In Patagonia

  The lecture melted into a dream voyage. Marquesans beached their canoes in the fjords of Southern Chile, scaled the Andes, settled by Lake Musters and merged with the indigenous population. Father Palacios described his own discovery, in Tierra del Fuego, the sculpture of a headless woman, life size and smothered in red ochre.

  ‘Oh Dios! Que conocimientos!’

  ‘And you have photographs?’ I asked.

  ‘Certainly, I have photographs,’ he smiled again, ‘but they are not for publication. And now let me ask you a question. Upon which continent did the human species emerge?’

  ‘Africa.’

  ‘False! Totally false! Here in Patagonia, sentient beings in the Tertiary witnessed the formation of the Andes. An ancestor of man lived in Tierra del Fuego before the African australopithecines. Furthermore,’ he added casually, ‘the last one was seen in 1928.’

  ‘Genio!’

  Father Palacios then outlined the story (which he has since published in a learned journal) of the Yoshil:

  The Yoshil (an Indian name) was—and perhaps still is—a tail-less protohominid, with lichenous hair of a yellowish green colour. It stood about eighty centimetres high, walked on two feet and lived in the territory of the Haush. It always went armed with a stone or short club. By day it lived in the ñire trees (Notofagus antarctica) but at night it would warm itself by the fire of a lonely hunter. The Yoshil was probably vegetarian and fed on wild fruits, fungi, and the white grubs that are the staple of the Magellanic woodpecker.

  The first modern account of the Yoshil was that of the Haush hunter, Yioi:molke, who saw one while hunting cormorants at Caleta Yrigoyen in 1886; the last positive sighting was in 1918 by the hunter Pai:men. But the most distressing encounter was that of the Indian, Paka, Father Palacios’s informant, some time during the Great War.

  Paka was camping alone in the forest when a Yoshil appeared at the fire. He knew of its dangerous reputation, reached for his bow, but the animal bounded for safety. Paka thought he’d be murdered if he slept and lay down with his weapon at the ready. The Yoshil approached. He fired and heard a scream of pain. In the morning he found the corpse nearby. To his horror, the animal had the same features as his brother, who had recently died. He dug a tomb, uncertain if he was burying a Yoshil, or reburying his brother.

  ‘I have decided,’ Father Palacios concluded, ‘to name the creature Fuegopithecus Pakensis. The name, of course, is provisional. The Yoshil may be the same species as the other Patagonian protohominid, Homunculus Harringtoni, from Chubut. Only skeletal material will clarify the issue.’

  ‘Dios! Qué ciencia!’

  ‘And now,’ he said, ‘I think we have finished our survey,’ and buried himself in his book.

  I left, gasping with wonder at the inspiration of the autodidact.

  ‘A genius,’ breathed my companion, as we brushed through the tamarisks towards the college buildings.

  ‘Tell me, am I wrong or is the college shut?’

  ‘Shut,’ he said. ‘Shut. Various problems.’

  The walls were covered with scarlet fists and the pronouncements of some proletarian front.

  ‘The boys,’ he shook his head. ‘The boys.’

  The chapel bell clanked.

  ‘And now I must go to Mass,’ he said. ‘Tell me, brother, which religion have you?’

  ‘Protestant.’

  ‘Different road,’ he sighed. ‘Same Divinity. Adiós, Hermanō.’

  37

  I NOW had two reasons to head back to the Cordillera: to see Charley Milward’s old sheep-station at Valle Huemeules and to find Father Palacios’s unicorn. I took a bus to Perito Moreno and got there in a dust-storm. The restaurant was owned by an Arab, who served lentils and radishes and kept a sprig of mint on the bar to remind him of a home he had not seen. I asked him about traffic going north. He shook his head.

  ‘A few Chilean trucks, maybe, but very very few.’

  The distance to Valle Huemeules was over a hundred miles but I decided to risk it. At the edge of town someone had written ‘Perón=Gorilla’ in blue paint on an abandoned police post. Nearby was a pile of gin bottles, a memorial to a dead trucker; his friends chucked on a bottle whenever they passed. I walked two hours, five hours, ten hours, and no truck. My notebook conveys something of the mood:Walked all day and the next day. The road straight, grey, dusty, and trafficless. The wind relentless, heading you off. Sometimes you heard a truck, you knew for certain it was a truck, but it was the wind. Or the noise of gears changing down, but that also was the wind. Sometimes the wind sounded like an unloaded truck banging over a bridge. Even if a truck had come up behind you wouldn’t have heard it. And even if you’d been downwind, the wind would have drowned the engine. The one noise you did hear was a guanaco. A noise like a baby trying to cry and sneeze at once. You saw him a hundred yards off, a single male, bigger and more graceful than a llama, with his orange coat and white upstanding tail. Guanacos are shy animals, you were told, but this one was mad for you. And when you could walk no more and laid out your sleeping bag, he was there gurgling and snivelling and keeping the same distance. In the morning he was right up close, but the shock of you getting out of your skin was too much for him. That was the end of a friendship and you watched him bounding away over a thorn bush like a galleon in a following sea.

  Next day hotter and windier than before. The hot blasts knocked you back, sucked at your legs, pressed on your shoulders. The road beginning and ending in a grey mirage. You’d see a dust-devil behind and, though you knew now never to hope for a truck, you thought it was a truck. Or there’d be black specks coming closer, and you stopped, sat down and waited, but the specks walked off sideways and you realized they were sheep.

  A Chilean truck did come on the afternoon of the second day. The driver was a cheerful tough, his feet smelling of cheese. He liked Pinochet and was pleased with the general situation in his country.

  He took me to Lago Blanco, where the lake water was a dull creamy white, and beyond was a basin of emerald grass blocked by a line of blue mountains. This was Valle Huemeules.

  Charley Milward was last here in 1919. The bar-keeper remembered his moustaches. ‘Los enormes bigotes’, she said, and imitated the way he hobbled with a stick. The policeman was having his late-afternoon gin and she ordered him to drive me to the estancia. Meekly he agreed, but to show his mettle went home for a revolver.

  The Estancia Valle Huemeules was painted red and white and bore the mark of efficient centralization. It was run by the Menéndez-Behety family, the sheep-farming moguls of the South, who with a French wool-buyer bought Charley out after the First World War. The manager was a German and mistrusted me on sight. I think he suspected I had a claim on the place, but he did allow me to sleep in the peons’ quarters.

  They were in the middle of shearing. The shearing shed had twenty bays and as many shearers; wiry Chilenos, stripped to the waist, their pants shiny black with grease from the wool. A driveshaft, powered by a steam engine, ran the length of the gallery. There were noises of whirring pistons, slapping belts, ratcheting clippers and bleating sheep. When the boys tied the animals’ legs, all the fight went out of them and they lay, dead weight, till the torture was over. Then, naked and gashed with red cuts about their udders, they bounded wildly into the air, as if jumping over an imaginary fence, or jumping to be free.

  The day ended in a vicious sunset of red and purple. The supper bell rang and the shearers downed clippers and ran for the kitchen. The old cook had a sweet smile. He cut me off half a leg of lamb.

  ‘I can’t eat that much.’

  ‘Surely you can.’

  He held his hands across his stomach. It was all over for him.

  ‘I have cancer,’ he said. ‘This is my last summer.’

  After dark the gauchos reclined against their saddles and stretched out with the ease of well-fed carnivores. The apprentices fed poplar logs into an iron stove on which two mate kettles were boiling.

  One man
presided over the ritual. He filled the hot brown gourds and the green liquid frothed to the neck. The men fondled the gourds and sucked at the bitter drink, talking about mate the way other men talked about women.

  They gave me a straw mattress, and I curled up on the floor and tried to sleep. The men threw craps and their conversation turned to knives. They unsheathed their own blades and compared their qualities, drumming the tips on the table. The light came from a single hurricane lamp and the shadowy blades twitched on the white wall above my head. A Chilean shearer made comic suggestions about what his knife could do to a gringo. He was very drunk.

  Another man said: ‘I’d better let the gringo sleep in my room.’

  38

  A BOER gave me a lift back south, through Perito Moreno, to Arroyo Feo, where the volcanic badlands began. He was a veterinary surgeon and he didn’t think much of the other Boers.

  A frill of pleated white cliffs danced round the horizon. The surface of the ground was blotched with scabs of dribbling magenta. I spent the night with a road gang, whose caravans sat inside a ring of yellow bulldozers. The men were eating greasy fritters and asked me to share them. Perón smirked over the company.

  Among them was a Scot with ginger hair and the physique of a caber thrower. He peered at me with milky blue eyes, feeling out affinities of race and background with a mixture of curiosity and pain. His name was Robbie Ross.

  The other men were Latins or Indian half-breeds.

  ‘This is an Englishman,’ one of them said.

  ‘A Scotsman,’ I corrected.

  ‘Si, soy Escocés,’ said Robbie Ross. He had no words of English. ‘Mi patria es la Inglaterra misma.’

  For him England and Scotland were an indivisible blur. He shouldered the brunt of the hard work and was target for the others’ witticisms.

  ‘Es borracho,’ the man said. ‘Is a drunk.’

  Obviously the men didn’t expect Robbie Ross to get mad. Obviously they had called him a drunk before. But he set his clenched fist on the table and watched his own whitening knuckles. The colour drained from his face. His lips quivered, and he lunged for the man’s throat, and tried to drag him from the caravan.

  The others overpowered him and he began to cry. In the night I heard him crying and in the morning he wouldn’t even look at another Englishman.

  39

  AN OLD red Mercedes truck drove into the camp at eight and the driver stopped for coffee. He was heading for Lago Posadas with a load of bricks and took me on. Paco Ruiz was eighteen. He was a pretty boy with strong white teeth and candid brown eyes. His beard and beret helped him cultivate the Ché Guevara look. He had the beginning of a beer stomach and did not like walking.

  His father was a bank clerk who had scraped up the money for the truck. Paco loved his truck and called her Rosaura. He scrubbed her and polished her and hung her cab with lace frills. Above her dashboard he fixed a statuette of the Virgin of Luján, a St Christopher and a plastic penguin that nodded with the corrugations of the road. He pinned nudes to the roof, but somehow the girls were an abstraction whereas Rosaura was a real woman.

  He and Rosaura had been on the road three months. When she wore out, there’d be money for a new Rosaura and they’d drive on and on for ever. Paco Ruiz was very idealistic. He did not want to make money and was pleased when people called him a tipo gaucho. The other teamsters helped him and taught him how to swear. His favourite expression was concha de cotorra which means ‘parrot-cunt’.

  Paco had overloaded Rosaura, and with her slipping clutch and patched tyres, we had to grind downhill in low gear. We were halfway down a small canyon, when he flicked the gear into top and we roared to the bottom. There was a hissing sound.

  ‘Puta madre! Puncture!’

  The left inside tyre had burst. Paco parked Rosaura on the gravel verge, tilting inwards so the slope would take the weight off the wheel. He unfreed the spare tyre and threw down the jack. But it was the wrong jack. He had lent his own-and this was typical-to a friend with a heavier load. And this small jack lifted the wheel so high but not high enough.

  So Paco shovelled a hole out under the tyre and slipped off the wheels, but as he removed the inner one, the foot of the jack started slipping through the road surface. Rosaura yawed sideways and the bricks shifted.

  ‘Qué macana! What a mess!’

  We waited seven hours for a truck and then could stand waiting no longer and tried again. Paco lay under the axle and worked the jack, this time packing the feet with stones. He was caked with grease and dust, red in the face, and showing signs of losing his temper. He dug a bigger hole under the axle, got the chassis jacked up so far, and even got both wheels back. But they were askew and he couldn’t tighten the nuts and he started booting the wheel and screaming: ‘Puta ... puta ... puta ... puta ... putana ... puta ... puta ... puta ... ’

  I walked to the nearest estancia for help. The owner was a toothless Malagueno in his nineties. He had no jack and I cut back over the grey scrub. I could see the line of the road and Rosaura’s red cab, but, coming up close, I saw she had keeled over further and no sign of Paco. I ran, thinking he was trapped underneath, and found him sitting away from the road, white, frightened and whimpering, feeling the bruise coming up on his shin. He had tried again and his leg had been grazed when the jack slipped off the axle. Now it really was a mess. Never kick the woman you love.

  40

  PACO AND I got help from the road gang and drove into Lago Posadas a day late. We stayed with a gentle, depressed Castilian, a monarchist, who had left Burgos when the King left Madrid, preferring to live in a Republic other than his own.

  ‘The unicorn,’ he said. ‘The famous unicorn. I know the place. We call it Cerro de los Indios.’ And he gestured out across the tamarisks of the flood-plain to a dome of reddish rock straddling the entrance to the valley. The sky was a hard thin blue and the two circling black dots were condors.

  ‘There are many condors,’ he said, ‘and also pumas.’

  The Cerro de los Indios was a lump of basalt, flecked red and green, smooth as patinated bronze and fracturing in linear slabs. The Indians had chosen the place with an unfaltering eye for the sacred. From the foot of the rock I looked down the turquoise line of Lakes Posadas and Purreydon stretching through a corridor of purple cliffs into Chile. On each overhang the hunters had painted the animals of the chase in red ochre. They had also painted themselves, tiny pin-men leaping about energetically. The paintings were thought to be about ten thousand years old.

  Alone on its rock face, Father Palacios’s unicorn exalted its horn as it was written in the Book of Psalms. It had a thick neck and tapering body.

  ‘Can’t be old,’ I thought. ‘Must be a bull in profile.’

  But if it were old, really old, then it had to be a unicorn.

  Underneath was a votive shrine with; offerings—a tin of Nestlé’s milk, a plaster model of a girl in bed, a nail dipped in grey paint, and some burned-out candles.

  41

  THE SPANIARD’S wife packed me a lunch of cold chops and I walked north through a country broken by gulches and mesas, where the most unlikely colours had been spat to the surface. In one place the rocks were alternately lilac, rose-pink and lime-green. There was a bright-yellow gorge bristling with the bones of extinct mammals. It led into a dried lake bed, ringed with purple rocks where cow skulls stuck out of a crust of flaky orange mud.

  The unnatural colours gave me a headache, but I cheered up on seeing a green tree—a Lombardy poplar, the punctuation mark of man.

  Beside an adobe cabin a wizened old couple were sunning themselves. The woman had covered the walls of her room with collage. Her surroundings had enflamed her imagination. The showpiece was a painted plaster head of a Japanese geisha, haloed, like a madonna, with the hairy thighs of Argentine foot ballers. Above this was a pottery dove, emblem of the Holy Ghost, now converted to a bird of paradise with blue plastic ribbons and dyed ostrich plumes. She had placed a photo of the Patagon
ian fox next to a crayon drawing of General Rosas.

  The woman passed me her maté gourd. She filled my bottle with water that tasted sweet from sheep-droppings, and waved me to the path across the mountains.

  In a brick-red sunset I came to the cottage of a German. He lived with a scrawny Indian boy. The two were sitting down to eat, formally, at table, on metal chairs from an ice-cream parlour. Both had identical knives and were hacking at a charred leg of lamb. Neither spoke to the other or to me. Silently the German gave me a tin plate. Silently, after dinner, he led me to the barn and pointed to a pile of sheepskins.

  In the morning it was overcast and rain-clouds were streaming out of Chile. The German stretched his arm and pointed to a nick in the line of black cliffs. His wrist flopped, indicating a valley the far side. I waved and he lifted his huge brown hand to the sky, splaying his fingers wide.

  I followed some horse-tracks that combed through stubbly yellow grass. At one place, the ground was strewn with white flakes, the carapace of a dead armadillo. The track zig-zagged up the mesa and went down into a brown basin littered with dead trees. At the far end was a farmhouse set in poplars.

  The owner was coming out with his peons. He was a tall young man in a striped poncho. His horse was black and gleaming, and his silver trappings jingled as he rode.

  ‘The women are in the kitchen,’ he called. ‘Tell them to get you some coffee.’

  His wife and mother sat in a white-tiled kitchen. They gave me coffee and chocolate cake and ewe’s milk cheese and spiced apple jelly. All year they sat in the kitchen, except for the ten days when they provisioned in Comodoro. I thanked the ladies and walked another eight miles. By mid-day I was looking down on the poppy-red roofs of the Estancia Paso Roballos.