You're Reading a Free Preview
Pages 4 to 14 are not shown in this preview.
Read the full version
 
horror passed over the boy’s face as she manoeuvred herself and her parcels onto the street.The permanent houses of the village were of brick with black stove pipes anda tangle of electric wires above. Where the brick houses gave out, the shacksof the Indians began. These were patched out of packing cases, sheet plasticand sacking.A single man was walking up the street, his brown felt hat pulled low over hisface. He was carrying a sack and walking into the white dustclouds, out intothe country. Some children sheltered in a doorway and tormented a lamb.From one hut came the noise of the radio and sizzling fat. A lumpy armappeared and threw a dog a bone. The dog took it and slunk off.The Indians were migrant workers from Southern Chile. They were AraucanianIndians. A hundred years ago the Araucanians were incredibly fierce and brave.They painted their bodies red and flayed their enemies alive and sucked at thehearts of the dead. Their boys’ education consisted of hockey, horsemanship,liquor, insolence and sexual athletics, and for three centuries they scared theSpaniards out of their wits. In the sixteenth century Alonso de Ercilla wrote anepic in their honour and called it the Araucana, Voltaire read it and throughhim the Araucanians became candidates for the Noble Savage (tough version).The Araucanians are still very tough and would be a lot tougher if they gave updrink.Outside the village there were irrigated plantations of maize and squash, andorchards of cherries and apricots. Along the line of the river, the willows wereall blown about and showing their silvery undersides. The Indians had beencutting withies and there were fresh white cuts and the smell of sap. The riverwas swollen with snowmelt from the Andes, fast-running and rustling the reeds.Purple swallows were chasing bugs. When they flew above the cliff, the windcaught them and keeled them over in a fluttering reversal and they droppedagain low over the river.The cliff rose sheer above a ferry-landing. I climbed a path and from the toplooked up-stream towards Chile. I could see the river, glinting and slidingthrough the bone-white cliffs with strips of emerald cultivation either side.Away from the cliffs was the desert. There was no sound but the wind, whirringthrough thorns and whistling through dead grass, and no other sign of life but ahawk, and a black beetle easing over white stones.The Patagonian desert is not a desert of sand or gravel, but a low thicket ofgrey-leaved thorns which give off a bitter smell when crushed. Unlike thedeserts of Arabia it has not produced any dramatic excess of the spirit, but itdoes have a place in the record of human experience. Charles Darwin found itsnegative qualities irresistible. In summing up The Voyage of the Beagle, he
 
tried, unsuccessfully, to explain why, more than any of the wonders he hadseen, these ‘arid wastes’ had taken such firm possession of his mind.In the 1860s W. H. Hudson came to the Rio Negro looking for the migrantbirds that wintered around his home in La Plata. Years later he rememberedthe trip through the filter of his Notting Hill boarding-house and wrote a bookso quiet and sane it makes Thoreau seem a ranter. Hudson devotes a wholechapter of Idle Days in Patagonia to answering Mr Darwin’s question, and heconcludes that desert wanderers discover in themselves a primaeval calmness(known also to the simplest savage), which is perhaps the same as the Peace ofGod.About the time of Hudson’s visit, the Rio Negro was the northern frontier ofan unusual kingdom which still maintains a court in exile in Paris. 
7 
 ON A drizzling November afternoon, His Royal Highness Prince Philippe ofAraucania and Patagonia gave me an audience at his public relations firm onthe Faubourg Poissoniere.To get there I had to pass the Marxist daily L’Humanite, a cinema showing‘Pinocchio’ and a shop that sold fox and skunk skins from Patagonia. Alsopresent was the Court Historian, a young and portly Argentine of Frenchdescent with royal buttons on his blazer.The Prince was a short man in a brown tweed suit who sucked at a briar pipethat curled down his chin. He had just come back from East Berlin on businessand disdainfully waved about a copy of Pravda. He showed me a longmanuscript in search of a publisher; a photo of two Araucanian citizens holdingup their tricolour, the Blue, White and Green; a court order allowing M.Philippe Boiry to use his royal title on a French passport; a letter from theConsul of El Salvador in Houston recognizing him as a head of state in exile;and his correspondence with Presidents Perón and Eisenhower (whom he haddecorated) and with Prince Montezuma, the pretender to the Aztec throne.In parting he gave me copies of the Cahiers des Hautes-Etudet Araucaniennes,among them Comte Leon M. de Moulin-Peuillet’s study, ‘The Royal Successionof Araucania and the Order of Memphis and Misraim (Egyptian Rite)’.‘Every time I try something,’ the Prince said, ‘I gain a little.’
 
 
8
 IN THE spring of 1859 the lawyer Orelie-Antoine de Tounens closed his grey-shuttered office in the Rue Hieras in Perigeaux, looked back at the byzantineprofile of the cathedral, and left for England, clutching the valise that held the25,000 francs he had withdrawn from his family’s joint account, thusaccelerating their ruin.He was the eighth son of peasant farmers who lived in a collapsing gentilbommiere at the hamlet of La Cheze near the hamlet of Las Fount. He wasthirty-three (the age when geniuses die), a bachelor and a freemason, who,with a bit of cheating, had traced his descent from a Gallo-Roman senator andadded a de to his name. He had moonstruck eyes and flowing black hair andbeard.He dressed as a dandy, held himself excessively erect and acted with theunreasoning courage of the visionary.Through Voltaire he had come on Ercilla’s epic of wooden stanzas and learnedof the untamed tribes of the Chilean South: Robust and beardless,Bodies rippling and muscular,Hard limbs, nerves of steel,Agile, brazen, cheerful,Spirited, valiant, daring,Toughened by work, patientOf mortal cold, hunger and heat. 
You're Reading a Free Preview
Pages 18 to 25 are not shown in this preview.
Read the full version
You're Reading a Free Preview
Pages 29 to 32 are not shown in this preview.
Read the full version
You're Reading a Free Preview
Pages 36 to 136 are not shown in this preview.
Read the full version
You're Reading a Free Preview
Pages 140 to 180 are not shown in this preview.
Read the full version
Buscar
Buscar historial:
Buscando…
Resultados00 de00
00 resultados para resultado para
  • p.
    • Comments
    Post comment