The Ends of the Earth

by Willemsen, Roger; Lewis, Peter;

  Here, at the end of one such gorge, where the row upon row of wooden huts climb up the slope, one on top of the other, here is where the stranded loggers of old fetched up, and the axe was king. The world was far away, and travellers only rarely found their way to this remote corner. Now, though, there’s a road which runs from up on the plateau down to the outskirts of the settlement, and the village is busy getting itself ready to receive the world. Soon, it will become too expensive, too loud, and too squalid, and the sense that when you arrive here you could be at the ends of the earth will only have a very limited shelf life.

  Yet while this process is still in train, this little tropical spot will briefly have dreamed the same dream that Las Vegas once did. After all, isn’t the river a marvellous grey-green colour and almost motionless? And don’t the colours on the slope radiate with the intensity of Bengal fire, with the different fuchsia-reds, brick-reds, hibiscus-reds, and redwood-reds of the freshly felled and rain-drenched tree trunks, and the blue of the bonfire smoke? You can’t move an inch here without being accompanied by soggy, grubby dogs, who needily and dozily dog people’s every footstep. The rain will grow more intense over the next few days, boulders will be washed down onto the dirt roads and make them finally impassable, and even the armadillos will cower down deep in the roadside ditches, when they can no longer find the entrance to their burrows in trenches that have filled with mud.

  Now the only perceptible movement is the veil of rain falling through the still air. It scarifies the atmosphere like etched cross-hatching in a piece of glass. Everything pauses and endures. The bulrushes stand tall and wait, the dead trees rise up from the ashy ground, which now takes on a deeper black hue as the smooth trunks look even more glistening. Many people lift their eyes to the heavens to study a patch of sky. If it keeps on raining for a long while, the sheep will be bound to die. Their wool will become saturated and heavy and they won’t be able to find shelter or warmth anywhere. They’ll either freeze to death or waste away from infections brought on by the cold.

  The thinnest clouds billow up between the precipices. Higher still, the snowfields merge like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle into the clouds that shroud the mountain tops.

  By the end of the third night, the rain finally gives out. Throughout the entire day, the sun evaporates moisture up from the road. A mist hangs over the asphalt, and a haze covers the dirt track. ‘We’re selling the tranquillity of the South,’ proclaims a hand-painted banner.

  We read this notice on the road in the mood that comes over us after the rain. That same evening, we run across it again when we have reached the steppe, the dry steppe, which is exhaling even though no rain has fallen here for a long time. The ground here is comprised of a slightly springy layer of steppeland grass, and yields under our footfall. We’re walking here on the surface of a dried-out lakebed, and its craquelured mud trembles like cork, and is covered with the impressions of countless footprints. In a few places, muddy pools have formed, while others have piles of bones that have been dragged here and left.

  Sometimes the air is filled with the bleating of a guanaco, and sometimes with the twittering of some small songbird. But occasionally, we come across a guanaco that’s been torn to shreds by a puma. Mountain lions love hunting down these llama-like creatures; for them, the chase is the real thrill, as after just a couple of mouthfuls, the puma will often leave the rest of its prey to the vultures. And indeed, as a flock of vultures feeds on one of these carcasses, a single beam of sunlight shines down from beneath a dark wall of cloud, brightly illuminating this dead sea. It’s the light of God, flipping open its fan, and it also briefly lights up the grassy slopes of the steep natural amphitheatre all around, before the cold evening descends, filled with the hollow whistle of the wind.

  Overnight, winter has arrived. Snow has dusted even the lower cliffs, and now there’s a thin layer of hoar-frost on the rounded, wooded hilltops, too. Even so, the power of the sun is still irrepressible, and where the fat, green flowing glacier squeezes itself between the massifs, you can hear the melt water steadily dripping. Where it falls from the glacier’s icy fringes to collect in a black stone basin, the pool it forms is large enough for you to paddle a canoe in. You can get right up close to the glacier by venturing out on the lake produced by the melt water. Rivulets of bottle-green and milky water run-off it into the fjord.

  When, after travelling for a long while, we finally reach the elbow of the fjord, we find ourselves once more in a settlement of former Sudeten Germans. The first house we come to on the square is the Hotel Ludwig, while the Avenida leading off the square is called Otto-Uebel-Straße. Hawks are perched on the town rubbish dumps, all around are small wooden huts that look like they were put up by Quakers, and porpoises leap from the water in the fjord. The water gives off a smell of seaweed and reeds, and the surrounding meadows are an aggressive green colour. From every chimney stack, a small plume of blue smoke drifts up into a cold sky. Bits of rotten wood are lying around all over the place, and out of the briars peeks a fantastic doll’s house petrol station, with four pumps of 1950s design.

  In the evening, a fire is lit in the lounge of the Hotel Ludwig. It’s an imposing, solid German wooden house, full of features that are familiar from the Alps. The hotel library is full of German books by Freud, Jung and Kafka, and Mozart’s clarinet concerto is playing. The spirit of exile here is tinged with a gentle melancholy, as the proprietress sits in this faraway land and thinks back on the happy times she spent in German meadows. Only the kitchen help has laid her head on her crossed arms, and dozed off, there and then.

  The following day, we enter a gigantic arroyo, an area that is strewn with driftwood and boulder fields. The crystals of the volcanic soil here glisten in the sand; all around us are uprooted and dead bushes, and stumps of vegetation from whose hearts bamboo canes are shooting. The tracks of pumas and red deer are evident in the sand between the wrinkled rocks that look as though they are pockmarked.

  A couple of hours further on by car, we catch our first glimpse in the distance of the metalled road once more, and as we turn a corner, the landscape unfolds before us like a woman throwing back the bedclothes. But the anticipated beauty turns out to be an illusion, as this region is reputed to be haunted, and at the bridge that arches over the river ahead of us the ghost of a dead woman is said to appear regularly in her wedding dress.

  A chapel has been hewn out of the rock face beside the bridge, forming a moss-covered cave. Lanterns are set into its rear wall of bare rock, and people have deposited little prayer slips, along with photos of cars that have been involved in accidents and snaps of smiling spouses who have been snatched from these happy moments by death. The tears of wax dripping from the lanterns have spattered down over everything, including a pair of pink woollen baby bootees, a plastic sword and a dummy. The smell of sheep pervades the air, as the animals take refuge in here at night.

  ‘Thank you for protecting me,’ says a note in felt-tip pen affixed to the Madonna. ‘I have to find out where my wife is,’ begs another. ‘I forgive her. Please help me find her. I want you to grant us a life together.’ And: ‘I have been lost for days. For several days now, I have been longing to be the person I once was: happy, contented and so on.’ The writer of this last note has added a bunch of artificial flowers, wrapped in cellophane. Manuel tells us that the supplicants even come here from across the border, in neighbouring Argentina, in order to make votive offerings to the ‘Madonna of the Cascade’, and to pray to her. One note simply reads: ‘Virgin Mary, I don’t know you, but I’ve heard that you are a good person. Please take care of my son, who has to go away.’

  As if it wasn’t dark enough already, this gloomy cave has recently been made even darker by a mysterious, still unexplained, story: in the space of a single month, no fewer than eleven teenagers have been found dead under the bridge here, one after the other. All eleven were good-looking, and all of them allegedly mixed up in drugs or the sex trade, and all of them supposed
ly committed suicide. What’s more, several local mayors were said to be implicated in the whole business. And all of this right under the nose of the Madonna of the Cascade!

  The mayors put the teenagers’ suicides down to depression, which is not uncommon round these parts because of the appalling weather. But who would believe them? Who’d be inclined to solve the mystery, and ultimately who round here wouldn’t find the intrigue surrounding the affair much more fertile and poetic?

  ‘What did I tell you?’ repeated Lili, ‘stories tend to take a dramatic turn here in Patagonia.’

  Dramas like this are sleepers. For any given situation that arises, tension can mount and come to a head. Where everything happens in the midst of such solitude, events are few and far between but extraordinary. You can see them in the distance, and then rumours take hold of them and carry them off, and in the twinkling of an eye, they have entered into the popular history of this barren region.

  We are travelling across the fault lines of this history, shaken by the seismic shocks emerging from the inner life of the past. Not far from the dark pilgrimage bridge, we come across the last genuine supermarket at the end of the world. It’s frequented by gauchos, and they really can find everything they need here: telescopic sights, guns, alcohol, kids’ tricycles, nappies, pills, fertilizer, rotting fruit, American muesli, sweaty cheese, and fresh cream horns. The women here stand around the aisles looking stunned. They’ve got oval faces and no chins, and they have the muscular shoulders of female wrestlers and a clearsighted, straight-shooting expression on their faces.

  Behind the supermarket, the toilet at the end of the world smells of the End of Days, too.

  ‘And the toilet roll,’ I tell Lili, ‘only had a single sheet of paper left on it.’

  ‘That’s laying it on a bit thick for the end of the world, isn’t it?’

  ‘Fair enough. In actual fact, there wasn’t any paper at all left on the roll.’

  We’re in Cochrane, a substantial settlement, on whose streets people arriving out of the surrounding wilderness wander around like strays, homeless characters, leading their horses behind them. Round a beige-coloured house laid out like a compound, there’s a high wall topped with barbed wire – this is the regional, correction, the provincial gaol. We’re intrigued to find out how the authorities make offenders feel the loss of their liberty in a completely dead-end place like this.

  The guard at the gate treats us like some unexpected task, but spotting in us an opportunity for advancement, the man solemnly promises to put in a good word for Lili and me with his superior. We wait, and in due course we’re granted an audience.

  The brawny commandant in his stiff, padded uniform that accentuates his stockiness is only twenty-four years old, but already sports a star on his epaulettes. The recent wedding photo of him and his wife has pride of place on his desk, and he sits enthroned on his chair. In the photo, his wife is blond and smiling. But on the wall behind the desk, the female chief of police watches over the room from a larger frame. Austere and thin-lipped, she gazes down from her photo onto the wedding photo. In a glass case, there are also several cups, won for fly-fishing and six-a-side football. We engage in a conversation, the most remarkable aspect of which is that it is such a free and easy chat, a genuine dialogue including little snapshots from our family and professional lives. Just three people playing variations on a single theme entitled: Look, I’m just a regular guy when all’s said and done.

  The commandant leads us through the double security doors, showing us first the cells housing the trustee prisoners, with three bunks, a television constantly on, and a bath towel with a pin-up girl printed on it. The corridor outside houses the windowless solitary confinement cell, with just a single bed in it. For serious misconduct, a prisoner can be kept in here for a maximum of ten days; during that time, he’s permitted just one hour’s recreation a day out in the courtyard. The prisoner in the next-door cell is leaning out of the window with his top off; he listens in on our conversation and then calls out:

  ‘And when our women come here, a cell’s prepared specially for conjugal visits.’

  The tiny courtyard is scarcely more than a gap between the cell blocks. Out there, a prisoner with the dull, fixated look of a simpleton is doing clean-and-jerk weightlifting with a dumbbell made from an iron bar with two buckets of concrete set on the ends, back and forth, from the ground to his chest and back down again. All the bodybuilding equipment out in the yard is home-made kit like this, created from tin cans, metal poles and cement castings.

  Most of the thirteen prisoners housed in the gaol are in here for crimes like rape, GBH, criminal damage, drunkenness or even just public disorder – in any event, nothing with fatal consequences. They all have either evil, dull, neutral or disillusioned expressions, indeed, sometimes their faces appear more criminal than the crimes they’ve been convicted of, or they look like they’ve only taken on the appropriate physiognomy after being banged up. One little crook clearly wants to come across like Al Capone. There are eighteen warders employed to guard them and minister to their needs.

  The prisoners also run a little joinery workshop, where they do repairs for local people, fixing up broken chairs or gluing cabinets. Right now, though, it’s a rocking horse that’s propped up on the workbench; once it’s been restored, it’ll find its way into some nursery room. It has a similarly poetic feel to it as the other work they’re doing at the moment – little plaques with verses carved into them. Laughing, the commandant points out a prisoner who’s in for GBH and now spends his time engraving simple aphorisms, metaphors or moral maxims, painted up in naïve, sentimental colours; all imparting homilies that he transgressed against.

  Next door, there’s a workshop for processing animal hides. There, a piece of tanned goatskin is in the process of being transformed into a cushion cover, while the finishing touches are being put to riding tack and harnesses, and a sheepskin bedside carpet has just been completed. Off to one side of the workshop, a prisoner is engrossed in plaiting a leather bullwhip. After I’ve spent some time observing him, he suddenly holds it up surprisingly high above his head and says, laughing, ‘the symbol of the state’s power’.

  The inmates are permitted to have their wares sold at the local market and keep the small profits that accrue. It’s cool in this room, but the prisoners clearly don’t notice this, especially because they’re also well aware that nothing concerning them can be expensive. Accordingly, everything’s very low-key, and the heating is only allowed to come on after five o’clock in the afternoon.

  There’s a French film about criminals where one gangster offers the opinion: ‘In life, there are doers and spectators. The problems are always caused by the spectators.’ Where the convicts are concerned, this apportioning of roles hasn’t changed even though they’re in prison. They continue to be the movers and shakers, whereas the guards are the spectators. So the warders stand around, with their cudgels and their sabres on their belts, but at least they don’t have revolvers. They drink maté tea with the prisoners, chat with them about the football results, and occasionally it will even be the case that one of the prisoners will interrupt the warders or even the commandant while they’re talking.

  They all rub along with the conditions here: the cold, the confined spaces, the workshops and the communal rooms, and the warders even eat food that’s been prepared by the prisoners. One time, the commandant tells us, the prisoners came to him and asked him whether they could grow salad leaves and lettuces and some other vegetable on the narrow external fire escapes.

  ‘I told them I’d turn a blind eye if they did.’

  For all his youth, the commandant knows the appropriate junctures at which to break the rules, and so now he spends his time looking approvingly at the lush salad crop that he can’t officially see.

  He also shows us the prison’s sick bay, with its two beds, and the room where prisoners’ lawyers can meet them, with its concealed panic button on the wall, and the booth w
here he holds his regular Friday meetings with prisoners, taking down their complaints in writing:

  ‘That means that I can’t then go and do the dirty on them.’

  Outside, the warders are liaising on walkie-talkies. The prisoners listen in with sad faces. The chain of communication between the prison staff is one of the chains binding them.

  When we’re out on the street once more, Lili stretches out her hand in front of her. She makes no attempt to disguise the fact that she’s trembling, and now she turns to me and says, half tearfully:

  ‘It really does still exist then, the good Chile! Now I’m sure it does. I’m so happy. My son’s due to join the police force. It was always so hard for me to accept that. But I know that it doesn’t have to be like how I remember the country in the past, it can be different now. Take this young commandant, for instance. He was so friendly. He’s got a difficult job, too. Just think about the young wife he’s just married. She’s given up everything to come and live with him here.’

  She’s talking and looking down as she walks along, her eyes fixed on the pavement.

  ‘Did you hear? They interrupt him. They’re even free to contradict him. That’s a good man.’

  He could be her son, the way she’s talking.

  I wonder if the young commandant knows that he’s just changed a person’s life? A solitary visit, a single encounter, and suddenly Lili’s perspective on her country has altered; for the first time, she’s started to refer to it as ‘my country’.

  A small rodeo show has set up shop by the side of the street, and a bit further on sits Carancho, the vulture, while on the fence close by a black eagle is watching him. They’ve killed a small rabbit, first plucking out its eyes and then dragging out its entrails, which are shimmering red with fresh blood, and spreading them out. Up in the trees, the other carrion birds hold a chattering conference. The ghost of a smile still plays on Lili’s face.