In Patagonia (22 page)

A German House at Rio Pico

The Dodge, Gaimán, Chubut

Driving to the Bethel in the Dodge

Welsh Farmer, Chubut

The Bethel, Gaimán, Chubut

Charley Milward's Foundry, Punta Arenas

Charley Milward's House, Punta Arenas

Punta Arenas

The Moreno Glacier

The Moreno Glacier

The Cave of Hands

The Mylodon Cave

There followed a flurry of shots and a rush of horses, in which three men died and forty were wounded. (Journalists counted thirty-six puddles of blood.) The police claimed self-defence and also unearthed seditious leaflets written in Hebrew, which they used to pin the disturbance on the plague of Russian nihilists, whom a slack immigration policy had allowed to pollute the country. In Argentina the words ‘Russian' and ‘Jew' were synonymous.

The second act took place later the same winter. Scornful of armed guards, Colonel Falcon was driving from the funeral of his friend, the Director of State Prisons. With him was his young secretary, Alberto Lartigau, who was learning to be a man. At a corner of the Avenida Quintana, Simon Radowitzky in a dark suit was waiting with a parcel. With perfect timing he tilted it into the car, jumped back to dodge the explosion and ran towards a construction site.

He was unlucky. Some bystanders raised two policemen. A bullet caught him under the right nipple and he dropped, gritting his teeth under the blows.
‘Viva la Anarqaria!'
he yelled, haltingly, at his captors. ‘I am nothing but for each of you I have a bomb.'

Colonel Falcon, a mess of broken limbs and arteries, was conscious enough to identify himself. ‘It is nothing,' he said. ‘Attend to the boy first.' In hospital he died of shock and loss of blood. Lartigau survived an amputation until evening. From all over the country, police delegations came for the funeral.

‘Simón Radowitzky belongs to that class of helots who vegetate on the steppes of Russia, dragging out a wretched existence in the harshest of climates and the misery of their own inferior condition.' The Public Prosecutor also pointed to certain somatic peculiarities as proof of a criminal personality. A man of conscience and humanity, he asked for the death sentence, but the Judge could not pass it until he had cleared up the matter of the assassin's age.

At this point Moses Radowitzky, rabbi and old-clothes merchant, surfaced with his cousin's birth certificate. When the crabbed characters were deciphered, the court learned that the prisoner was eighteen years and seven months old, too young for the firing squad, but not for life imprisonment. Every year, around the date of the crime, the Judge ordered twenty days solitary confinement on a bread and water diet.

Simón Radowitzky disappeared into labyrinths of rats and reinforced concrete. Two years later he was transferred to Ushuaia. (The jail in the capital was unsafe.) One night sixty-two prisoners were stripped naked for medical inspection and fettered with hoops of iron. Reflectors on the quay lit the procession up the gang-plank of a naval transport. The voyage began in calm and ended in the gales of Patagonia. The convicts shared their berth with the ship's coal-bunker, and, on landing, they were black with coal dust and their ankles were ulcerated by the iron hoops.