Beyond the Pampas

by Imogen Herrad

  Is that at the root of his outburst? Does he fear being seen as someone who benefited from the ‘Desert Campaign’? Or does he fear that someone will take his land away and restore it to Indian ownership?

  ‘Today, the Mapuche language is written down,’ says Miguel. ‘But that’s only since the Europeans came and taught them how to read and write. They didn’t even have that before.’

  I’ve got an answer for that one.

  ‘Neither did the Celts – your forbears, they had an oral culture for centuries, they had legends and tales and laws and everything, the Mabinogion, all that was transmitted orally.’

  Miguel waves Celts and Mabinogion aside. ‘People say the Mapuche have a great culture, great music – but show me the instruments, show me the culture,’ he says ‘– they had nothing, nothing!’ And he slams out of the room to put on the kettle for his maté, which has gone cold.

  A part of me is almost scared by Miguel’s uncharacteristic outburst. It’s as though a friendly, lazy dog had suddenly jumped up, growling and baring its teeth. I don’t like violence, even as low-key as this. I know about violence. I know about people you thought you could trust suddenly turning round and behaving in ways you’d never think possible. Trust is not something that comes naturally to me. My old survival instincts tell me to be on my guard now against Miguel. What might he do next?

  At the same time, I think: This is interesting. His reaction has nothing to do with me. This is about him. But I still don’t understand it. Without realising, I must have pushed one of Miguel’s buttons. A big red one.

  I decide to go back to my newspapers, bury myself in the past. I will tune Miguel out for a bit.

  He comes back with the kettle filled and retreats into his cupboard like a hermit crab into its shell. (It must be about as tight.) He even closes the door.

  Nothing happens for a while, and I think that all this is muy raro, very strange.

  A while later, he opens the door again and we talk a bit, cautiously, pretending that his strange outburst never happened. We talk about reading, I buy the Eluned Morgan book, he compliments me on my Spanish. I go back to my articles once more and he retires to his cupboard again, but leaves the door open. Indicates the radio: ‘Estoy sufriendo.’ I’m suffering.

  He’s listening to a football match and his side appear to be losing.

  ‘All I want is a draw, but...’

  Things don’t look good, apparently. He keeps the volume down, he says, so that he can’t hear the commentary properly. This is in case something terrible happens, so that he won’t have to hear it.

  I immediately perceive the flaw in this.

  ‘Something good might happen, and you won’t hear that then either.’

  ‘No importa.’ Doesn’t matter.

  ‘But it does,’ I argue. ‘The good is as important as the bad, ¿no?’

  He gives me a long look. I brace myself for another argument.

  He turns the volume of his radio up a bit.

  The game ends one all.

  32

  UNTIL NOW, I HAVE SEEN Patagonia in summer, when the air is hot and dry and dusty; in autumn, when the wind is cool despite the heat of the sun; and in spring, when the fresh green of the valley is a feast for the eyes after the harsh dry greyness of the desert and the dusty white hills. So for my next trip, I go in July, in the middle of winter: to see what the place was like when the Welsh first arrived.

  I have decided to travel south by coach again. I once travelled from Berlin to London on a coach. The trip that took twenty-four hours and seared itself into my memory as the most uncomfortable thing ever. But for some reason, I think of the trip from Buenos Aires to Patagonia as a diverting adventure. I am positively looking forward to sitting on my rear for twenty-one hours on a swaying coach full of strangers.

  In the central coach station in the Retiro area of downtown Buenos Aires people are strolling, walking, running. Couples sit, gloomily and silently, with just too much space between them, staring in opposite directions, or down at the floor, not communicating. (The end of a visit, an affair, a marriage?) Harried mothers try to manhandle howling children and mountains of luggage at the same time. Weeping families see off a loved one. Buses disgorge people from the provinces who have come to the city to make their fortunes. Not only their bodies, even their faces look stiff from travelling. They glance around at the huge new city with wary, tired eyes, uneasily aware that they are newcomers here. They don’t know the rules. There are bigger, sharper, more experienced fish in this pond who will regard them as prey.

  Outside the coach terminal stands a street market. Bars and cafés offer last-minute fast food. Stalls sell bags of every description, handbags and huge rucksacks and trendy wheeled suitcases in bright colours. You can buy clothes and toys and food, CDs and newspapers.

  Vendors with small mobile ovens bake and sell bread rolls. There is an almost visible aura of warmth around oven and vendor. You can see the live charcoal glowing, smell the almost painfully delicious scent of the baking bread. I discover that on a cool winter’s day like this, nothing is better than some fresh chipa. Chipa is a Paraguayan speciality, the vendor tells me, made with cassava and maize meal and cheese. Paraguay, a small, landlocked country to the north, is to Argentina what Poland is to the U.K.. Lots of Paraguayans come to Buenos Aires looking for work, most of them on the coaches. That’s why the chipa sellers congregate around the terminal. This one eyes me curiously. Not many foreigners travel by coach, he says.

  ‘Didn’t you tell me that you’re from Paraguay?’ I ask. ‘So you’re a foreigner too, in Argentina, ¿no?’

  He grins, shakes his head. ‘Not from as far away as you.’

  He doesn’t mean ‘foreigners’ exactly. He means Gringos: Europeans and North Americans.

  Behind the market, side streets lead off the big, multi-lane main road on which traffic roars past the old railway station and the coach terminal. They are narrow, dirty, pot-holed lanes crisscrossed by disused railway tracks from the old days, before coaches replaced trains for travel to all corners of the country. These streets lead to another world. Behind the coach terminal stands the most (in)famous of all Argentina’s shanty towns: Villa 31, squeezed between the railway tracks and the urban motorway. Infamous: because Retiro is a prosperous neighbourhood with glittering shops and office towers. It’s like having the back streets of Hackney or Deptford within spitting distance of Kensington; except that Villa 31 is a hell of a lot poorer and more drug and crime ridden than the worst sink estate in Britain.

  I always imagined a shanty town to be an anarchic huddle of ramshackle huts; beaten-earth floors and open sewers and gangs of abandoned children and dogs. Villa 31 at least isn’t like that. It is a small town in its own right, bang there in the centre of Buenos Aires. There are houses that look no different from those in any small town in Argentina: simple whitewashed cubes. There are shops: most have the nature of their business painted on the outside wall, Carnicería, butcher; Panadería, baker, and even Locutorio, an internet café. But the normality stops when you look up at the second or third floors, which have clearly been put there without the benefit of planning permission: Most are built of bare bricks and breeze-blocks, with window-frames crammed in anyhow. Most houses sport satellite dishes.

  That is as much as I can see from the main road. I don’t actually go down any of the side streets. It’s not a clever idea to visit a shanty town by yourself. I don’t really feel like a foreigner any more in Argentina, but I am one; and thus, by definition, rich. I can afford to travel here, to travel for fun. Venturing into the Villa by myself would be more than foolhardy. Although back in Europe I may feel as though I don’t own very much, in comparison with the inhabitants of Villa 31 I am wealthy. I’d resent having my wallet stolen by one of them, but I can see why they would think it OK.

  I never used to see this side of Argentina. I loved Retiro from the first time I caught a coach here. For me, it was – it still is – a place where journey
s and adventures start, somewhere exciting and romantic. But once when I was burbling about this to Lorena, she gave me a funny look and said, ‘Have you never seen the street children begging outside? The druggies? The kid prostitutes?’

  I hadn’t. I hadn’t seen the houses of Villa 31 either, although now I wonder how on earth I managed to look through them.

  Sometimes, Argentina is a tricky place. I love it, that hasn’t changed. I am learning more about it all the time, and while I feel at home here now, more familiar with place and people and language, there are still times when I am out of my depth.

  33

  THE COACH BUMPS OVER the last ramp on the road out of Retiro coach terminal, lumbers over the abandoned railway tracks and gathers speed to roll through dull, wintry Buenos Aires onto Ruta 3, which runs for almost two thousand miles south, south, south, all the way to Tierra del Fuego.

  This time, the journey seems to pass much faster. The endless pampas don’t appear much changed from the way they look in summer: they are still green and unnerving in their vastness.

  Darkness falls early, so I read, and doze, and wonder what Patagonia will be like in the depths of winter.

  I wake up in the middle of the night. The lights are dimmed. Blanket-covered forms huddle in their seats like Antarctic explorers buried in snow drifts. Outside the windows, all is darkness. The coach hums and sways; tinny tango music drifts up the stairs from the drivers’ radio. I rearrange my crumpled blanket and try to go back to sleep.

  But then the coach slows down, and now I can see the odd streetlight outside. Houses. I locate my left arm and check the time. It isn’t the middle of the night, it’s six o’clock in the morning.

  We’re not due to arrive until past eight. The coach comes to a stop, and the driver calls out something I don’t catch in my still sleep-befuddled state. Perhaps we’ve broken down? Flat tyre? Snow-bound road? People are unwrapping themselves from their blankets, stretching, pulling on shoes and coats and getting up. I scramble downstairs to enquire what’s happening.

  Not a breakdown. A fifteen-minute break.

  ‘Para tomar un cafecito,’ says the driver with a broad smile. A coffee break. His teeth glint in the lights reflected from the dashboard.

  Yawning figures clamber off the coach into the Patagonian darkness. I climb the stairs back to the top deck to get my cigarettes, my comb and my toothbrush.

  It’s cool outside, the pre-dawn dark is dense. A fine rain whispers. The air smells of damp sand and open spaces.

  I wander in the soft drizzle, past dark houses whose occupants still lie asleep. Pine needles and sand and small stones crunch underfoot. I feel a sudden mad happiness at being back here. Back home, I almost think, then catch myself. Don’t get carried away, I warn my romantic self. Patagonia isn’t home, it’s the very opposite of home; it’s a vast desert with a handful of towns dotted about it like oases, of which I know just a few.

  And yet, there’s something here that makes it mine, although I’ve never properly lived here. When I return to Buenos Aires I don’t feel like this. I love Buenos Aires, but it’s all one-way. Buenos Aires is a beautiful woman who might flirt with me in passing, but she won’t remember my name, or even my face.

  I stand for a moment alone in the darkness, in the cold south wind and the rain, and exchange greetings with Patagonia. Then I go blinking into the brightly lit service-station and brush my hair and my teeth, have a coffee and a cigarette and wake up.

  When the light of dawn finally floods the eastern sky, I’m long back on the coach, and it’s not far now to Puerto Madryn. The brown scrublands on either side lie half hidden in mist. Low stunted bushes grow on the grey, sandy soil, black in the dull light and wet from the rain. Clouds of drizzle swirl and eddy in the wind. A thin line appears on the horizon and steadily grows more substantial, expands and separates itself into squares and rectangles. Houses. Buildings. Puerto Madryn. Behind them, a thick, hazy grey line. The sea.

  Puerto Madryn, where the Mimosa made landfall, still bears its Welsh name and even boasts a tea shop or two. It got its name from Lewis Jones and one of the major financiers of Y Wladfa, Love Jones-Parry Esq., whose family estate near Nefyn on the Llŷn peninsula was called Madryn. (Jones-Parry’s Christian name really was ‘Love,’ birth certificate and all. It must have been very trying for his wife when she was cross with him. “Oh do shut up, Love” just doesn’t properly convey ire.)

  These days, its name is about as Welsh as Puerto Madryn gets. Lewis Jones and Love Jones-Parry had already named the place back in 1863, but the city wasn’t built for another twenty years, in the late 1880s, around the natural deep water harbour in the sheltering arms of the New Bay, the best harbour in all of Argentina. In its heyday, the railway ran 150 miles south-west from Madryn, stopping at Gaiman in the station that is now the museum, on through the famous tunnel and across the desert as far as the small settlement of Las Plumas. But the heyday of the Patagonian railway is long past. The trains stopped running in 1961.

  The harbour, on the other hand, is still very active; and the main business of the city is still connected with the sea, although in different ways. These days, Puerto Madryn is famous for its wildlife. Colonies of elephant seals, sea lions and penguins live on the nearby Península Valdés, and summer visitors flock to catch a glimpse of them. Cruise liners on their way down to Antarctica call in for a day, and their passengers are given a Welsh tea, and time to wander around the souvenir shops. In the winter, Southern Right Whales visit the bay’s deep, cold waters to mate, and to stock up on the plentiful fish; as they have done for millennia. Just a few decades ago, they were hunted nearly to extinction. Now, people travel to Madryn from all over the world simply to look at them.

  34

  IT’S ONLY HALF PAST EIGHT as I walk out of Madryn’s coach terminal, and I’m feeling cold and tired and excited.

  Madryn’s streets are wide and straight, laid out in grid pattern. They’re lined with two- and three-storey houses with red brick or stuccoed fronts in pastel colours. Most buildings are low, so that even in the middle of the city I can see the sky without having to look up.

  Souvenir shops, cafés and restaurants line the streets downtown, together with a surprising number of ice-cream parlours. All of which are open, despite this being the middle of winter. Lots of businesses offer excursions to Península Valdés to see the wildlife. As I walk, I can see the seafront at every intersection. It puts me in a holiday mood.

  The hostel at which I’m staying is basic but beautifully cheap, and the staff are friendly. There is also, I discover, an added bonus. Julián has blond hair and melting brown eyes and a sweet disposition. Intelligence is not his strong suit, but he has a way of jumping up and licking people’s faces that would charm a stone. Julián is a golden labrador.

  ‘Our watchdog,’ says the woman in the hostel, with an eyeroll and a laugh, and drags an over-enthusiastic Julián back by his collar.

  I dig out an extra fleece and stuff my bag under my bunk bed by way of unpacking. I meant to go for a coffee to warm up, but instead I find my feet carrying me to the beach. There’s a chance that I might spot a whale – a slim chance, the woman in the hostel has warned me: they tend not to come into the bay much when it’s overcast. There are excursions, of course, boatloads of people go out every day to whale-watch. But although all the trip organisers stress that they give the whales a wide enough berth so as not to bother them, I’m not sure that they do. I prefer to take my chance from the beach, where I won’t get in their way.

  Ballenas, whales, are big in Puerto Madryn: the gift shops along the seafront sell whale T-shirts and whale mugs, whale-shaped knitted hats, whale soft toys and whale calendars. A photo shop sports a neon whale over the door to advertise its one-hour developing service. One sweet shop even sells whale fluke-shaped chocolates filled with that most wonderful of Argentine inventions, dulce de leche. I think that chocolate filled with caramel must surely be a horrendously sweet affair, and buy a cola de ba
llena (‘whale tail’) to find out.

  Happily I am wrong. The ‘whale tails’ are delicious, and – together with ice cream and coffee – will form the basis of my diet over the next couple of days.

  The beachfront is lined with multi-storey buildings for as far as I can see. It’s not exactly Miami, most of them are just five or six storeys. The majority seem to contain holiday apartments. Big colourful hoardings advertise special mid-winter deals: Whale-watching from your bedroom!

  The beach itself is huge, a flat expanse which stretches in a wide arc in both directions. A cold, blustery wind is blowing and grey clouds hang low in the sky. The headlands north and south of the beach are visible, the ones beyond almost hidden in the murk.

  The water is grey and empty. No whales.

  But it doesn’t matter. I’m just happy to be back in Patagonia, and by the sea: the smack and hiss of the waves, the smell of salt on the air; walking on the damp, firm sand by the water’s edge. The wind is exhilarating. It seems to blow right through me, whipping away the close, confined night on the coach. I lean into it and stride on.

  There is something oddly pleasant about walking in freezing wind and rain in July; perversely pleasant, perhaps, since I’m losing out on summer back in Europe. But I love walking in the rain. I love to feel the strength of the elements. For a while, and with modern amenities in easy reach for when the elements become too strong. Madryn is the perfect setting. There are a dozen cafés within five minutes’ walk to which I can retreat. And so, in the secure knowledge that shortly, I’ll be having a big cup of tea (with a dash of rum, possibly) and then a hot shower, I throw myself into the teeth of the wind with abandon and delight.

  I check the water every now and then for any sign of whales, but nothing. Promising black specks invariably fly away after a while, revealing themselves as birds.

  The beach curves, slowly. It’s even longer than it looks. When I turn back to check my progress I can see that I am quite a distance from my starting point. But the buildings at the far end of the beach don’t appear to have come any closer at all.