Bruce Chatwin (53 page)

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Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs

BOOK: Bruce Chatwin
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Based at the Hotel Lancaster, Bruce responded to Jorge Luis Borges’s “almost endless city”, its wide cobbled streets, its wedding-cake architecture, its bookshops. “Buenos Aires is utterly bizarre,” he wrote to Elizabeth, “a combination of Paris and Madrid shorn of historical depth, with hallucinating
avenidas
flanked with lime trees, where not even the humblest housewife need forego the architectural aspirations of Marie-Antoinette. I have been mixing with Anglo-Argentines who have lost command of English and all knowledge of home and with some of the crustier Argentines who speak it far better than I do.”
Among the latter was “my best friend here”, a 22-year-old writer, Jorge Torre Zavaleta, “who is absolutely enchanting and of a culture and sensitivity that has died out in Europe”. Bruce had met Jorge in a red brick chateau in Calle Centeno belonging to Jorge’s uncle, a former Argentinian foreign secretary. Jorge entered the library to find Bruce sitting in jeans on a red damask chair, legs apart, and talking about his project “as if he was in love”. At lunch, they sat beneath the striking portrait of a cowboy. Painted on leather in 1842 by a French artist called Monvoisin, it showed a recumbent
gaucho
in a cap and red chemise, holding a
maté
gourd to his bared chest. Bruce was taken by the dark face frothed with a black moustache and excitedly described the
gaucho
as an odalisque. Jorge had plenty of times sat beneath the same figure without it striking him in this way. Since that moment, he has only been able to see the
gaucho
as an odalisque. “Good observation is a kind of invention.”
Jorge was a friend and reader to the blind Borges. He was trying to give up law and pursue a career as a writer against the wishes of his family. Bruce stood at a similar crossroads. Jorge invited him to the Jockey Club where they talked about books. “He spoke very little Spanish,” says Jorge, “and not with a good accent either, but I felt he had done a lot of homework.” Bruce’s excitement frankly mystified his host. Patagonia, to Jorge as to most
porteños
, was “a back alley where different cultures swirled about and rather a boring place”. It was fine for Scots and Germans, but Argentinians preferred to visit Scotland and Germany. “To me, Patagonia was just emptiness.”
Bruce heard the same sentiment expressed at the Braun-Menendez’s house in Punta Arenas. “Here am I inundated with Patagonian literature and I hear from across the table in Spanish heavily larded with a German accent, ‘I doubt if there are five books on Patagonia’.”
No one did more to overturn this perception than Bruce did. Over the next three and a half months he discovered Patagonia as a subject, and himself as a writer.
Patagonia is not a precise region on the map. It is a vast, vague territory that encompasses 900,000 square kilometres of Argentina and Chile. The area is most effectively defined by its soil. You know you are in Patagonia when you see
rodados patagonicos
, the basalt pebbles left behind by glaciers, and
jarilla,
the low bush that is its dominant flora. Patagonia may also be described by its climate. The wind which blows with terrific force from October to March made Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s plane fly backward instead of forward.
Travellers from Darwin onwards noted how this bleakness seized the imagination. Patagonia’s nothingness forces the mind in on itself. The stern Welsh pioneer John Murray Thomas, trekking inland in July 1877, wrote in his fading pencil: “Last night dreamt of Harriett that we were in the bedroom. Had a nice kiss. Hardly a night passes but that I see her in my dreams.”
In Patagonia, the isolation makes it easy to exaggerate the person you are: drinkers drink; the devout pray; the lonely grow lonelier, sometimes fatally. In Punta Arenas, Tom Jones was one of Charles Milward’s successors as British Consul. In his 1961 memoir
A Patagonian Panorama,
he wrote: “Whether it is the dreary and crude climate of Patagonia or the lonely life in the camp after the day’s work or remorse after a bout of hard drinking, I cannot say, but I have known, some very intimately, well over 20 people who have committed suicide.” Bruce would be moved most by the dreamers and adventurers whose dreams had failed them.
The first sheep farmers arrived from the Falkland Islands in the late 1870s, but the temptation among their descendants to cling to the culture their forebears left behind remains fierce. Patagonia spans two nations; a good many of its inhabitants pass a life likewise divided, rebuilding the environment they have escaped. The more remote the valley, the more faithful the recreation of an original homeland. In Gaiman, the Welsh preserve their language and their hymns. In Rio Pico, the Germans plant lupins and cherry trees. In Sarmiento, the Boers continue to dry their biltong (of
guanaco
). Bruce wrote in his journal, “The further one gets from the great centres of civilisation, the more prevalent become the fanciful reconstructions of the world of Madame du Barry.”
Patagonia is one of those fertile territories of fantasy, like the Galapagos, which has scarcely advanced from its early maps showing blue unicorns, red centaurs and giants. It still likes to think of itself as a land of giants. “Not those giants referred to by Hernando de Magellanes,” wrote Tom Jones, “but those men and women, many of them British, who made this vast, bleak and windswept land, prosperous and habitable for civilised people.” Today, it remains scattered both with dinosaur bones and living relics who live 60 kilometres from the nearest pavement and talk of “leagues” and “chappies” and “t’other side”. Everyone seems seven foot high, an oddball. Dreams proliferate. “Patagonia is different from anywhere else,” says Teresita Braun-Menendez, of the family with whom Bruce had dined in Buenos Aires. “That loneliness, that grandiosity. Anything can happen.”
Bruce had come to Argentina with a fixed idea. “I always try and decide what I want and then I will try and find it,” he told the broadcaster Melvyn Bragg. He was keen to retrieve from his abandoned nomad book the idea of the Journey as Metaphor, in particular Lord Raglan’s paradigm of the young hero who sets off on a voyage and does battle with a monster. Such journeys are the meat and drink of our earliest stories, Bruce told the Argentinian journalist Uki Goni – an “absolute constant, a universal in literature”. He wanted to write a spoof of this form. Where Jason had sought the Golden Fleece, Bruce would seek the animal in his grandmother’s cabinet. Wishing to make it more of a spoof, he even harboured the notion of calling his book: “A Piece of Brontosaurus”.
The spoof was a protective device, concealing a desire to continue his serious exploration into wandering and exile. “Tierra del Fuego was the last place man had wandered to on foot,” he told Goni. “There is some way in which Patagonia is the ultimate symbol of restlessness for the human condition.” He intended to grapple with his theme not in the abstract terms which had suffocated his nomad book, but in concrete stories.
“Your fascination is people?” asked Goni.
“Yes, in the end. It took rather a long time to discover that.”
The people Bruce would meet in Patagonia were often rootless storytellers like himself. “My temperament is definitely towards the fantastic,” he told Goni. “The whole of this journey was like a pursuit – not only for this ridiculous piece of skin, which was a sort of fantastical enough quest anyway, but then as it developed it became chasing one story or one set of characters after another.” It was, he said, “the most jaw-dropping experience because everywhere you’d turn up, there, sure enough, was this somewhat eccentric personality who had this fantastic story . . . At every place I came to it wasn’t a question of hunting for the story it was a question of the story coming at you . . . I also think the wind had something possibly to do with it.”
On 18 December, he took the overnight bus to Bahia Blanca and at 8 a.m. reached the small town of Cabildo. His destination was “El Chimango”, the
estancia
of David Bridges. Bridges was the son of Lucas Bridges, who had written one of Bruce’s favourite books,
Uttermost Part of the Earth.
His grandfather, the first missionary to Tierra del Fuego, personified Bruce’s childhood fantasy of the abandoned orphan. Found on a bridge wearing clothes marked with a “T” and christened Thomas Bridges, he was at the age of 19 put in charge of a mission on Keppel Island and from 1887 he lived on the Beagle Channel at Harberton in a green and white house pre-fabricated in Devon. “His lack of roots in England forced him to establish new roots in Tierra del Fuego.” One reason for visiting David Bridges was to establish contact with Bridges’s relations in the far south.
Bridges picked up Bruce outside the chemist in Cabildo and drove him to the house he was building half an hour away. The brick bungalow lay on a hill, roofless, with a sweeping view over charlock fields to the Sierra de los Vascos. Bridges showed Bruce round the farm. He had worked on the maps of his father’s book and shared his blunt suspicion of travellers. “I think explorers rather than missionaries ought to be put in the cook-pot,” he says. He nevertheless found Bruce “distinctly positive” as a person.
Bruce’s book on Patagonia would upset many of the people who lived there. Bridges is not one of them: “If you haven’t ruffled any feathers you certainly haven’t written anything worth writing.” In the book, Bruce gives Bridges the name of Bill Philips. “I asked him to disguise me, although he didn’t put enough damn camouflage. No one likes being discovered. No one likes looking at their own passport photograph, but I found it accurate. It’s not flattering, but it’s the truth.” Bridges confirms the accuracy of other portraits. “I thought he was being extremely discreet down south and therefore you could think it was someone else’s passport. I’ve never known an author yet who’s left a happy stream behind him. Some get on their high horse, and what they get on their horse about is as ridiculous as a fish on the roof. They have illusions about themselves that a photographer hasn’t.”
“My business was to record what people said,” Bruce wrote of his time in Patagonia. The author would be the thinnest presence. “I’m not interested in the traveller,” he told ABC radio. “I’m interested in what the traveller sees.”
He described his odyssey to Colin Thubron in photographic terms. “I was . . . determined to see myself as a sort of literary Cartier-Bresson going SNAP, like that. It was supposed to be a take each time.” The comparison is instructive. Cartier-Bresson is popularly defined by his notion of the “decisive moment”, an instant when everything in the picture is in balance. Bruce sought the same reverberating image. He wrote quick snapshots of ordinary people among whom he passed a very short time: stay longer and the picture would fog. Few guessed what he was up to. (In the Residential Ritz hotel in Punta Arenas, Bruce wrote down his profession as
estanciero
, or farmer.) This, partly, is why many of his subjects resented him. Not telling them that the camera was rolling, he caught them unawares and condensed their lives into a few vivid details. The portraits were not untrue, rather an encapsulation and the effect was to heighten and intensify. In the process, some felt, he had made off with their intimate moments and preserved them behind the glass of his prose for strangers to look at.
Nowhere was this resentment more acutely felt than in the community of Chubut.
In 1865, a boat-load of Welsh settlers landed on a beach near what is now Puerto Madryn. They had come to the desert to be free of England. Today, the name Bruce Chatwin conjures up everything the original emigrants had sailed to leave behind.
On 22 December, Bruce walked along the beach among the seals. “I am feeling tired and fat and old, cannot bear to look down to see the rings of fat that have been added to my waist over the last few weeks . . . I must unburden myself and go where the tourists are not.” On Christmas Eve, travelling by bus, he reached the village of Gaiman, 20 miles inland.
Gaiman’s schoolteacher was Albina Zampini. Her father was a Jones who had arrived in 1886. She took pity on Bruce and invited him to a Christmas Eve party at the house of her sister, Vally Pugh. “Poor chap, he didn’t have any presents so I gave him a linen handkerchief. He was eating
turron
, a hard candy, which he said reminded him of the mylodon. The main subject on his mind was that giant sloth.”
Albina introduced Bruce to Enrique Fernandez, a young musician, who became his guide. In the book, Bruce calls him “Anselmo” and writes that when he played Chopin “you could imagine you were in the presence of a genius”. Enrique died of AIDS in May 1990, but a photograph kept by his mother shows a young man of 26 in a brown jersey with both hands on the piano. He has a long nose and a moustache. Bruce told at least two people that he seduced Enrique, although his notebook makes no reference to this.
On Christmas Day, Enrique took Bruce to the smallholding belonging to his friend Edmundo Williams. Edmundo and his brother Geralt showed Bruce the contents of the adobe house, a collection of Welsh relics which Bruce photographed, and afterwards Geralt drove him to church in a 1958 Dodge.
Edmundo took intense exception to the few lines Bruce wrote about him. It is not too much to say that they changed his life. His resentment illustrates a sentiment widely held: whereas V. S. Naipaul insulted the important, powerful people when he wrote about Argentina (in
The Return of Eva Perón)
, Bruce upset the little people, those who could not answer back.
Bruce called Edmundo “Euan” and suggested, subtly, that because he was single he was other things too. This infuriated Edmundo. He had received this stranger politely. He knew nothing about appearing in a book and suddenly, two years later, other strangers start coming to his door asking personal questions he does not want to answer. Through his fleeting appearance in
In Patagonia
, people have assumed an intimate knowledge of him he was rarely prepared to give anyone. It was Edmundo’s link with Enrique which was especially damaging and misleading, as the book recasts Edmundo in a role Bruce, off the record, later acknowledged as his own. He wrote to a friend: “What I took OUT of that story was the head falling backwards at the end of the mazurka . . . and lifting him off the piano stool into the bedroom.”

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