In Patagonia (31 page)

The Governor of Magallanes sent a ship with troops and a judge. They took twenty-eight ringleaders away and work went on in the meat-works, just as it was before the Maximalists came.

In the Hotel Colonial, I asked the owner's wife about the riot.

‘It's too long ago,' she said.

‘Then do you remember a man called Antonio Soto? He was the leader of the strike in Argentina, but he used to work here at the
Ciné Libertad.'

‘Soto? I don't know that name. Soto? No. You mean José Macías. He was in the strike. With the leaders too.'

‘He lives here?'

‘He did live here.'

‘Can I find him?'

‘He just shot himself.'

J
OSÉ MACÍAS shot himself in his barber's shop, facing the mirror in his own barber's chair.

The last person to see him alive was a schoolgirl, who, at eight-thirty, had been walking up the Calle Bories, in a black dress and wide white collar, her shadow crinkling beside her along the corrugated housefronts. She looked at the windows of the house, painted a particularly arctic shade of blue, and saw—as she saw each morning—the barber eyeing her from behind the white blind. Shuddering, she hurried on.

At noon, the barber's cook, Conchita Marín, left her house on the ragged edge of town and walked up the Calle Baqueano to get her employer's lunch. She bought some vegetables in the corner shop and called in at the
Restaurant Rosa de Francia,
where she bought two empanadas for herself. When she saw the white blind drawn she knew that something was wrong.

The barber was a man of regular habits and would have told her if he intended to go out. She knocked but knew there would be no reply. She called on the neighbours but they hadn't seen the barber either.

Conchita Marín set down her basket. She wormed her way through the palings into the garden, opened the faulty catch of the kitchen window and climbed into the house.

Using an old Winchester, the barber had put a bullet through his right temple. With reflexes still functioning he had fired a second shot which missed and hit a calendar of the local glacier. The chair swivelled to the left and the body slumped sideways to the floor. His fish-eyes gaped glassily at the ceiling. A pool of blood lay on the blue linoleum. Blood had clotted on his steely Indian-stiff hair.

Macías prepared for death with his habitual attention to detail. He shaved, and trimmed his moustache. He drank his maté and emptied the green sludge into the garbage pail. He polished his shoes and put on his best Buenos Aires suit of striped worsted.

The front room was bare and white. Flanking the plate-glass mirror were two cabinets of pale wood containing pomades and brilliantines. On the shelf above the basin, he arranged shaving brushes, scissors and razors. Two flasks of hair spray faced each other, their nozzles pointing inwards, their red rubber puffers apart.

The impact of the shot ruined the symmetry of his last composition.

Macías had the reputation of being tight-fisted, but of being correct in all his dealings. He left no will and very little money, yet he owned three houses with tenants in them; they had no complaints against their landlord. He was nervous about his health, was a bigoted vegetarian, and dosed himself with herb teas. He rose early and had the habit of tidying the street before anyone was about. His neighbours called him ‘El Argentino', for his aloofness, the sharp cut of his clothes, his maté drinking, and for the once impetuous elegance of his tango.

Originally he came from the south of Chiloé, but left the island as a boy. He apprenticed himself to a gang of sheep-shearers, who worked the estancias of Patagonia. He got caught up in the peons' revolt in 1921, was apparently close to the leaders and escaped with them into Chile. Settling in Puerto Natales, he started up as a barber, which was similar to shearing sheep but better class. He married and had a daughter, but his wife left for a bigamous union with a mechanic in Valparaíso. Over the years he forsook the Revolution and became a Jehovah's Witness.

He shot himself on a Monday. The Sunday crowds had seen him out bicycling, for health they said, the old man in a beret and flapping raincoat, bent against the wind, zig-zagging street by street, then peddling out along the bay till he was swallowed up in the immensity of the landscape.

The townspeople had three main theories about the suicide: either his persecution mania had got the better of him since the Junta's coup; or he had calculated the End of the World for Sunday and shot himself in the anticlimax of Monday morning. The third theory explained the death in terms of arteriosclerosis. There were people who heard him say: ‘I'll finish it before it finishes me.'

Conchita Marín was a careless, spirited and heavy-breasted woman with two sons and no husband. Her lovers had fish-scales on their jerseys and came in fresh from the sea. The morning I called on her, she had on a pink jumper, jingly earrings and an uncommon amount of green eye-paint. A few plastic curlers were trying to establish order in her tangle of black hair.

Yes, she was fond of the barber. He was very correct and very reserved. And also very strange! An intellectual, she said. ‘Imagine, he used to lie on his back in the garden and gaze at the stars.'

She pointed to a drawing in coloured crayons.

‘Señor Macias made this drawing for me. Here is the Sun. Red. Here is the Moon. Yellow. Here is the Earth. Green. And this is the famous
cometa . . .'

She pointed to an orange streak zooming in from the top corner of the paper.

‘Let me read what it says . . .
Cometa
. . .
Ko
. . .
bou . . . tek.
Well, Senor Macias said this cometa was coming from God to kill us for our sins. But then it went away.'

‘Did he have any political connections?' I asked.

‘He was a Socialist. I think he was a Socialist.'

‘Did he have any Socialist friends?'

‘No friends. But he read Socialist books.
Many
books! He read them to me in the kitchen. But I did not understand.'

‘What were the books?'

‘I cannot remember. I could not listen when he read. But I remember one name . . . Wait! A famous writer. A writer from the North. Very Socialist!'

‘Ex-President Allende?'

‘No. No. No. Señor Macias did not like this Señor Allende at all. He said he was a
maricón.
He said all the government were
maricones. Maricones
in the Government! Imagine! No. The name of this writer began with an M . . . Marx! Could it be Marx?'

‘It could be Marx.'

‘It
was
Marx!
Bueno,
Senor Macias said that everything this Señor Marx wrote in his book was true, but others changed what he said. He said it was a perversion, a perversion of the truth.'

Conchita Marín was pleased with herself for having remembered the name of Señor Marx.

‘Would you like to see Senor Macias's testament?' she asked, and produced a colour print of a long-haired dachshund, which the barber had captioned: ‘THE ONE AND ONLY FRIEND OF MAN (the one who bears him no rancour)'. On the other side I read the following:

Yes, Conchita Marín said, the barber was sick, quite sick. He had arteriosclerosis. But there was something else, something always preying on his mind. No, he never talked about the strike in Argentina. He was very reserved. But sometimes she wondered about the scar at the base of his neck. A bullet, she said. Must have gone clean through. Imagine! He kept the scar hidden always. Always wore a stiff collar and a tie. She had seen the scar once when he was ill and he had tried to hide it.

The barber's daughter, Elsa, was a crushed spinster with sad skin and thinning hair, who lived in a house of two rooms washed the colour of cornflowers, and earned her living as a seamstress. She had seen her father once in the past year, but had not spoken to him for two. He had been an adventurer in his youth, she said.
‘Si, Señor, muy pícaro.
' As a child she remembered him singing to the guitar.

‘But they were all sad songs. He was a sad man, my father. He was not educated and he was sad because he had no learning. He read many books but he did not understand.' And with a look that encompassed all his sufferings as well as her own, she pronounced him an
infeliz
.

She showed me a photograph of a man with a shock of swept-back hair, anguish-chiselled features and fearful eyes. He wore the Buenos Aires suit with pointed lapels, a high starched collar and a bow tie. When I asked about the scar, she was quite taken aback and said: ‘How could she have told you that?'

The pharmacist on the plaza was one of Macías's old customers. He put me on to a peon who had known the barber in the Argentine strike. The old man lived with the widow who owned the ice-cream parlour. His eyes were cloudy with cataract; blue veins stood out on their lids. His hands were knotted with arthritis and he sat huddled over a wood stove. His protector eyed me mistrustfully, her arms pink to the elbow in ice-cream mix.

The old man was quite communicative at first. He was with the strikers who surrendered to Vinas Ibarra at Rio Coyle. ‘The Army had permission to kill everybody,' he said definitely, as if one couldn't expect anything else of armies. But when I asked him about the leaders and mentioned Macias's name, he became quite incoherent.

‘traitors!' he spluttered. ‘Bar-keepers! Hair-dressers! Acrobats! Artists!', and began to cough and wheeze, and the woman washed her hands and arms of the ice-cream mix and came over and patted him on the back.

‘Please, Senor, you must go. He is very old. It is better you do not disturb him.'

José Macías may have had no friends, but he did have customers to whom he talked. One of these was Bautista Díaz Low. Both men were the same age. Both came from the same part of Chiloé. They could reminisce about Chiloé when they tired of blasting each other with unusual information.

Bautista's ancestors were Spanish, Indian and English. His mother's grandfather was Captain William Low, the privateer and sealer, who piloted FitzRoy and Darwin through the
canales.
The great-grandson was a short square man with an amused smile, a steel-hard body and a bloody-mindedness he himself attributed to his
sangre británica
.

Seventy years of fist fights had flattened his nose. He could still drink anyone under the table, while airing his concepts of larger justice and telling even larger stories about his life. Yet photos existed to prove he had tamed an untamable stallion at the age of sixteen; had been a prize fighter and strike leader; had quarrelled with union thugs and had dodged their attempts on his life, in the course of which he had developed a theory that once you kill—or even plan to kill—you are doomed.

‘The only lawful weapon is the fist. Ha! All those who plotted against me are under the ground. There is no God but Right!'

As enemy of bqth capitalist and worker he had retreated up the far side of Last Hope Sound and hacked his own estancia from the wilderness. There I found him, in the blue-shingled house he built with his own hands. And we sat, drinking and laughing through the night, in his eccentric emerald-green kitchen, with two peons and a sealer.

Every two weeks Bautista sailed his red cutter down to Puerto Natales to reprovision himself and stay a night or two with his wife, who preferred his bullish presence at a distance and stayed in town feeding their five sons.

‘Five drunk sons!
Qué barbaridad!
What have I done to deserve five drunk sons? Their mother says they work, but I say they are drunk.'

I asked Bautista about the barber's suicide. He thumped his fist on the table.

‘José Macías had been reading the Bible and the Bible is a book that makes men mad. The question is: What made him read the Bible?'

I told him what I knew about Macías's part in the strike and of the scar which evidently shamed him. I said how the leaders got away leaving the men to the firing squads and wondered if the bullet wound on his neck was somehow connected.

Bautista listened with attention and said: ‘I put Macías's suicide down to women. That man was tremendously lecherous, even at his age. And jealous! He never let his women talk to anyone. Not even to other women. Well, of course, they all left him and that's why he got religious mania. But it's funny you should mention the strike. All the men I knew who came through that strike were haunted men. Perhaps old Macías shot himself as the repayment of a debt.'

I went back to Puerto Natales and checked what I already knew: before he fired the shot José Macías unbuttoned his shirt-front and bared his neck to the mirror.

I
N THE bar of the Hotel Colonial, the schoolmaster and a retired shepherd were having their lunch-time brandies and moaning quietly about the Junta. The shepherd knew the Mylodon Cave well. He advised me to call first on Senor Eberhard, whose grandfather found the place.

I walked out of town along the bay towards the smokestacks of the meat-works. Red fishing smacks veered erratically at their moorings. A man was shovelling seaweed into a horse-cart. He made a vague gesture as if he'd seen a madman. Then a truck stopped and took me some of the way.