In Patagonia Read Free Page A

and exile. Only this time, he intended to grapple with his theme not in the abstract terms that had suffocated The Nomadic Alternative , but in concrete stories.
    â€œYour fascination is people?” asked Goni.
    â€œYes, in the end. It took rather a long time to discover that.”
    The people Bruce would meet in Patagonia were often rootless storytellers like himself. Fugitives of justice, regime change, or simply “the coop of England.” The whole place was a magnet for those who suffered from a bad case of Baudelaire’s Great Malady: Horror of One’s Home. Hence the roll call of mad lingerie salesmen, maestros, autodidacts, geniuses, bandits, women with tatters of extraordinary beauty, and exiles like the Arab who “kept a sprig of mint on the bar to remind him of a home he had not seen.”
    Exactly as a 34-year-old French lawyer had decreed it res nullius —and therefore a perfect place of which to become king—so Patagonia enticed Chatwin as a marvelous and limitless backdrop against which to play out his thesis. A theater for his own restlessness, Patagonia, he would covertly argue, was the source of everyone else’s restlessness too.
    Under his transforming gaze, a windswept desert of basalt pebbles and jarilla bushes unravels into something else. In Chatwin’s Patagonia, the uniqueness of the landscape hardly comes into view. His book is largely about interiors that are elsewheres. You won’t come across many Patagonian Patagonians in its pages; nor will you discover much about the author, who remains teasingly absent. “How had he travelled from here to there?” Paul Theroux wanted to know. “How had he met this or that person? Life was never so neat as Bruce made out.” Nowhere, for instance, will you find details of Chatwin’s arrest by the Chilean military or his seduction of the young pianist “Anselmo”—i.e., the meat and drink of travel writers like Theroux. But you will find the Patagonian origin of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, Darwin’s theory of evolution, Shakespeare’s Caliban, Dante’s Hell, Conan Doyle’s Lost World, Swift’s Brobdignagians, Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym . Even the Patagonian origin of Man himself.
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    On January 21, marooned in the small village of Baja Caracolles, Chatwin wrote to his wife. He was stranded in the middle of nowhere, but he had arrived.
    Dearest E
    I have begun letters I don’t know how many times and then abandoned them. Now I am stuck, for 3 days at least, because the justice of the peace, to whom I confided some of my things, has run off with the key.
    Writing this in the archetypal Patagonian scene, a boliche or roadman’s hotel at a cross-roads of insignificant importance with roads leading all directions apparently to nowhere. A long mint green bar with blue green walls and a picture of a glacier, the view from the window a line of lombardy poplars tilted about 20° from the wind and beyond the rolling grey pampas (the grass is bleached yellow but it has black roots, like a dyed blonde) with clouds rushing across it and a howling wind.
    On no previous journey am I conscious of having done more. Patagonia is as I expected but more so, inspiring violent outbursts of love and hate. Physically it is magnificent, a series of graded steps or barrancas which are the cliff lines of prehistoric seas and unusually full of fossilised oyster shells 10” diam. In the east you suddenly confront the great wall of the cordillera with bright turquoise lakes (some are milky white and others a pale jade green) with unbelievable colours to the rocks (in the pre -cordillera ). Sometimes it seems that the Almighty has been playing at making Neapolitan ice-cream. Imagine climbing (as I did) a cliff face 2000 feet high alternatively striped vanilla, strawberry and pistachio in bands of 100 feet or more. Imagine an upland lake where the rock face on one