In Patagonia (18 page)

The question is: did Shakespeare know the book that triggered off the events at San Julián?

I believe he did. Both monsters were half human. The Grand Patagon was ‘engendered by a Beaste in the woods'; Caliban a ‘poisonous slave got by the Devil himself'. Both learned a foreign language. Both loved a white princess (even if Caliban did try to rape Miranda). And both were identical in one important particular: the Patagon had the ‘head of a Dogge', while Trinculo says of Caliban: ‘I shall laugh myself to death at this puppy-headed monster.'

The origin of the ‘dog-heads' is to be found in the ‘vizzards' or battle masks, such as worn by Genghiz Khan's cavalry or the Tehuelches when they attacked John Davis at Puerto Deseado. Shakespeare could have picked them out of Hakluyt. But either way Caliban has a good claim to Patagonian ancestry.

I
N THE British Club at Rio Gallegos there was chipped cream paint and not a word of English spoken. The twin black smoke-stacks of the Swift Corporation's old freezer reared above the prison yard.

On a windy sidewalk, a group of British sheep-farmers stood outside the Bank of London and South America. They had been discussing the wool slump with the manager. One family was bankrupt. Their boy, waiting in a Land-Rover, said: ‘I don't mind. Means I don't have to go to boarding school.' But a man in battered tweeds hopped up and down, shouting: ‘Filthy Latin yellow-bellies! Damn 'em! Damn 'em! Damn 'm!'

This branch was once the Bank of London and Tarapacá. I went in and asked the cashier about some North Americans.

‘You mean the Boots Cassidy Gang,' he said.

They were here in January 1905. They went to Punta Arenas where they met a crusty retired sailor called Captain Milward and, as guest members of the British Club, taught youngsters like Archie Tuffnell a few tricks at pool. Across the Argentine border they stayed at an English estancia. They entertained the locals by dressing up as real Western outlaws and riding into Rio Gallegos firing six-shooters in the air.

‘Aqui vienen los gringos locos !'
the townspeople laughed. ‘Here come the mad gringos!'

As usual they said they were looking for land. They went to the bank to discuss a loan with the manager, a Mr Bishop. He asked them to lunch and they accepted. They tied him up, and his clerks, bundled 20,000 pesos into a bag and
£
280 sterling, and rode out of town.

‘There go the mad gringos!'

Etta held the horses. I was told she lingered on, chatting to a circle of admirers, until her own men were clear. Then, pulling the pearl-handled revolver which she wore, tied to a velvet ribbon down the back of her neck, she shot the glass conductors off the telegraph line, cutting off communication with the one police post between them and the safety of the Cordillera.

Walking down the main street of Rio Gallegos I saw the bookshop was selling copies of a new book,
Los Vengadores de la Patagonia Trágica
by a left-wing historian Osvaldo Bayer. Its subject was the Anarchist rebellion against the estancia-owners in 1920-1. I bought the three volumes in Buenos Aires and read them, fascinated; for this revolution in miniature seemed to explain the mechanics of all revolution.

I asked Archie Tuffnell about it and he scowled.

‘Bad business. Bunch of Bolshie agitators came down and stirred up trouble. That was one thing. Then the Army came down and that was another. Shot good men. They shot good, honest, reliable men. They even shot
my
friends. It was a filthy business from start to finish.'

The leader of the revolt was called Antonio Soto.

P
EOPLE IN the South still remember the lanky, red-headed Gallician, with the down scarcely off his cheek, and the squinting blue eyes that go with Celtic vagueness and fanaticism. He wore breeches and puttees then, and his cap at a jaunty angle. And he'd stand in the muddy street, while the wind ripped at his red flags, shouting phrases borrowed from Proudhon and Bakunin, of Property being Theft, and Destruction a creative passion.

A few Spanish immigrants even remember his earlier incarnation, as prop-boy for some travelling actors who came down from the north and played Calderón and Lope de Vega in the bare auditorium of the Círculo Espanol. And sometimes he'd take a bit part and stand, decoratively, against the whitewashed walls of an Extremaduran village, peeling from its canvas backcloth.

Others remember him coming back to Rio Gallegos twelve years after the firing squads. He was still playing the Anarchist orator and wore his shirt unbuttoned to the navel. But he had a real worker's body to show off this time, scarred with the burns he got in a saltpetre mine in Chile. He stayed at the Hotel Miramar and lectured the families of men who had lain those twelve years under bleached wood crosses. That was his last visit and he played to empty houses. Only a few nodding Spaniards heard him out and the governor booted him back over the border.

But most of those who knew Antonio Soto recall a hulk of fallen muscle and an expression ranging from truculence to quiet despair. He lived in Punta Arenas then and ran a small restaurant. And if customers complained about the service he'd say: ‘This is an Anarchist restaurant. Serve yourself.' Or he'd sit with other Spanish exiles and remember Spain through the thin jet streaming from his
porrón,
remembering whom to honour in Spain, and whom to hate, and reserving a special curse for the boy he once saw on the streets of his home port, El Ferrol, the smug boy, whose career was the obverse of his own and whose name was Francisco Bahamonde Franco.

Soto was the posthumous son of a naval rating who drowned în the Cuban War. At the age of ten he quarrelled with his stepfather and went to live with maiden aunts in Ferrol. He was pious and puritanical and carried floats in religious processions. At seventeen he read Tolstoy's denunciation of military service and skipped to Buenos Aires to avoid his own. He drifted into the theatre and the fringes of the Anarchist Movement. There were many Anarchists in Buenos Aires and Buenos Aires is one big theatre.

He joined the Serrano-Mendoza Spanish Theatre Company and in 1919 sailed on tour for the ports of Patagonia. His coming to Rio Gallegos coincided with a wool slump, wage-cuts, new taxes and new tensions between the Anglo-Saxon sheep-farmers and their men. From the far end of the earth, the Britishers watched the Red Revolution and likened themselves to Russian aristocrats stranded on the steppe. One week their newspaper, the
Magellan Times
, ran a picture of a room in a country house, its owner grovelling before a muscle man, whose naked torso was criss-crossed by cartridge belts. The caption ran: ‘A nocturnal orgy of the Maximalists at the estate of Kislodovsk. 5,000 roubles or your livesl'

Soto's mentor in Río Gallegos was a Spanish lawyer and dandy, José María Borrero, a man of forty, with a face puffy from drink and a row of fountain pens in his top pocket. Borrero had started out with a doctorate in theology from Santiago de Compostella. He had ended up in the Far South, running a bi-weekly newssheet, L
a Verdad,
which sniped at the British plutocracy. His language thrilled his compatriots and they began to imitate his style: ‘In this society of Judases and Pulchinellas, Borrero alone preserves the rare integrity of Man ... among these twittering pachyderms with their snapping teeth and castrated consciences.'

Borrero overwhelmed Soto with superior education, seditious talk and love. He and a fellow radical, the Judge Viñas (a man motivated only by personal vendettas) alerted him to the plight of the Chilean migrants and the iniquity of the foreign
latifundistas.
In particular they singled out two men: the Anglophile Acting-Governor, E. Correa Falcón, and his foul-mouthed Scottish police commissioner called Ritchie. Soto made the easy switch from the theatre into politics. He got a job as a stevedore and, within weeks, was elected Secretary-General of the Workers' Union.

A new life opened up for him. On the Chilotes his voice had the effect of unstoppering the resentments of centuries. Something about his youth or messianic innocence impelled them to acts of self-sacrifice and then to violence. Perhaps they saw in in him the white saviour promised in their folklore.

He called them to stop work and they obeyed; they even flocked to join his march to celebrate the eleventh anniversary of the shooting of Francisco Ferrer, at Monjuich, Barcelona. (Soto said his Chilotes were honouring the Catalan educator as Catholics honoured the Maid of Orleans or the Mohammedans Mohammed.) Conceiving all life as a squalid economic struggle, he made no concessions to the propertied classes. He blackmailed the hotelkeepers, the merchants and sheep-farmers. He made them grovel as his price for lifting the boycott, and when they accepted his terms, he merely stepped up the pressure and the insults.

Attempts to silence him failed: nor could the jail hold him, for his faction was too strong. One night a knife flashed on an empty street, but the blade hit the watch in his waistcoat pocket and the hired killer fled. His escape only confirmed his sense of mission. He called for a General Strike, to bring down the powers that governed Santa Cruz, not noticing that the base of his support had narrowed. The local Syndicalists patched up their quarrel with the employers and jeered at Soto's wild impracticality. Soto countered that they were pimps for the brothel
La Chocolatería.

Isolated from the moderates, Soto started the revolution on his own. His allies were some propagandists by the deed, who called themselves The Red Council. The leaders were Italian: a Tuscan deserter; a Piedmontese who had once made shepherdesses in a Dresden porcelain factory. With a band of five hundred rough riders, the Red Council swooped on estancias; looted guns, food, horses and drink; freed the Chilotes from their inhibitions; left heaps of fire-twisted metal; and dissolved again on to the steppe.

Ritchie sent a patrol to investigate but it fell into an ambush. Two policemen and a chauffeur were killed. A subaltern named Jorge Pérez Millán Témperley, an upper-class boy with a weakness for uniforms, got a bullet through his genitals. When the bandits forced him to ride with them, the pain permanently unhinged him.

On January 28th 1921 the 10th Argentine Cavalry sailed from Buenos Aires with orders from President Yrigoyen to pacify the province. The commanding officer was Lt-Col. Hector Benigno Varela, a tiny soldier of limitless patriotism, a student of Prussian discipline, who liked his men to be men. At first Varela disgusted the foreign landowners, for his programme of pacification consisted of free pardons for all strikers who surrendered their arms. But when Soto came out of hiding and announced a total victory over Private Property, the Army and the State, the colonel sensed he had made a fool of himself and said: ‘If it starts up again, I'll come back and shoot the lot.'

The pessimists were right. All along the coast that winter, strikers marched, looted, burned, picketed and prevented officials from boarding steamers. And when the spring came Soto was planning his second campaign with three new lieutenants (the Red Council had fallen into an ambush) : Albino Argüelles, a Socialist official; Ramón Outerelo, a Bakuninist and ex-waiter; and a gaucho named Facón Grande for the size of his knife. Soto still believed the government was neutral and ordered each commander to seize a stretch of territory, to raid and take hostages. Secretly he was dreaming of a revolution that would spread from Patagonia and engulf the country. He was not very bright. His character was frigid and austere. At nights he went off to sleep alone. The Chilotes required a leader to share every detail of their lives and began to mistrust him.

This time Dr Borrero was conspicuous for his absence. He was having an affair with an estanciero's daughter and had taken advantage of depressed land prices to buy a place of his own. It then came out that, all along, he was on the payroll of
La Anónima,
the company of the Brauns and Menéndezes. The Anarchists noted his defection and sneered at the ‘degenerates who were once socialists, drinking in cafés at the workers' expense, who today, like true Tartuffes, clamour for the murder of their old comrades'.

President Yrigoyen called for Varela a second time and allowed him to use ‘extreme measures' to bring the strikers to heel. The Colonel disembarked at Punta Loyola on November 11th 1921 and began requisitioning horses. He interpreted his instructions as tacit permission for a bloodbath, but since Congress had abolished the death penalty, he and his officers had to inflate the Chilotes into ‘military forces, perfectly armed and better munitioned, enemies of the country in which they live'. They claimed Chile was behind the strike and, when they caught a Russian Anarchist with a notebook full of Cyrillic characters, here plainly was the Red hand of Moscow.

The strikers melted away without a fight. They were not well armed and couldn't even use the arms they had. The Army filed reports of gunfights and arsenals captured. But the
Magellan Times
for once reported the truth: ‘Various bands of rebels, finding their cause lost, have surrendered and the bad element among them shot.'

On five separate occasions, the soldiers got the strikers to surrender by promising to respect thier lives. On all five, the shooting began afterwards. They shot Outerelo and Argüelles. Varela shot Facón Grande at Jaramillo station, two days after he reported him killed in battle. They shot hundreds of men into graves they dug themselves, or shot them and heaped the bodies on bonfires of
mata negra
and the smell of burned flesh and wood resin drifted across the pampas.

The end of Soto's dream came at the Estancia La Anita, the prize establishment of the Menéndez family. He held his hostages in the green and white house, where, from the
art-nouveau
conservatory, you can see the Moreno Glacier sliding through black forests into a grey lake. His men were in the shearing shed but they began leaving in groups when they heard about the column coming up the valley.