In Patagonia (19 page)

The hardliners, led by two Germans, wanted to pile up wool-bales, to turn the shed into a blockhouse and fight to the last man. But Soto said he'd run for it, said he was not made for dog-meat, said he'd continue in the mountains or abroad. And the Chilotes did not want to fight. They preferred to trust the word of an Argentine officer than the promises of air.

Soto sent two men to Captain Viñas Ibarra to ask for terms. ‘Terms?' he shrieked. ‘Terms for what?' and sent them to make terms with Jesus Christ. He did not, however, want to expose his men to fire and dispatched a junior officer to negotiate. On December 7th the rebels saw him advancing cautiously in their direction: a chestnut horse, a man in khaki, a white flag and yellow goggles glinting in the sun. His terms: Unconditional surrender and lives respected. The men should line up next morning in the yard.

The Chilotes' decision let Soto off. That night he and some of the leaders took the best guns and horses and rode out, up and over the sierra, and came down to Puerto Natales. The Chilean carabineers, who had promised to seal the frontier, did nothing to stop him.

The Chilotes were waiting for the soldiers in three lines, in homespun clothes smelling of sheep and horse and stale urine, their felt hats drawn down low, and their rifles and ammunition piled three paces in front, and their saddles, their lariats and their knives.

They thought they were going home, thought they'd be expelled and sent back to Chile. But the soldiers herded them back into the shearing shed, and when they shot the two Germans, they knew what was going to happen. About three hundred men were in the shed that night. They lay in the sheep-pens and the light of candles flickered on the roof-beams. Some of them played cards. There was nothing to eat.

The door opened at seven. A sergeant ostentatiously distributed picks to a work-party. The men in the shed heard them marching off and heard the chink of steel on stone.

‘They're digging graves,' they said.

The door opened again at eleven. Troops lined the yard with rifles at the ready. The ex-hostages looked on. A Mr Harry Bond said he wanted a corpse for every one of his thirty-seven stolen horses. The soldiers brought the men out for justice in groups. Justice depended on whether a sheep-farmer wanted a man back or not. It was just like sorting sheep.

The Chilotes were papery white, their mouths lowered and their eyes distended. The unwanted ones were led off past the sheep-dip and round a low hill. The men in the yard heard the crackle of shots and saw the turkey buzzards coming in over the barranca feathering the morning wind.

About a hundred and twenty men died at La Anita. One of the executioners said: ‘They went to their deaths with a passivity that was truly astonishing.'

With some exceptions, the British community was overjoyed at the result. The Colonel, whom they had suspected of cowardice, had redeemed himself beyond expectation. The
Magellan Times
praised his ‘splendid courage, running about the firing line as though on parade ... Patagonians should take their hats off to the 10th Argentine Cavalry, these very gallant gentlemen.' At a luncheon in Rio Gallegos, the local president of the Argentine Patriotic League spoke of ‘the sweet emotion of these moments' and his joy at being rid of the plague. Varela replied he had only done his duty as a soldier, and the twenty British present, being men of few Spanish words, burst into song:
‘For he's a jolly good fellow ... '

Off-duty at San Julián, the soldiers made for the brothel
La Catalana,
but the girls, all over thirty, screamed ‘Assassins! Pigs! We won't go with killers!' and were hauled off to jail for insulting men in uniform and so the flag of the nation. Among the girls was a Miss Maud Foster, ‘an English subject, of good family, with ten years' residence in the country'.
Requiescat!

Varela did not return to a hero's welcome but to graffiti reading ‘SHOOT THE CANNIBAL OF THE SOUTH'. Congress was in uproar; not that people cared too much for Soto and his Chileans, but Varela had made the mistake of shooting a Socialist official. The question was not so much what the Colonel did as who gave him orders. They pointed to Yrigoyen, who was embarrassed, appointed Varela director of a cavalry school and hoped the matter would simmer down.

On January 27th 1923 Colonel Varela was shot dead, on the corner of Fitzroy and Santa Fé, by Kurt Wilkens, a Tolstoyian Anarchist from Schleswig-Holstein. A month later, on February 26th, Wilkens was shot dead in the Prison of the Encausaderos by his warder, Jorge Pérez Millán Témperley (though how he got there nobody knew). And on Monday, February 9th 1925, Témperley was shot dead in a Buenos Aires hospital for the criminally insane by a Yugoslav midget called Lukič.

The man who gave Lukič the gun was an interesting case: Boris Vladimirovič, a Russian of pedigree, a biologist and an artist, who had lived in Switzerland and known—or claimed to have known—Lenin. The 1905 Revolution drove him to drink. He had a heart attack and left for Argentina to begin a new life. He got sucked back to the old life when he robbed a
bureau de change
to raise funds for Anarchist propaganda. A man was killed. and Vladimirovič earned twenty-five years in Ushuaia, the prison at the end of the world. Here he sang the songs of the Motherland, and for the sake of quiet, the Governor had him transferred to the capital.

On Sunday, February 8th, two Russian friends brought him the revolver in a basket of fruit. The case was hard to prove. There was no trial, but Boris Vladimirovič disappeared for ever into the House of the Dead.

Borrero died of T.B. at Santiago del Estero in 1930 after a gunfight with a journalist in which one of his sons was killed.

Antonio Soto died of cerebral thrombosis on May 11th 1963. Since the Revolution, he had lived in Chile, as miner, trucker, ciné-projectionist, fruit-vendor, farm-worker and restauranteur. I am told that in 1945 he worked in the iron foundry of a Mrs Charles Amherst Milward.

A
t Río Gallegos I stayed in a cheap hotel, painted a poisonous green, that catered for migrants from Chiloé. The men played dominoes late into the night. When I asked about the revolution of 1920, their answers were mumbled and vague; they had a more recent revolution to think about. Then I asked about the sect of male witches, known on Chiloé as the
Brujería
. From what little I knew, I felt it might explain their behaviour in 1920.

‘The
Brujeria,'
they smiled. ‘That's only a story.' But one old man went cold and silent at the mention of the word.

The Sect of the
Brujería
exists for the purpose of hurting ordinary people. No one knows the exact whereabouts of its headquarters. But there are at least two branches of its Central Committee, one in Buenos Aires, the other in Santiago de Chile. It is not certain which of these is the senior, or if both are beholden to Superior Authority. Regional committees are scattered through the provinces and take their orders, without question, from above. Junior members are kept in ignorance of the names of the higher functionaries.

On Chiloé the Committee is known as the Council of the Cave. The cave lies somewhere in the forests south of Quincavi, somewhere below ground. Any visitor to it suffers thereafter from temporary amnesia. If he happens to be literate, he loses his hands and the ability to write.

Novices of the Sect must submit to a six-year course of indoctrination. Since the full syllabus is known only to the Central Committee, the island schools have a tentative character. When an instructor thinks his pupil is ready for admission, the Council of the Cave assembles and puts him through a sequence of tests.

The candidate must submerge himself for forty days and forty nights under a waterfall of the Thraiguén River, to wash off the effects of his Christian baptism. (During this time he is allowed a little toast.) Next, he must catch, without fumbling, a skull, which the instructor throws from the crown of a tricorn hat. He must kill his best friend to show he has wiped out all trace of sentiment. He must sign a document with blood from his own veins. And he must disinter a recently buried male Christian corpse and flay the skin from the breast. Once this is cured and dried, he sews it into a ‘thieves' waistcoat'. The human grease remaining in the skin gives off a soft phosphorescence, which lights the member's nocturnal expeditions.

Full Members have the power to steal private property; to change themselves into other animals; to influence thoughts and dreams; to open doors; to drive men mad; to change the course of rivers; and to spread disease, especially some new virus that will not respond to medical treatment. In some cases the Member scars his victim lightly and allows him to buy his life back by supplying the Council of the Cave with a quantity of his own blood (to be delivered in a conch shell). If anyone is so foolish as to mock the Sect, he is put to sleep and tonsured. His hair will not grow back until he has signed a confession.

Among the technical equipment the Sect has at its disposal is the
Challanco,
a crystal stone through which the Central Committee surveys the minutest details of a man's life. No one has yet described the device with complete accuracy. Some report it as a bowl of glass; others as a large circular mirror, which emits and receives penetrating rays. The
Challanco
is known as the BOOK or the MAP. In addition to spying on all members of the hierarchy, it is thought to contain an indecipherable copy of the dogma of the Sect itself.

Only men can become members, but the Sect does use women to carry urgent messages. A woman thus employed is known as the
Voladora.
Usually a trusted member selects the most beautiful girl in his family and forces her into the role. She cannot, thereafter, return to normal life. The first stage of her initiation is a similar forty-day bath. One night, she is required to meet her instructor in a forest clearing. All she can see is a shining copper dish. The instructor gives orders but never appears. He tells her to strip and stand on tiptoe with her arms in the air. A draught of some bitter liquid makes her vomit her intestines.

‘Into the dish!' he barks. ‘Into the dish!'

Once freed of her insides, she is light enough to grow the wings of a bird and fly over human settlements shrieking hysterically. At dawn, she returns to the dish, redigests her intestines and recovers her human form.

The Sect owns its own ship, the
Caleuche.
She has the advantage over other vessels in that she can sail into the eye of the wind, and even submerge beneath the surface. She is painted white. Her spars are lit with innumerable coloured lights and from her deck streams the sound of intoxicating music. She is thought to carry cargo for the richest merchants, all of whom are agents for the Central Committee. The
Caleuche
has an insatiable appetite for crews and kidnaps sailors from the archipelago. Anyone with less than the rank of captain is instantly marooned on a lonely rock. Sometimes, one sees demented sailors roaming the beaches, singing the songs of the Central Committee.

The most singular creature associated with the Sect is the
Invunche
or Guardian of the Cave, a human being perverted into a monster by a special scientific process. When the Sect needs a new
Invunche,
the Council of the Cave orders a Member to steal a boy child from six months to a year old. The Deformer, a permanent resident of the Cave, starts work at once. He disjoints the arms and legs and the hands and feet. Then begins the delicate task of altering the position of the head. Day after day, and for hours at a stretch, he twists the head with a tourniquet until it has rotated through an angle of 180°, that is, until the child can look straight down the line of its own vertebrae.

There remains one last operation, for which another specialist is needed. At full moon, the child is laid on a workbench, lashed down with its head covered in a bag. The specialist cuts a deep incision under the right shoulder blade. Into the hole he inserts the right arm and sews up the wound with thread taken from the neck of a ewe. When it has healed the
Invunche
is complete.

During the process, the child is fed on human milk. After weaning, the diet is changed to young human flesh, followed by that of the adult male. When these are unobtainable, cat milk, kid and billy-goat are taken as substitutes. Once installed as Guardian of the Cave, the
Invunche
is naked and sprouts long bristly hair. It never acquires human speech, yet, over the years, it does develop a working knowledge of the Committee's procedure and can instruct novices with harsh and guttural cries.

Sometimes the Central Committee requires the presence of the
Invunche
for ceremonies of an unknown nature at an unknown place. Since the creature is immobile, a team of experts come and transport him by air.

It would be misleading to suggest that the people take the impositions of the Sect lying down. Secretly, they have declared war on the Central Committee, and have been perfecting their own intelligence and defence system. Their aim is to surprise a Member in the act of doing mischief. Caught red-handed, he is not supposed to live beyond a year. The people hope, one day, to bring their listening equipment to perfection and so penetrate the higher ranks of the Central Committee.

No one can recall the memory of a time when the Central Committee did not exist. Some have suggested that the Sect was in embryo even before the emergence of Man. It is equally plausible that Man himself became Man through fierce opposition to the Sect. We know for a fact that the
Challanco
is the Evil Eye. Perhaps the term ‘Central Committee' is a synonym for Beast.

I
CROSSED over into Fireland. On the north shore of the First Narrows, a lighthouse, striped orange and white, stood above a beach of crystalline pebbles, purple mussels and the scarlet of broken crabs. At the water's edge oyster-catchers were needling for shellfish in piles of ruby-coloured seaweed. The coast of Tierra del Fuego was an ashy stripe less than two miles away.