In Patagonia (5 page)

An alley of gingko trees led past a statue of Benito Juárez to the steps of the museum. The Argentine national colours, the ‘blue and white', fluttered from the flagpole, but a red tide of Guevara dicta sprawled up the classical façade, over the pediment and threatened to engulf the building. A young man stood with his arms folded and said: ‘The Museum is shut for various reasons.' A Peruvian Indian who had come specially from Lima stood about looking crestfallen. Together we shamed them into letting us in.

In the first room I saw a big dinosaur found in Patagonia by a Lithuanian immigrant, Casimir Slapelič, and named in his honour. I saw the glyptodons or giant armadillos looking like a parade of armoured cars, each one of their bone plates marked like a Japanese chrysanthemum. I saw the birds of La Plata stuffed beside a portrait of W. H. Hudson; and, finally, I found some remains of the Giant Sloth,
Mylodon Listai,
from the cave on Last Hope Sound—claws, dung, bones with sinews attached, and a piece of skin. It had the same reddish hair I remembered as a child. It was half an inch thick. Nodules of white cartilage were embedded in it and it looked like hairy peanut brittle.

La Plata was the home of Florentino Ameghino, a solitary autodidact, the son of Genoese immigrants, who was born in 1854 and died Director of the National Museum. He started collecting fossils as a boy, and, later, opened a stationery business called
El Gliptodonte
after his favourite. In the end the fossils squeezed out the stationery and took the place over, but by that time Ameghino was world-famous, for his publications were so prolific and his fossils so very strange.

His younger brother, Carlos, spent his time exploring the barrancas of Patagonia, while Florentino sat at home sorting the fossils out. He had wonderful powers of imagination and would reconstruct a colossal beast from the least scrap of tooth or claw. He also had a weakness for colossal names. He called one animal
Florentinoameghinea
and another
Propalaeohoplophorus.
He loved his country with the passion of the second generation immigrant and sometimes his patriotism went to his head. On one issue he took on the entire body of scientific opinion:

About fifty million years ago, when the continents were wandering about, the dinosaurs of Patagonia were much the same as the dinosaurs of Belgium, Wyoming or Mongolia. When they died out, hot-blooded mammals took their place. The scientists who examined this phenomenon proposed an origin for the newcomers in the northern hemisphere, whence they colonized the globe.

The first mammals to reach South America were some odd species now known as the notoungulates and condylarths. Shortly after their arrival, the sea broke through the Isthmus of Panama and exiled them from the rest of Creation. Without carnivores to harass them, the mammals of South America developed odder and odder forms. There were the huge groundsloths, toxodon, megatherium, and mylodon. There were porcupines, ant-eaters, and armadillos; liptoterns, astrapotheriums, and the macrauchenia (like a camel with a trunk). Then the land-bridge of Panama resurfaced and a host of more efficient, North American mammals, such as the puma and sabre-tooth tiger, rushed south and wiped out many indigenous species.

Dr Ameghino did not like this zoological version of the Monroe Doctrine. A few southerners, it was true, did push against the
Yanqui
invasion. Small sloths got to Central America, the armadillo to Texas, and the porcupine to Canada (which shows there is no invasion without a counter-invasion). But this didn't satisfy Ameghino. He did his duty to his country and up-ended the chronology. He twisted the evidence to show that
all
hot-blooded mammals began in South America and went north. And then he got quite carried away: he published a paper suggesting that Man himself had emerged from the soil of the patria; which is why, in some circles, the name of Ameghino is set beside Plato and Newton.

I
LEFT the boneyard of La Plata, reeling under the blows of Linnaean Latin, and hurried back to Buenos Aires, to the Patagonia station, to catch the night bus south.

The bus was passing through low hilly country when I woke. The sky was grey and patches of mist hung in the valleys. The wheatfields were turning from green to yellow and in the pastures black cattle were grazing. We kept crossing streams with willows and pampas grass. The houses of the estancias shrank behind screens of poplar and eucalyptus. Some of the houses had pantile roofs, but most were of metal sheet, painted red. The tallest eucalyptus trees had their tops blown out.

At half past nine the bus stopped at the small town where I hoped to find Bill Philips. His grandfather was a pioneer in Patagonia and he still had cousins there. The town was a grid of one-storey brick houses and shops with an overhanging cornice. In the square was a municipal garden and a bronze bust of General San Martin, the Liberator. The streets around the garden were asphalted but the wind blew in sideways and coated the flowers and the bronze with white dust.

Two farmers had parked their pick-ups outside the bar and were drinking
vino rosado.
An old man huddled over his maté kettle. Behind the bar were pictures of Isabelita and Juan Perón, he wearing a blue and white sash and looking old and degenerate; another of Evita and Juan, much younger then and more dangerous; and a third of General Rosas, with sideburns and a downcurved mouth. The iconography of Peronism is extremely complicated.

An old woman gave me a leathery sandwich and coffee. Naturally, she said, I could leave my bag while I tried to find Señor Philips.

‘It is far to Señor Philips. He lives up in the sierra.'

‘How far?'

‘Eight leagues. But you may find him. Often he comes to town in the morning.'

I asked around but no one had seen the gringo Philips that morning. I found a taxi and haggled over the price. The driver was a thin, cheerful type, Italian I guessed. He seemed to enjoy bargaining and went off to buy gasoline. I looked General San Martin over and humped my bag on to the sidewalk. The taxi drove up and the Italian jumped out excitedly and said:

‘I've seen the gringo Philips. There, walking this way.'

He didn't mind losing the fare and refused to be paid. I was beginning to like the country.

A shortish, thick-set man in khaki bags was coming down the street. He had a cheerful boyish face, and a tuft of hair stood up on the back of his head.

‘Bill Philips?'

‘How did you know?'

‘I guessed.'

‘Come on home,' he said, grinning.

We drove out of town in his old pick-up. The door on the passenger side had jammed and we had to pile out at a rusty shack to let in a wrinkled, sandy-haired Basque, who did odd jobs on the farm and was a bit simple. The road sliced through flat cattle country. Black Aberdeen Angus clustered round the windpumps. The fences were in perfect shape. Every five miles or so we passed the pretentious gates of a big estancia.

‘Millionaire country down here,' Bill said. ‘I'm up in the sheep zone. I can do a few Jerseys, but we don't get the grass or water for a big herd. One bad drought and I'd be wiped clean.'

Bill turned off the main road towards some pale rocky hills. The clouds and mist were breaking up. Beyond the hills I saw a chain of mountains, the same silvery grey as the clouds. The sun caught their flanks and they seemed to be shining.

‘Are you here because of Darwin, or to see us?' Bill asked.

‘To see you. But Darwin?'

‘He was here. You can see the Sierra Ventana, showing up now, far left. Darwin went up it on his way to Buenos Aires. Haven't done it myself. Too much work on a new farm.'

The road climbed and gave out into a bumpy track. Bill opened a gate by a farmhouse and a dog streaked towards us. He nipped back into the cab and the dog crouched, hatefully baring its gums.

‘My neighbours are Italian,' Bill said. ‘The Its have got the whole region buttoned up. All came from one village in the Marches forty years back. All ardent Perónistas and not to be trusted. They have a simple philosophy: breed like flies, bellyache about land reform later. They all started off with good-sized lots, but they go on splitting them up. You see that house building over there?'

The track had risen sharply and the whole country was spread out behind, a basin of fields ringed by rocky hills and lit by flashing shafts of sunlight. All the farmhouses were set in clumps of poplars, except the new one, a plain block of white, bare of trees.

‘There's a family who've just split up. Old man dies. Two sons quarrel. Elder son gets best land and builds new house. Younger son active in local politics. Wants to lay fingers on gringo's best sheep-pasture. I've got just enough to keep going without frills. And we were Argentine citizens when this lot were holed up in their bloody Italian village.'

‘Here's the house coming up now,' he said.

We stopped to let out the Basque, who walked down the hill. The house was a prefabricated cottage of two rooms, stuck on a bare hillside, with big windows and a wonderful view.

‘Don't mind Anne-Marie,' Bill said. ‘She gets a bit jumpy when we have visitors. Works herself into a state. Seems to think visitors mean housework. Not the domesticated type. But don't take any notice. She loves having visitors really.'

‘Darling, we've got a visitor,' he called.

I heard her say, ‘Have we?' and the bedroom door slammed shut. Bill looked unhappy. He patted the dog and we talked about dogs. I looked at his bookshelf and saw he had all the best books. He had been reading Turgenev's
Sportsman's Sketches
and we talked about Turgenev.

A boy in blue trousers and a freshly laundered shirt poked his head round the door. He looked at the visitor apprehensively and sucked his thumb.

‘Nicky, come and say hullo,' Bill said.

Nicky ran back into the bedroom and the door shut again. Finally, Anne-Marie did come out and shake hands. She was edgy and formal. She couldn't think what had possessed her father to suggest I come.

‘We're in chaos here,' she said.

She had a bright open smile when she smiled. She was thin and healthy and had black hair cropped short and a clear tanned skin. I liked her tremendously, but she kept talking about ‘us provincials'. She had worked in London and New York. She knew the way things ought to be and apologized for the way they were. ‘If only we'd known you were coming we'd have. ...'

It didn't matter, I said. Nothing mattered. But I could see it did matter to her.

‘We shall need more meat for lunch,' she said, ‘now we've got a visitor. Why don't you both take Nicky down to the farm and I'll clean up.'

Bill and I waited for Nicky to change out of the clothes he'd put on for my benefit. In the first field we saw some brown birds with long tails and crests.

‘What's that bird, Nicky?' Bill asked.

‘Ouraka.'

‘Ugliest bird in the book,' said Bill.

‘And that's tero-teros,' Nicky said.

A pair of black and white plovers got up and circled above us, shrieking that the enemy was about.

‘And that's the ugliest damned noise. Hates man, that bird. Absolutely hates man.'

The track cut through a patch of bristly grass and came up to some farm buildings in a hollow out of the wind. A wiry kid called Dino ran out of the concrete house and played with Nicky in the yard shouting. There was a sheep-dip full of slimy green liquid, and Bill had to call them away from it.

‘Bad business,' he said. ‘Two months ago, neighbour's child drowned in the gringo's sheep-dip. Parents drunk after Sunday lunch. Thank God the mother's pregnant again—for the ninth time!'

The boy's father came out, doffed his cap to Bill and Bill asked him to kill a sheep. We looked round the farm, at the Jerseys, some new rams and a McCormick tractor.

‘And you can imagine what that bloody thing cost with our exchange rate. Can't afford another thing. Do you know what we pray for down here? Pray for sadistically? Bad winter in Europe. Makes the price of wool go up.'

We walked up to the orchard where Dino's father had strung the carcass to an apple tree and his dog was eating the purple bunch of intestines in the grass. He took his knife to the neck and the head came away in his hand. The carcass swung on the branch. He steadied it and cut off a leg, which he handed to Bill.

Halfway back to the house, Nicky asked if he could hold the visitor's hand.

‘I can't think what you've done to Nicky,' Anne-Marie said when we got back. ‘Usually he hates visitors.'

I
N THE evening Bill drove me down to Bahia Blanca. On the way we went to see a Scot about a bull.

Sonny Urquhart's farm was out on the flat land, about three miles back from the road. It had passed from father to son for four generations, since the time of the Indian raids. We had to open four wire gates along the track. The night was silent but for the teros. We made for a hump of black cypresses with a light shining among them.

The Scot called the dogs off and led the way down a narrow green corridor into a tall, darker green room lit by a single bulb. Round the fire were some Victorian easy chairs with flat wooden armrests. Damp whisky glasses had bitten rings into the french polish. Hung high on the walls were prints of willowy gentlemen and ladies in crinolines.

Sonny Urquhart was a hard stringy man with blond hair swept back and parted in the centre. He had moles on his face and a big Adam's apple. The back of his neck was criss-crossed with lines from working hatless in the sun. His eyes were watery blue, and rather bloodshot.

He finished his business with Bill about the bull. And Bill talked about farm prices and land reform and Sonny shook or nodded his head. He sat on a firestool and sipped his whisky. Of Scotland he preserved a certain pride of blood and a dim memory of kilts and pipes, but those were the festivities of another generation.