Wenja: ‘to be loose or easily moved as a broken bone or the blade of a knife’—‘to wander about, or roam, as a homeless or lost child’—‘to be attached yet loose, as an eye or bone in its socket’—‘to swing, move or travel’—‘to exist or be’
—Yaghan-English Dictionary compiled by Rev Thomas Bridges (1898)
This definition from the Yaghan language is read by Bruce Chatwin, sitting in the Bridges’ family farmhouse in Tierra del Fuego, and recorded in the famous tale of his journey through Patagonia. Something in the word wenja speaks to why I was making my own way through South America, 30 years after Chatwin, and more than 100 after Bridges arrived. To be loose, to wander about, to roam, to move—these ideas have always seemed to me fundamental to what it is to exist, to be.
Stationariness, by contrast, rings of death. One house, one job, one country—how on earth do people manage it? How can they possibly choose one place in which to sate all their curiosity of the world, one home in which to house all their myriad selves? So I have long thought to myself with incredulity and, not uncommonly (broke, sick, longing for absent family and friends), a stain of envy. Yet there is comfort to be taken in the nobility of like-minded precursors. Pascal wrote that all man’s unhappiness stems from his inability to remain quietly in a room. Rimbaud ran off to Africa, Robert Louis Stevenson to the South Seas, and Chatwin to Patagonia. In my own smaller way, in the decade since I finished university, 24 months is the limit I have stayed in any one place at a time. The interest always has been to travel as far and as wide as funds would allow—Turkey, Morocco, Russia, Japan, Europe, and then last year through South America, the longest period yet of just wandering about, roaming, moving, being.
There, after seven months, I read a reference to the Jesuit missions in south eastern Bolivia. A sentence about operas performed ‘in the Bolivian wilderness’ took hold and I decided to go and see for myself. The image called up by the guidebook had reminded me of Fitzcarraldo—the maniacal 19th-century Irishman, obsessed by the vision of building an opera house in the Amazon. My partner and I had seen Fitzcarraldo’s own house, now a glaring electronics store, on the plaza at Iquitos, a city