By which Argentines mean Argentinians of Italian extraction.
‘Do you like ice cream?’ Marcela asks me.
‘Síííííííí,’ I say. I’m beginning to pick up the Argentine habit of extending vowels almost indefinitely. It’s fun.
‘Would you like one?’
What, now?
‘Let’s go out for an ice cream!’ Marcela declares. It is almost eleven o’clock on a Monday evening.
We go down in the lift to the residents’ garage in the basement, and back up to street level, inside the car, in another lift. A car-sized lift! Marcela laughs at my amazement.
Then we’re on the street with the roof open and the windows down and the warm wind in our hair, and Marcela is driving like a madwoman. But so is everybody else. Cars weave in and out of lanes, across lanes, overtake other drivers on the left and the right, screech to a halt in front of red lights as though on a sudden whim.
I have fastened my seat belt (Marcela hasn’t. Very likely nobody else has, either. But it makes me feel a little bit safer) and hold on to the edge of my seat until Marcela comes in to land and park the car at Puerto Madero. I half expected to see the buildings lying still and dark, the lights off, the people all gone home.
But of course, this is Buenos Aires. You can go out for a meal long after midnight, an amused Marcela explains to me. Lots of cafés are open all night. You can go for a coffee or a pizza at three in the morning, should you so desire. At a club, you shouldn’t even bother turning up before one o’clock. When I tell her that in London, many clubs open around ten and close at two or three in the morning, she laughs.
The bricked pavement along the water’s edge is alive with people and lights. Tango music and the smell of roast meat drift from the restaurants. Well-dressed couples and families stroll slowly along, chatting and laughing. It looks like an ad from the Argentine Tourist Board.
There is the ice cream parlour. Marcela ushers me inside, and we go abruptly from twenty-odd degrees outside into what feels like an ice cave. Ugh. Air conditioning.
‘What would you like?’
‘Holy cow!’
All along one wall behind the glass counter runs a double row of plastic containers, each the size of a bucket, each containing a different flavour of ice cream. There must be about thirty in all. Forty? There are at least half a dozen different flavours of chocolate alone: ordinary, dark, with almonds, with nuts, Swiss chocolate, white chocolate.... There is banana split, Irish cream, American cream (which appears to be blue), fruits of the forest, mascarpone, melon, strawberry, vanilla, mint, lemon. And a whole bank of flavours headed dulce de leche, an Argentine specialty: caramel creme.
We take our cones outside, strolling along the brightly lit basins of Puerto Madero in the warm, sticky night air. Almost midnight, and I’m in fashionable Buenos Aires eating ice cream.
Life is mad, and good.
We talk about houses, and living space, about house prices in the U.K. and the U.S.A. and Argentina, and I remember that small room in her apartment, behind the kitchen. The guest room, I call it.
But no. That’s not what it is.
‘It’s for my empleada,’ Marcela explains.
‘Your employee?’ That doesn’t seem to make sense.
‘The girl who works for me. You know, she does the dishes, the cleaning, the grocery shopping, some of the cooking. She’s off at the moment because my daughter is away on holidays, but normally she lives with us, and these are her quarters.’
I don’t know what to say. Marcela has a maid? A maid who lives in a windowless room at the back of the kitchen.
11
Retiro, the central coach station in Buenos Aires, is large and noisy and busy. I have decided to take the scenic route south this time: I will go to Patagonia, not on the plane, but by road. Trelew lies over eight hundred miles south of the capital: a twenty-one hour coach trip.
People hurry through corridors, tugging large suitcases and small children behind them. Some have a mountain of luggage that consists simply of their possessions bundled into shiny black bin liners. Everywhere is noise and hubbub and hurry. Cafés offer last-minute coffees and sandwiches, shops sell suitcases and clothes and souvenirs from all over Argentina. Outside, coaches stand lined up or leave in clouds of exhaust fumes. They are big beasts, double-deckers, with large comfortable reclining seats.
We start at noon. Tomorrow morning, I will be in Patagonia.
We leave the city behind, drive slowly through tattered suburbs with pot-holed roads, stop on the very outskirts of the Buenos Aires sprawl. Sellers of sandwiches, sweetmeats and newspapers cluster around the doors of the coach, singing out their wares. My fellow passengers scramble out to stock up as though this were the last outpost of civilisation. Then the doors hiss shut once more, and we’re on our way. The houses thin out, disappear altogether.
The road stretches ahead, as straight as an arrow. The land to both sides is lush; green, flat fields stretch all the way to the horizon. This is the pampa húmeda, the fertile pampas where millions of cattle graze. It goes on for hour after hour, unchanging.
Birds resembling snow-white herons stand unmoving in small ponds; others, small and tan, perch on the backs of grazing cows. Larger birds sport a lovely pattern of browns and cream, and fly away with indignant squawks as soon as the coach approaches. I recognise their calls. I have heard those before in Patagonia, last time. They are teros, named after their piercing cries of ‘Tero – tero – tero!’
There is a swamp every now and then by the side of the road, ominously bright green or turquoise water fringed by spiky rushes. Occasionally, we pass a crossroads or a turn-off from the main road, but at times an hour goes by without any change at all, just the road dead straight ahead and the unending green outside the windows.
Road signs flash by: Bahía Blanca 427 km, Puerto Madryn 1469 km, Ushuaia 2918 km. I’ve never seen a four-figure distances on a road sign before.
Green fields. Cattle. The odd homestead on the horizon. Some reddish rocky hills outside the small settlement of Azul, a welcome change and very beautiful after all the green flatness. Every now and again the tattered remains of blown-out tyres lie by the roadside. I try not to think about those.
It starts to rain and the sky becomes dull and grey. Dusk falls, and the landscape is swallowed up by darkness.
On and on we go.
I fall asleep, and am jerked awake again when the bus bumps over a ramp, into a large, brightly lit space. It’s 9 pm, and we have arrived at Bahía Blanca. Forty minutes’ break for supper. After the meal – which is included in the price of the ticket – I stretch my stiff legs and walk outside the coach station, curious about Bahía Blanca. The town isn’t very much to look at, especially in the dark. There are very few streetlights along dusty, pot-holed roads and dusty, uneven pavements. Small houses and lit windows, dogs and cars on the roads. I wander about its few streets for a while, and I feel like a stranger in a strange place; alone and far away in the darkness, in a land that isn’t mine.
After Bahía Blanca the road follows the line of the coast. Orange chains of streetlights are visible in the distance, the lights of other places, mirrored in the sea. I wonder whether it has really been a good idea to come back. Perhaps I should have gone on dreaming of Patagonia without exposing myself to the reality of it again.
Visions of multi-coloured lights on the road appear to swim towards us: squares or triangles winking orange, green, yellow, red. Am I seeing UFOs? As they come closer, they turn out to belong to the long-distance lorries that travel between the port of Buenos Aires and the far south of the world, Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. Colourful bulbs are strung around the drivers’ cabs and sometimes all along the length of the vehicle.
I follow them with my eyes until they’re lost from sight. I’d love to travel to the end of the continent, by car or in the cab of such a lorry. As a teenager, I used to dream of being a long-distance truck driver one day: tough and calm, with a long p
lait of red hair and a cool gaze and a swagger.
On and on. Night. Darkness. Sleep. Somebody snores.
I wake up around 5.30am to a bright sky and clouds. Brownish scrubland stretches to the left and right of the road. It is a sunny spring day in early November. My uneasiness evaporates. This isn’t the unknown. We’re in Patagonia, and everything looks familiar.
As I get off the big coach in Trelew and board a local bus to Gaiman, I feel as though I’ve come home, and sternly admonish myself not to get carried away. I may be filled with memories of places and people, but that doesn’t mean that anybody else will have remembered me. Visitors from Europe are not exactly a rarity in Patagonia. I expect to spend some quiet weeks in Gaiman; sightseeing, going on excursions to beauty spots and into the desert, perhaps visiting the penguins again; sitting by the canal reading about the Welsh settlers, going for long walks in the valley. Nothing more.
Instead, I keep bumping into people who remember me from last time. They stop me in the street or the shop, ask me how I am. Annegret John in the health food shop is delighted when I remember her name. Clara Roberts, the choir mistress, gives me a hug in the street and tells me to come round and see her in the music school to tell her how I’ve been. The man at the supermarket check-out looks at me for a long moment, then breaks into a smile and says, ‘You’re the German writer, aren’t you?’
It is strange and wonderful and I’m not quite sure what to make of it. Everybody is so nice. I still don’t entirely understand why I have fallen so much in love with Patagonia, but this is surely one of the main reasons: the people. They are open and spontaneous, warm and friendly.
Like sunlight after a long, hard winter.
12
I GREW UP IN A PLACE much like Gaiman, small and rural and far away from everywhere, a farming village in central Germany. My parents had moved there when I was a year old. We were incomers; I grew up there but I always knew I wasn’t from there.
Everybody in the village knew everybody else and their business. Everybody knew that the owner of the largest farm also had the biggest financial problems because he went out every weekend and spent a fortune in the bars and brothel of the market town, while his wife worked sixteen hours a day to keep the farm going. Nobody suggested she divorce him. You didn’t do things like that in the village. It wouldn’t have been considered right.
Everybody knew that my father was beating me whenever he felt like it and that my mother saw no reason to stop him. Walls didn’t have ears but neighbours did, they heard thumps and cries. I went to some of them for help, asking them to stop what was happening to me, but they just shrugged and told me that life was like that. Nobody called in the social workers. You just didn’t. It wouldn’t have been considered right.
So as soon as I could, I left. There was nothing holding me in the area. I had no other family, neither brothers nor sisters, and life had taught me that I was better off without my parents. I missed the house and the farmyard sometimes, the stream and the wooded hills and the warm, dusty straw smell of harvest time, but for years I wouldn’t have admitted it. I was too glad to have got away, too afraid that the past would catch up with me. I gave villages and small towns a wide berth. They reminded me, brought back old fears and the feeling of being trapped with no escape. I preferred to live and work in large cities. The year I had spent in Aberystwyth as a student had shown me that I could live by myself. I spent seven years in Berlin, then moved to Britain. I made some friends, slowly, but avoided people on the whole. After my childhood, I tended not to trust the human race very much.
And then Gaiman, small and provincial and far away from the rest of the world, where everybody knew everybody else and their business. The first time I went there, I came as an obvious stranger. I didn’t know anybody and just drifted around the place for a while and then went back to where I’d come from.
On my return, Gaiman looks familiar. I remember the way the light changes on the long white hill across the valley; the dip in the road just before the turn into the main street towards the plaza. I recognise the dry, dusty scent of the air and the bird calls that are no longer foreign. I know people’s faces, the names of streets and houses, I have memories on almost every street corner.
People remember me. I walk down the high street exchanging greetings and stopping to chat. I am most definitely not a stranger. I am somebody who has come back. It is wonderful and moving and I love it, but it scares me too. I am in a place where everybody knows everybody. I suddenly feel nine years old and back in the past. I feel trapped. I almost wish I was back in Britain. I do wish I was back in Buenos Aires, drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette in a street café, watching the endless stream of cars go by on the busy roads. I catch myself thinking that returning to Gaiman has been a mistake.
I walk past the greengrocer’s, and Dudú Hughes waves at me through the window. We had laborious conversations over a pound of apples or half a dozen tomatoes the last time I was here, me in my limited Spanish and she in her limited Welsh. We stumbled over words, got caught by grammatical snares and came up against the boundaries of our knowledge. But somehow, it didn’t matter. We talked anyway, mixing Welsh and Spanish regardless, waving our arms and contorting our faces to mime words we didn’t know. Despite the difficulties in communicating, I got to like her very much. I go into the shop to say hello.
‘You’re back!’ They kiss your cheek in Argentina, not the air two inches away. I feel warmed and welcome, and at the same time wary. I feel that I ought to remember what small-town people are really like, the lessons the past has taught me: not to trust them, because although they might know, they don’t care. They won’t help. I try to remind myself that in the years since I left the village, I have found that not everybody is untrustworthy.
I stand by the counter, feeling embarrassed and nervous and pleased to see Dudú again.
She is talking with two other women customers who have finished their shopping and now stand by the counter, gossiping. They all keep a watch on the high street out of the large front window.
‘Look at her,’ one of the women says, nodding at a passing car.
‘New hairstyle again. And whose car is that she’s in anyway?’ She doesn’t sound hostile, just curious, as though it is her right to know these things.
‘Eva hasn’t been to choir practice this week for the third week running,’ the other contributes. ‘Wonder what she’s doing with her Wednesday evenings?’
‘Have you heard? Elena’s youngest is expecting.’
‘How have you been?’ Dudú asks me. ‘She’s from Germany, and she speaks Welsh!’ she tells the two women proudly, introducing me.
I tell her that I am very well, glad to be back. I have learned more Spanish in the intervening time, so that I can now communicate with relative ease. I speak about my work, a short story that has been published in Wales, another that has won a small prize in a writing competition. She is delighted for me, asks more questions, but just then, more customers come into the shop.
‘Are you doing anything tomorrow morning?’ she asks. ‘It’s my day off. If you like, you could come to my house to drink maté. Then we can catch up.’
I take a long walk that evening, along the road and over the creaking footbridge that crosses the River Chubut, into the relative dark and quiet of the south side of the town. The wind whispers in the poplars that grow along the river near the old chapel, some distance back from the road and invisible now in the dark.
I feel disoriented. This is as far away from home as I have been, and here of all places I feel reminded of the village where I grew up, the village I left as soon as I could. And instead of fighting the feeling that I have returned to somewhere like my childhood home, I am welcoming it. That frightens me. I half expect a trap-door to open in the pavement, swallow me and spit me out bang! thirty years back in the past. I think about the things that go on behind the closed doors of Gaiman and wonder who would care enough to listen and to know. I am afraid
that if I lower my guard just a little, I will lose my judgement and not be able to tell friend from foe.
I feel naked; not exposed but unprotected, reduced to my bare essentials. In the clear air of Patagonia, I’m forced to look at myself without distractions. I’ve never admitted before that I missed the village. Or my parents. They had been bad for me, had harmed and damaged me in ways I am still finding out about more than a decade and a half after I left them for good.
As a child, I built myself a mental shelter in which I could survive. It was founded on the firm belief that I was, in every way that counted, utterly unlike my parents. I had nothing to do with them. I would never be like them. I long ago stopped loving them. Even now it seems to me insane and dangerous to miss them when they did me so much harm, but here under the dark, brilliant night sky of Gaiman, I can admit for the first time that I do.
I look up at the unfamiliar stars of the southern hemisphere, and imagine that I am on another planet. I can feel how far away I am; just me, memories and fears and dreams and hopes, ten thousand miles away from home. Just me and my life and the stars in the huge, velvety Patagonian night.
13
NEXT MORNING, I TAKE THE back way to Dudú’s house, turning off the main road and on to a promising footpath that dips and winds around a hillside, in and out of thorny shrubs. Every now and again I slide down in a mini landslide of gravel and dust and clamber back up onto the path, negotiating the thorns as best I can. A sudden rustling noise makes me jump: a large hare runs from the shelter of the bushes across the path and disappears again behind a rock on the other side.
The path seems to mark the boundary between Gaiman and the wilderness. To my left are houses and back gardens with clotheslines, toys, flowers, to my right only dust and thorn bushes and wild hares.
Beyond the Pampas Page 5