In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin Read Free Book Online

back of his neck was criss-crossed with lines from working hatless in the sun. His eyes were watery blue, and rather bloodshot.
    He finished his business with Bill about the bull. And Bill talked about farm prices and land reform and Sonny shook or nodded his head. He sat on a firestool and sipped his whisky. Of Scotland he preserved a certain pride of blood and a dim memory of kilts and pipes, but those were the festivities of another generation.
    His aunt and uncle had come down from Buenos Aires to look after him. The aunt was pleased we had come. She had been baking and brought in a cake, iced with pink sugar and fluffy inside. She cut huge slices and served them on delicate china plates with silver forks. We had eaten earlier but we couldn’t refuse. She cut a slice for Sonny.
    â€˜You know I don’t eat cake,’ he said.
    Sonny had a sister who was a nurse in Buenos Aires. When their mother died she came back home but she quarrelled with Sonny’s peon. He was half-Indian and he slept in the house. She hated his knife. She hated the way he used it at table. She knew the peon was bad for Sonny. They drank most nights. Sometimes they drank all night and slept through the next day. She tried to change the house, to make it more cheerful, but Sonny said: ‘The house stays the way it was.’
    One night they were both drunk, and the peon insulted her. She panicked and locked herself in her room. She felt something bad was going to happen and went back to her old job.
    Sonny and the peon fought after she’d gone. The neighbours said it could have been much worse. The aunt and uncle came down then, but they couldn’t take the farm either. Fortunately they had savings enough to buy a bungalow in a Buenos Aires suburb, in a nice neighbourhood, mind you, with other English people.
    They chattered on and Sonny sipped his whisky. He wanted the peon back. You could tell from what he did not say that he wanted the peon back.

6
    B AHÍA BLANCA is the last big place before the Patagonian desert. Bill dropped me at the hotel near the bus station. The bar-room was green and brightly lit and full of men playing cards. A country boy stood by the bar. He was shaky on his feet but he kept his head up like a gaucho. He was a nice-looking boy with curly black hair and he really was very drunk. The owner’s wife showed me a hot airless room, painted purple, with two beds in it. The room had no window and the door gave out on to a glassed-in courtyard. It was very cheap and the woman said nothing about having to share.
    I was half asleep when the country boy reeled in, flung himself on the other bed and groaned and sat up and was sick. He was sick on and off for an hour and then he snored. I did not sleep that night for the smell of the sick and the snoring.
    So next day, as we drove through the desert, I sleepily watched the rags of silver cloud spinning across the sky, and the sea of grey-green thornscrub lying off in sweeps and rising in terraces and the white dust streaming off the saltpans, and, on the horizon, land and sky dissolving into an absence of colour.
    Patagonia begins on the Rio Negro. At mid-day the bus crossed an iron bridge over the river and stopped outside a bar. An Indian woman got off with her son. She had filled up two seats with her bulk. She chewed garlic and wore real gold jangly earrings and a hard white hat pinned over her braids. A look of abstract horror passed over the boy’s face as she manoeuvred herself and her parcels on to the street.
    The permanent houses of the village were of brick with black stove pipes and a tangle of electric wires above. Where the brick houses gave out, the shacks of the Indians began. These were patched out of packing cases, sheet plastic and sacking.
    A single man was walking up the street, his brown felt hat pulled low over his face. He was carrying a sack and walking into the white dustclouds, out into the country. Some children sheltered in a