Anatomy of Restlessness (15 page)

Soto came out of hiding and claimed a total victory over the army, private property and the State. ‘You'll see,' Ibon Noya told Varela. ‘Once you go this will start up again.' ‘If it starts up again,' the Colonel said, ‘I'll come back and shoot them by dozens.'

Noya was right. Soto was puffed up with success and made the Governor's life impossible. He tried to organise a strike in the Swift freezer, but the new police chief outwitted him and herded the workers back into the factory. As winter closed in, Soto went to Buenos Aires to canvass for support at the eleventh Workers' Congress, but the professionals bickered over the policies of Lenin and Zinoviev and ignored the Patagonian delegate. Meanwhile the coastal towns of Patagonia were convulsed with arson, sabotage and at least one murder. By spring, Soto was dreaming of a revolt that would spread up from Patagonia and engulf the country. He had three lieutenants – a Bakuninist ex-waiter called Outerelo; a Syndicalist official, Albino Arguëlles; and a courteous and silent gaucho called Facón Grande for the size of his knife. Dr Borrero was conspicuous by his absence. The wreck of
La Verdad
had silenced him and he saw the dangers of provoking the army a second time. Besides, he was having an affair with an estanciero's daughter and had taken advantage of depressed land prices to buy a little place of his own. Then it was discovered that he had, all along, been on the payroll of the Brauns and Menéndezes; the anarchist broadsheets spoke of Judas' thirty pieces of silver.

The Red Council began the second phase of the revolution on their own, but were betrayed to the police and bundled off to jail. Soto should have taken the hint, but he still believed the government was neutral, and sent ‘evangelists of Bakunin' round the sheep farms giving orders to raid and take hostages. On the whole the prisoners were well-treated, but a Mr Robbins of Torquay cut his throat in a fit of depression.

President Yrigoyen called Varela a second time and told him to use whatever measures were necessary. The
Magellan Times
commented: ‘So far the Argentine Cavalry has done nothing to justify its presence, but we hope that Commandante Varela is preparing a campaign that will completely stamp out this revolt and that the bandits will receive a lesson they will not forget for a good number of years.'

This time Varela had indeed come ‘not to pardon but to clean'. (He used the words
limpiar
and
depurar.)
He interpreted his instructions as tacit permission for a bloodbath, but since Congress had just abolished the death penalty, he had to inflate Soto's Chilotes to ‘military forces perfectly armed and better munitioned ... enemies of the country in which they live'. Many, it was claimed, were salitreros from the nitrate mines in northern Chile; when three Chilean carabineers were captured inside the frontier, this was evidence that the Chilean government lay behind the revolt; a Russian Menshevik with a notebook of Cyrillic characters plainly signified the red hand of Moscow. (Bayer categorically denies Chile's involvement, though members of the Argentine Frontier Commission assured me that documents exist to the contrary.)

The ill-armed strikers melted away before the troops. Varela filed reports of stirring gunfights and arsenals captured, but the
Magellan Times
for once told the truth: ‘Various bands of rebels, finding their cause lost, have surrendered and the bad element among them have been shot.'

The army's performance was one of outstanding cowardice. On five occasions the soldiers got the peons to surrender by promising to respect their lives. Each time the killings began straight afterwards: they were shot into graves they dug themselves or their corpses burned on bonfires of thornscrub. Borrero made an exaggerated estimate of 1,500 in his book
La Patagonia Trágica,
but the number of the dead is uncertain. Officially the firing squads did not exist.

Soto's megalomaniac dream finally collapsed at La Anita, the prize Menéndez estancia, ringed by snowy mountains, with a view of the Moreno Glacier sliding through black forests into a turquoise lake. Here, with five hundred men, he held his hostages in the big green and white house with its
art nouveau
conservatory. When he heard of the massacres on the plain, and of Captain Viñas Ibarra's column not far up the valley, he knew his number was up. His character became more frigid and austere, while his talk of the dignity of man more than ever obscured any understanding of real men. At nights he went off to sleep alone, and the Chilotes, who required their leaders to share every detail of their lives, began to loathe him. At his last conference, the hardliners, led by two Germans, wanted to barricade the shearing shed with wool bales and fight to the last man, but Soto said he was not dog meat, he would run for it and continue the revolution elsewhere. And the Chilotes preferred to trust even the Argentine army rather than Soto's promises.

Soto sent two peons to Viñas Ibarra to ask for terms. ‘Terms for what?' he asked and told them to make terms with Jesus Christ. Subsequently, he demanded an unconditional surrender, but said he would spare their lives. That night Soto and a few others rode out over the Cordillera and escaped into Chile. (He died at Punta Arenas in the 1960s, filled with remorse, the proprietor of a small restaurant run on anarchist principles.) In the morning the soldiers freed the hostages and herded the peons into the shearing shed. One of the hostages, who had been a professional Indian killer, said he wanted thirty-seven corpses for his thirty-seven stolen horses. The three hundred Chilotes thought they would be expelled over the border into Chile. But at seven in the morning the door of the shed opened and a sergeant ostentatiously distributed picks to a work-party. The others heard them marching off and then the chink of picks on stone. ‘They're digging graves,' they said. The door opened again at eleven and the men were led out in groups for the estancieros to pick out the men they wanted back at work. It was just like sorting sheep.

The unwanted ones – mouths lowered and eyes distended – were led off past the sheep-dip and round a scrubby hill. From the yard the others heard the crackle of shots and saw turkey buzzards soaring in from the mountains. About 120 men died that day. One of the executioners said, ‘They went to their deaths with a passivity that was truly astonishing.'

The British community was overjoyed. The
Magellan Times
praised Varela's ‘splendid courage, running about the firing line as though on parade ... Patagonians should take their hats off to the tenth Argentine Cavalry, these very gallant gentlemen'. Ibon Noya's Patriotic League was already urging Varela's appointment as Governor. At a luncheon, Noya spoke of the ‘sweet emotion of these moments' and of his ‘satisfaction mixed with gratitude at being rid of the plague'. The colonel replied modestly that he had only done his duty as a soldier, and the twenty British present, being men of few Spanish words, broke into song: ‘For he's a jolly good fellow ...'

In Buenos Aires it was a different story. There was no hero's welcome for Varela, only graffiti reading: ‘SHOOT THE CANNIBAL OF THE SOUTH!' Few left-wingers cared too much about Soto or the Chilotes, but the army had, unwittingly, killed a Syndicalist official and Congress was in uproar. Yrigoyen appointed Varela director of a cavalry school and hoped the crisis would simmer down. But at dawn on 27 January 1923, as Varela was on his way to work, he was approached by a a tall, red-haired man in a dark suit carrying a copy of the
Deutsche La Plata Zeitung
and a bomb. As the bomb exploded, the assassin fired his Colt twice and pierced Varela's jugular. ‘I have revenged my brothers,' he mumbled in bad Spanish as he fell, ‘I do not need to live.'

The killer was Kurt Wilkens, a thirty-six-year-old German wanderer from Schleswig-Holstein, who had been a miner and anarchist in the United States until the immigration authorities expelled him. In Buenos Aires he washed cars by day and read great books by night. In his lodgings police found framed photos of Tolstoy and Kropotkin, and copies of Goethe's
Werther
and Knut Hamsun's
Hunger
. He claimed to have made the bomb himself, but there were no traces and the police were sceptical.

One of the mourner's at Varela's funeral was an effeminate young man who moped round the coffin, sobbing and swearing revenge. The murderer, who had recovered, was put in the Prison of the Encausaderos (‘those awaiting trial'). Wilken's new warder was strangely nervous; he paced up and down in the hot sticky night until his spell was over, then he entered the cell, rubbed the barrel of his Mauser against the German's shoulder blades, asked him, ‘Are you Wilkens?' ‘Jawohl,' came the answer, and he fired. The young warder rushed to his superior and said, ‘I have avenged the death of my cousin, Colonel Varela.'

The warder, the same boy who behaved so strangely at Varela's funeral, was Jorge Pérez Millán Témperley, last seen at El Cerrito and now permanently unhinged by the wound to his genitals. How he became Wilken's warder was never explained, for the inquiry smoothed the issues over. He got off with a light sentence, eight years, in view of his ‘physical abnormality' and was soon transferred to a hospital for the criminally insane.

One of his fellow internees was a Yugoslav midget, a compulsive talker who had once murdered his doctor. On Monday afternoon, 9 February 1925, Témperley, in a black mood, was writing a letter to the National President of the Argentine Patriotic League, when Lukič, the Yugoslav, poked his head round the door of the cubicle, shouted, ‘This is for Wilkens!' and shot him.

The mechanics of vengeance had taken their final turn. The question was: Who gave Lukič the gun? The police eventually pinned this on another internee, Boris Vladimirovič, a Russian of some pedigree, a biologist, artist and revolutionary writer who had lived in Switzerland and known Lenin. After the 1905 revolution he took to drink and then went to Argentina to begin again on a cattle ranch in Santa Fé. But the old life drew him back. In 1919 he bungled the robbery of a bureau de change in Buenos Aires to raise funds for an anarchist publication. A man was killed and Vladimirovič got twenty-five years in Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, the prison at the end of the world. But the cold, the clouds and black water drove him mad. He sang the songs of the Motherland, and for the sake of quiet, the Governor had him transferred to hospital in the capital. That Sunday visiting day, two Russian friends brought him a revolver in a basket of fruit. The case was hard to prove, and there was no trial. But Boris Vladimirovič disappeared for ever, paralysed, into the House of the Dead.

Last year, I met near Punta Arenas an old Chilote sheep shearer who had escaped the massacre and had known Antonio Soto. His hands were knotted with arthritis, and he sat wearing a beret huddled over a wood stove. When I asked about the Revolution he said, ‘The army had permission to kill everybody' – as if one could hope for nothing else. But when he talked of Soto and the leaders, he shook, and, as if surprised by the violence of his own voice, shouted, ‘They were not workers. They never worked a day in their lives. Barkeepers! Hairdressers! Acrobats!
Artistas!'

 

No biographer should embark on Robert Louis Stevenson without taking stock of the effect of Edinburgh on its inhabitants. For the gaunt northern capital demands from them, and usually gets, a very specific moral commitment. Stevenson was an Edinburgh phenomenon; his childhood in the city set up a repetitious see-saw of attraction and loathing that almost predetermined his death in the South Seas. Coddled in the sickroom by masterful women, he turned in boyish fantasy to all-male adventures in bright islands in the sun. Once installed in Samoa, in the style of a laird, with his family and the solid furniture of his father's house about him, he finally grew up and came to terms with the ‘precipitous city' he had once hated to the backbone.

The late James Pope-Hennessy's book makes interesting reading. He has picked over the abundant documentation, assembled at the turn of the century by people who turned the commemoration of Stevenson into a literary industry, and he has selected well, packing the story with telling detail and anecdote. He gives a straightforward account of Stevenson's placid, cheerful mother, from whom he inherited his weak chest; of his morose and pious father, the lighthouse engineer; and of his nurse, the fearsome Alison Cunningham, who whipped his imagination into a frenzy of religious torment. He dwells on his sexless love affair with the Madonna-like Mrs Sitwell, and goes over the vicissitudes of his bizarre marriage with the American Fanny Osbourne. We are given a vivid glimpse of artistic, expatriate bohemia at Grez in the Forest of Fontainebleau. We also get something of the essential perversity of Stevenson's character, of his hysterical gaiety in the face of fatal illness, and of his gift of making himself irresistible to both sexes.

And yet Pope-Hennessy leaves the impression he was bored by Stevenson, both as a writer and as a man. The Stevenson family and its entourage glide through the book, picturesque figures in a picturesque decor, but there is little to indicate why they function as they do—until, that is, they board the yacht
Casco
and sail for the South Seas. At this point they enter Pope-Hennessy's own orbit of interest, and the reader's interest quickens in turn. He plainly enjoyed visiting Samoa; and we enjoy his descriptions of its luxuriance, its warmth and colour, and the pale, glistening bodies of the natives. In an earlier book,
Verandah,
he wrote brilliantly about his grandfather's governorship of Mauritius. He should perhaps have expanded the last seventy-odd pages of this one, and used the Stevensons as a peg to illustrate the pleasures and delusions of Europeans who settle in a tropical island paradise.