ON THE table is Bruce Chatwin’s ‘In Patagonia’ , and here I am in Patagonia, but Neuquen is nothing like the place of my imagination, it is a perfectly formed grid city in the centre of a vast barren desert where the pink dust forms incredible sunsets and it rains but a week a year. There is no sight of the Andes, nor the romance of region except in the bottle of tinto on my table which proclaims it is the product of the Bodega, “fin del mundo’. It goes well with the succulent bife de chorizo, the best cut of meat in the land.
In the restaurant as my steak cooks there is a continuous homage to John Lennon being avidly watched by the locals, for the oil workers who founded this town love the Beatles and especially the man who asked us to imagine no heaven and no hell, above us only sky. For sky is all there is Neuquen, a vast sky as far as the eye can see.
The smell of cooking meat is reminding me of the events of the last few days. For on Sunday along with many working Argentines I waited patiently in a line to kiss the skirt of a 38cm high statue of the Virgin in one of the holiest places in Argentina, the impressive rose coloured basilica of Lujan, where every year 5million walk from Buenos Aires to plea to the tiny statue for a miracle.
Even on the day I was there a queue of families trailed pushchairs around the corner its walls and the waiting air was thick with the grease of burning fat from the public grills provided for the pilgrims. No part of the animal was wasted, hearts, lungs and testicles piled on to the fires while children played with light up plastic replicas of our Lady of Lujan.
At lunch I spoke with a local English teacher. Making light conversation she told of her weekend high in the mountains waiting for a ‘visionary’ village woman to meet her ill elderly mother. It had involved silently waiting for hours in a five thousand throng to be blessed. “Do you believe in miracles?” she asked me. I floundered. “I don’t” she said, “but I swear as I looked at her, her face changed to that of Mary” I am lost for words, nod and believe her.
In Neuquen tonight, this city able only to survive in its wilderness by Andean melt waters that feed the acid blue river at its heart, a thick dust storm is brewing. I read once more Chatwin’s epic journey through this inhospitable landscape and wonder what miracle made him return to Britain, convert to Greek Orthodoxy and have his ashes strewn in a small chapel in the middle of the Mani.
I ask the oilman beside me the question of the day before, ‘Do you believe in miracles?” “Of course” he laughs, “we survive on miracles in Patagonia.”
