26
HE HAD blond hair and was travelling south. The hair flopped over his face and he flipped it back with a shake of his head. His body was soft and girlish. He held back his smile to hide a set of discoloured teeth. He was a miner, he said. He was looking for work in a mine.
He had torn a page from an old copy of the National Encyclopaedia. The page had a map showing various mines in Argentina. There was a gold mine at Rio Pico.
He had been one of the original Flower Children in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. Once, when he was hungry, he had picked up a half-eaten Hershey bar off the sidewalk on Haight Street. This incident had printed itself on his memory and he mentioned it a number of times.
In San Francisco he had signed up on methadone, but managed to get detoxicated when he first found work in a mine. There was something elemental, he said, about mining. Mines gave him a feeling of security. Working in a mine in Arizona he had himself a house and a fine living wage, that is, until they came after him for taxes. Those darned taxes, and he’d said: 'I’m through. I’m goin’ down South America, find myself another mine.’
We helped the driver change a wheel and he stood us drinks at Gobernador Costa. I asked a Welsh shopkeeper about the mine in Rio Pico. He said it had closed fifty years back. The nearest was a kaolin mine at Apeleg.
‘What’s kaolin?’
‘White china clay.’
‘White what? D’ye say white? White? Cheesus! A white mine! Where d’ye say that mine was?’
‘Apeleg.’
‘Where’s Apeleg?’
‘A hundred kilometres on south,’ the Welshman said. ‘After that there’s the coal mine at Rio Turbio, but it’s soft coal and you wouldn’t want to work there.’
The miner had no money and his passport was stolen. He had dinner on me. In the morning, he said he’d be heading on south. Man, he’d be all right. It was simply a question of finding the right mine.
27
THE HOTEL in Rio Pico was painted a pale turquoise and run by a Jewish family who lacked even the most elementary notions of profit. The rooms shambled round a courtyard with a water-tower and flower-beds edged with upturned bottles and full of fierce orange lilies. The owner was a brave and sorrowful woman in black, with heavy-lidded eyes, mourning with a Jewish mother’s passion the death of her first-born son. He had been a saxophonist. He had gone to Comodoro Rivadavia and died there, of stomach cancer. She picked her teeth with a thorn and laughed at the futility of existence.
Her second son, Carlos Rubén, was an olive-skinned boy with the flickering eyes of a Semite. He ached for the outside world and would soon disappear into it. Her daughters padded the bare scrubbed rooms in carpet slippers. She ordered a towel and a pink geranium to be put in my room.
In the morning I had a tremendous row about the bill.
‘How much was the room?’
‘Nothing. If you hadn’t slept in it, nobody else would.’
‘How much was dinner?’
‘Nothing. How could we know you were coming? We cooked for ourselves.’
‘Then how much was the wine?’
‘We always give wine to visitors.’
‘What about the maté?’
‘Nobody pays for maté.’
‘What can I pay for then? There’s only bread and coffee left.’
‘I can’t charge you for bread, but café au lait is a gringo drink and I shall make you pay.’
The sun was up. Spouts of wood-smoke rose vertically from the chimneys. Rio Pico was once the German colony of Nueva Alemania, and the houses had a German look. Elderflowers rubbed their heads against the planked walls. Beside the bar was a logging truck, off up into the mountains.
28
LAS PAMPAS was twenty miles on from Rio Pico, the last settlement before the frontier. To the north towered El Cono, an extinct volcano of bone-white screes and brighter snows. In the valley the river ran fast and green over white stones. Each log cabin had a potato patch, barricaded from cattle by stakes and thorns.
There were two families at Las Pampas, Patrocinio and Solis. Each accused the other of cattle-stealing, but both hated the State logging company and in their hatred they were friends.
It was a Sunday. God had given a son to the Patrocinio who owned the bar and he was celebrating the event with an asado. Riders had been coming in for two days. Their horses were hitched in the stable, their lariats and boleadoras tucked into the girths. The men lay in white clover, drinking wine from skins and warming themselves by the fire. The sun dispersed the milky haze that hung in patches over the valley.
Rolf Mayer, a gaucho with German and Indian blood, did the butchery. He was lean and silent with mighty scarlet hands. He was dressed all over in chocolate brown and never took off his hat. He had a knife made from a bayonet with a yellowing ivory pommel. He laid each sheep on a trestle and began undressing the carcass until it lay, pink and sheeny, legs in the air on the white inner lining of its own fleece. Then he slipped the knife point in where the skin stretches tight over the belly and the hot blood spurted over his hands. He enjoyed that. You could tell he enjoyed it by the way he lowered his eyelids and stuck out his lower lip and sucked the air in through his teeth. He pulled out the guts, skimmed them of liver and kidneys and threw the rest to the dogs.
He carried the five carcasses to the fire and crucified each one to its iron cross, set on an incline to the flame.
In the afternoon the wind and snow flurries sliced out of the Cordillera, while a tow-haired dreamer stoked the fire and the men played taba. The taba is the astragalus bone of a cow. The player throws it ten paces on to a prepared circle of mud or sand. If it falls on its concave side, this is suerte (good luck) and he wins; on its rounded side, this is culo (arse) and he loses; and if it falls on its edge there is no play. A good player knows how much backspin to give so that it lands suerte. Naturally there are a number of jokes about culo. I was culo many times and lost a lot of money.
After dark Patrocinio played the accordion and the dreamer sang in a nasal voice. The girls wore cretonne dresses and the boys held their partners far away from them.
29
A MAN called Florentino Soils offered to ride with me up the mountain. His face was burned a bright even red, and when he took off his hat, there was a sharp line where the red ended and the white began. He was a wanderer, without wife or house, owning nothing but two sleek criollo ponies, their saddles and a dog.
A few cattle, stamped with his brand, roamed the rough camps along the frontier, but usually he let them be. He had come down to exchange a cow for groceries and stayed for the asado. He was awkward in company. All day he did not drink but sat by the stream, alone, picking his teeth with grass stems.
The morning was cold. Cumulus clouds were piling up over the peaks. Soils put on sheepskin chaps and mounted his piebald. Patrocinio lent me a black gelding and we forded the river. The ponies went in up to the girth but their feet held. For an hour we rode up a steep valley, the track zig-zagging over a ridge of red rocks, then plunging in among the big trees. Another hour and we came to a sheer cliff. Solfs pointed to a pile of hewn timbers rotting into humus and said: ‘This was the prison of Ramos Otero’:
Ramos Luis Otero was a troubled young man, the son of a patrician family, who dressed in good clothes gone to rags and liked washing up dirty mess-cans. He hated women. He hated the salon atmosphere of Buenos Aires, and worked in Patagonia as a backwoodsman. One year he worked for a government surveying team, but, when his disguise fell through, he bought the Estancia Pampa Chica., at Corcovado, mid-way from the mountain to the plain.
In the last week of March 1911 Otero and his peon, Quintanilla, were driving a buckboard and two horses to the estancia. Crossing the Cañadón del Tiro they saw two riders trotting in the opposite direction. One of them, smiling, waved Otero on. The other grabbed his reins as he passed. The riders were North Americans.
They unhitched the horses and forced Otero and the peon t
o ride with them into the mountains. On coming to the cliff, the Americans felled some trees and constructed a prison cell, of trunks lashed together with rawhide. Otero took a special dislike to the tall blond one called Wilson, who left the heavy work to his friend.
Cooped up in the prison Otero went suicidal, and Quintanilla yellow with fear. Their jailers let them out twice a day for food and the functions of the body. There were several members of the gang, all gringos, North American or English. After two weeks one of the guards accidentally dropped a match. Otero picked it up, lit a fire on the floor and used the embers to burn through the rawhide. In the evening he heaved a trunk aside and the two men escaped.
Once free, Otero was full of hysterical denunciations. His brothers had come down with the ransom and he accused them of setting up the kidnap to make him leave Patagonia. He was not a balanced young man. Nor did the police believe his story until he led them to the cliff—and then it was a national sensation.
The Minister of the Interior ordered a manhunt to clear the Cordillera of outlaws. In December 1911 Wilson and Evans came down to Rio Pico to buy stores from two German brothers called Hahn. The Hahns were founders of the colony and warned their American friends that the Frontier Police were patrolling the area. Wilson’s hand was septic and swollen. He had been repacking a cartridge and it had exploded. Dona Guillermina Hahn dressed the wound and they rode back into the cover of the mountains.
But Evans had been tampering with the wife of one of the Solis family. This man knew the outlaws’ camp and led the patrol to it. Evans was under a tree eating lunch. Wilson, feverish from his hand, was lying in the tent. The officer, a Lt Blanco, shouted ‘Arriba las manόs!’ from behind a tree. Evans fired, killing one soldier and wounding another, Private Pedro Penas (alive to give an interview in Rawson in 1970 aged 104). The troops returned fire and shot Evans dead. Wilson broke out of the tent and ran, barefoot, among the trees, but the soldiers soon laid him out alongside his friend. On the bodies they found two gold watches and the photograph of ‘una mujer hermosisima’. (Testimony of Pedro Peñas.)
Cantering back to Las Pampas and dodging the low branches across the track, my saddle-girth snapped and the horse pitched me in among sharp rocks below. I looked up through the bushes and saw the sad mask of Solis break into a smile.
‘Feet!’ he said later to Patrocinio. ‘All I could see were the gringo’s feet.’
My hand was cut to the bone and we rode down to Rio Pico to have it dressed.
30
THE DOCTOR pushed through a swing door. There was something the matter with her legs. She had small white hands and a mane of greying yellow hair. She growled at me in English but I knew she was Russian. She moved with the slow fluidity that saves Russian women of bulk from ungainliness. She screwed up her eyes as if trying not to see.
In her room there were red cushions and red tapestry rugs, and, on the walls, two paintings of Russian subjects, daubed landscapes dimly remembered by a fellow exile: black pines and an orange river; light fluttering through birches on the white planks of a dacha.
She spent every spare peso ordering books from the Y.M.C.A. Press in Paris. Mandelstam, Tsvetayeva, Pasternak, Gumilev, Akhmatova, Solzhenitsyn—the names rolled off her tongue with the reverberation of a litany. She followed from samizdat reprints the fluctuations of Soviet dissent. Greedily she reached out for news of the new exiles. What had happened to Sinyavsky in Paris? What would become of Solzhenitsyn in the West?
Her sister was a school-teacher in the Ukraine. The doctor wrote to her often, but for years she had had no word.
I said Patagonia reminded me of Russia. Surely Rio Pico was a bit like the Urals? She scowled. Rio Pico did not remind her of Russia. In Argentina there was nothing—sheep and cows and human sheep and cows. And in Western Europe also nothing.
‘Total decadence,’ she said. ‘The West deserves to be eaten. Take England for example. Tolerating homosexuality. Disgusting I One thing I feel ... One thing I know for a fact ... The future of civilization is in the hands of the Slavs.’
In conversation I made some slight reservation about Solzhenitsyn.
‘What can you know about it?’ she snapped back. I had spoken a heresy. Every word Solzhenitsyn wrote was the truth, the absolute, blinding truth.
I asked how she came to Argentina.
‘I was a nurse in the war. I was captured by the Nazis. When it was over I found myself in West Germany. I married a Pole. He had family here.’
She shrugged and left me guessing.
And then I remembered a story once told to me by an Italian friend: she was a girl at the end of the war, living in a villa near Padua. One night she heard women screaming in the village. The screams scarred her imagination and, for years, she woke at night and heard the same hideous screaming. Long after she asked her mother about the screams and the mother said: ‘Those were the Russian nurses, the ones Churchill and Roosevelt sent back to Stalin. They were packing them into trucks and they knew they were going home to die.’
The pink plastic of artificial limbs shone through the doctor’s stockings. Both her legs were off at the knees. Perhaps the amputation saved her life.
‘You, who have been to Russia,’ she asked, ‘would they let me back? The Communists I do not mind. I would do anything to go back.’
‘Things have changed,’ I said, ‘and there is now the detente.’ She wanted to believe it was true. Then, with the particular sadness that suppresses tears, she said: ‘The detente is for the Americans, not for us. No. It would not be safe for me to go.’
A mile outside the settlement there was another exile:
31
SHE WAS waiting for me, a white face behind a dusty window. She smiled, her painted mouth unfurling as a red flag caught in a sudden breeze. Her hair was dyed dark-auburn. Her legs were a mesopotamia of varicose veins. She still had the tatters of an extraordinary beauty.
She had been making pastry and the grey dough clung to her hands. Her blood-red nails were cracked and chipped.
‘J’aime bien la cuisine,’ she said. ‘C’est une des seules choses que je peux faire maintenant.’
Her French was halting and slow. Her face lit up as she remembered the idioms of her childhood. She took up a coloured photograph of her city and began to recall the names of quays, streets, parks, fountains, and avenues. Together we strolled around pre-war Geneva.
Long ago she sang in operettas and cafés concerts. She came to Argentina, the land of opportunity and the tango in the early 1930s. She showed me copies of her own song, Novia Pàlida, The Pale Bride. The tempo was slow waltz. On the green cover was her picture, taken in 1932, leaning over the white rail of a ship, in a sailor suit with a wide white collar, smiling a diffident smile.
At some negative turning point she had married a moon-faced Swede. They joined two failures in one and drifted towards the end of the world. Caught by chance in this eddy, they built the perfect cottage of his native Malmö, with its intelligent windows and vertical battens painted red with iron-oxide.
The Swede died fifteen years ago and she had never left Rio Pico. Their son was a trucker. He wore chequered shirts and a red handkerchief at the neck, but when he relaxed, his face collapsed in Nordic sadness.
Her two rooms led one into the other. A pair of plastic curtains divided the space. She had painted them in trompe l’oeil to resemble the crimson velvet of theatre draperies, tied back with tassels of gold.
‘I can still paint a little,’ she said.
She had covered every inch of wall with murals, some in paint, some in coloured crayons.
A yellow sun rolled over the pampa and into the room. It played over the sails of yachts drifting on a summer’s day; on cafés hung with Japanese lanterns; on the Château de Chillon, mountain chalets and the Île des Peupliers.
She had carved little wooden faces of angels, painted them with rosy cheeks and set them round the cornice. On one wall was a small picture in oils, a sunny landscape cleft by
a black gulch. At the bottom were skulls and bones and, above, hung a ricketty bridge. Halfway across stood a little girl with a white frightened face and red hair streaming in the wind. She was tottering to fall but a golden angel hovered above and offered her his hand.
‘I like this painting,’ she said. ‘It is my guardian angel. My Angel, who has always saved me.’
A copy of The Pale Bride lay open on the music stand of the piano. Black gaps yawned where the ivory had come off. I noticed that not all her fingernails were painted. Some were red. Some she had left blank. Perhaps she did not have enough nailpaint to complete both hands.
I left the soprano and went to call on the Germans:
32
THE WIND blew the smell of rain down the valley ahead of the rain itself, the smell of wet earth and aromatic plants. The old woman pulled in her washing and fetched the cane chairs off the terrace. The old man, Anton Hahn, put on boots and a waterproof and went into the garden to check that all the catchments were clear. The peon came over from the barn with an empty bottle and the woman filled it with apple chicha. He was drunk already. Two red oxen stood yoked to a cart, bracing themselves for the storm.
The old man walked round his vegetable garden and his flower garden bright with annuals. Having seen that they would get the full benefit of the rain, he came inside the house. Apart from its metal roof nothing distinguished it from the houses of a South German village, the half-timbering infilled with white plaster, the grey shutters, the wicket fence, scrubbed floors, painted panelling, the chandelier of antler tines and lithographs of the Rhineland.
Anton Hahn took off his tweed cap and hung it on an antler. He took off his boots and canvas gaiters and put on rope-soled slippers. His head was flat on top and his face creased and red. A little girl with a pigtail came into the kitchen.
In Patagonia Page 9