Beyond the Pampas Page 3

  ‘So what do you do when you’re not minding the museum?’

  ‘Nothing. I learn things.’

  ‘You’re a student.’

  ‘No. I don’t study, I learn. I learn about things that I find interesting.’

  I feel a trifle envious, and I’d like to know what he lives on. I wouldn’t mind spending my time learning about interesting things.

  Miguel, like me, learnt his Welsh on the Ulpan course in Lampeter.

  ‘I like speaking Welsh, but I also like speaking English. That Welsh-only mania some people have in Wales... I don’t get it. Not everyone in the world speaks Welsh. Why should they? Welsh people come here and speak Welsh with us but they don’t speak the language of my country, Spanish. Norteamericanos come to visit the museum who speak neither Welsh nor Spanish. How should we communicate with them if we don’t use English? And anyway,’ he grins, ‘Spanish is really easy. You just speak English with a Spanish accent.’ He points to a large old-fashioned gun displayed on one of the museum walls. ‘What do you call that?’

  ‘Um... a gun?’

  ‘A rifle. In Spanish: rifle.’ He pronounces it reefla. ‘And this?’

  ‘A computer.’

  ‘Computadora.’

  ‘This?’

  ‘A plate.’

  ‘Un plato. And that one?’

  ‘A bottle.’

  ‘Una botella. You see?’ He beams. ‘It’s the same language really.’

  I like Miguel’s Spanish lessons; and I like, too, the way he stresses similarities over differences.

  ‘So what are you doing later on?’ he wants to know. ‘Any plans?’

  Why, does he want to ask me out?

  ‘It’s choir practice tonight.’

  Ah.

  ‘The mixed choir. There’s also a male-voice choir and a women’s choir, and a children’s. You should come – it’ll be fun.’

  Choir practice. I should have expected it really. This place was, after all, founded by Welsh people.

  ‘I’m sure you’d enjoy it. I’m a member, too,’ he adds modestly.

  6

  AT A QUARTER PAST NINE I’m on my way to choir practice. Past the pharmacy, the agricultural co-op, the newspaper stall (now closed), houses, bakery, petrol station, the other bakery, greengrocer, ‘Blue Moon’ taverna. A group of people stand waiting by a house with a large porch.

  ‘Por favor, ¿habla usted galés?’ Regretful shaking of heads. They don’t speak Welsh.

  I clear my throat again, try to think of Spanish words. I haven’t been here long, but already my exceedingly sketchy beginner’s Spanish is expanding, taking in new words. ‘Er... yo busco el coro galés.’

  ‘¡Sí, sí! Acá.’ They nod vigorously. I have come to the right place. Ten minutes later some cars pull up, a group of women get out. Somebody nudges me in the direction of one of them.

  ‘Ella habla galés.’ She speaks Welsh.

  ‘¡Muchas gracias!’ I say thankfully and address myself to the woman, explaining that I am a visitor from Germany – with some Welsh – and that I would like to sit in at choir practice tonight. Will they mind?

  ‘No, of course not. Come in.’

  The door is unlocked, a rectangle of light illuminates the dusty pavement. A large group of people pours into the room. There must be at least thirty of them; all ages, both sexes, though there are more women than men. There is a very respectable number of boys and young men, Miguel among them, who gives me a cheery wave.

  I sit down between two middle-aged ladies, both Welsh speakers. Somebody hands me a sheet of music. And they’re off. I close my eyes and feast my ears.

  I imagined that all the songs were going to be in Welsh, but the first one is in Spanish, the second something by Händel and the third, to my utter surprise, in German. It is one of Johannes Brahms’ lieder.

  One of my seated neighbours has caught hold of the fact that I am German. She leans across and whispers.

  ‘You speak German?’

  I admit that I do.

  ‘Couldn’t you translate this for us?’

  ‘This’ are the words to the Brahms lied. Good grief. I do speak some Welsh, but nowhere near enough to translate poetry! I nearly eat an entire pencil in linguistic anguish. How do you say ‘the bitter pain of loneliness’ in Welsh?

  Finally I’m done. In the next break between songs, I hand the sheet to the lady, who reads it and nods.

  ‘Gracias,’ she says and smiles and repeats her thanks in Welsh. ‘Diolch yn fawr.’

  While the next piece is being rehearsed – something spirited in Spanish – I amuse myself by looking about me and trying to guess from people’s faces which are of Welsh descent and which are not. Some of the old ladies seem very Welsh to me – it’s their colouring, and something about their faces that looks familiar. With everyone else, I am reduced to guessing. Almost everybody in the room is deeply tanned, and a lot of people have dark hair. Then again, quite a few Welsh people in Wales have dark hair and eyes. I give up on the guessing and just people-watch.

  In the front row sits a young woman of no more than twenty-five, clad in tight jeans and a short jumper that shows off her midriff. I am envious; it is a very lovely midriff. She looks downright cool – certainly not like somebody from the provinces. I hadn’t thought of the choir as being cool.

  Patagonia is rearranging and prodding some of my assumptions. I like that. I will go home and be changed through having been here. I will wash the dust from the desert off my clothes and my tan will fade over time; but Patagonia will stay with me.

  A little boy and girl, neither more than four years old, are playing while the choir rehearses. They draw with coloured chalk on a blackboard, and then the little girl amuses herself by wiping the board methodically while the boy is still drawing. An argument erupts. The members of the choir take this entirely in their stride. The young woman jumps up and arbitrates in whispers; the rest go on singing, with only the occasional look and smile in the direction of the children. Nobody shushes disapprovingly.

  After the rehearsal has ended, some people rush straight out into the night with only a brief good-bye. Others stay a while for a chat. Outside in the dark, crickets are rasping, every now and then a car passes, a dog barks, people walk past, chatting and laughing.

  I talk to Clara Roberts, the choir mistress. Her Welsh is quick and businesslike and comfortable, she speaks it as well as Spanish, in an accent that is pure south Walian. It’s only now that I notice that most of the people of Gaiman with whom I’ve spoken so far use the Welsh of the north. They said rŵan, not nawr, for now; hogyn for boy instead of bachgen; efo, not gyda, for with; not mamgu but nain for grandmother.

  ‘Yes – my great-grandparents came from Aberdare,’ says Clara when I ask about her accent. ‘Edward Morgan and Ann Philips. They got married when they were very young and came out to live in Patagonia. They never went back to Wales.’

  Clara tells me about occasions when the choir travelled to Wales, to compete at the International Music Eisteddfod in Llangollen, or at the National Eisteddfod.

  ‘Every time we go, I want us to visit new places, to see where our great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers came from. Some of the members of the choir have relatives in Wales who work in a coal-mine. So once, some of us went down the mine.’ She shakes her head. ‘Edward Morgan, my great-grandfather, came from a family of miners. I never imagined how hard the work was. Seeing it made me understand why people wanted to leave and have a better life. They went to a place so far away, so dry, so different when everywhere in Wales is so green. But at least they had freedom here, and the language, and the chapels.’

  ‘And you?’ I want to know, although I suspect I know the answer. ‘How do you feel, Welsh or Argentinian?’

  ‘Argentinian,’ Clara replies promptly. ‘But, you know... I’m very grateful to my parents that they taught me to speak Welsh. I didn’t speak any Spanish at all when I started school at five. But then I married a Spaenwr, a Spanish sp
eaker, so the language of the house is Spanish. But he’s learning Welsh now, in the evening classes at the college, you know. And the girls, our daughters, they sing in Welsh, they both sing in the choir.’

  ‘The choir is fantastic,’ I tell her. ‘This really isn’t my kind of thing usually, but I did enjoy all the different songs tonight. And the range of people!’

  She laughs. ‘All our visitors from Wales say that. They’re always surprised that we’ve got old people, young people – everybody in the choir. Our oldest gentleman is seventy-one, and the youngest boy fifteen. I started the mixed choir in 1989. Last year we went up to Buenos Aires and sang for parliament there. We try to get around, you know.’

  I walk back to Ar Lan yr Afon through the cooling night air.

  Gaiman is quiet at this hour, but by no means asleep: the crickets are still singing, and there are cars abroad, and from a garden somewhere I hear the voices of children. It’s past midnight, but children are still up and playing in the middle of the night. I walk through the dusty darkness, smiling.

  7

  ONE DAY IN MY LAST WEEK in Patagonia, Natalia puts her head round the door to announce that a couple of other guests are going an excursion to the penguin colony at Punta Tombo. There’s a spare seat. Do I want to come? I didn’t know there was a penguin colony near Gaiman. I have never really thought about penguins. I’m here for the Welsh flavour, not the wildlife. But I’m in Patagonia, where I have decided to see new things and to try out the new and the unexpected. So why not penguins?

  The tour guide arrives in a beautiful new 4x4. Meinir and Jayne, two Welsh travellers, and I make up the entire group. That makes it nice and cosy, except that Guillermo, the guide, has no English or Welsh whatever, and neither Jayne nor Meinir speak a word of Spanish.

  How can those two travel to another country without speaking its language? I’d have expected better of Cymry Cymraeg. They always complain – quite rightly, too – about English people coming to Wales in utter ignorance of the Welsh language.

  ‘You speak Spanish, don’t you?’ Jayne says blithely and clambers into the back seat next to Meinir. That leaves the front seat for me. I have picked up a bit of Spanish by now, so that I can just about communicate in a me-Tarzan-you-Jane kind of way what I want to say. But when Guillermo answers my halting questions in rapid-fire Spanish, I am utterly lost. I have to ask him to repeat most things two or three times before I get them. It’s great practice, but I can feel steam beginning to pour from my ears with the effort.

  We travel along the main road for a while, past the city of Trelew, then turn onto a gravel road. Only the main roads in Patagonia are tarmacked, most side roads (even those fairly frequently used) are somewhat bumpy dirt-and-gravel affairs. Stones fly up and smack into the underside of the car. I had wondered why every single vehicle I have so far seen in Patagonia (with the exception of Guillermo’s, which is obviously brand new) has at least one crack in the windscreen.

  It takes two hours to reach the penguins. I have already learned that this is not a long distance in South America. But the sheer size of the land continues to astonish me. There is so much of it. The few people who live here are simply swallowed up by the vastness.

  While we’re on this road the only living beings we see are a few dusty horses and some birds. Then, in the middle of nowhere, a gate, a gift shop, a café. We stop at the gate to buy our tickets, then bump slowly along a pot-holed track. We are now inside the nature reserve of Punta Tombo: the home of the largest colony of Magellanic penguins in the world, according to a sign by the entrance. In front of us, framed left and right by cliffs as red as a landscape on Mars, lies the sea: blue and green and sparkling in the sun. All three of us sit glued to the car windows, eyes peeled for penguins, cameras at the ready.

  ‘There!’ we shout as one woman. ‘Stop the car! A penguin!’

  Guillermo grins and stops for a minute so we can take our photos, then goes slowly on round the next bend.

  ‘Another one!’ we yell. ‘And there.... and there....’

  We’re round the next bend, and we’re speechless.

  Then: ‘Mae nhw ym mhobman,’ Jayne says in a small voice. They’re everywhere.

  The place is black and white with penguins. Penguins are sitting under shrubs; in shallow holes in the ground; smack bang in the middle of the track. Some lie flat on their fronts, and for a second I am afraid they might be dead, perhaps having succumbed to heat stroke in the sun. I associate penguins with ice and Antarctica and freezing temperatures. The dry heat of the Patagonian autumn seems not quite the right environment.

  One of the ‘corpses’ lifts its head, lets its gaze sweep briefly over the car, closes its eyes again. Tourists, the look says.

  Guillermo laughs. ‘They’re just asleep,’ he says, lets the clutch in and drives on, careful not to run over any penguins.

  Penguins waddle across the track, penguins lie and stand everywhere on the dusty, stony ground; by the roadside, not giving a hoot about us. I become aware of the fact that I am pressing my nose flat against the window and making little ecstatic noises in my throat.

  Guillermo parks the car and pulls the key from the ignition.

  ‘¿Bueno?’ he asks and smiles. He’s probably used to seeing awestruck first-time visitors. We clamber out of the car, looking everywhere at once.

  Penguins stand about like garden gnomes, faces turned towards the sun, eyes half closed, not moving a muscle. Others waddle about solemnly. I know it’s a cliché, but they really do look as though they’re wearing miniature frock coats. I walk slowly, wanting to take in as much as possible.

  I never knew penguins made sounds, but these most certainly do. Every now and again, one of the dozing ones will wake up, blink, look around. Then it tilts its head back, opens its beak and produces the most astonishing sounds. They start as a series of small hoots until the penguin has built up a head of steam. Then it lets fly with a big, noisy, braying honk. The penguins are fairly small, maybe knee high, with as much mass as a small cat. The amount of noise they produce is out of all proportion. They sound like small elephants, or like donkeys: hooting and shrilling and trumpeting. (Which is, as I learn later, why in English they’re called Jackass Penguins.)

  I wander among penguins, speechless with delight. The sea before me shimmers and rolls in the breeze, its water jade green. The rocks that surround it are an unlikely brick red. Penguins waddle past, adding patterns of black and white to the red rocks, the green sea. Mosquitoes buzz, penguins bray. Minute downy feathers drift on the breeze like snowflakes.

  One hour doesn’t seem nearly enough. All too quickly it is over. I tear myself away from the penguins and return, reluctantly, to the car where Guillermo and Meinir and Jayne are already waiting.

  I have fallen deeply and irrevocably in love with penguins. What I would really like to do is stay here and spend the night. One day, I promise myself, I will return with a sleeping bag, and wake up by the sea to the trumpeting of the pingüinos of Punta Tombo.

  Exhausted with speaking Spanish and the wonder of penguins, I fall asleep and don’t wake up until we’re back by the roundabout just outside Gaiman in the early evening. Guillermo makes to turn onto the main road, then half swivels towards me.

  ‘Have you seen the tunnel yet? The railway tunnel?’

  I did notice it on a picture postcard of Gaiman and wondered why it was considered a tourist attraction. Jayne and Meinir didn’t even know Gaiman had a tunnel. Guillermo takes pity on our ignorance and turns the car towards the old railway station where the museum is now housed. A rocky hill rears up a little further on, and in it, sure enough, a tunnel opening. I expect Guillermo to stop the car so we can admire the tunnel, and then to turn around and drive back. Instead, he drives straight at it.

  The opening in the hillside is narrow and the car rather wide. I wait to hear the wing mirrors scrape along the tunnel sides. The tunnel is long and dark and dusty, as though no air had stirred in it for many decades. It makes me
think of ghost trains in the Wild West, of train robbers and desperadoes and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. We go slowly. The beams of our headlights travel along greyish, slightly curving brick walls. There is no trace of tracks on the ground, just sand and more dust.

  Once upon a time, a railway line connected the Welsh settlements in the lower Chubut valley with the sea port of Puerto Madryn fifty miles to the east of Gaiman. The last trains ran in the 1960s, and all that remains of the railway today are the station buildings in Puerto Madryn, Trelew and Gaiman – and the tunnel. With very few exceptions,s eastern Patagonia is as flat as a board. The railway tunnel is both a feat of engineering and an exotic occurrence, something Gaiman is proud of.

  8

  THE FIRST YEARS WERE desperately hard for the colonists. They had come to live off the land, but only a few knew anything about farming. The majority had been coal miners from the south Wales valleys or slate miners from the north, with some assorted craftsmen thrown in. Only a handful of them were farmers. Among the first contingent on the Mimosa had also arrived three ministers of religion and a doctor of medicine. This latter, Dr. Thomas Green, accompanied Lewis Jones to Buenos Aires to see the Argentine government, and never returned to Patagonia.7 Instead, he kept going north until he reached the United States, where he settled. Nobody knows why he deserted the colony. Perhaps in the bustle of Buenos Aires he found that he just couldn’t face a return to the isolation, the loneliness, the monotony and the endless hard work that was Y Wladfa. His chest of medicines was still in Patagonia. He never went back for it. When people fell ill, they had to sort through the Latin labels of the drugs, making sense of them as much as they could. It must have been a desperate choice sometimes: not to treat an illness or to take a drug without quite knowing what effect it would have.

  The settlers did their best with their limited knowledge of farming and almost complete ignorance as to the local soil and weather conditions. In hindsight, it is not surprising that the first harvests failed, but at the time, the settlers must have been increasingly worried. Here they were, having left everything at home for this promised land, and all it gave them were stones and thorns. Twice they had to ask for more supplies of foodstuffs from the Argentine government simply to have enough to eat.