Beyond the Pampas
Page 9
Patricia is the white mastiff. Hearing her name, she thumps her tail a couple of times in the dust without lifting her head.
‘But Gaiman is such a conservative place! Very closed against outsiders. It took me a long time to grasp that. And some things are just odd... there are all these empty houses in the valley. In the seventies and eighties, most of the Welsh sold their land and left their farms and moved to the city. Hardly any of the descendants of the Welsh are still farmers, you know. It’s a difficult life, hard work; now it’s mostly the Bolivian immigrants who do the farming, they don’t mind the hard work. I’ve asked people why they only sold the land and not the farm houses, and they say they don’t want their houses to pass out of the family and go to strangers. So they just leave them empty, to decay.’ She wrinkles her forehead.
I think of Treborth, the empty house that Lisa showed me with its smell of mothballs and mouse repellent, the shrouded dining-room table, the outdated wiring. And I can understand both of them: why Lisa is so attached to the house she grew up in and all it stands for, her family history, the first settlers; her connection to Wales, even, because John Morgan James who built the house with his own hands came from Ponterwyd. If it was my house, I would hate to lose all that. But I understand Lorena’s frustration, too. Why not let someone else live in the house if you no longer want to? Why cling to a past that is almost dead?
‘It’s as though they want to hold on to their special status,’ Lorena says. ‘You know, the Welsh were the pioneers, the first to settle here. They’re proud of that and a lot of them still keep themselves apart from everyone else. But times are changing. There’s a lot of fear of change here. People want to hold on to the old days, to how things were. They don’t want people from the outside who do new things.’
I say, jokingly, ‘You’re from the big city, girlie, you don’t understand that we do things differently here.’
Lorena gives me a startled look.
‘Do you know, that’s exactly what people have been telling me!
“You’re from Buenos Aires, you don’t know how we do things here.”’ She shakes her head. ‘I sat on a sub-committee of a residents’ group for a while. I wanted to go to the municipality to push them to do something on a project they were dragging their feet over. The new estate over on the other side of the hill isn’t connected to the electricity grid, and nothing was happening. So I wanted to get something done. But the other people on the committee said, “No, we don’t do things here that way, they won’t like it if we push them.” As though we were still living under the military dictatorship! The municipality doesn’t own Gaiman; it’s ours, we pay our taxes and we have a right to the services that we pay for.’ She makes an exasperated growling sound in her throat, and Patricia the dog lifts her head, slightly alarmed. I imagine that Lorena doesn’t lose her patience very often.
‘They didn’t like me talking like that. Sometimes, I’m getting a bit disillusioned with Gaiman, to tell you the truth. I’ve been living here three years now, and it’s a great place to live. It’s safe, too, Buenos Aires is not a safe place to live, so many robberies and everything. And I tell myself: You’ve made your choice, now stick with it. But, you know, sometimes....’
21
ERNESTO, LORENA’S PARTNER, owns a chacra in the valley, six miles or so outside Gaiman. In the summer, when everybody is on holiday and Lorena closes her yoga studio for two whole months, they live out on the farm. They often spend the weekends there as well.
It’s hot in the valley, even the cool wind from the south can’t change that. The air hangs heavily between the white hills. At noon, the heat of the sun beats down like a hammer. The poplars rustle dryly, their leaves fluttering silver and green. The minicab – remis – I’m in trawls an enormous dust cloud. I have been invited out to Ernesto and Lorena’s for lunch. There is no bus going to the individual chacras, and it’s too far to walk in the heat. So I go by remis.
The chacra has no address as such. It is simply Chacra No. 322. Lorena told me to tell the driver that it’s on the road to Treorky, near Capel Camwy, the chacra with a red gate. There are no maps to the roads in the valley, and practically no sign posts. People just know where places are because they’ve grown up here, or learnt what is where. Or else they get lost.
We arrive. The gate is an unspectacular brown that doesn’t look in any way red, but there is Lorena, outside a house with a bright red front door, red window frames and shutters. There are also Patricia and three more white mastiffs. Or more precisely, they would be white if they were clean. They are Patricia’s offspring, they’re just six months old and have the souls of puppies in the bodies of almost fully-grown dogs. They have been splashing about in the water of the old irrigation canal that runs alongside the farm boundary. Now they come running and throw themselves at me in delight, grinning all over their wide, ugly, lovely faces. They are dripping wet, and mucky. Within minutes, so am I. My jeans are covered in muddy paw prints. ‘Don’t jump!’ Lorena admonishes the dogs, but to no avail. I don’t mind. It’s so hot, I’m tempted to join them in the cool water of the canal.
I ask Lorena about the gate – I’d thought she’d said it was red.
She laughs. ‘It used to be, and everybody still remembers that. When I got here it was already brown, but this will probably be “the chacra with the red gate” for the next hundred years.’
We go for a tour round the chacra – which I thought would be a major walk, but it’s just two fields long, and one wide. Ernesto fattens beef cattle. Half-grown cows arrive, stay three or four months in a corral outside the house, eat and eat and eat, then they’re off to the slaughterhouse. There’s money in beef, Lorena says. I haven’t met Ernesto yet. He’s off in the car somewhere doing farmerly things, but will be back for lunch.
I have assumed that Ernesto inherited the chacra from his forbears, and that he, too, has some Welsh ancestry. But he is, like Lorena, an incomer, although not one from so far away. He’s from the Patagonian province of Santa Cruz to the south, and used to work in Trelew as a joiner. Then he lent someone a lot of money, and they kept not being able to pay him back.
‘And in the end,’ says Lorena, ‘the man gave Ernesto twenty head of cattle instead, and he decided to buy the farm with the money he’d been saving to buy a house.’
She rolls her eyes, sighs, smiles.
‘They gave him cows instead of cash?’ I try to imagine that. ‘Why didn’t they sell the cows to get the money?’
Lorena shrugs. ‘I don’t know. I’m not even trying to understand. I guess it’s a Patagonian thing. But I must say, it’s worked out well. And Ernesto is happy out here. It suits him, he’s not a city type.’
There are also some sheep. They were similarly meant for fattening, but arrived ill last autumn, and most of them died over the winter. The few that are left don’t look too good. Then there are chickens, with chicks – little and fluffy and yellow – and three cats. The house is single-storey, built of pinkish bricks, with a corrugated zinc roof. The bricks are made just round the corner, at one of two brickworks in Treorky.
Indoors it’s beautifully cool, despite the metal roof. There are muddy boots by the kitchen door – I add my own muddy trainers to the collection – a modern kitchen sink, a gas cooker, and a black cast-iron stove like the one I saw in Treborth with Lisa.
‘We use that for heating in winter,’ Lorena says with a nod in its direction.
‘But you don’t cook on it, do you?’
‘I do in winter. When it’s hot anyway, it seems a bit of a waste not to use it.’
‘That must have been quite a change from how you lived in Buenos Aires.’
Lorena laughs out loud. ‘I’ll say! At the beginning, I didn’t even know how to light this thing! Can you imagine, there’s no electricity out here, there was no water... It’s like another world. But I like learning. I like being able to manage with what there is out here. But I’m glad Trelew is only half an hour’s drive away.’
We eat, and Ernesto tells me how they found the well on their land that now supplies them with water.
‘There are problems with the water supply in the entire valley,’ he says; ‘especially since the big dam was built a hundred miles upstream in the 1960s. The ground water level has sunk a lot. But we got a man to come here to douse for water, a Chilean. He is very good. He used an old silver fob watch on a chain, and in his hand held a little bottle of water from a mountain spring in the Andes, on the Chilean side – the place where he was from. And then he went all over the farm. In one place, the watch began to go round in circles, like a pendulum, and he told us that there was water in the ground there. So we sunk a shaft. At a depth of eighteen feet, we found a subterranean current of water between two layers of clay. We put a layer of gravel and sediment as a natural filter, and now the water comes out, crystal clear. Better than bottled mineral water from the shop!’ Ernesto exclaims and jumps up. ‘Come and see for yourself!’
He drags me off outside to the hose connected to the electric pump that draws up the water. He fills a glass straight from the hose. ‘Taste that.’
The water is very cold and slightly salty, and it tastes dark, somehow, of subterranean passages and deep places in the earth.
22
IN 1867, TWO YEARS AFTER the arrival of the Mimosa, Michael D. Jones wrote a letter to one Thomas Benbow Phillips. Phillips, latterly of Tregaron, was living in Nova Cambria, a Welsh colony which he had established in the province of Rio Grande do Sul in southern Brazil some twenty years earlier. (What on earth had that been like: to exchange grey, small-town Tregaron for the lush subtropical jungles of Brazil?)
The Brazilian settlement had begun with plenty of funding in place, and houses built even before the first settlers arrived. By the end of 1851, there were 80 people living in Nova Cambria, but even at its peak it never seems to have been home to more than 120. And despite its grand name, it never was very Welsh. The Brazilian government made it clear very early that all the administration, internal and external, had to follow Brazilian law. The Welsh of Nova Cambria were free to speak Welsh among themselves and to their God in chapel, but other than that, they might as well have remained in Britain. When in 1854 a coal prospector arrived from Liverpool to look for coal in the mountains of southern Brazil, several of the settlers – many of whom were former coal miners – went with him. There was nothing to keep them in Nova Cambria, no heroically overcome hardship, no mad dream like the one of Y Wladfa. Once the first people had gone, more followed. The settlement unravelled until even Phillips and his family gave up and moved to the nearest town, Pelotas, to open a business there.27 They were still there ten years later when Michael D. Jones’ siren call lured them south to Patagonia.28 He wanted the seasoned pioneers to share their valuable experience with the raw settlers of Y Wladfa. Phillips and his family seem not to have hesitated. They packed up and made their way south to the Chubut valley: a journey of some 1900 miles, which these enterprising souls made by oxcart.
In his letter, Michael D. Jones outlined the economic situation of Y Wladfa, then in its third year:
About 200 Indians came down and bartered quillangoes guanaco-hide mantles, ostrich [rhea] feathers, dogs, horses and goats for bread, flour, matti [maté], tea, coffee, tobacco, etc. According to the reports we have received, this visit brought a profit to the colonists of about £1000....The visit of the Indians has evidently paid the colonists well.29
All those feather boas and fans, Victorian hats trimmed with ostrich feathers and feather dusters sold and used all over the British Empire meant that there existed a big demand for feathers. And so the first modest wealth of Y Wladfa was built, of all things, on the plumage of the rhea, the large flightless bird of the desert. (Rhea look very like ostriches, so that’s what the settlers called them.)
In the late 1870s, there were no fewer than eight merchant houses in the Chubut valley, set up to trade with the Indians.30 As late as 1881, sixteen years after the arrival of the first settlers, a full two thirds of the exports of the Chubut colony consisted of feathers. 1881 had been a bad year with a disastrous harvest. A year later, just under half of the exports was wheat – but still the larger part was made up of feathers and quillangos, guanaco hide mantles. Trade with the Indians was the economic mainstay for Y Wladfa31. After the first ten years, between agriculture and trade, the settlers had proved that life – European, settled, ‘civilised’ life – in Patagonia was possible.
Indeed, by 1875 the little settlement in the middle of nowhere was regarded as a success not only back home in Wales, but also in other attempted Welsh colonies, most of which were in the United States and Canada: so much so that further would-be settlers arrived from Wales and North America.
Emigration was a fact of life at the time, not only in Wales but all over Britain, Ireland and the European continent. The New World offered the possibility of a better life, upward mobility, an escape from poverty. In exchange, emigrants had to give up family ties, homeland, community. Welsh-speaking emigrants often lost their language within a couple of generations, went to church instead of chapel. But Y Wladfa had been established to prevent exactly that. Here was a little Wales beyond Wales, where morals and mores, school and religion were as Welsh-speaking and God-fearing as anyone in the old country could possibly wish. It was Utopia.
‘It was a strange and unforgettable sight,’ wrote William Hughes, who had arrived from Wales in 1881; ‘to behold those Welshmen come to meet us on the deserted shore of a faraway, exotic land. What made it so very odd, and what caused us no little amazement, was how different it all was from what one had imagined. To hear the settlers converse in perfectly correct Welsh whilst seeing the ponchos they wore slung over their shoulders was like a dream of an enchanted land.’32
What did Utopia look like? I have a faded sepia photograph of Gaiman in 1906. It was taken by Henry Bowman, an English stonemason and something of an adventurer who had drifted to the Chubut colony in the 1880s and more or less stayed. He would move away to other places in Patagonia for a few years, but eventually always come back to Gaiman. His hobby was photography. He left many records – often the only ones of their kind – of the early years of life in Patagonia.33
The photo shows the typical grid of streets running at right angles with a few scattered houses built of adobe – mudbrick – or rough stones quarried from the dusty, whitish hills. All in all, I can count twenty-three buildings. There can’t have been more than a hundred people living in the village at the time, if that. None of the buildings has more than one storey. Most of them look like a house in a child’s drawing: the front door in the centre with a window on either side and a chimney at both ends of the roof.
Other buildings in the photo must have been built by Argentines or immigrants of Spanish or Italian extraction, of whom there were a couple of dozen living in Y Wladfa around the turn of the century. They are rectangular, with a high, red-brick front and a flat roof of corrugated zinc which slopes towards the back. There are buildings like that all over Patagonia; as typical for the region as the semi is for the U.K.
And then there is, oddly, what looks exactly like a terrace of workers’ houses on the edge of what will later become the central plaza. They might have been taken off any street in the South Wales valleys and moved to Gaiman. Were they built by homesick miners from Merthyr or Tredegar? They look incongruous in the middle of the flat, dusty landscape of Patagonia.
The streets of this Gaiman of the past are as wide as motorways, but there isn’t a single vehicle to be seen on them. The most substantial thing in the picture is a line of bushy poplars on the horizon.
23
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p; IN 1885, A GROUP OF FARMERS, craftsmen and – perhaps oddly – a couple of religious ministers decided to set up a co-operative trading company, which became known as Compañía Mercantil del Chubut. (The Chubut Trading Co.) Now the settlers could join together and sell their rhea feathers, quillangos and wheat directly in Buenos Aires, instead of having to rely on middlemen. They sent their own representative to negotiate with the merchants in the capital and to hire boats which would take the grain to Buenos Aires and, on the return trip, to bring all manner of goods to Patagonia. Suddenly, there was a shop in Rawson which sold furniture and agricultural implements, tools and fabric and crockery: things which most people would take completely for granted, but which the Chubut colonists had now done without for two decades.
The Compañía Mercantil was a roaring success. Wheat from the Chubut valley turned out to be top quality. It famously won gold medals, a fact which everybody in the valley today will proudly recount: one in the Paris Exhibition of 1889, and two at Chicago Exhibitions, in 1893 and 1918 respectively; and the company could demand high prices for it in Buenos Aires.
Construction of the railway began a year later, in 1886. The first trains ran from Rawson to the newly founded town of Trelew (named after Lewis Jones: Tre meaning town in Welsh and Lew being short for Lewis), and on from there to the harbour at Porth Madryn, as the New Bay had now become.
The population of Y Wladfa had grown to almost 3000 by this time. There were three villages in the Chubut valley: Rawson, Gaiman and Trelew with its brand new railway station. After over two decades of struggle, things were looking good.
Then the river flooded.
There had always been floods in the valley. Every few years, Afon Camwy – the river Chubut – burst its banks. It was something of which the Tehuelche had warned the Welsh from the start. But now, the colonists had lived in the valley for many years. They knew it. They had constructed a network of irrigation canals with which they could control the flood water. Or so they thought.