Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey (41 page)

Serka nodded. Patricio said, grinning, 'You see, we weren't being so brave out there in
Lautaro,
were we?'

I shivered. The idea of facing those gigantic seas and vicious winds, not for heroics, but to make a few dollars, in a seven-tonner... Serka tanked us up high with pisco and vermouth, which made our return to the
Lautaro
quite an adventure. She was moored to the end of the jetty — which was broken down, planks missing, unrailed, unlighted, and 300 feet long.

Next day we crossed the Beagle Channel to Canasacka, where a rancher was reputed to have oil and logs ready for us. The oil was, and we loaded it; but the logs were not. Patricio happily told him he'd have to wait for the next patrol ship, and we sailed. Our next task was to provision the crew of the Yamana Lighthouse on the north shore of the Beagle, but the weather turned dour, clouds sank low to the water, the mist thickened, wind and rain drove into the ship and Patricio decided to put off the provisioning till the next day. We steamed on westward. I used my binoculars to scan both sides of the channel, hoping to see a stranded whale. Serka had told us that he quite often found whales beached and dead or dying along the shore, well out of the water. They had been chased by packs of the giant black-and-white dolphins called killer whales
(orca orca).
Although the whale is ten times the size of the
orca
it has no protection except flight, and often hurls itself full speed ashore, where it cannot move or breathe, for its weight is too great for its own bones to support without the added lift of a water environment. The barrels of oil we had loaded at Canasacka were from two whales that the rancher had found, cut up, and rendered down.

We anchored that night in Romanche Bay, a narrow and steep-sided fiord on the south side of the Beagle Channel. It was the most picturesque anchorage, in its severe way, of the whole trip. Snow clouds drifted and flurried over the Channel, whose water was a palish inky green. Opposite, the Romanche Glacier hung down the mountain like a frozen river of ice, to the edge of the sea. A few minutes earlier we had passed the mighty Italia glacier, where a wide torrent of ice three hundred feet thick hangs blue and streaked over the northern shore of the Channel. A great piece of this ice, breaking off, made waves which nearly wrecked the
Beagle's
whaleboat in 1833.

Full darkness came and we gathered in the ward-room to play solo whist. I had Grand Abundance once and Misère twice, in successive hands, but still Patricio finished the evening ahead. He was a real card-player, one of those damned sharps who count the cards and remember who played what, and why, fifteen hands back.

The next day was clear and windy and the Pico Frances, from which both the Romanche and Italia glaciers flow, was very distinct. Snow cornices 100 feet high ran up the south and east ridges to the peak, which was over 7,000 feet above us. The wall facing the Channel was an almost vertical cliff, 4,000 feet sheer, enclosed by the ridges which swept down on either side, like arms, to the sea. Clouds of snow blew off the summit arete, making opaque white veils in the northern sky. Deep caves pitted the ice at the foot of the central cliff.

Then, as usual, clouds descended, the fog-horn blared mournfully, and it began to rain. The temperature was a bone-chilling 38 degrees, but that wasn't what made me hunch my shoulders deeper into my duffel coat. We were heading for Punta Arenas and 'civilization' now, and the prospect depressed me immensely. I was sorry, very sorry, to be leaving the desolate and savage splendour of the southern channels.

For the next two days we crawled down a low tunnel between grey sea and grey cloud, back along Whaleboat Sound, Cockburn Passage, the Magdalena Channel and at last out into the Magellan Strait opposite Cape Froward. There the clouds lifted, rainbows, storms, and hail passed over and the deck hummed like a steel guitar. Then the sun came out, and when we docked the stars were shining.

There was a man waiting on the jetty with a message for me: would I come for drinks at the British Club, right away. I sighed. I was back, all right.

The note was signed
Michael Pigott, late 4th Gurkhas,
which baffled me until I reached the club and learned that Pigott had served with the 2nd Battalion of my regiment in Italy as a wartime officer. I was in Burma at the time, so had not met or even heard of him. His father, Michael Pigott Sr, was General Manager of the Sociedad Explotador de Tierra del Fuego, the giant sheep combine which owned most of Chilean Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. Until very recently the (British) General Manager's word had carried considerably more weight in these parts than that of the (Chilean) Governor of the Province, Magallanes.

So I stepped out of the
Lautaro's
world of steel and rain and sea into a chattering, perfumed flock of expatriates. Everyone was British, even the wives, and I gathered that it was deeply frowned upon to marry a Chilean. Everyone had been there a long time — Pigott Senior, forty-seven years — and no one spoke Spanish. Everyone complained about the weather, the Chileans, the peso. There was a lot of gossip, most of it silly (e.g. the local admiral was trying to get his daughter married off to an
Englishman.
What a hope!), but some informative. I solved a riddle which had been puzzling me for days: why was one mainland estancia called China Greek, on the map? An old gentleman explained:
Greek
was a misprint for Creek;
Cina
was the Ona word for 'woman'; by that creek the Ona women used to jump out at the early settlers to frighten the horses and enable their men to shoot the white men with bows and arrows.

When I returned to the
Lautaro I
found Fierro reading in the ward-room, though it was late. Fierro was a more taciturn man than either Patricio or young Germain, but I liked him. I asked him how anyone could live so long in a country and not speak its language. He said, with a sardonic smile, 'It's the English
snobismo.
It prevents fraternization with the natives, and miscegenation.'

On the next night I gave a farewell dinner party for the officers at the Cosmos Hotel, a marvellously rambling old firetrap long famous in Punta Arenas legend. Patricio, I had grown very fond of; he was a good man and a great sailor and I wished then, as I mixed my special extra-dry Martinis, that we could go on cruising those channels together for a long, long time more. They blinked when they tasted the Martinis and I can hear Patricio now, chuckling,
'Qué barbaro! Qué salvaje!'

Next day they all came to see me off at the airport and to tell the captain of my flight what an important fellow I was. Only mildly hungover, I headed north. That flight up the southern Andes is one of the most spectacular in the world, particularly at the low altitudes of those days. On the way south I had flown in a D.C.3 down the west side of the range from Puerto Montt to Balmaceda, where we passed through a gap to the east side. All the time we crawled along at eye level with mountain streams, snow-fields, or walls of forest sliding down to a crawling sea. Now, heading north in another D.C.3 over Patagonia, the landscape was at first a familiar desolation, of tundra pockmarked with half-frozen water holes and lakes large and small, the Andes cut out of the western sky. The light was pale blue and green, clouds low and streaky overhead, a path of sun, another hurrying cloud below. Gradually this gave way to the open pampa, a brown waste marked by the arrow-straight lines of sheep fences coming from nowhere and going to the same place. Mt. Fitzroy, the highest of the south Andes, wore cloud like a cloak on its shoulders.

The drone of the engine dropped in pitch and we began our descent towards Balmaceda. We crossed the lip of the Lago Buenos Aires gorge five feet up and at once flew into strong turbulence over the huge lake. On the north side we snaked among low hills, and when I saw a sheep peering at us from a crag fifty feet higher than the wing tip, I made ready to complain.

When we took off after the Balmaceda stop the pilot invited me forward. As we headed for the serried volcanoes of the south-central Andes he pressed me into his own seat and said, 'You fly her. She is easy... wonderful.' On orders I brought the D.C.3 down from 7,000 to 5,000 feet and controlled her through some turbulence, which felt much less alarming there than in the passenger cabin. 'Now head there,' the pilot said, pointing at the nearest volcano. 'Volcan Villarica, good volcano,' he said. 'Live! Very picturesque, take photos.' the sun blazed in a clear sky, the mountains thrust up all round, most of them higher than us. We flew on, a little winged insect among them. Volcan Villarica was smoking and the pilot's delight knew no bounds: then the co-pilot did take over the aeroplane, as they said I must be free to take pictures. He flew it over the crater 500 feet above the rim, then banked steeply. I got two photos straight down into the smoking, quaking, black and red bowels of the earth. It was wonderful. It was awful.

'Again?' the pilot cried eagerly.

'I'd love it,' I said, 'but I have a train to catch.'

When I returned to the cabin the passengers almost applauded. Chileans like spice in their lives. And they knew that the pilot and co-pilot were Chileans, and therefore without fault or technical blemish.

After a day's business in Santiago I headed for the Chilean lake country to have a rest and write up my notes. My taxi driver to the Alameda station was a girl-fancier, who began to extol the beauty and passion of Chilean women as soon as we drew away from the hotel. 'Look at that one!' he cried over his shoulder, the taxi veering — 'See how she walks!... And that, ay, what breasts' — the brakes squealed — 'There, a madonna!... But not that one, no virgin that one, eh?' He worked himself up to such a pitch about the nation's beauties that several times I thought he was going to stop the taxi, jump out, and enjoy one on the spot, insisting that I join him so that I could carry the good word back to the U.S.A. He had the right idea, at that, as I have never seen a higher average of beauty than in Chile. One particular young woman who walked by while we were stopped at a light was perhaps the loveliest human being I have ever seen. She was about 5 feet 8 inches, with ash-blonde hair, deep violet eyes, a velvet skin and a proud but supple carriage, and she fairly radiated an innocent sexuality. The taxi driver should have been quick-frozen and stuffed for exhibition at that moment, for his expression of combined animal lust and religious awe was the very epitome of man's feeling for woman.

It was a cool, cloudy afternoon, the sun low, black smoke drifting across the railroad yards. After a brief wait an old tall-funnelled steam locomotive emerged from a hole in the ground almost at my feet, pulling a string of dirty old-fashioned wooden carriages; but their windows were clean, and when I got in, I found they were comfortable, too. After the necessary backing and filling we chugged off for the south. (When Chileans talk about the south,
sur,
of their country, they mean the middle: the real south, where I had been, is called
austral.)

Our engine laid a trail of black smoke through a haze of dust, for dust rose from the horse carts and trucks on the road beside us, and from our own passage down the dusty right of way. We ran between blue-grey mountains to the left and lower hills, silhouetted against the setting sun, to the right. We passed from sun-hazed eucalyptus groves into twilit villages, grass shacks, tin roofs, children playing in the dust. I talked with a young lawyer about the
austral,
about Argentina, about Chilean women. He purred with pleasure at my appreciation of them. The mixture of races caused their beauty, he said — German, Spanish, British, Yugo-Slav, and of course Indian. 'The Germans work hard here,' he said, then told half a dozen funny stories against them, not as Nazi types (which is not their reputation in Chile at all) but as dense, simple-minded people, the butts of everyone else's wit. Many Chileans seemed to have a similarly dichotomous outlook on their Indians, the Araucanos. They were proud that the Araucanos are the only Indians on the whole American continent never defeated by the white man. (Incidentally, the Incas couldn't conquer the Araucanos, either.) They told stories of their courage and endurance; of how the Indian Lautaro was a body servant to the Spanish conquistador Pedro de Valdivia, then became a leader against the Spaniards and killed de Valdivia, only to be himself later betrayed and killed. They named their warships after Indians, but still treated them as a people apart, dirty, lazy and thriftless.

Next morning the white Chilean peasants, the
rotos,
that I saw out of the train window were beginning to look more as they 'ought' to, with wide black hats, huge spurs, ponchos plain and ponchitos coloured. The inn at Villarrica, my destination, was situated where the Tolten River flows out of Lake Villarrica on its short course to the Pacific. Across the lake towered the volcano I had been peering down into two days before. I found that the main business of the hotel was fishing; and though I had not thought of fishing when I made the reservation, I hired gear, a boat and a boatman and after lunch set off down the Tolten. It is a wide river, mostly about 100 feet across, that goes down to the ocean in alternate calm pools and shallow rapids. For long stretches the banks are cliffs, and with the bamboo growing everywhere I felt I was back in North Burma. Passing under one rock wall I was astonished to see a line pass my nose. I looked up and saw a
roto
sitting on the edge of the cliff a full ninety feet above, dangling his hook in the river — a very vertiginous pastime.

At each set of rapids the boatman would row back and forth across the river while my line streamed into the first of the rough water. At the fourth rapids, I got a bite. After ten minutes of low comedy, in which I nearly fell into the river, and did manage to tip several gallons of water into the boat, I landed a 1 lb. rainbow; then in quick succession two more, one of nearly 2 lb., who fought very hard and well. The boatman cooed congratulations and praise, and I wondered what were the going tip-rates for flattery and rainbow.