I haven’t seen Dana in two years, but it feels as though I was here only last week. We sip our hot drinks – maté for her, coffee for me – and talk. Dana grew up in Gaiman, but moved out to Esquel as a young woman.
‘It’s the mountains,’ she says. ‘Gaiman is all very well, but it’s too flat. And don’t you think it looks like Wales here?’
I can talk about Wales with Dana, and about Y Wladfa, and discuss the vagaries of Welsh grammar. But her interests go beyond Y Wladfa. Dana has no patience with parochialism. In that, she is unlike a lot of Patagonian Welsh, who look at me askance when I explain that my interest in Patagonia has shifted to include the Mapuche and Tehuelche.
‘I remember,’ says Dana, ‘when I first moved here, there was this old doctor who lived on a farm yn y cwm, in the valley. His sister kept house for him. They kept themselves to themselves. I think they were Welsh, but I forget the name now, it’s a long time ago. People were saying that back in the old days, at the beginning of the century, he would pay people for every cut-off ear of a dead Indian that they would bring him. Their chacra, their farm, was on land that had belonged to the Tehuelche.’
This is the first time I have heard of a Welshman paying others to kill Indians. It might be rumour, a distortion, a misremembered tale. It might be true; a story that everybody knows and nobody talks about, because it doesn’t reflect well on the community.
Later, I hear about this doctor and his sister from other people, and it turns out he wasn’t Welsh at all, but of Syrian extraction. There is a sizeable Syrian-Lebanese community in Argentina.
‘Later,’ Dana continues, ‘the doctor and his sister adopted a small Indian boy, an orphan. He worked for them round the house for years, and they didn’t treat him very well. He wasn’t beaten or anything, but they would call him names, ‘dirty little blacky’, that sort of thing. And when eventually the sister died – the doctor was already dead, he went before her – it was found that she had left all her money to the church. There was nothing at all for the boy.’
I imagine the boy – an adolescent, a young man – creeping back into the house in the night after the funeral: kicking down doors, breaking windows, wrecking furniture; systematically destroying every possession of those two who stole his land and his life and left him with nothing.
Dana doesn’t know what became of him.
‘Most of the Welsh weren’t like that,’ she says. ‘To have others killed over a piece of land.’
Dana and I talk about most things under the sun; politics and people and books, music, travel, the meaning of life. And cookery. We swap recipes for cakes and jams and chutney. Dana is an inspired cook and baker, without appearing at all domestic.
I have one of the best meals of my life in her house one evening: spaghetti doused liberally in olive oil, accompanied by a huge amount of fresh basil. That’s it. And it’s divine. Basil and olive oil explode on my tongue, followed by a quiet murmur of pasta, a red velvet swish of wine. Every mouthful is a revelation.
I have a coffee and a (so to speak) post-coital cigarette after this delight, outside under the soughing pine trees in the last lingering warmth of the day, and think back to Aberystwyth, fifteen years ago. There’ll be somebody in the college giving a talk about Patagonia tonight. And how I’d thought, between disbelief and curiosity and delight: Welsh people in Patagonia? I want to see that!
I’ve still not come to the end of the journey that began in Aberystwyth a decade and a half ago. I couldn’t even say where it is I’m going. But it won’t be long now. I can feel it.
50
ALL I KNOW ABOUT Ambrosio Ainqueó is his name, his phone number and that Oscar Payaguala has told me that he’s an important Mapuche chief in Esquel, and that I should talk to him.
Except that he is not a chief. I have gone to meet Ambrosio Ainqueó at his house in a quiet part of Esquel. We sit at a heavy wooden table in a shady alcove off his living room. The shutters are closed against the sunlight. The outside world seems far away.
‘No, no,’ he says, shaking his head slowly. He does everything slowly, unhurriedly, with deliberation. ‘I couldn’t be a cacique, because I have no community. I was taken away from my community when I was six years old, back in 1937.’
He thinks that I have come to hear his life story. He is famous for it. Ambrosio Ainqueó is one of the last survivors of a particularly unpleasant act of government oppression against the Mapuche. I had no idea, and his story is like a blow.
‘I was little. I didn’t have a word of Spanish. I only knew Mapudungun, the Mapuche language. I’d never seen a car or a lorry in my life. But suddenly there was this noise – now I know that it was a motor – and a man jumped down, and then three more, and they began to tear down our house. They tore off the chapa, the corrugated metal sheets, and threw them on the ground. You mustn’t believe that we lived in tents! No, we had a good solid house made of adobe, with a chapa roof and everything. We weren’t savages, whatever people believed. But there they came and started to tear our house down.’
I don’t know how to even begin to comment on what he’s saying. Who gets to decide that somebody else is a savage? On what grounds? And that it’s permissible to throw a savage out of their tent, but not a civilised person out of their house?
‘Why?’ I ask him. ‘Why did they throw you out of your house?’
‘At the time, I didn’t understand what was happening because I was so small, but Mama said to me, in Mapudungun of course, she said, “They’re going to throw us out, son, because apparently this land doesn’t belong to us”.’
‘Our community had been living on that land since 1908! And this was ’37. That was the Mapuche community of Nahuel Pan. Three hundred people they took away from that place. They threw the wood and the chapa from our house on the back of their lorry, and when only the adobe walls of our house were left standing, they threw water over it all. I thought it was water, but it was petrol. They set fire to it and burnt it all down. I can still see it burning, now. I dream about it sometimes. We were crying, my sister and I. And then they put us on the back of the lorry too and drove us away. The whole community was scattered.’
I assume that Ainqueó’s community had been living on the land unofficially; that they had, perhaps, been driven out of their original settlement by a late action in the ‘Desert Campaign’ and gone to live on unclaimed land in 1908 which was then, almost thirty years later, claimed and cleared by its owner.
But it wasn’t like that at all. The Nahuel Pan community was living on land (some 19,000 hectares, to be precise) which the Argentine government had granted to them by decree as a reservation in 1908.77 They were entitled to be exactly where they were. But in 1937, a big absentee landowner who already owned large tracts of Patagonia wanted even more: in particular, the land of the Mapuche community of Nahuel Pan. So he pulled strings in Buenos Aires to have the Mapuche removed from it. The national government, at the time under the rule of military dictator General Agustín P. Justo, was happy to comply, declaring that the reservation was not being put to its intended use because of ‘the lack of a work ethic by its residents, who live their lives precariously and in a state of great abandon, without order or morals.’78 This absentee landowner was, in fact, none other but the son of the doctor who had paid a prize for the ears of dead Indians. The family is still around, and still rich.
In the same year the enlightened Argentine government declared the Southern Right Whale a protected species, and the millenarian forest on the slopes of the mountains around Esquel a nature reserve. No protection was granted the indigenous peoples of the region.
Ambrosio Ainqueó’s insistence that his people weren’t living like savages makes sense now. I feel, not for the last time, ignorant and naïve confronted with the realities faced by the Tehuelche and Mapuche in Patagonia.
‘They put us on the back of the lorry and drove us away, and then in a field outside Esquel, they put us down and threw the wood and the corrugated chapa
sheets on the ground. And then they drove off and left us there, Mama and my sister and me. It was in May, the middle of winter. There was snow, a hard frost. Mama put the wood up as best she could, and the metal sheets, and built us a shelter like that. And there we spent that night. The next days, we went to cut branches off the willows that grew there, and Mama wove them like this, and put clay on them, and constructed a house for us. Well, a house – it was a hut, it only had the one room for living and sleeping and cooking. And there we were: Mama and my elder sister, who was nine, and me. Two months later, my sister died. Nine years old, and she died from hunger and sadness.’
Ambrosio Ainqueó looks up, looks at me.
‘I don’t usually talk about this much,’ he says, matter-of-factly. ‘It’s too painful. I’m telling you because you’ve come from so far away.’
The room is full of pain, it hums like a current.
‘I think back then, people didn’t look at us, the Indígenas, as human. They thought we were animals. I can’t think of any other reason why they would have treated us like that. To let a child die of hunger. I would have good reason to hate white people. I don’t. And I’m not bitter, despite the terrible things that happened.’
I can still feel the pain in the room, like a living presence, like a ghost that won’t go away. Perhaps it is a ghost; the ghost of a little girl who died in the snow more than seventy years ago. Ainqueó is full of pain when he recalls the past. But at all other times, there is a great sense of calm about him. He is a man at peace with himself. Not with the world, but he uses his pain and his anger to tackle the world, to work on its wrongs.
‘The worst of it is that my father was un blanco, a white man. My mother was Mapuche, but my father was an Arab merchant here in the town. A wealthy man. And yet my sister died of hunger.’
The front door suddenly bursts open, and we both jump.
A girl whirls into the room, a teenager in jeans and a white school smock, the guardapolvo.
Ambrosio Ainqueó rouses himself. ‘My granddaughter,’ he explains, and the shadows of the past retreat a little in the presence of the smiling girl and the sunlight that streams in through the open door.
We exchange the customary kiss on the cheek. The girl – I never catch her name – stays for a bit and we chat. Ainqueó has seven children, he tells me.
And how many grandchildren?
‘Muchos,’ he says and laughs. Lots.
And then she leaves, and we go back into the past.
‘School,’ says Ainqueó, shaking his head. ‘I went to school in Esquel. But as I told you, I had no Spanish at all. Things were different, back then. The teacher would show us pictures of animals, and ask what this one or that was called. And I would answer in Mapudungun, because that was all I knew. They would laugh at me, all of them. So of course I got furious, and I shouted at them in Mapudungun.’ He laughs at the memory, at the absurdity, perhaps. ‘I go into the schools now, sometimes, to talk to the children in Mapudungun. So that they can at least hear the language. Almost nobody speaks it anymore. It’s dying out.’
I ask about his father. He was a rich merchant in Esquel, or did I misunderstand that?
‘Yes. Yes, he was. He was with my mother for ten years, then they separated. Later, she had an Italian partner, and he brought me up. My own father...’
He falls silent for a long time.
‘When I was in fourth grade, he came into the school. He was looking for a boy to work in his store. He picked me, and so I went to work for him. I didn’t know that he was my father. He never called me his son. He never told me.’
‘You didn’t know?’
‘I didn’t know. I worked in his store for several years, and I had no idea. Then one day somebody came into the shop and asked me: ‘Where’s your Papa?’ That’s how I found out. And then when I looked at him, I could see the resemblance. That’s how fate punished him. I looked more like him than his two legitimate sons. So his wife found out. She was a bitter woman. She gave me cold tea to drink and mouldy bread to eat. Sometimes, no food at all. That was my life.’
I daren’t ask how old he was at the time. Fourteen? Fifteen?
‘So I stole biscuits and cake from the shop. I ate those. One day my father caught me, he asked me what I thought I was doing. So I showed him the green bread. I told him, “I’m leaving. Unless you acknowledge me as your son.”
‘And when he wouldn’t, I left. The only way I was going to go back was if he acknowledged me as his own flesh and blood. And when he didn’t, I went away for good. I left the store, and I left Esquel. I joined the army as a musician, and I was away from Patagonia for thirteen years. I went to the very north of Argentina, to the province of Misiones, in the subtropics. That’s where I met my wife.’
Another long silence.
‘I never saw my father again.’
Several Mapuche communities live in the hills and on the altiplano in the area around Esquel, further north towards the towns of Epuyen and El Bolsón. The majority of the community forcibly evicted from Nahuel Pan – those who had not been dumped in one of the surrounding small settlements like Ambrosio Ainqueó and his mother and sister – went to live on a territory on the shores of Lake Rosario, some 30 miles to the south. They still live there; and they are still known as the community of Nahuel Pan, decades later.
Nahuel Pan itself, in the midst in the stunning Andean landscape, is today the terminus for La Trochita, or El Trencito as they call it in Esquel: the little train, the last remainder of the Old Patagonian Express. Once, the train went all the way to Buenos Aires. These days, the small steam locomotive puffs just the 20 kilometres, 12 or so miles, from Esquel to Nahuel Pan, and back, taking tourists for a jaunt out into the country. Nahuel Pan is home, again, to a small Mapuche community. In 1943, seven years after the men with the lorries came to throw people off their land, a few hectares at Nahuel Pan were handed back to the Mapuche, and a handful of families settled there again. But the rest of the land is still under dispute.
When the tourists clamber off the Old Patagonian Express these days, they find not only a café and a small gift shop, but a museum: Museo de Culturas Originarias Patagónicas, the Museum of Patagonian Indigenous Cultures. Seventy years after the the authorities of the time illegally forced Ambrosio Ainqueó’s community off the land, a museum is funded by public money to showcase and celebrate that community’s culture.
It’s something. It’s a start. An acknowledgement that not all Argentine culture is European. But the problems of the displaced continue. Many Mapuche no longer live on the land. Many have migrated to the cities to look for work; others have been made to leave. They exist in the shanty towns that ring the cities, where drugs and drink and violence are rife, and escape from the downward spiral is hard.
Ambrosio Ainqueó has been working for many years with an N.G.O. to fight for the rights of indigenous people in Argentina. He used to travel to Buenos Aires frequently, to meet representatives of the government. He talks about this work with great equanimity. There was anger as well as pain in his voice earlier, when he recounted his own story. But that was directed at the individuals who caused suffering to him and his family; and at the people and the institutions of the past. He doesn’t appear to be angry, now.
He moves his head back and forth when I ask him if that is the case.
‘It depends,’ he says finally. ‘I’m always happy to talk to journalists about my work, and about the situation of the Mapuche. And when a student comes or another young person, and asks me about my life like you did, then I tell them what happened, more or less; as I have told you. But if it’s an old person, I won’t talk to them. I never did, in all the years since I returned to Esquel with my wife and our children. Not when it was someone old enough to know what had happened in Nahuel Pan. Someone who was around at the time. I don’t know how the people of Esquel lived, knowing what was done to us. I don’t know what people think they’re doing, if they were around then; and now they come a
nd ask me to tell them about my life when they could have done something to help us, and they didn’t! They didn’t lift a finger. I don’t think I will ever lose my rage about that. It’s what drives me to go on with my work. That’s why I continue to fight for my people.’
There is a knock on the door.
Outside stands a somewhat dishevelled man in shabby, dusty clothes with a shock of grey hair. He asks for a coin so he can buy some bread.
Money clinks, and Ambrosio Ainqueó closes the door and comes back to sit down heavily at the table.
‘He wants the money for drink,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘Allá en el campo, ¡es un señor! When he’s in his community, out in the country, he is a respected man. But when he comes into Esquel, he asks people for money and buys wine and gets drunk. Then he’s just a wino.
‘That’s another thing the whites have done to my people,’ Ambrosio Ainqueó tells me with a bitterness I’d not previously heard in his voice. ‘The drink.’
When he says my people, Ambrosio Ainqueó means the Mapuche. But there’s also the other half of his life, his non-Mapuche heritage, his non-Mapuche wife. He has chosen, very consciously, to be an interpreter, a messenger who goes back and forth between two peoples, two cultures.
And two religions. Because, although he takes part in traditional Mapuche religious ceremonies, Ambrosio Ainqueó is a staunch Christian.
‘To the core,’ he says, tapping his chest, when he catches my surprised look. He doesn’t, somehow, seem like somebody who has found Jesus. But that is exactly what he is.
Beyond the Pampas Page 19