Leaving the shop behind, we make our way back to the scrubland on barely visible tracks, crossing a ravine, teetering along trails cut into sheer cliff faces and over rickety bridges, until, in the lunar landscape of a rocky hilltop, a gate suddenly appears, the first man-made object we’ve seen for many hours. Beyond it, a footpath runs between some rather sparse-looking vegetable plots to a corrugated iron shack with a view over a pond.
You could easily have taken the woman standing in the middle of her garden with her back to us for a sculpture. But in actual fact this embittered forty-year-old woman was the widow María, who had lost her husband to stomach cancer two years before. Ever since, her face has been haunted by an autumnal look.
‘Why don’t you leave that shack of yours in the back of beyond?’ her children and friends had urged her, ‘and come and live with us in the village. We’ll look after you.’
But the time has long gone when this weather-tanned woman was still capable of living in a flat, in a permanent settlement among other people. No, she has to remain here now, come hell or high water, with her animals, her horse, her vegetable plot and her pond.
Her hooded eyes range about gloomily, unsettled and worried. Nothing is worth resting her gaze on for any length of time. So now she just hangs on, lurking in the wings of her lost love story, living without any company or any electricity. Now and then, a gamekeeper will drop by, or a farm labourer, and tell her what’s going on down in the valley or even in the city of Coyhaique.
Sometimes she takes her horse and rides bareback for four hours to go and fetch cigarettes – only to discover that they haven’t got any in that day. The stage on which her life is played out is the bleakest setting imaginable, a rocky wasteland constantly embattled by the wind.
María is busy drying onion skins, which she will use to dye her home-knitted woollen clothes. Clutching just a single candle, she wanders through the rooms in her house; the flickering light falls on finished garments, coarse-knit items in green, purple and orange, which she tips out of a plastic bag onto the table. There’s a strong smell of soup in the room. Hanging on the washing line in front of the door, secured with two pegs, is a little transistor radio whose aerial is sticking out into the wide blue yonder. Apparently you get the best reception that way, and it needs to be good for local people to send all their important messages: ‘Miguel, come home, you’re dinner’s ready’, ‘Pick up some beer, would you, Pablo?’, ‘Carlos, the cow’s run off again.’ In a place like this where there’s no mobile phone reception, CB radio is often the best way for locals to communicate with each other.
Suddenly, though, a blast of Mexican accordion music accompanied by the wail of a maudlin Mariachi singer issues from the transistor radio dangling from the washing line. Presently, the wind will swing round and carry his voice away. The draught inside the shack sets a mobile made from mussel shells jingling. I grope my way through the darkness once more out into the open, where I take a stroll round the foundation wall of the building. It feels like the home of a person who has simply stuck a stick in the ground in the wilderness and erected a property around it.
For instance, within the boundary fence a plot with a kitchen, tiny rooms and turquoise-painted walls has been put up, a living unit that stands pretty much unprotected up on the knoll that rises by the side of the pond. Up there, the wind constantly catches hold of anything that’s hanging on the outside wall or is trapped between the roof shingles and makes it rattle, hum, bang, hammer or thunder. It’s impossible to try and make sense of the ensuing cacophony, or to try and read each individual sound separately. All you can do is sit round the oven and listen to the wind and its percussion section.
The inhabitants of this area live such an isolated existence that the local authorities had community centres built so that people could meet up and compare notes and create some sort of local network. But the people round here never used them. Since the Pinochet period, when neighbours turned out to be traitors, informants and even torturers, they have become untrusting, shunning all community activities and keeping themselves to themselves.
The widow’s got toothache, so she’s stuffing her cheeks full of cloves and mentally adding this suffering to all her other woes.
She reckons that someone who’s lost her husband shouldn’t have to put up with toothache as well. But on the other hand, we’ve got white wine, we’re all together and safe and we’re enjoying each other’s company. If we have to nip out to use the loo that’s behind the vegetable plot, we strap on little head torches to find our way. María’s child-sized bathtub, which can just about hold a little puddle of cold water, is matched by her tiny bed, which smells of wet wool, like the inside of the mattress and the bedspreads have been steeped in it.
We eat all the things that she grows here: beetroot, potatoes, red cabbage and the leftovers of a home-butchered lamb. Manuel picks up the leg bone and gnaws the last scraps of meat off it.
‘My grandfather taught me that you always eat women and lambs with your hands.’
Lila tells María the fairytale of the princess and the pea.
‘Hang on, though,’ the widow says when she’s finished, ‘why did she need so many mattresses, was it that cold?’
‘No, they wanted to find out whether she was really a princess.’
María doesn’t get it.
‘So she could still feel the pea?’
‘Yes.’
María is happy, and we’re all happy. Even on a barren, stormlashed hill in the middle of nowhere in Patagonia, it seems, a European tale taking the mickey out of the decadence of the rich is still quite intelligible.
María gets by on very little indeed, and there’s nothing here to take her out of herself – no TV, no company and no alcohol. If we didn’t happen to be there today, she’d just be sitting in the middle of her room in the dark, listening to the wind and watching the wisps of smoke and steam rising up from her cooker and her pot of maté tea.
‘Have you got any friends?’
‘Oh, everyone wants to have a good friend, but nobody’s prepared to be one,’ she replies, sidestepping an answer.
On the wall, I discover a page from an old calendar with a picture of Berchtesgaden. From thousands of kilometres away, I find myself looking at the small format landscape of Europe. It makes us, our landscapes, and our mountain panoramas look dinky. By contrast, in Patagonia, individuals are crushed, their hovels are buckled and they are forced to take shelter in the shadow of the mountains, condemned to utter insignificance. Even the roads prefer to follow the rivers; paths that nature has willingly granted to humans, so that they can loiter on the margins of insignificance.
Here, the normal state of affairs is turned on its head, and you learn not to interpret nature in human terms. Anyone who settles here lives under sufferance, protected in their allotted little corner, and spends their time staring into candlelight or a fire. This power that humans have of keeping themselves to themselves, and cultivating an inner life which never leaves them in the lurch and never threatens them, is positively monumental.
‘Where are you heading to?’ María asks.
‘To Chaitén,’ I tell her.
‘You’ll be lucky. Chaitén’s off-limits.’
Lili doesn’t react, but just keeps staring straight ahead.
‘But I’ve heard that there are still eight people living there.’
‘Troublemakers. After the volcano erupted on 2 May last year, the police evacuated the town. They won’t let you in. It’s dangerous, anyhow. The mountain could blow up again at any moment.’
It’s true that after the unexpected volcanic eruption there have been sixty smaller explosions. Ash rained down on the surrounding region and contaminated the water. And then when, a year later, the lava dome inside the crater also collapsed and a new river of fire poured into the sea, the authorities evacuated the last of the inhabitants and warned them not to return.
We talk about killing. Lili mimics the ways fish gasp f
or air when they’ve been landed, then the heart-rending cries of young goats, and the ways cows bellow in mourning, sometimes for as long as twenty hours, when they’ve lost one of their calves.
‘It’s real torment,’ says Manuel, ‘but it’s got to be done.’
The sadness in the widow’s eyes has given way to a look of ferocity. It’s a harshness that she unpityingly transposes from her own life to that of the animals.
She tells Lili: when you’ve castrated an animal, you’ve got to keep its tail tied back so the wound won’t get dirty and infected. Sometimes, the kids will even block the other goats’ ears when we’re doing slaughtering. But we usually do the castrating with our teeth, it’s a kind of quick scraping action that you’ve got to do out in the open. In the barn, the animals would smash everything to pieces in no time with all their kicking and struggling.
Even though they’re generally kind to the animals, the children like cutting off their cocks. When they’re roasted in the oven the bristles drop out and you can easily suck out the rest of the flesh. Yes, Lili admits, the first time she’d had to slaughter an animal herself, her hands couldn’t stop shaking, whereas now … Now it’s another image entirely that haunts her:
‘After you’ve slaughtered a cow, the others form a circle round the pool of blood and cry. It’s awful, it’s terrible.’
For sweet, there’s jelly that tastes of Gummi-bears. Heaven only knows how that chemical product managed to find its way to this barren hill. Suddenly, everyone starts talking about their childhood, and when that particular reverie is over, María turns the conversation to the childhood of civilizations, and shows us the ancient spearheads that she found buried in the sand. These came from the civilization of the Patagones, she tells us, the ‘big-foot’ people who once lived and hunted here; they were tall aboriginals who were eventually displaced to Argentina.
‘It’s a crying shame,’ Manuel chips in, ‘all you find right across the world are the last remnants of extinct peoples and the descendants of their conquerors …’
‘… and they spend their time manipulating their guilty conscience into folklore.’
We turn in early and feel the poverty like a gift.
As we’re leaving at the crack of dawn, the widow stands there at the barred window, transformed into a shadow. She gets ever darker, losing all her colour. If there’s such a thing as incarnation, then why not ‘inumbration’ too? The death of her husband has made her life the way it is: now she’s sure it’s nothing but an illusion, held together by illusions.
As we journey on that day, scrubby landscapes begin to close in around our route, criss-crossed by milky rivers. At the bottom of pools, the stones arrange themselves into the shape of pumpkin seeds. From the swaps rise the dead trunks of the Bosque Muerto, which was left behind as a kind of ghostly wood after an earlier volcanic eruption in 1991. Yellow pancakes of lichen hang down from their naked branches, swaying in the wind. By the side of the track, the next roadside shrine is waiting, this time dedicated to the family of a doctor from Santiago who came to grief here.
It seems that his car careered through the crash barrier; he and his wife were thrown clear of the wreck and died instantly. Their eldest daughter was found further along the road, after wandering for several kilometres in a daze, completely unharmed but with her clothes all torn to shreds. When asked about her younger sister, who was nowhere to be found, all she could say, in a flat emotionless voice, was that angels had abducted her and taken her up to heaven. And indeed, she did seem to have vanished without a trace. Even so, they spent weeks searching for her. The first miraculous stories began to grow about around her – the germ of a cult that was just waiting to blossom forth – when she was finally found forty metres away high up in the crown of a tree.
Later, fire burned the mythical wood to the ground, which – with its charred tree stumps, and the white buds of the first new plants starting to poke through and the fiery-red colour of fuchsias on its fringes – still looks as though the embers of the conflagration are only just dying down.
We follow the marshy path through the Patagonian rain, passing large tracts of remote terrain. The colour of the lakes is tinged with grey, with their shores covered in dense drifts of wild roses laden with rose hips, so large they shine from the branches like plump little tomatoes. Beneath the shadowy walls of the mountain ridges, the banks of cloud glisten like greasy waxed paper. Even the massive looming bulk of the mountains appears to rush down with the speed of river rapids.
The women in this region wear thick woollen pullovers, which reveal no bodily contours. Hunched over, as though they’ve been bent double by the wind, they stand in the fields, with their skin tanned by all the fresh air and their hair clinging to their skulls like wavy, dark caps. The townspeople occasionally venture out into the more remote parts of this landscape to turn their dogs loose before the long summer holidays begin. Several times, these wretched creatures cross our path, with drooping chops and bloody paws.
We are accompanied on our travels by a pair of plump rainbows, which arc over the northern ice fields against a base of shimmering violet. We gaze up from the shadows at their magnificence. The cold breath of the Sierra Contreras with its dirty glaciers wafts over us and skims the deep turquoise of the mountain lakes, and the waves that its gusty blasts stir up slap against the rock faces like a peal of chuckling. The snowfields are coated with a layer of anthracite-coloured dust.
This is a landscape for people who turn away, away from community and towards solitude, away from settlements and the zone of pleasant pastimes, and games for grown-up children. When all’s said and done, there’s little to be learned from what these recluses get up to in their isolation, but the breath with which they turned away continues to enliven this distant vista. And yet in this place even the old farmers fear solitude. Their children up sticks and leave, and slowly but surely all the farmsteads around Puerto Bertrand are being sold up, and even the settlers admit:
‘We’re trying to live here in the face of our homesickness. Most people succumb to it after ten years. But we don’t hold with this urge to go home, in fact we don’t feel like turning around ever.’
And saying this they strike a defiant pose, fully prepared to take preventative measures to disenfranchise themselves if they should ever feel tempted to think otherwise. So what they’re all hoping for is a tourist boom. But the trickle of visitors who do make it as far as here hardly bring in any money, so in the meantime, the locals spend their time building up the infrastructure in anticipation of the great influx. But every cinder track you set off on hereabouts, you find yourself simply turning round on and driving all the way back. Roads just stop in the middle of nowhere, and where they end they just dwindle to a path that runs behind a hut and then fizzles out in the undergrowth at the foot of the Andes.
The little settlements here are places of refuge and retreat, where communities grow up, and in whose midst one day the urge to find new places of refuge will be born. Also, because the air is so clear, all colours appear vibrant. The wind tugs on Tibetan prayer flags on the line, while, in front, smoke streams horizontally from the chimney pots. Each of the oval wooden signs conveys a painted promise: a lovely view, a soft bed, a warm oven. In one of these living rooms, I sat and wolfed down so many of those fried eggs done in oil with their marsh- marigold-yellow yolks that even several days later I could still feel the nausea well up in me in great waves and then abate again. Suddenly, the silence is abruptly shattered by the roar of chainsaws. The clearings are eating ever further into the wilderness – all for the future of a country that only blossoms for a few months a year.
At the end of the long process of subjugating nature, it was inevitable that such a phenomenon would arise: a love of dominant landscapes on the part of travellers. Nowadays, they like seeing nature in a state where it is not yet lost. All they do is visit it, and gaze upon its rebelliousness with respect, but also with indulgence. People still settle here humbly, defens
ively, and dissemble about their own hazardousness – like the wild rose, or the fox or the hare. These all bring with them into this piece of the natural world the principle of infiltration and of hostile takeover.
But the traveller enjoys the landscape so long as it doesn’t look subdued. He marvels at it, as though marvelling at his own pre-civilized past in it. But in that very moment, it has already capitulated. The talk has long since been of these ‘lost paradises’, and this is said in an elegiac tone, from a posthumous perspective.
The rain spatters in the trees, making a humming and sighing sound. Now and then, the sun sends a fleeting ray through the leaves, turning the tropical shower first glassy, then invisible. Yet its drops still speckle the blades of grass, and because it is so still, all they do is yield to this incessant dripping. As life reawakens outside, all of a sudden you can hear dogs barking, a chainsaw howling, the chugging of a tractor being started, the owner of the neighbouring plot chopping wood, and the shingles creaking as they dry. Nothing but the sounds that are constant here.
Further on, the sometimes barely passable track, interrupted by large fallen boulders and streams, leads us into a riverine landscape such as you find on the Malay Archipelago, with swarms of parrots, catalpa trees, the red calyxes of hibiscus flowers, and livid green mosses – the landscape of Tortel. The rain spatters millions of tiny craters into the sluggish broth of the river. The steps are stairways hewn directly into the cliff face.
Thickset melancholics with the faces of heavy drinkers wait, with their chainsaws resting on their shoulders, under a shelter. Shy women with lady-sized chainsaws creep past on the boardwalks. With their trousers rolled up at half-mast, they deftly saw the firewood up into manageable chunks. The whole area here seems to pine for a bygone era when the loggers did not climb down from the rocky plateau, but arrived here by travelling upstream on the river in ships and boats, and then had to disembark at the point where the gorges became narrow and impassable.
The Ends of the Earth Page 11