In Patagonia (4 page)

The person most upset was the daughter of the former British Consul, Tom Jones, who whenever Chatwin's name came up in the press, would fire off salvos to the letters page, listing complaints about his “disgraceful” book. Daphne Hobbs did not possess a copy of
In Patagonia
. “I would not sully my shelves.” But her sense that Chatwin had twisted the truth to make it more readable would strike a responsive chord among local historians and one or two English critics, who suspected that a number of Chatwin's brontosauri were mylodons. Chatwin's book, she often wrote to the
Buenos Aires Herald
, “whilst containing some elements of truth was much exaggerated and in some instance pure lies.”

Chatwin admitted as much to Michael Ignatieff. “I once made the experiment of counting up the lies in the book I wrote about Patagonia. It wasn't, in fact, too bad. There weren't too many.”

There are errors of fact that had Chatwin known about he would surely have corrected. Several may be attributed to his poor Spanish. (In the Silesian Museum in Punta Arenas, for instance, he writes down the wrong name for the murdered priest: Father Pistone instead of Father Juan Silvestro.) Other mistakes seem the result of his haste. (Patagonia is generally understood to begin not at the banks of the Rio Negro, but 120 kilometers north at the Rio Colorado.) But there are, surprisingly, strikingly few instances of mere invention. He told the Argentine critic Christian Kupchik: “Everything that is in the book happened, although of course in another order.” The “lies” he admits to Ignatieff are examples of his romanticism, as when he describes an ordinary stainless steel chair as being “by Mies van der Rohe” or makes an Ukrainian nurse in Rio Pico a devotee of his beloved Mandelstam instead of Agatha Christie. These are artistic devices. He was not writing a government report. Nor a tourist brochure. His structure was of a journey constantly interrupted, zigzagging among texts and through time. As a master fabulist, he had absorbed the rules and contrived something original out of them. Generally speaking, he did not subtract from the truth so much as add to it. He told not a half-truth but a truth and a half. His achievement is not to depict Patagonia as it really is, but to create a landscape called Patagonia—a new way of looking, a new aspect of the world. And in the process he reinvented himself.

 

As with the author, Chatwin's Patagonia is a landscape to which people do not remain neutral. “An unfortunate book,” the King of Patagonia told me at a chateau in the Périgord. He spoke shortly after proposing a champagne toast to “La Patagonie et L'Araucanie libre!” surrounded by his court in exile, amongst whom
In Patagonia
had gone down like a leadish balloon.

Yet in Patagonia itself, the book has had a liberating effect. In 1981, six years after its author passed through, Gaiman was a dusty grid of pale red houses, two of them tearooms. The Welsh language was spoken by fewer than 2,000 in the region and in danger of disappearing altogether. In the burial ground at Chapel Moriah, the headstones of the founders pitched at an angle and vandalized plastic roses lay melted under the sun. The place was sinking back into the desert.

Today, the village spreads in a new development beyond the Bethel chapel. There are seven tearooms, including the ranchstyle “Caerdydd,” which was favored with a visit from Diana, Princess of Wales, in November 1995. Twice a week in January, a Welsh choir performs to busloads of tourists, among them 500 Americans on a Cunard cruise down the coast. Gaiman is firmly on the map and the eight pages Chatwin wrote about it are quoted on board by the lecturer on the evening the ship docks in Puerto Madryn.

“We should write something on the
gringos
who come here with
In Patagonia,”
says Fabio Roberts de Gonzalez, who sings in the choir. “It's their Bible.”

Il n'y a plus que la Patagonie, la Patagonie,
qui convienne a mon immense tristesse ...

 

Blaise Cendrars

I
N MY grandmother's dining-room there was a glass-fronted cabinet and in the cabinet a piece of skin. It was a small piece only, but thick and leathery, with strands of coarse, reddish hair. It was stuck to a card with a rusty pin. On the card was some writing in faded black ink, but I was too young then to read.

‘What's that?'

‘A piece of brontosaurus.'

My mother knew the names of two prehistoric animals, the brontosaurus and the mammoth. She knew it was not a mammoth. Mammoths came from Siberia.

The brontosaurus, I learned, was an animal that had drowned in the Flood, being too big for Noah to ship aboard the Ark. I pictured a shaggy lumbering creature with claws and fangs and a malicious green light in its eyes. Sometimes the brontosaurus would crash through the bedroom wall and wake me from my sleep.

This particular brontosaurus had lived in Patagonia, a country in South America, at the far end of the world. Thousands of years before, it had fallen into a glacier, travelled down a mountain in a prison of blue ice, and arrived in perfect condition at the bottom. Here my grandmother's cousin, Charley Milward the Sailor, found it.

Charley Milward was captain of a merchant ship that sank at the entrance to the Strait of Magellan. He survived the wreck and settled nearby, at Punta Arenas, where he ran a ship-repairing yard. The Charley Milward of my imagination was a god among men—tall, silent and strong, with black mutton-chop whiskers and fierce blue eyes. He wore his sailor's cap at an angle and the tops of his sea-boots turned down.

Directly he saw the brontosaurus poking out of the ice, he knew what to do. He had it jointed, salted, packed in barrels, and shipped to the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. I pictured blood and ice, flesh and salt, gangs of Indian workmen and lines of barrels along a shore—a work of giants and all to no purpose; the brontosaurus went rotten on its voyage through the tropics and arrived in London a putrefied mess; which was why you saw brontosaurus bones in the museum, but no skin.

Fortunately cousin Charley had posted a scrap to my grandmother.

My grandmother lived in a red-brick house set behind a screen of yellow-spattered laurels. It had tall chimneys, pointed gables and a garden of blood-coloured roses. Inside it smelled of church.

I do not remember much about my grandmother except her size. I would clamber over her wide bosom or watch, slyly, to see if she'd be able to rise from her chair. Above her hung paintings of Dutch burghers, their fat buttery faces nesting in white ruffs. On the mantelpiece were two Japanese homunculi with red and white ivory eyes that popped out on stalks. I would play with these, or with a German articulated monkey, but always I pestered her: ‘Please can I have the piece of brontosaurus.'

Never in my life have I wanted anything as I wanted that piece of skin. My grandmother said I should have it one day, perhaps. And when she died I said: ‘Now I
can
have the piece of brontosaurus,' but my mother said: ‘Oh, that thing! I'm afraid we threw it away.'

At school they laughed at the story of the brontosaurus. The science master said I'd mixed it up with the Siberian mammoth. He told the class how Russian scientists had dined off deep-frozen mammoth and told me not to tell lies. Besides, he said, brontosauruses were reptiles. They had no hair, but scaly armoured hide. And he showed us an artist's impression of the beast—so different from that of my imagination—grey-green, with a tiny head and gigantic switchback of vertebrae, placidly eating weed in a lake. I was ashamed of my hairy brontosaurus, but I knew it was not a mammoth.

It took some years to sort the story out. Charley Milward's animal was not a brontosaurus, but the mylodon or Giant Sloth. He never found a whole specimen, or even a whole skeleton, but some skin and bones, preserved by the cold, dryness and salt, in a cave on Last Hope Sound in Chilean Patagonia. He sent the collection to England and sold it to the British Museum. This version was less romantic but had the merit of being true.

My interest in Patagonia survived the loss of the skin; for the Cold War woke in me a passion for geography. In the late 1940s the Cannibal of the Kremlin shadowed our lives; you could mistake his moustaches for teeth. We listened to lectures about the war he was planning. We watched the civil defence lecturer ring the cities of Europe to show the zones of total and partial destruction. We saw the zones bump one against the other leaving no space in between. The instructor wore khaki shorts. His knees were white and knobbly, and we saw it was hopeless. The war was coming and there was nothing we could do.

Next, we read about the cobalt bomb, which was worse than the hydrogen bomb and could smother the planet in an endless chain reaction.

I knew the colour cobalt from my great-aunt's paintbox. She had lived on Capri at the time of Maxim Gorky and painted Capriot boys naked. Later her art became almost entirely religious. She did lots of St Sebastians, always against a cobaltblue background, always the same beautiful young man, stuck through and through with arrows and still on his feet.

So I pictured the cobalt bomb as a dense blue cloudbank, spitting tongues of flame at the edges. And I saw myself, out alone on a green headland, scanning the horizon for the advance of the cloud.

And yet we hoped to survive the blast. We started an Emigration Committee and made plans to settle in some far corner of the earth. We pored over atlases. We learned the direction of prevailing winds and the likely patterns of fall-out. The war would come in the Northern Hemisphere, so we looked to the Southern. We ruled out Pacific Islands for islands are traps. We ruled out Australia and New Zealand, and we fixed on Patagonia as the safest place on earth.

I pictured a low timber house with a shingled roof, caulked against storms, with blazing log fires inside and the walls lined with the best books, somewhere to live when the rest of the world blew up.

Then Stalin died and we sang hymns of praise in chapel, but I continued to hold Patagonia in reserve.

T
HE HISTORY of Buenos Aires is written in its telephone directory. Pompey Romanov, Emilio Rommel, Crespina D.Z. de Rose, Ladislao Radziwil, and Elizabeta Marta Callman de Rothschild—five names taken at random from among the R's—told a story of exile, disillusion and anxiety behind lace curtains.

It was lovely summery weather the week I was there. The Christmas decorations were in the shops. They had just opened the Perón Mausoleum at Olivos; Eva was in good shape after her tour of European bank-vaults. Some catholics had said a Requiem Mass for the soul of Hitler and they were expecting a military coup.

By day the city quivered in a silvery film of pollution. In the evenings boys and girls walked beside the river. They were hard and sleek and empty-headed, and they walked arm in arm under the trees, laughing cold laughter, separated from the red river by a red granite balustrade.

The rich were closing their apartments for the summer. White dust sheets were spread over gilded furniture and there were piles of leather suitcases in the hall. All summer the rich would play on their estancias. The very rich would go to Punta del Este in Uruguay, where they stood less chance of being kidnapped. Some of the rich, the sporting ones anyway, said summer was a closed season for kidnaps. The guerillas also rented holiday villas, or went to Switzerland to ski.

At a lunch we sat under a painting of one of General Rosas's gauchos, by Raymond Monvoisin, a follower of Delacroix. He lay swathed in a blood-red poncho, a male odalisque, cat-like and passively erotic.

‘Trust a Frenchman,' I thought, ‘to see through all the cant about the gaucho.'

On my right was a lady novelist. She said the only subject worth tackling was loneliness. She told the story of an international violinist, stuck one night on tour in a Mid-Western motel. The story hinged on the bed, the violin and the violinist's wooden leg.

Some years ago she knew Ernesto Guevara, at that time an untidy young man pushing for a place in society.

‘He was very
macho
,' she said, ‘like most Argentine boys, but I never thought it would come to
that
.'

The city kept reminding me of Russia—the cars of the secret police bristling with aerials; women with splayed haunches licking ice-cream in dusty parks; the same bullying statues, the pie-crust architecture, the same avenues that were not quite straight, giving the illusion of endless space and leading out into nowhere.

Tsarist rather than Soviet Russia. Bazarov could be an Argentine character,
The Cherry Orchard
is an Argentine situation. The Russia of greedy kulaks, corrupt officials, imported groceries and landowners asquint to Europe.

I said as much to a friend.

‘Lots of people say that,' he said. ‘Last year an old White
émigrée
came to our place in the country. She got terrifically excited and asked to see every room. We went up to the attics and she said: “Ah! I knew it! The smell of my childhood!”'

I
TOOK the train to La Plata to see the best Natural History Museum in South America. In the compartment were two everyday victims of
machismo,
a thin woman with a black eye and a sickly teenage girl clinging to her dress. Sitting opposite was a boy with green squiggles on his shirt. I looked again and saw the squiggles were knife blades.

La Plata is a university town. Most of the graffiti were stale imports from May 1968 but some were rather unusual: ‘Isabel Perón or Death!' ‘If Evita were alive she would have been a
Montonera.'
‘Death to the English Pirates!' ‘The Best Intellectual is a Dead Intellectual.'