That evening extra blankets were left out in our rooms and we certainly needed them. Patagonia has no sympathy for the unprepared.
We are up early and have breakfast in the kitchen.
‘Well, Bri, here we are in Patagonia with a man with a large farm. I reckon it’s time to ask about the great scheme.’
‘Oh God! John, I don’t know.’
Alfonso and Isabel look on, intrigued. Brian eats some bread, then slowly, obliquely, edges towards the question.
‘Um, so um how much land do you need for each sheep?’
‘Generally one sheep needs half hectare, one of your acres. Maybe a little more, in some places less. You want to farm sheep in Patagonia?’
‘No. Well, no, not exactly,’ Brian stumbles on. ‘You see, I had an idea that maybe you could farm yaks here.’
‘Yaks?’ squeaks Alfonso. I start giggling.
‘What are you laughing at, McCarthy? You thought it was a good idea too!’
Alfonso laughed and listened and then became intrigued. What facts and statistics we held about these animals, their habitat, diet and their quality of milk, leather and wool had our host in a stunned silence. We could see his mind was working overtime. Suddenly he interrupted.
‘Did you know Chile is one of the few countries in the world to have an opposite land pole?’ We were confused until he explained, ‘You see, if it were possible to drill a hole from any country in the world down through the centre of the earth, it would be almost certain to emerge somewhere in the sea. Its opposite point would be in the ocean. But if you were to do the same in Chile, the point of our imaginary drill would emerge in China. I have studied this phenomenon and it’s quite correct.’
Alfonso continued to elicit information from us. His serious demeanour was encouraging.
‘But if it takes half a hectare to feed one sheep how can you feed an animal five times its size?’ I asked.
‘Sheep are not indigenous to Patagonia. But from what you say about the yak and Tibet, it would survive here much more easily than sheep.’
At first we thought Alfonso’s curiosity was mere politeness. But when he told us that the Chilean government were offering subsidies to anyone developing new agricultural enterprises and that he might contact the Chinese embassy in Santiago, we realized how intrigued he was.
Before leaving, I wandered round this strange farmhouse standing in the middle of nowhere. It looked more and more like a set for a gothic fantasy film. The house was crammed with large bronze busts, Alfonso’s stern-faced Victorian forebears. They were relatives and cousins, the rural aristocracy of a Chile that was fast disappearing. Among them was Don José Menendez, past president of Chile and another of Alfonso’s uncles. Cracks were everywhere in the brickwork and large patches of plaster had long since fallen from the ceilings. But I could feel the command in those bronzes, that this house and all its history should not die. Alfonso had to pass them several times a day and I could imagine the intimidating effect of their gaze.
We are due to meet a bus to take us north to Torres del Paine at noon. Alfonso is determined to show us his farm and works out that he can get us back to the main road, from where he can hitch a lift. He is anxious that we should witness the disaster that has befallen the farmers of the Magallanes. In a dreadful snowstorm 40,000 sheep were lost in one night; his farm alone lost 4,000. The catastrophe had been dubbed ‘the White Earthquake’ by the press.
First Alfonso drives our truck back down to the Magellan Straits where we had seen the group of buildings in last night’s gloom. He shows us the massive shearing sheds full of bales of wool marked with Chinese characters, and points out the wooden buildings that had once housed workers, school and shops. On the beach lies the hulk of the Amadeo, a large coastal launch that the estate used in its heyday to take the wool to Punta Arenas. Estancia San Gregorio had once extended to 90,000 hectares (some 180,000 acres) but it had been expropriated and broken up in the Sixties and Seventies under the socialist governments.
‘How did you get it back?’ I asked Alfonso.
‘With the dictatorship, some was given back to my family. But every member had a piece so for years I have been buying bits back, little by little.’
‘So how big is it now?’
‘It runs three kilometres along the strait and inland it goes forty kilometres. But it’s still only one third of what it was before the socialists destroyed everything.’
He takes us to a little chapel, explaining that it was built on the spot where Magellan himself had first landed and held a service of thanksgiving when he discovered the channel. A simple building, peaceful and suffused with gentle light. I am surprised that it is in such good condition.
‘You look after the chapel, Alfonso?’
‘Yes, but it is sad, we have no services now.’
‘Oh, I suppose there are not enough people?’
‘No. People would come in from the farms if we had a priest.’
‘Oh. Why no priest?’
‘I am in dispute with the bishop!’
‘Alfonso, you seem to be in dispute with everybody.’
Alfonso just laughs, a little wildly.
‘Come, we have a long way to go.’
We head inland across the farm, racing on and on, bouncing over the rutted track and barrelling through puddles, the world instantly obliterated as the muddy water immerses the vehicle. Eventually we stop beside what is little more than a shed, hardly even a shack. One or two horses munch grass and give us a cursory once-over. A dog bounds out to greet us followed by a small man. His face is so sweet, wreathed in smiles at seeing Alfonso. His skin looks as soft as a baby’s, not raw and lined as I would expect from a life outdoors in this wild climate. His excitement matches his dog’s, his whole demeanour making me think of a happy puppy. He and Alfonso talk for a little while and then we roar off again.
Now we go off the beaten track, straight across the virgin land. We bounce and jolt wildly, desperately hanging on as the truck pitches and heaves over the mad terrain. Alfonso appears oblivious to the savage ride. I sit, or rather lie, in the front seat of the pick-up bracing myself with arms and legs, reminded with surprising fondness of Charlatán’s relatively gentle camel-like gyrations as he laboured uphill and down. On this terrain being on horseback would be far more comfortable; but what can it be like to be a shepherd here, living in a tiny wooden house, maybe twenty miles or more from a neighbour?
Meanwhile in the back Sancho Panza is musing between inaudible curses as he is flung willy-nilly like a storm-tossed bird. This place should have been named the Gulf of Pain. Alfonso is steering the jeep like a crazed Captain Ahab! He seems oblivious to the fact that if we seriously damage this vehicle it may take us days to walk out of this wilderness. Whenever we stop to get our bearings I think how much Alfonso’s mind is like this landscape, excitedly bumbling and jolting from idea to idea. Then we are off again and I am flung every which way and backwards. I am glad Don John is up front as there is something dangerously Quixotic about Alfonso. They should get on well together! I make a mental note to write in my diary, ‘Today we went pitching over Patagonia with a kamikaze sheepfarmer named Alfonso!’ John insists on holding a conversation as we roll and flounder onwards. Obviously Quixotes One and Two are crazy as coots.
‘Do the shepherds live way out here permanently?’ I ask Alfonso as he hunches over the wheel, gunning the truck through another fence of scrub like some demented Grand National jockey.
‘They live here for a month at a time, with food supplied by the farm. Then they go into town with their money and maybe drink lots of beer and pisco.’
‘What do you pay them?’ asks Brian, who like me has pinned himself like a rigid starfish against the truck’s motion.
‘They get two hundred US dollars a month.’
Such a harsh life, it is difficult to imagine anyone starting it or staying with it for so little reward.
Under a slate-grey sky with wind-driven drizzle lashing at
the car, Alfonso stops and points across a wide dip in the land. A fence runs along beside us. In the distance the ground is a grey colour. We move closer and start making out the shapes of sheep, thousands of them, laid out as far as the eye can see. It is horrific. So many animals lying there where they died. Some have already rotted, bones and skulls scattered in a tangled mess. Others are strangely intact, as if they are just lying down to sleep. One or two are still hanging from the fence and if you half close your eyes you can imagine them attempting to bound over the obstacle to safety. The area covered is so large and the carcasses so numerous that, now there is no snow, one cannot imagine a natural event causing such devastation; one’s mind argues that it must have been done by a lunatic human. The air is filled with the stench of rotting flesh.
When I look at Alfonso with his thin body, pinched face and greying hair, he suddenly appears very frail. It is evident that this event, perhaps this land, had shocked him profoundly. We are all silent for a while. The engine still, the only noise is of the wind and rain.
‘What happened, Alfonso?’ Brian’s voice is quiet from the back seat. There is a long silence before Alfonso answers in low, shaky tones.
‘The snowstorm was very bad. Always the wind blows from there,’ he says, pointing to the far side of the fence. ‘The sheep know that. They shelter under the fence. This night—’ He stops, swallowing hard. ‘This night the wind comes from the wrong side, this side.’ He stops again.
Brian and I remain silent.
‘The snow was so thick, the wind so strong. They were buried there, alive, where they thought they were safe. Some try to escape and die on the fence.’ He stops again, close to tears.
I study the profile of his face as he stares intently at this scene of devastation and realize that the tautness of his jaw, the agony in his eyes reflects no concern for the financial loss to his business. It is the loss of the animals for which he cared that troubles him; he imagines their suffering. The rain stops and the wind eases and as it does so Alfonso relaxes a little.
His face brightening, he asks in his usual high-pitched, excited tone, ‘You want to walk closer, take photos?’
We get out of the car and walk to the carcass field. It is a horrible sight, the twisted, decaying faces of the sheep suggesting the terror and agony of their final hours.
‘Were you able to save any?’ I ask.
‘Yes. With my men we saved those we could reach. But the work was so hard. It was so cold. After some time I collapsed.’ He pauses and then goes on, his voice rising with a blend of shock and indignation, ‘It took twenty hours to get to hospital. I almost died!’
We stay a few minutes more. Alfonso clearly wants us to take photographs, to record this awful event. I do so automatically but something keeps me from taking a picture of Alfonso, the driven, traumatized shepherd.
After a while Brian speaks.
‘Alfonso. Why do you stay here? Why do the shepherds stay out here?’
‘It is our home,’ is the simple reply.
There is silence again for a while before Brian speaks again, his tone warm and gently teasing.
‘So maybe your friend Neruda got something right. He called Chile “the harsh homeland”!’
Alfonso grins broadly. ‘So maybe he got something right. Lousy Stalinist!’
I was profoundly moved by Alfonso’s response to this ghastly sight. All my unspoken thoughts about his eccentricity seemed trite and cheap. For a moment I walked away from Alfonso’s anguish. Standing apart, looking at this hideous vision, I felt how Neruda’s passionate romanticism could better capture this white death spreading out over the landscape like some hideous coverlet. His poetic emotion was, I convinced myself, very close to what Alfonso was now feeling. It was easy to forgive the man his intemperate dismissal of the poet. For I was sure if Neruda were standing beside me now he would have written Alfonso Campos into his Canto General as one of Chile’s heroic figures.
He drove us around this scene which repeated itself for what seemed like miles. It was as if he didn’t want to leave the sheep.
‘What about the shepherds?’ we asked.
It took Alfonso some minutes before he replied.
‘One of them was snowed in for six weeks. He was crazy when we dug him out. He disappeared for many weeks . . . he is all right now.’
I could imagine the terrified shepherd and the terrified sheep buried alive and Alfonso’s terrified, crazy desperation as he tried to save what was his whole world. It was enough. At last we left.
We bounce on and on, increasingly worried that we will never meet the bus. The pampa rolls on relentlessly, our bodies battered by the mad lurches of the vehicle. After one stomach-wrenching bump, Brian’s head appears between the front seats, his knuckles white as he holds on for grim death.
‘Now I know what it’s like inside a washing machine!’
Eventually we arrive at the main road. Alfonso gets out, reminds us where we should meet Ricardo the car-hire man and the bus for Torres del Paine, waves down a passing car and disappears into it, heading for home. A very unusual man; kind, full of emotion and great courage.
Alfonso’s sudden disappearance was odd. He was like a will-o’-the-wisp, that curious phenomenon that often happens in remote boggy land when the process of natural decomposition creates a phosphorescent gas that glows luminous in the half-light of dusk. Back home in Ireland these ‘ghosts’ are said to be the spirits of the dead returning to reclaim their land. Though Alfonso was no ghost, there was something luminous about him. This land was truly his, by something older than birthright. With all his eccentricity and enthusiasms, he somehow glowed here. This was his place. His roots were sunk deeper than history. When I think back on Alfonso I remember his face lighting up, almost fluorescent, like the bright yellow flower of the bog iris.
Chapter Thirteen
We doze most of the way to Torres del Paine, tired after the battering of the earlier drive and now exhausted by the scenery. The mountains creep closer and closer as the light fails and the track begins winding through the foothills.
We are nearly there when the driver stops, hissing, ‘Puma, puma!’
There, a hundred or so feet away on a small hill, are two puma. They, like us, are quite motionless, watching, their bodies facing away from us towards the crest of the hill. But their eyes, glinting yellow-green in the failing light, are fixed on our vehicle. We do not even think of photographs, our surprise is as great as theirs and we realize the encounter may last only a moment. In fact they remain looking at us for a few minutes before strolling off into the dusk. We are told later that to see one puma in a year of looking is lucky, but to see two, minutes after entering the park, is remarkable.
Once again Chile reduces us to what R. L. Stevenson called ‘the virginity of senses’ where words cannot match the impressions received.
Patagonia is a word that has entered into the language as a metaphor for the ultimate, a point beyond which no-one could go. Some writers have dismissed it completely. Jorge Luis Borges once said, ‘You will find nothing there, there is nothing in Patagonia.’ Throughout the ages though, others have idealized it, among them Melville, Swift and Coleridge. W. D. Hudson, writing in the late nineteenth century, suggested that these literary stars were mistaken in their flights of fantasy, that instead it is a place full of intellectual rebuttal. The experience of Patagonia is a journey to a higher plane of existence, a kind of harmony with nature which precludes thought. It was for him the source of an animism bound to an intense love of the visible world.
Edgar Allan Poe adapted Wendell’s book on Patagonia to write his own novel of a crazed self-destructive journey in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. In turn Dostoyevsky, Baudelaire and Rimbaud all took up ideas from Poe. So the literary reference library on this place is voluminous and diffuse, if somewhat esoteric. It would be pointless to argue who came nearer the truth. But the truth is only one’s experience of it and whatever that truth may be, it must begin w
ith a fascination.
Patagonia has sucked into itself a vast cross-section of the world’s nationalities. Each, no doubt, had their own truth and their own fascination that brought them to these ‘final capes of exile’ as Bruce Chatwin called them. I wondered if I would find an answer or even a reason for my own fascination. These were, after all, our last few days in Chile and we were headed into the most mystically beautiful landscape imaginable.
It was already late when we arrived, and the darkness and silence outside had completely swallowed up our hotel, the Explora. Having at last reached the inner heart of Patagonia, we began to feel really exhausted. Thankfully we found the hotel was extremely plush and, after so much travelling, the luxury seemed well deserved.
When our driver called out boastfully to the rest of the staff about our encounter with the pumas, the significance of seeing them became clear. At first no-one believed him. He had lived in the park for twenty-five years and this was his first sighting. Everyone was disbelieving that he should see two at once. I turned to John, bemused by the excitement.
‘One for you, one for me, obviously.’
After a shower and change of clothes, we went to the bar to discuss plans for the next day. As luxurious as the hotel might be, people came here to do things! We decided, weather permitting, to take a boat across Lago Grey to the Grey Glacier at its head.
I went to bed thinking of the pumas who had come to welcome us, and thought of the poem I had written home to my wife. How long ago was that? It seemed like an infinity. We had been travelling harder than we thought. Though we had maps, timetables, compasses, tickets, schedules and all the other essentials of outward and onward travel, I was beginning to feel we had lost contact with our centre of gravity. The compass bearing to our point of departure had become buried under this urgency to reach the end of the earth. Now that we were practically there, now that we could sit back and relax, the call of home seemed to filter into my thoughts.