Free In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Fierro.
    â€˜The Indians rode better than the gauchos,’ he said. ‘Brown limbs! Naked on horseback! Their children learned to ride before they walked. They were one with their horses. Ah! Mi Indio !’
    His desk was littered with broken almond shells and his favourite books; Ovid’s Tristia , The Georgics, Walden , Pigafetta’s Voyage of Magellan, Leaves of Grass, The Poem of Martin Fierro, The Purple Land and Blake’s Songs of Innocence , of which he was especially fond.
    Smacking it free of dust, he gave me a copy of his Canto on the Last Flooding of the Chubut River , privately printed in Trelew, which combined, in Alexandrines, his vision of the Deluge and a paean of praise for the engineers of the new dam. He had published two volumes of poetry in his life, Voices of the Earth and Rolling Stones , the last named after the layer of glacier-rolled pebbles that cover the Patagonian pampas. The scope of his verse was cosmic; technically it was astonishing. He managed to squeeze the extinction of the dinosaurs into rhymed couplets using Spanish and Linnaean Latin.
    He gave me a sticky apéritif of his own manufacture, sat me in a chair, and read, with gestures and clattering of false teeth, weighty stanzas that described the geological transformations of Patagonia.
    I asked him what he was writing at present. He cackled humorously.
    â€˜My production is limited. As T. S. Eliot once said: “The poem can wait.” ’
    It stopped raining and I came to leave. Bees hummed around the poet’s hives. His apricots were ripening the colour of a pale sun. Clouds of thistledown drifted across the view and in a field there were some fleecy white sheep.

15
    W AVING TO the poet, I walked towards the road that goes westwards up the Chubut River and on to the Cordillera. A truck stopped with three men in the cab. They were going to get a load of hay from the mountains. All night I bounced in the back, and at dawn, covered in dust, I watched the sun strike the Ice-caps and saw the high slopes, far off, streaked white with snow and black with forests of southern beech.
    As we drove into Esquel, a bush fire was burning on one of the tight brown hills that hemmed in the town. I ate at a green restaurant on the main street. A zinc counter ran the length of the room. At one end a glass vitrine displayed steaks and kidneys and racks of lamb and sausages. The wine was acid and came in pottery penguins. There were hard black hats at every table. The gauchos wore boots creased like concertinas and black bombachas. (Bombachas are baggy pants, once French ex-army surplus from Zouave regiments in the Crimean War.)
    A man with bloodshot eyes left his friends and came over.
    â€˜Can I speak with you, Señor?’
    â€˜Sit down and have a glass.’
    â€˜You are English?’
    â€˜How did you know?’
    â€˜I know my people,’ he said. ‘Same blood as my employer.’
    â€˜Why not Welsh?’
    â€˜I know Welsh from English and you are English.’
    â€˜Yes.’
    He was very pleased and shouted over to his friends: ‘You see, I know my people.’
    The man directed me to the stud farm of an Englishman about twenty miles into the country. ‘A tipo macanudo ,’ he said, a good fellow, the perfect English gentleman.
    Jim Ponsonby’s place was a hill farm, with winter grazing in the valley and summer pasture on the mountain. There were Hereford bulls in his meadow and among them yellow-fronted ibises, big birds with bright pink feet that made a melancholy honking sound.
    The house was low and white and stood in a planting of silver birches. A Spanish woman came to the door.
    â€˜My husband’s helping the patrón with the rams,’ she said. ‘They’re choosing rams for the show. You’ll find them in the shearing shed.’
    He was, certainly, the perfect English gentleman, of middle height, with thick grey hair and a close-clipped moustache.