The Story of the Village of Bell Ville, Córdoba, Argentina (Part 2 of 7)

The story so far:

My grandmother and mother were born in Bell Ville, originally named Fraile Muerto, and this series of posts is the result of my research into this village, later a town.  There were English farmers in the countryside and (mainly) Italian immigrants in the town, and I descend from both.

Part 1:  The history of the area up to the mid nineteenth century.

Richard Seymour in later life

The arrival of English pioneers

In January 1865 a young Englishman by the name of Richard Seymour sailed from Liverpool bound for the River Plate to make his fortune.  He and his friend Frank Goodricke purchased land in the south east of the province of Córdoba, in an area near the village of Fraile Muerto.  They were beguiled not only by the low price of land, but also by the sweeping vistas of never ending, well-watered pasturelands with an attractive river flowing through them, imagining it full of contented sheep.  He was told he was close to the indian frontier, but they paid scant attention, judging that the government, so desirous of foreign investment, would protect them.

The railway did not arrive for another few years, and at first Seymour was obliged to travel around the country by diligence, the most uncomfortable form of travel he had ever experienced.  The carriage was pulled by 6-8 horses which were changed every 4 leagues (20km) –

A diligencia in the 1860's

“...A man rides on each of the animals, who pull from the girths and proceed at full gallop without the least regard to ruts, holes, etc ...  roads are not macadamised, being nothing in fact but a track over the prairie.  About 6 unfortunate beings are able to go inside this machine, which looks rather like an aged coach, and two more can sit in front with the driver...

“The accommodations at the post-houses are not very splendid, the beds consisting of our own rugs on the floor; and our dinner... was usually walking happily about when we arrived, and not therefore remarkably tender when it appeared on the table. The country through which we passed was, as usual, perfectly flat, with only a few occasional bushes or a rancho, that is to say, a mud hut, to be seen; a few deer and ostriches sometimes appeared, but the most frequent objects were the large hawks called caranchos, who were generally engaged in picking the bones of some dead animal; they are much hated by the sheep farmer, as they take every opportunity of killing his young lambs, by picking out their eyes...”

He goes on to remark that English knowledge of South American geography was very shaky, for once back in England years later he was often asked by “intelligent people” what it was like to reside in a remote part of the Southern States of America, and how the Civil War had affected him.

Seymour and Goodricke worked very hard to set up their farm, named Monte Molino because it was the name by which the land was known locally.  It was all very basic for a long time because they could not afford to build a proper house.  They shared a rancho – a humble little abode made of mud and straw, along with many dogs who helped with the work, and the farmhands they employed.  There was no fencing or moat to protect them at first, and they were soon to learn the disadvantages of being so exposed.

Traditional romanticised view of a 19th century rancho in Argentina

Nearer to reality 

They staffed their new farm with what they could get – sometimes English or Irish, other times gauchos, the lawless men of European descent who roamed the pampas; or local residents, and wanderers on occasion.   He frequently mentions their capataz (foreman) Gumersindo Lisada, who clearly interested him as a character –

As Gumersindo Lisada might have looked in his Sunday best

“…a handsome, clever man, to whom we at first took a great fancy – was celebrated at Fraile Muerto as being the very worst character in the whole country.  He professed a great regard for us, but cheated us, I believe, on every possible occasion, and did no work he could possibly avoid.  His redeeming point was his courage, and perhaps, in his own peculiar way, he may have had a liking for us… On one occasion he defended his wife and two children successfully in a mud rancho from a sudden attack of Indians, with no better weapon than an old horse-pistol, the unfortunate woman concealing herself behind the door with her baby in her arms, holding her hand on its mouth lest its screams should betray her presence…”

He was starting to find the tales of indian hordes descending on unsuspecting farmers a bit unnerving.  On a trip to a neighbouring village to try to buy sheep, he heard one such tale which clearly made a deep impression on him.  The late owner of the estancia they were visiting and his capataz had been killed in a fight with Indians just outside his house the year before, when the latter had stood bravely by his master and made an attempt to rescue their cattle from these invaders.  This was the first proper account of indian attacks that they had been told of but they consoled themselves with the thought that they were 60 miles farther from the frontier and therefore not very likely to attract the notice of the marauders. 

They didn’t have long to wait before they were proved wrong.  There were by this time 12 people living at Monte Molino, of which 9 were male adults as there was work going on – at last - digging a ditch round the property and round a further piece of land for the purposes of planting maize. 

Some time after breakfast one morning Lisada, the capataz, was on the roof trying to work out where and how far the horses had wandered looking for good pasture in the night – the roofs of the houses were built flat for the purpose of serving as a lookout post – when he saw some hundred horsemen in the far distance advancing at full gallop.   At first they thought it was just horses, but as Lisada chillingly explained, it was the Indian custom on a raid to cling to the sides of their horses so as to conceal their true numbers.

The men ran the bullock-wagon into the gateway over the ditch, blocking the entrance, and snatched up their guns and pistols.  Seymour gave each of the men a weapon, took up his own gun and revolver, and waited for the attack.  Meanwhile, Lisada’s wife Salomé rushed into the house with her two children and a small trunk, which must have contained all her valuables, and concealed herself in a dark corner where, they afterwards learned, she kept up her spirits during those trying moments by smoking cigarettes.

Ten minutes later the horsemen were within 400 yards of the house and they realised that the actual number of Indians was nearer 50, with the rest being unmounted horses.  They halted, and the mounted men galloped to within 50 yards of the ditch, fanned out and surrounded them on all sides, and again halted.  Seymour instructed everyone in his party not to fire until it was clear that their intentions were hostile.  They stood facing them, waiting until they came closer. 

 “...Lisada now shouted out that if they wished to fight we were quite ready to accommodate them, at which intimation a short parley took place among the Indians, after which 3 of them rode close up to the edge of the ditch, first leaving their long spears stuck in the ground, and one who was evidently a gaucho acting as interpreter, said that the cacique (the chieftain) wished to speak with the owner of the estancia.

I therefore put down my gun and revolver, and walked forward to the edge of the ditch to meet the cacique and his two attendants, having first desired my companions to fire at once if they saw any symptoms of treachery.  The conversation was conducted through the interpreter, as the two Indians could only speak a word or two of Spanish, and was begun by the cacique expressing a wish to come into our house, which polite offer I respectfully but firmly declined.  He then told us he had lost his way, the party having come out on an expedition for hunting ostriches, and had not the least wish to injure us, but was, on the contrary, extremely anxious for our friendship.

While this conversation had been going on, the rest of the Indians had come up close behind the cacique, having also left their spears stuck in the ground; they talked rapidly among themselves, but of course we could not understand a word they said, and only two or three of them appeared to understand any Spanish.  They were small wiry-looking men, with very black hair falling over their shoulders, flat faces with high cheek-bones, and no beard or whisker, and dark coppery complexions....  All were dressed in the Gaucho costume as far as they were dressed at all, some few possessing decent clothes; one, I remember, wore an officer’s coat, having probably murdered the unfortunate owner; but most of them were without hats, and had only a handkerchief tied over their matted locks, and all were excessively dirty.

The cacique, an old man with grey hair, was better got-up than the rest, wearing a large gaily-coloured poncho.  Their arms consisted of spears about 10 ft long, many of them ornamented with bunches of feathers tied round the handles; and bolas, which they carried either round their waists or attached to the pommel of the saddle.

The conversation continued in the same amicable tone, the cacique next mentioning that he was very poor, and would be glad if we would give his men some clothes.  This request I at once complied with, and brought out a few old things, presenting him with an old straw hat of my own, which he at once placed on his head with evident satisfaction.  I also gave them some caña and tobacco, and Lisada and our other peon, seeing the friendly turn affairs had taken, crossed the ditch and handed cigarettes to our visitors, conversing with the interpreter, the only one of the party who dismounted.  Whether this excellent man had been previously known to our equally respectable capataz, I cannot say, but they talked to each other with great apparent interest.  The Gauchos who reside with the Indians have usually committed some atrocious crime which places them beyond the pale even of Gaucho civilisation.

The cacique made repeated declarations that nothing should induce him to injure his new and dear friends, or tempt him to touch their horses, and as we felt very uneasy lest they should fall in with Frank and his companions, whom we were every day expecting with the sheep, we said something about them, when the obliging cacique assured us again that, being friends of ours, they need fear nothing from him.

After staying nearly an hour they all rode slowly off, but before they went we crossed the ditch one by one, and shook hands with the cacique, who was able to say “Adios amigo”.  We were watching the departure of our unexpected and unwelcome visitors with feelings of extreme joy, when to our dismay, we suddenly saw them all draw up on the rising ground about a mile from our house, when half their party rode towards our horses, and in a few minutes they had driven them up to their own troop of unmounted horses, and the whole body were off like the wind, in a northerly direction.  It was impossible to pursue them, as we had only three indifferent horses, on one of which however, Lisada galloped after them for some little distance, shouting like a madman, but I am sure he had not the least intention of overtaking them.”  

Lisada later explained to them that the troop had left them unharmed because they had observed quantity of weapons at their disposal.  A neighbouring farm was not so lucky when they were raided the following day, its owner divested of most of his possessions.  In fact, their neighbour had recognised the straw hat being worn by the cacique and with sorrow concluded wrongly that Seymour himself had perished.

-oOo-

Bibliography will be listed on the final post.

Next time:  Indians and Gauchos

The Story of the Village of Bell Ville, Córdoba, Argentina (Part 1 of 7)

Introduction

I’ve long wished to tell this story.  Bell Ville is not that different from many villages which grew into towns the length and breadth of the Americas, but I feel strongly that not many of their histories are recorded, and they deserve to be.  I’ve drawn extensively from a book written in the mid nineteenth century by Richard Seymour, an English pioneer farmer who spent only three years in Argentina (1865-8) but managed to pack a wealth of experience into that short time.  He lived between excitement and fear – excitement because he fell in love with the land and its climate; fear because he had not reckoned with the number of native indian incursions and the human, livestock and financial losses constantly sustained as a result. 

The people to whom I refer as indians or natives are the original tribes of Argentina brutally wiped out almost completely in 1878-9, barely ten years after Richard Seymour had returned to England.  Now we perceive them as wronged and cruelly treated, part of the population which was merely trying to survive in a world where being hunter gatherers had become an anachronism and threatened the lives and livelihoods of the rest, the agricultural society and the city dwellers. But at the time they were regarded as pests and standing in the way of progress. They were also unfortunate enough to inhabit some of the most fertile land on the continent.

The constant threat they posed was ignored for decades by a government far more concerned with sending soldiers to their war with Paraguay than in using them to defend the indian frontiers at home.  The pioneer farmers felt abandoned to their fate, and many such as Richard Seymour opted to return to England.

Pink blob marks the location of Bell Ville

Province of Córdoba - Bell Ville is in the centre of the red square.

-oOo-

When it was called Fraile Muerto

During a hot summer in the early 1970’s my mother and I were travelling by car to visit relations in the province of Córdoba, Argentina, when on impulse she suggested we make a small detour to visit the village of Bell Ville, where she was born in 1922 and spent her early years.  Perhaps she could find the house – it had been at least forty years since she had last seen it. 

In the seventies the village was identical to thousands of other rural villages – laid on a grid system with very wide streets lined with plane trees planted in specially dug square holes edged in concrete at equal intervals on the pavement, pruned to within an inch of their lives and trunks painted white up to the six foot mark, looking like survivors of an immemorial flood.  Overhead cables were lazily draped across the streets here and there, sagging in the middle and swaying when there was a breeze.  It was siesta time; the only life to be seen was the occasional dog scratching itself in a shady corner.  There was a very large plaza in the middle of the village, complete with mature trees, criss-crossed at right angles by tiled paths and at the intersection the inevitable equestrian statue positioned in the middle of a dry fountain.  During windy periods dust swirled round the village making doors slam and old windmills clank.

We found the house.  It was now a couturier’s shop, and although the ground floor had been opened up and most of the internal walls removed, the front door and entrance hall were, she said, exactly the same.  It made her misty eyed to remember the design of the old tiles on floor and walls up to waist height, not to mention the heavy wrought iron door with its glass panes. 

I was about eighteen then, and from this distance in time very much regret that I had not yet become interested in photography.  Thus I have no record of that visit.

My mother used to tell us about Bell Ville, a proud little village where Anglo Saxon adventurers had arrived in the mid nineteenth century in search of good land to farm and from which they hoped to become rich by dint of hard work; and later where Italian immigrants had sought refuge from conflict and poverty at the turn of the century.  She was a descendant of both.

Back then, a century before she was born, there were also wanderers from the capital Buenos Aires seeking their fortunes, where failure in one village made them move on to the next; soldiers turned vagabonds and vice versa; and always in the background the original native hunter gatherer peoples (the Ranquel and Tehuelche tribes) who once had had the land to themselves and now regarded the settlers with hostility.  Indeed it was mutual.  No longer able to roam as before, there were easy pickings to be had from the farms, and the tribes regularly staged long distance cattle rustling incursions which included violence to their proprietors and workforces.

Bell Ville’s story is typical of small urban settlements all over the world which grew into towns, weaving struggle and triumph with tragedy, achievement with failure; farmers gambling with the weather and waiting for help from the central government of the day in the form of soldiers to protect them and laws to safeguard their livelihoods.  Lives were spent surviving from one day to the next with no time to record these efforts in any detail, and there are few contemporary accounts.  It is therefore up to us the descendants to piece it all together so that it is not forgotten.

I have tried to assemble what little there is to give readers a flavour of how the area evolved, but have concentrated on Bell Ville as it was, trusting that there is plenty of information in existence about the modern day town.

Argentina had once been under Spanish rule, but achieved its independence in 1816.  The turmoil continued for many decades afterwards, and short-term chancers aside, during this time few foreigners saw it as a good long term investment.  This was to follow later.

The land itself is unchanging.  Nowadays there are sweeping vistas of soya, wheat, sunflower and maize crops.  In the beginning you would have seen gentle undulating pastureland of tufted grass; dark, richly fertile and humid topsoil 50 cm deep at barely 130 metres above sea level crossed by a substantial river, the Río Tercero, part of a system that eventually flows into the Altantic.  In the early days the fauna and flora were rich and varied, the size of the river fish beyond myth - this we know from the memoirs of Richard Seymour - Pioneering in the Pampas (1869).

The picture on the cover is in fact his brother
Walter, who is mentioned later on.

It was natural therefore, that the region should be well frequented going back to the colonial days of the sixteenth century.   It was then part of the viceroyalty of Alto Perú which at its height stretched from Patagonia to Colombia at either end of the Latin American continent.  The area was on the route travellers took while traversing all or part of the 3,200 km distance between Buenos Aires, the large city in the south of the viceroyalty, and Lima, its capital (now the capital of Peru).  The only other choice would have been to navigate up the river Paraná. 

The area was known unofficially as Fraile Muerto – Dead Friar – because according to legend the body of a Catholic friar had once been found amid the carob and hackberry trees, fatally wounded by pumas or jaguars.   Until 1650 it remained as a staging post, when an officer in the Spanish army and his wife purchased a large tract of land there and turned it into an estancia, or large ranch.    They called it “Our Lady of Pure and Clean Conception”, but unsurprisingly it remained Fraile Muerto to most people.

During the 18th century the area had become a fort for defence against Indian raids and later in the following century evolved into a village when the frontier moved a little further away to the surrounding land being purchased and occupied by European pioneer farmers.  The village was located exactly half way between two flourishing cities, Rosario and Córdoba, and thus provided a convenient stopover for travellers. 

For some there was no choice.  In 1807 Mariano and the heavily pregnant Loreta Ascasubi, descendants of freed slaves, were making their way to Buenos Aires in a horse-drawn cart to attend a wedding.  When they reached Fraile Muerto her waters broke, and she gave birth in the back of the vehicle to a little boy, Hilario.  When this child grew up he became one of the best exponents of gaucho literature, as every Argentine primary school pupil knows.

In the environs there were pitched battles not only between the creoles and Ranquel Indians, but also between opposing political factions, the federalists (supporters of provincial autonomous government) and unitarians (who wanted a government centralised in Buenos Aires, the capital).  One of its battles in November 1818 was so local in fact, that it was named El Combate de Fraile Muerto.   The charismatic local leader, federalist Felipe Álvarez was captured and taken as prisoner to the city of Mendoza in the foothills of the Andes, where he was executed.  (Commemorated in the painting below.  Felipe Alvarez is seated, and in uniform) 

By government order his head was returned to Fraile Muerto, where it was put on display on a pike in the public plaza, until pressure from the family persuaded officials to take it down so they could give it a decent burial.  The civil war was to rumble on sporadically for several decades until 1852. 

In the meantime, the village was visited by a delegation from the Vatican in 1824 which was on its way to Chile.  This was a great honour for the devout and God-fearing Catholic community of Fraile Muerto, which at this stage still only numbered some two hundred souls.  Nevertheless they spared no expense to make them welcome and the Delegation was so impressed in fact that as a sign of their gratitude, they promised on their return to Rome to send them a painting of the Virgin for their church.  This did indeed take place, though the process took a long time; the painting of the Immaculate Conception finally arrived 103 years later in 1927, and now adorns a parish church of the same name.  

Iglesia de la Inmaculada Concepción, Bell Ville

It was all the more venerated because one of the senior members of that 1824 Delegation – by name Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti – became Pope Pius IX twenty-two years later.  He served for 32 years, the longest reigning elected pope in the history of the Catholic Church and the first ever to have visited South America.  He died in 1879, and my mother remembered her Italian grandmother – la Nonna – referring to him as il Pio Nono di santa memoria and quoting the oldest locals who remembered his visit as a young man when they were children.

Pius IX (Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti) in dramatic pose

In the 1850s there was at last an effort to deal with the village’s outlandish name, and it was re-christened San Jerónimo.  The governor of the province declared that the old name was “inconvenient”.  It did not however take off, and “Dead Friar” it remained.

The country as a whole was ripe for foreign investment, with vast expanses of very fertile land waiting to be used and few nationals able to afford it.

-oOo-

Bibliography will be listed at the end of the final post.  Anyone wanting credits for their photographs, please let me know. 

Next instalment:  the arrival of the English pioneers and their first encounters with the indians.

Go to Part 2

-oOo-

Update

It would have been John’s birthday today, 13th November.  He died almost 8 months ago, but to me it feels like only yesterday.  In that time I’ve gone through various stages – and not necessarily the ones labelled by psychologists.   A blogging friend in Chile said something that made sense, that I can consider myself to be over the worst when I can look back with nostalgia instead of pain.  I’m still wondering how long it will be before I stop feeling that I’ve been cast out to sea towards some unknown and distant shore. 

The legal issues when a person dies are only just being resolved now.  There were things of John’s I wanted to keep, and most of the rest were sent to good homes, but there were plenty I forgot about, and they have appeared around the house to surprise me and make my heart stop from time to time – brandy still in his brandy flask; his little stash of 50 pence pieces for the bridge toll; his favourite ginger jellies languishing at the bottom of a large jar; a box with his witty musical compositions; his metronome. 

Christmas is looming, and I wish I could disappear to a desert island till the new year, instead of avoiding invitations where I can, and sleepwalking through the ones I can’t.  I’m not lonely and have always been fine in my own company – it’s the absence of John himself; the absence of his devotion, nobility, generosity and loyalty that’s the problem.  I know that by shutting myself away I risk being forgotten about, but that will have to take care of itself when the time comes.

Another sadness hit me in August – one of our beloved companions, our 12 year old ginger cat Rusty had to be put to sleep.  Unbeknown to me he used to wander up the road – 10-15 houses away – and he had made friends with an old man who must have reminded him of John, and was there for him during the day when I wasn’t.  This man fed him, and as Rusty was diabetic, I was therefore getting his insulin wrong because I thought his appetite had slowed down.  In any case I was being very careful with the dosage.  Giving him too much insulin had resulted in a terrifying hypo during April when the vet only just managed to save him.  I hadn’t reckoned with this new unknown. 

One night he didn’t come in when I called him... and called him and called him till 1.30 a.m., and eventually gave up.  I wish I had done what John would have done, to walk up the road calling his name.  My neighbours discovered the following day that he had taken refuge in one of the old man’s thorny bushes when his hind quarters inexplicably ceased to function; unable to defend himself blowflies got to him and he was heard crying all night.  I would have heard him if I had not been too nervous to walk up the road in the dark.  I would not have been able to save his life, I know that, but oh I could have shortened his torment, poor little mite. 

Unaware of all this, I was anxious when I left for work the following morning and I asked my neighbours to look out for him.  They called me at work a few hours later when he was found, and we rushed him to the vet.  He explained gently to me that there was nothing further that could be done other than to numb his hind quarters and then put him to sleep.  I stroked him till I felt his life ebb away.

His ashes will go on John’s grave when I put red roses on it today.

Now it’s just his brother Banjo and me, and we’ve got closer than I ever thought a human and a cat could get.  I imagine he’s motivated by anxiety that his remaining meal ticket might get sick and go away too, but I also need him, and we comfort each other.  When I’m obviously sad he sits very close and rests one or both paws on my knee.  I’m so grateful he’s nervous of other people and is not the wandering type, which I think will help protect him from venturing into trouble as Rusty did.

Blogger friends know I love to write, and it’s a good distraction – I’m perfectly aware that this blog has been silent for too long, and I’m struggling to write a post which is turning out much longer than I expected and will probably have several parts.  I’ve no idea if the story of a remote village on the Indian frontier in Argentina in the mid nineteenth century will be of interest, but I hope some will find it so.  I’m sure that readers from the North American continent will find it follows a familiar pattern. 

I’d never make a good writer of history books – I need to be emotionally involved in what I’m telling you.  I want it to shock you as it shocked me, make you laugh and cry as I did.  Overall I suppose I’m trying to say “Argentina is a wonderful place; its heart and soul is not what you read in the newspapers.  Let me tell you about the extraordinary people who made this land.”  (And sometimes about the quirks of my own family).

To finish, I’d like to show you a scan of John’s last birthday card from me in November last year.  I had been nagging him about the idiocy of owning a mobile phone and never leaving it switched on.  Brought up during the war, the “Don’t-waste-the-battery” litany was hard to break.

Don’t give up on me – I’ll be writing about more cheerful subjects soon.  Meantime, don’t forget I’m still working at keeping my other blog going with daily brief entries – Eavesdroppings and Stories – just click on this link.

-oOo-

Rescue in Somuncurá, Patagonia

(None of the pictures in this post are mine - alas. If the authors recognise their own pictures, would they please tell me and I'll be delighted to give them the credit) 

Somuncurá Plateau

When I visited Patagonia in 2008 and 2009 researching and photographing the background to the book I was translating, it was like going back in time to when Argentina was more relaxed and strangers were courteous.  I loved the silent landscape, the endless horizons, the whistle of the wind and the view of the entire hemisphere’s Milky Way at night.   I daydreamed of settling there, with my own little house in a quiet backwater at the foot of the Andes.

But life called me back to my place in Bristol, UK, and I made my regretful farewells.  Back in the real world I got into the habit of browsing online Argentine newspapers, keeping up to date with both my homeland as a whole and in particular the region of which I had grown so fond.  I used to describe it – and the tendency has grown stronger over the years – as being a bird circling Patagonia on thermals, hovering high above and far away, looking down with affection at what was going on, yet unable to land.

Last week I was captivated by a curious story in the online version of the Río Negro newspaper, which took me on my thermal to the plateau of Somuncurá, a 35,000 square kilometre, stretch of basalt 1000 metres above sea level in the provinces of Río Negro and Chubut.
 

It has expired volcanoes so ancient that the land is now only gently undulating, with occasional hills, shallow valleys and a few lakes.  Fossils prove it was once under the sea, and today it is home to unique species of flora and fauna, the most unusual being the mojarra desnuda, (Gymnocharacinus bergii) or a miniature species of river bream, measuring barely three inches in length and completely devoid of scales – hence it includes ‘naked’ in its name, and is found nowhere else in the world. 

Mojarra Desnuda

There are said to be vast reservoirs of water underground, but little of it reaches the surface, where rare species thrive – long legged black and grey frogs measuring 2.4 cm, multicoloured lizards and small creatures known locally as rats without tails which are in fact a species of marsupial.  Research remains sketchy and there is much to learn; not only about the fauna and flora.  Recently a crater measuring 5km in diameter was discovered by means of satellite images; the eventual analysis of its rocks rich in nickel, aluminium and cobalt should yield much about the history of the earth at those latitudes.

 

For humans it is an inhospitable place – in the native Mapuche language, Somun means speaking, curá means rock.  The rock that speaks – referring to the Andean and Antarctic winds that howl there for most of the year except in summer.  Temperatures fluctuate between -36 and + 35 degrees centigrade; 200mm of rain fall on it per year, some of it as snow.

Its population per square kilometre is a meagre 5 and mainly consists of people from the original Tehuelche and Mapuche tribes – the only ones who are inured to the tough conditions.  They are in the main crianceros, or livestock herders, and live with their families in huts made of stone and move around on horseback, since there are few proper roads.

They have no amenities, and their means of communication across the distances owes nothing to technology.  A type of resinous cactus bush grows there (probably the Maihuenia patagonica), and specimens located at a high point when set on fire serve the dual purpose of boasting to your neighbours that you are the first up in the morning, or if you have not heard from them in some time, to ask them whether they are alright.  You then ride over to check on them if you have received no reply. 

The story I read is about one such case last week.  It is mid-winter.

A shepherd had ridden to the town of Sierra Grande to report that an outpost 180 km away was experiencing difficulties.  The Torres-Liempi family was composed of three people, two of which were of advanced age, and in poor health.  They had not been seen for fifteen days.

A rescue team was scrambled in Sierra Grande.  Five fire-fighters and a male nurse with the shepherd as guide set off early on Wednesday 31st July in the fire engine, stopping off at the village of Arroyo Ventana to collect the council representative for the area,  a local resident and a further male nurse driving the village’s ambulance, and a policeman using his own patrol car.  There were therefore 11 people and 3 vehicles.

It was very tough going.  The convoy skidded about in the snow and mud and made very slow progress.  By two in the afternoon all three vehicles had got stuck.  The decision was made to continue on foot, and five of them -  one of the fire fighters, both nurses, the guide and the policeman - donned backpacks and set off cross country taking short cuts to reach the remote outpost before dark.  They trudged over the whitened landscape for 20 km skirting round hills and following guanaco paths, finally arriving at the home of the Torres-Liempi.

There they were surprised to find the family in good health.  The wires had got crossed somewhere along the line and there was no emergency. The family admitted however that they were running a bit short of food and were rationing what guanaco meat they had left. 

It was now dark.  The team left them the basic emergency provisions they had brought with them, and immediately departed again.  The Torres-Liempi, they said, were in fine fettle.

The return journey to the stuck vehicles was even more exhausting, as the cold of night had clamped down on them.  By 9.30 p.m. they were back with the rest of the party, and their short wave radios were not working because of the cold, so no communication with the nearest village was possible.  The ambulance was the only extricable vehicle, and six of the eleven people crammed into it and limped slowly back, reaching the nearest village at 3 in the morning.

On Thursday 1^st August Sierra Grande sent out a team to rescue the remaining six people who had remained with the fire engine and the patrol car in temperatures way below zero, and a trailer was despatched at the same time from San Antonio to collect the stuck vehicles.

The reporter writing up the story on Friday 2^nd August told readers that as at the time of going to press, these last two rescue teams had not returned to Sierra Grande and could be lost.

Since reading this story I have been thinking a lot about how we take our technology for granted, our modern roads, our easy lives.  One phonecall would have sufficed ... and perhaps a four-wheel driven vehicle.   I wonder if even in Buenos Aires, the modern capital, people are aware of how tough life is for some of their compatriots.

-oOo-

Life After John

I was sitting on my back patio one evening a fortnight ago, looking out at the small garden which is very dry at the moment.  It had been a very hot day, with no rain for weeks – most unusual in this green and pleasant land.  My thoughts were far away but I suddenly became aware of two things – firstly that my two cats had quietly joined me and were sitting at my feet, and secondly that the scent of honeysuckle emanating from the hedge was so powerful that it had interrupted my reveries.  ‘That’s the lonicera’, I thought, ‘what a gorgeous perfume’…

From there it was just a step away from remembering that this is my blog name, and that I love my blog and don’t wish to abandon it.  Since then on several occasions I have sat at my computer looking at my last few entries, got bogged down and just stared into space.  But after several goes (when Freecell won), here I am, determined that I’m going to write a post.

Shortly I’ll be telling the story of Bell Ville, the village in Argentina where my grandmother and mother grew up, and have done all the research.  But first I would like to catch up with any readers I have left and who have been kind enough to ask me how I am.

It has been four and a half months since John died, and all I can think of to say is that I could never have envisaged how hard it would be.  I guessed at the crushing sadness I would feel, how much I would miss him, but didn’t realise how my mental state would dictate my behaviour.  I don’t want to go out, I don’t want to communicate, I can’t manage small talk, in fact I’d rather not talk at all.  I hate bright light; I hate noise and bustle, I crave silence although I can’t shake off the feeling that I’m screaming in a void and nobody can hear me, not even myself. 

I don’t care much about myself either, and am very grateful to the happy few who help me keep the house clean, the garden under control, the cat litter changed and the light bulbs replaced.  Long, soothing showers help, and as many hours of sleep as I can manage.  At the very beginning when I went to bed at night I would think – stupidly – that perhaps I would not wake up, or if I did I would find it had all been a bad dream; then later that John would come to me in dreams and talk to me – he didn’t -, and latterly it has just been a form of escape. 

Unfortunately it doesn’t stop there either.  Being the sort of person I am (this blog did after all start out as group therapy for living with the gastric band) I’m eating the wrong things, partly because I now have to do the washing up (!) and I can’t be bothered to cook properly except once in a while, and because certain foods give me pleasure to eat.  Don’t confuse this with comfort food.  Mash potato is comfort food.  Ice-cream is just pleasure, and very bad for my diabetes.  Merely giving myself a lot of insulin isn’t the answer, and I struggle to bring it under control.  I have to care; when I’m older and suffer the effects of my self-neglect I’ll certainly care, I’m sure.

I watch more television now than I have for years, staring at the screen and zapping backwards and forwards.  The British sitcoms are all old, I’ve seen them a million times – but Big Bang Theory is new to me, and it’s the only regular programme that makes me laugh.  It has also been good to see films from start to finish without interruptions, and Brokeback Mountain has been a wonderful discovery, joining the pantheon of my all-time greats such as The Shawshank Redemption and Silent Witness. 

I read a lot too, mainly on my Asus Eeepad.  I’ve become absorbed in biographies of celebrities I was fascinated by as a teenager – Jackie Kennedy, Grace Kelly, Natalie Wood, Elizabeth Taylor, Queen Sofía of Spain - because it’s easy reading and I don’t have to work too hard.  Last Saturday I read for seven hours straight; it was wonderful to forget about the world for that long.

Sometimes I deliberately conjure up John’s more annoying habits, but give up when I find myself wishing there were around to irritate me again.  When I sold his car I cleaned it out before it was collected, and in the door pocket I found a small pack of cigarettes with 8 of the 10 gone, and a lighter.  He had stopped smoking in 1999, so I was now looking at an aspect of John I had missed completely.  No wonder he had insisted on continuing to drive right up until he went into hospital; it was the only place he could smoke without me to nag him, and it was hardly going to make any difference then to his lung cancer.  The fact that it was a small carton meant that it was occasional – there were indeed times when I said I smelled smoke on him, and he would reply indignantly that sometimes he found himself with smokers, and must he take the blame for them too?  Perhaps it was his only pleasure, like me and my ice-cream.

The cats are my companions, they stick to me like glue when I’m not at work, and when I’m clearly upset Banjo jumps onto the sofa, sits down beside me and puts a paw or two on my knee.  I have the proof every day that cats are not merely self-interested animals, and that they are capable of great affection.  I don’t know what I’d do without them.

Plenty of humans have helped me too, and I’m grateful.  For my 60^th birthday in mid June my friend Michèle and her husband with her daughter and family came over from Argentina for a holiday and spent a few days with me, and my sister and brother-in-law joined me for the day when we all went out for a birthday lunch.  A couple of weeks’ later we gathered on the south coast at the home of an aunt who had recently lost her husband of nearly 70 years, and when my niece, her husband and His Gorgeousness my adorable great nephew aged 4 came along too, as well as my uncle, aunt and cousin from Guildford.  My sister made a beautiful birthday cake.  It was unexpectedly  comforting to be surrounded by relations who had known me for so long.

On the actual day of my birthday, Saturday 15^th June, I had a houseful of people – seven of us altogether counting Michèle’s two grandchildren, when the doorbell rang and flowers were delivered.  I had to sit down when I read the card that came with them – Happy birthday Tich, from Humph.  I learned later from John’s daughter Jo that when she had been visiting him in hospital in February, he had asked her that in case he wasn’t around for my birthday, would she send me something nice from him, and she promised she would.  And here, almost three months to the day since his passing, was a beautiful bunch of flowers and a bottle of wine from him (see picture top of post). 

My only thank you undelivered.

-oOo-

Help me to be a better driver

 Last Autumn I was visiting relations near Worthing on the south coast, and unbeknown to me was clocked doing 57 mph in a 50 mph speed limit area.  The forbidding-looking Penalty Notice in bold black print arrived a week later, which informed me that I could either have points on my licence or I could attend a half-day speed awareness driving course in the geographical area where the offence was committed – a two-hour drive away from Bristol.

I opted for the latter (most people do) and presented myself on a cold January morning just after New Year.  I had been on one of these courses before in Bristol six years earlier, and knew what to expect, but was interested to find out whether the focus of the course had improved or varied from one region to another.  Not really in both cases: it left me once again wanting to have a rant – and this time I’ve got a blog on which to do it. 

The speakers rambled through the importance of keeping to the speed limit, the potential fatal results to yourself and others if you don’t, the distances you need in which to come to a halt after braking according to the speed you’re doing and the prevailing weather conditions, a terrifying video about an accident, quizzes to test our knowledge on speeds, distances, survival rates, percentage of different types of accidents in the United Kingdom, the dizzying multiple rules about speed limits according to what sort of road, how many lamp posts there are as you’re going through a village (yes, really) and so on.  This was all very worthy and valid, and it was important to be reminded of these facts. 

My rant is that this is simply not enough.

Give me the facts, certainly – but it’s essential to address the psychological reasons why people speed, carve each other up and are generally inconsiderate on the road.  We need to be forced to confront ourselves and our insane behaviour when we’re behind the wheel, and to be given the tools to deal with it.

This is what drivers need above all:

Road Rage.  How to stop ourselves from feeling road rage – what anger management arguments will stop us in our tracks?  How should we react when others show road rage towards us?  How should we deal with a driving situation caused by another vehicle which is patently unfair to us?

Age.  The age factor – the younger and more hormonal men and women are, the more intolerant and quick to anger we are likely to feel.  The older we are the more likely we are to make mistakes;

Unrelated problems.  When we’re on the road, how to compartmentalise our personal problems so that they don’t affect our driving;

Asleep at the wheel.  How to deal with tiredness and general lack of concentration – apart from opening the window and turning on the radio;

Competitive behaviour.  How to deal with competitiveness on the road: I’m not talking about being boy racers here, but a situation that happens to me every morning, on a stretch of motorway with a 50 mph speed limit.  The car in the next lane is large, and doing (say) 50 mph, and I’m in a small car being squeezed over, with another car behind me – so tempting to up the speed slightly to 55 mph “just to get passed him”, yet we risk being caught by speed cameras.

Lorries.  European lorry drivers urgently need to be taught all this on refresher courses every year, as they drive for a living, and tend to use their large vehicles to gain advantage – like the classic bully in the playground.  The type of accidents their mistakes cause are far more serious.  I’m tired of hearing that x number of people were killed because the continental driver forgot that we drive on the left.

There is one area – drinking and driving – where in this country all these aspects are dealt with strongly via powerful advertising and in other media, and I understand that drink and drive accidents are lower than in many other parts of the world.  I believe we have the Scandinavian example to thank for that.

The course was a half day one – and I believe that what I’ve mentioned above needs at least another half day, and should not be restricted to people who have been caught speeding.  We should all be forced to go on these courses with refreshers every two years, or risk losing our licences.  The extra cost should be met by us the drivers.

At both courses six years apart I asked the question about dealing with these psychological issues, which after all lie at the bottom of most road incidents.  I was told there were no plans to incorporate this into their course, and it would be too expensive anyway.  None of the speakers said “Good idea though”.  One of the attendees was a barrister (lawyer) of some standing in London who drives a sports car and in a jokey fashion conveyed how he was rather proud of the way he had avoided speeding offences (up until this one, that is).  I would say he was in dire need of being pulled up by his bootstraps and being forced to go on a driving psychology course, if it only existed. 

Is this a woman’s viewpoint then?  Does male pride come into it?

This is a crowded little country where most adults own cars, goods are rarely transported by rail and lorries from the continent are now permitted free access, including the very heavy goods vehicles, for which roads and bridges have been strengthened.  This is a lethal cocktail, and it is unlikely that drivers will be persuaded to give up their cars for public transport.

Do you have the same problems in your country?  Do drivers respect speed limits?  Do they respect drink and drive laws?

I’d love to know your thoughts on this – if you think I’m wrong, do tell me why.

-oOo-

Photo Finish

From Lonicera's digital archive

Spring

-oOo-