Beyond the Pampas

by Imogen Herrad

  The canals worked in most years. But in 1899, the last year of the old century, thirty-four years after their arrival, it began to rain and rain and didn’t stop.

  ‘The rain fell day and night in terrifying silence,’ recounted Eluned Morgan, writer and educator and the daughter of Lewis Jones. ‘Even the animals appeared to sense that something unnatural was happening; they would stand in small groups on the higher ground, away from the constant, unfamiliar dampness.’34

  The river rose higher than ever before. Finally, in the middle of winter at the end of July (by bitter irony the very time when usually there were celebrations to commemorate the landing of the Mimosa) it burst its banks and flooded the entire valley.

  A dark winter night; the rain fell steadily; and youths on horseback galloped from house to house to raise the alarm: ‘Run to the hills, the waters are coming!’... It is hard to describe this strange exodus. At times, there was only a quarter of an hour’s notice in which to collect enough food and clothes to stave off cold and hunger. Often the waters had already begun to arrive by the time the cart made its getaway; and there was nothing for it but to whip the horses and race away, while behind the waves were rising up like mountains.35

  Animals were drowned, seed and hay were spoilt. And almost everything that people had not managed to load on a cart and take with them was lost: furniture and clothes, food supplies and tools and books. And two years later in 1901, exactly the same thing happened again.

  If those floods had happened twenty years earlier, they would probably have been the last nails in the coffin of the mad dream that was Y Wladfa. But now, more than thirty years on, things were different: there were three thousand people living in the valley, not just 153. There was infrastructure: roads and the railway and a regular, comparatively quick connection to the outside world. Even after two devastating floods in three years, nobody seems to have suggested that they give up and go elsewhere. Y Wladfa was firmly rooted in Patagonian soil, and nothing was going to shift it.

  24

  I’M HALFWAY BETWEEN heaven and earth, sometimes seemingly flying, at others swaying, through a cloudless blue sky past golden hills. For the past three hours, the view has been uniform: flat, greyish-white soil showing through the sparse grey-green shrubs like skin through thinning hair.

  I am not on a plane, but on the upper deck of the long-distance coach to Comodoro Rivadavia, a city some 400 kilometres – 250 miles – south of Trelew and Gaiman. For miles and miles and miles, hour after hour, nothing changes. I doze, read, doze, look out at the unchanging steppe.

  The coach sways and rolls in the buffeting wind like a ship on the high seas. The road runs ahead as straight as a ruler to the horizon. Puddles of heat shimmer like mirages on the tarmac. It is December – early summer – and the temperature is set to climb to 33 degrees in the shade. There is no shade at all on the bare, baking tableland.

  Finally the land moves aside like a woman lifting her skirt for a moment, and I catch a glimpse of a bay: blue glittering sea water, white-capped waves, framed by rocky fjords. Even just the sight of the sea from afar feels refreshing after so many miles of dusty land.

  As the road descends from the tableland towards the coast, it appears to experience a moment of madness: it coils in sudden hairpin bends and curves, hills and dips, left and right and up and down as though we were skirting the Pembrokeshire coast. It makes a lovely change after hours of straightness. The only thing is – I’m not sure that the driver has noticed. His driving is no different at all from when we were the only vehicle on a straight road with a visibility of several kilometres. The coach merrily overtakes cars and lorries just before sharp bends, oblivious of dips and blind summits. I clutch the arm rests of my seat and don’t dare take my eyes off the road, as though that might somehow help. (It’s a good job that I don’t know, at this point, that several coaches have in fact careered off just this stretch of road and crashed down into ravines due to reckless driving and high winds.) After some kilometres of this roller-coaster ride the road regains its composure and reverts to its previous flat, straight self. I sit back and breathe again.

  Outside the coach windows, hammer-shaped black metal crossbeams move busily up and down, pumping crude oil out of the ground. It all looks a bit unreal to me, like something out of a Hollywood film set in 1950s Texas. Comodoro Rivadavia is best known in Argentina for producing the bulk of the country’s oil. It even has an oil museum. The first pumps started work here in 1910.

  The city looks as uncompromisingly modern as the oil pumps looked old-fashioned: it is all tower blocks and new, blindingly white, angular buildings. At first glance I can see only three colours: a dazzling cornflower blue for sea and sky, the blinding white of the buildings, and the calm grey-brown of the Patagonian steppe in the background.

  Comodoro’s street pattern is, as everywhere in Patagonia, laid out on a regular grid. Away from the city centre, the tarmac roads downgrade to gravel and finally peter out altogether like the threads of a piece of coarse-woven cloth with no hem. Comodoro’s noisy, busy roads under the beating sunshine have a whiff of frontier town, of the oil rush about them. This place feels raw and new.

  I have dinner that evening in a restaurant on the seafront. The building consists, so it seems, entirely of windows. The formal and pricey and the food is unspectacular. Unlike the view. The sun sets while I eat bland ravioli in cheese sauce, and I am transfixed by the changing colours in the immense sky: blue fading to green and turquoise and purple while the sea reflects clouds of burning gold and red and crimson.

  I want to break into applause when finally the dark curtain of night descends.

  25

  IT’S NOT AN EASY TASK next morning to find the Museo Histórico Regional. Everyone I ask wants to direct me to the Museo del Petroleo. Finally I locate the Museo Regional on an island in the current between two busy, noisy roads. It is a square whitewashed building with beautiful dark wooden shutters covering its windows like closed eyelids. The sunlight bounces off the walls with glaring brilliance. The interior is dusty and gloomy and beautifully cool after the hot, hot sunshine. Traffic is audible as a constant rushing noise in the background.

  The exhibits don’t appear to have changed since the Museo was set up in the late 1940s: dusty artefacts and fossils in glass cases, accompanied by faded inscriptions on little cards. There are the obligatory whale and dinosaur bones. (Patagonia is famous for dinosaurs past, and whales both past and present.) There are stuffed cormorants and penguins that have seen better days, and swarms of prehistoric flint arrowheads mounted on wall boards. The Visitor Book records visits of school classes and the odd university student bent on research. It looks like a museum showing what museums were like fifty years ago.

  The second of the two exhibition rooms houses the section about indigenous peoples. By accident or design, this room has whitewashed walls and unshuttered windows that allow daylight to stream in and brighten everything up. I feel back in the twenty-first century here. The glass cases contain photos and books about the culture and language of the Tehuelche and Mapuche; silver jewellery, pottery, textiles and musical instruments.

  ‘I put all of that there,’ says Oscar Payaguala. ‘Every single thing comes from my own collection.’

  Oscar Payaguala is the director of the Museo Histórico Regional. He is also a protest singer and a Tehuelche. Being Tehuelche is not only his ethnic origin, it’s something of a full-time job.

  Which is why I have come to see him. The descendants of the Welsh settlers of Gaiman are always ready to acknowledge how much their forefathers were indebted to the Indians for their support during the rough early years, and how proud they all are of the friendship that developed between the two peoples. But the Tehuelche are only ever talked about in the past tense. The Tehuelche were. The Tehuelche did.

  In the present, the Tehuelche are not. They have disappeared. Some time after my second trip to Argentina, as I was reading about Patagonia and planning my third vis
it, this fact suddenly struck me. History books about Argentina only mention the immigrants: Italian and Spanish, Russian and German, Syrian and Polish and Welsh. It is as though they went to an empty land. I decided to find out what had happened to the Tehuelche.

  ‘Actually, my people is called Aoniken,’ Payaguala tells me. ‘The Mapuche called us Tehuelche, and that’s how we went down in history. In the Mapuche language, tehuel means wild, recalcitrant and che means people. So we were the Fierce Folk. But we call ourselves Aoniken, People of the South.’

  Payaguala takes me up to his office. We climb a wide, white marble staircase. One storey. Two. Three? And emerge on the roof in a sudden burst of air and sky, heat and noise and light. Oscar Payaguala’s office is located in a sort of little cottage on the flat roof of the building, like a bird’s nest atop a cliff.

  Outside are hot sunshine and much sky, dust and the noise of the city. Inside, the walls are covered with photos of Oscar Payaguala. Oscar Payaguala with his guitar. On stage, singing. On stage, taking a bow. Oscar Payaguala in Venice, in Barcelona, in Hanover, in Stockholm. Oscar Payaguala in Patagonia. Oddly, some of them appear to be autographed.

  Along the length of one wall run shelves with cassettes, CDs and books. Another wall is covered by a variety of musical instruments: a guitar, a kind of tambourine, a horn of some description, something that resembles a couple of gourds, a sort of long-handled trumpet, a drum a bit like an Irish bódhran.

  On the desk, under a sheet of glass, more photos of Oscar Payaguala.

  ‘That’s me in Germany,’ says Oscar Payaguala, pointing out a group of photos in case I might have overlooked them. ‘They think very highly of us abroad,’ he tells me, half bragging, half wistful. He refers to his band and to his people. ‘But here in Argentina...’ He waves his hand, dismissively.

  ‘I have actually read,’ I say, feeling unkind as I point it out, ‘that there are no Tehuelche any more.’

  He gives a short bark of a laugh.

  ‘Lots of us,’ he says, ‘are living in the province of Chubut and the neighbouring province of Santa Cruz to the south. There are some 7000, maybe 10,000 Tehuelche. Oh yes. What is true though, sadly, is that not many of us still live in the ways of our ancestors. Most of my people have migrated to the cities, looking for a better life, for work. Why? Because most of our land has been taken away from us. Many of our people have died. But our culture did not die.’ He bangs his hand down on the desk, on the glass sheet and the photo showing himself out in the country, in the midst of a group of people I would, at this point, describe as Indios. I learn later that they themselves don’t care for that word. They refer to themselves as Indígenas, the Indigenous, or Pueblos Originarios, the First People: much in the same way the Native Americans and the First Nations do on the North American continent. Stressing their seniority, their older claim.

  ‘The future,’ says Payaguala, ‘the future will be ours. All we need for the Argentinian state is to allow us to be who we are. We’re not asking for help. All we want is our land back, our own land that has been taken away from us; and for an end to discrimination. It’s not much to ask, is it? The freedom to live life our own way, to express our faith, to use our traditional medicine, to live in the old way, using our own wisdom. We can end droughts, we can make rain, did you know that?’

  Thankfully, he doesn’t seem to require an answer.

  ‘We understand the earth, we know how to treat it. The land, the earth, it doesn’t belong to us: we belong to it. It’s where we came from, where we will return to. It’s a continuous fight to reclaim our lands. To struggle for equality and diversity in a country that opened its arms to immigrants from all over the world, but that stole from its own peoples.’

  He’s been delivering the last few words looking out of the open door, now he turns and fixes a gimlet eye on me.

  ‘I’ve been to Europe, and I don’t believe that the European countries close the doors to their own populations and instead give preferential treatment to those coming in from outside, eh? But that’s what’s happening to us here. We’re the underdogs. We have no lands, no work, not much education, not much access to health-care – the very basics.’

  It is an uncomfortable but instructive hour I spend in the company of Oscar Payaguala. He shows me a side to Patagonia that had been invisible to me. Or rather: unnoticed. Of course, I have passed through the outskirts of Trelew: the almost-shanty town, la villa, as they say in Argentina, short for villa miseria: misery settlement, literally. In Argentina, the town and city centres are bright, attractive areas where people work and live and shop; whereas the undesirable areas are found outside the centres, ringing the city like a besieging army, trying to get in.

  And in passing through the villa outside Trelew I saw, without thinking about it, that most of its inhabitants were on the whole darker-skinned than the people in the city centre, and the people of Gaiman. In contrast, on all the advertising and public information posters I have ever seen in Argentina, the people depicted were white. In his office, and in his museum, Payaguala is attempting to restore some kind of cosmic balance that has gone badly out of kilter for himself and his people.

  Of course, not all the poor in Argentina are Indígenas and not all Indígenas are poor. But the correlation is strong. The Peróns referred to the masses of the dispossessed as Cabecitas Negras, the black-haired ones; because by and large, they are. Evita, the angel of the poor, caused dark-skinned dolls to be manufactured for their children, for the first and so far only time in Argentinian history.

  A few weeks later, in a café in Trelew, I fall to chatting to the man who occupies the table next to mine. He is a perfectly nice, charming man, an educated man. We talk about travel and books, about Germany and Argentina. He tells me, in all seriousness, that all Argentinians are of European extraction and appearance.

  ‘If you see a dark-skinned or a black person on the street, they will be from elsewhere – Bolivia or Peru,’ the nice man says pleasantly. ‘Argentinians are all white.’

  26

  A SOUND LIKE AN ELEPHANT fills the tiny office on the rooftop. Oscar Payaguala has taken one of the musical instruments off his wall and is giving me a spirited demonstration.

  The instrument in question looks like a young alpenhorn: a slender neck perhaps three or four feet long, at the end of which sits what appears to be a cow’s horn.

  No, corrects Payaguala. Not a cow’s horn. A calf’s. The trutruka is a ceremonial instrument. It is not played for pleasure, but for religious purposes only. And, when played more gently, it sounds like a trumpet.

  Unlike the trompe, says Payaguala, and jumps up once more like a Jack-in-the-box. Twanging sounds fill the office. The trompe turns out to be a mouth-harp. I always thought these were European originally; I have a vague idea that they were played by travelling folk back in the Middle Ages. Apparently, the Mapuche had a very similar instrument, a kind of bow made of wood and a gut string, instead of which they adopted the mouth-harp and gave it the old name.

  ‘It’s an instrument used for meditating, to relax, to de-stress. Everybody is stressed these days,’ says Payaguala, talking in the slightly unnerving way peculiar to people who are very aware of history. When he says ‘these days’, I get the feeling that he talks as one who has been around for several centuries.

  There is certainly a soothing quality to the trompe as he plays it. Its twanging sounds bounce round the walls of the office like small rubber balls. It sounds like an instrument that doesn’t quite take anything seriously. Nothing’s all that bad, now is it? is what the trompe appears to say.

  ‘It’s the most important instrument of all,’ Payaguala tells me. ‘When two caciques meet, chiefs; or two longkos, elders, they play trompe to clear their minds, so as not to rush into anything.’

  Perhaps if George Bush and Tony Blair had sat down and played the mouth-harp for a while instead of all that posturing...

  ‘And this is the kultrung.’ It is the drum I saw earlier. It
s front is painted with abstract symbols in blue and yellow. ‘It represents literally thousands of years of our culture,’ Payaguala tells me. ‘Christopher Columbus came to America believing that the earth was round, didn’t he? But we, the pueblos originarios, the original inhabitants of America, have known for twelve thousand years that the earth is as round as the kultrung. We paint the four points of the compass on every single one of our percussion instruments. They symbolise the Mother Earth, who can get by just fine without us. And you see, there is no man and no woman in this representation. Nature and the animals can live very well without us. But we cannot live without them, without Mother Nature. That’s the difference.’

  I have no problem identifying the last instrument that comes off the wall. It’s a guitar. Oscar Payaguala is going to sing for me. I brace myself. I’m not sure what to expect after the visual overkill of all those photos. But I needn’t have worried.

  Payaguala’s music is one-man-and-his-guitar-type folklore, singer-songwriter stuff. It’s beautiful. As is his mellow, surprisingly powerful baritone. But there’s nothing Tehuelche about the song, nothing new and unfamiliar; which to me is somehow at once a relief and a disappointment. That’s until I start to listen to the words and I realise that I don’t understand a single one of them. This isn’t Spanish.

  I ask about the Tehuelche language. Does he speak it? I have heard that it, too, is extinct.

  ‘Oh yes,’ says Payaguala. ‘I speak both languages, Tehuelche and Mapuche.’And then he bursts into a short speech in Tehuelche. It sounds staccato and guttural and utterly foreign.

  ‘I said there, Welcome Imogen Herrad to Patagonia, may your stay be fruitful and successful. May you be well and healthy and happy here so far away from your loved ones back home.’