Storie della Terra del Fuoco

«I went to catch a plane to the bottom of Patagonia. There are days when you want to put a distance between yourself and history, and shelter in geography. Geography, for me, was Patagonia. In a way I was wrong. I was going toward condors and skulls....

By airliner, you know, one should not travel. Here what you fly over – what you cancel out – is the whole of Patagonia, all the way to Tierra del Fuego. Patagonia is a wide, yellowish map with a giant, red, half-naked Indian leaning on his bow: I would not have seen much more from the porthole, and so I ceded it without regret to the young mother who was going to Ushuaia to work for a season. The child's name was Catherine, she notified me with her middle fingers of her three years. She was afraid only to fly over the water. She looked at the vast esplanade of brown water of the Rio de la Plata and was about to cry. “That's land”, his mother said. Then we flew above the clouds, which calmed Catherine. “Underneath is earth”, said the mother. The stewardess offered me the “Nación”. I read that at the Buenos Aires Zoo a giraffe had choked to death on a plastic bag. Above the Valdés Peninsula the sky was clear, and I could make out the opaque strip where the ocean lapped the land. Whales had just calved in Puerto Madryn, but they were too small for the naked eye. As we began our descent on Rio Gallegos, Catherine looked out the window at the dry, yellowish desert of land and declared, “Dirty water”. But no; her mother corrected her, it is earth. “It's dirty water”, Catherine firmly reiterated. Around the airport, however, yellow patches of dandelions had bloomed. In Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world, the public telephone post had a formidable sign: “El locutorio del fin del mundo”.

The muchacho Chatwin

In Punta Arenas there is a bizarre house, the castelletto of Captain Charles Milward, the cousin on whose trail Bruce Chatwin crossed Patagonia. Compared to the picture in Chatwin's book, there is only one more television antenna: the new inhabitants are no longer content, like the old captain, to watch with regret as ships parade through the Strait of Magellan. No one has heard of him, Chatwin. Even in Harberton, on the Beagle Channel, Clarita Bridges' son and daughter-in-law haven't felt like talking, say they weren't there when he passed, and that he wrote ungrateful and exaggerated things anyway. Exaggerated: that's what they say about every travel book, from Marco Polo's Million onward. Clarita, the oldest white indigenous woman in Tierra del Fuego, is 92 years old, and she remembers it in her own way, Chatwin: “Este muchacho came here looking for his father, I guess he found something”.

Tourists arrive with their copy of In Patagonia full of underlining, and struggle a bit to get their bearings. Almost two decades have passed since Chatwin's trip, a war between Argentina and England, a volcanic eruption, and Chatwin is dead. The eruption occurred on August 13, 1991, at one of Chile's hundred volcanoes, the Hudson. It was not talked about in the First World, perhaps because it was the same date as the attempted coup in the USSR. A gigantic amount of ash and lapilli was spewed out for days, and the west wind, which swept over Patagonia, carried it to the Argentine side. Late one night it descended on the villages immediately beyond the Cordillera, Los Antiguos and Perito Moreno, on the shore of Lake Buenos Aires. The wind then carried the dust cloud around, and it still continues to do so, from Comodoro Rivadavia on the Atlantic coast in the north to Rio Gallegos in the south, and even the snow on the peaks of Tierra del Fuego is congealed by it. The great lone trucks that crossed Patagonia stopped with filters clogged with ash. For the ranchers it was a catastrophe. The sheep could find no food or drink, the rain kneaded the wool, cemented them alive to the ground. [...]

Melchíades

Helicopter flight over Perito Moreno ice. The pilot carries his little girl. He worked on Herzog's film on Cerro Torre. Great film, he says, many workers and extras died. Rivers like blue veins flow through the diamond serac. On the way back we detour to the “estancia” La Anita. Here a massacre of defenseless striking peons took place, at least one hundred and twenty shot. On the way, two little girls give milk to guanaco chulengos from Fanta bottles with pacifiers. We give a ride to a peon, he walks in high rubber boots, he can't take it anymore. His name is Melchíades Jara, he is quintero a la Anita. Even yesterday I was looking for the pit where they killed them, he says. First there was a 90-year-old man, Martin, who remembered everything. It happened in 1921, he says, it's been at least 40 years. [...]

The wind of San Julián

From Rio Gallegos I set off again for San Julián, this time by plane, a tiny, high-winged Piper, unadapted to the wind, as the pilot, Daniel, explains. He is in his 40s, was among the aces of the Malvinas, now making ends meet with the El Pinguino company.

We arrive early in San Julián, because we have the wind in our favor, in return we have to jump off and hold on to the plane, while Daniel anchors it so the wind won't carry it. We are met by a young man, Walker, who runs a small local cable TV station. We pass by the sites of Bechis's film, Alambrado, and then by the imposing ruins of the Swift Frigorific, a giant slaughter plant that retains a sinister air of a lager, with banging metal sheets and palisades with hooks. There is a large dormitory, in the 1930s and 1940s anti-Stalinist Russian refugees worked here, separated by real walls to foil factional fights. In front is a beach of broken shells, and Punta Desengaño, where Magellan had hoped to find the Strait. At the church of Santa Maria Auxiliadora I meet two Salesians, both in their eighties, both lame of a leg – but we are going the right way, they say. Don Bosco traveled only once by ship, from Genoa to Civitavecchia, and he was so seasick that he gave up forever: but he did not give up dreaming of the antipodes converted by his Salesians, and describing miraculous visions of a Patagonia full of oil, coal, steel... His Salesians were peasants from the Piedmont valleys, studying atlases, putting on plays in Turin called Gianduia in Patagonia. Then they really went there, to convert the savage Indians. They didn't know what to do except baptize, clothe the naked, give the poor nomads a roof. The naked nomads let them. They would let their hair be cut, their bodies smeared with whale blubber and smelly seal blubber be groomed. Soon after, they would fall ill and die, chattering their teeth in those new cloths, mowed down by pneumonia, chicken pox, measles: children's diseases to which they were not prepared, and which concentration in the missions made rampant. The Salesians insisted that at least, blessed savages, they put on the skin of the guanaco with the fur facing inward, which would warm them better: and those blessed savages answered no, that even the guanaco wears it with the fur out. Of course, they were right. The Indians died in the space of two generations – decimated by disease, as well as by shootings and deportations ordered by the estancieros; the Salesians stayed, and turned the missions into museums of papier-mâché Indians and stuffed animals. In 1892, at the Colombian Centennial Exposition in Genoa, the Salesians led a small Fuegian Patagonian tribe. King Umberto came and, according to the chronicles, “wanted to stop and talk to those children of the forest”. After Genoa, Pope Leo XIII received Salesians and their Indians in Rome. A 17-year-old Patagonian read a speech in Italian. He also mentioned the quai that the papacy was going through because of contemporary anticlericalism. The pope embraced the five-year-old fuegino. The whole thing was very touching. The little boy found that the pope was dressed like a penguin. [...]

The Lady and the Patagonian

In San Julián Magellan encountered the first indigenous giant, captured it with a malicious ruse, and kept it to die on his ship; after all, Magellan died too. The origin of that name, patagon, was never figured out until a lady, who was not a linguist but a philologist and a teacher in Buenos Aires, Maria Rosa Lida de Malkiel, noticed that a Spanish chivalric novel, published shortly before Magellan's voyage, and popularized, devoted a few chapters to the story of giant and savage peoples called patagon and the great Patagonian. The lady's discovery made linguists burst with envy, who tried to denigrate her: one who was not from the field, and a woman too! Rather, if the discovery solves the question of Magellan's source, it leaves open another, that of the source of the novel. Wouldn't it be nice if the name had come from America with the first discoverers, passed in the story published in 1512 to Salamanca, and from there, through Magellan, returned eight years later to America? It is a fact that the name Patagonia and the adjective, Patagonian, carry with them an idea of immensity, of madornality, of exaggeration.

The Salesian and the pirate

Among the Salesians who came for this fantastic adventure there was one who was different from the others. His name was Alberto De Agostini. He was born in 1883 in Pollone, Biella, to a merchant family with many children. A brother of his, Giovanni, twenty years his senior, had graduated in geography, and had written a short essay on expeditions to Tierra del Fuego. Then he was content to become a specialist on Italian lakes, and founded the Geographical Institute that still bears his name. For half a century, almost every year, Alberto made expeditions to the Patagonian Andes and Tierra del Fuego. Thanks to him, a large number of glaciers, fjords, mountains, and canals have names from Biella, Asti, and Canavese. A masterpiece of De Agostini's cartography was a Map of the Argentine Republic at the scale of 1 to 1,000,000, costing two years of work, covering 14.40 square meters. De Agostini embarked with the most reckless sea dogs. Sometimes they were shady types. The most famous was called Pascualin, or the Smuggler, or the last pirate from Tierra del Fuego. He was a Neapolitan, Pasquale Rispoli. He employed his schooner to poach sea lions. He would load up men for the hunt and leave them ashore in the Island of the States, or Wollaston, and return to pick them up at the end of the season. Rumor had it that when any of the men made a mischief for him, he would forget to go and fetch them back. When Pascualin was hired for the attempted escape from the Ushuaia penitentiary of the anarchist Radowitzky, the latter, who must have heard those little stories, refused to let himself be landed on a small island, as Pascualin suggested, and for that very reason he was recaptured. Once, under Peron, the Argentines caught him with the schooner full of skins. He swore it was not to sell them but to give them to the Evita Perón Foundation. They confiscated the skins; they did not put him away. He died, at large, in 1960.

Virginia, the last

Land of records, of ultimate things, Tierra del Fuego meticulously jotted down names and dates. 

The last indigenous Yamana died in 1974. In the same year the last ona woman died. But at the Salesian Archives in Buenos Aires I found an old photograph. There is a little girl and a nun, on the back it says: Virginia Choquintel, last ona, lives in Rio Grande, the oil city in Argentina's Tierra del Fuego. The museum in Rio Grande displays little Virginia's calligraphy notebooks. She is alive, yes, they tell me, and give me an address. She is a little strange, they add, and she drinks too much. But the more surprising news is another: the last india ona is living with a Sicilian bricklayer. The door opens only a crack to the dark room and a frantic barking of dogs. I manage, shouting, to make an appointment for the next day, at my hotel. The next day Virginia arrives, bruised on her face, struggling to hold back tears. She was born in late July 1942 – a few days before me – at the Salesian mission in Candelaria. I was raised by the nuns, she says, especially with her sister Rosa, an Italian. My father, I was told, died in Chile, crushed by the horse he was taming. Yes, I live with an Italian, Nino, he is seventy years old: where did he tell me he is from? from Catania? He doesn't work anymore, poor guy, he is going blind.

I'm always sad, he says, because I'm nostalgic, I remember too many things, the good and the bad, actually no, more the bad than the good.... No, it's not childhood memories, childhood was good. We went with sheep, there was shearing, the nuns made bread.... Even now I would like to be a child. The bad memories start with adolescence... I started to go off on my own, went to service, went all the way to Buenos Aires – it was too hot. Now here they greet me more, in the beginning they didn't... but if someone walks beside me I go across the street. I understand, I tell her, if it's the last one she may be alone. Yes, she says».

(Adriano Sofri, "La mia Patagonia", "Sette – Corriere della Sera", 3 june 1993)