichtyosaurus. I met an old gentleman who was born in Lithuania who found a dinosaur the other day and didn’t think much of it. He thought much more of the fact he had a pilot’s licence, at the age of 85 being probably the oldest solo flyer in the world. When he was younger he tried to be a bird man.
I have been caught in the lost beast fervour and 2 days ago scaled an appalling cliff to the bed of an ancient lake . . . and there discovered to my inexpressible delight a collection of fragments of the carapace of the glyptodon. The glyptodon has if anything replaced the mylodon in my affections – there are about 6 whole ones in the Museum of La Plata – an enormous armadillo up to 9-10 feet long, each scale of its armour looking like a Japanese chrysanthemum. The entertaining fact about my discovery, and one that no archaeologist will believe, is that in the middle of one scatter of bones were 2 obsidian knives quite definitely man-made. Now Man is often thought to have done away with the Glyptodon, but there is no evidence of his having done so.
Not an Indian in sight. Sometimes you see a hawkish profile that seems to be a Tehuelche i.e. old Patagonian, but the colonisers did a very thorough job, and this gives the whole land its haunted quality.
Animal life is not extraordinary, except for the guanaco which I love. The young are called chulengos and have the finest fur, a sort of mangy brown and white. There is a very rare deer called a Huemuel and the Puma (which is commoner than you would think but difficult to see). Otherwise pinchi the small armadillo, hares everywhere, and a most beguiling skunk, very small, black with white stripes; far from spraying me one came and took a crust from my hand.
Bruce Chatwin Page 40