‘A very, very big bath, and very deep,’ said Marie.
‘No, a nice hot shower and a comfortable chair,’ said Sophie.
‘Just a bed,’ said Jacquie, ‘a large feather bed.’
‘A bar that serves real ice with its drinks,’ I said dreamily.
Dicky was silent for a moment. Then he glanced down at his feet, thickly encrusted with rapidly drying mud.
‘I must have a man to clean my feets,’ he said firmly.
‘Well, I doubt whether we’ll get any of that at Deseado,’ I said gloomily, ‘but we’d better press on.’
When we drove into Deseado at ten o’clock the next morning, it became immediately obvious that we could not expect any such luxuries as feather beds, ice in the drinks, or even a man to clean our feets. It was the most extraordinarily dead-looking town I had ever been in. It resembled the set for a rather bad Hollywood cowboy film, and gave the impression that its inhabitants (two thousand, according to the guide-book) had suddenly packed up and left it alone to face the biting winds and scorching sun. The empty, rutted streets between the blank-faced houses were occasionally stirred by the wind, which produced half-hearted dust-devils, that swirled up for a moment and then collapsed tiredly to the ground. As we drove slowly into what we imagined to be the centre of the town we saw only a dog, trotting briskly about his affairs, and a child crouched in the middle of a road, absorbed in some mysterious game of childhood. Then, swinging the Land-Rover round a corner, we were startled to see a man on horseback, clopping slowly along the road with the subdued air of one who is the sole survivor of a catastrophe. He pulled up and greeted us politely, but without interest, when we stopped, and directed us to the only two hotels in the place. As these turned out to be opposite each other and both equally unprepossessing from the outside, we chose one by tossing a coin and made our way inside.
In the bar we found the proprietor, who, with the air of one who had just suffered a terrible bereavement, reluctantly admitted that he had accommodation, and led us through dim passages to three small, grubby rooms. Dicky, his deer-stalker on the back of his head, stood in the centre of his room, pulling off his white gloves, surveying the sagging bed and its grey linen with a cat-like fastidiousness.
‘You know what, Gerry?’ he said with conviction. ‘This is the stinkiest hotel I ever dream.’
‘I hope you never dream of a stinkier one,’ I assured him.
Presently we all repaired to the bar to have a drink and await the arrival of one Captain Giri, whom I had an introduction to, a man who knew all about the penguin colonies of Puerto Deseado. We sat round a small table, sipping our drinks and watching the other inhabitants of the bar with interest. For the most part they seemed to consist of very old men, with long, sweeping moustaches, whose brown faces were seamed and stitched by the wind. They sat in small groups, crouched over their tiny tumblers of cognac or wine with a dead air, as though they were hibernating there in this dingy bar, staring hopelessly into the bottoms of their glasses, wondering when the wind would die down, and knowing it would not. Dicky, delicately smoking a cigarette, surveyed the smoke-blackened walls, the rows of dusty bottles, and the floor with its twenty-year-old layer of dirt well trodden into its surface.
‘What a bar, eh?’ he said to me.
‘Not very convivial, is it?’
‘It is so old … it has an air of old,’ he said staring about him. ‘You know, Gerry, I bet it is so old that even the flies have beards.’
Then the door opened suddenly, a blast of cold air rushed into the bar, the old men looked up in a flat-eyed, reptilian manner, and through the door strode Captain Giri. He was a tall, well-built man with blond hair, a handsome, rather aesthetic face and the most vivid and candid blue eyes I had ever seen. Having introduced himself he sat down at our table and looked round at us with such friendliness and good humour in his child-like eyes that the dead atmosphere of the bar dropped away, and we suddenly found ourselves becoming alive and enthusiastic. We had a drink, and then Captain Giri produced a large roll of charts and spread them on the table, while we pored over them.
‘Penguins,’ said the Captain meditatively, running his forefinger over the chart. ‘Now, down here is the best colony … by far the best and biggest, but I think that that is too far for you, is it not?’
‘Well, it is a bit,’ I admitted. ‘We didn’t want to go that far south if we could avoid it. It’s a question of time, really. I had hoped that there would be a reasonable colony within fairly easy reach of Deseado.’
‘There is, there is,’ said the Captain, shuffling the charts like a conjuror and producing another one from the pile. ‘Now, here, you see, at this spot … it’s about four hours’ drive from Deseado … all along this bay here.’
‘That’s wonderful,’ I said enthusiastically, ‘just the right distance.’
‘There is only one thing that worries me,’ said the Captain, turning troubled blue eyes on to me. ‘Are there enough birds there for what you want … for your photography?’
‘Well,’ I said doubtfully, ‘I want a fair number. How many are there in this colony?’
‘At a rough estimate I should say a million,’ said Captain Giri. ‘Will that be enough?’
I gaped at him. The man was not joking. He was seriously concerned that a million penguins might prove to be too meagre a quantity for my purpose.
‘I think I can make out with a million penguins,’ I said. ‘I should be able to find one or two photogenic ones among that lot. Tell me, are they all together, or scattered about?’
‘Well, there are about half or three-quarters concentrated here,’ he said, stabbing at the chart. ‘And the rest are distributed all along the bay here.’
‘Well, that seems perfect to me. Now what about somewhere to camp?’
‘Ah!’ said Captain Giri. ‘That is the difficulty. Now, just here is the estancia of a friend of mine, Señor Huichi. He is not on the estancia at the moment. But if we went to see him he might let you stay there. It is, you see, about two kilometres from the main colony, so it would be a good place for you to stay.’
‘That would be wonderful,’ I said enthusiastically. ‘When could we see Señor Huichi?’
The Captain consulted his watch and made a calculation.
‘We can go and see him now, if you would like,’ he said.
‘Right!’ I said, finishing my drink. ‘Let’s go.’
Huichi’s house was on the outskirts of Deseado, and Huichi himself, when Captain Giri introduced us, was a man I took an instant liking to. Short, squat, with a weather-browned face, he had very dark hair, heavy black eyebrows and moustache, and dark brown eyes that were kind and humorous, with crow’s feet at the corners. In his movements and his speech he had an air of quiet, unruffled confidence about him that was very reassuring. He stood silently while Giri explained our mission, occasionally glancing at me, as if summing me up. Then he asked a couple of questions, and, finally, to my infinite relief, he held out his hand to me and smiled broadly.
‘Señor Huichi has agreed that you shall use his estancia,’ said Giri, ‘and he is going to accompany you himself, so as to show you the best places for penguins.’
‘That is very kind of Señor Huichi … we are most grateful,’ I said. ‘Could we leave tomorrow afternoon, after I have seen my friend off on the plane?’
‘¿Si, si, como no?’ said Huichi when this had been translated to him. So we arranged to meet him on the morrow, after an early lunch, when we had seen Dicky off on the plane that was to take him to Buenos Aires.
So, that evening we sat in the depressing bar of our hotel, sipping our drinks and contemplating the forlorn fact that the next day Dicky would be leaving us. He had been a charming and amusing companion, who had put up with discomfort without complaint, and had enlivened our flagging spirits throughout the trip with jokes, fantastically phrased remarks, and lilting Argentine songs. We were going to miss him, and he was equally depressed at the thought of leaving
us just when the trip was starting to get interesting. In a daring fit of joie de vivre the hotel proprietor had switched on a small radio, strategically placed on a shelf between two bottles of brandy. This now blared out a prolonged and mournful tango of the more cacophonous sort. We listened to it in silence until the last despairing howls had died away.
‘What is the translation of that jolly little piece?’ I asked Marie.
‘It is a man who has discovered that his wife has T.B.,’ she explained. ‘He has lost his job and his children are starving. His wife is dying. He is very sad, and he asks the meaning of life.’
The radio launched itself into another wailing air that sounded almost identical with the first. When it had ended I raised my eyebrows inquiringly at Marie.
‘That is a man who has just discovered that his wife is unfaithful,’ she translated moodily. ‘He has stabbed her. Now he is to be hung, and his children will be without mother or father. He is very sad and he asks the meaning of life.’
A third refrain rent the air. I looked at Marie. She listened attentively for a moment, then shrugged.
‘The same,’ she said tersely.
We got up in a body and went to bed.
Early the next morning Marie and I drove Dicky out to the airstrip, while Sophie and Jacquie went round the three shops in Deseado to buy the necessary supplies for our trip out to Huichi’s estancia. The airstrip consisted of a more or less level strip of ground on the outskirts of the town, dominated by a moth-eaten-looking hangar, whose loose boards flapped and creaked in the wind. The only living things were three ponies, grazing forlornly. Twenty minutes after the plane had been due in there was still no sign of her, and we began to think that Dicky would have to stay with us after all. Then along the dusty road from the town came bustling a small van. It stopped by the hangar, and from inside appeared two very official-looking men in long khaki coats. They examined the wind-sock with a fine air of concentration, stared up into the sky, and consulted each other with frowning faces. Then they looked at their watches and paced up and down.
‘They must be mechanics,’ said Dicky.
‘They certainly look very official,’ I admitted.
‘Hey! Listen!’ said Dicky, as a faint drone made itself heard. ‘She is arrive.’
The plane came into view as a minute speck on the horizon that rapidly grew bigger and bigger. The two men in khaki coats now came into their own. With shrill cries they ran out on to the airstrip and proceeded to drive away the three ponies, who, up till then had been grazing placidly in the centre of what now turned out to be the runway. There was one exciting moment just as the plane touched down, when we thought that one of the ponies was going to break back, but one of the khaki-clad men launched himself forward and grabbed it by the mane at the last minute. The plane bumped and shuddered to a halt, and the two men left their equine charges and produced, from the depths of the hangar, a flimsy ladder on wheels which they set against the side of the plane. Apparently Dicky was the only passenger to be picked up in Deseado.
Dicky wrung my hand.
‘Gerry,’ he said, ‘you will do for me one favour, yes?’
‘Of course, Dicky,’ I said, ‘anything at all.’
‘See that there is no bloody bastard horses in the way when we go up, eh?’ he said earnestly, and then strode off to the plane, the flaps of his deer-stalker flopping to and fro in the wind.
The plane roared off, the ponies shambled back on to the runway, and we turned the blunt snout of the Land-Rover back towards the town.
We picked up Huichi at a little after twelve, and he took over the wheel of the Land-Rover. I was heartily glad of this, for we had only travelled a couple of miles from Deseado when we branched off the road on to something so vague that it could hardly be dignified with the term of track. Occasionally this would disappear altogether, and, if left to myself, I would have been utterly lost, but Huichi would aim the Land-Rover at what appeared to be an impenetrable thicket of thorn bushes, and we would tear through it, the thorns screaming along the sides of the vehicle like so many banshees, and there, on the further side, the faint wisp of track would start again. At other points the track turned into what appeared to be the three-feet-deep bed of an extinct river, exactly the same width as the Land-Rover, so we were driving cautiously along with two wheels on one bank – as it were – and two wheels on the other. Any slight miscalculation here and the vehicle could have fallen into the trough and become hopelessly stuck.
Gradually, as we got nearer and nearer to the sea, the landscape underwent a change. Instead of being flat it became gently undulating, and here and there the wind had rasped away the topsoil and exposed large areas of yellow and rust-red gravel, like sores on the furry pelt of the land. These small desert-like areas seemed to be favoured by that curious animal, the Patagonian hare, for it was always on these brilliant expanses of gravel that we found them, sometimes in pairs, sometimes in small groups of three or four. They were strange creatures, that looked as though they had been put together rather carelessly. They had blunt, rather hare-like faces, small, neat, rabbit-shaped ears, neat forequarters with slender fore-legs. But the hindquarters were large and muscular in comparison, with powerful hind-legs. The most attractive part of their anatomy was their eyes, which were large, dark and lustrous, with a thick fringe of eyelashes. They would lie on the gravel, sunning themselves, gazing aristocratically down their blunt noses, looking like miniature Trafalgar Square lions. They would let us approach fairly close, and then suddenly their long lashes would droop over their eyes seductively, and with amazing speed they would bounce into a sitting position. They would turn their heads and gaze at us for one brief moment, and then they would launch themselves at the heat-shimmered horizon in a series of gigantic bounding leaps, as if they were on springs, the black and white pattern on their behinds showing up like a retreating target.
Presently, towards evening, the sun sank lower and in its slanting rays the landscape took on new colours. The low growth of thorn scrub became purple, magenta and brown, and the areas of gravel were splashed with scarlet, rust, white and yellow. As we scrunched our way across one such multicoloured area of gravel we noticed a black blob in the exact centre of the expanse, and driving closer to it we discovered it was a huge tortoise, heaving himself over the hot terrain with the grim determination of a glacier. We stopped and picked him up, and the reptile, horrified by such an unexpected meeting, urinated copiously. Where he could have found, in that desiccated land, sufficient moisture to produce this lavish defensive display was a mystery. However, we christened him Ethelbert, put him in the back of the Land-Rover and drove on.
Presently, in the setting sun, the landscape heaved itself up into a series of gentle undulations, and we switchbacked over the last of these and out on to what at first looked like the level bed of an ancient lake. It lay encircled by a ring of low hills, and was, in fact, a sort of miniature dust-bowl created by the wind, which had carried the sand from the shore behind the hills and deposited it here in a thick, choking layer that had killed off the vegetation. As we roared across this flat area, spreading a fan of white dust behind us, we saw, in the lee of the further hills, a cluster of green trees, the first we had seen since leaving Deseado. As we drew nearer we could see that this little oasis of trees was surrounded by a neat white fence, and in the centre, sheltered by the trees, stood a neat wooden house, gaily painted in bright blue and white.
Huichi’s two peons came to meet us, two wild-looking characters dressed in bombachas and tattered shirts, with long black hair and dark, flashing eyes. They helped us unload our gear and carry it into the house, and then, while we unpacked and washed, they went with Huichi to kill a sheep and prepare an asado in our honour. At the bottom of the slope on which the house was built, Huichi had prepared a special asado ground. An asado needs a fierce fire, and with the biting and continuous wind that blew in Patagonia you had to be careful unless you wanted to see your entire fire suddenly lifted in
to the air and blown away to set fire to the tinder-dry scrub for miles around. In order to guard against this Huichi had planted, at the bottom of the hill, a great square of cypress trees. These had been allowed to grow up to a height of some twelve feet, and had then had their tops lopped off, with the result that they had grown very bushy. They had been planted so close together in the first place that now their branches entwined, and formed an almost impenetrable hedge. Then Huichi had carved a narrow passage-way into the centre of this box of cypress, and had there chopped out a room, some twenty feet by twelve. This was the asado room, for, protected by the thick walls of cypress, you could light a fire without danger.
By the time we had washed and changed, and the sheep had been killed and stripped, it was dark; we made our way down to the asado room, where one of the peons had already kindled an immense fire. Near it a great stake had been stuck upright in the ground, on this a whole sheep, split open like an oyster, had been spitted. We lay on the ground around the fire and drank red wine while waiting for our meal to cook.
I have been to many asados in the Argentine, but that first one at Huichi’s estancia will always remain in my mind as the most perfect. The wonderful smell of burning brushwood, mingling with the smell of roasting meat, the pink and orange tongues of flame lighting up the green cypress walls of the shelter, and the sound of the wind battering ferociously against these walls and then dying to a soft sigh as it became entangled and sapped of its strength in the mesh of branches, and above us the night sky, trembling with stars, lit by a fragile chip of moon. To gulp a mouthful of soft, warm red wine, and then to lean forward and slice a fragrant chip of meat from the brown, bubbling carcase in front of you, dunk it in the fierce sauce of vinegar, garlic and red pepper, and then stuff it, nut-sweet and juicy, into your mouth, seemed one of the most satisfying actions of my life.