Bruce Chatwin (58 page)

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Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare

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In Chapter 85, Bruce adapted a story from Captain Milward’s journal about Daphne Hobbs’s father-in-law. In the journal, Milward describes how he visited his friend Ernest Hobbs on his
estancia
on Tierra del Fuego and noticed a human skull “set up on the wall of the pigsty”. The skull belonged to an Ona Indian, part of a group who had fled after killing two Chilean sailors. This Ona had been shot by “tame” Indians working for Hobbs. Milward writes: “Hobbs, of course, took no part in the killing and he simply reported that his tame Indians had got foul of some wild ones and that the wild ones had got the worst of it.”
Bruce ratchets this encounter up a notch. He recasts it in direct speech, makes Hobbs reluctant to tell Milward what really happened and invents a second meeting in which Hobbs effectively admits to instigating the attack. This tampering understandably incenses Daphne Hobbs. “That conversation never took place. It was a pure lie.” Speaking without proof but with conviction, she would “put my hand in the fire” to defend her father-in-law from a charge of Indian killing.
Bruce obviously embroidered the scene. But one must question why he did not change Hobbs’s name as he protected identities elsewhere – unless he was persuaded that Hobbs had connived at the murder. This is a hard claim to verify. British farmers did have a hand in Indian killing in Tierra del Fuego, as Jones acknowledges in
A Patagonian Panorama.
“Many were murdered and a bad page of Patagonian history was recorded when one or two farmers paid one pound per head to Indian killers, a few of them British, for those liquidated; proof of accomplishment was the production of the Indian’s ears.” This does not mean Hobbs was among the Indian killers. Neither does it mean he was not. Bridges worked with Hobbs for many years on
Estancia
Baker and does not consider it impossible. “I’m quite sure that Ernest possibly did most of the things that are attributed to him – good and bad. Unfortunately, that is the way life works.”
Bruce had no scruples about rattling family skeletons, or about reshaping even his own cousins’ lives and natures, their names or their appearances. Charles Chatwin, who all his life had suppressed mention of his grandfather’s embezzlement, was mortified to read, in the book’s sole footnote, an account of the scandal surrounding Robert Harding Milward’s imprisonment. Charles asked his son to remove the paragraph in future editions. After Bruce agreed to this, he wrote to say that he felt the rest of the book “a worthy recognition of a lot of endeavour & hard work put in by you, and . . . to my mind, completely free of any padding”.
More distressed were Charles Milward’s daughters, Monica and Lala. They had looked forward to the book’s publication, but “feelings ran high” after it appeared. According to Monica’s husband, John Barnett, “they were spitting tin-tacks!”
On 28 November 1977, Monica wrote to Bruce expressing her “shocked horror – yes, horror” over a paragraph “full of conjecture and half-truths” which she felt had impugned the honour of both her parents. The paragraph dealt with her mother’s rape. (“One night the whisky-soaked proprietor went for her and laid her down. She ran from the house, saddled a horse and rode through the snow to Punta Arenas.”) By “raking up her bitter shame”, Bruce had given an impression of Isabelle, “never Bella!”, as a “rather cheap adventuress” preying on the soft heart of a lonely old man.
Lala objected deeply to his depiction of their father. “One of the things that drove me out of my mind was that he called my father ‘Charley’. He was never called that. He was ‘Charles’ or ‘Captain Milward’. He described my father as tall, having startling blue eyes and black mutton chops, with sailor’s hat at a rakish angle. He was short and red-headed and bald by the time he was 30, and always wore a black tie. And he was not this sickly old man. He died very suddenly of a heart attack.”
Monica could not understand her cousin’s motives. “Surely it cannot be resentment of us?” she wrote to Bruce. “To my knowledge, not one of my Mother’s family, children or grandchildren has ever harmed you in any way. We had never even heard of you until you turned up on our doorsteps. You were received with great kindness by my sister and her husband and later by my husband and myself. We welcomed you in our home, first alone and later with your wife and mother-in-law, who were with us over a period of several weeks. I allowed you free access to my Father’s papers, although I never dreamed that you were copying portions of my father’s ‘Journal’ with the intention of inserting them in full in your book . . . but I understand now why you insisted on staying on, shut up in your room upstairs while we were in the process of moving house.”
She accused Bruce of embezzling the material she had hoped to use in her own book. “Maybe your memory is hazy, but when I gave you access to my Father’s papers, I never gave you permission to photograph the ‘Journal’ – quite the contrary, I sought to make sure that it didn’t leave the house.” She asked him to imagine her surprise on finding “a receipt for 197 pages of photocopying dated 30 April”. He had, she wrote, “lifted” sections “virtually word for word from my Father’s ‘Journal’ – which is our one inheritance from him”.
Bruce apologised at once. “If I am in the wrong, then I am deeply in the wrong. But I recall the matter differently.” He agreed to remove the offending paragraph, change “Bella” to “Belle” and to credit Monica fulsomely in future. But Monica and Lala never forgave him. He became in Lala’s words: “the cousin of whom I am not proud.”
* * *
 
There are errors of fact in the book which had he known about he would have corrected. Several may be attributed to his poor Spanish. (In the Salesian Museum in Punta Arenas, for instance, he writes down the wrong name for the murdered priest: Father Pistone instead of Father Juan Silvestro.) Other mistakes seem the result of his haste. (Patagonia is generally understood to begin not at the banks of the Rio Negro, but 120 kilometres north at the Rio Colorado.) But there are strikingly few cases of mere invention. Bruce told the Argentinian critic Christian Kupchik: “Everything that is in the book happened, although of course in another order.” The “lies” he admits to Michael Ignatieff are examples of his romanticism, as when he describes Señora Eberhard’s ordinary stainless steel chair as being “by Mies van der Rohe” or makes the Ukrainian nurse in Rio Pico a devotee of his beloved Osip Mandelstam instead of Agatha Christie. These are tiny artisitic devices. “He is not writing a government report,” says Wyndham. Nor a tourist brochure.
Jean-François Fogel says of
In Patagonia
: “No one goes on such a journey.” People who read it wanting to find out something about Patagonia are left behind. The uniqueness of the landscape hardly comes into view. The book is largely about interiors which are elsewheres. “With little exaggeration,” wrote the German critic Manfred Pfister, “there are no Patagonian Patagonians, at least not in Chatwin’s Patagonia.” The structure is of a journey constantly interrupted, zigzagging among texts and through time. As a master fabulist Bruce has absorbed the rules and contrived something original out of them. He mixes and plays with literary forms, entering Drake’s cabin with the same flamboyant ease as he enters an
estancia
, or the mind of a
guanaco.
“Once you read his interpretations you can’t forget easily,” says Guillermo Alvarez, for 20 years a geologist in Patagonia. “I always saw
guanacos
and they followed me. I thought they were
guanacos,
nothing more. Then I read Chatwin and I saw
guanacos
in a different way. Now I wonder: ‘What does the
guanaco
think of me?’ He motivates me to think, to want to know more, to be more observant. This is his power. Once you read him, you want to know: ‘Is this true?’”
Generally speaking, Bruce does not subtract from the truth so much as add to it. He tells not a half-truth, but a truth-and-a-half. His achievement is not to depict Patagonia as it is, but to create a landscape called Patagonia – a new way of looking, a new aspect of the world. And in the process he reinvented himself.
XXIV
 
“Kicked by Amazon”
“
How much did it
[In Patagonia]
change you?”
“It enabled me to go on writing books.”
—BC, Australia, 1984
BRUCE DEVOTED A CHAPTER OF
IN PATAGONIA
TO THE STORY
of a 33-year-old French lawyer, Orélie-Antoine de Tounens, who came to be first constitutional monarch of the Araucanian Indians. Bruce traced the present claimant, Philippe Boiry, to a public relations firm in the rue Poissonnière in Paris. Other pseudo-royals in his address book were the claimant to the Aztec throne and the King of Crete. He would also be amused by a musician, Melvin Lyman, who in 1969 declared that he was God.
Bruce was told about Lyman by an excited Welch who had visited “the divinity” in a fortress of six dilapidated houses in the Fort Hill district of Boston. In January 1970, Welch’s intriguing report of the drug-taking Sufi guitar-player (“the music was mostly Hank Williamsish”) attracted Bruce to Boston. He came upon Lyman’s followers noisily eating popcorn and watching the Super Bowl. Lyman, or “Christ” as Bruce called him, sat like a movie mogul in the plushest armchair. “He operated several remote control switches, and while an enterprising insurance company proposes life policies for Hippies at special rates (higher), he turns round so that I can see his face . . . He is a mixture of boyishness and decrepitude. He has lost his teeth.”
The interview was very short.
“‘What’s your name?’
“‘Bruce.’
“‘What’s your sign, Bruce?’
“‘Taurus.’
“’You’re a liar, Bruce.
He’s
Taurus. Look at him!’
“The bodyguard stood close by. He was small and dark and hairy. ‘You’re not the same as him, Bruce’.”
In his own words, Bruce took “a clinical interest in Messiahs”. The story of a man who rose from humble origins to assume superhuman powers would be the subject of his second book.
On 21 September 1976, Bruce wrote to the writer Gerald Brenan outlining a fresh project. “Some years ago I went to a place called Ouidah on the slave coast of Dahomey and met members of a family called de Souza, now totally black. The original de Souza was a Portuguese peasant, who went to Bahia, became captain of the Portuguese fort on the slave coast and successively the leading slave-dealer, the Viceroy of the King, and one of the richest men in Africa. At one point he had 83 slave ships and two frigates built in the Philadelphia dockyard, but he could never leave his slave
barracoon
and his hundred odd black women in Ouidah. The family went mulatto and are now
feticheurs [sic].
A de Souza is high priest of the Python Fetish, which Richard Burton saw on his Embassy to Dahomey in the 1860s. At that time it was in decline but, since independence, has taken a new lease of life. Tom Maschler of Cape’s says I should go and try and chronicle the gradual blackening of the family.”
Bruce had carried the story around with him a long time. As a boy he had read Burton and Skertchley and had memorised the etchings of King Ghezo’s Amazons, bloodthirsty women who carried Winchesters slung across their backs. (“They were mostly elderly and all of them hideous,” wrote Burton. “The officers were decidedly chosen for the size of their bottoms.”) In addition, the fate of his murdered uncle must have quickened an interest in West Africa. Humphrey Chatwin’s seed necklace in his grandmother’s cabinet was strung on that coastline.
He also picked up isolated bits of information about Dahomey from his friends Brendan and Alison Oxmantown. In November 1965, Bruce had celebrated the Oxmantowns’ departure for Cotonou. Brendan was quick to detect similarities with Papa Doc’s Haiti: at his suggestion, the hotel sequences of
The Comedians
were filmed in Cotonou’s Hotel de la Plage. Brendan reported to Bruce on an extraordinary colloquium held in 1966, part of a cultural exchange between Ouidah, the old slave town, and Bahia in Brazil, where a great proportion of the slaves had settled. “Do descend if in need of a little French colonial decadence after caravanserai-ing around the Sahara,” he urged Bruce. “It’s kind of different from your normal sphere of converts, convicts and patriarchs and incense in the snow.”
Bruce arrived in Ouidah in February 1972, after his not terribly successful filming of the nomad market in Niger, and by then the Oxmantowns had departed for Teheran. He peered into the Python Temple. He spent a week “wandering among the peeling ochreous mud walls and clanking armadillo corrugated-iron roofs”. He attended the sacrifice of a cow and behind a wall in the Quartier Brésil he found his story.
An old black lady showed him into a room containing an ebony four-poster bed. On a table stood a bottle of Gordon’s gin, “half open and a glass of gin poured out in case he woke up”, and in an alcove a plaster statue of St Francis, “the saint of holy wanderers”, guarded a tombstone. The words on the grey marble slab read:
FRANCISCO FELIX DE SOUZA
.
“And then the old lady rolled back the bed sheets and you looked through, down – because the mattress was only sort of half there – at the most amazing sight. A mass of blood and feathers and sacrifices . . .”
De Souza, known as Cha Cha, had died in this bed in 1849 at the age of 95. A painting over the door showed a hook-nosed white man in a red scarf and tasselled cap who resembled Garibaldi. He was called Cha Cha because he was always in a hurry. The old lady was one of his descendants.

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