In Patagonia

by Bruce Chatwin

  Compared to the verbs, other parts of speech droop in the wings. Nouns hang suspended from their verbal roots. The word for ‘skeleton’ comes from ‘to gnaw thoroughly’. Aiapi is ‘to bring a special kind of spear and put it in a canoe ready for hunting’; aiapux is the hunted animal and so ‘the sea otter’.

  The Yaghans were born wanderers though they rarely wandered far. The ethnographer Father Martin Gusinde wrote: ‘They resemble fidgety birds of passage, who feel happy and inwardly calm only when they are on the move’; and their language reveals a mariner’s obsession with time and space. For, although they did not count to five, they defined the cardinal points with minute distinctions and read seasonal changes as an accurate chronometer.

  Four examples:

  Thomas Bridges coined the word ‘Yaghan’ after a place called Yagha: the Indians called themselves Yámana. Used as a verb yámana means ‘to live, breathe, be happy, recover from sickness or be sane’. As a noun it means ‘people’ as opposed to animals. A hand with the suffix—yámana was a human hand, a hand offered in friendship, as opposed to a death-dealing claw.

  The layers of metaphorical associations that made up their mental soil shackled the Indians to their homeland with ties that could not be broken. A tribe’s territory, however uncomfortable, was always a paradise that could never be improved on. By contrast the outside world was Hell and its inhabitants no better than beasts.

  Perhaps, that November, Jemmy Button mistook the missionaries as envoys of the Power of Darkness. Perhaps, when later he showed remorse, he remembered that pink men also were human.

  65

  IN HIS autobiography The Uttermost Part of the Earth, Lucas Bridges tells how his father’s manuscript was filched by Frederick A. Cook, a glib American doctor on the Belgian Antarctic Expedition of 1898-9, who tried to pass it off as his own work. Cook was the mythomane traveller from Rip van Winkle country who began with a milk-round and claimed the first ascent of Mount McKinley and to have beaten Robert Peary to the North Pole. He died at New Rochelle in 1940, after serving a sentence for selling forged oil shares.

  The manuscript of the dictionary got lost in Germany during the Second World War, but was recovered by Sir Leonard Woolley, the excavator of Ur, and presented by the family to the British Museum.

  Lucas Bridges was the first White to make friends with the Onas. They trusted him alone when men like the Red Pig were butchering their kin. The Uttermost Part of the Earth was one of my favourite books as a boy. In it he describes looking down from Mount Spión Kop on the sacred Lake Kami, and how, later, the Indians helped him hack a trail linking Harberton with the family’s other farm at Viamonte.

  I had always wanted to walk the track.

  66

  BUT CLARITA GOODALL did not want me to go. The distance to Lake Kami was about twenty-five miles but the rivers were in spate and the bridges had fallen.

  ‘You could break a leg,’ she said, ‘or get lost and we’d have to send a search party. We used to ride it in a day, but you can’t get a horse through now.’

  And all because of the beavers. A governor of the island brought the beavers from Canada and now their dams choked the valleys where once the going was clear. But still I wanted to walk the track.

  And in the morning early she woke me. I heard her making tea in the kitchen. She gave me slabs of bread and blackcurrant jam. She filled my thermos with coffee. She took sticks soaked in kerosene and put them in a watertight bag: so if I fell in the river I should at least have fire. She said: ‘Do be carefull’ and stood in the doorway, in the half-light, in a long pink housecoat, waving slowly with a calm sad smile.

  A film of mist hung over the inlet. A family of red-fronted geese rippled the water, and at the first gate more geese stood by a puddle. I passed along the track that led up into the mountains. Ahead was Harberton Mountain, black with trees, and a hazy sun coming over its shoulder. This side of the river was rolling grass country, burned out of the forest and spiked with charred trees.

  The track rose and fell. Platforms of logs were laid in corrugations in the hollows. Beyond the last fence was a black pool ringed with dead trees and from there the path wound uphill in among the first big timber.

  I heard the river before I saw it, roaring at the bottom of a gorge. The track snaked down the cliff. In a clearing were Lucas Bridges’s old sheep pens now rotting away. The bridge was gone, but a hundred yards upstream the river opened out and slid over slippery brown stones. I cut two saplings and trimmed them. I took off my boots and trousers and eased out into the water, testing each footfall with the left stick, steadying myself with the right. At the deepest point the stream swirled round my buttocks. I dried off in a patch of sunlight on the far bank. My feet were red from cold. A torrent duck flew upstream. I recognized its striped head and thin whirring wings.

  The track soon lost itself in the forest. I checked the compass and struck north towards the second river. It was a river no longer, but a swamp of yellow peat moss. Along its edge, young trees had been felled with sharp oblique cuts, as if with the swipe of a machete. This was beaver country. This is what beavers did to a river.

  I walked three hours and came up to the shoulder of Mount Spión Kop. On ahead was the valley of the Valdez River, a halfcylinder running north twelve miles to the thin blue line of Lake Kami.

  A shadow passed over the sun, a whoosh and the sound of wind ripping through pinions. Two condors had dived on me. I saw the red of their eyes as they swept past, banking below the col and showing the grey of their backs. They glided in an arc to the head of the valley and rose again, circling in the upthrust, where the wind pushed against the cliffs, till they were two specks in a milky sky.

  The specks increased in size. They were coming back. They came back heading into the wind, unswerving as raiders on target, the ruff of white feathers ringing their black heads, the wings unflinching and the tails splayed downwards as air-brakes and their talons lowered and spread wide. They dived on me four times and then we both lost interest.

  In the afternoon I did fall into the river. Crossing a beaver dam I trod on a log that felt firm but was floating. It pitched me head first into black mud and I had a hard time getting out. Now I had to reach the road before night.

  The track showed up again, yawning a straight corridor through the dark wood. I followed the fresh spoor of a guanaco. Sometimes I saw him up ahead, bobbing over fallen trunks, and then I came up close. He was a single male, his coat all muddied and his front gashed with scars. He had been in a fight and lost. Now he also was a sterile wanderer.

  And then the trees cleared and the river wound sluggishly through cattle pastures. Following their tracks I must have crossed the river twenty times. At one crossing I saw boot-marks and suddenly felt light and happy, thinking I would now reach the road or a peon’s hut, and then I lost them and the river sluiced down a schist-sided gorge. I struck out across the forest but the light was failing and it was unsafe to clamber over dead trees in the dark.

  I spread my sleeping-bag on a level space. I unwrapped the sticks and piled up one half with moss and twigs. The fire flared up. Even damp branches caught and the flames lit the green curtains of lichen hanging from the trees. Inside the sleeping-bag it was damp and warm. Rainclouds were covering the moon.

  And then I heard the sound of an engine and sat up. The glare of headlights showed through the trees. I was ten minutes from the road, but too sleepy to care, so I slept. I even slept through a rainstorm.

  Next afternoon, washed and fed, I sat in the parlour Viamonte, too stiff to move. For two days I lay on the sofa reading. The family had gone camping all except Uncle Beatle. We talked about flying saucers. The other day he had seen a presence in the dining-room, hovering round a portrait.

  From Viamonte I crossed the Chilean half of the island to Porvenir and took the ferry to Punta Arenas.

  67

  IN THE Plaza de Armas a ceremony was in progress. It was one hundred years since Don José Menéndez
set foot in Punta Arenas and a well-heeled party of his descendants had come south to unveil his memorial. The women wore black dresses, pearls, furs and patent shoes. The men had the drawn look that comes of protecting an over-extended acreage. Their Chilean lands had vanished in land reform. As yet they clung to their Argentine latifundias, but the good old days of English managers and docile peons were gone.

  Don José’s bronze head was bald as a bomb. The bust had once adorned the family’s estancia at San Gregorio, but under the Allende regime the peons shoved it in an outhouse. Its reconsecration on the plaza symbolized the return of free enterprise, but the family were unlikely to get anything back. Insincere eulogies tolled like funeral bells.

  The wind sighed through the municipal araucarias. Ranked round the square were the cathedral, the hotel and the palazzos of the old plutocracy, now mostly officers’ clubs. A statue of Magellan pranced over a pair of fallen Indians, which the sculptor had modelled on ‘The Dying Gaul’.

  The top brass had lent their presence to the occasion. A band drowned the wind in Sousa marches, as the Intendente, a redfaced General of the Air-Force, prepared to unveil the memorial. The Spanish chargé d’affaires stared with the glassy eyes of absolute conviction. The American ambassador looked affable. And the crowd, which always turned out for a brass band, shambled round the ceremony with expressions of stone. Punta Arenas was a Leftist town. These were the people who elected Salvador Allende their deputy.

  A block away was the palais which Moritz Braun imported piece-meal from Europe when he married Don José’s daughter in 1902, its mansard roofs poking above a shroud of black cypresses. Somehow the house had weathered the confiscations and, in a setting of hygienic marble statues and buttoned sofas, the domestic serenity of the Edwardian era survived.

  The servants were preparing the dining-room for the evening’s reception. The afternoon sun squeezed through velvet draperies and bounced off a runway of white damask, reflecting light over walls of Cordoba leather and a painting of amorous geese by Picasso’s father, Ruiz Blasco.

  After the ceremony the older generation relaxed in the winter-garden, attended by a maid in black and white, who served scones and pale tea. The conversation turned to Indians. The ‘Englishman’ of the family said: ‘All this business of Indian killing is being a bit overstretched. You see, these Indians were a pretty low sort of Indian. I mean they weren’t like the Aztecs or the Incas. No civilization or anything. On the whole they were a pretty poor lot.’

  68

  THE SALESIAN FATHERS in Punta Arenas had a bigger museum than the one at Río Grande. The prize exhibit was a glass showcase containing the photo of a young, intolerant-looking Italian priest, the cured skin of a sea-otter and an account of how the two came together:On September 9th 1889 three Alakalufs of the canales came to Father Pistone and offered him the otter skin, now conserved in the museum. While the Father examined it, one Indian swung a machete and dealt him a terrible blow on the left maxilla. The other two immediately set on him. The Father struggled with these examples of Homo Silvestris but his wound was grave. After some days in agony, he died.

  The killers had lived in the Mission for seven months, well-loved and cared for by the Salesians as adopted sons. But atavism, ambition and jealousy drove them to crime. Once they had done the deed, they fled. Some time after they returned, and, in contact with Our Religion, they became civilized and were good Christians.

  Life-sized painted plaster effigies of the Indians stood in mahogany showcases. The sculptor had given them ape-like features which contrasted with the glucose serenity of the Madonna from the Mission Chapel on Dawson Island. The saddest exhibit was two copy-book exercises and photos of the bright-looking boys who wrote them:THE SAVIOUR WAS IN THIS PLACE AND I DID NOT KNOW IT

  IN THE SWEAT OF THY BROW SHALT THOU EAT BREAD.

  So, the Salesians had noticed the significance of Genesis ; 3:19. The Golden Age ended when men stopped hunting, settled in houses and began the daily grind.

  69

  THE ‘ENGLISHMAN’ took me to the races. It was the sunniest day of summer. The Strait was a flat, calm blue and we could see the double white crown of Mount Sarmiento. The stands had a coat of fresh white paint and were full of generals and admirals and young officers.

  The ‘Englishman’ wore suede boots and a tweed cap.

  ‘Day at the races, eh? Nothing like a good race-meeting. Come along with me now. Come along. Come into the V.I.P.’s box.’

  ‘I’m not dressed properly.’

  ‘I know you’re not dressed properly. Never mind. They’re quite broad-minded. Come along. Must introduce you to the Intendente.’

  But the Intendente took no notice. He was busy talking to the owner of Higbland Flier and Highland Princess. So we talked to a naval captain who stared out to sea.

  ‘Ever hear the one about the Queen of Spain,’ the ‘Englishman’ asked, trying to liven up the conversation. ‘Never heard the one about the Queen of Spain? I’ll try and remember it: A moment of pleasure

  Nine months of pain

  Three months of leisure

  Then at it again.’

  ‘You are speaking of the Spanish Royal Family?’ The Captain inclined his head.

  The ‘Englishman’ said he had read history at Oxford.

  70

  THE OLD lady poured tea from a silver teapot and watched the storm blot out Dawson Island. Three chains of gold nuggets were festooned round her neck: she used to pay her peons to wash them from her streams. Soon the storm would break on this side of the Strait.

  ‘Oh, it was beautifully done,’ she said. ‘Of course, we heard rumours before, but nothing happened. And then we saw the planes circling the city. There was a bit of shooting in the morning and by afternoon they had all the Marxists rounded up. It was beautifully done.’

  Her farm had been one of the showplaces of Magallanes. Her father had an estate in the Highlands as well. They’d stay for the grouse and stalking and sail at the end of October.

  In 1973 the Government gave her two weeks to quit. Two weeks on property they’d had for seventy years. The letter came on the 2nd. Just a few ill-mannered lines to say she’d to be out by the 15th. She’d never worked as she worked in those two weeks. She stripped the house. Of everything. She took out everything. Even the light-switches. Even the marble surrounds for the baths. She’d had them sent out from home. But the men weren’t going to have them. They were going to get nothing from her.

  They stabbed her in the back, of course. The worst was a man she’d had for thirty years. Always helpful. Oh yes, always polite. She looked after him when he was sick and he only started to get uppity when the Marxists came in. He tried to stop the others loading cattle. Cattle she’d already sold, so they should have more for themselves. Then he turned off the heating oil, her oil, the oil she’d paid for.

  It was terrible. They stole her dog and trained him to kill people. All that winter they were making knives. Waiting, just waiting for orders to kill them in their beds. And what did they do when they got the place? Ruined it! Burst pipes! Sheep in the vegetable garden! And in the flower garden! They had no use for vegetables. Wouldn’t know what to do with them.

  They’d complain they had no milk. Said they got T.B. because she gave them no milk. So she gave them milk, which they poured down the drain. They hated fresh milk. Only liked tinned milk I And what did they do when they got the dairy herd? Turned it into bifes! Ate the lot! They couldn’t be bothered to milk the cows. Half the time they were too drunk to stand up.

  And the bull ... Oh! the bull! You didn’t know whether to laugh or cry about the bull. The Ministry bought this prize bull in New Zealand. No need for it! Plenty of good bulls next door in Argentina. But they couldn’t buy an Argentine bull, not without losing face. So they flew the bull from New Zealand to Santiago, flew it to Punta Arenas, where it was presented, with Lord knows what in the way of speeches, to the so-called model farm. And how long did the bull last? How long before th
ey ate it? Three days! Destroy and destroy. That’s all they wanted. So there’d be nothing left.

  She moved her furniture from the farm to the city, to the house she’d had for fifty years. The prettiest house in Punta Arenas, and of course, they wanted that too. Mr Bronsovič, the Party Boss, came three times. Nothing to stop him. No respect for private property in those days. Said the Party wanted it for its headquarters and she said: ‘Over my dead body!’

  The second time he came with his wife, nosing in all her cupboards and even trying out the bed. And the last time he stood in the drawing-room with his Red thugs and said: ‘It’s all so English. And to think she lives here alone. Aren’t you frightened living here all alone?’

  Yes. She wasn’t going to say it to him. She was frightened. So she sold the house to a Chilean friend. For nothing, of course. The peso was worth nothing. But they wouldn’t get it. Not yet. Not from her, anyway. And guess what Mrs Bronsovič did when she heard the place was sold. She sent a message: ‘How much did she want for her chintz-covered suite?’

  They arrested Bronsovič in his shop that morning. They marched him home, shaved his head and packed him off to Dawson Island. Then some of his friends went to the Intendente to try and get him out. ‘You surprise me,’ the Intendente said. ‘Can you recognize his handwriting?’ They said yes, and he showed them their own names on Bronsovič’s death list and they then said: ‘He’d better stay where he is.’