In Patagonia (6 page)

His aunt and uncle had come down from Buenos Aires to look after him. The aunt was pleased we had come. She had been baking and brought in a cake, iced with pink sugar and fluffy inside. She cut huge slices and served them on delicate china plates with silver forks. We had eaten earlier but we couldn't refuse. She cut a slice for Sonny.

‘You know I don't eat cake,' he said.

Sonny had a sister who was a nurse in Buenos Aires. When their mother died she came back home but she quarrelled with Sonny's peon. He was half-Indian and he slept in the house. She hated his knife. She hated the way he used it at table. She knew the peon was bad for Sonny. They drank most nights. Sometimes they drank all night and slept through the next day. She tried to change the house, to make it more cheerful, but Sonny said: ‘The house stays the way it was.'

One night they were both drunk, and the peon insulted her. She panicked and locked herself in her room. She felt something bad was going to happen and went back to her old job.

Sonny and the peon fought after she'd gone. The neighbours said it could have been much worse. The aunt and uncle came down then, but they couldn't take the farm either. Fortunately they had savings enough to buy a bungalow in a Buenos Aires suburb, in a nice neighbourhood, mind you, with other English people.

They chattered on and Sonny sipped his whisky. He wanted the peon back. You could tell from what he did not say that he wanted the peon back.

B
AHÍA BLANCA is the last big place before the Patagonian desert. Bill dropped me at the hotel near the bus station. The bar-room was green and brightly lit and full of men playing cards. A country boy stood by the bar. He was shaky on his feet but he kept his head up like a gaucho. He was a nice-looking boy with curly black hair and he really was very drunk. The owner's wife showed me a hot airless room, painted purple, with two beds in it. The room had no window and the door gave out on to a glassed-in courtyard. It was very cheap and the woman said nothing about having to share.

I was half asleep when the country boy reeled in, flung himself on the other bed and groaned and sat up and was sick. He was sick on and off for an hour and then he snored. I did not sleep that night for the smell of the sick and the snoring.

So next day, as we drove through the desert, I sleepily watched the rags of silver cloud spinning across the sky, and the sea of grey-green thornscrub lying off in sweeps and rising in terraces and the white dust streaming off the saltpans, and, on the horizon, land and sky dissolving into an absence of colour.

Patagonia begins on the Rio Negro. At mid-day the bus crossed an iron bridge over the river and stopped outside a bar. An Indian woman got off with her son. She had filled up two seats with her bulk. She chewed garlic and wore real gold jangly earrings and a hard white hat pinned over her braids. A look of abstract horror passed over the boy's face as she manoeuvred herself and her parcels on to the street.

The permanent houses of the village were of brick with black stove pipes and a tangle of electric wires above. Where the brick houses gave out, the shacks of the Indians began. These were patched out of packing cases, sheet plastic and sacking.

A single man was walking up the street, his brown felt hat pulled low over his face. He was carrying a sack and walking into the white dustclouds, out into the country. Some children sheltered in a doorway and tormented a lamb. From one hut came the noise of the radio and sizzling fat. A lumpy arm appeared and threw a dog a bone. The dog took it and slunk off.

The Indians were migrant workers from Southern Chile. They were Araucanian Indians. A hundred years ago the Araucanians were incredibly fierce and brave. They painted their bodies red and flayed their enemies alive and sucked at the hearts of the dead. Their boys' education consisted of hockey, horsemanship, liquor, insolence and sexual athletics, and for three centuries they scared the Spaniards out of their wits. In the sixteenth century Alonso de Ercilla wrote an epic in their honour and called it the
Araucana.
Voltaire read it and through him the Araucanians became candidates for the Noble Savage (tough version). The Araucanians are still very tough and would be a lot tougher if they gave up drink.

Outside the village there were irrigated plantations of maize and squash, and orchards of cherries and apricots. Along the line of the river, the willows were all blown about and showing their silvery undersides. The Indians had been cutting withies and there were fresh white cuts and the smell of sap. The river was swollen with snowmelt from the Andes, fast-running and rustling the reeds. Purple swallows were chasing bugs. When they flew above the cliff, the wind caught them and keeled them over in a fluttering reversal and they dropped again low over the river.

The cliff rose sheer above a ferry-landing. I climbed a path and from the top looked up-stream towards Chile. I could see the river, glinting and sliding through the bone-white cliffs with strips of emerald cultivation either side. Away from the cliffs was the desert. There was no sound but the wind, whirring through thorns and whistling through dead grass, and no other sign of life but a hawk, and a black beetle easing over white stones.

The Patagonian. desert is not a desert of sand or gravel, but a low thicket of grey-leaved thorns which give off a bitter smell when crushed. Unalike the deserts of Arabia it has not produced any dramatic excess of the spirit, but it does have a place in the record of human experience. Charles Darwin found its negative qualities irresistible. In summing up
The Voyage of the Beagle
, he tried, unsuccessfully, to explain why, more than any of the wonders he had seen, these ‘arid wastes' had taken such firm possession of his mind.

In the 1860s W. H. Hudson came to the Rio Negro looking for the migrant birds that wintered around his home in La Plata. Years later he remembered the trip through the filter of his Notting Hill boarding-house and wrote a book so quiet and sane it makes Thoreau seem a ranter. Hudson devotes a whole chapter of
Idle Days in Patagonia
to answering Mr Darwin's question, and he concludes that desert wanderers discover in themselves a primaeval calmness (known also to the simplest savage), which is perhaps the same as the Peace of God.

About the time of Hudson's visit, the Rio Negro was the northern frontier of an unusual kingdom which still maintains a court in exile in Paris.

O
N A drizzling; November afternoon, His Royal Highness Prince Philippe of Araucania and Patagonia gave me an audience at his public relations firm on the Faubourg Poissonière. To get there I had to pass the Marxist daily
L'Humanité,
a cinema showing ‘Pinocchio', and a shop that sold fox and skunk skins from Patagonia. Also present was the Court Historian, a young and portly Argentine of French descent with royal buttons on his blazer.

The Prince was a short man in a brown tweed suit who sucked at a briar pipe that curled down his chin. He had just come back from East Berlin on business and disdainfully waved about a copy of
Pravda.
He showed me a long manuscript in search of a publisher; a photo of two Araucanian citizens holding up their tricolour, the Blue, White and Green; a court order allowing M. Philippe Boiry to use his royal title on a French passport; a letter from the Consul of El Salvador in Houston recognizing him as a head of state in exile; and his correspondence with Presidents Perón and Eisenhower (whom he had decorated) and with Prince Montezuma, the pretender to the Aztec throne.

In parting he gave me copies of the
Cahiers des Hautes-Etudes Araucaniennes,
among them Comte Léon M. de Moulin-Peuillet's study,
The Royal Succession of Araucania and the Order of Memphis and Misrāim
(
Egyptian Rite
).

‘Every time I try something,' the Prince said, 'I gain a little.'

I
N THE spring of 1859 the lawyer Orélie-Antoine de Tounens closed his grey-shuttered office in the Rue Hiéras in Périgueux, looked back at the byzantine profile of the cathedral, and left for England, clutching the valise that held the 25,000 francs he had withdrawn from his family's joint account, thus accelerating their ruin.

He was the eighth son of peasant farmers who lived in a collapsing
gentilhommière
at the hamlet of La Chèze near the hamlet of Las Fount. He was thirty-three (the age when geniuses die), a bachelor and a freemason, who, with a bit of cheating, had traced his descent from a Gallo-Roman senator and added a
de
to his name. He had moonstruck eyes and flowing black hair and beard. He dressed as a dandy, held himself excessively erect and acted with the unreasoning courage of the visionary.

Through Voltaire he had come on Ercilla's epic of wooden stanzas and learned of the untamed tribes of the Chilean South:

Murat was a stable boy and he was King of Naples. Bernadotte was a lawyer's clerk from Pau and he was King of Sweden. And Orélie-Antoine got it into his head that the Araucanians would elect him king of a young and vigorous nation.

He boarded an English merchantman, rounded the Horn in mid-winter, and landed at Coquimbo, on the desert shore of Chile, where he lodged with a fellow mason. He soon learned that the Araucanians were heading for their last stand against the Republic, began an encouraging correspondence with their Cacique, Mañil, and in October crossed the River Bio-Bio, the frontier of his designated kingdom.

An interpreter and two Frenchmen went along—MM. Lachaise and Desfontaines, his Minister for Foreign Affairs and Secretary of State for Justice, phantom functionaries, named after La Chèze and Las Fount and contained within the person of His Majesty.

Orélie-Antoine and his two invisible ministers battled through an underscrub of scarlet flowers and fell in with a young horseman. The boy told him Mañil was dead and led the way to his successor, Quilapán. The Frenchman was delighted to hear that the word ‘Republic' was as odious to the Indian as to himself. But there was one new fact he did not know: before dying the Cacique Mañil prophesied that eternal delusion of the Amerindian: the end of war and slavery would coincide with the coming of a bearded white stranger.

The Araucanians' welcome encouraged Orélie-Antoine to proclaim a constitutional monarchy with a succession to be established within his own family. He signed the document with his spidery royal signature, endorsed it with the bolder hand of M. Desfontaines, and sent copies to the Chilean President and the Santiago newspapers. Three days later, a horseman, exhausted by two crossings of the Cordillera, brought fresh news: the Patagonians also accepted the kingdom. Orélie-Antoine signed another paper, annexing the whole of South America from Latitude 42° to the Horn.

Staggered by the magnitude of his act, the king retired to a boarding house in Valparaiso and busied himself with the Constitution, the Armed Forces, the steamship line to Bordeaux and the National Anthem (composed by a Sr Guillermo Frick of Valdivia). He wrote an open letter to his home newspaper
Le Périgord
advertising ‘La Nouvelle France' as a fertile land bursting with minerals, which would compensate for the loss of Louisiana, and Canada, but didn't mention it was full of warrior Indians. Another newspaper,
Le Temps
, jibed that ‘La Nouvelle France' inspired about as much confidence as M. de Tounens his former clients.

Nine months later, penniless and stung by indifference, he returned to Araucania with a horse, a mule and a servant called Rosales. (When hiring this individual he made the common tourist's mistake of confusing fifteen for fifty pesos.) At the first village his subjects were drunk, but they revived and passed word for the tribes to muster. The king spoke of Natural and International Law; the Indians replied with
vivas.
He stood within a circle of naked horsemen, in a brown poncho, with a white fillet round his head, saluting with stiff Napoleonic gestures. He unfurled the Tricolour, crying, ‘Long live the Unity of the Tribes! Under a single chief! Under a single flag!'

The king was now dreaming of an army of thirty thousand warriors and of imposing his frontier by force. War cries echoed through the forest and the itinerant hooch-sellers scuttled for civilization. Across the river, the white colonists saw smoke signals and signalled their own fears to the military. Meanwhile Rosales scribbled a note to his wife (which she alone could decipher) telling of his plan to kidnap the French adventurer.

Orélie-Antoine moved through the settlements without escort. Stopping one day for lunch, he sat by a riverbank, lost in reverie, ignoring a party of armed men he saw talking to Rosales in the trees. A weight pressed on his shoulders. Hands clamped round his arms. More hands stripped him of his possessions.

The Chilean carabineers forced the king to ride to the provincial capital of Los Angeles and hauled him before the Governor, a patrician landowner, Don Cornelio Saavedra.

‘Do you speak French?' the prisoner demanded. He began by asserting his royal rights and ended by offering to return to the bosom of his family.

Saavedra appreciated that Orélie-Antoine could want nothing better. ‘But,' he said, ‘I am having you tried as a common criminal to discourage others who may imitate your example.'

The jail in Los Angeles was dark and damp. His warders waved lanterns in his face as he slept. He caught dysentery. He writhed on a sodden straw mattress and saw the spectre of the garrotte. In one lucid interval he composed the order of succession: ‘We, Orélie-Antoine Ier, bachelor, by the Grace of God and the National Will, Sovereign etc. etc.... ' The throne would pass to his old father, at that season gathering in his walnuts—then to his brothers and their issue.