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15 January 2025 – I pick another stalk of rhubarb and cut off the leaf before putting it in the wheelbarrow a short distance away while the wind whistles in my ears incessantly: this repetitive and unintellectual gesture on a farm that has all the air of being on the edge of the world, is the perfect culmination of these two months spent wandering.
The last thousand kilometres southwards flowed like water. There was only the steppe, endless and yellow, with a very long, straight road running through it. There were a few oil wells, fences on both sides with the skeletons of poor guanacos stuck and dying of hardship, and the occasional ocean. The place names passed on the map without a single bakery appearing to buy something to eat. Then, there is a village, a town, or a tiny estancia, and another 300 kilometres of desert.
In Rio Gallegos, I stopped at Monica’s home, the wife of a tour bus driver who gave me a lift. She opened the door for me and shortly afterwards had to go out to run some errands with her two spoiled children, aged 6 and 7. I told her I would have dinner ready, and around 9.30 am, I started cooking some chicken following her generic instructions. When the child approached the table, she exclaimed: ‘What a strange chicken! I’ve never seen it so white!’ referring to the tomato sauce her mother had forgotten to tell me to add. ‘You cook better,’ she concluded, with the excitement of the novelty, and I can say I’m satisfied as it’s probably the first chicken I’ve cooked in my life. On the contrary, I got the wrong pot for the spaghetti and came out with a horrible goo that made me feel unworthy of being Italian – who knows what they must have thought of me.
All this time when people asked me what my destination was I replied that I didn’t have one: I wanted to go, more or less always south, to see where I could get to and what was always around the next bend. And then at a certain point it was as far south as you could go. I found myself buying pasta and bolognese sauce by the pound in a supermarket in Ushuaia, together with an Irish guy I met on the ferry over the Strait of Magellan, and I thought I was closer to Antarctica than to Santiago, where I had started from.
The next day, we went on a trek to see a lagoon nestled at the foot of a glacier, and when we arrived, I realised it was lovely, but I was – am – tired of seeing places, however beautiful they are. I have so many undigested postcards in my head, so many chats with different people, and so many intense moments that I ran out of RAM to absorb new ones. It’s nice to go trekking, but I would have also happily spent the day lying down, looking at the tent’s ceiling, drinking coffee, and eating chocolate chip biscuits.
The following day, it is raining, and I have my backpack sheltered under a roof by the side of the road while I am hitchhiking – for the first time northwards – to reach the Estancia from which I am writing to you now. I am picked up by a woman who is taking a Sunday drive with her daughter, at one point stopping at a bakery to refill her mate thermos in the free hot water and yerba dispensers. Argentines just can’t do without this ritual: they go everywhere with their mate kit, and when you least expect it they assemble everything and start spinning the cup, which they refill more or less every time someone takes a sip. The lady offers it to me, and we share the steel straw even though we met less than an hour ago.
The Estancia is a small group of red-roofed buildings, each with a specific function: the main house, the house of the peons who look after the animals, the house of the girls who work in the garden and kitchen, the processing room, the greenhouse, shed. When I arrive, it is lunchtime, and there is a lot of excitement about serving the guests of the weekend horticulture course. I soon discover that it never stops here, from early morning to the wee hours of the morning it is an anthill of people coming and going, caught up in the most varied occupations and solving unforeseen problems.
Then I walk into the kitchen and it feels like home. Ladles and pots hang everywhere, the stove is the centre of the room and of attention, a sink that empties and constantly fills with dishes to be washed, more or less at the same pace as someone decides to make a cake, or a sauce, or bread, or another cake. I mix eggs and sugar to make scones, biscuits with more butter than soul, and immerse myself in this flow of chatter, great food, a cosy atmosphere and plants growing in an extreme, windswept climate. Outside the window there is still the steppe, an expanse of yellowish grass that is not enough for the cows to make milk.
I enjoy the days here one by one, turning them over like the pages of a book, absorbing and processing and resting before it is time to switch the turbo on again, head north and start a whole new stage of this journey.
