The sleeping car was an unusual shape. It was old, and wooden, and the wood panelling of the interior was dark polished mahogany. It was very long, and in the middle there was a lobby, a sort of sitting room, with upholstered chairs and card tables. There were doors here, too; this was where the passengers — most of them elderly — congregated and talked about how cold it was in Patagonia. I had been given a First-Class ticket. I kept to my compartment, wrote about Buenos Aires and Borges and regretted that I had not asked him in my Boswell role, 'Why is a fox's tail bushy, Sir?'
At dinner that first evening — wine, two salads, the statutory steak — a fellow in an army uniform was seated at my table. It was purely for the waiter's convenience — there were only six of us eating in the dining car, but we were gathered together to save the waiter running the length of the car to serve us. The soldier was young. I asked him where he was going.
'Comodoro Rivadavia,' he said. 'It is an ugly place.'
'So you're going to Patagonia, too:'
'I don't have any choice,' he said, tugging at his uniform. 'I'm in the service.'
'You have to do it?'
'Everyone does- for a year.'
'It could be worse,' I said. 'You don't have a war.'
'Not a war, but a problem — with Chile, over the Beagle Channel. It had to be this year! This is an ugly year to be in the service. I might have to fight.'
'I see. You don't want to fight the Chileans?'
'I don't want to fight anyone. I want to be in Buenos Aires. What did you think of it? Beautiful, eh? Pretty girls, eh?'
'What sort of an army does Chile have?'
'No good — not very big. But the Chilean navy is huge. They've got ships, boats, cannons, everything. I'm not worried about the army — it's the navy that scares me. Where are you going?'
'Esquel,' I said.
He snorted.'Why there?'
The train goes there.'
'The train goes to Bariloche, too. That's where you should go. Mountains, lakes, snow, pretty houses. It's like Switzerland or Austria.'
'I've been to Switzerland and Austria.'
'The snow is fantastic.'
'I came to South America to get away from snow. It was ten feet deep where I come from.'
'What I'm saying is that Esquel is only a little bit pretty, but Bariloche is fantastic.'
'Maybe I'll take your advice and go to Bariloche after Esquel.'
'Forget Esquel. Forget Patagonia. They're ugly. I'm telling you, Buenos Aires is the place to be.'
So even here, within striking distance of the little town I had circled on my map in Boston, they were trying to discourage me.
Hearing frog-croaks that night, I peered out of the window and saw fireflies. I slept badly — the wine gave me insomnia (was this the reason the Argentines always diluted it by mixing it with water?) — but, wakeful, I was comforted by a great orange disc of moon. Towards dawn I began to drowse; I slept through Bahia Bianca, a city I had wanted to see, and did not wake until we started to cross the Rio Colorado. Some people take this to be the frontier of Patagonia, and indeed there was nothing to be seen after we reached the far bank. Nothingness, I had been told, was the prevailing feature of Patagonia. But grassland intervened, and with it, cattle grazing under an empty sky. For the next few hours, this was alclass="underline" grass, cattle, sky. And it was chilly. The towns were small, no more than clusters of flat-roofed farm buildings which quickly diminished to specks as the train moved on.
Just after eleven that morning we came to the town of Carmen de Patagones, on the north bank of the Rio Negro. At the other end of the bridge was Viedma. This river I took to be the true dividing line between the fertile part of Argentina and the dusty Patagonian plateau. Hudson begins his book on Patagonia with a description of this river valley, and the inaccuracy of its name was consistent with all the misnamed landscape features I had seen since Mexico. 'The river was certainly miscalled Cusar-leofu, or Black River, by the aborigines,' says Hudson, 'unless the epithet referred only to its swiftness and dangerous character; for it is not black at all in appearance. . The water, which flows from the Andes across a continent of stone and gravel, is wonderfully pure, in colour a clear sea-green.' We remained on the north bank, at a station on the bluff. A lady in a shed was selling stacks of bright red apples, five at a time. She looked like the sort of brisk enterprising woman you see on a fall day in a country town in Vermont — her hair in a bun, rosy cheeks, a brown sweater and heavy skirt. I bought some apples and asked if they were Patagonian. Yes, she said, they were grown right here. And then, 'Isn't it a beautiful day!'
It was sunny, with a stiff breeze riffling the Lombardy poplars. We were delayed for about an hour, but I didn't mind. In fact, the longer we were delayed the better, since I was scheduled to get off the train at Jacobacci at the inconvenient hour of one-thirty in the morning. The connecting train to Esquel was not leaving until six a.m., so it hardly mattered what time I got to Jacobacci.
With 'the aid of a bright sun', said Charles Darwin, who had come to Carmen on the Beagle, the view was 'almost picturesque'. But he had found the town squalid. 'These Spanish colonies do not, like our British ones, carry within themselves the elements of growth.'
We crossed the river; it was only a few hundred yards wide, but the experience, even after so many repetitions in South America, was startling to me: on the far bank we entered a different land. The soil was sand and gravel, there was no shade, the land was brown. Over in Carmen de Patagones there were cattle grazing and poplars grew and the grass was green. But there was no grass beyond Viedma. There was scrub and dust, and at once a pair of dust-devils rose up and staggered towards the horizon.
I was in the dining car, eating my lunch. A plastics salesman, on his way to the Welsh settlement at Trelew, chucked his hand disgustedly at the window and said, There is just more and more and more of this, all the way to Jacobacci.'
You might at first mistake it for a fertile place. At the horizon there is a stripe of rich unbroken green, with the bumps of bushes showing. In the middle distance it is greeny yellow, paling to a bumpier zone with patches of brown. Up close, in the foreground, you see the deception: these sparse, small-leaved thorn bushes create the illusion of green, and it is these dry brittle things that cover the plain. The thorn bushes are rooted in dust, and the other bushes are lichen-coloured and nearly fungoid in appearance. There are not even weeds on the ground, only these bushes, and they might well be dead. The birds are too high to identify. There are no insects at all. There is no smell.
And this was only the beginning of Patagonia. We were as yet still travelling along the coast, around the Gulf of San Matías. One would hardly have known the sea to be so near, although in the middle of the afternoon what first appeared to be a lake came into view, grew fuller and bluer and proved to be the Atlantic Ocean. The land continued scrubby, the old salt water tides had made the soil more desolate by poisoning it.
We passed villages; they were named as towns on the map, but in reality no name would do. What were they? Six flat weatherbeaten buildings, of which three were latrines; four widely spaced trees, a lame dog, a few chickens, and the wind blowing so hard a pair of ladies' bloomers were flapping horizontal from a clothesline. And sometimes, in the middle of the desert, there were solitary houses, made out of mud blocks or dusty bricks. These were a riddle; they had the starkness of cartoons. The picket fence of branches and sticks- what were they enclosing? what were they shutting out? — was no aid to fathoming the purpose of such huts.