Beyond the Pampas

by Imogen Herrad

  I have rung Olivia de Mulhall’s house beforehand, but not actually spoken to her. Instead I talked to her daughter-in-law, who looks in on the old lady every day, and who, after some hesitation, agreed that I could come and talk to her.

  ‘She’s quite elderly,’ said the daughter-in-law. ‘She does love meeting people and talking about history, but she gets very excited, and it tires her. Please don’t stay too long.’

  She has also asked me not to use the front door of the house, but to go to the grocer’s shop next door instead. I assume Señora de Mulhall is none too mobile and has trouble walking to the front door, and that the lady in the shop will have a key and let me in instead.

  I walk into the shop and explain, feeling a little silly amid stacks of biscuits and chewing gum, household cleaning products and a bunch of mops that brush against my elbow, that I have come to meet Señora Olivia de Mulhall who lives next door. The shop lady jumps up from behind her counter, locks the shop door from the inside and disappears into the interior reaches of her shop, no doubt to get her bag. I wait politely.

  ‘Señora! Aren’t you coming?’

  Is she talking to me?

  I take a few hesitant steps around the counter, look beyond it.

  She is half-way down a corridor, about to turn into a doorway on the left.

  ‘This way!’ she calls encouragingly when she sees me.

  Feeling a little bit like Alice in Wonderland, I plunge into the corridor after her. Where are we going?

  Through the doorway, along another corridor, up a few steps, through a door into a large, cool, shuttered drawing room full of heavy Victorian furniture. From the next room, a T.V. blares. The shop lady marches purposefully towards the din of the telly.

  ‘Llegó la escritora para usted!’ she announces loudly. The writing lady has come to see you.

  A small lightbulb appears almost visibly over my head. There must be an internal connection between the shop and Olivia de Mulhall’s house, in whose drawing room I am now standing.

  ‘¡Pase, pase!’ calls an old voice. Come in, come in! The T.V. is turned down a few decibels.

  I walk into an equally dark, cool, shuttered and over-furnished room. Its walls are hung thickly with paintings. I experience a sinking feeling, not at all sure that it was a good idea to come here.

  ‘Well, there you are,’ says the lady from the shop, beams all round and departs.

  Olivia de Mulhall sits at a heavy dinner table which is flanked by a small stand with the T.V. on it, on which flickers some daytime show. On the table in front of her are an empty plate and a cup, stacks of magazines and a couple of books.

  ‘Come, sit down,’ she says, gesturing at another chair.

  I had mentally prepared myself to explain what I’m doing, why I have come to see her, what I want to know from her. But she launches straight into a narrative about the life and works of her grandfather. Her voice is cracked with age, but vigorous still. Every sentence ends with an exclamation mark.

  ‘My Papa told me all about John Murray Thomas, and I have all the documents here to prove that he told me the truth. It’s incredible what that man achieved! He rode out into the desert, spending six months at a time without his family, without any news whatsoever from them. No water, nothing! What he must have suffered. In 1886 he discovered the Andes, but will they believe a word of that here? They say it was Fontana, but I ask you, who paid their expenses? Eh, who? My grandfather, he did everything! ¡Era el único, él! He, alone. But nobody here will believe it, nobody. They have no idea. No culture. ¡Brutos!’

  It’s easy to see why her daughter-in-law warned that Olivia de Mulhall gets excited when people come to see her. On and on goes her tale, looping endlessly around her two central concerns: the numerous achievements of John Murray Thomas, and the ingratitude of a world that refuses to acknowledge even a single one of them.

  Her complaint is this: In the history books, it is governor Luis Jorge Fontana who is credited with having led the expedition of the Rifleros, in the course of which the western reaches of the province of Chubut were ‘discovered’ and an offshoot colony of Y Wladfa was founded in the fruitful lands which the Günün A Künna and Tehuelche had described to the Welsh. But Olivia de Mulhall wants the credit to go to her grandfather, and is incensed by the refusal of the authorities to comply. ‘They would not even name a road after him!’ She repeats this, much affronted, several times.

  I would like to hear about her own life, but she keeps jumping back a generation or two, to talk about her grandfather or her father. And yet I find myself warming to Olivia de Mulhall. She has a real enthusiasm for history. She is continually jumping up to bring more books to the table, soon I sit behind a small hill of them. There are photocopies of old maps, photos, newspaper articles carefully clipped and folded.

  Then she suddenly abandons the books and presses an alfajor on me: a small sweet cake. They are immensely popular in Argentina, most shops sell them like they do chocolate bars. There are lots of different sorts of alfajores: large and small; covered in milk chocolate, dark chocolate, meringue, made of cornflour, wheat flour...

  ‘Here, take a tea towel.’ She points to where a small pile of tea towels lies, incongruously I had thought, on the table; then takes it herself and spreads it over my lap. ‘It will crumble, it’s coated in meringue, you know.’

  The alfajor is sweet and sticky and filled with dulce de leche. A small snowstorm of tiny meringue crumbs drifts downwards and settles on my black fleece while I eat.

  ‘Good, isn’t it?’ she asks with satisfaction. ‘Here, have another. One for the road.’

  It is good. I lick sugary white dust off my lips and wonder whether I should politely refuse the second alfajor. But she seemed genuinely pleased that I enjoyed the first one, and pleased to have another to give.

  ‘Yes, please,’ I say. ‘And thank you very much, it was delicious. Era riquísimo.’

  She produces a high-pitched giggle, like a teenage girl, or a witch. With this giggle she has won me over.

  I hope that I will be giggling like that when I am old.

  ‘Papá vivió en el campo...’ Olivia de Mulhall says. ‘Papa lived out in the country, near Dolavon.’

  Dolavon is the third settlement in the Chubut valley, a few miles west of Gaiman; begun in the early nineteen-hundreds when the land around Gaiman had all been claimed and settled.

  But already she’s off again, talking about John Murray Thomas.

  ‘He was the first paymaster of the province of Chubut, the first photographer, the first everything! How could one man do so much?’ She thumps the stack of books next to her, causes a small avalanche of loose photocopies on another part of the table. ‘The first merchant. Postmaster in Rawson. Why don’t those Welsh talk about that? Why don’t they want to know?’

  Almost towards the end of our conversation, she mentions in passing that a street has now been named after John Murray Thomas, in the town of Esquel in the Andes. One of her nephews unveiled the street-sign and a plaque only last year. But it is as though that had been much too little, much too late for Olivia de Mulhall. She has lived in a state of righteous indignation for decades, and indignant she will continue, regardless.

  And then, suddenly, she switches back to the subject of Papa. It’s as though she has to get the outbursts about John Murray Thomas out of her system periodically.

  ‘Papa did everything. Everything! ¡Papá era terrible inteligente! He was terribly intelligent. We lived there with him for a while, on a little farm by the river outside Dolavon. He worked near Dolavon for seven years, seven years out there, in the middle of nowhere! ¡Lejos! So far away, in Laguna de Vaca, Cow Lagoon. And all alone, he was. He lived by himself most of the time, because it was so remote. Sometimes Mama went to stay with him for a while, with my sisters, so that he wouldn’t be lonely. They would help him teach, Mama and my sisters.’

  Ah. So he was a schoolmaster, out there in the chacras?

  ‘There was
an estancia nearby, a ranch, and the people from there came to be taught by him. Such poverty! Papa not only taught them, sometimes he gave them a little to eat, from what he had. There was a girl he taught, and she’s now working in Rawson, and when I meet her, she always says: How well your Papa taught us, Señora de Mulhall! That’s what she says.’

  She stops talking and just sits there for a few moments, looking vaguely around the table; like a wind-up mechanism that has run down. I wonder whether the tiredness her daughter-in-law has mentioned is now setting in; whether I should take my leave.

  But then she looks up again, as vigorous as before, and enquires whether I would like a cup of tea.

  I answer truthfully that I would rather hear more about her life. I’m afraid that a trip to the kitchen to boil the kettle and brew a cup of tea now will interrupt her train of thought.

  What was it like, I ask again, growing up en el valle, in the Chubut valley, all those years ago?

  ‘Ha!’ she exclaims. ‘It was hard work! Clothes were washed by hand until recently, everything was done by hand! If you wanted to do the washing, you had to take a horse and cart out into the country to collect firewood to heat the water. We went once a week, every Saturday. Then there were the cows to be milked, every day: ten, twelve cows, before school!’

  Until now, I had pictured her childhood in something like this house, in Victorian splendour. But I have no trouble imagining her in the country, running out before dawn with her hair in untidy braids to see to a dozen cows. It’s easy to imagine her as a girl. She is so alive still.

  ‘Young people these days, they have it too easy,’ she grumbles, the universal refrain of the older generation; but with perhaps more justification than most. ‘They don’t know where their water comes from, their electricity. We had to go to chapel three times a day. And milk the cows beforehand! Then in the cart as far as the river, get a boat across and walk to chapel. Three times a day! These days, they hardly go the once. And things are worse, for all that their lives have become easier. We used to go to Capel Moriah, the very first chapel. The very first!’ she repeats, fixing a sudden gimlet eye on me. ‘A historical place. Have you been there?’

  I admit, shamed, that I have not.

  ‘The Welsh,’ she says, off again on another track, ‘in Gaiman. They’re very closed there. They cling to their language, even the Indians had to learn Welsh because the Welsh refused to learn to speak Spanish. They’re fanatics, even now. Last Sunday when I went to church, there was one lady who told me to speak Welsh. “Look,” I told her, “even in Wales, Welsh isn’t spoken everywhere. English is the universal language of commerce, not Welsh, you know!” That’s what I said to her.’

  I have to laugh, and she shoots me a quick look and giggles.

  ‘Ooh, the women!’ she says, shaking her head, and I brace myself for another tirade. But no. ‘They worked hard, the women. Everybody had to work. I helped in the fields, milking the cows, making butter, with the washing – I did all that, and school on top! Papa had not even been able to go to school. He worked in the fields all day, and then he went across the river into Trelew to night school. And look how well he turned out.

  ‘He had the first automobile in Chubut, Papa, a Ford.’ She smiles proudly at the memory. ‘I went with him to the shops. I was the eldest. They had these big wooden counters where they sold things, and Papa would stand me on top of the counter and I would sing – I was little, three, four years old. And there I would stand and sing.’

  And she sings a nursery rhyme with her old voice.

  Una niña bonita

  que del cielo bajó

  con sus alas doradas

  y en su pecho una flor.

  Para qué tantas flores

  si no son para mí

  yo me muero de amores,

  y me muero por ti.

  A pretty little girl

  who came from heaven down

  with a pair of golden wings

  and a flower her crown.

  Look at all the flowers,

  all for me, can it be true?

  I’m dying for love,

  I’m dying for you.

  I sing this to Lorena, later, back in Gaiman, to make sure I have remembered all the words correctly. She bursts out laughing when she hears the second stanza.

  ‘You must have got mixed up,’ she tells me. ‘Dying for love, in a children’s song?’

  But I remember especially those lines, because they had struck me as odd too.

  ‘It definitely doesn’t go like that,’ Lorena assures me. I don’t care. I bet Olivia de Mulhall got plenty of flowers from admirers in her time. Listening to her singing, I wish that that I’d thought to bring her some.

  42

  ‘GUESS HOW OLD I AM,’ she says, coquettishly.

  I consider. Olivia de Mulhall is clearly old, and somewhat frail – probably more so than she appears at the moment, buoyed by excitement at having a new audience.

  ‘Eighty?’ I hazard. ‘Eighty-something?’

  ‘Noventa,’ she says with satisfaction. ‘I turned ninety this year. Oh, you should have seen the party they threw for me! I’ll show you.’ And up she jumps again to fetch a photograph album. The television blares on in the background, ignored. ‘Here – Osian, my brother arranged it all... he’s a poet, he writes me a poem every year.’ She leaves through the album, showing me photos of children, grandchildren, cousins, nieces, nephews; pasted newspaper clippings, Osian’s poem written out in an immaculate flowing hand.

  ‘One hundred and ninety guests! Can you believe that so many people came? How they all love me.’ This might sound pretentious, as though she’s showing off, bragging about her fortune; or else seeking confirmation that they do indeed love her. Instead, she radiates a sense of happy contentment. Life is a bit dull these days, she is old and can’t get about much, but for her ninetieth birthday, one hundred and ninety people came and showed their love.

  ‘I didn’t even know that they were planning a party! It was a complete surprise when suddenly everybody showed up.’ She gives her girlish, witchy giggle again, lost in memories. ‘I danced all night. All night!’

  She gets up to show me out. ‘There, down that corridor is my front door,’ she says, pointing straight ahead. Then disappears through a doorway on the right. I hesitate, thinking that perhaps she has gone to fetch another book, a last photo to show me.

  ‘Come along,’ she calls from somewhere inside the labyrinth of the house.

  More Alice in Wonderland. I follow her, wondering what is to come. And find myself in a small, dark kitchen.

  ‘My sewing machine,’ Olivia de Mulhall says, patting a shrouded shape. ‘I have two, one mechanical, the other electric.’

  From beneath the cover peeks a cast-iron pedal. Olivia de Mulhall whisks round another corner, out of sight again. This feels like the oddest game of hide and seek.

  ‘Here,’ her voice calls. ‘Come and see my papers!’

  ‘Here’ is a study. There are boxes full of papers, stacked on a bookcase behind a curtain.

  ‘El escritorio de papá,’ she says, removing another dustsheet. ‘Papa’s desk.’

  The desk is covered with piles of papers. In a glass-fronted bookcase rest yet more books, old, cloth-bound volumes; and about two dozen copies of John Murray Thomas’s diary which she edited and published. On top of the bookcase, yet more boxes of papers.

  A young man appears suddenly from the recesses of the house. He is dressed, oddly, in a white smock. Olivia de Mulhall is talking non-stop, about the books, the papers, Papá, John Murray Thomas...

  The young man – her nurse perhaps? – and I say hello and exchange smiles over her stream of words. Then she turns abruptly and does her vanishing act again.

  ‘Come on through!’ she calls, and when I do – followed by the unexplained young man – I find myself standing in what I take, at first, to be her front room.

  ‘The first chair Papa won in the Eisteddfod,’ she says and proudl
y points at a large wooden throne. Y gwir yn erbyn y byd – Eisteddfod y Chubut 1942 is carved into the wooden back. A faded red ribbon tied between the armrests indicates that, despite the (also faded) red cushion on the seat, this chair is not for sitting. (Y gwir yn erbyn y byd, Truth Against the World, is the motto of the Bardic Circle of Wales. There is still an Eisteddfod held in Patagonia every year, and the author of the best poem in Welsh still wins a carved chair and is ceremonially enthroned.)

  ‘He won this one for me, the eldest. And then another one for my sister. But then after the War there was no Eisteddfod for fourteen years.’

  The walls of the room are covered in large, framed sepia photographs.

  ‘John Murray Thomas,’ says Olivia and points. ‘Look at the face of that man! And that one there, that’s Papa.’ Papa is fair-haired with the face of an aesthete.

  There is yet another shrouded piece of furniture.

  ‘The piano. The very first piano in the province of Chubut!’

  On the wall opposite, the photo of a Victorian lady with a sweet face, her dark hair gathered up in a bun.

  ‘Mama. She played the organ in chapel. She was a very fine organist.’

  Underneath the photograph, bizarrely, I see a white porcelain basin and a leather chair with a high backrest. It looks like a chair you might find in a barbershop or a hairdressing salon. There is a framed newspaper article on the wall, the headline goes: Peluquería El Museo. The Museum Salon.

  This place is a hairdresser’s. In Olivia de Mulhall’s house? I remember now that I did pass a hairdresser’s on my way here, next door to the house. There must be another internal door. After all, I came in through a shop.

  ‘This is Manuel, the owner of the salon. He’s from Chile,’ says Olivia de Mulhall, introducing the young man much as she did each of the photographs. ‘He speaks Welsh.’

  ‘My wife is of Welsh extraction,’ explains the hairdresser. He has a lovely smile. His white smock makes sense now. ‘At home, we mostly speak...’

  But Olivia de Mulhall has already swept on, taking framed photos off the walls, off the piano, introducing their subjects. For her, there doesn’t seem to be any difference between Manuel and the photos of people long since dead. I’m not at all sure that they are dead, to her. Even those whom she never met, or only as a small child when they themselves were already old, like John Murray Thomas, seem rather more real to her than Manuel or I. Most of the time, we are merely her audience, her listeners.