Beyond the Pampas Read online

  And that is much, much easier for me to write today than it was for them to do in 1866. How do you ask the government for help when the government is eight hundred miles away and there is no phone, no telegraph or postal service, no pony express even, no roads for carts? How long would a cart have taken to Buenos Aires and back? Eight hundred miles. That’s as long as the entire island of Britain from John O’Groats to Land’s End.

  What they did have was a small ship. (The Mimosa, in which they had arrived, had only been hired for the journey, so the colonists decided to buy a small vessel for transport). And so a letter was written and Lewis Jones got himself elected to be the messenger to take it all the way to Buenos Aires. There was much sense in his election. He was an educated man, he had negotiated with the government before, he spoke good Spanish: He would be able to make their case as eloquently and convincingly as possible.

  Meanwhile, the settlers were stuck in the valley with dwindling supplies. They waited. It was now 1866. They had been here for over a year and were beginning to understand the land a little better. They had learnt, though trial and error, I imagine, which of the local plants were edible and which were not. They dug up roots, used edible leaves, collected berries.

  A report from those early years recounts that a group of Welsh men out exploring in the valley ran out of water. So thirsty were they in the end, with no hope of finding liquid any time soon, that they shot down a hawk and drank its blood.8 They must have felt very, very far away from civilisation as they looked at each other with their red-smeared mouths. Did they worry? Did they ask themselves what had become of them, of their high-flying dreams of life according to their own faith and their own Welsh laws in a new land? Or did they laugh it off, think of it as a story to tell their grandchildren, later, when there would be not only grandchildren, but hearths and armchairs and pipes and china cups of tea, and nobody would be able to imagine how they had once lived?

  When Lewis Jones finally returned from Buenos Aires, he brought with him sheep, potatoes, wheat, sugar, tea and other staples. The ghost of starvation was banished for the time being.

  Things began to look up. The year after, the settlers finally worked out how to farm the land efficiently. Methods that had worked in Wales were not suited to the dry climate and the sandy soil of the Chubut valley. Here, you couldn’t just sow your wheat and wait for it to grow. Annual rainfall in the region is only about a third of what it is in Wales, and what little there is usually falls in winter, while the summers are long and warm and dry. (Occasionally, it rains a lot and then the river would burst its banks and flood the entire valley. But, perhaps luckily, they didn’t know that yet.) Precious little rain fell in spring and summer and the young wheat plants shrivelled and died through lack of water. So the new farmers carried water from the river in pails and buckets. It was slow, back-breaking work; and they just could not carry enough water to save the first couple of harvests.

  It was Rachel Jenkins, a coal-miner’s wife from Mountain Ash in the south Wales valleys, who first raised the idea of digging irrigation channels to bring water from the river directly to the fields. The other farmers listened but shook their heads doubtfully: thinking of how much more work her plan would entail, of how doubtful the results would be. But Rachel’s husband Aaron was prepared to give it a try. Their plot of land was near the river, so it wasn’t too much work for him to dig a channel to his wheat, just a few inches deep and a few inches wide. And while everybody else’s fields dried up once more that summer, Aaron and Rachel’s wheat thrived and grew. (All the history books written until just a few years ago credited Aaron Jenkins with suggesting the irrigation canals, not Rachel.)

  So now they knew how to do it. The 1867 harvest wasn’t enough to feed everybody, and certainly not enough to feed everybody and keep wheat to use for seed the following year. Lewis Jones had to board the Denby and sail up the coast to Buenos Aires once more and grovel to the Argentine government, and once more he was successful and they gave him supplies.

  Now the digging started. With the few implements they had – shovels, pickaxes, harrows and rakes – with boards and stones and even bare hands the men went and dug. The owners of neighbouring farms clubbed together and dug one main channel which would then branch off into smaller ones, leading to each field. Altogether, the colonists would dig a network of irrigation channels of almost 200 miles in length.

  It was a gargantuan undertaking. Fifteen years later, in 1881 when William Hughes arrived in the colony, it was still not finished. (In his autobiographical account the reason he gives for going to Y Wladfa was his delicate health. His doctor had strongly advised him to seek a dryer climate in which to recuperate. Either the climate restored him to health instantaneously, or else the life he had led in Wales had been even more strenuous.) Hughes recalled,

  Thither I went, carrying on my shoulder my new pick-axe and spade, and in my heart the determination to work and thus open up the land. It was then the beginning of July, the middle of winter; and what a cold and hard winter it was... There were severe frosts every night, and in the shade the frost stayed during the days as well. We walked, a number of us, against the cutting, icy wind from the west, two miles every morning to where the ditch was being dug; and upon arriving, found the earth frozen solid, so that it proved impossible to dig up. It was therefore necessary to collect firewood, heap it all together and light a fire to thaw the ground before any work could commence. The ditch we dug was one yard wide and between three and five feet deep. It was hard work to cut between ten and twelve cubic yards per day, although some achieved even more than this.9

  The heavy work paid off. The harvest of 1868 exceeded their wildest expectations. Now they had truly arrived. They had unlocked the puzzle of the land. During the harvest festival in the communal barn that still served as storehouse and meeting house and law court and chapel, Abraham Matthews preached a sermon on ‘Israel in the Wilderness’.

  A year later, they were back in the wilderness. After the first staggeringly abundant crop of wheat, the harvest failed once more in 1869. Argentina was under a new leadership, that of liberal president Domingo Sarmiento. He and his government were much less interested in the success of the Welsh colony; indeed, they were convinced that the venture had been doomed from the start. They refused to invest any more money in it and instead offered to resettle the Welsh elsewhere in Argentina.

  By then, however, the Welsh did not want to be resettled. With all the difficulties and hardship of the last five years – perhaps in part precisely because of them – the Chubut Valley, Dyffryn Camwy, had become their home. They were used to its moods, to the light, the murmur of the river, the dry cool air that always smelt, ever so slightly, of the clean dust of the desert. Lack of furniture, implements, clothes, medical care and luxuries of every description notwithstanding: they had fought for their existence here and won the land over. It belonged to them and they to it. Their children were growing up on it. Many of them had never known anything else.

  Also, apart from those times when famine threatened, they liked being so far away from the government. They had drawn up a constitution for themselves. Every adult voted on every decision taken – and that, very unusually for the times, really did mean every adult: all women and men over eighteen; half a century before women got the vote in Britain.10

  School was in Welsh. Chapel was in Welsh. Life was pretty much as grassroots-democratic as it could get. It must have been not unlike an alternative community of the 1960s or ’70s: no worldly goods and lots of spiritual fervour; children and beards and long, patched skirts; although there were no mind-altering substances and no free love, only a hell of a lot of hard work.

  Every one of those not-very-well-washed, weather-beaten, lean-faced men and women in threadbare and patchy clothes had been and was and would be instrumental in shaping their own lives, their own futures. They were free and independent and in charge, and they liked it.

  To be quite honest: Not all of them did
like it. A handful of them liked it not at all and in fact signed a petition to ask the governor of the Falkland Islands – the nearest British official – to take them away from Patagonia where they would all starve. The families of Cadfan Hughes, Edward Price, William Davies, Thomas Davies and Gruffydd Hughes11 (nobody bothered to name their womenfolk in the accounts) were in due course picked up from the beach of the New Bay – today Puerto Madryn – by a British ship. Some settled in Carmen de Patagones, some in the – much more clement – north of Argentina and a couple of families went all the way to Canada. None returned to Wales. All the rest, three quarters of the settlers, remained; although some of them took some persuading. But in the end they stayed.12

  9

  A YEAR AND A HALF after my first visit, I am back in Argentina.

  This time, I have a couple of days in Buenos Aires before heading south. My Patagonian friend Lisa James is already in Gaiman for the summer, but she has arranged for me to stay with an acquaintance of hers. Marcela Valetti is an Argentinian of Italian extraction, with no Welsh roots. Her son lives in the United States, and she will be happy to have me to practice English with, she told me in the couple of emails we have exchanged prior to my arrival.

  Now it’s early evening and I have just arrived on a sixteen-hour flight from London. I can’t quite believe that I’m back in Buenos Aires. Even in the airport, everything is simultaneously strange and familiar: the corridors, the signs; the faint, enticing smell of coffee and cigarettes; the quick rhythm of Castellano, Argentine Spanish. I’m back!, I say to the arrivals hall, and to Argentina in general.

  Arrivals. Baggage reclaim. Except there’s nothing for me to reclaim, because my very large, very purple, very easy-to-spot suitcase isn’t there to be spotted. I wait until everybody else has triumphantly snatched up their bags and left, but it’s still not there.

  Damn. I make my way to the lost-and-found counter and wait for what seems like a very long time while other people queue-jump. Did I not notice, in my befuddled post-flight state, that they had already been there before me? Or are they doing what I think they’re doing – viz. sneak in front of me and get served first? I’m rather annoyed as well as tired, jet-lagged and unwashed. Finally, my turn has come to make my missing baggage claim. Happily, the lost-and-found lady speaks English. I’m not up to speaking Spanish just now. Not with all my things missing. I feel as though my brain is in my case.

  The lost-and-found lady regrets that she cannot say where my bag might be at this moment. Its label might have come off and it might be here, or it might have been temporarily left behind on the other side of the Atlantic. She will investigate. Meanwhile, she takes my details and Marcela’s address and phone number, and assures me with fake, professional cheerfulness that I will have my bag back in no time.

  It’s ridiculous how rumpled and unwashed I feel just because I know that I can’t have a change of clothes just now. This isn’t helped by meeting Marcela, who is very beautiful and poised and rather on the glamorous side. She’s a cosmetic surgeon: clearly a walking advertisement for her profession.

  Buenos Aires is among the cities in the world with the highest per-capita numbers of both cosmetic surgeons and psychoanalysts. It’s a fact I read somewhere and remembered for its oddity, but it never seemed to describe the place I had experienced. Now I get a glimpse of how the other half live.

  Marcela’s apartment is on the tenth floor of a modern apartment block in the posh barrio (neighbourhood) of Palermo. When I first heard the name, it conjured up visions of espresso bars in Sicily, fishing boats and rural poverty and the Mafia. Nothing could be further from the Palermo of Buenos Aires. This one is made up of sleek apartment blocks, well-groomed parks and swish boutiques, all of which flash by the windows of Marcela’s car.

  Her apartment takes up the entire floor, and comes complete with round-the-clock doorman, plush lift and not one but two balconies (one of them runs the entire length of the building) and I don’t know how many rooms. We sit in what in Argentinian Spanish is known as el living (pronounced leeving): the living room. It’s marginally smaller than a tennis court and boasts a spectacular view. Outside in the dark, hundreds of lighted windows are shimmering, seemingly heaped in large, upright rectangular shapes. They belong to the luxury apartment blocks – similar to Marcela’s – across the park. The park itself is visible too, palm trees and blossoms brightly lit by streetlamps.

  Early next morning, I tiptoe into the kitchen for coffee. Marcela is still asleep. The kitchen is equipped with every appliance one could possibly desire. The fridge is a gleaming white monster, half the size of an igloo.

  Coffee in hand, I wander around, exploring. At one end, the kitchen gives on a family dining room, a comfortable space, much less grand and imposing than el living. At the other end of the kitchen, a door leads out to a sort of utility balcony with a washing machine and a clothes line. Behind the balcony, running parallel to the kitchen, lies a narrow, dark space that I take for a store room, or perhaps more utility space. There is a sink and toilet at the front, then a doorway with empty hinges, and beyond it, a small, dark, windowless room with a narrow bed. Perhaps the guest bedroom for less favoured visitors.

  I need to make a phone call to the airport to enquire about my missing bag. I’ve had a shower, and a change of underwear from my hand luggage, but apart from that, I’m wearing yesterday’s clothes – jeans and a sweatshirt. Good clothes for October in Britain. Not so good in Buenos Aires where October is early summer: the temperature is set to reach twenty-five degrees today.

  I ask Marcela if she can call my airline and find out the whereabouts of my luggage. I speak more Spanish now, but I still dread talking on the phone.

  She agrees at once, and is magnificent: she rings up the airport under my name.

  ‘Listen,’ she says, drawing herself up to her full height at her desk, ‘I am a prize-winning author!’ (I have told her that one of my short stories has been shortlisted in a literary competition back in Britain.) ‘I’m writing a book about Patagonia, I am going there tomorrow and I need my luggage! What do you think I will wear in Patagonia?! Get me my luggage!’

  But to no avail. The airline is inconsolable. They regret infinitely that they cannot say what has happened to my suitcase. It is not to be found. But they will have news, they promise. Soon.

  Marcela snorts. ‘They’re useless!’ she says and slams the phone down. ‘I used the same airline once to fly to Europe, and they lost my case and it didn’t turn up for six weeks.’

  I feel myself blench. ‘Six weeks?’

  But in fact, by noon that same day, the doorman rings Marcela’s flat and says that he is sending something up in the lift.

  And there, as the doors ping open in el living, as large as life, violently purple, is my suitcase.

  I think of myself, by and large, as someone not unduly attached to material objects, to things. People, yes; animals, places: yes. Things, no. But of course, I usually have my things around me, I take them for granted. Here in Buenos Aires, I am without them, in a foreign land, with a foreign language, in only the clothes I’m wearing and one small rucksack. It’s as though I have no personal space here. No way to tell other people about me, my personality, my likes, my character.

  I feel much more solid now that I have my case back. I croon over my treasures: my own clothes, my shoes, my socks, my books, my odds, my ends!

  10

  AFTER I HAVE CHANGED – into wondrously clean, summery clothes – Marcela whisks me off for a day’s sight-seeing in Buenos Aires. Her idea of the city’s must-sees are different to Lisa’s. She takes me, first, to MALBA, the museum of modern Latin American art, the largest of its kind, she tells me, on the entire continent. It is a bright, modern building, all glass and white-painted steel and concrete. Its mix of paintings and sculptures is eclectic. My favourite is the ‘Fossil Machine’ by Jorge Michel, a contemporary Argentinian sculptor. It has been made of one entire, highly polished tree-trunk which splits into
asymmetrical, spherical and oval limbs. The effect is very beautiful.

  The small (and, to be honest, not terribly good) Frida Kahlo is the only work by a Latin American artist whose name I recognise. Marcela appears startled by this fact. She knows a lot about modern and contemporary art (indeed, if her living room is anything to go by, she’s something of a collector herself). So it is only natural that she would know more about it than me. But some of those artists are household names in Latin America, as well-known as Matisse and Rodin are in Europe. Except that Matisse and Rodin are just as well-known here; and Marcela by her own admission travels to the US or Europe at least twice a year, to see her son, yes, but also to visit museums and galleries.

  I’ve never consciously thought about modern South American art before. I need to widen my outlook. The world to me looks upside-down from here, so far south. So far away from everywhere else. Although that, of course, depends on how one defines everywhere.

  That evening, Marcela cooks in my honour: ñoquis. Which is gnocchi in Spanish spelling. More than a third of the immigrants who flocked to Argentina in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were Italian, and they have left an enduring legacy in Argentine cuisine. Of course, the most typically Argentine dish is steak, but I am vegetarian and steak isn’t an option. So Marcela has made gnocchi, or rather ñoquis, with a herby tomato sauce and grated parmesan cheese.

  After dinner, we sit out on the balcony with our coffee, and Marcela bums a cigarette off me (‘I don’t really smoke’) and we talk about ice cream. She tells me enthusiastically of the new development of Puerto Madero: the old docks of Buenos Aires which have been redeveloped much like Cardiff Bay, and turned into a glitzy new shopping and eating district. The absolute best ice cream parlour of the city has just opened a branch there. It is run, of course, by Italians.