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The Penguin Lessons

Page 14

by Tom Michell


  They showed me the crude loom they used for making the blankets, which I found intriguing and wanted to see working. The little children were greatly amused that I was able to read but didn’t know how to weave; obviously my priorities were badly mixed up! The men smoked pipes, chewed coca leaves, and drank locally made cane spirit at a rate that was only a little faster than the women’s. Thus the evening wore on. The children nestled up close together and fell asleep, as did the adults later, once the alcohol took hold. We all snuggled close under skins and blankets against the extreme cold of the high Altiplano night. It was definitely a new experience for me to be huddled up close with so many complete strangers. Their generosity moved me, a young man in his selfish twenties, for while they had so little, they shared what they had with a traveler that night.

  In the morning the women were up first, lighting the fires and baking bread for breakfast. The men got going more slowly and appeared to be considerably more hung over. I was delighted when they offered to show me around the village after breakfast. It was impossible not to admire the sturdy goat pens, the neat rows of crops, the handwoven fabrics, and the nobility of spirit displayed by the villagers as they talked about their lives with pride. Although the most desirable parts of the continent had been seized by the Europeans in the names of their deities and rulers, leaving those members of the indigenous population who survived the violence and the foreign diseases with only the most inhospitable regions, their descendants still clung to a traditional way of life with fierce independence. So it was with real sorrow that they explained how all their lives were changing as the younger generations insisted upon looking for work in the towns, rather than staying to support the villages that raised them.

  Feeling the experience had left me both humbled and enriched and had more than compensated for my pecuniary loss, I continued my journey.

  —

  By day the very thin air of the high Andes offers little protection from the searing sun, and by night the starlight is equally unimpeded. Those mountain ranges provide better views of the night sky than anywhere else on earth, which is why so many international observatories are situated there. The firmament, I discovered, is the most perfect inky blackness, and from it the Milky Way blazes as though Apollo’s hand had sloshed white paint right across the heavens with a brush. The stars of familiar constellations become lost against the hundred thousand million stars of our galaxy, all of which appear to be visible. I was amazed to discover that to the naked eye there are no really dark parts of the Milky Way at all. Away from the main disc of the galaxy other stars shine out fiercely from the darkness, steady and brilliant. Even without a moon there is sufficient light to navigate on foot along the roads and paths without difficulty. But without the thick blanketing atmosphere that at lower altitudes obscures most of the brilliance and beauty of the cosmos, the bitter cold can be unendurable.

  On the second night I didn’t look for shelter. I’m embarrassed to admit it now, but the smell of the unwashed people, clothing, blankets, and badly cured skins of the night before had been extremely pungent. I expect my hosts felt exactly the same about me. Consequently, I thought a night in the open couldn’t be worse, so I decided to walk on through the starlit night aided by the light of the waning moon, which rose an hour or two before dawn. But during the darkness I became cold, very cold; I became so extremely cold that I began to understand how people can freeze to death. Try as I might, I couldn’t keep warm. Running or jogging isn’t an option; the air is too thin and exhaustion sets in very quickly. With insufficient air to exercise, yet in temperatures far too cold not to, the ill-equipped traveler finds himself in a perilous situation. By the time the sky eventually lightened in the east, I was so cold I could scarcely force one leg in front of the other. I stood still as the upper limb of the sun eventually broke the horizon and I felt almost instantly the reviving warmth on my face. As the sun rose, I luxuriated in its bounty, like a lizard on a stone. I had made it.

  It was not a good experience and not one I would willingly repeat without adequate protection, notwithstanding the awe-inspiring majesty of the universe as few see it. In hindsight, the night in the rustic hut had been hugely preferable. I had never deliberately courted danger, and that night spent in the open so high up was an imprudent decision, I will concede now. But I did enjoy the experience of self-reliance over the course of those years and have carried memories of those adventures ever since.

  —

  Still, for all the occasions when things didn’t quite go according to my plans, there were others when I couldn’t have devised any improvement in the unrolling of events. After all, the timing of my stay in Punta del Este was pivotal for my fateful encounter with Juan Salvado. The coincidence happened as I was making my way home following a remarkable three-week stay in Paraguay, courtesy of an invitation from the Williams family, whose son Danny was in his final year at St. George’s.

  Alfred Williams, Danny’s father, had timed a business meeting in Buenos Aires to coincide with the end of term and had then flown all of us back to Paraguay in his plane. Thanks to the pilot’s skillful low-level flying, I was given an opportunity to see how, during the passage of millennia, the course of the Paraguay River had meandered for dozens of miles either side of its current location, creating vast impenetrable wetlands and countless thousands of oxbow lakes, which glinted in the sunlight as we passed. Those flatlands are a haven for wildlife. From this privileged perspective, I saw great clouds of birds take to the air from dense jungle, and family groups of capybara—a relative of guinea pigs that grow to the size of a large pig—flee as we disturbed them in their watery home. I found it hard to believe my luck.

  After a few days at the Williamses’ grand house in Asunción, the Paraguayan capital, Alfred, Danny, a school friend of Danny’s named Jack, and I flew to the extreme southeast of the country to live the life of gauchos for a couple of weeks in the family’s camp (an anglicization of campo, meaning “farmed land”). Chongo, the pilot, located the cattle—a herd of thousands—by flying systematically over the estancia before we returned to land on a grass strip alongside the hacienda.

  We collected such provisions as we required—maize, fruit, and essentials to supplement the workers’ rations, along with some chocolate, an unaccustomed luxury for them. Within a couple of hours we had saddled up the tough little ponies and set off to find the herd. Progress was not quick in those wild lands, which are a mixture of grassland and scrub riddled with armadillo holes. It wasn’t until the late morning of the second day that we encountered the cattle again.

  Living among the gauchos who worked on the Williamses’ cattle ranch was a superb experience. The estancia was not like an English farm. It had no fences and was instead more savannah-like, with poor grass and shrubby trees that grew to some thirty feet. Where an English farm is measured in hundreds of acres, South American estancias can occupy hundreds of square miles, about 150 in the Williamses’ case. It was just a little bigger than the Isle of Wight!

  The gauchos lived with the cattle and drove them on to pastures new each day. The land was poor and the search for fresh grass unrelenting. The men lived in the saddle and collected new supplies from the hacienda only every few weeks. Their horsemanship was superb, as would be expected of anyone who has lived in the saddle from childhood. The life of a gaucho was a seamless combination of working, eating, sleeping, and entertainment, and it was often impossible to determine which of those things was being done at any given time.

  At sunset a camp would be made, fires lit, food prepared, songs sung, and sleep taken under the stars. The life of these gauchos and peons (the former are skilled cowboys, while the latter are semiskilled workers) was very simple and extremely hard. The epic poem of Martín Fierro, written in the 1870s, described something of their life, which hadn’t noticeably changed a century later.

  My glory is living freely as birds of the air;

  I make no earthly nest where there is so much suffering,
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  Nobody can follow when I again take flight.

  I have no lover to vex me with quarrels;

  Like the beautiful birds that hop between branches,

  I make my bed of clover and the stars are my covers.

  All of a gaucho’s possessions had to be carried with him on his horse. A saddle, a bedroll, a folding tripod stool, a facón with a blade up to a foot long (which was often worn on the back), a few coins and some decorative silverware, a gun, and a lasso, together with a small hollowed gourd decorated with silver, from which they would drink mate at every opportunity through a metal straw—that was about the sum of it. If they became ill, they either survived through the skills and herb lore of their fellows or they died and were buried where they fell.

  These men were of Guarani Indian blood and spoke little Spanish that I could understand. They were small, dark, wizened, sinewy, tooth-challenged, leathery, and as hard as the baked earth from which they wrested their living. They appeared to smile all the time, although at first I found that discomfiting, because the smiles looked more like maniacal grins.

  The estancia was bordered to the east by the Paraná River. There were no roads on the estancia, and no paved road led to it. These were truly wild lands. If a crime was committed, these men were judge and jury. There was no form of authority or law to protect them from the criminals and outlaws who roamed the borderlands pretty much at will and who lived by taking what they wanted wherever they could find it…if they could get away with it. The gauchos didn’t expect outside interference and certainly wouldn’t have thanked anyone for trying to provide it, either; these were men who were used to looking after themselves. Cattle rustlers from over the border, whom they called brasileños, were troublesome at times but, I was told, not many of the brasileños ever had a second chance to try to steal from Don Alfredo.

  The gauchos’ staple diet was meat. On one occasion while I was there, several armadillos were caught, and in the evening they were gutted, thickly wrapped in mud from the riverbank, and rolled into the embers of a fire. An hour or so later the baked mud balls were broken open to reveal the pale, juicy, steaming, and succulent flesh from which the bones and shell simply fell away. A seven-banded armadillo grows to about thirty inches in length and has as much meat as a very large chicken. It tastes more like strong pork than anything else. Eaten with a light sprinkling of charcoal, the mud of the cooking case, and the dust of a Paraguayan cattle drive, from a tin plate, using fingers and a stone-sharpened facón, wearing a peon’s bombachas and poncho, sitting on the warm sun-baked earth and leaning against a sheepskin saddle roll, the air filled with a thousand new smells, listening to Guarani songs as the moon rose and the campfire died down: such were the ingredients for just about the most memorable meal of my life. Quite simply, each one of my senses, touch, hearing, sight, taste, and smell, was buzzing and tingling with the electricity of totally new sensations. This indeed was what I had come to South America for. In that brief and shining moment I had found my El Dorado.

  I fell asleep under the stars that night dreaming of giving it all up and living the life of a gaucho. It would have been far too grueling and probably too limiting after a while, but at that moment it was simply a glorious romance to be able to play cowboys for real.

  Each night I slept like a log until first light, when I would be kicked into life by Danny, who took the greatest delight in the reversal of authority away from the college. Each day, with his help, I learned new skills. He was only five years younger than me and had spent a great deal of time with the gauchos, perfecting their way of riding over years in their company. The peons’ riding style was quite different from the English school I had learned as a child. One wouldn’t describe it as kind. Hell-for-leather, hard-mouthed, and devil-may-care were the nature of it, and until I accepted that, neither the ponies nor the peons were cooperative. After a very short time, I admitted I had to learn to ride as they did, for my pony gave me no choice; he simply didn’t respond to being handled the English way. However, once I had that sorted—or, should I say, once he had that sorted—we got on tolerably well.

  Although direct communication between these men and me was very limited, they showed me how to do the things their lives required. I’d like to think that it was because I tried to copy their words and their ways that I was accepted, especially by the younger men. I tried to look at life through their eyes and not my own; I learned to acquire their skills and to laugh at the things they laughed at (which was mainly me). So I was able to observe a way of life that had gone unchanged for a couple of centuries but which was, at that moment, on the point of being lost forever.

  It was with a heavy heart I left that beautiful and intriguing country. Little did I realize, however, that the timing had been ordained by destiny so that I should be in Punta del Este at precisely the same moment as a certain penguin.

  —

  Whether traveling by train or truck, bus or motorbike, horse or Shanks’s pony, I discovered moments of profound fulfillment and contentment in South America. With Juan Salvado safely staying with friends, I set out for the southern extremity, Tierra del Fuego, and from there I crossed into southern Chile. I spent a full week without seeing another living soul, apart from penguins, and totally out of communication. By day I walked amid the snow-capped mountains and in deep valleys where the ground was so covered with waist-high daisies that they appeared from a distance to be as white as the towering peaks. By night I camped in the great forests of southern beech trees and cooked my meager rations on a wood fire. All I carried was some fruit and a little flour, sugar, and butter, from which I made crude pancakes. It was Elysian.

  Traveling alone gave me ample opportunity to reflect on all that I had seen and heard, to compare the reality of South America to my preconceptions, and to consider what was truly important and of real value. How, in a world so full of astonishing beauty and priceless wonders, had humans devised so much misery, and not just for our own species? The essence of being human and the nature of friendship were recurring issues of my contemplations. However interesting or entertaining they may have been, such compañeros as I met along life’s byways who shared a journey, a campfire, a cooking pot, or even a tent for a while were simply ships that passed in the night; I would never have opened my heart to them as I had to Juan Salvado, and the same was true of all those who encountered him. How was it that a penguin brought such comfort and tranquility to the people whose lives he touched? Why did they go to his terrace and bare their souls to him as though they had known him for a lifetime, treating him like a real friend who could be relied upon in adversity? Was it peculiar to those times of violence and despair, and would it have been different in periods of peace and prosperity?

  It certainly appeared that people confided more willingly in Juan Salvado than in their fellows. Such, it seems, is simply the nature of humans with penguins.

  “How was it that a penguin brought such comfort and tranquility to the people whose lives he touched?”

  From the very first day that I brought a penguin to live at St. George’s, one student in particular wanted to help with the care of Juan Salvado, and his name was Diego Gonzales. Diego found life difficult, more so than most. He was a Bolivian boy; his father was of European descent and his mother indigenous Bolivian. The offspring of such unions were traditionally called “mestizo” in Latin America, a term that was considered descriptive and not insulting necessarily, but nevertheless he was occasionally the butt of unkind comments from the other boys.

  Diego arrived at School House a diffident, shy, thirteen-year-old lad who gave the impression of being frightened by his own shadow. He was not an academically gifted boy and really struggled with his work. In the competitive atmosphere of the college, his shortcomings were always apparent. Fortnightly orders, where students were placed in rank order of their academic results, were intended to be an incentive to work hard and improve, but they certainly didn’t help Diego.

  Sad to say,
none of the many and varied extracurricular activities seemed to suit Diego, either. He was a slightly built boy whose motor skills and coordination appeared to be well below average for his age; he couldn’t catch a ball to save his life. On a rugby field, he was gaunt, miserable, and cold even on the warmest of days. His oversized games shirt hung limply on his narrow frame, almost hiding his shorts, from which his spindly legs protruded, and his sleeves hung down so low that only his fingertips were visible. Nobody passed the ball to him or involved him in the game, except to plague him. If the ball came his way, it usually struck him heavily on the chest as though it had taken him by surprise, and he invariably fumbled the pass.

  Diego’s early education had not equipped him well for life in the college. His knowledge of English was decidedly limited, and even his Spanish was heavily laced with the patois of the Bolivian mestizos, so he avoided conversation. He hadn’t been taught to look after his possessions nor how to organize them. It was generally beyond him to have the right things for lessons or kit for games. But, for me, the saddest part of all was the homesickness from which he suffered. He hadn’t been ready to leave home and he missed it dreadfully. In almost every way, Diego was young for his age.

  The college, like all communities, had many good qualities. There was a well-structured pastoral system, and each new boy was assigned an older boy who was responsible for looking after his younger charge for the first two or three weeks. In turn, these “old lags” were supervised by a prefectoral system, which was overseen by responsible residential staff who were well aware of Diego’s difficulties. It must be remembered that the overwhelming majority of the boys who went through the college flourished. They enjoyed their lives there and made strong and lasting friendships. Diego was just the worst case of a fish out of water.

 

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