I indulge in worst-case scenario fantasies for a few minutes longer, then I get up from the rock on which I have sunk down, rearrange my backpack on my shoulders, take a bearing from the hoofprints I’ve been following, and march off.
It is about twenty minutes later, as I am picking my way through a swampy patch along a slope, that a gaucho appears, riding a white horse.
I stop and stare.
‘Along here!’ he yells and gestures. He is not a vision, despite the white steed. Catalina has sent him to come looking for me. Sadly, he has not brought a spare horse for me.
‘Not far now,’ he says and grins encouragingly.
We descend from the tableland into another valley. The path begins to climb again. For the last part of the way, I get to ride and he gets to walk.
The top of the hill is planted all around with trees; horses stand in the shade and doze. Behind the trees, a little house. This is journey’s end. There is no village.
The front door of the house stands open, smoke pours out of the chimney in the roof. There are lots of people about, children run around in the yard in which chickens scratch, geese waddle and a turkey wanders. I climb stiffly off the horse and totter indoors. I could do with a rest now. Lots of people sit on benches around a cast-iron, wood-burning stove and sip maté.
I find a seat on one of the benches, sink down in it gratefully, and look around. Mauro isn’t here yet. I don’t know a soul in this place except for Catalina. The house – an adobe hut, bigger than Juana Luz’s cottage but even more basic – is almost devoid of furnishings. The kitchen has a beaten earth floor. There is no electricity. Water comes from a standpipe in the yard. Apart from the wood-burning stove and the benches, there is a calor gas cooker, a wooden table piled high with plastic bowls, plastic bags, a couple of tin mugs, packets of various dry foodstuffs, a couple of wooden boards, assorted big knives and general flotsam. A wooden crate hangs on the wall and does duty as a shelf. There is a kitchen radio on a board, an extremely rickety chair, and a plastic bucket full of water. A calendar and a couple of pictures torn out of a magazine hang on the wall; someone has sellotaped photographs of the children of the family on the back door. If you want water, you dunk a plastic cup into the bucket and drink. The kettle on the stove top is replenished by the same method. The window is covered partly with glass and partly with plastic sheeting and by no means keeps out the wind.
From the exposed beams in the roof hang large chunks of meat. (To dry? To be smoked? Is the roof the larder?) A sheep carcass hangs from the washing line outside. Next morning, I see more carcasses in the trees behind the house.
My vegetarian soul should be freaked out, but for some reason I don’t really mind. Everything here is so different from what I know; the whole way of life, the poverty, the remoteness; that I half feel as though I’ve entered another world, another time, another reality.
63
THE KITCHEN IS WARM and smoky. The maté circulates. There are perhaps two dozen people in total. Some haven’t seen each other for a year or more, some are here for the first time. They exchange news about friends and relatives – who got married, moved away, has found work, lost work, given birth, died since the last meeting. Children run in and out; play in the yard, clamber on laps for a cuddle and a bit of warming up, then go back outside. They don’t interrupt the flow of conversation. Nobody shushes them, and they in turn don’t scream or whine.
I am the only wingka here, but I am not made to feel like a foreigner. People ask me where I am from, how I liked the walk – with big grins; the fact that I walked all the way here becomes a running joke all through the evening – how I like the house, the place, the country. They all beam when I tell them that I’m in love with Patagonia.
When Doña Natalia, the hostess, hears that I don’t drink maté, she looks doubtful and offers me a cup of black tea instead. There is no milk. I haven’t yet broken to her the news that I am vegetarian, and won’t be able to eat any of the barbecued sheep that is for supper.
Cold gusts of wind come in through the open door, make the strips of plastic sheeting in the window snap and rattle. After a while, several of the old men and women get up and leave the house, followed by Doña Natalia. I pay no heed to this until I hear a chorus of voices from outside, calling in unison. Is this the beginning of the ceremony?
I ask Catalina, but she shakes her head. ‘Doña Natalia asked the longkos to ask the wind to calm down a bit. She gets a headache when it is blowing so strongly.’
Reality in the house on the top of the hill is a different beast from the one I know. It’s as though there is no dividing line here between the mundane and the magical. I find it alarming, and enviable at the same time. The longkos can’t really talk the wind down. Can they?
I sip my tea and offer to give Catalina a hand with making bread. I know about bread. I frequently bake my own. It’s a point where this world and my own intersect.
Catalina pushes the piled-up stuff on the table aside, gives its wooden surface a brief wipe with a dishcloth, and begins to make the dough. And just as I don’t have any strong feelings about the sheep carcass on the washing line, I don’t mind the bread being kneaded on the not-quite-hygienic table surface. It’s simply how things are done here.
I’m torn between respect for people who live such a basic, hard life, distant from the modern world; and worry on their behalf about what it must be like here in the middle of winter when the hut on the hill will be cut off by the weather, when the snow will make it impossible to leave the hill for days. What do they do when someone falls ill in the middle of the night?
‘We ride to the phone box,’ says Deborá and points into the hills, in the opposite direction to the one we have arrived from. Deborá is fifteen and lives here with her parents, her elder brother and a couple of younger siblings.
I envisage the phone box being a couple of hours’ ride away, but it turns out that it is in fact just beyond the pass, less than ten minutes on horseback.
‘If the wires aren’t down,’ Deborá adds. ‘In winter they sometimes snap from the weight of snow, or in storms, but if they’re not broken, everything’s fine.’
I find the idea of a phone box in the middle of nowhere strange, but it appears that it was placed there for the use of the community of Vuelta del Río. Maybe a dozen families live scattered in these hills, and they – together with the Organisación 11 de Octubre – campaigned hard until the authorities agreed to provide this means of communication with the outside world. Mobile phones receive no signal up here.
‘So what do you do about school?’ I ask Deborá, half expecting her to say that she and her brothers and sisters don’t go to school. But I am wrong.
‘We ride,’ she says, matter-of-factly. ‘Or sometimes we walk.’
To school?
‘To the road. You know, the way you came? You walked, didn’t you? How long did it take you?’
‘Nearly three hours.’
‘Well, I can do that way in an hour,’ Deborá boasts. ‘I’m used to it, see.’
‘And then? Where’s the school?’
‘In El Bolsón.’
El Bolsón is a small town maybe thirty miles away. ‘Bloody hell. How long does it take you to get there?’
‘We start here at five in the morning... sometimes in winter the snow is so high you can’t get out of here at all. We’re often really late. So we start here at five, we get a bus from the road, and then we’re in school by ten.’
The school is a boarding school, and Deborá and her siblings come home every other weekend. It must be very strange to live in a town that has cars and electric light and computers and fridges as a matter of course, and then to come back home to this place in the mountains that has none of these things. Deborá shrugs. To her, that’s just her life, and normal.
Just as normal, perhaps, as the fact that a little while later the strong cold wind quietens down to the merest breeze.
64
THE YOUNG MEN
OF THE COMMUNITY are shy, feral people who don’t mix much with other humans. They appear much more at home in each other’s company and that of their dogs and horses. I don’t think I’ve heard a single one of them say a word, with the exception of two short sentences uttered by my rescuer several hours ago. I go looking for them, and find them outside, at some distance from the house, where they have set up a big fire to prepare the asado, our evening meal. Asado means ‘roast’ and can be any kind of barbecued meat made on a parrilla, a metal grill. Or, in its original form – and the way it is being prepared here in the hills – it is half a sheep stuck on a metal spit over an open fire.
The fire sings and crackles and spits where fat from the roasting meat drips down. Then men hunker round it, some sit on chunks of wood, others squat on their haunches. They smoke and gaze into the fire and occasionally communicate in brief half sentences. They seem to inhabit a world quite separate from the domesticity of the kitchen.
I dither a while before approaching the fire, wondering whether it’s some kind of sacred male space. But I don’t hold with sacred male anythings; and also, I have a question for Deborá’s big brother Valentín, and she has told me that this is where I can find him.
A lithe young man with a beret on his black hair uncurls himself from his crouching position when I ask for Valentín. I want to know a bit more about tomorrow’s ceremony. Julio has tried to explain things to me, but he used so many Mapuche words, and talked so fast, that by the end I wasn’t much wiser. Deborá has assured me that Valentín is the man to ask. So, I ask him, what is tomorrow going to be about?
‘We’re going to hold a religious ceremony just like our ancestors did. It’s something that is slowly coming back in our community. We haven’t held one here for a long time,’ says Valentín. He has a tendency to look over my shoulder, towards the far horizon, even while talking to me. ‘It’s difficult, people have to travel, to come from other places, because there’s nobody left in Vuelta del Río who knows how to conduct a ngillatun. Nobody in the community here speaks Mapudungun any more. So we’re lucky that the longkos, the elders, have agreed to come here to teach us. It will help us to refresh our strength. We have a fight on our hands here.’ He looks at me for the first time. ‘Mauro told you about that, ¿no?’
No, I say, feeling ignorant and uninformed. A fight? With whom? Against whom?
It turns out to be over land. I might have guessed.
‘Es una zona conflictiva acá,’ explains Valentín, looking sideways into the fire. There are clashes over land in this area. ‘People turn up with title deeds to land inside Mapuche communities. We had that happen here, a Gringo landowner wanted this land where we live. It’s been like that for a long time. Lots of things have happened here. We’ve been thrown out of the house, the house has been torn down, totalmente todo. They’ve done everything they could think of to get us out.’
‘The house has been torn down? This house? What, while you were there?’
The question appears to amuse him, but it’s hard to tell; Valentín’s face is mostly a study in immovability.
‘It used to be worse in my grandparents’ time,’ he says, matterof-factly. ‘And their parents’ time. It was very bad for them.’
Valentín’s great-grandparents would have been alive at the time of the ‘Desert Conquest’. For me, that’s something I have been reading about. For him, it’s family history.
‘Today there are the media, the radio, television, the internet; places where we can go and tell our stories. It helps. I think if it weren’t for those, we maybe wouldn’t be here any more. We wouldn’t have been able to resist. We’d have been thrown off our land, and be living in a shanty town somewhere on the edge of a big city. En una villa,’ he repeats, and spits into the fire.
‘So this landowner came to throw you out of the house?’ I repeat. I still don’t know what to expect from the ceremony tomorrow. But maybe the what isn’t as important as the why.
‘He sent the police,’ says Valentín drily. ‘That was three years ago. In March, actually. Exactly three years ago.’
He lets a lungful of air out in a long breath, hunkers down again by the fireside. I sit down on a log, get out my cigarettes, take one, offer one to him. We light them from the fire.
‘It was cold then, we’re quite high up in the mountains here, there was lots of snow. There are all the children living here, my brothers and sisters, and some cousins, too. Luckily, on that day when the police came, they were all in school. So it was just me and my parents.’ He gestures with his cigarette. ‘Look where we live, so deep in the mountains, on a hill top: you wouldn’t believe that a vehicle could come up here, would you? When we needed an ambulance once because my mother was ill, we rang the hospital and they told us that nothing could come up here. But the police came in a four-by-four, they came all the way up here, they threw us out of the house and started to tear the house down. They didn’t care what would happen to us, that we’d be homeless.’
I think of Ambrosio Ainqueó’s tale. It had seemed to belong to another era, to the bad old days when such things could happen. But three years ago, in the very place where I sit now, exactly the same thing happened to Valentín, who can’t be more than twenty years old.
‘So what did you do?’
He bares his teeth in what might be a grim smile or a snarl.
‘We came back,’ he says briefly. ‘We came back and we put the roof back on, and we’re going to stay here, whatever happens. We’re going to continue our resistance. People helped us. The community, and other communities in the region. People showed solidarity. We have a lawyer, and some of the press wrote about us. And so...’ He shrugs. ‘This is our land. This is where we’re from.’
‘Is the ngillatun tomorrow going to be a thanksgiving as well, because you’re still here?’
Again that brief flash of white teeth.
‘We’re still here, but the fight isn’t over. We’re going to ask for strength to continue resisting. We took the landowner to court, and we lost, but we’re not accepting the verdict. We’re going to appeal, so we’re asking for a good outcome this time.’
65
NIGHT FALLS. DINNERTIME. There’s barbecued mutton and fresh bread (tea and bread for me), and then the maté circulates again. Outside, the hills surrounding the hut stand black against a sky glittering with stars. Horses shift beneath the trees. A low murmur of voices drifts out from the kitchen, and the wind sighs through the branches.
It’s cold now that the sun has gone in, and I am beginning to wonder where I will sleep. I had hoped that there would be space on the kitchen floor, hopefully near the stove, but the kitchen is still filled with people chatting away, and the time is coming up to eleven o’clock. I should be worried; under normal circumstances I would be worried, but I’m filled with a serene and completely irrational confidence that everything will work out fine.
Catalina is also tired. She sits in the warmest corner of the kitchen and tries to catch forty winks, but the bench wobbles, and when her head nods forwards, so does the entire bench, and Catalina nearly ends up with her head in the kitchen fire. She swears and laughs and gets up.
‘I need to go to sleep,’ she announces and buttonholes Doña Natalia, the lady of the house.
‘Where can we sleep, Doña Natalia?’
There are a couple of bedrooms at the back of the house, but they have been reserved for the family, for the elders and the children.
‘Haven’t you brought a tent?’ Doña Natalia wants to know.
Catalina and I look sheepish. Doña Natalia goes off somewhere, and we stay where we are by the side of the beautifully warm stove. I keep dozing off. Maybe, I think drowsily, I’ll just stay on this bench and sleep sitting up.
It’s warm, that’s the most important thing. In the absence of the coddling paraphernalia of civilisation (glass windows, heating, electric light) creature comforts that I take for granted have suddenly become much more important. Nature in the shape
of cold and darkness is out there, just on the other side of the window with its thin membrane of plastic sheeting. Nature is only just kept at bay by the crackling flames in the stove. I feel like a cave-dweller huddling by the fire. It’s an unsettling experience. My values and my way of thinking are being shaken up again, and in the knowledge that I will soon be back in the world I know I ride the rough waves and enjoy the experience, and wonder what is really important and what is not.
Doña Natalia comes back, and with her a young woman.
‘We brought a tent for two persons,’ says this wonderful apparition. ‘You’re welcome to borrow it, we won’t actually need it.’
Yet another novel experience: how to pitch a tent in the dark. Of course neither of us has brought a torch, and Catalina has never before assembled a tent. It takes us a while, and there is much rustling and giggling and stumbling under the magnificent sky.
‘I can’t wait to sleep,’ Catalina says and yawns.
There remains the small question of what I am to sleep on. I haven’t brought anything other than lots of layers of clothes and my waterproof coat, which Catalina has been wearing all evening because she didn’t bring a coat; and the mountain night has grown autumnally chilly. Nobody has brought any extra mattresses or sleeping bags (and really, it would be a bit much to ask). Doña Natalia offers me a fleece for a mattress, and a blanket from the kitchen.
I stumble in the dark to where the men sit around the dying embers of the asado fire, and ask for a fleece. The fleece is exactly as it came off the sheep, rough and full of burrs and bits of dry grass, and the legs with their small, hard hooves are still dangling from it. (Happily, the head is not.) I heave it on to my shoulders (it is heavy!) and stagger back to the tent.
All I hear, after Catalina and I have finally stopped fidgeting and rustling in the tiny tent, is a faraway murmur of voices from the men by the campfire and some hardy souls who have come to stand outside to smoke. Occasionally, laughter wells up and ebbs away again, and metal clinks against metal as the maté is replenished from the tin kettle. My face and my hands are cold and my hair smells of woodsmoke. I feel as though I’m ten years old and have somehow strayed into the pages of an adventure novel. This is the kind of thing I’ve always dreamed of but never really thought would happen: I’m spending the night on a sheepskin under the starry Southern sky in the Andes, by an open fire, and tomorrow morning I’m going to experience a ngillatun.
Beyond the Pampas Page 24