In Patagonia (2 page)

In Patagonia, the isolation makes it easy to exaggerate the person you are: the drinker drinks; the devout prays; the lonely grows lonelier, sometimes fatally. Tom Jones worked as British Consul in Punta Arenas. In his 1961 memoir A
Patagonian Panorama
, he wrote: “Whether it is the dreary and crude climate of Patagonia or the lonely life in the camp after the day's work or remorse after a bout of hard drinking, I cannot say, but I have known, some very intimately, well over 20 people who have committed suicide.”

The first sheep farmers arrived from the Falkland Islands in the late 1860s. The temptation among their descendants to cling to the culture their forebears left behind remains fierce. Patagonia spans two nations; a good many of its inhabitants pass a life likewise divided, one often spent replicating the environment they have escaped. The remoter the valley, the more faithful the re-creation of an original homeland. In Gaiman, the Welsh preserve their language and their hymns. In Rio Pico, the Germans plant lupins and cherry trees. In Sarmiento, the Boers continue to dry biltong (of
guanaco
). As Chatwin wrote in his journal, “The further one gets from the great centres of civilisation, the more prevalent become the fanciful reconstructions of the world of Madame du Barry.”

Barren for the most part, Patagonia is a land of extreme fertility in one respect. To travel through it, as Chatwin soon discovered, is “the most jaw-dropping experience because everywhere you'd turn up, there, sure enough, was this somewhat eccentric personality who had this fantastic story. At every place I came to it wasn't a question of hunting for the story, it was a question of the story coming at you.... I also think the wind had something possibly to do with it.”

Like the Galapagos, Patagonia has scarcely advanced from its early maps showing blue unicorns, red centaurs, elephantbearing condors, and giants. It still likes to think of itself as a land of giants. “Not those giants referred to by Hernando de Magellanes,” wrote Tom Jones, “but those men and women, many of them British, who made this vast, bleak and windswept land, prosperous and habitable for civilised people.” Even today, it remains scattered both with dinosaur bones and living relics who dwell sixty kilometers from the nearest pavement and talk of “leagues” and “chappies” and “t'other side.” Everyone seems seven foot high, an oddball. Dreams proliferate. (This may explain why Ted Turner and Sylvester Stallone have bought properties there.) “Patagonia is different from anywhere else,” says Teresita Braun-Menéndez, of the family that did most to open up the territory in the nineteenth century. “That loneliness, that grandiosity. Anything can happen.”

Like many people, I experienced its effect in heightened colors when reading
In Patagonia
. I'd read Hudson and Darwin and Lucas Bridges, but none had validated my Patagonia as Chatwin had.

In crowded London, I sought the author out. My pretext was to get the telephone number of the Frenchman who would be King of Patagonia. Really, I wanted to meet Chatwin.

In those days I kept a diary. On January 19, 1982, I wrote: “The morning with Bruce Chatwin, after eventually locating his Eaton Place bedsit: a bicycle against the wall and Flaubert on the floor. He was younger than I imagined, rather like a Polish refugee: baggy trousered, emaciated, grey blonde and blueeyed, sharp-featured and razor-worded. He has just delivered a manuscript—a novel about a square mile near Clyro where 2 families fight, without exposure to the modern world, through 2 world wars. He talks like a bird, very funny, very boyish and very well read. ‘Isn't it extraordinary how the most fraudulent people often have a very good eye for the genuine article?'”

His book had conjured a loose-limbed ascetic at one with the desert around Trelew, a silent man whose longest sentence was “I see.” In fact, he told me later, “I'm at my happiest having a good old yakking conversation.” Only afterward did I meet the lady in Puerto Natales who confessed, “Don Bruce, he talked a lot,
bastante
.” Or, in Alice Springs, an anthropologist who complained: “He
murdered
people with talk.” He didn't stop yakking from the moment I entered his tiny attic flat. Within minutes, he'd provided a telephone number for the King of Patagonia and Araucania, a pipe smoker with glaucoma who ran the Free Faculty of Law in the Faubourg Poissonière. He also gave me numbers for the King of Crete, the heir to the Aztec throne—and a guitarist in Boston who believed he was god.

In return he wanted to know about Argentina.

One of Chatwin's literary gifts was to make readers feel involved in his fantasies. He could exercise the same power in the flesh. His first editor, Francis Wyndham, said of him: “He made you participate in what, in that moment, did not seem to be a fantasy. One was included in it, even though he did all the talking.” Chatwin was particularly adept at extracting from perfect strangers their best stories and making extravagant connections. This is what happened at our first meeting.

Swiftly he drew from me how, as an adolescent living in Buenos Aires, I read aloud to the blind Borges; how our house in Martinez was guarded by ex-SAS bodyguards who stored their grenades in my youngest brother's desk; and a story I'd picked up in Salta, about a figure called Guemes, a hero of Argentina's independence who had lent his colors to the famous gaucho poncho. Black for the death of Guemes, red for the blood of his soldiers.

It was the Guemes story that held Chatwin—and taught me at firsthand his talent for persuading others to view the world as he did.

Guemes, I had learned—indeed, I'd worn the same poncho—was an hispanicization of the Scottish Wemyss: the colors were possibly those of a Wemyss tartan. Chatwin's blue eyes widened and with hands waving he explained how he was at that moment at work on a theory about the color red. Did I know that Garibaldi, while fighting for neighboring Uruguay's independence, had filched a consignment of these ponchos from a warehouse in Montevideo and, on the ship back to Italy, had scissored them into the uniforms for his “red-shirts”—and so inspired the red flags flying over the barricades of revolutionary Europe and ultimately the Kremlin?

I didn't, but I left his flat taking very seriously the link between a Scots tartan and the red flag of Socialism.

There was a further reason to be excited. He promised to accompany me on a pilgrimage to Southampton to see the tomb of the Argentine dictator General Rosas, who'd died in exile as a milk farmer in Hampshire and who, in power, had worn Guemes's poncho as a uniform for his colorados, a terrifying gaucho cavalry.

We met two or three times a year after that. Our pilgrimage to Rosas's tomb would crop up in conversation, but Southampton was just down the road. It could wait; we could go there any time. Meanwhile, Chatwin was off to Australia, India, China. I felt glad to be able to pin him down just once, to appear on a BBC television program about South American literature with Vargas Llosa and Borges. He disliked giving interviews and it would be one of his few television appearances. As I waited to escort Borges into the studio, Chatwin started enthusing uninhibitedly. “He's just a genius; you can't go anywhere without taking your Borges. It's like packing your toothbrush.” To which Borges, standing next to me, muttered: “How unhygienic.”

Chatwin died before we could make it to Rosas's tomb. Soon afterward, Rosas's bones were transported with tremendous fanfare back to Buenos Aires and reburied in the Recoleta cemetery. In 1992, I visited the new grave with Chatwin's widow, Elizabeth, before heading south with her in his footsteps. I thought he would have enjoyed the latest story to circulate about Rosas, that his original grave in Southampton had been destroyed in the blitz, killing a few stray cattle. The bones in the ornamented Buenos Aires tomb belonged most likely to a bomb-blasted cow.

 

Bruce Chatwin was always attracted to border countries: to places on the rim of the world, sandwiched ambiguously between cultures, neither one thing nor another. In South Africa, I met a poet who said that Chatwin wrote as if he was in exile from a country that didn't exist. “He was in exile from everywhere,” says his wife, Elizabeth. And he was on the run again when he boarded the bus in Buenos Aires.

He'd resigned from the auctioneer's Sotheby's to study archaeology at Edinburgh University, had left Edinburgh prematurely to write a book on nomads, and had put aside the manuscript in a mood of despair to work as a journalist at the
Sunday Times
magazine. In November 1974 he'd arrived in New York with $3,500 of expense money in his pocket to research a story on the Guggenheim family when “on the spur of the moment” he made a break for it.

The following month a letter arrived on his editor's desk in London postmarked Lima: “I have done what I threatened / I suddenly got fed up with N.Y. and ran away to South America / I have been staying with a cousin in Lima for the past week and am going tonight to Buenos Aires. I intend to spend Christmas in the middle of Patagonia / I am doing a story there for myself, something I have always wanted to write up.”

The story, he went on, “could be marvellous, but I'll have to do it in my own way.” Provisionally entitled “A Piece of Brontosaurus,” it related to a treasured object from his childhood: a wedding gift sent to his grandmother in Birmingham from her cousin at the end of the world. The opening paragraph gives the flavor:

The scrap of “brontosaurus” was in fact cut from the hide of a mylodon, or Giant Sloth, and Chatwin's parents had thrown it out when they moved to Stratford in 1961, but he had never lost sight of its provenance. The safest place in the event of nuclear war, the place where he planned to escape from his Shropshire boarding school, Patagonia was the habitat of several tribes Chatwin had studied at Edinburgh. Among the few lectures to stir his blood were those of Charles Thomas on the Welsh in Chubut and on Charles Darwin's shocked reaction to the Yaghans of Tierra del Fuego. In December 1972 the Irish designer and architect Eileen Gray had rekindled Chatwin's “childhood infatuation”—after visiting Gray in her Paris apartment, he wrote to thank her for “the most enjoyable Sunday afternoon I have spent in years.” Gray, then 93, had on her wall a large map of Patagonia that she had painted in gouache. Chatwin pointed to it: “That's one of the places I've always wanted to go to.” It was Gray's ambition too. If she were young again she would try to see Cape Horn. “
Allez-y pour moi
, go on my behalf.” He later said: “It was almost one of the things that decided me in fact to go.”

 

Chatwin didn't mind giving the illusion that he had gone to Patagonia for four months and dashed off a classic. But he took with him a body of knowledge that he had cultivated for years. Although
In Patagonia
would become an overnight success, it had been an arduous apprenticeship. Haunting Chatwin on his journey south was “the rotten experience” of
The Nomadic Alternative
, the book on which he'd spent several years and which his editor at Jonathan Cape, Tom Maschler, had pronounced unpublishable after reading 50 pages. (“They were terrible. They were completely sterile. They were a chore to read and I imagine a chore to write.”) This time Chatwin determined to keep silent until he was finished. “The fatal thing is ever to tell anyone about what you're really writing till it's done because (a) you don't do it and (b) you get people vaguely worked up about it and they try to tell you what to do.”

But what was he writing? The question would vex editors and critics. Just as Patagonia is not a place with an exact border, so Chatwin's “peculiarly dotty book,” as he called it, would not fall into an easy category. Was it travel writing? Was it historical fiction? Was it reportage? And was it true—and, if not, did it matter?

In advance of its American publication, Chatwin drafted a letter to his agent, requesting that
In Patagonia
be taken out of the travel category. He wanted the blurb on the American edition to convey four points, in his opinion the key to understanding the book:

His letter makes clear that Chatwin had come to Argentina with a fixed idea: to retrieve from his abandoned nomad manuscript (“that wretched book,” Elizabeth called it) the idea of the Journey as Metaphor, in particular Lord Raglan's paradigm of the young hero who sets off on a voyage and does battle with a monster. Such journeys are the meat and drink of our earliest stories, he told the Argentinian journalist Uki Goni—an “absolute constant, a universal in literature.” He wanted to write a spoof of this form. Where Jason had sought the Golden Fleece, he would seek the animal in his grandmother's cabinet. And if possible find a replacement scrap.