I emerge abruptly onto a road, firmly back in civilisation with no idea where I am in relation to Dudú’s house. I have to ask a woman who is passing me in the otherwise empty street. She knows Dudú, nods and pours forth a stream of rapid Spanish. I am pleased and surprised to find that I understand her. A few minutes later, I find myself outside Dudú’s house.
‘So there you are,’ she says with her slow, warm smile when I knock on her door. ‘Come in, come in, I’ve just put the kettle on. Do you drink maté?’
‘Why not,’ I say. ‘I’d like to give it a go.’
She looks doubtful. ‘Are you sure? I can make you a cup of tea if you like.’
Maté is the Argentinian national drink, made by pouring notquite-boiling water over the leaves of the yerba bush. I took some back with me from my last visit and tried to brew a cup of maté at home, but I don’t think I did it right. The result tasted horrible.
‘I’ll try maté,’ I say firmly.
Maté is drunk out of a gourd and through the bombilla, a kind of metal straw with a little sieve at the lower end to keep the yerba leaves out of your mouth. When you drink maté with someone, you share cup and bombilla. It’s a companionable kind of drink. Bitter, admittedly, but Dudú has added camomile blossoms and plenty of sugar. She laughs when I say that I sort of like it.
We talk about money, and life, and work. When I tell her what I earn per hour in the temping jobs I sometimes do, she gasps.
‘I make less than that in a day!’
The Argentinian currency crashed disastrously some years ago and lost three quarters of its value. But even before, my earnings would clearly have been way above hers. I feel very rich and first-world, and not entirely comfortable with it.
‘Do you have a flat or a house?’ Dudú asks me.
I make a face. ‘Neither. I rent a room in a house-share, that’s all I can afford.’
‘Oh,’ Dudú says and looks around herself. ‘This is my house, I finally paid the mortgage off.’
Before coming here, I worried that our meeting would be strained and awkward. Our backgrounds are so different, my Spanish is still quite basic, and we don’t really know each other at all. But it isn’t awkward, and it turns out that we aren’t all that different.
Dudú asks about my parents. I never quite know how to answer that one, so I cautiously say that I’m not in touch with them.
‘Oh?’ she says, and I tell her a bit more.
‘They mistreated me when I was little.’
People have all sorts of different ways of reacting to this statement. Some look uncomfortable, pretend they haven’t heard and go on to talk about the weather. Others get almost aggressive in defence of The Family, tell me that I ought to forgive and forget and extend the hand of friendship. Most avoid actually talking about what happened.
There is a brief silence.
‘They hit you?’ asks Dudú.
‘Yes,’ I say and let out a long breath. I am relieved and nervous, all at once.
She nods slowly. ‘And so you left? How old were you when you left?’
‘Twenty-two,’ I say.
‘Oh?’ she says again, maybe because it seems to her quite old to leave a bad home.
‘I was afraid of them, afraid to leave,’ I try to explain. ‘I wasn’t sure I knew how to live on my own.’ She nods again, accepting what I have said. We sit in silence for a while, but it is a comfortable silence. I light a cigarette, Dudú opens the front door to let the smoke out. Sunlight and bird calls drift in, the occasional noise of a car driving by. Dudú refills the maté gourd with hot water, adds a couple of sugars and pushes it across the table to me. The taste is just as strong and bitter as I remember it, with added sweetness. Then she tells me about herself. She comes from a small place in the Andes, where she lived with her husband and four children. But the husband treated her badly, and so in the end she took the children and left him. She stayed with her parents first, but that was in the same small town, still too close to the home she had left. She left and came to Gaiman, several hundred miles away. Here, she found herself a flat.
‘Eventually,’ she says emphatically and takes a long sip of maté, hot, sweet, bitter, comforting. People saw her arrive, a single woman with four children. The place she had left was far away, but news travelled fast. Like a lot of the people of Gaiman, Dudú is of Welsh extraction, and inevitably related to a lot of them, albeit distantly. Soon everybody knew that she had left her husband. There was a lot of gossip. Everybody had a firm opinion of Dudú: she had broken up the family. She was a bad woman. She should not have left him. When she was finally given a council flat, people said that the council shouldn’t have given her the place – that it was a flat for a family, not for a single woman.
I stare at Dudú incredulously when she tells me that bit. ‘You weren’t a single woman, you had four kids to look after!’
‘But I didn’t have a husband,’ she explains patiently. She seems amused by my indignation, and at the same time angry in a distant way. ‘While we waited for the council flat, we lived for three years in a house without running water and electricity. With four small children, can you imagine?’
I can’t.
I admire Dudú’s courage, her determination, her lack of bitterness.
‘He didn’t let me live,’ Dudú says, talking about the man she left. ‘I didn’t want to leave him, but there wasn’t any other way. He would wash at least twice a day and change all his clothes. I had to wash them, iron them. Everything had to be in its place, always, the way he liked it. Always. And when it wasn’t...’
She shakes her head, her eyes turned inwards.
‘Did he ever get violent?’ I ask.
‘Sometimes,’ she says, matter-of-factly, ‘you couldn’t talk to him. Everything had to be exactly how he wanted. He wouldn’t allow me to go out, to go to work, to read even! I couldn’t have any sort of life at all. So in the end, I took the children and left.’
I hadn’t wanted to leave my parents, hadn’t wanted to give up hope that one day, things would change. I’d been afraid to leave, unsure what they might do; I’d doubted my ability to earn a living, run my own life. My belief in myself had been badly undermined. But I did want to have my own life. So, like Dudú, I eventually decided to leave so I could live and be myself.
‘It was the right thing to do,’ I say, to myself as much as to her.
She smiles, sighs. ‘It was. But it was hard. I didn’t have any money. I had to look for a job and everything. I put all four kids through school, but there wasn’t enough money for all of them to go to university.’
She gets up. ‘Let’s have another maté. Or perhaps a cup of tea for you?’
I had tried not to grimace at the bitterness of the maté, but she must have noticed my less than enthusiastic response to it.
‘Yes, please. Panad o de i fi. I’ll have a cuppa.’
I feel shaky and alarmed and comforted as I walk away from Dudú’s house. We spent nearly three hours talking over maté and tea. I can’t remember when I last told a virtual stranger so much about myself, so many personal things that I usually keep hidden. But it isn’t just that. I feel again as I did the night before when I was out walking under the stars: stripped of my everyday masks, down to the bare bones of who I really am. I am a battered child, a grown-up woman and a writer, all at once. I didn’t give up on the humanity in me and in others, despite everything. And in Patagonia, of all places, I have met a kindred soul.
I clamber up the hill. From up here, I can see all of Gaiman laid out beneath my feet, the valley gathered up in folds and hills along both sides. Bryngwyn (the white hill) across the valley lies smooth and golden in the sunlight. The river sparkles like a silver snake. It’s quiet, so quiet. The only noise comes from bird calls, the buzzing of insects and the occasional drone of a plane high overhead.
14
John Morgan James was born in 1870, the youngest of a family of twelve. He grew up on a 200-acre sheep farm in Po
nterwyd in mid Wales. By the time he was in his teens, he could see that his chances of ever inheriting anything worth farming were slim. He would have known other people who left Wales in search of land and a better life; older siblings and cousins and friends who’d gone to Wisconsin or New South Wales to make a fresh start. He would have seen envelopes arrive, covered with writing in a familiar hand and strange, unknown stamps; bringing news from distant places. The New World was far away, but it contained people he knew. So he, too, decided to take the big step into the unknown. In 1886, when he was just sixteen, he left the farm, and Wales and Britain, and everything familiar, and went across the ocean to Patagonia where they were looking for settlers. He may have reasoned that the small colony in the Chubut valley was at least self-contained, Welsh-speaking and chapel-going, a village on the other side of the world that was perhaps not so different from Ponterwyd. He arrived just in time for someone to put a shovel into his hand and tell him to help dig the new irrigation canal. Not, perhaps, the welcome he had envisaged.
But when the canal had been finished, he was given a hundred acres of land in the valley, and in time he built himself a house and got married. He and his wife had twelve children and innumerable grandchildren. One of his granddaughters is named Lisa: the very Lisa James who gave me that memorable Welsh-language tour of Buenos Aires.
‘¿Hola, Lisa? Imogen ydw i,’ I say, clutching the phone. My Spanish has improved so much that when I try to speak in Welsh, my sentences come out in a wild jumble of Welsh and Spanish. Somehow, it’s even worse when I talk on the phone. ‘I’m back in the valley, and I’d love to meet up. Do you have time?’
‘Wrth gwrs!’ she replies in Welsh. Of course. We arrange to meet for a cup of tea, and over the apple pie she announces that if I like, she is going to give me a tour of the chacras – the farms – in the valley, and show me where she grew up. She never sold the farm house that John Morgan James built with his own hands more than a hundred years ago.
We set out next afternoon. The sky is its customary blue. The wind rustles the leaves of the poplar trees by the river as we cross the bridge. A couple of kilometres on, Lisa turns off the main road. Now we are travelling on a gravel track, the Patagonian B road. Occasionally, another vehicle comes towards us. Every time one of them passes us in the road, Lisa puts the back of her hand against the windscreen and turns her head away, in case a stone should hit the glass. All the roads are straight, crossing each other at regular intervals. You can tell that they were mapped out on a drawing board before they were built.
We drive past fields, cows, sheep, wheat and the occasional row of high, slender trees. In this land where the wind is never silent, the fast-growing poplars make a good wind break. Lisa turns off the gravel road onto a grass track and stops the car. In a field in front of us stands a red-brick building.
‘Capel Bethesda,’ Lisa says. We speak Welsh (mostly), and every now and again she slips in a sentence in Spanish. ‘This is where I went to Chapel and Sunday School as a child. I even taught here myself, briefly, after I’d been to university and become a teacher. I was so nervous! I was only twenty years old, and I still felt like a child, being back in my old school, you know.’
We get out and walk around. There stands a Welsh chapel – sheltered porch, red-brick walls, elongated pointed windows and all – in the middle of the flat Patagonian landscape. On the façade is engraved, ‘Bethesda 1904’.
John Morgan James would have been thirty-four the year this chapel was built. He had become a successful farmer with a growing family. The first settlers, the adults of that small group of 153 that had come over on the Mimosa nearly forty years earlier, were old people by then, some of them dead and laid to rest in the earth they had chosen over that of their homeland. Their children had been born here or had made the crossing as infants, too young to remember anything but this dusty landscape of brown and gold, the white hill across the valley, the huge horizon, the endless skies. This was their home. Did they think of themselves as Welsh or Argentinian, or both? Were they secretly wishing for a ship that would take them back to the land of their fathers and mothers?
I try to imagine them, and find that I can’t think of them in any other way but as people who loved the land, this land: the wind whispering in the poplar trees, the dry air scented with the clean smell of dust, the murmuring river, the wide open sky and the roads that go on forever, into the unknown, towards the Andes mountain range hundreds of miles to the west. Some of them might have longed for life in a large city, a variety of people, no minister to tell them what to do, not to swear and not to sin. They might have felt constricted by a life of work and morality and not much else. Some no doubt left. But perhaps even they, like Lisa (like me) would come back from time to time, would not want to cut themselves off completely from the land. They would miss the city when they were here, and the open land, the sky and the stars, when they were back in the city.
The word chacra comes from Quetchua, the Inca language that is still spoken today by millions of people in Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and the north-western parts of Argentina. Chacra in Quetchua means land, plains, field. In Argentinian Spanish the word has come to mean a smallish farm.
‘And now I’ll show you where I grew up,’ says Lisa as we get back into the car to drive on.
It isn’t far from the chapel, another kilometre or so. To our left is a field full of cows, ahead another row of green poplars swaying in the wind. We turn left into a short driveway and Lisa stops the car.
‘Treborth,’ she says, introducing the house. It is a compact, good-sized building, made of red brick with a tiled roof and a sturdy wooden front door. A wonderful smell of woodsmoke scents the air. Across the road lies the entrance to another farmyard.
‘My neighbours,’ Lisa says. ‘They’re keeping an eye on the place for me when I’m not here. We’ll go and say hello presently, I want to have a look at the house first. Oh, I hope everything will be all right! I haven’t been here for months and months, and we’ve had such storms and rain! I hope it hasn’t been burgled, it is so isolated out here...’
We go round the house first. The large round metal water tank on the roof appears undamaged. The window panes are hung with cobwebs and blind with dust, but they are whole. The chimney still stands where it should. In the shrubs that divide the garden from the field beyond, a white turkey scratches in the soil and seems to watch us out of the corner of its eye.
To the side of the house, a stack of metal pipes lie in the long, unkempt grass. Lisa nudges them with a foot.
‘For water,’ she says, annoyed. ‘We don’t get piped water out here. Recently, the council finally decided to connect us to the water grid. We had to pay for the pipes, and they’re supposed to put them in the ground and do the plumbing work. Half a year ago I bought those pipes, and nothing at all has happened.’
She sighs.
‘Let’s go inside,’ she says and walks to the front door. ‘Oh, Imogen, I hope everything will be all right inside!’
The front door is stuck. Lisa stands for a moment, perhaps entertaining visions of fallen masonry blocking it from the inside. Then she takes a deep breath and applies her shoulder. The door opens with a screech of wood scraping on stone and a creak of unoiled hinges, and we are inside. The light is dim, all the curtains are drawn. There is a strong smell of mothballs, dust and enclosed air.
The house feels like a place that has not been lived in for a long time. Everything in it looks old-fashioned and unused.
Lisa goes from room to room, exclaiming with relief that things are just as she left them. In the parlwr (the parlour), stern, high-backed wooden chairs are assembled around a long, dark table. An old wooden chest covered with a white cloth looks like a coffin. At the head of the table, over the fireplace, hangs a Bible text done in cross-stitch in a large, gilded frame.
The only furniture in the master bedroom are two ornate iron bedsteads, side by side but separated from each other by a decorous distance.
Across the corridor lies the nursery for Lisa and her sister. Somebody has scratched LISA in large, inch-high letters on the brick mantelpiece.
‘I did that when I was little!’ Lisa says. ‘Look at it, isn’t it terrible?!’
I have to smile. ‘No, it’s not.’
But Lisa is still shaking her head. She has become rather respectable. What would the child Lisa think if she could see herself now?
The floorboards creak under our feet. I try to imagine Lisa and her sister Bethan living here as children, surrounded by solid Victorian furniture that had come all the way from Wales, straight-backed chairs and Bible verses on the wall, and the Bible-black cast-iron stove that lives in a small room off the parlour. The stove is a proper work of art. Except for the top, every square inch of it is covered in ornate swirls and scrollwork. It crouches in a corner like a prehistoric beast, aware that its time has passed but refusing to die.
‘My mother used that for cooking and baking,’ Lisa says.
There are electric sockets in the walls, switches by the doors and light bulbs under the shades that hang from the ceiling. Everything seems to be the latest technology, circa 1930. I’m not entirely sure that the twenty-first century has arrived inside the house. Gaiman may be small and provincial, but it lives in the present: it has two internet cafés, bars with pinball machines, a health food shop. Out here in Treborth, the past has massed like clouds. Every room is thick with days long gone.
‘Let’s have a cup of tea!’ Lisa says.
I follow her to the kitchen, glad to have my train of thought interrupted. But she isn’t in the kitchen, she has gone out to the car and is now wrestling a large water canister through the front door.
‘No piped water out here,’ she says somewhat out of breath, and sets the canister down with a thump on the table. ‘That water tank on the roof is only for washing and for flushing the toilet, you can’t drink the stuff. We have to bring our own.’
Beyond the Pampas Page 6