Beyond the Pampas

by Imogen Herrad

  Finally, when I’ve almost given up hope, there is the chapel like a vision of Wales: a squat brick building like a young barn standing in a field by itself, against a backdrop of wet, mist-wreathed hills. A little apart under a stand of dripping trees, light shines from the windows a low house that seems to duck against the elements: the old manse, now home to the Welsh teacher.

  ‘I do wish you’d had a chance to meet my father,’ says Jane Lamb regretfully. ‘He knew everything about the history of Patagonia. About the Welsh. Everything.’

  We’re sitting in the kitchen. A clothes-line is strung diagonally across the room. On it hang jolly red-checked tea towels and mushrooms drying on a piece of string. The windows are steamed up, and on the hob a dented tin kettle is just beginning to sing.

  Jane Lamb, despite her name, is not the current Welsh teacher. She is a Patagonian of Welsh and English extraction who grew up bilingually with English and Welsh and, later, Spanish. We’re talking in Welsh. My once-rusty spoken Welsh has become so beautifully fluent again that I can have quite intelligent conversations. Jane’s Welsh is a joy, pure and rich and a little old-fashioned, and with no trace of a Spanish accent.

  She grew up on a farm, and I want to hear all about her childhood. Except she doesn’t want to talk about herself, but continues to tell me about her father, lamenting that I cannot meet and talk to him instead. In this respect, she rather resembles Olivia de Mulhall, but Jane possesses none of the older woman’s oomph, none of her enthusiasm. I don’t exactly know what she’s done with her own personality, but it’s not very much in evidence. Perhaps she keeps it at home in a drawer, well ironed.

  I want to know what life was like in this remote corner of the world thirty, forty years ago. Dana has told me a little, but she grew up near Gaiman, where they had electricity and paved roads and other such luxuries. Out here progress arrived much later, and much more slowly.

  ‘If only you’d come last year,’ says Jane. ‘He could have told you so much.’

  ‘I’m sure so can you,’ I say encouragingly.

  But she shakes her head, doubt all over her face. Behind her, the shadow of Timothy Lamb rears up, dominating the room even in his absence.

  Shoo, I want to say to him.

  In the room next door, Sarah the Welsh teacher is practising verbs with a small group of adult learners. One of them is Jane’s younger daughter. I’m surprised that Jane doesn’t speak Welsh with her children.

  ‘Well,’ she says, ‘it’s complicated. Back in the old days, the Welsh would marry each other and pass the language on, but these days that’s all changed. I’m married to a Spaniard, so at home we speak Spanish. I did speak Welsh with my eldest when she was a baby, and these days she finds it easy to learn the language. But the younger only ever heard Spanish, so it’s harder for her...

  ‘My Mam grew up here in the valley, and my Dad on a farm between Trelew and Gaiman. Both of them spoke Welsh as their first language, and we never spoke anything else at home. I didn’t know any Spanish until I went to school when I was five, six years old.’

  ‘What was that like?’ I want to know, and expect a speech like the one I heard in Gaiman: pride in the survival of the language, the achievements of the ancestors, yr Hen Iaith, that kind of thing.

  Jane hesitates. ‘Well. Having two languages is good, yes, but there is also a price to pay. We had to speak Welsh even though it seemed rather pointless. What on earth should we speak Welsh for? Nobody ever came here. We didn’t feel much of a connection with Wales. The only contact was by letter. My Auntie would write to my mother; and I sent her letters sometimes too, even though I didn’t know her at all, I’d never met her. I just wrote to her because she was my Auntie.’

  I try to imagine what life was like for the child Jane in a valley in the Andes, speaking the language of a faraway place that wasn’t even a country; of a place that nobody she knew had ever even seen, that only existed in old stories and a few faded photographs. Perhaps it’s not so surprising that she decided not to burden her daughters with the gift of Cymraeg.

  46

  ‘AND THEN, OF COURSE, there were the other children, in the town, and in school. They only spoke Spanish. Children can be cruel sometimes, make fun of those that are different, that do things differently, you know?’

  She shakes herself, as though shaking off her memories.

  ‘These days, our young people see young people from Wales coming over here, and they themselves can go to Wales. So suddenly it’s interesting and exciting. But years ago, people didn’t travel. It was too far, too expensive. Globalisation hadn’t arrived yet.’ She pronounces the English word doubtfully, as one might a Latin term for an ailment or a newly discovered insect. ‘It was only in 1965 that things changed. It was the centenary of the Mimosa, see. A big crowd of people came over here from Wales, sixty or seventy, for the first time. So then a door had been opened. But before, there was hardly any visiting. You had to take a ship. It took weeks and weeks, and it was so expensive. The first time I went to Wales was by boat. In 1966. The world was different back then.’

  I blink. ‘You went to Wales on a boat? How old were you?’

  Jane laughs. ‘Thirteen. I went by myself. My Dad was determined that all of us children should go to Wales for our education. He was a grandson of Richard Berwyn, you know, the first teacher of Y Wladfa who had come across on the Mimosa.’

  There is the shadow of Timothy Lamb again. I scowl at it. The man had a nerve, sending a thirteen-year-old girl across the Atlantic by herself.

  ‘So what was it like for you then, seeing Wales for the first time, the land of the ancestors?’

  She laughs again. ‘To be honest, Wales didn’t make much of an impression. I mean, look at it – I’d come from a farm and a small town – Trevelin – where people spoke Welsh and went to chapel on Sundays.... and I went to Tregaron. A small town surrounded by farms, where everybody spoke Welsh and went to chapel on Sundays.’ She makes a face. ‘It wasn’t frankly that much of a change. But the journey... oh, you can’t imagine. It was the first time I’d ever left home, the first time I’d left the valley. I travelled all the way to Buenos Aires to catch the boat. Buenos Aires! I’d never seen a big city before. And then Europe, London... the whole wide world. I watched television for the first time. The Beatles! You can’t imagine,’ she says again; her eyes shining with the memory. ‘After that trip, all the doors were open.’

  ‘Weren’t you tempted to stay there? In London, or in Buenos Aires?’

  The light in her eyes goes out as though somebody had thrown a switch. ‘Oh no. I couldn’t have. It wouldn’t have been home. My Dad always said, Cas y gwr na gar ei wlad. A bad man he who loves not his homeland.’

  It’s still raining, and darkness is beginning to fall. The short, gloomy autumn day will soon be over. I’ve gone out to look round the chapel; to try to get a sense of the place and its past. Raindrops whisper in the grass, ping off an old rainwater barrel. A smell of woodsmoke hangs in the cold air. The lights of Trevelin are hidden in the gloom. It should be easy to imagine myself back in the early days of Cwm Hyfryd, a century ago. But it’s not. I can’t get a handle on it at all. It’s all I can do to hold on to the here and now.

  I’ve been on the road for too long, by myself, in a place where it’s autumn in April and the sun stands in the north at noon. I’m lonely and cold and fed up. I want nothing so much on earth as to go home.

  I’ve been wanting to like Patagonia, to enjoy this dream-cometrue; I willed myself to love every minute of this trip, my first time in Patagonia, utterly and passionately. And I have loved most of my time here more than I would have thought possible. But now I’ve come up against a place where I just don’t feel comfortable.

  I can’t make Cwm Hyfryd work.

  And I won’t try any more.

  I stand in the field surrounded by hills. Stand with my head tipped back staring upwards into the trees as they go from dark green to grey to almost-black as dusk falls. Loo
k at the pattern made by droplets of rain on the surface of the water barrel. I won’t think. Won’t plan. Won’t try to cope.

  47

  AFTER THAT FIRST VISIT, I didn’t return to Esquel, Trevelin and the Andes for a couple of years. I spend time in Gaiman, but the vastness and foreignness and the sheer otherness of the Cordillera spooked me more than I want to admit. And yet the Andes stay with me. The landscape has imprinted itself on me in a way I cannot explain. I miss the shapes of the mountains on the horizon, even while I shy away from going back.

  And then it reappears on my radar. When I talk to Rodrigo Gómez and Lía Ñancufíl Musa from Banco de Lanas in Trelew about their work with Mapuche and Tehuelche weavers, they mention communities in the west of the province of Chubut. Oscar Payaguala in Comodoro Rivadavia gives me a name and phone number in Esquel and urges me to look up a man whom he describes as un cacique importante, an important chief. It begins to look as though I should take another trip out west.

  I go on the same coach again, the one that travels during the day to arrive in Esquel in the evening.

  Only it’s not the same one. Clara Roberts looks at the ticket which I have just booked in the small Gaiman office of the transport company – in a shop just off the main street that sells agricultural implements and bags of fertiliser – and exclaims: ‘You’re never going on that coach! ¡Ese va por todas las rutas de tierra!’(Rutas de tierra are unpaved, gravelled dirt roads.) It turns out that this coach goes by the most circuitous route possible, starting in Trelew and arriving – eventually – in Esquel, but taking in many dirt roads along the way that serve small settlements far from the main, direct route. The trip will take me eleven hours.

  ‘I’ll be seeing parts of the country I haven’t before,’ I say excitedly to Clara. ‘It’ll be fun!’

  She shakes her head at such madness.

  At first, everything is the same as before: the endless straight road out of Gaiman, the flat landscape, first green, then brown. But not so brown this time, because it’s December and early summer; whereas before I was travelling in autumn. Even away from the River Chubut large swathes of the desert are green now. Clumps of bushes are dotted with intensely yellow flowers. Snow-white plumes of pampas grass nod in the breeze. The whole place has exploded into life and colour. The stony soil is parchment pale, almost white in places; in others an improbable rich red. The sky is immense, a huge blue embrace.

  I remember how last time, I looked through the window wishing I could go outside, into the desert. Now, when the bus turns off the main road onto the ruta de tierra, I feel that I have come a little closer to that dream. I’m still on the coach, I’m still being carried far too fast to look at things properly. But there is no layer of tarmac now between me and the ground, and somehow that seems significant. And at least we’re travelling more slowly; because on the gravel road there’s only so fast you can go before the shock absorbers give up.

  The landscape slowly changes. Hills appear, the first outposts of the foothills of the Andes. They are the most amazing colours: wine-red rocks, hills striped red and green and grey, each layer sharply defined. Some of the rocks look like ruined palaces, like the tumbled-down remains of an ancient, lost civilisation. One of them almost exactly resembles the Sphinx, except that it’s crimson. There are rocks shaped like columns, like the carved palaces of Petra or the temples of Angkor Wat or a Roman amphitheatre. With a sudden startled movement, a group of guanacos bursts out from behind the amphitheatre and runs away into the steppe, white tails bobbing.

  We stop for coffee in a village whose name I don’t catch. When I light a cigarette, I discover dust in the crumpled pack of cigarettes, dust in my lighter, gritty dust in my mouth, even.

  On we go. The road begins to climb. Not much, not steeply, but instead of the flat expanse of the desert, the land is undulating now: we’re surrounded by a frozen sea of wave after wave of hills. The air changes, becomes sharper, cooler, contains a hint of moisture.

  A chain of translucent mountains appears far away on the horizon. Clouds hang over the land. A lake by the roadside. Something pink flashes and flies away. Flamingos!

  Sheep graze on the grey-green vegetation, horses, cattle. Every now and then, an isolated farmstead is visible: a house and outbuildings, a windmill for power, water tanks, corrals.

  We’re on the altiplano now, the tableland that precedes the Cordillera. The hills are rocky and brown; the mountains previously on the horizon much nearer, much larger, shining eerily, spectrally white with snow.

  It’s a good while since we passed the last settlement, when the coach stops in the middle of nowhere along a stretch of road. I half expect a gaucho to climb on board; but instead, it’s a swarm of teenage girls. At least, they look like teenagers, but some of them carry small children. They all have long black hair and dark eyes; and they wear beautiful dangling silver earrings. They sit together, chatting and laughing. I prick up my ears, but they speak Spanish, not Mapuche.

  There are no more hills now, just the huge snow-capped mountains in front of us, rearing up and filling most of the sky. The road winds down from the altiplano, becomes wider, less bone-shaking, almost respectable; it smoothes itself down and joins the main, paved road. We’re in Esquel.

  48

  IT’S THE WEIRDEST FEELING, being back.

  The air is pure and cool and clean and scented with pinesap and snow and so rich that breathing it feels almost like drinking cold, fresh water. The water is amazing, too. I have a terribly sweet tooth and will normally not drink just plain water. I want something with a taste. But while I’m in the Cordillera, I’m off the sweet stuff because the water is so wonderful. It’s deep and rich with layers and layers of flavours; as though you could taste all the different types of rock and soil through which it has flowed.

  I spend a day walking around Esquel. The town centre is full of touristy shops selling woven textiles, chunky wooden objects, silver jewellery, chocolates. There is a strong Swiss-German element in western Patagonia.

  Last time, I didn’t venture beyond the town centre. I was alarmed by the wildness of the scenery, intimidated by my lack of language; but also by what I thought was the rough aspect of some of the houses further out. I was afraid I might wander into a shanty town and be robbed. I had no way of gauging the meaning of buildings or roads. Everything was foreign.

  For reasons I cannot explain, I am delighted to be back. I have missed the mountains, the air, the very atmosphere of Cwm Hyfryd. I walk through the centre and towards the end of town where the streets straggle into the mountains beyond. The road goes from tarmac to gravel. This is what I used to think was the poorer part of town. But there are houses of all sorts here: One is built of bare breeze blocks on an unkempt lot where drunkenly leaning, rusty sheets of corrugated iron serve as fence and garden gate, and another sheet as the roof. But right next door stands a smart little building with gabled windows, the outside freshly painted, and flowers in the garden. A cornershop operates out of a window of the next house. Minikiosco, a handmade sign says. There are some vacant lots covered with weeds. In one of them a lonely horse is tethered. On the next corner stands a large house inside a big garden with shrubs and a few small trees on the well-tended lawn.

  There are many dogs: a vigilant rottweiler guards the garden of the big house, a couple of small terriers yap in the concreted-over front yard of a smaller house a few doors down. But most dogs are free to roam; they wander along the road on some business of their own. Some trot quickly as though on their way to a rendezvous. Others amble, stop every now and then for a sniff or to visit a friend in a neighbouring house. Lots of dogs sleep or doze on the rough grass or the dusty sidewalk, some curled up with their tails over their noses, others stretched out on their sides, fast asleep, their only movement a twitching ear to dislodge a mosquito.

  Small children are running and playing in a schoolyard, all wearing white, thigh-length tunics over their clothes: guardapolvos (dustguards), the Argentinian sc
hool uniforms. Teachers wear them too.

  Some houses are a peculiar triangular shape with roofs reaching all the way to the ground. They look like the letter A or a wedge of cheese standing upright. I’ve seen tourist cabins shaped like that around Esquel and thought they were a gimmick. But perhaps this is a shape somehow typical for the region. The ones I have seen previously were made of wood and very decorative, while these cabins are built of corrugated zinc sheets – the poor home owner’s version, perhaps. Then again, cars are parked outside them – and indeed, there are cars parked outside the breezeblock cubes, too, indicating that these won’t be poor people’s houses. (Owning a car is a sign of a certain amount of financial comfort in Argentina. I remember how struck I was, after my return to the U.K., to hear a politician on the radio talking about poor people and their cars.) Once I look, I see lots of houses in Patagonia that have corrugated zinc roofs. So perhaps this isn’t a rough part of town. I still can’t read it right; and I’m still a bit nervous out here. I walk briskly as though I know where I’m going, and I clutch my bag tightly.

  Eventually the dirt road peters out altogether and becomes a track. I have arrived at the foot of the mountains. Broom covers their lower slopes, its blossom bright gold. And everywhere, there are exuberant lupins growing wild in the fields: pale yellow, pink, violet, red, blue, purple. The sun is hot but a cold, cold breeze is blowing straight off the snow-capped mountains. The wind sighs and whistles in the trees like a living thing, a spirit that lives on the mountain.

  49

  I’M STAYING WITH Dana Williams again, in her lovely modern house in the pine forest a couple of miles outside Esquel. Dana had the house built less than twenty years ago, but the kitchen is dominated by an old, cast-iron, wood-burning stove that might well go back to the very early days of Cwm Hyfryd. Apart from a couple of months in high summer, it is always on. The muted crackle and hiss of the flames and the warmth they spread make it seem almost alive: an old Welsh dragon perhaps that’s come to live out its days in Dana’s kitchen. An ancient chair with a disreputable off-white fur cushion stands next to the stove. Next morning at breakfast, the cushion unfurls itself, stretches, yawns pinkly, curls up and goes back to sleep.