When Carles Santasusagna suddenly bursts in front of the corral, the goats are overjoyed and begin to stick their heads out of the feeder opening. They push each other. They identify the presence of the farmer with satisfying hunger. And they fight to be the first. The strongest prevail, of course. They are about fifty, plus one that is loose on the outside with a bandage on one leg. On the mountain, grazing oblivious to the scene, there are dozens of others. “We put the lame one aside because if they hadn’t killed it, the goats are moody and fight a lot,” he explains as he deposits the fodder.
“I don’t like goats, they are not reliable,” he repeats vehemently, quite the opposite of what one might expect from a shepherd and farmer who has spent more than a decade learning and developing this trade in l’Olbier, a small town in the French Pyrenees with a little more than twenty inhabitants and a group of grouped houses with slate roofs, surrounded by ash forests. Maybe the cycling race has never passed through there, but it looks like a typical picture of the Tour de France every July.
The problem, in reality, is not the goats, nor the cold (“I am from Solsona”, he says as if that were a vaccine against low temperatures) nor even the fact that Carles Santasusagna has spent half his life in the hot jungle Amazon embraced by a relative solitude. The point is that he has realized that he can no longer kill animals and that is why he is going to change his life, again, and he is going to return to the jungle, who knows if permanently. “To which you put soul to the animal, you can no longer sacrifice it and that we decided on the goats because we did not want to sell meat, but to milk them and make cheese, but of course, for them to give milk they have to get pregnant and in the end you have to sacrifice the baby”, he sums up with a certain hint of disappointment.
Carles Santasusagna is 73 years old and in good shape. He leads a healthy and active life, bustling up and down between the farmyard and the cheese factory, attached to the small church of l’Olbier, under the Montcalm massif, near Tarascon-sur-Ariège. In fact, the room where the cheeses are fermented is the ground floor of the rectory that they have rented to Carles and his partner, Yan Ling, the Chinese woman who fell in love with him during his last stage in the Amazon basin. His couple and their common son, Tielan, help her with the daily walk of the dogs and goats, and she practically handles the process of fermenting the thirty liters of milk they produce daily.
“What worries people most about living in the Amazon is being alone and that doesn’t worry me, I like the richness of life there more, in every way,” he clarifies and drops his reading glasses on his chest. , held by cords. The sky is so overcast in l’Olbier and the window of the house is so ecclesiastically narrow that Carles has turned on the table lamp to eat a bowl of broth with potatoes and chicken, accompanied by a bottle of Bordeaux. And he continues comparing life here with that there: “In the Pyrenees, with luck, I see about thirty species of birds a year, and only in the place where I lived in French Guiana I saw about 70, there I found a hundred of mammals, and here there are about five, among them the bear, poor bears, that reintroduce them to the high mountains, which is a rare habitat for them, then they are surprised that it goes down, but it is theirs by nature, in the middle of the mountains , not where they confine him now.”
Carles Santasusagna, self-taught in every way, a former Claretian seminarian who tried to study anthropology until he concluded that he knew as much or more than his professors, to whom he recommended books they didn’t even know about, has always been enthusiastic about animals and plants. A year ago he went to Guyana to start preparing for his return and a friend who has a cabin on the river showed him an ‘adopted’ five foot alligator that had appeared one day and hadn’t left. He fed him and if he called him, he would come without fail even though he lived in freedom. Of course, his friend had discovered that he served as a lure to attract tourists. This is the jungle, full of animals and exoticism, inhospitable for the majority, the longed-for home for Santasusagna.
The third stage of Carles Santasusagna in the jungle of French Guiana will start at the end of this summer. He will go with his son, who will help him with the transfer and will stay with him for a month to learn basic techniques to survive in the tropical forest such as fishing, hunting or orienting himself. The Catalan farmer doubts that Tielan will end up settling in Guyana because “there are no mountains to climb there” but he wants him to at least know his surroundings, since he was born in the jungle in 2009.
The idea is that Yan Ling finishes dismantling the cheese business and moves with the boy to the Alps. She will study nursing for three years thanks to the French State scholarship, which pays for alternative studies to all those who have carried out a peasant activity for at least five years. And Tielan will try to enter a sports high school to specialize in climbing, since she already has an almost professional level. Yan Ling confirms the family reunification as soon as she graduates in nursing and Tielan is a little older. She misses the jungle, she assures herself.
The house is in disarray, clothes piled around a chest of drawers at the bottom of the stairs that lead to the loft bedrooms. Downstairs, the living room is full of pairs of climbing shoes that the son is trying out before going to practice climbing on a wall. There is no TV. The estancia is presided over by the immense white Pyrenean mastiff called Pampa and who will go with Carles to Guayana. On a small shelf there are books, not many, some in Chinese, many in French, a few in Catalan and Spanish. They dominate animal and plant manuals, their true passion. He likes to identify birds. And on another shelf there are philosophical relics from the 1960s and 1970s, authors who inspired dreams of establishing a commune in the jungle, such as Eros and Civilization and The One-Dimensional Man, both by Herbert Marcuse, exponent of the Frankfurt School, recycler of influences. of Marx and Freud.
There are no foreign lands, whoever travels is the only foreigner, wrote Robert Louis Stevenson, the adventurer who narrated the southern seas to Europe. And Carles has always tried to look through the eyes of the indigenous when he has traveled to French Guiana. That is why he has not been surprised by the recent episode of survival of four brothers in the Colombian jungle after a plane crash in which his mother and the pilots lost their lives. “There are few risks in the jungle, minimal chances that they would have been killed by an animal. In the jungle there is no grass, to eat you depend on the fruits and they are so high up in the trees that you cannot climb to get them, you have to wait for them to fall and what falls is quite safe because otherwise it would also poison the monkeys that they live in the trees”, assesses Carles, although he highlights the merit of the older sister for having taken good care of the rest. He believes that the fact that the brothers had been indigenous helped, although he regrets that, in Guyana, more and more, the natives are forgetting about the jungle: “They are city Indians, most of them ignore everything about the forest, like the peasants Europeans, who no longer know anything about meteorology, plants, animals, before any farmer knew his environment perfectly.
Santasusagna’s books are very demystifying of the supposed dangers of the jungle and dramatic regarding human relationships. In the jungle, armed neighbors pose a greater risk than elusive species such as the puma, which he has heard hundreds of times but has barely seen a couple of times. Reading ‘Una granja a l’Amazònia’ (Editorial Cossetània, 2009), one learns that jungle animals are very cautious: they only attack if their prey is easy or if they are sure they are not going to take risks, they make decisions based on function of avoiding an eventual injury, which in the jungle could have catastrophic consequences. And that is why he ended up saving himself from an unfortunate encounter with a jaguar despite the fact that his shotgun failed due to having the cartridges wet.
Santasusagna closed the farm in the Amazon for the same reason that he is now going to dismantle the cheese and goat business, although he boasts that it was a genuine success. He wanted to show that a meat business was possible in the Amazon, “a source of animal protein” as he defines it, with pigs that were not locked up and roamed freely. And he affirms that in five years a pig has never died because of a predator and that none of them have gotten sick either: “Pigs know how to defend themselves very well, but they ran around my yard, I ended up taking affection for them and then I couldn’t kill them anymore ”, he concludes.
Carles closed the farm but continued in Guyana until they decided to return to Europe, especially so that Yan Ling, with whom he is more than thirty years apart, could have more of a social life since the friends Carles had in the jungle were his age. . The choice of l’Olbier was fortuitous. They preferred to go to a town in Spain, but in France they were given better conditions to set up a business with goats.
Although the farm lasted five years, Carles Santasusagna spent eleven, between 1997 and 2011 in this second long stay in Guyana. The first was between 1985 and 1992, more radical and alternative, accompanied by his partner at the time, Lydia, and from that journey he wrote his first book, ‘Cinc anys a la selva de la Guiana’ (La Campana publishing house). “I wanted to live in contact with nature in a place unmediated by man, to discover the magical dimension of existence”, he reasoned when I interviewed him in 1994, on the occasion of a report on adventurers that was published in La Vanguardia Magazine. That challenge ended with a sentimental separation, but without the fatalism of the character played by Harrison Ford in The Mosquito Coast, Peter Weir’s film adaptation of Paul Theroux’s novel.
Now he is hesitating between choosing to live on the banks of the Approuague River, like last time, or closer to the road that connects Cayenne, the capital of French Guiana, with the border with Brazil, which would allow him to do without buying a house. canoe and an outboard motor. But the life of Carles Santasusagna has never been very planned. Like when he went to Brazil and worked as a cowboy in Mato Grosso or when his first attempt to live in the jungle in a commune with some friends was a resounding failure. Or his initial obsession with finding out if Amazon riders really existed.
Carles Santasusagna is not afraid of growing old in the jungle. “There are the same diseases there as here,” he explains. But he has made a firm decision. The farmer who no longer wants to kill more animals is going to dedicate himself to growing fruits in the jungle. Banana trees for sure, maybe avocados, that remains to be seen. And flowers to attract the birds. Thus Carles Santasusagna, who says that he never had time to retire, will be able to enjoy the animals, although, he proclaims, nodding in agreement, that “at a certain age, everything is very temporary.”
