In Patagonia (9 page)

‘Persia is a very poor country,' he said.

‘Persia is a bloody rich country,' I said.

‘Persia could be a rich country but the Americans have robbed her wealth.' Ali smiled showing a set of swollen gums.

He offered to show me over the Institute. In their library the books were all Bahai literature. I noted down two titles—
The Wrath of God and Epistle to the Son of the Wolf, Bahai Ullah
. There was also a
Guide to Better Writing
.

‘Which religion have you?' Ali asked. ‘Christian?'

‘I haven't got any special religion this morning. My God is the God of Walkers. If you walk hard enough, you probably don't need any other God.'

The negro was delighted to hear this. He wanted to walk to the lake and go fishing.

‘How you like my friend?' asked Ali.

‘I like him. He's a nice friend.'

‘He is
my friend.'

‘I'm sure.'

‘He is my very good friend.‘ He pushed his face up to mine. ‘And this is
our room
.' He opened a door. There was a doublebed with a stuffed doll perched on the pillow. On the wall, strung up on a leather thong, was a big steel machete, which Ali waved in my face.

‘Ha! I kill the ungodly.'

‘Put that thing down.'

‘English is infidel.'

‘I said put that thing down.'

‘I only joke,' he said and strung the machete back on its hook. ‘Is very dangerous here. Argentine is very dangerous people. I have revolver also.'

‘I don't want to see it.'

Ali then showed me the garden and admired it. The Bahais had set their hand to sculpture and garden furniture, and the Bolivian had made a crazy-paving path.

‘And now you must go,' Ali said. ‘I am tired yet and we must sleep.'

The Bolivian did not want me to go. It was a lovely day. He did want to go fishing. Going to bed that morning was the last thing he wanted to do.

M
ILTON EVANS was the principal resident of Trevelin and son of its founder. He was a round moustachioed gentleman of sixty-one, who prided himself on his English. His favourite expression was ‘Gimme another horse piss!' And his daughter, who did not speak English, would bring a beer and he'd say, ‘Aah! Horse piss!' and drain the bottle.

His father, John Evans, came out on the
Mimosa
as a baby. He was the first of his generation to ride like an Indian. Not for him the inflexible round of field-work, chapel and tea. He settled up-country in the Cordillera, made money and built the mill. Once established he took his family to Wales on a year's visit. Milton went to school in Ffestiniog and had a long story about fishing from a bridge.

He directed me to the grave of his father's horse. Inside a white fence was a boulder set in a plantation of marigolds and Christmas trees. The inscription read:

At the beginning of that month, John Evans, with three companions, Hughes, Parry and Davies, rode west up the Chubut Valley. There was an old legend of a city and a new rumour of gold. They stayed in the tents of a friendly Cacique and saw the grass country beginning and the peaks of the Cordillera, but having no food they decided to return. The horses' hooves splintered on sharp stones and set them limping. They were thirty-six hours in the saddle. Parry and Hughes hung their heads and let the reins go limp. But Evans was tougher and shot two hares, so the four did eat that night.

Next afternoon they were crossing a valley of blinding white dust and heard the thud of hooves behind. John Evans spurred El-Malacara clear of the Indian lances, but, looking back, saw Parry and Hughes fall and Davies clinging to the saddle with a spear in his side. The horse outpaced the Indians', but stopped dead before a gulch, where the desert floor split wide. With the Indians on him, Evans spurred again and El-Malacara took a clean jump of twenty feet, sheer over the precipice, slid down the screes and made the farther side. The Indians, who recognized a brave man, did not attempt to follow.

Forty hours later, Evans rode into the Welsh colony and reported the deaths to the leader Lewis Jones.

‘But, John,' he said, ‘the Indians are our friends. They'd never kill a Welshman.'

Then Lewis Jones learned of an Argentine patrol that had trespassed on Indian land and he knew that it was true. Evans led a party of forty Welshmen to the place. Hawks flew off as they came near. The bodies were not yet picked clean and their sexual organs were in their mouths. Lewis Jones said to John Evans: ‘Heaven hath saved thee, John, from a horrible death.'

They took up the remains and buried them. A marble monument marks the spot. Its name is
Biddmyrd os syrfeddod
‘There will be a myriad wonders...'—a line from the hymn of Anne Griffith, the mystic girl from Montgomery who lived on a remote hill-farm and also died young.

‘You're not looking for a job, I suppose?' Milton Evans asked. It was lunch time and he presented me with a slab of meat on the end of a small sword.

‘Not particularly.'

‘Funny, you remind me of Bobby Dawes. Young Englishman, same as yourself, wandering about Patagonia. One day he walks up to an estancia and says to the owner: “If you give me work, you're a saint, and your wife's a saint, and your children are angels, and that dog's the best dog in the world.” But the owner says, “There is no work.” “In which case,” Bobby says, “you're the son of a whore, your wife
is
a whore, your children are monkeys, and if I catch that dog, I'll kick its arse till its nose bleeds.” '

Milton laughed a lot as he told this story. Then he told another he once heard from the Cooper sheep-dip man. The second story was about a cure for scab. The punch line was ‘Put a lump of sugar in the sheep's mouth and suck its arse till it tastes sweet.' He repeated the story twice to make sure I'd get the point. I lied. I couldn't face it a third time.

I left Milton to his hay-making and went north of Esquel to a small settlement called Epuyen.

T
HE NIGHT was hot and it was getting late and the owner of the one shop in Epuyen was swabbing down the counter which also served as a bar. Señor Naitane was a small creased man with unusually white skin. He eyed his customers nervously and wished they would go. His wife was waiting for him in bed. The rooms around the courtyard were in darkness. Only in the shop a single electric bulb smeared its thin yellow light over the green walls and the lines of bottles and packets of maté. From the roof-beams hung strings of peppers, garlic, saddle-trees, bits and spurs, which cast jagged shadows on the ceiling.

Earlier, the eight gauchos present had shown signs of leaving. Their horses, tied to the fence, were chomping and stamping. But whenever Naitane swabbed the counter clean, one of them slammed down a wet glass or bottle and called for another round. Naitane let his boy serve. He took a duster of ostrich feathers and flicked, agitatedly, at the things on the shelves.

Once you get a drunk gaucho in the saddle, he won't fall off and his horse will get him home. But this presupposes a dangerous moment while you seat him. Naitane thought this moment was approaching. The youngest gaucho was bright red in the face, propping himself against the bar on his elbows. His friends watched to see if his legs would hold. All had knives stuck into their waistbands.

Their leader was a scrawny rough in black bombachas and a black shirt open to his navel. His chest was covered with a fuzz of ginger hair and the same ginger bristles sprouted all over his face. He had a few long, sharp, brown teeth and a shark's fin of a nose. He moved with the grace of a well-oiled piece of machinery and leered at Naitane with a teasing smile.

Then he crunched my hand and introduced himself as Teófilo Breide. The words slurred through his teeth and he was hard to follow, but from something he did say, I realized he was an Arab; the nose had explained itself. Epuyen, in fact, was a colony of Arabs, Christian Arabs, but whereas I could picture Naitane as a shopkeeper in Palestine, Teófilo Breide belonged in the black tents.

‘And what,' he asked, ‘is a gringito doing in Epuyen?'

‘I want to know about an American called Martin Sheffield who lived here forty years back.'

‘Bah!' said Teófilo Breide. ‘Sheffield!
Fantasista! Cuentero! Artista!
You know the story of the plesiosaurus?'

‘I do.'

‘Fantasía!'
he roared and launched into an anecdote that made the gauchos laugh.

‘Funny you should mention him. You see this?' He handed me a
rebenque
, the Argentine riding whip, with a silver-sheathed handle and leather strap. ‘This was Martin Sheffield's.'

He directed me to the
lagunita
where the American once had his camp. Then he smacked the
rebenque
on the counter. The young man's knees did hold. The gauchos drained their glasses and filed out.

Señor Naitane, in whose house I had hoped to pass the night, pushed me out into the street and bolted the door. The generator cut out. From all directions I heard the sound of hooves dwindling into the night. I slept behind a bush.

T
HE
lagunita
lay under a mountain of red screes. It was little bigger than a pond and not more than a metre deep. Its unruffled surface reflected the black conifers that grew round the edge. Coots were swimming in the reeds. It was hardly a place to attract world headlines.

On a January morning in 1922, Dr Clemente Onelli, the Director of the National Zoological Gardens in La Plata, found this letter on his desk:

The writer was an adventurer from Tom Green County, Texas, who styled himself sheriff and wore a star and sheriff's hat to prove it. Around 1900 he appeared in Patagonia looking rather like Ernest Hemingway, roaming the mountains ‘poorer than Job' with a white mare and an Alsatian for company. He persisted in the illusion that Patagonia was an extension of the Old West. He panned the streams for gold. Some winters he stayed with John Evans at Trevelin and swapped dirty nuggets for flour. He was a crack shot. He shot trout from the rivers; a cigarette packet from the police commissioner's mouth; and had the habit of picking off ladies' high-heels.

Sheffield offered his services, as fellow drinker and guide, to any explorer who appeared in this part of the Andes. On one expedition he helped unearth the fossilized skeleton of a plesiosaurus, a small dinosaur related to the modern turtle, which had indeed a neck like a swan. Now he was proposing a live specimen.

Onelli called a press conference and announced the forthcoming plesiosaurus hunt. An upper-class lady subscribed 1,500 dollars for the purchase of equipment. Two old age pensioners escaped from the Hospital de la Mercedes to fight the monster. The plesiosaurus also lent its name to a tango and a brand of cigarettes. When Onelli suggested it might have to be embalmed, the Jockey Club hoped to have the privilege of exhibiting, but this brought a denunciation from Don Ignacio Albarracín, of the Society for the Protection for Animals.

Meanwhile the country was paralysed by a general election which would decide whether to unseat its Radical President, Dr Hipólito Yrigoyen, and somehow the plesiosaurus managed to insert itself into the campaign as emblematic beast of the Right.

Two newspapers whose policy was to welcome foreign capital adopted the plesiosaurus.
La Nación
confirmed preparations for the hunt and wished it well. In
La Prensa
enthusiasm was even greater: ‘The existence of this unusual animal, which has roused the attention of foreigners, is a scientific event, which will bring to Patagonia the definitive prestige of possessing so unsuspected a creature.'

Foreign cables buzzed into Buenos Aires. Mr Edmund Heller, Teddy Roosevelt's hunting companion, wrote asking for a piece of skin for the American Museum of Natural History in memory of his old friend. The University of Pennsylvania said a team of zoologists was ready to leave for Patagonia at once, adding that if the animal were caught, the proper place for it was the United States. ‘It is clear,' commented the
Diario del Plata
, ‘that this world has been created for the greater glory of the North Americans, viz. The Monroe Doctrine.'

The plesiosaurus was an electoral gift to the Left. Clemente Onelli, the Beast-Slayer, was presented as a new Parsifal, a Lohengrin or a Siegfried. The journal
La Montaña
said that, domesticated, the animal might prove of service to the blighted inhabitants of the
Tierra del Diablo
, a reference to the revolt of the peons in Southern Patagonia, whom the Argentine Army had brutally massacred the month before. Another article bore the title ‘The Cappadocian Dragon'; and the nationalistic
La Fronda
wrote: ‘This millenarian, pyramidal, apocalyptic animal makes a noise like a Madonna and usually appears in the opaline stupors of drunken gringos.'