From Nahuel Pan, arid Patagonia, a little 'before the end of the world, every day or near a train. Back to Esquel where you party, snow border with Chile
are four hundred kilometers from Esquel Jacobacci Ingeniero, a route around curves and canyons of ocher.
Yes, I have taken the legendary Patagonian train instead of going to the Strait of Magellan. I wanted to hang out a bit, 'as they say in my part, wasting time before going to South ; And what better way for the train to get lost in fantasies of the trip?
And then what does it mean to waste time? Almost always traveling to waste time. And losing it actually finds himself.
Wasting time in Patagonia wander useful means to approach corners and unexplored places expected. The fate of the traveler always takes you somewhere, the promise of land and water.
are now announcing that part of Patagonia Tierra del Fuego, where the continent crumbles in the green of the close of the penguin colonies and infect the air with their odor, unmistakable.
The train comes in and stirs the imagination of every traveler. Here, the legendary Patagonian Ferrocarril do is almost nothing. Now only the memories that have left us writers and missionaries.
The worst president of Argentina, after the general has seen fit to inaugurate the era of the wild privatization in the closure of almost the entire railway network. At least the legendary Trochita has resisted all attacks . It 'so beloved by Argentines who tried to close it when there was a genuine popular uprising.
And so, day after day, the crazy speed of thirty miles an hour, still huffing through the pampas.
Four carriages with wooden benches hardened dirt that lurks in the graffiti are everywhere. Carved with knives, keep the names and dates of those who boarded the train. Who knows what stories are behind us. Some come from Puerto Montt or from the island of Chiloe in the ocean, which Magellan called the Pacific.
In each car there at the bottom of the stove, with wood ready for the fire. The passengers to take care to keep the fire lit the night if you do not want to freeze. And the frozen nights accompany the railway up to the Andes.
A journey into space, earth and sky. Yellow, green and blue. Scroll through the windows of the last prairie world.
The Far West of Argentina.
Train Passengers greet me, because all hail from these parts, a meeting is an opportunity to hear the stories to tell and tell, with humility, not arrogance. We are few in the car. It occurs to me that now the only tourists take the train, but maybe I'm wrong.
least helps to know. Travelling with a dozen assorted tourists, embarazada a young woman sipping a thermos of yerba mate and a group of high school students who go to camp, taking advantage of the end of the school.
I can give the green light to the imagination? Why not?
I'm fine here, I am assailed by a sense of inner peace, well-being that goes beyond thoughts, perhaps because it is easy to train them free, thoughts.
I often dream of living in my own imagination. When this happens I can find the joy of telling stories.
then I guess being with my heroes. Those who have given their souls to grow the legend of the Patagonian. This is a train car all to ourselves.
were up all or almost all. By the anarchist English Antonio Soto Errico Malatesta to the young in Patagonia was a gold prospector, a hunter of seals, from my Salesian mountaineer, aviator and postman Saint Exupery and there, at the bottom of the car, right next to the stove, the group of writers in travelers head Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux animatedly conversing with the great poet of the end of the world: Francisco Coloane.
Open the comparison, giving the word to everyone. Everyone can tell her something. Not much, because time, in dreams, is a tyrant, but now is the time to tell the greatest thrill of discovery that have lived on this earth.
The door at the back of the compartment opens. Enter new travelers and I are with them. Coloane near the stove and Chatwin are still talking, throwing a glance at the newcomer nodded but immediately returned to their discussion.
"I do not understand anything about unless you also explores Patagonia Tierra del Fuego," said Francisco Coloane.
"In what way?"
"In the sense that the boundaries of the invention have been, I do not know anything more united and consequences. Do you know one and understand each other and then you get used to thinking together, in their history and their destiny. And that goes for colors, flavors, for people who live there and the Indians who are born there. "
" I think I understand, but then why do not we even Antarctica? "replica Chatwin." One great southern hemisphere with its unexplored lands and pristine glaciers. Lands that have known wars, tribal clashes and the death camps and where they came the madness of men "
he just did not wrong , Bruce Francisco but now look elsewhere, loads of dust over the windows. Look pass the Patagonian countryside. His thoughts run away. Think of that land that runs under her eyes, which approaches the first sign of modernity and it gets confused.
Think about the hasty passage of time that is changing the Patagonia of her childhood.
From dusty windows are meeting and suddenly materialize old little stations abandoned cars left there to corrode and fight with the wind. Sometimes stations deserted unravel rusty rails that are directed towards nothing.
In the search interior of a land last Coloane was essential to find himself in the world that ended, and hold that and not be blinded by what he started. There was nothing in the discovery, if you do not tell the fatigue of being in the world.
Well, just this thought, the labor of man. To love the man, especially different from you. For this had been kept sheep and cows in the haciendas of Tierra del Fuego, participated in the search for oil in the Strait of Magellan, who lived many years among the sealers and whalers sailed aboard terrible. Then, at forty, he began to write. Even managed to escape from Pinochet that he wanted all the Communists in jail or dead on the island of Dawson.
wrote and told us about her world at the end of the world. Made of oceans bruises, and words of fjords, populated by seals and whales, fishing and shipwrecks. Shipwrecks wood but also of men. And his Patagonian grass cover and cattle fat and dry winds that know no mercy.
Now here is on the train and turns to Chatwin as if he had one final answer.
"You know, I was born in Chiloe, the beginning of the Chilean Patagonia, a beautiful island and green, but I have always felt part of the immense Magellanic archipelago. An island with a port for timber and one for the whaling ships, always on the brink of tragedy, and the winds that bend the men crazy dogs "
As if this were the explanation for everything. Nothing to add.
And the sound of the train beats the words that come as unexpected gifts. Could not think of Sepulveda:
began to walk in the park, then through the deserted streets, suddenly I noticed that the echo of my footsteps multiplied. I was not alone. I would not be alone anymore.
Coloane I had spent its ghosts, its characters, the Indians and immigrants who live in all latitudes of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, its crew and its wanderers of the sea. Now they are all with me and allow me to say out loud that life is a wonderful exercise.
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