The Whispering Land

The garden at the back of the house was as well tended as the front, and, to my surprise, contained two well-constructed and spacious aviaries.* I peered into them hopefully, but they were both empty. We did not have to wait long for Coco's appearance. He appeared from the path leading to the saw-mill at a brisk trot, and arrived, breathing deeply, in front of us and doffed his straw hat. He was a short, well-built man with coal-black, curly hair and (unusual in Argentina) a thick black beard and moustache, carefully trimmed. His eyes were dark, and shone with eagerness as he held out a well-shaped brown hand to Luna and myself.

"Welcome, welcome," he said, "you must excuse, please, my English… she is not good for I have no chance to practise."

The fact that he could speak English at all amazed me.

"You have no idea what this means to me," he said eagerly, wringing my hand, "to speak with someone who has an interest in Nature… if my wife had not called me I would never have forgiven her… I could not believe it when my son told me… an Englishman to see me, and about animals, too."

He smiled at me, his face still slightly awe-stricken at this miracle that had happened. One would have thought that I had come to offer him the Presidency of Argentina. I was so overwhelmed at being greeted like a newly-descended angel that I was almost at a loss for words.

"Well," said Luna, having obviously decided that he had done his job by bringing one lunatic in contact with another, "I will go and do my work and see you later." He drifted off, humming to himself, while Coco seized my arm gently, as though it were a butterfly's wing that he might damage, and urged me up the steps and into the living-room of his house. Here his wife had produced wonderful lemonade from fresh lemons, heavily sweetened, and we sat at the table and drank this while Coco talked. He spoke quietly, stumbling occasionally in his English and saying a sentence in Spanish when he realised I knew enough of the language to follow. It was an extraordinary experience, like listening to a man who had been dumb for years suddenly recover the power of speech. He had been living for so long in a world of his own, for neither his wife, children nor anyone in the fly-blown* village could understand his interests. To him I was the incredible answer to a prayer, a man who had suddenly appeared from nowhere, a man who could understand what he meant when he said that a bird was beautiful, or an animal was interesting, someone, in fact, who could speak this language that had been so long locked up inside him, which no one around him comprehended. All the time he spoke he watched me with an embarrassing expression, a mixture of awe and fear – awe that I should be there at all, and fear that I might suddenly disappear like a mirage.

"It is the birds that I am particularly studying," he said. "I know the birds of Argentina are catalogued, but who knows anything about them? Who knows their courtship displays, their type of nests, how many eggs they lay, how many broods they have, if they migrate? Nothing is known of this, and this is the problem. In this field I am trying to help, as well as I can."

"This is the problem all over the world," I said, "we know what creatures exist – or most of them – but we know nothing of their private lives."

"Would you like to see the place where I work?. I call it my study," he explained deprecatingly, "it is very small, but all I can afford…"

"I would love to see it," I said.

Eagerly he led me outside to where a sort of miniature wing had been built on to the side of the house. The door that led into this was heavily padlocked. As he pulled a key from his pocket to open this he smiled at me.

"I let no one in here," he explained simply, "they do not understand."

Up until then I had been greatly impressed with Coco, and with his obvious enthusiasm for animal life. But now, being led into his study, I was more than impressed. I was speechless.

His study was about eight feet long and six feet wide. In one corner was a cabinet* which housed, as he showed me, his collection of bird and small mammal skins, and various birds' eggs. Then there was a long, low bench on which he did his skinning, and nearby a rough bookcase containing some fourteen volumes on natural history, some in Spanish, some in English. Under the one small window stood an easel, and on it the half-finished water colour of a bird, whose corpse lay nearby on a box.

"Did you do that?" I asked incredulously.

"Yes," he said shyly, "you see, I could not afford a camera, and this was the only way to record their plum-age."