Juana Luz soon draws me into a conversation while she unpacks her shopping. She and Julio have been to the grocer’s before they came to the bus stop. There will be what looks like a leg of mutton, pasta and assorted vegetables for dinner. No, no, she doesn’t need a hand with anything. I’m to stay on the sofa and she will presently make me a cup of coffee. Meanwhile, I’m to tell her what exactly has brought me here, and what I would like to know.
While I talk, she chops onions, potatoes and a small squash.
‘Vegetables for you. You don’t eat meat, do you?’ she says with the bemused tolerance with which most Patagonians greet my eating habits. She opens the lid of a large saucepan and, before I can say anything, adds handfuls of dry pasta shells to the already simmering mutton. ‘It gives the pasta more flavour when you put it in with the meat,’ she explains.
Vegetarianism is not a concept well understood in rural Patagonia. And, to be honest, I don’t mind too much. I hate factory-farmed meat, but the sheep that provided the leg of mutton will have spent its whole life in the fields around Futacura, ranging freely. A good life, a quick death: that’s as much as anyone can ask. My conscience will not suffer from ingesting some of this meat.
Amidst the increasingly delicious food smells comes a whiff of something sweet and flowery from beyond the curtain.
Juana Luz has noticed it too.
‘It’s Julio,’ she says with a smile. She raises her voice. ‘Have you been at my perfume again, hijo?’ (Hijo means son.) ‘That boy loves to put scent on himself.’
And shortly afterwards Julio sidles bashfully into the kitchen area from behind the curtain, preceded by a cloud of scent. Juana Luz smiles and tousles his hair and sends him out for water.
It’s only now that I notice that there is no sink between the work surface and the cooker. Julio picks up a plastic bucket and goes outside. I hear the plashing of water, and a short time later he reappears, dragging the almost full bucket with him. Juana Luz uses a red plastic mug for ladling water from the bucket into the kettle and a plastic bowl that’s used for washing.
‘If you want the bathroom,’ she says to me, ‘it’s in the garden, just beyond the turkey enclosure. Remember to take a torch, there’s no electricity outside.’
Julio is now emboldened to talk to me. Juana Luz must have told him of my interest in Mapuche culture. He wants to show me his book. He’s studying Mapudungun, the Mapuche language. Not, as I have initially assumed, in school.
‘Bless you, no, they don’t do Mapudungun classes in the school here,’ says Juana Luz. (So much for the constitutional right of the Mapuche to a bilingual, bi-cultural education.)
I tell her about Lía Ñancufíl Musa of the Wool Bank in Trelew, who goes into the schools there to teach traditional Mapuche crafts and some words of Mapudungun.
‘I try to do something like that here,’ Juana Luz says, ‘with the crafts, but I’m afraid there’s nobody to teach the language to the children.’
‘I learn from the longkos, the elders,’ Julio explains. ‘When there is a ngillatun or a kamarukun, I’m a piwichén. We dance with the kawell, the horse. The longkos taught me that too. And I know how to play the ñorquin, the trutruka and the pillilka. I’m Mapuche.’
The shy child is transformed, he radiates enthusiasm and delight.
‘Whoa,’ I say and laugh. ‘You will have to explain, I’m afraid I don’t know any Mapuche words. I know what a trutruka is – like a big trumpet, yes?’
He nods.
‘But the rest?’
Juana Luz steps in. ‘Piwichén is the sacred child. When we have a religious ceremony, a ngillatun or kamarukun, there are always two small boys and two young girls who take part in the ceremony. They’re the piwichén.’
Julio nods energetically. He is a confident young Mapuche boy, already steeped in his culture. I think of the three generations of Mapuche-Tehuelche I have encountered so far: Ambrosio Ainqueó with his horrific first-hand experience of persecution and state repression against his people. Oscar Payaguala, Mauro Millán, who battle ignorance and discrimination. Lía Ñancufíl Musa, who as a child was ashamed of her background and had to rediscover her culture as an adult. And now young Julio, who at the age of ten is studying Mapudungun and says proudly: ‘I am Mapuche’.
As a child, I was never allowed to be myself. My parents told me that my own personality was wrong and warped and had to be corrected by blows for my own good. Julio’s confidence in himself radiates out of him like rays of sunshine. I want to hug him for it, but I’m not sure what he would make of that. So I beam at him instead, and he perches on the arm of the sofa and reads me some more phrases in Mapudungun from his book.
57
IT’S MARCH, EARLY AUTUMN. The day has been pleasantly warm, but once the sun sets the air turns cool. After dinner Juana Luz goes outside to put the shutter – a plank of wood with a handle screwed to it – before the window and secure it with stones. Julio switches on the ancient television and expertly twiddles its knobs until he has managed to tune it to a station. (The local provincial channel, the only one available in Futacura without a satellite dish.) There is a film playing: Fort Apache with John Wayne.
Julio pulls a plastic stool out from under the kitchen table and sits down mere inches from the T.V., raptly following the adventures of the cowboys and Indians on the screen.
Juana Luz and I sit on the sofa with cups of tea, and talk. In many ways, Juana Luz reminds me of Dana. She is thoughtful and warm and tough; and as with Dana, I feel that even after only a few hours, a friendship, a companionship is springing up between us.
But Juana Luz has had to battle much harder odds than Dana. And she is, of necessity perhaps, much more politically and socially aware.
‘I have German and Italian ancestors as well as Mapuche, but for me, my Mapuche heritage is the most important. I’m Mapuche. My grandparents still spoke the language and followed the old ways, they celebrated the ngillatun and the kamarukun. But I was brought up by wingkas, white people. I never learnt our language. When I was five years old, both my parents died. I was the youngest in the family. We were separated and brought up in different families. We never really came back together after that. I was five years old when mamá died, but even so, I was strong, because she had taught us well. I was ready to face the world. She knew she was going to die, so she prepared us as well as she could. But it was hard. Sufrimos mucho. We suffered much.
‘I hope you don’t mind me saying this – but really, the Welsh settlement is not where the history of this province begins. The history of Argentina, that’s us, the Pueblos Originarios, the First Nations. Later, others came, some good people and others who took the land away from us, because they said that we had never worked the land, so it should be given to others who would work on it. Imagine, if I went to a European country now, they wouldn’t take the land off someone who lives there and give it to me instead, would they? I don’t know why it is in Argentina that what comes from abroad is valued so much more highly than what originates here.’
She shakes her head, sighs. On Julio’s T.V. screen, the Apache chief delivers a noble speech and is vanquished by civilisation.
‘No. The Argentinian state has to give back what it took from us,’ Juana Luz continues. ‘Our lands, first of all. They took our language, too. We were punished for speaking it. Our mother wanted to teach my older brothers and sisters, but there was police about, and she didn’t dare. She was afraid. Her mother and grandmother were survivors of the Conquista del Desierto, where people were killed simply for being Mapuche. They learnt to be afraid, to be quiet. They kept their heads down. That was how the wingka, the whites, ruled. Communities dispersed and the language began to die. We are the fifth generation after the ‘Desert Conquest’. We want our children to learn the language, to have that chance that we never had. To be able to defend themselves better than we could. They won’t have it as hard as we did, because we cleared the road for them. They won’t face the same obstacles
that we did.’
For Juana Luz, the line from the ancestors to her descendants is unbroken: despite the genocide, despite the painful rift in her own past. She is a link in a chain that stretches back into the distant past, centuries and millennia of rootedness in these lands, in these mountains; and forward into an unknown future. It’s an unfamiliar vision of the world for me. I’m the product of an individualistic society. I come from an abusive family. I have no family, now, there are no ancestors that I care to know about. I have no children, nobody who will carry my memories and teachings forward into the future. My children are my stories, and I’m happy that way. I don’t regret my choices.
But now, for the first time, I see that the enmeshedness of a clan need not be suffocating, entrapping, hampering. It can be empowering. It can give one’s struggles meaning. Even if Juana Luz will never see improvements in her life, she can work towards making Julio’s life better. He will continue the struggle, and he will have her support, her work, her pride, to carry him forward.
In fact, he plans to continue the struggle very literally.
‘He wants to be a lawyer when he grows up,’ Juana Luz says with a smile. The film is over, and Julio has switched the T.V. off and gone behind the bedroom-wall curtain to read. Juana Luz looks behind the curtain and beckons for me to look too. Julio lies fast asleep, still clutching his book. She switches off the light, and we sit again and have another cup of tea.
‘It won’t be easy, but if he still wants to study when he’s grown, then we will somehow find the money for it. In the meantime, I have him spend a couple of hours every afternoon with a car mechanic who lives in the neighbourhood. So that he’ll have a trade, a way to earn money. Just in case. I want him to be prepared.’
Prepared, I think she means, in case she dies and leaves him all alone to face the world, the way she had to.
58
‘HE’S NOT MY SON, YOU KNOW. I didn’t give birth to him.’ Juana Luz makes an expressive gesture as though she were pulling a child from between her legs. ‘He’s adopted. He was in a terrible state when I got him. He’s fine now, but back then....’ She shakes her head. ‘He’d been beaten badly. He was black and blue all over.
‘The doctor told me about him, he said there was this little boy whose mother beat him and wouldn’t bring him into the surgery for treatment. She didn’t want him, and the doctor asked me to take him in. So I thought about it, and in the end I decided to take him. He was four years old. Can you imagine? He had nightmares every night. He cried, he wet his bed. In his nightmares he was back there and they were beating him. He stole and lied. He was feral. He’d gone hungry so often. I had a little dog back then who lived in the house with us. And one day, I turned around and there was Julio at her bowl, eating the dog food. I think he must have been eating dog food, sometimes, at his mother’s. They made him sleep outside. He still has a scar on his ankle from where they’d tied him up like a dog. When he cried with hunger they gave him wine to make him sleep.
‘I went to the council to formalise the adoption, and do you know what they said? They told me that I couldn’t, because his mother refused to give her consent, and they said they had to respect her rights. Her rights, but not those of the child! They asked me if I was related to him. It seemed more important for them that I should be a blood relative than that I had the child’s interests at heart. And his family don’t care about him at all. The mother has not been to see him once. Not once! In a way it’s better, I think – that way he isn’t reminded. He calls me Mummy now. In the beginning, I told him to call me Auntie, but a couple of years ago, he said, “I want to call you Mummy, because you are my Mummy”. So that’s what he calls me now. And we’re on track to get the adoption formalised now. The doctor helped me.
‘Children are important,’ says Juana Luz. ‘They’re the future. And we should all remember that we were once children ourselves, however old we are now.’
I blink back tears. Meeting genuinely good people always touches me in a way that is both painful and healing. And I can never tell them, because if I tried try to express any of this, I would end up crying all over them. I’m horribly near to bursting into tears as it is. I get up and fuss with my mug of tea, rearrange the blanket, fiddle with my cigarettes. I will go outside, have a smoke, collect myself.
Outside, the sky is black and crammed with stars. I’m shivering with cold and tiredness and old, remembered pain. I can feel the loneliness of a small child for whom nobody cares; the fear, the hunger, the lack of warmth and love. Julio, so alive, so proud, so full of dreams and enthusiasm now, tied up with a cord round his ankle like a dog. Would he even be alive now, if the doctor and Juana Luz hadn’t saved him?
I pull on my fleece-lined raincoat when I go back indoors. I need an extra layer not only of warmth, but of skin. Juana Luz’ tale has opened old doors, old wounds.
She sees me huddling into my coat, and gets up to get me a blanket from behind the curtain.
‘It gets cold here at night,’ she says. ‘But it’s not so bad yet, when you’re used to it. In winter, it’s really cold; we get snow and frost. I have to have the stove on in winter, but it’s expensive. You have to buy wood. There are no trees here at all, and firewood is expensive. Life here can be hard. But it’s worse in the cities. Here, you have neighbours, and when times are hard, they will help you, they will give you a meal, tide you over. There is a community here. But in the city, people have no roots. No community, no help. No pride, no hope. That’s why there’s so much drugs, so much violence, because people lose their way. When you take the Mapuche away from the land, they’re not Mapu Che any more, the People of the Land, are they? They become uprooted.’
Julio makes a sound behind the curtain, a snuffle, a murmur. Juana Luz gets up to make sure he’s all right, then puts the kettle on for another round of tea.
‘One more, eh?’ she says. ‘And then we go to bed. It’s late.’
It’s long past midnight.
‘That boy,’ she says, nodding towards the curtain, the sleeping Julio. ‘He’s as bright as a button. He’s really clever! I had been afraid that the wine they’d given him might have caused brain damage, but he just zips through his schoolwork. And this year, he came home from school one day and complained about the teacher: they were doing a play for the national holiday on 12 October, and the teacher had given him the role of Columbus to play. He didn’t want to do it. He didn’t want to go in the next day. He was afraid the teacher would give him a bad mark if he refused. So I said, You know what, you tell them it’s me. Tell them I absolutely forbid you to play Columbus.
‘But in the end, he went to the teacher and he told her: “I’m Mapuche. I won’t play Columbus”.’
‘He will start a debate like that. And the teacher accepted his reason and gave the role of Columbus to another boy! I’m very proud of him. There are lots of children in school with Mapuche surnames, but they’re ashamed. They say they’re Italian, Spanish, French, German, they deny that they’re Mapuche.’
It’s that bad, I ask, even today?
Juana Luz nods. ‘Oh yes. Fijate, imagine, when Julio was five years old and went to school, there was this other little boy in his class, the same age; a little blond boy, the son of the mayor. They’re a German family. And this boy says to Julio, ‘You’re not going to sit with me, you’re black, you’re an Indio’! Five years old, this little boy, and talks like that! He hears it at home, of course, and repeats it. It starts that early.’
59
NEXT AFTERNOON AFTER SCHOOL, Julio takes me on a walk around Futacura, and then to the top of one of the hills overlooking the village. It is stony, dry and overgrown with low prickly shrubs. Most of them look like dry straw, except for one whose leaves shine like bright silver in the sun.
From the top of the hill, Futacura doesn’t look dry at all. I can see now that it lies in a river valley. Green fields line the river banks, and masses of bushy poplars obscure most of the houses. The lands beyond are dr
y again, dry and brown and stony like a moonscape bordered by a brown mountain ridge.
We’re only really meant to come up here for the view and then go back to Juana Luz’ house, but Julio has other ideas.
‘Let’s go fishing!’ he says. ‘It’s not far to the river, and I can catch some fish for my dinner.’
I’m impressed by his enterprise, and agree to extend our walk. I’m rather awkward around children; I like them but I’m never quite sure what to say to them. With Julio, conversation is slow at first, but after a while we both thaw. Soon he is telling me all about his fishing technique, suggesting photo opportunities, and giving me a blow-by-blow account of the last kamarukun (religious ceremony) he and Juana Luz attended.
The river is wide and shallow, flowing over a bed of flat, round-edged, grey pebbles. The river banks on both sides are made up of the same pebbles. Julio casts a quick look round, then, apparently distinguishing one pebble that to me looks identical in all respects to the other pebbles, lifts it up and brings out from underneath two tin cans and a quantity of string. He digs for bait, and a few minutes later he’s ready to cast.
I don’t know the Spanish for fishing rod, otherwise I’d ask where he keeps his rods. This is just as well, because he hasn’t got any. His ‘rods’ are the tin cans. He carefully winds the string around them, leaves some dangling at the end, whirls that string – with the baited hook at its end – round a few times, and when he lets go, it sails elegantly through the air and lands in the centre of the river.
In the space of ten minutes, he has expertly hooked four fish. (I avert my eyes for the coups-de-grâce.) He’s all for staying longer, but I have remembered with a guilty start that Juana Luz is under the impression that we’ve only gone to the top of the hill. She will surely be wondering what has become of us.
‘Come on,’ I say to Julio. He’s so delighted with his catch, and in basking in my admiring exclamations, that I haven’t got the heart to be very stern with him. I’ve no idea how to deal with children except to treat them, by and large, like I treat everybody else. This works well as far as communication is concerned, but doesn’t do much for me in the discipline stakes.
Beyond the Pampas Page 22