Anatomy of Restlessness (8 page)

I reached Lago Angostura on 9 November. The settlement had grown since Mustanoja's time. The estancia now belonged to a German, Don Guillermo Meingast, who came here after World War II. There was a police post, a gas-pump and the Hotel-Bar Alhambra, a corrugated iron building, painted a livid green but stripped by salt dust on the windward side.

The owner was a sorrowful young widow running to fat who spent her days lacquering her nails and leafing through Argentine football magazines. Dinner, the invariable dinner of the Patagonian pampas, consisted of a can of sardines, a lump of lamb that bounced on the plate and acid red wine that came in a penguin jug.

The two other customers wore hard hats and sat by a window playing dominoes. One was a big weatherbeaten man with an implacable mouth and wandering eyes, dressed from head to foot in black. His partner was a hunchback Indian dwarf.

The dwarf won the game and said, ‘Vamos!' quietly, and the big man sheathed his knife and sat him on his forearm. Together they rode off into the storm.

The track to Puesto Ibáñez still answered Mustanoja's description, but there was no sign of the logging camp and the valley floor was choked with bamboos. No traveller without a copy of
Patagonian Researches
could have found his way up the cliffs of the Meseta.

At 5,050 feet – if my aneroid reading is correct – Istood on Chilean territory and looked down from the ridge where Mustanoja first sighted the valley. I let my eyes wander over the sights he described so vividly: the barrage of purple clouds ringing the ice-caps; the ‘hole' of clear blue sky; the rainbows; the chutes of light rain; the Belgrano itself ‘streaming like the folds of a wedding garment': the glittering screes of micaceous schist, the black forests and, far below, the river snaking through bright green pastures.

More than ever I realised what he meant by ‘the ideal microclimate'. I followed the track downwards, zigzagging through a ‘flowering mead' of columbines, tulips, narcissi, widow iris, crocuses and fritillaries – all Asiatic species; in fact, the number of rarities from the Caucasus and Hindu Kush made it clear that the plantsman was a botanist of no ordinary competence. I stopped beside a gnarled cypress to rest in a hut built of bark and tree roots and modelled on Rousseau's hermitage in the park at Ermenonville (after the engraving by Hubert Robert). And the track itself was no less a work of art—spread with white gravel and so graded to ensure perfect footfalls with all debris and jarring stones removed.

Brushing through curtains of jade-green lichen I plunged into the dark wood of
Nothofagus antarctica
, silent but for the toctocking of Magellan woodpeckers. Another descent of 1,000 feet brought me into the dappled sunlight of young specimen trees – poplars, paulownias, wing-nuts, Siberian birches and the blueneedled Kurile larch.

The valley floor was an expanse of undulating turf that proved not to be of grass, but a carpet of the prostrate Andean strawberry, studded with fruit that gave off a delicious smell when crushed.

A cobalt ribbon of
Iris Kaempferi
bordered a lake whose waters were the palest silvery celadon and so transparent that the trout floating over its bed of white stones seemed to be airborne.

These irises were the only blue flowers in the valley. Otherwise, the vegetation consisted of white willows, white-margined aralias, silver whitebeams and the tansy-leaved thorn. Among the flowers were a white eremurus, Moutan peonies, the Mount Omei rose and the waxy pagodas of the giant Himalayan lily. Or else the plants were black, black trilliums, black-stemmed bamboos and the Black Knight Fritillary from Kamchatka. The spathes of the Cretan Dragon Arum peopled a grove of willows with funereal shades.

Mr Tod's house—for that was the name of the proprietor—was an airy pavilion built on a knoll about one hundred yards from the water. It was thirty-five feet square, aligned to the cardinal points, and had five sash windows on each face except for the north. The walls were of battened vertical planks painted the colour of pewter. The glazing bars were a warm ivory.

No structure could be simpler. It owed its severity and perfect proportions to the utopian projects of Ledoux and the houses of Shaker communities in New York State. The only attempt at decoration lay in two thin strips of beading round the window frames, one painted a dark lapis, the other a dry red.

Yet the architect had avoided the absolute regularity of the Western tradition. The roof was
slightly
hipped in the Chinese manner; none of the walls were
precisely
the same length; all were
fractionally
inclined inwards; and these marginal assymetries gave the building an air of movement in repose.

The doorstep was a slab of grey schist, chamfered at the comers and embedded with balas rubies. A bed of rue had been planted to conceal the foundations and the glaucous foliage seemed to lift the house above the ground.

At the foot of the knoll was a wooden pillar, ten feet high and lacquered cinnabar red. Hitched to it with a green rein was a light bay Turkoman stallion. The saddle was of the Mongolian type, of yellow leather, with base silver stirrups.

A boy came out of the house with a peregrine falcon on his gauntlet. He wore a collarless shirt of grey silk, snuff-brown breeches and red leather boots crinkled like a concertina. His grey eyes looked only into the eyes of the bird. He mounted and cantered off westwards towards a cleft in the mountain wall.

A second path led over a cloud-blue bridge that arched over the stream into a pasture. A range of buildings showed up indistinctly from behind a smokescreen of white poplars. Nearby was the black neo-classical pigeon house where Mr Tod was in the habit of training his favourite birds to imitate the dances of Sufi dervishes in trance.

On such occasions he would wear boots of canvas and rawhide elk and a
hubertusmantel
of light grey loden cloth. He was an athletic man of about fifty-five ... but it is not my intention to describe his appearance in this memoir.

All the interior walls of his house were painted an ivory-coloured tempera.

The shutters were grey: there were no curtains.

The hall was lit by a Swedish chandelier with amber instead of crystal drops. The floor was a pebble mosaic of jasper and chalcedony from the screes of the volcano. Laid out on a trestle table were two Purdey shotguns and a pair of Napoleonic green morocco dispatch boxes, one now used for cartridges, the other for trout flies. Around the walls was an arrangement
en trophée
of split cane rods, gaffs and Mr Tod's archery equipment: a yew-wood bow made for the Chevalier de Monville in 1788, a Mongolian double-reflex bow, and a Japanese samurai target of the Muromachi.

A pair of Austrian ice-axes were crossed about the lightest imaginable rucksack, stitched from strips of seal bladder and lashed to a frame of laminated birch.

The kitchen and bathroom were purely functional, the only evidence of luxury being a set of silver-lidded toilet pots made of imperial porphyry. Apart from some built-in cupboards, the rest of the house was a single room, heated by a Rostrand stove of white faience tiles. The floor was a parquet of scrubbed pine. The rug was Tibetan and blue.

At the eastern end of the room there was a screen covered with the palest orange Hawaiian tapa-cloth and, behind it, Marshal Ney's steel campaign bed with its original lime green taffeta hangings.

On the back of the screen hung the few watercolours and drawings, salvaged from a far larger collection and which Mr Tod did not now absolutely loathe. Among them were:
The Horsehair Standards of Suleiman the Magnificent,
by the German draughtsman Melchior Lorch;
The Mechanics of an Eagle's Wing
, by Jacopo Ligozzi; a miniature of an Arctic Tern done by Mansur for the Emperor Jahangîr; a few brushstrokes of the quarry at Bibémus; an ice-floe by Caspar David Friedrich; Delacroix's own rumpled bed-sheets, and one of Turner's ‘colour beginnings' – two crimson clouds in a golden sky.

Apart from a steel
chaise de
camp
and Baron Vivant-Denon's travelling desk, the furniture of the room was of no consequence. Mr Tod said he had no time for furniture that would not fit on the pannier of a mule.

There were, however, two wing chairs with
decisively
cut linen covers. And on three grey tempera tables were arranged the collection of curiosities that Mr Tod, by a process of elimination and the exigencies of travel, had reduced to the bleak essentials.

In none of the works of art was the human image to be found.

Inventories make tiresome reading, so I shall confine the list to a Shang bronze fang-i with the ‘melon-skin' patina; a Nuremberg sorcerer's mirror; an Aztec plate with a purple bloom; the crystal reliquary of a Gandharan stupa; a gold mounted bezoar; a jade flute; a wampum belt; a pink granite Horus falcon of Dynasty I and some Eskimo morse ivory animals which, for all the stylised attenuation of their features, seemed positively to breathe. I must, however, single out three cutting implements since they were the subject of Maximilan Tod's essay
Die Ästhetik der Messerschärfe
, published in Jena in 1941, in which he claimed that all weapons are artificial claws or canines and give their users the satisfaction known to carnivores as they rend warm flesh.

These were:

Nor shall I omit a description of three other items from the Gruenwald Collection: a tea bowl by Koetsu called ‘Mountains in Winter', a box of woven birchbark from the Gold Tribe of Manchuria, and a block of blue-black stone with green markings and the inscription: ‘
This inkstone with Dead Eyes comes from the Old Pit of the Lower Cliff at Tuan Hsi and was the property of the painter Mi Fei
.'

In the bark box Mr Tod kept his two most treasured possessions: a calligraphy by the Zen Master, Sen Sotan, with the tenet: ‘Man originally possesses nothing', and a landscape scroll by Mi Fei himself—painter of cloud-like mountains and mountain-like clouds, drunk, petromaniac, connoisseur of inkstones, hater of domesticated animals, who roamed about the mountains with his priceless art collection always beside him.

The walls of the room were bare but for a framed Turkish calligraphy, written on a gilded skeleton leaf with a line from Rûmi (Mathnâvi VI, 723): ‘To be a dead man walking, one who has died before his death.'

Mr Tod's library—the visible part of it at least—was not a library in the usual sense but a collection of texts that held for him some special significance. They were bound in grey papers and kept in a shagreen travelling box. I shall itemise the order of their arrangement, since this order itself furnishes a measure of insight into their owner's character: Cassian's treatise on Accidie; the Early Irish Poem
The Hermit's Hut;
Hsien Yin Lung's Poetic
Essay on Living in the Mountains
; a facsimile of the
De Arte Venandi Cum Avibus
by the Emperor Frederick II; Abu'l Fazl's account of Akbar's pigeon flying; John Tyndall's
Notes on the Colour of Water and Ice
; Hugo von Hofmannsthal's
The Irony of Things; Landor's Cottage
by Poe; Wolfgang Hammerli's
Pilgrimage of Cain
; Baudelaire's prose poem with the English title
Any where out of the World
and the 1840 edition of Louis Agassiz's
Etude sur les Glaciers
with the appendix of chromolithographs of the Jungfrau and other Swiss glaciers.

It should be clear, even to the most unobservant reader, that I am Maximilian Tod. My history is unimportant. I detest confidences. Besides, I believe that a man is the sum of his things, even if a few fortunate men are the sum of an absence of things. Yet a few facts of my existence may help pattern my acquisitions into a chronological sequence.

I was born on 13 March 1921 in the granite mansion of my American forebears at Bucksport, Maine. (The house contained an indifferent portrait by Copley and a collection of Attic vases that did not, even as a child, excite my cupidity.) My father was Caleb Saltonstall Todd and my mother Maria Grafin Henkel von Trotschke of Ueckermünde in East Prussia. The Todds of Bucksport owed their fortune to the export of ice to India. My German ancestors stepped into history in the aftermath of the Mongol invasions. My father was a disciple of Madison Grant and was forever quoting from that author's
The Passing of the Great Race
. As an undergraduate of the Harvard Class of 1910 he read and swallowed the racial philosophy of Ernst Haeckel, whose attempts to explain history in terms of a crude biological determinism are an affront to logic and common sense.

Caleb Todd first went to Germany in 1912 where his looks won him many admirers and his charm concealed a mind of exceptional vacuity. At Harvard he had become interested in archaeology and, after reading Kossinna's inflated chronology of the German Bronze Age, seriously believed that the Aryan Race had occurred, spontaneously, on Lüneburg Heath. He stayed in America for the duration of the War, but went back to Germany in 1919. While excavating the tumulus on the Von Trotschke's estate, he met my mother and married her.

The summers of my childhood were divided between Maine and the vast neo-classical house at Ueckermünde, with its view of marsh and sky and its atrium of frigid marble goddesses. I can date my enthusiasm for blue ice to a visit to the Hamburg Kunsthalle in 1930 where I saw Friedrich's masterpiece
The Wreck of the Hope
. I confirmed this passion in 1934 when I first set eyes on the pinnacles and ‘chimneys' of the Lower Grindelwald Glacier.