Home > Work > In Patagonia
21 " But when the men went ashore for firewood, the wind veered and breakers began rolling into the bay. Captain and crew had to strip and shove the boat out to sea : ‘Oh! It was cold. And the sight of all hands naked was enough to make a cat laugh. We were red as lobsters and our teeth chattering. "
― Bruce Chatwin , In Patagonia
22 " The city kept reminding me of Russia—the cars of the secret police bristling with aerials; women with splayed haunches licking ice-cream in dusty parks; the same bullying statues, the pie-crust architecture, the same avenues that were not quite straight, giving the illusion of endless space and leading out into nowhere. Tsarist rather than Soviet Russia. Bazarov could be an Argentine character, The Cherry Orchard is an Argentine situation. The Russia of greedy kulaks, corrupt officials, imported groceries and landowners asquint to Europe. I said as much to a friend. ‘Lots of people say that,’ he said. ‘Last year an old White émigrée came to our place in the country. She got terrifically excited and asked to see every room. We went up to the attics and she said: “Ah! I knew it! The smell of my childhood! "
23 " Fifty years ago he found the dinosaur in the barranca. Now, toothless, hairless and in his middle eighties, he was one of the oldest flying pilots in the world. Each morning he put on his white canvas flying-suit, pottered down to the Aero Club in his Moskva and hurled himself and his antique monoplane to the gales. The risk merely increased his appetite for life. The wind had polished his nose and coloured it pale lilac. I found him at lunch ladling the bortsch into the ivory orb of his head. He had made his room cheerful, in the Baltic way, with flowered curtains, geraniums, diplomas for stunt flying and a signed photograph of Neil Armstrong. "
24 " The history of Buenos Aires is written in its telephone directory. Pompey Romanov, Emilio Rommel, Crespina D.Z. de Rose, Ladislao Radziwil, and Elizabeta Marta Callman de Rothschild - five names take at random from the R's - told a story of exile, disillusion and anxiety behind lace curtains. "
25 " Underneath was a votive shrine with; offerings—a tin of Nestlé’s milk, a plaster model of a girl in bed, a nail dipped in grey paint, and some burned-out candles. "
26 " In my grandmother's dining-room there was a glass-fronted cabinet and in the cabinet a piece of skin. "