When Miss Starling’s mother died, she sold the bungalow and its contents. She bought a lightweight suitcase and gave away the clothes she would never wear. She packed the suitcase and walked it round the neighbourhood, trying it out for lightness. Miss Starling did not believe in porters. She did pack one long dress for evening wear.
‘You never know where you’ll end up,’ she said.
For seven years she had travelled and hoped to travel till she dropped. The flowering shrubs were now her companions. She knew when and where they would be coming into flower. She never flew in aeroplanes, and paid her way teaching English or with the odd gardening job.
She had seen the South African veld aflame with flowers; and the lilies and madrone forests of Oregon; the pine woods of British Columbia; and the miraculous unhybridized flora of Western Australia, cut off by desert and sea. The Australians had such funny names for their plants: Kangaroo Paw, Dinosaur Plant, Gerardtown Wax Plant and Billy Black Boy.
She had seen the cherries and Zen gardens of Kyoto and the autumn colour in Hokkaido. She loved Japan and the Japanese. She stayed in youth hostels that were lovely and clean. In one hostel she had a boyfriend young enough to be her son. She gave him extra English lessons, and, besides, the young liked older people in Japan.
In Hong Kong Miss Starling had boarded with a woman called Mrs Wood.
‘A dreadful woman,’ Miss Starling said. ‘Tried to pretend she was English.’
Mrs Wood had an old Chinese servant called Ah-hing. Ah-hing was under the impression that she was working for an Englishwoman, but could not understand why, if she were English, she would treat her that way.
‘But I told her the truth,’ Miss Starling said. ‘“Ah-hing,” I said, “your employer is not English at all. She’s a Russian Jewess.” And Ah-hing was upset because all the bad treatment was now explained.’
Miss Starling had an adventure staying with Mrs Wood. One night she was fumbling for her latchkey when a China-boy put a knife to her throat and asked for her handbag.
‘And you gave it him,’ I said.
‘I did no such thing. I bit his arm. I could tell he was more frightened than me. Not what you’d call a professional mugger, see. But there’s one thing I’ll always regret. I so nearly got his knife off him. I’d have loved it for a souvenir.’
Miss Starling was on her way to the azaleas in Nepal ‘not this May but the one after’. She was looking forward to her first North American Fall. She quite liked Tierra del Fuego. She had walked in forests of notofagus antarctica. They used to sell it in the nursery.
‘It is beautiful,’ she said, looking from the farm at the black line where the grass ended and the trees began. ‘But I wouldn’t want to come back.’
‘Neither would I,’ I said.
59
I WENT on to the southernmost town in the world. Ushuaia began with a prefabricated mission house put up in 1869 by the Rev. W. H. Stirling alongside the shacks of the Yaghan Indians. For sixteen years Anglicanism, vegetable gardens and the Indians flourished. Then the Argentine Navy came and the Indians died of measles and pneumonia.
The settlement graduated from navy base to convict station. The Inspector of Prisons designed a masterpiece of cut stone and concrete more secure than the jails of Siberia. Its blank grey walls, pierced by the narrowest slits, lie to the east of the town. It is now used as a barracks.
Mornings in Ushuaia began in flat calm. Across the Beagle Channel you saw the jagged outline of Hoste Island opposite and the Murray Narrows, leading down to the Horn archipelago. By mid-day the water was boiling and slavering and the far shore blocked by a wall of vapour.
The blue-faced inhabitants of this apparently childless town glared at strangers unkindly. The men worked in a crab-cannery or in the navy yards, kept busy by a niggling cold war with Chile. The last house before the barracks was the brothel. Skull-white cabbages grew in the garden. A woman with a rouged face was emptying her rubbish as I passed. She wore a black Chinese shawl embroidered with aniline pink peonies. She said ‘¿Qué tal?’ and smiled the only honest, cheerful smile I saw in Ushuaia. Obviously her situation suited her.
The guard refused me admission to the barracks. I wanted to see the old prison yard. I had read about Ushuaia’s most celebrated convict.
60
THE STORY of the Anarchists is the tail end of the same old quarrel : of Abel, the wanderer, with Cain, the hoarder of property. Secretly, I suspect Abel of taunting Cain with ‘Death to the Bourgeoisie!’ It is fitting that the subject of this story was a Jew.
May Day of 1909 was cold and sunny in Buenos Aires. In the early afternoon, files of men in flat caps began filling the Plaza Lorea. Soon the square pulsed with scarlet flags and rang with shouts.
Swirling along with the crowd was Simón Radowitzky, a redhaired boy from Kiev. He was small but brawny from working in railway yards. He had the beginnings of a moustache and his ears were big. Over his skin hung the pallor of the ghetto—‘unpleasantly white’, the police dossier said. A square jutting chin and low forehead spoke of limited intelligence and boundless convictions.
The cobbles underfoot, the breath of the crowd, the stuccoed buildings and sidewalk trees; the guns, horses and police helmets, carried Radowitzky back to his city and the Revolution of 1905. Gravelly voices mixed with Italian and Spanish. The cry went up ‘Death to the Cossacks!’ And the rioters, loosing control, smashed shop-windows and unhitched horses from their cabs.
Simón Radowitzky had been in a Tsarist jail. He had been in Argentina three months. He lived with other Russian Jewish Anarchists in a tenement. He drank in their hot talk and planned selective action.
Across the Avenida de Mayo, a cordon of cavalry and a single automobile checked the advance of the crowd. In the car was the Chief of Police, Colonel Ramón Falcón, eagle-eyed, impassive. The front-rankers spotted their enemy and shouted obscenities. Calmly, he calculated their numbers and withdrew.
Patagonian Railways
Jaramillo Station
The Tomb at Rio Pico
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 veget
ate 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.
A certain taste for degradation and the wild hopes of his race carried Radowitzky through the years of swill and potatoes. Some family photographs were his only possessions. He greeted each new indignity with a smile and discovered in himself the power to lead men. The prisoners loved him, came to him with their problems and he led their hunger strikes.
His power, once recognized, made the prison officials hate him more. The warders had standing orders to swing a lantern in his face, every half-hour as he slept. In 1918, the Deputy Governor, Gregorio Palacios, desiring his white flesh and wishing to degrade its owner yet further, buggered him. Three guards held him down and buggered him in turn. They beat his head and ripped his back with cuts and welts.
Radowitzky’s friends in the capital got wind of this business and published their version under the title La Sodoma Fuegina. The Russian Revolution was in full swing. Graffiti reading ‘Freedom for Radowitzky!’ were smeared all over Buenos Aires. Some of the more enterprising Anarchists were planning to spring their favourite martyr from jail.
The only man for the job was Pascualino Rispoli, the ‘last pirate of Tierra del Fuego’, a Neapolitan who had tracked his renegade father to the Bar Alhambra in Punta Arenas and stayed. Pascualino had a small cutter, officially for hunting seals and sea-otters, privately for smuggling and stripping wrecks. He sailed in all weathers, dumped loose-lipped crews overboard, lost regularly at cards and was open to any kind of commission.
Sometime in October 1918, two Argentine Anarchists hired Pascualino for the jail-break. The cutter anchored off Ushuaia on November 4th. At dawn, three days later, Radowitzky, in the uniform of a prison guard accomplice, walked through the prison gate. A dinghy ferried him aboard, and before the alarm went up, she was swallowed up in the maze of channels where, four years earlier, the German cruiser Dresden had eluded the British Navy.
The Neapolitan wanted to provision the fugitive and drop him on one of the outer islands until the hue-and-cry died down. But Radowitzky’s urban soul recoiled from the sinister rain-forests and he insisted on being taken to Punta Arenas.
Meanwhile, the Chilean Navy agreed to co-operate with the Argentine police. Their tug Yáñez overtook the cutter on her last reach home, but not before Pascualino had made his passenger swim ashore for the safety of the trees. Finding nothing, but suspecting all, the officers took some of the crew to Punta Arenas, where the police made them squeal. The Yáñez steamed back down the coast and caught Pascualino in the act of transferring Radowitzky ashore with a load of barrels. The fugitive lay motionless in the water, under the lee of the cutter, but there was no escape. A force of carabineers had circled the place. Exhausted and freezing, he gave himself up and was shipped back to Ushuaia.
Twelve years passed. Then, in 1930, President Yrigoyen released Radowitzky as a gesture to the working class. One night in May, the ex-convict stood on the deck of a military transport and watched for the lights of Buenos Aires, but he was not allowed to land. His guards transferred him to the Montevideo ferry. Secretly Yrigoyen had promised his police chiefs to expel him from Argentine soil.
Without papers, without money, and dressed in some illfitting clothes got from a Turk in Ushuaia, ‘the victim of the bourgeoisie’ walked down the steamer gang-plank to the cheers of an Anarchist crowd. The reception committee hoped for the words and gestures of a firebrand, and were disappointed by the puzzled, mild-mannered man, with beetling brows and a face streaked with livid veins, who smiled vaguely and didn’t know where to put his hands.
His new friends embraced him and hustled him off in a taxi. He tried to answer their questions but kept harking back to his friends in Ushuaia. Separation from them, he said, was more than he could bear. When asked about his sufferings, he was tonguetied and fumbled for a piece of paper from which he read a text thanking Dr Yrigoyen in the name of the International Proletariat. When he said he wanted to go back to Russia, the Anarchists laughed. The man hadn’t even heard of the Kronstadt Massacre.
Once free, Radowitzky sank back into obscurity and nervous exhaustion. His friends used him to run messages to comrades in Brazil. He fell foul of the Uruguayan police and was put under house arrest, but, having no house, found home again in jail.
In 1936 he sailed for Spain. Three years later he was among the columns of broken men plodding over the Pyrenees into France. He went to Mexico. A poet got him a clerk’s job in the Uruguayan consulate. He wrote articles for mimeographed reviews of small circulation and shared his pension with a woman, perhaps the only one he ever knew. Sometimes he visited his family in the United States, where they were making good.
Simón Radowitzky died of a heart attack in 1956.
61
THE YEAR the nations of Europe settled the course of the nineteenth century on the plain of Waterloo, a boy was born on the Murray Narrows, who would make a modest contribution to settling the course of the twentieth.
His birthplace was an arbour of green saplings, sods and rancid seal-skins. His mother cut his umbilical cord with a sharp mussel-shell and rammed his head against her copper-coloured teat. For two years the teat was the centre of his universe. He went everywhere with the teat: fishing, berrying, canoeing, visiting cousins, or learning the names—as complex and precise as Linnaean Latin—of everything that swam or sprouted, crawled or flew.
One day the teat tasted horrible, for his mother had smeared it with rancid blubber. She told him to play with boys his own age, now he could chew a steak of seal. His father then took over his education and taught him to garrotte cormorants, club penguins, stab crabs and harpoon seals. The boy learned about Watauineiwa, the Old Man in the Sky who changed not and resented change; and about Yetaita, the Power of Darkness, a hairy monster who pounced on the slothful and could be shaken off by dancing. And he learned the stories which wander at all times in the minds of all men—of the amorous seal, of the Creation of Fire, or the Giant with an Achilles heel, or of the humming bird who freed the pent-up waters.
The boy grew up fearless and loyal to the customs of his tribe. Season followed season: egg-time, baby-gulls-flying, beach-leaves-reddening, Sun-Man-hiding. Blue sea-anemones heralded the coming of spring; ibises meant equinoctial gales. Men were born and men died. The people had little sense of ongoing time.
The morning of May 11th 1830 was clear and sharp. (For the Fuegians, the date was a combination of bare branches and sea-otters returning.) Under the snow line the hills were blue and the forests purple and russet-brown. Black swells broke in white lines along the shore. The boy was out fishing with his uncle when they sighted the Apparition.
For years the People of the South had murmured about the visits of a monster. At first they assumed it was a kind of whale, but
closer acquaintance revealed a gigantic canoe with wings, full of pink creatures with hair sprouting ominously from their faces. These, however, had proved at least half human, since they knew something of the rules of barter. Friends up the coast had swapped a dog for a most useful knife made of a hard, cold, glittering stone.
Heedless of danger, the boy persuaded the uncle to paddle up to the pink man’s canoe. A tall person in costume beckoned him and he leapt aboard. The pink man handed the uncle a disc that shimmered like the moon and the canoe spread a white wing and flew down the channel towards the source of pearl buttons.
The kidnapper was Captain Robert FitzRoy, R.N., Chief Officer of H.M.S. Beagle, now winding up her first survey of southern waters. All down the coast of Patagonia he had seen, in the beds of fossil oysters, a confirmation of his belief in the Universal Deluge. It followed that, all men were the Children of Adam; all were equally capable of improvement. For this reason he was delighted with this bright-eyed addition to his collection of three natives. The crew called him Jemmy Button.
The next phase of the boy’s career is clearly documented. With two other Fuegians (a fourth died of smallpox at Plymouth), he travelled to London, saw a stone lion on the steps of Northumberland House, and settled down to boarding-school at Walthamstow, where he learned English, gardening, carpentry, and the plainer truths of Christianity. He also learned to preen before mirrors and fuss over his gloves. Before leaving, he had an audience with William IV and Queen Adelaide; and, if we believe Mark Twain, his colleague York Minster went to a Court Ball at St James’s in the costume of his country—and emptied the ballroom in two minutes.