Out in the bay, there’s something black again, and a spray of white. I peer out over the grey waters, but I see nothing more. Just a wave, probably. But I still keep looking in that direction. And there: a cylindrical black shape with a blunt nose rises half out of the water and throws itself back in, producing an enormous splash. A whale!
White spray flies everywhere as the huge creature sinks back beneath the waves.
A whale. I’ve seen a whale!
I stand there on the cold, windswept beach of Puerto Madryn, jumping and whooping and watching a real live whale out there in the sea, just a few hundred yards away.
For a mad moment I am very, very tempted to throw myself into the sea and swim out there to join it.
There are more. Quite far out: six, seven, eight hundred yards away maybe, but even so they’re clearly visible. A yacht lies at anchor near where they’re sporting, and the whales are about the same size as the boat. Their sheer size is impressive. (I look them up later: an adult female Southern Right Whale can grow to a length of 18 metres, around 60 feet. That’s big.) Perhaps that is why I find myself so unexpectedly touched by their presence: They’re so huge, and so peaceful. We could learn a thing or two from whales.
As I walk towards the end of the beach, I see several more whales: whales rising up and throwing themselves back in the water. I see large, black, curved backs rising briefly above the waves and exhaling a large plume of spray that drifts off on the wind. And I see, finally, that iconic image: the whale fluke rising out of the water and – that’s what it looks like – waving. It moves vigorously back and forth a few times, and then crashes into the water with an almighty splash, as though a giant had slammed his open palm down on the water. (Apparently nobody knows why the whales wave their tails about in this manner. I like that. There are a few mysteries left in the world.)
I pinch myself at one point: I’m seeing whales. In reality; eye to eye, so to speak, not in a photo, not on T.V. Real whales, here, now. The world is a place full of wonders and beauty and surprising and unexpected things, and I’m out here in it, standing on a beach by a bay with a whale in it.
35
IT’S RAINING. Everybody is commenting on it, which is unusual. As a rule, Argentinians don’t talk very much about the weather, because there doesn’t tend to be all that much of it. The eastern part of Patagonia is usually either bright and windy, or cloudy and windy, and nearly always dry. Annual rainfall is around seven inches, twenty-odd millimetres. People from Gaiman who’ve been to Wales have commented to me on how the British tirelessly talk about the weather. The Patagonians regard this as an eccentricity.
I’m in Gaiman, because today is the 27th July and tomorrow will be the anniversary of the landing of the first Welsh settlers in the Mimosa in 1865: a public holiday in the entire province of Chubut which today celebrates its foundation. There’s a local transport company named after it, all of whose buses have the venerable date emblazoned on their fronts and sides; and there’s even a village called 28 de Julio. The first time somebody told me they lived there, I thought I had misunderstood. (‘Where do you live?’ – ‘28 July.’) 28 July is A Big Thing in Chubut, a sort of equivalent to Thanksgiving in the US, I suppose. And I have come to Gaiman to witness the festivities.
Except, as soon as I arrive there after a ninety minute bus journey, Clara Roberts the choir mistress, with whom I’m staying this time, tells me that the most interesting celebration will take place in Puerto Madryn, whence I have just come. There will be a pageant of sorts with a Mapuche-Tehuelche religious ceremony tomorrow morning; and later in the day a staging of the actual arrival of the Welsh, with people dressed up in nineteenth century garb rowing ashore, to be greeted by smiling Mapuche-Tehuelche.
It will be a pleasing distortion of history, and of course no mention of the ‘Desert Campaign’ will be made.
‘To be fair,’ says Clara, who knows my views well; ‘at the time, the Welsh and the Indians actually did co-exist very peacefully. They would have been all right if the government had left well alone. The Welsh tried to intervene, you know.’
‘The pageant is going to be a lot more fun than that bromide we’ll be going to tomorrow,’ Clara’s husband says gloomily. Amando used to be mayor of Gaiman, and a bank manager too; he and Clara won’t be able to wriggle out of any public functions.
‘I’d go to Madryn if I were you,’ he tells me. ‘Of course, they might cancel the event because of the rain, but if not, it should be great fun.’
‘They wouldn’t cancel it just because of a bit of rain?’
‘Half the teas in the valley have already been cancelled because of the weather,’ Clara says. ‘Most of the chapels are en las chacras, in the country, where only dirt roads go. They are impassable when it gets really wet. Mud slides, the lot of them.’
Still – the roads to and in Puerto Madryn are tarmacked; and surely a shower or two won’t stop the festivities for the Founding Day of the province. I don’t take her warning too seriously.
28 July dawns cloudy, but breezy and dry. I get up early to catch the bus back to Puerto Madryn.
Dawn creeps up slowly as we leave Gaiman, and between Trelew and Madryn, as we traverse the endless, flat, bare steppe, the sun peeps through the clouds.
Sitting on the bus, my nose pressed against the window, I try to conjure up the past. I would so love to witness their arrival, to stand hidden at the edge of the beach and see them come ashore in the Mimosa’s small boat; splashing through the last few yards of water. Standing there, surveying their new homeland.
We bump into the bus terminal of Madryn only a day after I left it, and I clamber off the bus and back into the present.
It’s started to drizzle and the sea is heavy and the colour of lead. A whale sports far out, and I want to wave to it. I don’t know why it cheers me up so much that a whale is out there in the water, without the least idea that I exist; and even if it did what would it care? But I’m heartened, and pleased, and only mildly miffed when I hear that the pageant on the beach has, indeed, been cancelled.
Actually, I find it quite funny. This is Patagonia, the Deep South, one of the last wildernesses of the world... and they cancel a parade because people might get wet?
An hour later, I understand a little better. There has been a sudden, brief downpour of no more than perhaps ten minutes. But the roads in Madryn’s city centre are flooded. The gutters can’t cope at all. This place isn’t built for rain.
So I catch yet another bus back to Gaiman. There is to be a big celebratory community tea in the old Capel Bethel in the afternoon, with a concert to follow in the evening, just like the communal teas and concerts of old. Capel Bethel stands in the middle of Gaiman, and so this tea will not be cancelled. I am very keen to experience at least one of the famous festive teas of Y Wladfa.
36
I MAKE MY WAY to the chapel alone. Clara and Amando are being politely bored at some official function in the village of 28 de Julio. I rang Dudú from a phone shop in Puerto Madryn to ask whether she would go to the tea in Capel Bethel, but she said No – it wasn’t her kind of thing. Lisa, who would be in her element at a Welsh commemorative tea ceremony, has decided not to travel all the way to Patagonia this year for the festivities, but instead to remain in Buenos Aires. I haven’t bothered to ask Lorena. I don’t think a celebration of the Welsh pioneers is quite her scene.
There is a queue outside Capel Bethel. As all the other chapels in the valley are closed, everybody is coming here. Only as many people are allowed into the chapel as there are others leaving it, because there aren’t enough seats to go round.
Already half a dozen bedraggled figures are sheltering in the porch. It is drizzling again, and the bare branches of the poplars bend in the wind.
Finally, my turn arrives.
Boards have been laid over the backs of pews to make tables. People sit facing each other and eat cake. Young girls run about busily replenishing tea cups and bearing trays of cake and bre
ad-and-butter. The bread is home-made, of course, as are all the cakes. There is the wonderful cream cake which looks so misleadingly like cheese cake but consists entirely of cream and sugar and egg yolks. And tastes divine. There is apple pie and scones and Swiss roll (made, an Argentinian touch, with dulce de leche instead of jam), lemon tart and the famous torta negra.
The floor of the old chapel is made of thick, uneven planks of wood, worn smooth by the feet of many generations. On the walls hang oil paintings that make up in fervour what they may lack in talent: the recently arrived Welsh on the beach in Puerto Madryn, Bible in one hand, pointing with the other towards the desert. There stands the Reverend Abraham Matthews looking like a Biblical patriarch compete with bushy beard and stern gaze. A portrait of Michael D. Jones, the spiritual father of the whole mad scheme, who himself prudently stayed at home in Wales – although, to be fair, he did donate large amounts of his own money to the cause. Or, perhaps, The Cause.
What I hadn’t quite grasped is the extent to which this is strictly a social occasion for the Welsh. Entire extended families sit and chat and demolish cake. Absolutely nobody except for me has turned up by themselves.
The thing is, until now, I haven’t felt like an outsider in Gaiman. I’ve been coming here for years; coming and going, admittedly. I’m not actually Welsh, but I speak the language and I have learnt Spanish, too; I have studied the history of Y Wladfa, have explored the country, spoken to its people. I feel at home.
But I’m not. Not here, not today.
For the first time, I feel like a stranger in Gaiman.
I don’t belong here. I’m nobody’s daughter, niece, wife, mother.
The people with whom I share a pew ask where I’m from, about my family. I hate that question. How to respond? “I haven’t been in touch with my family for fifteen years because they’re respectable middle-class abusers who beat the hell out of me throughout my childhood and never ever apologised” is truthful but a bit of a conversation stopper. I know. It’s how I used to answer when I was younger and my feelings were much more raw. For a while after that, I would say they were dead; it seemed less extreme somehow and people would be sympathetic instead of disconcerted.
By now much time has passed. I have made my own life. I’m working on making some of my most cherished dreams come true. I have friends who are, I suppose, a sort of elective family. I’m my own person, and usually I care much less about being different, about what people might think. Usually, I just say firmly that I’m not in touch with my family and that my life is the better for it; and let people make of that what they will.
But here in Capel Bethel, I find it difficult to hold on to that. In the face of the gathered clans, I feel again like a piece of unclaimed baggage; the way I used to feel as a child, when nobody cared enough to protect me.
I feel rather alone in Capel Bethel.
I think of Dudú and suddenly understand her wry tone when she told me this morning that the commemorative tea wasn’t her kind of thing. How many of the people here knew of her prison of a marriage? Of her husband gambling away their money, her struggle to get herself and her children out into a decent life? How many looked away, then blamed her for the break-up of the marriage?
Who among those assembled here knows of a woman or a child being beaten behind closed doors, but won’t interfere because the family is more important than the well-being of an individual?
I finish my tea and cake as quickly as I can, and leave. I will give the concert a miss. Instead, I walk by the canal in the fresh cold air, with only the wind and the bare trees for company.
And a while later, when I feel fit for human company again, I call in on Lorena and Ernesto and their brand-new baby daughter, and Patricia the mastiff. I spend the rest of 28 de Julio with the four of them, drinking velvety red Argentinian wine and talking about dogs, and babies, and the meaning of life.
Desert
37
WHEN THE WELSH FIRST ARRIVED in Patagonia, they were alarmed and intimidated by the vastness of the land, and nervous of its indigenous peoples. After some timid exploring they found that the valley where they had chosen to live appeared to be virtually sealed off from the desert. Relieved, they returned to Rawson: they were living in an easily defendable cul-de-sac. The desert – and the Indians – couldn’t get at them.60
It’s easy now to smile at both their alarm and their naïveté. Yet I remember the first time I was in Gaiman. I didn’t dare leave the village for almost the entire length of my stay. Everything outside was big and strange and potentially dangerous. All kinds of threats might lurk there: rabid dogs (possible), pumas (unlikely), robbers and desperate characters (very unlikely), the alarming emptiness of the desert (undeniable). Beyond the safe circle of Gaiman lay outer space. I might be sucked into emptiness and never return.
On the last day of my first trip, daringly, I went for a walk outside the immediate centre of Gaiman, in a kind of grey area between the village and the desert. It was before dawn when I set out; which, in autumn, made it just before seven. I felt as though I were venturing into the jungle, the Sahara, the Antarctic. After a short while the tarmac turned into to a gravel road that struck me as a whole lot less trustworthy. You know where you are with a tarmac road. This gravel business was unfamiliar, and somehow seemed less substantial, as though I might encounter a patch of quicksand along the way, or an elephant trap.
I laughed about it later, as soon as I was safely back in the garden of Ar Lan yr Afon, with a cup of coffee and a cigarette. But at the time, I was genuinely (unnecessarily) afraid. The valley was grey as cobwebs when I got there: grey ruler-straight roads. Grey poplars, rustling in the pre-dawn breeze. Grey scrubby thorn bushes. Although I couldn’t see any houses or farmsteads, I could hear cocks crowing and dogs barking and the occasional lowing of a cow.
I encountered a few people, bemused figures walking or cycling to work, or to catch a bus in Gaiman. I nodded good morning, but only a few returned my greeting. I didn’t know then that Argentinians absolutely don’t walk unless they have to. The concept of ‘going for a walk’ for recreation or enjoyment isn’t understood except in big cities which have parks for the purpose. In the country, only those who can’t afford a car – or a horse – or at least a bike, have to walk. ‘Going for a walk’ in the valley at dawn would have struck the people who encountered me as a very odd thing to do.
I didn’t stay out there long, just long enough to watch the sunrise. Light suffused the sky. Colours changed from black to inky blue to green to pink. For a time, the whole of the eastern sky was the most improbable, amazing hot pink. Birds flew up, cawing. When I looked up, the sky directly above me shimmered like a crystal.
It sounds as though I was on LSD, but I hadn’t even had a cup of coffee.
It’s easy to look at the vast, dusty steppe with the eyes of a recently arrived European and see empty desert, unclaimed land waiting to be irrigated, worked and made fruitful. But for the people who inhabited it, whose forbears had done so for millennia, it already was fruitful. ‘Our plains have plenty of guanacos and plenty of rheas. We are never in want of food,’ the cacique Antonio had written to Lewis Jones.
Once friendly relations had been established, things improved greatly. Here were people who knew the land, who lived in it and off it and understood it. They taught the Welsh where paths ran; taught them to hunt and search for water and survive in the desert.
During the lean years, the young men would ride out hunting with groups of Pampas or Tehuelche Indians, several days’ worth deep into the desert. They learnt which animals to hunt, how to shoot, how to use the bolas to bring down a rhea or a hare or a guanaco. Finally, they felt safe enough to go forth by themselves. Understanding came gradually. Early attempts failed when they ran out of water or encountered impassable territory. But they perse-vered, and travelled a little further each time.
Apart from sheer curiosity, there were two main motivations for exploring the desert: land and gold.
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br /> In the early 1880s – almost twenty years after establishing the colony – there was still arable land to be claimed in the lower Chubut valley. But new settlers continued to arrive. Indeed, they arrived in larger numbers than ever before, now that the valley had proved fruitful. By 1883, the population of Y Wladfa had risen almost tenfold to 1300, and still more were coming. Land would have to be found for them all. The Indians had told tantalising tales of a fruitful, green landscape many days’ travel to the west, in the foothills of the mountains.
Among the new arrivals were some who had been prospecting for gold in Australia. Gold fever was in the air: these were the years of the California Gold Rush. Why shouldn’t the Argentinian West turn out to be just as rich in gold?
It’s astounding what an effect a soft yellow metal will have, even on otherwise quite sensible, unworldly people. The majority of the Welsh settlers in Patagonia were unworldly in the best sense of the word; they were deeply religious, without much interest in material goods and riches. But the possibility of gold in the Andes led to a rush to explore.
Perhaps not all. But there were certainly numerous small groups that set off along the courses of the rivers Chubut, Senguerr and Chico, panning as they went. They didn’t find much, certainly not masses of gold, and no fertile land for several years. But that didn’t stop them trying.
38
THERE IS A PLACE a hundred miles west of Gaiman, out in the dusty steppe, known today by two names. Officially and on maps, it is Las Plumas in Spanish and Y Plu in Welsh: The Feathers; probably named after the rhea feathers in which Indígenas and Welsh traded.
Unofficially, especially among the Patagonian Welsh, it’s known as Valle de los Mártires: The Valley of the Martyrs. Whereby, as you might expect, there hangs a tale.
Beyond the Pampas Page 14