Beyond the Pampas

by Imogen Herrad

  66

  I WAKE IN THE MIDDLE of the night, not quite sure why. It’s pitch black in the tent, and quite cold. My nose is cold, my feet lumps of ice. I have no idea what the time is. I can’t read my watch in the dark. I can hear a murmur of voices, and the clinking of kettle and maté.

  Some people are still awake, and chatting, I think. We went to bed around eleven, and now it will be, what, one or two in the morning? This is going to be a long, cold night.

  But just as I am about to drift off again, there is a sudden blast as of a trumpet.

  Dogs begin to bark. A cockerel crows.

  Another fanfare.

  Catalina stirs. ‘I guess they want us to get up,’ she says. ‘Is it five o’clock yet?’

  Is it what?

  ‘On days when religious ceremonies are held, we always get up at five,’ she explains.

  I’m glad I didn’t know that last night. A moment ago, I had been worrying that there were going to be several more hours of night to come. Now, I rather wish there were. The sun won’t rise until eight o’clock at this time of year. What on earth is there to get up at five for?

  The trumpet sounds again, and the dogs join in with much enthusiasm. Actually, it isn’t a trumpet, it’s a trutruka.

  ‘Come on,’ says Catalina. We look for our shoes in the dark. The tent is tiny and filled to capacity with the two of us, the fleece and Catalina’s camping mattress and sleeping bag; yet our shoes have found unexpected crevices in which to hide.

  Shoes finally located and fumbled onto the correct feet in the dark, we unzip the tent entrance and clamber out.

  It is like ink outside. A profusion of stars sparkles like diamonds in the black hair of the night sky. Even stumbling outside the enclosure for a pee on the dark hillside is a rather poetic experience.

  The kitchen door stands open, bright light streams outside from the Tilley lamp, which yesterday afternoon had appeared gloomy after the brilliant sunlight. I sidle into the kitchen, a bit uneasy amongst all the people I only met yesterday. I’m beginning to feel self-conscious now that the ceremony is about to start. For one thing, I haven’t a clue what’s going to happen. Will it start now, soon? What will they do and where will they do it, and how long will it take? Also, I’m a stranger here, not one of them, and the act that is about to take place is not only an expression of Mapuche religion, but of Mapuche identity as well.

  I don’t exactly feel like a wingka intruder, but I do feel a bit conspicuous.

  Doña Natalia sits by the stove, pouring hot water from a kettle into the maté. I borrow one of the mugs and some hot water and go outside to the standpipe to brush my teeth. There is no mirror that I can see, so my face will have to look after itself for today.

  Teeth brushed and deodorant sprayed on, I feel much better. Even some of the awkwardness has gone.

  I wash the mug under the standpipe and return it to Doña Natalia, then go back outside to join the small knot of smokers for a cigarette by way of breakfast.

  The sky is coal black, and the early morning wind is cold on my face. The air smells of woodsmoke and cigarette smoke and cold earth. A horse snorts somewhere in the dark. The cockerel keeps crowing.

  I am finally driven back into the kitchen by the cold. All the good seats near the stove have already been taken. Catalina sits in state in the warmest corner, wielding a kettle and maté. She waves and grins, and I grin back. I’m glad that I have met her.

  I’ve been here little more than twelve hours, but somehow it already feels quite natural to go and sit in the kitchen with everybody else, near the warmth of the stove and the light of the lamp. People talk in low voices, or just sit in silence, waking slowly. The maté circles.

  I finally find a draughty seat on a bench by the door that leads from the kitchen to the rooms at the back of the house. After a while, the door opens and a young woman comes out carrying a sleepy child. It is Victoria, our saviour who conjured up a tent out of thin air last night.

  Everyone on the bench shifts a bit closer together, and she sits down and rocks the child on her lap, whispering something into its ear. The child gradually wakes up, and begins to tell her a long, involved story. She listens attentively while it searches for words, or gets tangled in the intricacies of language and the tale. Listening to children talking, I wonder sometimes if they have some native tongue of their own before they learn to speak. Their efforts to express themselves resemble so much those of a person learning a foreign language. Hearing this little one talk – he is maybe two, three years old – I get the sense that he knows quite well what he’s trying to say, but just doesn’t know the words.

  His mother listens without appearing the least bit bored or impatient while the child talks himself awake. She smiles and nods and answers his questions as though there were nothing more interesting in the world. For all the material things this house on the top of the hill doesn’t have, there is no shortage of time here. Nobody is in a hurry. Nobody is impatient.

  When the child has talked himself out, Victoria lifts him from her lap and hands him over to one of the gauchos who has come in, her husband.

  With her hands freed, she gets up to fill a thermos flask with hot water from the kettle on the stove. She fills her own maté nearly to the rim with yerba tea, and then adds at least three heaped spoons full of sugar. She unscrews the thermos and adds hot water. Steam curls up, and with it a strong, hot scent of herbs.

  ‘You don’t drink maté, do you?’ she says to me as she prepares to pass the maté round.

  The steam curls, tempting with its heat. The last time I tried maté, in Dudú’s house in Gaiman, I found it too bitter and decided to stick with familiar tea and coffee. But now my stomach growls like a puma. I’m dying to get something warm inside me.

  ‘Er, actually...’ I say. ‘I’ll give it a try.’

  She smiles with real pleasure as she hands me the cup. ‘I think you’ll like this, we make it sweet.’

  The maté is sweet and bitter and strong and hot. It isn’t heavy, like coffee or even tea; there is a herbal-ness about it that I like. Perhaps an infusion of hay (with three spoonsful of sugar) would taste like this.

  ‘You’re right,’ I say to Victoria, surprised. ‘I do like it.’

  She refills the maté and hands it to the person on my right; then she turns to the woman who sits on her other side and says, ‘Did you see? ¡La señora se animó a tomar mate!’ The lady decided to try my maté!

  67

  EVERYBODY ON THE HILL is unfailingly courteous. Most people address me with the formal usted. Women over the age of roughly forty are addressed as señora; the elderly ladies as abuela (Grandmother) but also in the formal usted. Is that because manners out here are still as they were in the old days? Or is it a Mapuche custom?

  Victoria is visibly pleased that is was her maté that tempted me to give the national beverage a try. When my turn comes again, she holds the cup up questioningly, and beams when I nod and take it for another mouthful of hot water, caffeine and sugar. I might get used to this stuff.

  Slowly the night lightens to grey. I’m sliding back into sleepiness, wondering why on earth we had to get up so early just to sit about in the kitchen for hours. The longkos get up stiffly and make to walk outside. Nobody has said a word that I am aware of, but one after the other, everybody gets up and drifts outside.

  It is light outside now, a cold, clear morning. The sky is the palest shade of blue, almost silvery white. The sun has yet to rise above the peaks.

  An old, old lady is dragging a large bundle in one hand and a plastic bag the size of a bin liner in the other. She sets them down and begins to rummage, pulling out lengths of cloth: blue, yellow, red, white. From them and a handful of safety-pins, she fashions cloaks and headbands. Those the two women longkos put on are dark blue. Cloaks of a bright sky blue go on two teenage girls. One of them is Deborá, the daughter of the house on the hill. They are also given bright yellow headbands, and finally the longko pulls out a
couple of silver necklaces which are braided into the girls’ hair. I remember what Juana Luz told me about the kamarukun ceremony. The girls are one of a pair of piwichén, sacred children. Children and teenagers always take part in Mapuche religious ceremonies, and there is a very practical reason for that. When I ask afterwards, I am told that the girls’ role was to learn, to take part; so that, when they will be grown women with children of their own one day, they will be able to pass the knowledge on to the next generation. In fact, everybody takes part at some point in the ceremony. There are no spectators.

  While the longkos are busy with the clothes, Valentín has brought some long, thin wooden poles. They clatter together in the morning breeze. Everybody is now assembled outside, the longkos and the two piwichén girls in the front row. Almost all the women wear headscarves.

  We stand and wait. I wish I knew what was going to happen. It is a little unnerving, being the only outsider here. I don’t feel unwelcome or intrusive, just ignorant and rather invisible.

  And cold. The effect of the maté has worn off. I’m wearing all the clothes I brought, but I haven’t eaten anything since the bread and tea last night. I have hardly moved this morning to get my circulation going. While we wait, I dash back indoors to get the blanket I’d used last night, which I returned to the kitchen this morning. I wrap it around myself and go back outside.

  Most of the men seem to have disappeared from the crowd. The rest of us get down to some more waiting.

  The minutes pass. The dawn breeze touches chilly fingers to my face and my exposed hands clutching the blanket, creeps into my shoes.

  Near me stands Inés. She is maybe twelve years old, and has come here in the company of a short-tempered elderly man.

  ‘Everybody thinks I’m his grandchild but in fact, I’m his daughter,’ she explained yesterday, resigned.

  She doesn’t speak much, and spent much of the afternoon and evening sitting quietly on a bench by herself. She’s too old to play with the younger children but not old enough to be friends with teenagers like Deborá.

  One of the longkos, an gnarled old man, has moved to stand at the front of the crowd. He is making a speech in Mapudungun. Inés stands near me in a hoodie and jeans, her arms wrapped around herself. Her face is pinched with cold. I struggle for a bit with my baser nature, then move closer to her and hold out the blanket, offering to share it. We huddle together and tug at the quilt until most of both of us is covered. My front is now exposed to the cold, but the rest of me is still warm, and I feel better knowing that Inés is also a little warmer. I spoke to her father yesterday, and he told me that the two of them live alone on his remote chacra. All his other children are grown up and left, and his wife recently died. There is something about Inés, her withdrawn air, the way her eyes look inward and don’t make much contact with other people, that worries me. I used to be like that at her age: quiet, withdrawn, not making contact with anyone.

  Sharing the quilt with her now, I can at least offer her some companionship.

  68

  THERE IS THE SOUND of hoofbeats: the men have evidently been to saddle the horses. Now, they ride in a circle around the house on top of the hill, three times. After each completed circle, they raise their fists and shout out a single word, it sounds like Hey or Yay. The women and girls and the horseless men inside the enclosure also raise their fists and shout. Perhaps this is a call to the sky, to the gods, or maybe – this is how it appears to me – it is an expression of the strength of the people, a way of saying, ‘Here we still are, we are loud, we are strong, we will last.’

  The two old ladies now each hold a kultrung, the Mapuche ritual drum. It is held in one hand and beaten with a small wooden club. As I look closer, I see that one of the kultrungs has been made by stretching a skin tightly over an enamel bowl.

  The women longkos beat the kultrungs and chant in wavering voices, while the man longko makes another long speech in Mapudungun. The men on horseback gallop another three times round the house and the enclosure, then the crowd shows signs of dispersing. I begin to cherish hopes that this is it, and that we can go back indoors, sit by the lovely warm stove and drink more lovely hot maté.

  I should have known, really. A fully grown ngillatun can go on for five days. Even a comparatively simple appeal ceremony like this is going to last longer than just an hour and a half.

  Everybody now gathers their things together, musical instruments, the poles, various flags and a number of buckets that have appeared from somewhere, and begins to walk downhill to the valley. The bigger children lead the smaller ones by the hand, and the dogs come of their own accord.

  The men on horseback are already down there, and are about to drive the poles into the ground. Once they stand securely, a flag is fastened to each: the blue, white and yellow Mapuche flag with its arrowhead in the centre, signifying the ongoing fight and resistance of the People of the Earth.

  Suddenly, the place resembles a scene like ones I’ve seen in photos in Oscar Payaguala’s museum in Comodoro Rivadavia: the flags fluttering on slender poles, ringed by a crowd of people standing in a semi-circle and a group of men on horseback. To the front of the crowd stand the longkos, male and female. Among the riders are two small boys, one on a brown horse, the other astride a white one. In the photos in the museum there was also one brown horse and one white. Payaguala even told me why, but I didn’t understand, and didn’t ask him to explain. I never thought then that I’d get to attend a ngillatun.

  We stand here, ringed by mountains in the cool morning breeze of an autumn morning in the foothills of the Andes, and I remember my first trip to Gaiman, almost exactly five years before. How nervous I was then, how intimidated by the land, the size of it, the unfamiliarity of the landscape, the country, the continent.

  And look what Patagonia has given me: new friends and adventures, horizons as endless as the sky. I’m still nervous and often timid. I probably will be for the rest of my life. But this is what Patagonia has taught me: to listen less to the voice of fear, and more to the enticing murmur of ‘Why not?’

  The trutruka sounds and the longkos beat a rhythm on their kultrung, and as many women as there are flagpoles go forward with buckets full of a mixture of what they later tell me is chicha, maize beer, and wheat. Each kneels down at the foot of a flagpole and ladles this mixture onto the ground. It looks like a gesture of gratitude, or perhaps a gift in exchange for the assistance they ask for. When they’re done, the next half a dozen comes forward, and the next after them, while the men play a melody on pillilkas, little clay pipes, and the old ladies beat a rhythm on their kultrungs.

  I get a little caught up in the spirit of it all myself. If I’m ever able to write this down and make it into a book and get it published, I decide, I will travel back to this place and bury a copy in the earth of Patagonia: as my thank you to Madre Tierra, Ñuke Mapu, Mother Earth, for showing me so many wonders.

  The sun comes up over the mountains and floods the tableland with warmth and light; and the horsemen thunder round the circle another three times, and all the Mapuche lift up their balled fists and shout their triumph and their challenge into the light.

  Afterwards, everybody takes off their ceremonial cloaks and headbands. They become ordinary pieces of cloth again and go back into the black bin liner, until the next ceremony.

  Valentín and the other young men see to the horses, then light the fire again and roast the remains of last night’s sheep. Doña Natalia stokes the cast-iron stove and heats water for maté. Everybody has lunch – it’s mid-day by now – and I eat bread and maté. Catalina and I strike the tent, pack our few belongings and say our good-byes to the company. An old lady, one of the longkos, gives us both a rib-crushing hug and a dazzling, toothless smile.

  We join the steady trickle of folk making for the road, most of them on foot this time; it’s an easy walk downhill. Only the abuelos travel on horseback again, gnarled old men and women riding nonchalantly, one foot supported by a stirrup an
d the other dangling free; they hold the reins loosely in one hand and with the other give us a cheery wave as they go past.

  Before we know it, we’re at the foot of the hill, by the bridge and Catalina’s car. Standing here now, one foot still in the hills and one on the road to Esquel, it seems hard to believe that in a couple of days’ time, I’ll be in Buenos Aires, on my way to the airport and home.

  ‘You’ll come back,’ says Catalina. It’s not a question; it’s a simple statement of fact.

  We speed towards the mountains of Esquel, the car incredibly fast on the bumpy gravel road after a couple of days of moving at walking pace only.

  It’s the end of one journey.

  The beginning of another.

  Select Bibliography

  María Teresa Boschin & Rodolfo Magin Casamiquela (eds.), Patagonia: 13.000 años de historia, Buenos Aires 2001

  Curapil Curruhuinca & Luís Roux, Sayhueque: el último cacique, Buenos Aires 1986

  Fundacion Ameghino (ed.), Los Galeses en la Patagonia, Trelew 2004

  Víctor M. Gavilán Pinto, La Nación Mapuche. Puelmapu ke gulumapu, Santiago de Chile 2007

  Olivia Hughes de Mulhall (ed.), John Murray Thomas: pequeño hombre pero gran heroe para la historia de Chubut, Trelew 1999

  William Hughes, A Orillas del Río Chubut, Rawson 1993

  Lewis Jones, La Colonia Galesa, Rawson 1993

  Thomas Jones (Glan Camwy), Historia de los Comienzos de la Colonia en la Patagonia, Trelew 1999