Argentina

The desolately empty moonscape lulled me gently to sleep and when I awoke we were cruising over a billiard table road with nothing but the odd sheep …

The trip to the Argentinean border was monotonous and the time passed in a soporific haze of flat windswept scrubby looking land with low twisted bushes with painful looking thorns. The desolately empty moonscape lulled me gently to sleep and when I awoke we were cruising over a billiard table road with nothing but the odd sheep to break the monotony. I wrote in my diary: After a while even the ends of the earth become little more than eye candy, and fell asleep again.

The Chilean formalities were swiftly completed. A sleepy eyed policeman in a black bomber jacket with DETECTIVE printed on the back thumbed my passport and stamped me out of my beloved Chile. Half a mile down the road the situation was more tense and the unlikely border post swarmed with olive jump-suited soldiers, their name tags haphazardly velcroed in place. My passport was given an imperious scanning and then I was ushered out into the weak sunlight and into Argentina once again.

As the bus began to pull away a soldier came running out from the lonely customs hut and levelled his rifle at the driver bringing us to a juddering halt. The soldier smartly shouldered his weapon and ran a hand through his heavily Brillcreamed hair. His spit and polish boots creaked as he walked up the narrow aisle and his eyes flicked nervously amongst the passengers. His hand hovered over the safety of his weapon as forty people tried to sink into their seats and pretend that they were elsewhere. He came to a stop next to my seat, gave me a long hard look and then turned to the shy young girl who was sitting in the seat opposite. He ran a tanned hand through his hair and leaned closer to her. I had to strain to hear…

“Senorita, you are very beautiful. There is another bus due tomorrow. Perhaps we could have a drink together now and…”

His words trailed off into an incoherent mash of hopefulness. The girl gave him a long withering look that betrayed the hard thirteen years she must have endured deep in Patagonia and gave the slightest possible shake of her head. The final view I had, before the dust storm from the rattling bus blurred my vision, was of a terribly vulnerable young man in ill fitting combat fatigues with a rifle slung over his shoulder standing in the middle of the road gently shaking his head.

By the time I arrived in Rio Gallegos the light had drained out of the day and rivulets of rain melted the view from the window. The bus station was deserted and the chance of any more buses that day, or even that year, seemed remote. I stood in the pouring rain wondering what to do, and how to do it. In desperation I flagged down a passing taxi and headed along damp grey streets towards the airport. “Where are you from?” asked the driver in slow, lazy Spanish and when I told him he screwed up his nose and sneered, “England. Maggie Thatcher, hooligans, Malvinas,” and then spat noisily out of the window. I tried to sink into the seat and think of something nice to say.

Everything at the endearingly small airport was shut up and covered with a thin layer of dust and cobwebs. It seemed remotely unlikely that it would ever be used again in my lifetime. I spent another lifetime trudging around in the rain and grim twilight trying to find a taxi and when I did find one it was held together with wire and bits of rags. I squeezed into the front seat between the driver and his smiling wife, made polite conversation and, much to my disgust, pretended to be French – “Don’t you just love Diego Maradona, he was the greatest.”

As we drove through the dank dark streets I rummaged in my bag for the address I had been given months back by a friend of a friend of a friend’s cousin’s uncle’s boyfriend in Rio. It took some finding but tucked in the back of my dairy between Cathy in Wuhan and Miriam in Mexico on a grubby scrap of paper was Carmen’s address. I didn’t know her, she didn’t know me, but on a wet New Year’s Day there weren’t many other options.

Feeling totally dispirited and with rain drip drip dripping down my neck I knocked on Carmen’s door. The house looked deserted and vaguely forgotten in the feeble twilight. After sufficient time had passed for me to become soaked to the skin the door cracked open and a sleepy face appeared in the crack. I gave my best smile and tired to muster enough Spanish grammar together. Wrinkles swam across the face as I murdered the beautiful language and the warm brown eyes seemed to say “What the bloody hell is happening here? It’s New Year’s Day, its pissing with rain and this guy is either foreign or mad.” It was another one of those times when I wished my Spanish teacher had had smaller breasts (and been a better teacher).

I pushed the scrap of paper with her address through the door and after some fumbling with her glasses she exploded out into the grotty night, grabbed my hand and bundled me into the warm stuffy kitchen. In between screams of joy and machine gun rapid Spanish, which boiled down to the fact it was a small world and that if I had said sooner that I was a friend of a friend of her son then I wouldn’t now be guiltily dripping onto the clean floor and would, in fact, be sitting in front of a nice warm fire eating cake, she busied around making coffee and smothering me with garlicky kisses.

After a bizarrely complex conversation about people we knew, Carmen led me to the annexe of her house and began to fuss around with blankets, duvets and other trappings of civilisation. By the time she left me to unpack and freshen up I felt blissfully happy; a feeling which continued when I found out that next door was a small store which sold stupidly inexpensive beer and wine and was owned by a girl with legs up to her armpits.

An hour later I was sitting at the solid oak kitchen table, beer in my hand and my diary in front of me when Carmen burst in. “Now,” she wagged a finger at me and heaved half a sheep through the door, “I don’t have much for you to eat. It’s New Year’s Day and I didn’t go to the shops. You will have to make do with left overs.” I felt terribly embarrassed and spluttered excuses about not wanting to impose or anything as Carmen loaded the table up with dish after dish of mutton, sausage, bread, wine and beer. “If you had told me you were coming,” munched Carmen through a flank of lamb which was spilling out over the side of the plate, “I would have gone shopping and had been able to offer you something nice to eat.”

Early the next morning I was back at the airport. Yesterday’s insistent rain had washed most of the colour from the city and the sleepy airport was still suspended in a sleepy trance. I ran my fingers over the eerily deserted check-in desks and left long train tracks in the dust and then sat down to wait for something to open. After an hour of inactivity I gave up hope of ever getting a flight and took a taxi downtown. Eventually I found a travel agent that was open and not covered in a thick layer of dust, brought a ticket for $60 and felt terribly happy with myself. I wondered if my family knew where I was. I imagined my parents sitting in front of the TV in a post festive stupor wondering where their errant offspring was this time.

Whilst the agent typed my ticket on an ageing typewriter I mooched around the city looking for something to get excited about: a grim barely functional supermarket, a lonely tourist office staffed by pretty girls who were painting their nails when I wandered in, a few second hand bookshops and the obligatory mass of monuments celebrating the glorious military past of Argentina. It wasn’t even vaguely exciting until you realised that this was most definitely terra incognito and one of the most lonely parts of the world.

I bought a cake and a quiche from a shop and sat in the cool sun with my picnic. The quiche was bitter and tasted medicinal, even a passing stray dog turned its nose up at it. To kill some more time I walked around a housing estate. The ancient battered mobile rust heaps which passed as cars here on the edge of nothingness wheezed their way around the grimy cracked wind blown streets whilst hard faced women looked quizzically at me. Tourists were obviously few and far between. By the time I had collected my ticket and walked back to Carman’s there were tears in my eyes and I wasn’t sure if it was the gritty wind or the sheer desolation and isolation.

Carmen busied herself with lunch; two massive slabs of pizza thick with local cheese and dribbling with homemade tomato sauce. Bottles of beer appeared from the folds of her apron and we sat and chatted, and drank and I felt vaguely guilty about my mangled Spanish whilst Carmen looked pleased to have such patient company. After a few bottles of beer she shyly pulled a faded pile of photos from an old shoebox and let the years and regrets slip away. Her sons were away ‘travelling’ and slowly she laid the memories of a hectic life out for me on the greasy table. She promised me that the next person who would pass through would find my picture and in that way she felt we all belonged to her – her spiritual children on the less travelled road.

A few hours later Carmen bundled me into a mobile heap of rust which was euphemistically called a car in Patagonia and drove me along a bleakly dusty and forgotten highway to her other house. I sat sandwiched in the back between two impossibly round friends of hers who spent their time firing machine gun fast questions at me and sipping mate from a beautifully carved cup. I lost count of the number of times my head smashed against the roof of the car as we dived in and out of potholes accompanied by Carmen’s enthusiastic screams. The view ahead was obscured by a spider’s web of cracks which fractured the sunlight into the car and half blinded me.

A few kilometres after we left the city limits the road gave way to a more crude gravel track and the sky opened out into a huge parabolic vista of swirling blues the like of which has never graced a canvas. We wheezed along the track totally absorbed in the incredible sky and when we came to a juddering halt I was half surprised to look back along the forgotten road and not see it scattered with bits of rusted car.

Carmen’s half completed house was on a scrub on land temporarily claimed from the Pampas. The nearest neighbour was a stout hike away and when an occasional car went rumbling past it left us coated with a thick sheen of dust and grime. It was idyllic and whilst Carmen went to unlock the door and pamper the guard dog I walked around with my camera taking photos and feeling blissfully at peace, only the creaking of a distant water pump kept me rooted to reality.

Later we sat in the half built kitchen and whilst Carmen prepared onces (afternoon tea) I fed the whining dogs table scraps. Occasionally Carmen would rush to the nearest work surface and run a damp cloth over long forgotten and dusty surfaces whilst fleshing out her dream of having the place finally finished in soft sibilant Spanish. Around us was the debris of many abortive building attempts and the master bedroom was a jumble of tools, masonry and hope. With Carmen’s osteoporosis and age the fate of the house didn’t look good, but then again I had never met anyone like Carmen whose heart showed no end. Perhaps one day…

We spent the last few hours of sunlight in a quaint little museum devoted to the early Patagonian pioneers. It was a charming little timbered building stuffed with an eclectic collection of mementos; a picture of a prim family in frock coats and top hats corralling their children into a formal photo, a working model of a steam engine, an antique gramophone and a faded needle point. Everything hinted back to the pioneers’ past lives on the verdant hills of Wales and how much they suffered for a new life here at the virtual end of the world. It was deeply moving and I lingered a long time chatting in broken idioms to the warm curator who rarely got to see tourists.

The last stop before the sun dipped below the horizon for the night was the local supermarket when Carmen bought a couple of huge steaks, wine, garlic and potatoes. I struggled to carry the bags back to the rusting car whose suspension gave an audible groan as I put the bags on the back seat.

Whilst Carmen crushed garlic, uncorked wine and scraped potatoes I walked to the local war memorial. Every town in Argentina, no matter how small, has its own memorial to the Falklands conflict. This particular one was carved from rough granite blocks and had two eternal flames gently flickering in the soft breeze. A gardener was cutting the grass with an old rotary mower and traffic boomed past. It hardly seemed a serene place to remember the dead of such an unnecessary conflict. I mentioned this to the gardener who nodded his head and chewed his lip thoughtfully and then turned the sprinkler system on, soaking me to the skin.

That night the table was once again groaning with thick doorstep sized steaks, greasy sausages, bottles of rich local wine, beer and fresh crusty bread dipped in homemade garlic butter. We ate and chatted late into the night and I forgot about the long journey ahead of me and Carmen forgot her itinerant children and her half built house. We had nothing in common really, apart from the desolate Patagonian landscape which had deeply coloured our lives and a sense of freedom from the open road. And, of course, a love of thick juicy steaks, cold beer and good conversation.

The next day, when the sky was still ashen, I slipped out of the house and into a taxi. Carmen gave me a hug and asked me to come back when the flowers that she had just planted in the front garden were in bloom. But that was the last time I ever saw her, or Patagonia for that matter. But I have carried them both in my heart to many strange lands since…

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