In Patagonia Read Online Free Page B

a responsive chord among local historians and one or two English critics, who suspected that a number of Chatwin’s brontosauri were mylodons. Chatwin’s book, she often wrote to the Buenos Aires Herald , “whilst containing some elements of truth was much exaggerated and in some instance pure lies.”
    Chatwin admitted as much to Michael Ignatieff. “I once made the experiment of counting up the lies in the book I wrote about Patagonia. It wasn’t, in fact, too bad. There weren’t too many.”
    There are errors of fact that had Chatwin known about he would surely have corrected. Several may be attributed to his poor Spanish. (In the Silesian Museum in Punta Arenas, for instance, he writes down the wrong name for the murdered priest: Father Pistone instead of Father Juan Silvestro.) Other mistakes seem the result of his haste. (Patagonia is generally understood to begin not at the banks of the Rio Negro, but 120 kilometers north at the Rio Colorado.) But there are, surprisingly, strikingly few instances of mere invention. He told the Argentine critic Christian Kupchik: “Everything that is in the book happened, although of course in another order.” The “lies” he admits to Ignatieff are examples of his romanticism, as when he describes an ordinary stainless steel chair as being “by Mies van der Rohe” or makes an Ukrainian nurse in Rio Pico a devotee of his beloved Mandelstam instead of Agatha Christie. These are artistic devices. He was not writing a government report. Nor a tourist brochure. His structure was of a journey constantly interrupted, zigzagging among texts and through time. As a master fabulist, he had absorbed the rules and contrived something original out of them. Generally speaking, he did not subtract from the truth so much as add to it. He told not a half-truth but a truth and a half. His achievement is not to depict Patagonia as it really is, but to create a landscape called Patagonia—a new way of looking, a new aspect of the world. And in the process he reinvented himself.
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    As with the author, Chatwin’s Patagonia is a landscape to which people do not remain neutral. “An unfortunate book,” the King of Patagonia told me at a chateau in the Périgord. He spoke shortly after proposing a champagne toast to “La Patagonie et L’Araucanie libre!” surrounded by his court in exile, amongst whom In Patagonia had gone down like a leadish balloon.
    Yet in Patagonia itself, the book has had a liberating effect. In 1981, six years after its author passed through, Gaiman was a dusty grid of pale red houses, two of them tearooms. The Welsh language was spoken by fewer than 2,000 in the region and in danger of disappearing altogether. In the burial ground at Chapel Moriah, the headstones of the founders pitched at an angle and vandalized plastic roses lay melted under the sun. The place was sinking back into the desert.
    Today, the village spreads in a new development beyond the Bethel chapel. There are seven tearooms, including the ranchstyle “Caerdydd,” which was favored with a visit from Diana, Princess of Wales, in November 1995. Twice a week in January, a Welsh choir performs to busloads of tourists, among them 500 Americans on a Cunard cruise down the coast. Gaiman is firmly on the map and the eight pages Chatwin wrote about it are quoted on board by the lecturer on the evening the ship docks in Puerto Madryn.
    â€œWe should write something on the gringos who come here with In Patagonia,” says Fabio Roberts de Gonzalez, who sings in the choir. “It’s their Bible.”

Il n’y a plus que la Patagonie, la Patagonie,
qui convienne a mon immense tristesse ...
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    Blaise Cendrars
    Prose du Transsibérien

In Patagonia

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    I N MY grandmother’s dining-room there was a glass-fronted cabinet and in the cabinet a piece of skin. It was a small piece only, but thick and leathery, with