Sunday Magazine, En Viaje.El Mercurio, Journal, November 11th, 2001
Writing by: Paula Andrade from Las Bandurrias, Lake District
Fotographies:Juan Ernesto Jaeger

Françoise Dutheil lives alone on a remote island in the south of Chile. She arrived on foot from Argentina and decided to stay. It wasn’t easy: For example, she moved the toilets by horse and carriage and her 18th century wardrobe on a raft. This Frenchwoman is a pioneer in the Rio Puelo region, although she doesn’t admit it.
Françoise Dutheil is 67 years old and is just a bit less than a myth. When she arrived to the Las Bandurrias Island, walking across the Argentinean border, the locals couldn’t believe it.

I came with my tent and my dog and settled in. I took advantage of those two incredible days to study the wind. One day I heard the sound of paddles of an approaching rowboat and saw a man. It turned out to be a carpenter who lived on the other side of the lake and knew how to build just about everything. He got out of his rowboat, barefoot, and said: “I couldn’t believe what they had told me about you being here. I had to come and see for myself if it was true”.

Françoise Dutheil became La Gringa from that moment on. At least that’s what the country folk would call her. She was a foreigner, blonde, beautiful, older, and well off: a phenomenon, in this Andean zone, which can be reached after two days of traveling from Puerto Montt.

Nowadays, they call her Señora Fran. Twelve years have passed since that French born Parisian has settled in here. She already knows all her neighbors. She has horses, sheep, pigs, oxen, cows and a bull—all on a 570-acre property.

Over the course of a year, Françoise built the house in which she lives, with the help of that skeptical carpenter. Years later she added an adjoining cabin to receive tourists. She also planted a vegetable garden and a small flower garden with fuchsias, mint, broom and birches.

--What’s a woman like you doing alone in a place like this?

--While it seems insane, it wasn’t. I’m not an impulsive person. I thought it over well before coming. I always dreamed about a place with mountains, and rivers… of going to a place and saying “Ahh, A house … far away from everything.”

--A hermit?

--For me being alone is a necessity but I’m not a hermit. It’s not that. I travel every 6 months to buy supplies or for that matter any time I feel like seeing the world. The thing is, I can’t be around too many people for too much time. I need time for me, reflects Françoise in her living room, which is maintained toasty thanks to the same firewood that provides the hot water. Meanwhile, the southern rain falls outside.
Assuming Puerto Montt as the departure point, one has two days of travel time to arrive at Françoise’s. You could say the same if you were seated in an inter-provincial bus or airplane. It would be one of those trips that imprints on your memory like a hard days work at the office.

The trek to Las Bandurrias Island is a physical experience, which excludes much reasoning. Basically, due to the lack of paved roads and a single cowhand’s route on which to penetrate the forest the trip demands maintaining all five senses alert. It’s arduous.

Just by taking Route 223 that leaves Puerto Montt and passing by Ensenada, one penetrates the Cold Forests of the Tenth region. There you can find the arrayán (Luma apiculata), ulmos (Eucryphia cordifolia), lumas (Myrtus luma), alerce (Fitzroya cupressoides), and coigües (Nothofagus)— lots of coigües whose horizontal branches extend as if they were part of a Japanese engraving.

Let’s go! Get in! We’ve been expecting you! Orders the boatman who fires up the engine of the motorboat and sets off towards the Río Puelo Lodge, in the Tagua Tagua Lake. It’s just the first leg of the journey. At high noon, a pisco sour and a sample of the famous regional salmon are called on for a little strength.

In this region everything is called salmon. When talking about trout, salmon; when talking about salmon, salmon. An invitation could lend itself to misunderstandings but in this lodge that John Denver visited regularly salmon-salmon is served. They say you can also count on tasting wild boar meat, a delicious delicacy for outsiders, even though it is considered a rather common experience for the local palate.

The trip continues along the Puelo River heading toward Santo Domingo, a beach made up of paltry sand. There is where four saddled horses, one packhorse (pilchero) and a cowhand, called Llemo short for Guillermo, await us. Then it starts to rain.

It is necessary to put on rain gear, adjust the stirrups and head out as soon as possible. There is not much daylight left warns Catherine Bérard, Françoise’s daughter who lives in Puerto Montt and works as a professional guide.

How did Françoise Dutheil come upon these trails, alone? Could she have taken long to find the path which leads too Llanada Grande, the principal hamlet in the zone? Was she afraid of the wild boar and pumas milling about the mountaintops? And in the winter? What did she do when the snow would completely covered over this Andean Valley?

After close to three hours on horseback the muffled laughter of children is heard. While they can not be seen they can just be made out between the nighttime shadows that surround La Escuela Rural Capitán de Bandada Carlos Rodríguez, the only boarding school in the area.

Llanada Grande is the main reference point of the sector, which has no more than 300 inhabitants. However, the fact that you can find a boarding school and a landing strip lends its residents a kind of status.

Even now the inhabitants still manage to live in relative isolation. Aside from the medical unit that arrives every once in while and a priest who visits monthly, the people of Llanada Grande live without intrusions: They take advantage of the microclimate to cultivate figs, cherries and nuts, shear sheep and keep the rosehip plants, an export product which grows wild, under control.

However, the situation is changing. Not only because of the export of morrile, a mushroom, which fetches up to 100 dollars per kilo is creating a competitive climate between the families, but also due to the advancing highway being constructed by various military outfits. It is assumed that afterwards the connection to Argentina will be made.

Currently the highway is generating the classical controversy between those desiring a lifestyle in harmony with the environment and those who hope to be part of a larger urban civilization.

Françoise Dutheil was an adolescent when the Germans took her father prisoner during the Línea Magginot.

--We didn’t see him for eight months. My mother and I thought that he had disappeared so we left for the countryside which was 37 miles from Limoges, the city where lived. One day we saw him, forty pounds lighter, coming towards us. What happened to him was what happened to all of them: He spent a lot of time hungry.

--Did the war affect you much?

--A great deal. I saw very sad things, indecent things of which men are capable. It’s in that context that my desires for peace and my repulsion to all forms of violence were born.

At the end of World War II, the Dutheil family boarded a DC-4 and crossed the Atlantic Ocean, stopping over in Recife and landing in Buenos Aires.

In that way Françoise’s adult life began and was thereafter delineated by the strictness of her father who was a doctor.

She even studied medicine for 5 years despite the fact that her interests lied in sculpture, painting and the arts. Soon afterwards, she married, had Philippe and Catherine and maintained a bourgeois lifestyle not so different than that which she might have had in France.

Then things took a turn: After separating she began studying plant physiology in an institute in order to learn the cultivation of virus-free plants. “That took me to El Bolsón where the climate is ideal for plants. I got in the car and drove one thousand two hundred and forty miles accompanied by my dog. Coming and going, escaping the city was my joy for many years”, reminisces this woman who drags her R’s like a Frenchwoman and stresses her Y’s like an Argentinean.
Françoise ended up moving to El Bolsón, built her first house and gradually detached mentally from the city.

--I worked a lot because, just like this house, my house was on the riverbank. It was on infertile land. I spent my time pulling out rosehips, spreading seeds and weaving with another woman. We became great friends and while we weaved she would tell me stories of this place because her parents were from Llanada Grande. She told me that I would love the place and that we had to come.

The El Bolsón of 1982 was a peaceful place. The Frenchwoman wasn’t the only foreigner who had settled down in the area. In fact, many other outsiders came with dreamy aspirations (“ I’ll plant lettuce and watch the little birds”). It could have been said that while this hippie town in southern Argentina was growing it was also gradually becoming impoverished. Its very growth wounded its internal balance, which once made it an attractive place.

The first time that Françoise crossed over to Chile from El Bolsón she did it by foot. Her friend, Sonia, the weaver accompanied her on horseback. They went into the Cold Forest, crossing the border, traveling eighteen miles, until the Frenchwoman sat down and concluded: “I’m not taking another step. I’m staying here. ”

She would thereafter repeat the trip, on horseback: “At night the townspeople, the few of them that there are, offered us their hospitality. They are people who don’t know you and yet they give you everything that they have. For example, the best room in the house. You know what I mean? These attitudes helped me reconcile with so many things, among those the human race.”

The events that followed came together naturally: La Gringa bought a piece of land from a local landowner, hired a custodian, decided that maintaining a house both in El Bolsón and in the Las Rocas lake area would be expensive and once and for all decided on packing her bags.

I always say that my family is like the turtle because we travel with all of our belongings. It was very difficult for my mother to get used to Buenos Aires, because she left behind everything as an older woman. That’s why we decided to come with all of our furniture from France. All of the pieces are now divided between Philippe and Cathy’s houses.

La Gringa had an 18th century French armoire, which was in the Dutheil family for generations. She was resolved to take it to the island.

How? She tied it to a balsa and launched it on a grade 4 rapid river.

--The second rapid empties into and forms the beginning of a fast-flowing river. I ran along the riverbank, bursting out laughing for a mile, waiting for what was to come. In the end, the balsa was dilapidated but nothing fell off, nothing! happily recalls the woman who was still then designated La Gringa.

Afterwards, in Puerto Montt, she charted various flights to Llanada Grande in order to dispatch the infinity of things that are found in her house, everything from 1000 pounds of windows to a toilet! What about from Llanada Grande to the island? The various fixtures and hardware negotiated those 10 miles in horse and buggy and later on in rowboat. A true feat.

The Señora Fran brings homemade quiches and pizzas to the table, uncorks a bottle of Malbec y serves Twinnings tea with the same dexterity with which she weaves or prepares a leg of ham. And as a radio ham, at one moment in time she connected to La Rueda de la Amistad, a channel where a group, consisting of those individuals dotted throughout the southern Chilean zone, gets together every day at two in the afternoon.

The new day in Las Bandurrias finds the sun arising from the middle of blue mountains, and paints a shining iris on the lake surface. The hualas flap their wings. Everything seems to quiver- from the sky to the green mass which forms the forest:

You can’t help but see the energy, the strength. One has to learn to see nature, to observe those things that with the rhythm of the city one no longer sees. For that reason this place doesn’t allow those who are not beautiful to enter. It is immediately apparent. For example, someone who doesn’t like nature breaks out in hives his first day.

--When the tourists don’t come, how do you pass the time?

--Here time is measured in other ways. There are always things to do: the vegetable garden, the cats, the firewood, weaving, the CB. They’re going to bring me a satellite dish, which will connect me to Sky TV. Then I have my books. Delving into an interesting book is like going into a tunnel of time travel. I have history books, books on the Patagonia… books on the pioneers.

--The pioneers?

--Sure. I’m becoming familiar with a lifestyle that the pioneers lived years ago and in conditions far more difficult than mine.

--And you? Are you a pioneer in the Puelo river zone?

--No, I don’t feel like a pioneer. I feel like someone with the fortune of having obtained something important: my freedom.