December 28, 2024 – Ben’s pick-up truck did a U-turn and drove away, kicking up the dust of the Carretera Austral. It was about eight in the evening on Boxing Day; sunset was still a way off, but we’d said our goodbyes in a light that was already golden.
I could no longer see the car; I was alone again after a week with Italian friends. I’d thought about how not to make it sound tragic, but I did not want to say ‘finally’: I was happy to be at the mercy of the road and my own decisions once more, but a few days of rest had done me good. The low sun caressed the tufts of grass on the pampa; there was a delightful breeze, and I’d just put on my glasses to get a good look at the guanacos, a kind of llama that’s everywhere in this part of Patagonia. I couldn’t wait to pitch my tent in this sensational spot, lie down to watch the sunset, and absorb everything that had happened in the last week. I let my mind wander to see where it would take me, and it went straight to Laguna San Rafael, a fjord dotted with icebergs, seals, and sea lions.
A block of ice as big as my house broke away from the face of the Northern Patagonian Ice Field and crashed into the water fifty metres below, creating a wave that halved, halved, and halved again until it reached our boat. It’s the fourth largest ice field on Earth, and every summer, it’s chipped away at a little by its nature and a little more by the ever-warming planet. The only thing I could think was how lucky I was to be there. Just a moment ago, we’d passed within ten metres of a leopard seal diving off an iceberg, and I’m not really an animal enthusiast, but it was a gigantic thing, more than two metres long, that lives only in this lake and in Antarctica. And then there was the sea lion sunbathing on a rock, and the pieces of blue ice floating on the water, and all the coincidences that had led me to witness these things in a remote fjord almost on the Pacific, sitting cross-legged on the roof of a small boat.
At two o’clock in the afternoon on Christmas Day, I dived into the freezing water of the lagoon beneath the 2,500-metre wall of Cerro San Lorenzo. The sun was shining with an intensity you wouldn’t believe possible in Patagonia, and the water was so cold that putting my head under felt like someone was crushing it; a jolt of energy woke up my whole body. At six o’clock, I was sitting at the table in the house of a certain Don Luis, owner of a 600-hectare estancia (ranch), 40 cows, and who knows how many sheep, in a place that’s reached by two hours of rough dirt road from another place that’s already quite remote. Twice a day, a radio programme goes around every house in the area, asking if the inhabitants need to send messages because there’s no phone signal here.
The sons brought out an indefinite number of beers, which after the walk felt like a godsend, while the kid, killed and skinned the night before, roasted in front of the fire. When it was ready, we moved to the kitchen, and all together around the same table, we ate a Christmas dinner so atypical and delicious that it was moving. Don Luis picked up the accordion before dessert (but after a considerable amount of wine) and began to play. After a while, he stopped and recounted that he’d been taught by his father, who loved to play but who, at a certain point, was no longer able to because of illness. His eyes filled with tears; he passed the accordion to his son and sat at the table with his hands over his face.
My mind made another leap and returned to today, 26th December, when I closed the car door, and we set off towards the Carretera, towards the tarmac, away from that estancia with the green meadow, at the foot of the Cerro (hill/mountain). You leave one of those places with a slightly heavy heart because you never know if you’ll return. And who knows if Don Luis’s estancia will remain like that, or if the telephone, road, and guesthouses will arrive, and all those little things capable of taking the poetry of a place and breaking it into grains so small that they’re almost invisible.
