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Travelling with the writers
“Have gone to Patagonia. Chatwin”. With this telegram sent to the director of the Sunday Times, then British journalist announced the beginning of an experience that would profoundly change his life and of those who would read about his travels. It was 1974. Three years later Bruce Chatwin was officially becoming a famous writer while Patagonia was taking hold in the imagination of the general public. The Sheffield-born writer became interested in the American region as a child because of a supposed piece of Brontosaurus found by this grandmother’s cousin in the Strait of Magallanes. “The oldest kind of travel writing”, he later wrote, ”occurs when the narrator leaves home to search for a legendary animal in a faraway land”.
But for Chatwin, the personal diary always blends with the social and mythological. And so in his years of youth Patagonia is transformed into an open bunker against the cold war.
"And yet we hoped to survive the blast. We started an Emigration Committee and made plans to settle in some far corner of the earth. We pored over atlases. We learned the direction of prevailing winds and the likely patterns of fall-out. The war would come in the Northern Hemisphere, so we looked to the Southern. We ruled out Pacific Islands for islands are traps. We ruled out Australia and New Zealand, and we fixed on Patagonia as the safest place on earth. I pictured a low timber house with a shingled roof, caulked against storms, with blazing log fires inside and the walls lined with the best books, somewhere to live when the rest of the world blew up. Then Stalin died and we sang hymns of praise in chapel, but I continued to hold Patagonia in reserve.”
A reserve that is an eccentric land, an extreme limit, refuge and salvation (as is was for many immigrants before it was for Chatwin) and above all a source of inspiration. And it’s held there, to rest like a fallow land, just waiting for a book to come out. That’s what Argentinean Mempo Giardinelli does in Final de novela en Patagonia.
"Something told me that the land would inspire the rest of the story for which I had been searching too long.”
A twofold territory: there is what writers and travelers arrogantly expect to see; and what actually unfolds in front of them leaving them with the feeling that they can’t understand it all.
“Patagonia reveals itself little by little, subtly. (…) the traveler is anxious, he needs his eyes to confirm what he expects to see. It is an old idea, that Patagonia inevitably confirms, even if it does so very slowly”.
It is a region that is a kind of El Dorado of the imagination for writers, a warehouse of stories and interesting people, weird and absurd, sometimes funny and grotesque at other times extremely sad. Like the episode – recounted by Luis Sepulveda in Patagonia Express – of Carlos E Basta, a pilot who was once made to transport the body of a famous person for eight hundred kilometers in his Piper: “…because of those things that happen in the south of the world, one day he found himself piloting the first funereal airplane in the southern skies”.
But ultimately Patagonia is a free space where you can reconnect with nature and its creative energy.
“Descending down towards the plains of the farm, a light breeze combed the shimmering prairie grass; in some places where the coiròn did not dominate with its lichen-like stiffness, the fields were sprayed with small, white daisies and other flowers that dared to sprout in that harsh climate. We could feel the intoxicating liquid of full spring; the muscles of our steeds twitching, our blood churning so that it seemed to want to spurt out of our fingers and a feeling of youth and strength that made us fill our lungs, filled us with the desire to run towards the infinite.” (Francisco Coloane, Cape Horn)
(19/10/2005)
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