Senor Nice (37 page)

‘Just my bloody luck. Would you believe it? The batteries of the bloody camera have packed up. Now of all times. I told Bethan to buy new ones yesterday. She forgot, of course. Typical.’

‘Gareth! Where did you come from? Where am I?’

‘Oh you recognise me now, do you? Thank God for that. The doctor said you might be delirious for a bit longer. He wasn’t kidding. You’ve been talking complete nonsense. Nasty thing, mind, snakebite. I got bitten by one in Italy once.’

‘What doctor, Gareth?’

‘Your buddy, the one who’s the image of Che Guevara. Nice bloke, I thought. Didn’t say much.’

‘Do you know him, then?’

‘Well no. You both came into the bar together. I’d never seen him before.’

‘Which bar?’

‘I can’t remember what it’s called. I only went in for a piss while the others were visiting the ranch next door. As I was leaving, I saw the two of you at the bar. You looked terrible.’ This made some sense.

‘Shouldn’t we be getting off this boat, Gareth?’

‘Off the boat? I think we would be wise to wait until it docks, another half an hour, I think.’

‘But didn’t they just call abandon ship?’

‘You’re still a bit delirious, I think, Howard. Let’s go and sit outside on the deck.’

‘Sure. But why was everyone rushing to the side?’

‘Doing the same as I was – taking pictures of that bloody condor. And then the bloody camera batteries gave out.’

The giant otherworld vulture which I had thought was a Fatboy Slim remix of God was the rare Andean condor, the world’s heaviest flying bird with a wingspan of ten feet and a lifespan of up to seventy-five years. It spends most of its time riding thermals in the company of jets and fighting with vultures and eagles over the carcasses of sea lions. A condor was perched at the mouth of a small cave in the face of a rocky bank, which explained the stampede.

‘Where are we, Gareth?’

‘Didn’t you hear a word of what the guide was saying before my camera went kaput? We’re cruising on Lago Argentino, Howard, going through the National Glacier Park. Next question.’

‘Are we anywhere near Calafate?’

‘Of course. That’s very close to where we got on the boat, and it’s where we’ll get off.’

‘Where’s my doctor friend?’

‘No idea; he didn’t get on the boat. But he gave me his card to give you. Here it is. Bloody hell! He really is Che Guevara. Well, well, well. I thought he’d been killed in Bolivia or somewhere ages ago. I must be mixing him up with someone else. I suppose it could be his son.’

‘He’s not Che Guevara, Gareth; he’s just got the same name. He idolises him, and tries to look like him.’

‘I’ve got you. It’s a bit like one of our neighbours in Blackwood. He changed his name to Elvis Presley. He didn’t look like Elvis, though, no matter how much he tried.’

We went up on deck and sat down. I watched the luminous blue glacier slip back up the valley from where it had come. The DMT was flashing back. The glacier sparkled, twitched, glowed and squirmed like a segmented blue worm with a black centipede’s head. Thick mandibles chomped on swollen blood vessels. It looked dangerous but seemed otherwise occupied.

‘Are you all right, Howard?’ asked Gareth. ‘You were looking a bit better; now you seem a bit odd again.’

‘I’m fine. I’ve just had a funny old day.’

‘What have you been up to? I was wondering.’

‘I’ve been with that doctor on his rounds. He doesn’t half use some strange medicines – stuff from all different types of animals and plants. I tried some just for a laugh, and I’ve been feeling weird since. I wasn’t really bitten by a snake.’

‘What did you take?’

‘Something from a toad.’

‘Well, that’s odd. My Auntie Ceridwen used to keep toads,’ said Gareth.

‘Was she a doctor too?’

‘Hell, no. She was a bloody witch, a real one. She used to feed her cats from spare nipples that she had in her armpits. There aren’t many witches left these days.’

‘Is she still alive?’

‘I doubt it very much. She disappeared without trace over ten years ago, and she was pretty old then. She might be still alive, but everyone assumes she’s dead. Ilfant, her son, my cousin, has inherited her house and all her stuff. In fact, as you’ll know being a Welsh speaker,
ilfant
is the Welsh for toad. Shows how much she thought of toads. Not that she treated them very well, mind. She mangled them to bits, took lumps out of their heads and cut off their tongues. She would even clean the handle of her broomstick by rubbing the poor buggers up and down it. Ilfant told me that he once found her using it like a vibrator. She wasn’t married, of course.’

‘I’ve read about witches doing that,’ I said. ‘The pus from the toad’s skin used to get them high, and they would think they were flying.’

‘Well, I never knew that, Howard. You learn something new every day. It makes sense, though. I always thought the idea of them actually hurtling through the sky on brushes was a bit far-fetched. She used to feed the toads with flies’ wings and special tiny mushrooms she called
bwyd yr ilfant
.’

‘That’s Welsh for toad food,’ I said. ‘Maybe they were toadstools.’

‘That’s a point, a very good point. I hadn’t thought of that.’

We were silent for a few minutes, then Gareth said, ‘Let’s have a drink at the bar here on the boat. They’ve got local brandy with glacier ice. I’ve not tried it, but it might clear that toad shit out of your system.’

I hadn’t seen Gareth since the meeting at the bar in Trelew. ‘So, how’s your holiday going? Are you still with the Saga group?’

‘Yes, quite a few of them are on the boat. Bethan isn’t here; she’s gone to see those bloody penguins she’s been on about since before we left home. I thought I would rather go on a boat trip round the glaciers and take some pictures. I had enough of wildlife yesterday. We went to a sea lion colony. Bloody huge they are – sixteen foot and four tons, according
to the guide. They go out to sea and gorge as much as they can and then come back to lie on the beach and fart all day. It smelt worse than that sewage place near Kenfig Hill where me and Bethan used to pick dewberries. I got some good photos, mind. And I took some great ones today until the bloody camera gave up the ghost.’

‘Is it the camera or the batteries?’ I asked anxiously.

‘Well I can’t be sure, I suppose. I think it’s the batteries. I bloody hope so; otherwise, I’ve lost all my photos. You’re thinking of the one I took in Trelew, aren’t you? I’m sure it’s the batteries. Don’t worry. I’ll get some as soon as we’re off this boat.’

Just as the sun was setting over the pale blue lake, the boat docked at somewhere named Puerto Bandera. It looked familiar.

‘Is this where I got on, Gareth?’

‘Of course. And that’s the bar where we ran into each other,’ answered Gareth, pointing out a wooden building in the distance. A sign, ‘Estancia Alicia’, pointed in the same direction. I began to feel normal.

‘Shall we meet later?’

‘I would love to, believe me, but I have to have dinner, all-inclusive, with the rest of the old codgers at the hotel, and I promised Bethan we’d have a quiet night in tonight. She feels cheated if we stop at a posh hotel and don’t feel the benefit of it. We could meet tomorrow morning, if you like. I’ll come over to yours. Hotel La Loma, wasn’t it?’

‘That’s it. See you tomorrow, Gareth. Not too early.’

‘Don’t worry about that. I can see the toad has taken the bollocks out of you. You have a lie-in. I’ll probably have a bit of one myself.’

Gareth caught the Saga bus. I took a taxi to the hotel and lay on my bed to dream about witches, babies’ cauls and naval heroes.

*

There was a note waiting for me at reception when I went down in the morning for breakfast:

Later that day, I caught the two-hour flight from Calafate to Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego. It was snowing. I took the courtesy bus to the Las Hayas Resort Hotel, checked in, left my bags at reception for the staff to take to my room, and took a seat in the restaurant. I was starving, and my hunger had been severely inflamed by my in-flight reading. Ushuaia’s culinary delights included the Antarctic king crab – also called the centolla or spider crab. One of those and a bottle of Malbec from Bodega Escorihuela would be a sensible way to begin a visit to the end of the world.

Tierra del Fuego was discovered in 1520 by Fernão de Magalhães – known in English as Ferdinand Magellan – a Portuguese navigator engaged by the Spanish crown to find a route to the East Indies by sailing west from Spain. After
crossing the Atlantic and heading south, Magellan found a narrow seaway cutting through the southern tip of the South American land mass and the Pacific Ocean at its western end. Smoke and fire, presumably made by the indigenous Indians, rose from the island south of the strait as Magellan sailed through. He named it Tierra del Fuego – Land of Fire. At the bottom of Tierra del Fuego, on the shore of the Beagle Channel, lies Ushuaia, repeatedly referred to in all the tourist leaflets, thereby reducing the isolation they are trying to promote, as the southernmost town in the world. South of the Beagle Channel, which also joins the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, lie hundreds of largely uninhabited and variously sized and shaped islands petering out at Cape Horn. Sea and ice alone form the physical landscape between there and the South Pole.

I went to my room. Innumerable large snowflakes blotted out most of the view in the dark night, but I could see from the slow-moving ships’ lights that I was close to the sea. I overlooked the Beagle Channel, named after the ship that had carried the father of evolution, Charles Darwin, to his discoveries during the 1830s. Ushuaia makes the most of its connection with Charles Darwin, and a copy of his book
The Voyage of the Beagle
lay on my desk next to the Gideons’ Bible and hotel services folder. I had read it years ago while studying the history of science as an Oxford postgraduate but forgotten most of it. Skimming through the conclusion, I read the following:

A blinding dawn suddenly blazed through the windows. I got up to shut the curtains and saw a backdrop from Dungeons and Dragons. The morning sun blazed from the clear blue sky behind the Martial Mountains as they surveyed what was clearly their domain, like white-capped, chocolate-faced giant wizards poring over a magical potion. They were huge and magnificent, and a bit too close for comfort.

Lounging around the hotel reading local newspapers and magazines, I read that George Bush had been here fishing at a $1,000-a-night lodge, and CNN’s Ted Turner had just bought a ranch. I also found out that Ushuaia had been built by those incarcerated nearby at what was once Argentina’s biggest penal colony. The prisoners, mainly anarchists sent down from the north, built the steep criss-crossed streets of houses and bridges, and a fifteen-mile railway track. I consulted the telephone directories. There was no one called McCarty or even Williams.

I had woken up wanting to eat more Antarctic king crab. The hotel’s Martial Restaurant did not open until the evening, but the staff recommended Volver, reputedly the best crab restaurant in the world and open from eleven o’clock. The snow had stopped, and I took a taxi to the main street, San Martín, a non-stop parade of shops stuffed with world’s end souvenirs, penguin paraphernalia, duty-free whisky and
cigarettes. Volver was an old-fashioned restaurant at the water’s edge. Inside, shelves carrying hundreds of old photographs and piles of bric-a-brac jutted out from walls covered with yellowed newspapers. The menu offered crab pâté, crab salad, crab soup, crab pasta, crab goulash and crab. I ordered crab. Soon afterwards, Ernesto, who told me he had served his apprenticeship as a waiter in Bournemouth, brought to the table a plate on which a crab, its spindly legs spanning over a yard from tip to tip, was lying on its back. The meat was delicious.

I gazed at the photographs. There were no obvious portraits of a Patrick McCarty. While browsing though some bits and pieces I noticed some empty boxes labelled ‘Fabrica Centolla, Puerto Williams’. I was on to something.

‘Ernesto, where is Puerto Williams?’

‘About twenty kilometres away, sir, on the island of Navarino just south of Ushuaia.’

‘But I thought Ushuaia was the southernmost place in the world.’

‘It is if you ignore Chile, sir, which Argentinians always do.’