Almost all the peons were migrants. They came—as they still come—from the green and beautiful island of Chiloé, where the air is soft, conditions primitive and the farms overcrowded; where there is always fish to eat and nothing much to do; and the women are fierce and energetic and the men are lazy and gamble away their earnings.
The Chilotes sleep in spartan dormitories, get saddle-sores on their backsides, and fight the cold on a diet of meat and maté till they collapse of age or stomach cancer. In general they work without enthusiasm. Often, at nights, I heard them grousing about their employers: ‘Es hombre despótico’, they’d say. But if you mentioned the name of Archie Tuffnell, they’d hold back and say ‘Well, Mister Tuffnell is an exception.’
47
‘SO YOU want to find Mister Tuffnell,’ the barman said. ‘It’s not easy. First there’s a road that’s hardly a road and then there’s a track that isn’t even a track.’
He was a big man in a striped suit and double-breasted waist coat. Seals and keys jingled on his fat gold chain. His hair was engominado, like a tango dancer’s, gleaming wings of jet-black hair, but the white was showing at the roots and he looked sick and shaky. He had been a great womanizer and his wife had just got him back.
He drew a map on a paper napkin. ‘You’ll see the house in some trees by a lake,’ he said and wished me luck.
I found the place in the dark. Moonlight glimmered on the pearly shells of fossil oysters. There were some ducks swimming on the lake, black forms on silver ripples. I followed a thread of golden light into a clump of poplars. A dog barked. The door opened and the dog slunk past with a lump of red meat in its mouth. The woman pointed to a cabin in some willows.
‘The old man lives over there,’ she said.
A straight-backed gentleman in his eighties peered through steel-rimmed spectacles and grinned. His face was shiny pink and he wore khaki shorts. I apologized for the late hour and explained my business.
‘Did you ever know a Captain Milward?’
‘Old Mill. Course I knew Old Mill. H.M. Consul Punta Arenas de Chile. Irritable old bugger. Can’t remember too much about him. Young wife. A bit solid but a good-looker. Look here, come in and let me cook you some dinner. Fancy finding this place on your own.’
Archie Tuffnell loved Patagonia and called her ‘Old Pat’. He loved the solitude, the birds, the space and the dry healthy climate. He had managed a sheep-farm for a big English land company for forty years. When he had to retire, he couldn’t face the coop of England, and had bought his own camp, taking with him 2,500 sheep and ‘my man Gómez’.
Archie had given the house over to the Gómez family and lived alone in a prefabricated cabin. His domestic arrangements were a lesson in asceticism: a shower, a narrow bed, a desk, and two camp stools but no chairs.
‘I don’t want to get sunk down in an armchair. Not at my age. Might never get up.’
He had two sporting prints in the bedroom, and a sacred corner for photographs. They were sepia photographs, of confident ladies and gentlemen, grouped in front of conservatories or in hunting rig.
He was not a clever man but a wise one. He was a self-centred bachelor, who avoided complications and did little harm to anyone. His standards were Edwardian but he knew how the world changed; how to be one step ahead of change, so as not to change himself. His rules were simple: Keep liquid. Never wait for higher prices. Never use money to show off to your workers.
‘They’re a proud lot,’ he’d say. ‘You’ve got to keep your distance or they think you’re a toady. I do it by speaking lousy Spanish on purpose. But you’ve got to do what they have to do. They don’t give a hoot what you’ve got in the bank as long as you eat what they eat.’
‘My man Gómez’ and Archie were inseparable. All morning they pottered round the garden, weeding the spinach or planting tomato seedlings. Señora Gómez cooked lunch and, in the heat of the day, the old man took a nap, while I sat in the blue kitchen listening to Gómez on the subject of his master.
‘What a miracle,’ he said. ‘So intelligent So generous! So handsome! I owe everything to him.’
In the place of honour, where in some households you saw a picture of Perón or Jesus Christ or General San Martin, beamed an uncommonly large photo of Mister Tuffnell.
48
I STOOD on the shore at San Julián and tried to picture a dinner party in Drake’s cabin; the silver plates with gilt borders, the music of viol and trumpet, the plebeian Admiral and his gentleman guest, the mutineer Thomas Doughty. I then borrowed a leaky rowing boat and rowed over to Gibbet Point, combing the shore for the ‘great grinding stone’ set over Doughty’s tomb and carved with his name in Latin ‘that it might be better understood by all that should come after us’. Drake had him beheaded alongside the gibbet from which Magellan hung his mutineers, Quesada and Mendoza, fifty-eight winters before. Wood preserves well in Patagonia. The coopers of the Pelican sawed the post and made tankards as souvenirs for the crew.
Over lunch in the hotel some sheep-farmers were plotting to block the trunk road with bales, protesting against the government of Isabel Perón which had pegged the price of wool far below its value on the international market. The hotel itself was built in mock-Tudor style with black beams nailed over corrugated sheet. The style suited San Julián’s various sixteenthcentury associations:
49
BERNAL DÍAZ relates how, on seeing the jewelled cities of Mexico, the Conquistadores wondered if they had not stepped into the Book of Amadis or the fabric of a dream. His lines are sometimes quoted to support the assertion that history aspires to the symmetry of myth. A similar case concerns Magellan’s landfall at San Julián in 1520:
From the ship they saw a giant dancing naked on the shore, ‘dancing and leaping and singing, and, while singing, throwing sand and dust on his head’. As the white men approached, he raised one finger to the sky, questioning whether they had come from heaven. When led before the Captain-General, he covered his nakedness with a cape of guanaco hide.
The giant was a Tehuelche Indian, his people the race of copper-skinned hunters, whose size, strength and deafening voices belied their docile character (and may have been Swift’s model for the coarse but amiable giants of Brobdingnag). Magellan’s chronicler, Pigafetta, says they ran faster than horses, tipped their bows with points of silex, ate raw flesh, lived in tents and wandered up and down ‘like the Gipsies’.
The story goes on that Magellan said: ‘Ha! Patagon!’ meaning ‘Big-Foot’ for the size of his moccasins, and this origin for the word ‘Patagonia’ is usually accepted without question. But though pata is ‘a foot’ in Spanish, the suffix gon is meaningless. πάταγoς, however, means ‘a roaring’ or ’gnashing of teeth’ in Greek, and since Pigafetta describes the Patagonians ‘roaring like bulls’, one could imagine a Greek sailor in Magellan’s crew, a refugee perhaps from the Turks.
I checked the crew lists but could find no record of a Greek sailor. Then Professor Gonzáles Díaz of Buenos Aires drew my attention to Primaleon of Greece, a romance of chivalry, as absurd as Amadis of Gaul and equally addictive. It was published in Castille in 1512, seven years before Magellan sailed. I looked up the English translation of 1596 and, at the end of Book II, found reason to believe that Magellan had a copy in his cabin:
The Knight Primaleon sails to a remote island and meets a cruel and ill-favoured people, who eat raw flesh and wear skins. In the interior lives a monster called the Grand Patagon, with the ‘head of a Dogge’ and the feet of a hart, but gifted with human understanding and amorous of women. The islanders’ chief persuades Primaleon to rid them of the terror. He rides out, fells the Patagon with a single sword thrust, and trusses him up with the leash of his two pet lions. The Patagon dyes the grass red with blood, roars ‘so dreadfully that it would have terrified the very stoutest hearte’, but recovers and licks his wound clean ‘with his huge broade tongue’.
Primaleon then decides to ship the creature home to Polonia to add to the
royal collection of curiosities. On the voyage the Patagon cringes before his new master, and on landing Queen Gridonia is on hand to inspect him. ‘This is nothing but a devil,’ she says. ‘He gets no cherishing at my hands’. But her daughter, the Princess Zephira, strokes the monster, sings to him and teaches him her language, while he ‘delights to gaze a fair lady in the face’ and follows ‘as gently as if he had been a spaniell’.
Wintering at San Julián, Magellan also decided to kidnap two giants for Charles V and his Queen Empress. He put a number of gewgaws in their hands and, while his men riveted iron fetters round their ankles, assured them that these too were another kind of ornament. Seeing they were trapped, the giants roared (in Richard Eden’s translation) ‘lyke bulls and cryed uppon their great devill Setebos to help them’. One escaped but Magellan got the other aboard and baptized him Paul.
History may aspire to symmetry but rarely achieves it: the Giant Paul died of scurvy in the Pacific and his body fed the sharks; Magellan’s body lay face down in the shallows at Mactan, felled by a Filippino sword.
Ninety years would then pass before the first performance of The Tempest at Whitehall on November 1st 1611. Shakespeare’s sources for the play are the subject of brisk debate, but we know he read the account in Pigafetta’s Voyage of the vile trick at San Julián:Caliban I must obey. His art is of such pow’r
It would control my dam’s god, Setebos,
And make a vassal of him.
Into the mouth of Caliban, Shakespeare packed all the bitterness of the New World. (‘This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother, which thou tak’st from me.’) He saw how the white man’s language was a weapon of war (‘The red plague rid you for learning me your language.’); how the Indians would grovel to any jackass who promised freedom (‘I’ll kiss thy foot...’ ‘ ‘I’ll lick thy shoe ... ’Ban ’Ban Cacaliban has a new master—get a new man’); and he read Pigafetta more carefully than is usually noticed:
and:
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.
50
IN 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.
51
PEOPLE 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 coi
ncided 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, La 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.