In Patagonia Read Online Free PDF Page B

night on tour in a Mid-Western motel. The story hinged on the bed, the violin and the violinist’s wooden leg.
    Some years ago she knew Ernesto Guevara, at that time an untidy young man pushing for a place in society.
    â€˜He was very macho ,’ she said, ‘like most Argentine boys, but I never thought it would come to that .’
    The city kept reminding me of Russia—the cars of the secret police bristling with aerials; women with splayed haunches licking ice-cream in dusty parks; the same bullying statues, the pie-crust architecture, the same avenues that were not quite straight, giving the illusion of endless space and leading out into nowhere.
    Tsarist rather than Soviet Russia. Bazarov could be an Argentine character, The Cherry Orchard is an Argentine situation. The Russia of greedy kulaks, corrupt officials, imported groceries and landowners asquint to Europe.
    I said as much to a friend.
    â€˜Lots of people say that,’ he said. ‘Last year an old White émigrée came to our place in the country. She got terrifically excited and asked to see every room. We went up to the attics and she said: “Ah! I knew it! The smell of my childhood!”’

3
    I TOOK the train to La Plata to see the best Natural History Museum in South America. In the compartment were two everyday victims of machismo, a thin woman with a black eye and a sickly teenage girl clinging to her dress. Sitting opposite was a boy with green squiggles on his shirt. I looked again and saw the squiggles were knife blades.
    La Plata is a university town. Most of the graffiti were stale imports from May 1968 but some were rather unusual: ‘Isabel Perón or Death!’ ‘If Evita were alive she would have been a Montonera.’ ‘Death to the English Pirates!’ ‘The Best Intellectual is a Dead Intellectual.’
    An alley of gingko trees led past a statue of Benito Juárez to the steps of the museum. The Argentine national colours, the ‘blue and white’, fluttered from the flagpole, but a red tide of Guevara dicta sprawled up the classical façade, over the pediment and threatened to engulf the building. A young man stood with his arms folded and said: ‘The Museum is shut for various reasons.’ A Peruvian Indian who had come specially from Lima stood about looking crestfallen. Together we shamed them into letting us in.
    In the first room I saw a big dinosaur found in Patagonia by a Lithuanian immigrant, Casimir Slapelič, and named in his honour. I saw the glyptodons or giant armadillos looking like a parade of armoured cars, each one of their bone plates marked like a Japanese chrysanthemum. I saw the birds of La Plata stuffed beside a portrait of W. H. Hudson; and, finally, I found some remains of the Giant Sloth, Mylodon Listai, from the cave on Last Hope Sound—claws, dung, bones with sinews attached, and a piece of skin. It had the same reddish hair I remembered as a child. It was half an inch thick. Nodules of white cartilage were embedded in it and it looked like hairy peanut brittle.
    La Plata was the home of Florentino Ameghino, a solitary autodidact, the son of Genoese immigrants, who was born in 1854 and died Director of the National Museum. He started collecting fossils as a boy, and, later, opened a stationery business called El Gliptodonte after his favourite. In the end the fossils squeezed out the stationery and took the place over, but by that time Ameghino was world-famous, for his publications were so prolific and his fossils so very strange.
    His younger brother, Carlos, spent his time exploring the barrancas of Patagonia, while Florentino sat at home sorting the fossils out. He had wonderful powers of imagination and would reconstruct a colossal beast from the least scrap of tooth or claw. He also had a weakness for colossal names. He called one animal Florentinoameghinea and another Propalaeohoplophorus. He loved his country with the passion of the