PATAGONIA ON MY MIND

Argentina's Route 40, like US Route 66, drives deep into your imagination.

Patagonia exists almost more in my mind than as a concrete geographic place. The images from a visit in December and January will not go away. Patagonia is a place to be swallowed up by. It has so many sides to it that you can find your own separate reality and live it out. In my case, I found many realities that I continue to live out mentally. Maybe I will choose one and go back.

But how does one get to that memory, that desire? Even Bruce Chatwin, whose "In Patagonia" is one of the great travel books, in the end resorted to recounting stories of others, fantasizing on encounters with unique people and inventing quests. I dogged Chatwin during my journey in Patagonia and talked with people he talked with, went to the places he went to. It would be easy to say he was a phony, but in the end I understood he had arrived at a deeper truth about Patagonia. I appreciated that Chatwin was striving to express a deeper, mystical, truth about the place: That Patagonia exists more solidly as an idea.

We traveled 10 hours by plane around Patagonia and did 3000 kilometers by car, and still only saw a fraction of this immense expanse. So as one of the proverbial blind men defining an elephant, I will let the images below show the flawed glimpses of what I saw of Patagonia.

In 1901 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, with Miss Etta Price, settled right here in Cholilla, province of Chubut, Argentina. They lived like gentlemen farmers for about 5 years, inviting the local people and the governor of the province for parties, where the Sundance Kid entertained them playing sambas on his guitar. But Etta Price got impatient with so much gracious living and incited them back to the exciting life of robbing banks. With the American and Argentine police after them, they escaped to Bolivia, where it is believed that they died in a shootout.

Sometimes, in the middle of nowhere, one comes across a lonely rider.

The immense Perito Moreno glacier, covering more territory than Buenos Aires.

Breathtaking Torres del Paine, in Chile.

Puerto Natales is known for its "magellanic" architecture, with colorful houses made of wood and corrugated zinc plates. Abandoned dogs are everywhere in Patagonia, it breaks your heart. We gave them food, but it was like a grain of sand.

Wind. There is wind everywhere in Patagonia, and the further south you go, the more wind there is. In Punta Arenas they put ropes at the intersections so people will not be blown out into traffic.

The emptiness of Patagonia prompts the few people who live there to reach out for very personal forms of spirituality. You come upon lovingly cared for shrines in the most desolate spots. These shrines are mainly dedicated to two very popular “saints” in the local folklore.

Gauchito Gil was a young cowhand murdered by the authorities in an atrocious way because he loved the rich widow who owned the estancia. At the place where he was killed, miracles were recounted – good ones for the poor and bad ones for the rich. His red-painted shrines with his painted or sculpted image are filled with bottles of wine and cigarettes.

Difunta Correa was a young woman who had just given birth and died of thirst while walking through Patagonia’s vastness. When her body was found four days later, her baby was still alive and nursing from the dead woman’s breast. Difunta Correa’s shrines, with the image of the miracle, are piled with mountains of bottles of water.

Patagonia's magnificent fauna -- eagles, guanacos, foxes, ñandús, and many others.

A characteristic sight in the windy vastness of Patagonia are "arboles bandera" - flag trees - bent from the constant wind.

We stayed at the estancia in Viamonte, belonging to the descendants of Lucas Bridges who wrote the must-read book on Tierra del Fuego, "The Uttermost Part Of The Earth".

Traveling south in Tierra del Fuego.

The meeting of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans – the Drake Passage – is one of the very roughest seas in the world, where countless ships have sunk over the centuries. The End of The World Museum in Ushuaia is filled with beautiful figureheads and historical memories rescued from the waters.

Leaving Ushuaia for Antarctica.

SINTRA MYSTERY RESOLVED - A CONVERSATION WITH ANNA THULIN

Soon after returning from the north, I received a surprising message from Anna Thulin, who I talked about in a previous entry. She thanked me for my note – left at the hospital the day before she was to be discharged – and invited me for tea.

Ms. Thulin greeted me at the door of her lovely home. She is very pretty and young looking. Proper. Lithe as a dancer.

She took me to a room bathed in sunlight, big windows giving onto a garden. I gasped, recognizing a painting of mine on the wall. Anna smiled and told me she loves the painting, and had always wanted to meet me. What a rare and wonderful coincidence for me!

As we sipped tea and ate little hot almond pastries, Anna Thulin talked. I will try to transmit here, in an impressionistic way, the gist of what she told me.

“I have been like a fish that lives in the sunless depths of the ocean….

“I married a year after arriving in Portugal. I was very young. I was staying with a Swedish couple, friends of my parents, and attending art classes. One day I was invited to a party where I met Vasco. I was blown away by his charm and seduced by his extravagant love of life. I was in over my head.

“I guess we go on playing various roles until we find our own….

“I seemed concocted to fulfill Vasco’s fantasies, like an exotic pet one likes to show off to one’s friends. At first I loved it, to be treated like a valuable collector’s item, but with the passing of years I was more and more dissatisfied. I became filled with frustrated artistic visions, daydreams, restlessness, chain-smoking….

“My husband’s schemes and pace were getting wilder, his demands on me more and more difficult. It frightens me to admit I was frightened.


“I suppose I could just have walked away, but it was not so easy. Everything was his, the travel agency, the houses, the cars, all in his name. I was naïve and he was a lawyer.

“My dissatisfaction with myself was the hardest. I have artistic talents, but if they are not expressed and acknowledged they don’t exist.

“And I was being tossed aside like a fading mistress. I felt there was no way out for me.

“I had to do it, get out of my life -- get out of life as I’ve known it for almost 20 years -- and I felt an unfamiliar kind of courage. I started collecting sleeping pills.

“I went to Hotel Central, a place I know well from work. All our clients stay there. I knew the hotel’s routines well. The rest you know. As it took place in a hotel, it became public. Vasco has a total terror of publicity, he has to control everything. Then he was exposed by his wife’s attempted suicide splattered across the paper. You picked it up. Others did too. The police are all over him because of the note I left behind in the room. I am being invited daily for interviews with TV and papers. He is giving me all I want, divorce, this house, in exchange for my silence.

“You know, the world is beginning all over again for me, and I intend to savor the exciting days ahead. I am going to design fabric. It has been my passion since my art school days in Sweden. I came here to learn how to paint azulejos, Portuguese tiles, and now I am starting again.

“Living means change and growth. Sometimes one has to take risks.”

PEDRO AND INÊS – A Portuguese Medieval Love Story


Shakespeare wishes. On my trip to the north of Portugal I have been criss-crossing with one of the most beautiful love stories of the Middle Ages, which took place 200 years before Shakespeare’s fable of “Romeo and Juliet”. The Pedro and Inês love story is not only true but fully documented.

It started in 1340, when the heir to the throne of Portugal, Prince Pedro, was 20 years old.

His father, King Afonso IV, the 7th King of the newly created nation of Portugal, had secretly arranged by proxy the marriage of his son to Lady Constanza, a Castillian Princess. Pedro had not been consulted or informed of his arranged marriage because there had been an earlier episode of repudiation. When he was 14 and laid eyes on another Castillian Princess his father had planned to marry him to, he revolted and had the Princess returned to Spain. This time Pedro’s father had arranged that Lady Constanza arrive in Portugal as Pedro’s official wife and future Queen. The Prince was enraged with this “fait accompli”.

When Princess Constanza arrived, Pedro was smitten by one of her ladies-in-waiting, Inês de Castro. In the words of his chronicler, Inês was “...beautiful as a flower, blond as the sun, and extremely elegant.” Pedro fell madly, rapturously in love with her and they became inseparable lovers. The resulting scandal was such that the king ordered his son to stop seeing Inês. Pedro ignored his father’s demand and hid Inês in a castle away from the court.

This situation continued with the mounting disapproval of the King’s counselors, who began insinuating that the only solution was to kill Inês. Afonso IV resisted and instead exiled the young woman to Spain. The lovers were separated for two years, but Pedro, who had a deep romantic streak, stayed strongly connected to Inês through countless poems and love letters he wrote for her.

Princess Constanza died in 1345 while giving birth to a son. Poor Constanza, hers was an unhappy lot. Pedro immediately sent for Inês, ensconcing her in the Santa Clara convent in Coimbra, where Pedro thought she would be protected from the King and his counselors. The lovers met secretly at the nearby Quinta das Lágrimas – the Manor of Tears. Pedro insistently asked the King and the Pope for permission to marry Inês, but his requests were always denied.

With Princess Constanza’s death, Afonso IV’s advisors insisted on Inês’s demise so that Pedro would forget his obsession and consent to marry a princess who would ensure a peace treaty with the Kingdom of Castile.

Finally the King and three advisors planned her murder in all secrecy. They traveled to Coimbra, waited in hiding until the lovers, Inês and Pedro, bid farewell at the Fountain of Tears, and Pedro went off hunting. The assassins chopped her head off in the early morning of January 7, 1355.

Fountain of Tears

The death of his beloved Inês brought out Pedro’s dark side. He was profoundly altered by her murder and vowed to take revenge on her assassins. But he waited until he became King in 1357 upon his father’s death. The three murderers meanwhile fled Portugal, because they knew they would not be safe, and disappeared in Spain.

As soon as he became King Pedro I, with his heart black as tar, Pedro had Inês’s killers hunted down in Spain and brought back to Portugal. Two were found, but the third escaped to France. Pedro had the two men brought before him in the presence of his full court and had their hearts ripped out, one from the front, the other from the back. He then called for vinegar and bit into the still beating hot hearts of the assassins to inflict further insult.

The nobles of the court, the Pope and even Spanish Kings urged Pedro to re-marry, but he refused, saying that he needed time to honor Inês’s memory. Pedro had other ideas.

Seven years after Inês’s death, Pedro, claiming that he had married her in secret and that she was the true Queen of Portugal, had her body exhumed and, covered with a veil, sat on the throne next to his. The royal crown was placed on her head and Pedro ordered all the court nobles to kneel and kiss the dead Queen’s hand.

Pedro also had two magnificent stone sarcophagi sculpted, one for Inês and one for himself, and placed in the Monastery of Alcobaça. The tombs, his and Inês’s, were to be placed foot to foot so that when Judgment Day came and all souls would rise up, they would see each other before anything else.

Pedro took an interest in every symbolic message on the sarcophagi – down to the detail of having effigies of her assassins carved to support her sarcophagus, so they would bear the weight of their sin forever. The tombs, which can be seen today in the Monastery of Alcobaça, are wonderful. And to stand between them, looking from foot to foot, you almost wish you could be there on Judgment Day.

The effigy of one Inês’s murderers bearing the weight of his sin.

The Medieval depiction of the judgement of souls at the foot of Inês’s tomb.

The angels are to help Pedro and Inês rise up on Judgment Day.

SINTRA MYSTERY

Yesterday afternoon I was having a lemonade at a café in Sintra in a square filled with bougainvillea and wisteria.

Sintra is an enchanting UNESCO World Heritage Site about 15 kilometers away. Leafing through a free newspaper from the table next to me, I came upon an unusual article which I loosely translate here:

‘’July 29, 2009. At the Hotel Central in Sintra, Anna Thulin, a Swedish woman well known in Sintra, was taken by ambulance to the Sintra-Amadora Hospital on Tuesday evening, July 27. The manager of the Hotel Central was alerted by one of the hotel’s cleaning staff who had gone to turn down the sheets in the early evening and found Mrs. Thulin unconscious on a bed. Two empty bottles of sleeping pills were found on the table next to the bed. The hotel staff was unable to provide further information about Ms. Thulin’s stay at the hotel, or any explanation for what appeared to be an attempted suicide.
“The Sintra-Amadora Hospital reported that the patient’s condition was stable, that she is now out of the Intensive Care Unit, resting in a private room and receiving no visitors.
“A member of the Sintra police who did not reveal his name since he is not authorized to speak with the press disclosed that the Mrs. Thulin, 39, a former Swedish beauty queen, has been a resident of Sintra for twenty years, and runs a travel agency in the center of town. The police have no idea why she was renting a room at the Hotel Central, when she resides at a manor house with a large garden next door to her travel agency, just a few hundred meters from the hotel. Her expensive imported car is also missing. The officer stated that the police found an extensive note in Mrs. Thulin’s room, which he said could become the subject of further investigation.
“Miss Clara Pereira, an employee at Mrs. Thulin’s travel agency, said that Anna Thulin was admired in the community and ran a profitable excursions business. However, recently Mrs. Thulin was rarely in the office, and she had to do almost all the work of the agency. Miss Pereira said that Mrs. Thulin always attracted a great deal of attention – and even jealousy -- in Sintra. Miss Pereira added that her boss is married to Mr. Vasco de Sousa, a young, notorious, sports lawyer, and that the couple has no children.
“Mr. Vasco de Sousa did not respond to our repeated requests for comment.
“Mrs. Anna Thulin is apparently out of medical danger, but there remain many questions to be answered about this case."

I closed the paper and thought about the darkest part of the dark in this luminescent square. What could cause a beautiful successful young woman to want to take her life in an emblematic hotel in Sintra? And justify it in an extensive note? Perhaps the real story will never see the light of day, but suicide can be a kind of revenge against those who stay behind.

Note: I will be in the north of Portugal as of Saturday, August 1. I hope to have a few opportunities to keep up with all of you during the next 10 days.