Beyond debate is the fact that Patagonia is huge and full of its own particular kind of ghosts. No traveler can see everything, partly because Argentina isn’t cheap and partly because there’s so much land to cover, which means that it takes at least six months to visit what the tour guides call its hidden gems, even in the most superficial way.
For example, Neuquén. Not only is Neuquén the only Patagonian province with no outlet to the sea, it’s also the the only one to share a border with Chile, which makes it a kind of Bolivia in the geostrategic imagination of the Chilean military, who might just as well be Prussian. Neuquén is like Jurassic Park, South America’s lost world of dinosaurs. In Neuquén, one bumps into tyrannosauruses and pterodactyls on every corner. The ranchers of Neuquén no longer speak of heads of cattle but of velociraptors. Pilgrimages of paleontologists are notable in the spring and summer months.
The tourist generally gets around by plane, which makes sense. But the best way to travel in Patagonia is by hitchhiking. For example, one can take a bus to Choele Choel or fly to Bahía Blanca, and then hitchhike. That, at least, was how the cash-strapped Argentines who couldn’t make it to Europe in the 1960s traveled, and that’s how some Patagon Indians still travel when curiosity or some urgent errand brings them to the capital or to La Plata, that sinister city that Bioy pondered in his old age. Once in Choele Choel the traveler must ask himself a crucial question: Which way? The two routes into Patagonia are very different. Either you head for Bariloche or you head for Puerto Madryn. In Bariloche, the unsuspecting tourist will find the Andes and a legion of skiers, snow fanatics with perfect tans and serious psychological and sexual issues who stay at the Llao-Llao, a 1940s hotel vaguely reminiscent of a thermal spa. In Puerto Madryn, on the other hand, he’ll come upon the Atlantic, which at these latitudes (though it depends on the time of year, of course) is a distinctly horrible shade, like the color of some rotting animal or the skin of a rotting carcass, something from an abandoned tannery, although the sea, as always, smells good. And from here one can visit the Valdés Peninsula, which is the northern edge of the Golfo Nuevo, or, better yet, leave Puerto Madryn and head for Trelew and Rawson, which are nearby, and where, at daybreak, if one climbs up on a certain rock out in the country called the Rock of Yanquetruz, one can hear the cries carried on the wind from both cities, cries that speak vaguely of young recruits, young prisoners, nausea, and herds of pigs.
After this it’s best to hop on the first bus out of Trelew, and also Rawson. But here the indefatigable traveler is presented with another dilemma. Either he must take the road west, toward the mountains, toward Trevelín and Esquel, and visit Leleque and El Maitén, mountain towns of the province of Chubut, with stops at Los Alerces National Park or Lago Puelo National Park or even, if the traveler is unusually curious, the Cochamo Pass, where he can look over into Chile without knowing exactly why or what for, or he must take the road south, toward Comodoro Rivadavia and the Petrified Forest. South of the Petrified Forest anything can happen. Between the road that runs along the foot of the mountains and the road that runs along the Atlantic, there lies a vast expanse of land, the last place, the land toward which the hitchhiking Patagons are headed, crossed every so often by secondary roads or dirt tracks that first demoralize the traveler and then make him lose his way and finally plunge him into a kind of mystical delirium that hunger and good breeding manage to allay. The two roads meet in Río Gallegos, the last city in Patagonia. Beyond it, across the Straits of Magellan, is the Argentine and Chilean Tierra del Fuego, but that’s another story.
Fateful Characters
What is clarity in photography? Is it seeing what needs to be seen and not what doesn’t? Is it keeping one’s eyes always open and seeing everything? Is it choosing what to see, making what one sees speak? Is it seeking, amid an avalanche of empty images, the thing the eye perceives as beauty? Is it the vain search for beauty?
The killer sleeps as the victim photographs him. This sentence, spoken with weary calm in a near whisper, has been haunting me or my shadow for years. The killer sleeps. The victim takes pictures. In images: a cheap single bed in a room neither bright nor dark, an unsuspecting man on the bed, asleep on his stomach or his side, wearing undershorts and a T-shirt, dark socks, no sheet to cover him, in the sleeper’s customary state of abandon, and a shadow, neither man nor woman, just a shadow, an androgynous silhouette at the foot of the bed, pitched toward the left, toward the center of the room, who holds aloft a little camera and peers through the lens, as intently focused as the sleeping man, but (and this is another sign of horror and normality) in a different way. The camera that the shadow holds — it’s important to emphasize this — appears to be fixed on a tripod, an imaginary tripod in the middle of a slightly messy room, a room that may or may not be a hotel room. Either way, it seems to be the sleeper’s (or killer’s) room, not the photographer’s (or victim’s) room, though the latter moves around it with a kind of familiarity, a growing familiarity, in which one senses equal degrees of perseverance and pain, rebellion and resignation, as if reality had curved, and time, if only for an instant, were gazing backward.
The person taking the picture wins, but victory can lead to a death without hope of appeal. The person with open eyes wins, but whom does he beat? And what good does it do to win when we know that in the end everybody loses, that we all lose?
The vagabond children of Santiago and the ghosts of London. The wet and the dry in the work of Larraín.
I’d like to say that I’ve lived in one of his photographs. Maybe I have. What I know for certain is that I’ve strolled through one: I’ve walked the streets that Larraín photographed, I’ve seen those floors like mirrors (mirrors in which only the most unstable objects or nothing at all is reflected), I’ve been gazed at by the same people who were gazed at by Larraín.
He’s the accidental photographer, or so it seems; the playful photographer, the Chilean kid let loose. He appears to be many things that he isn’t. At times I think he seeks harmony or a simulacrum of harmony: the instant at which everything stops and men come to resemble objects. Nothing moves. The rain freezes in the air. The man with the umbrella grows to look like the equestrian statue in the background. The eye opens until it’s the size of a mouth.
I have the feeling that Larraín is the perfect tourist, the Medusa tourist who, as the result of years buried in the only corridor-country in the world and of generations of misspent, squandered, or forgotten Chilean lives, has been granted a gaze that is also a way of moving. Swift, agile, young, and vulnerable, Larraín scans a labyrinthine city and as he does so he scans us. The gaze of Larraín: an arborescent mirror.
Larraín photographs a line of people — waiting for the bus. This is in London but it might as well be on the fringes of hell. A perfectly orderly line, perfectly normal. When the bus comes everyone will get on and then the bus will go and the space where the people stood will remain empty for an instant. The sequence can be infinitely repeated. Incidentally, the people who get on the bus aren’t going to hell. Fate has determined that they’ll wander forever in the margins of the photograph.
Larraín photographs people walking in Hyde Park. The photograph seems very English and ordinary: it captures the same fragile harmony as the photograph of the queue. And yet, if I examine it carefully, on the right side I spot a parochial native of Santiago de Chile, a government or bank official, clerk or bureaucrat, a good man who has never left Chile, his little hat says as much, startled as he walks through Hyde Park with a stern look on his face (though his sternness is of the most helpless variety), as if he were thinking abstruse thoughts. On the left side of the picture a girl, possibly a nanny, pushes a baby carriage that isn’t seen: only the handle appears in the frame. This girl is English: her eyes gaze at the carriage that I can’t see and the child who I can’t see, but by the expression on her face it’s clear that she’s elsewhere, a much warmer place, the tropic of geometric forms, the tropic of geometric exiles. The photograph doesn’t end with these two figures, who actually only frame it and thereby give it a twist; between the Luciferian nanny and the parochial Chilean from Santiago, but further in the distance, a couple stroll arm in arm toward the photographer and the foreground, which thus becomes a promise of the future, as if the fate of that ideal (and eminently British) couple were the peripatetic Chilean and the baby we can’t see and the baby’s questionable caretaker. But even here the photograph doesn’t end (because this photograph and maybe all photographs have a beginning and an end, though as a general rule we never know for sure what they are), or the staging of the scene doesn’t end: in the background there are three tiny silhouettes, this time in the exact center of the lens, three silhouettes poised at the point where the placid Hyde Park path merges with the horizon, silhouettes that may either be approaching Larraín’s camera or moving away from it, probably approaching, three silhouettes that are like three black holes or like three tiny scratches in the fateful serenity (and clarity) of this photograph.