Between Extremes

by Brian Keenan

  I know that we are heading for an arid region, indeed one of the driest places on earth, the Atacama Desert, but I was expecting the transition from the green plains around Santiago, in Chile’s lush heartland, to the brown hills and valleys of the north, to be more gentle. Yet, almost as soon as we have changed planes and left the capital for Arica, green becomes nothing but a memory. The scene is utterly lifeless, scalded and scorched, with slivers of road wandering here and there. The mountains below stretch away to my left where I can see the shoreline and the Pacific breakers rolling in.

  For a long while we follow the coast, a seemingly endless succession of wide bays and small coves. Low cloud hugs the shoreline, blurring the distinction between land and water. Mostly, though, the ground looks quite barren, with no settlements, no boats and just the occasional track. I feel a sudden, unexpected respect for this uncompromising landscape.

  The coastal range looks like a giant skeleton picked bare by the vultures of sand and wind. The absence of even a hint of water, let alone anything green, conjures in my mind an image of a colonist, hopeful of founding a great estate, being defeated by nature and gradually going insane. In his dotage, believing that his slice of nowhere is really bountiful earth after all, he carefully plots it out and farms stones.

  Nearing the start of our Chilean journey, we fly along a narrow coastal strip of dull brown earth. A road, glistening and wandering like a filament of treacle, spins along near the sea, the few vehicles on it like beetles scuttling for safety. The sun beats down a hot warning. As we descend, and the plane’s shadow shrinks to a tiny, toy size, a small terminal building shimmers in the heat. This is Arica, the real start of our Chilean experience. I am excited yet tired and, now we are here, a little apprehensive.

  ‘We need an oasis, John.’

  ‘You’re not wrong there, Bri.’

  The flight into Arica airport should have filled me with some kind of anticipation or even excitement but for some reason that wasn’t the case. I spent most of the journey intrigued by a woman passenger sitting to the left of me. Her features were classically South American. Her skin and hair seemed to be shellacked. Her face and arms were a tone brighter than milk chocolate and her hair, pulled back tightly from her face, was so lustrous that you couldn’t define its separate strands. I tried to make conversation but failed miserably, my Spanish being almost non-existent. I watched her glance towards John, who had a book on his knee, Isabel Allende’s novel The House of the Spirits. She looked closely and not inconspicuously at it.

  John noticed her curiosity and smiled. She smiled back and leaned across, pointing at the book and saying simply, ‘This is a very good book.’ Unfortunately her English was as poor as my Spanish and she could add little to her statement. I knew the story and could imagine what she meant by its being a good book, but I would have loved to be able to talk to her about it. Would her native perspective be very different from my alien one? But that was one of the reasons I came to Chile, to find my own particular House of Spirits.

  Like many encounters, this one was all too brief and as swiftly as the small aircraft landed she was gone with a polite smile of acknowledgement. As we took down our belongings from the luggage racks I glanced again at Isabel Allende’s novel as it lay on the aircraft seat. Looking at the face of the woman on the book cover, I was momentarily struck by the fact that it could almost have been the face of the woman who had just left. It was one of those quirky moments you try to brush off but it lingers with you. To a weary traveller in a strange land, coincidence takes on a curious significance.

  Whatever I was beginning to make of this seemingly ghostly encounter was soon dispelled as we descended the aircraft steps to the tarmac. I looked about me. In the hot sun the landscape shimmered, bleached and bone white. It was barren, desolate and empty. Even the sea on one side could not relieve it. For a moment I wondered, what in the name of Christ are we going into? But my musings were noisily interrupted. Steaming towards us was an open-topped blue tractor of a dubious vintage with two very badly buckled front wheels. It lurched from side to side with all the grace of a demented bull. It looked like a mechanical animal puffing huge draughts of black smoke into the white-hot sky. When I considered it, I realized that no other kind of creature could survive in this landscape. It belonged here, buckled and huffing, roaring with a parched groan.

  As we made for the shade of the airport terminal we were confronted by a gaggle of passengers milling about. Everywhere men, women and children were carrying bags of goods purchased in the tax-free shop. The scene had the feel of a Sunday school outing. I looked back towards the aircraft, hoping to catch a glimpse of the spirit woman once more.

  Instead I saw a huge and very gaudy lampshade marching jerkily by. It was being carried by a small child who had hoisted it over his head so that only his legs protruded from under it. Behind the lampshade in single file came the rest of his family, each of them loaded down with colourful bags or boxes. They looked for all the world like a column of ants in clown costume parading across the tarmac. It was the only colourful relief from the bleakness of this place.

  But it was too hot to stand looking for the living embodiment of a book cover. We quickly collected our luggage and cleared the terminal.

  The sign says ‘Arica International Airport’. For the size of the place, this seems a joke, but it is just a couple of miles to the Peruvian border and half of Bolivia’s trade passes through Arica. I see a signpost, ‘Arica 16 km: Santiago 2,058 km’, and I think, Christ, we’ve just come from there, and now we’ve got to go all the way back. We have just touched down in a place of dreams and I am twitchy and cross. I look at Brian who, though I know he must be tired too, looks in good spirits. The bastard.

  The drive from the airport to Arica did little to dispel the feeling of emptiness of this place. Everywhere about me, desert scrubland rolled down into the boiling sea. Here were two salty wastes meeting on this bitter coastline. One hot and burning, the other liquid and coolly inviting.

  Arica itself was something of a curiosity, clinging desperately to that defining line between the desert and the ocean. I had imagined Arica to be like any frontier town, small and seedy and existing simply because it was just that, a marker delineating the border between Chile and Bolivia. A place where perhaps history had passed by and people survived because mankind, like animals, must have territories and borders and needs places like this to mark out the defining lines.

  But Arica has a history. During the Inca period, it was the terminus of an important trade route. Even then the Indian peoples exchanged corn, fish and maize for potatoes, wool and whatever other produce might arrive there. With the Spanish colonization this small trading port was upgraded to the status of a city in 1545. But more importantly, the discovery of a huge and fabulously wealthy silver mine near Potosí, in present day Bolivia, greatly increased the size and importance of Arica. It is difficult, but intriguing nonetheless, to imagine that by 1611 the town and the area surrounding Potosí was one of the most densely inhabited cities in the whole of the western hemisphere, and Arica was the equivalent of some Los Angeles suburb.

  I thought how McCarthy and I had marked out territories for ourselves, both literal and metaphorical, during our long sojourn in Lebanon. The lunacy of dividing up the planet in some squalid basement in Beirut suddenly struck me. For years we had survived on dreams and now here we were entering the reality of them.

  Most people suggest one should leave dreams where they belong, back in the never-never. But here we were, dreamers to the end, pursuing the never-never like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Perhaps we both needed our heads examined or perhaps, as my mother always used to say, ‘Be careful what you want because if you want it hard enough you will get it.’ As the bus chugged through the town traffic into the heart of Arica, I could still hear McCarthy’s voice defiantly stating, ‘You can’t have the Caribbean, that’s mine, and I’m gonna roof it!’

  Our hotel was a stucco construction,
a kind of mock-Spanish adobe. It was surprisingly lavish for a nondescript desert town. Having registered and had our bags taken to our room, we were offered a pisco sour, a local brandy-type spirit mixed with sugar and lemon juice. Two of these were more than sufficient.

  Sitting at the poolside bar of the Hotel Arica, a fine spot with the Pacific breakers creaming in 100 yards away, things seem less stressful as we chat with Karlen, our guide for the next few days.

  ‘So you are going to see all of Chile?’ she asks.

  ‘We hope so,’ I reply.

  ‘Why Chile especially?’

  I explain briefly about Lebanon and the dreams and plans we had then.

  ‘When did this happen?’ she asks.

  ‘Well, it’s more than ten years ago now that we were taken,’ says Bri.

  ‘Ten years?’ she asks, looking perplexedly from one to the other of us. She muses for a moment then goes on, ‘Well, I hope Chile is as good as you dreamed!’

  We talk through our plans to spend the next few days around Arica, learning that our guide tomorrow will be a woman called Katia.

  It begins to sink in that we have two months of this, and that, though we are tired now, it might not be so bad after all. We are here and settled and all the months of planning are about to pay off. We have spoken much on the phone about the details of the trip but haven’t actually seen each other for quite a while – what with Bri being in Dublin and me in England.

  I felt the same thrill as always when we met at Heathrow. Hugging Brian’s solid frame inevitably lifts my spirits in anticipation of laughter, affection and discussion of any number of topics and the likelihood of intense debate. Yet since Beirut we have only ever met for short periods, at most two or three days. Now we are committed to months on the road together, dealing with unknown problems, sharing brand new experiences. Since Lebanon our relationship has moved on, becoming more relaxed yet not losing its intensity. The captive days are far enough behind us now not to dominate, happily wrapped up as we are in our separate lives.

  I wonder to what degree, if any, we may have lost the ability to read each other’s feelings and react in tandem to situations without the need for explicit communication. But such musings will resolve themselves in the days ahead so for the moment I put them aside.

  Given the fact that we are very evidently in a desert it comes as no surprise that the bathroom is plastered with signs urging minimal consumption of water. I rinse some socks and myself in the feeble shower, then dress and go for a drink on the terrace while Brian freshens up.

  I had a shower and made the obligatory phone call home. Then I sat and read, but my mind was too preoccupied to be attentive. Instead I watched the desert sparrows flit to and from the balcony. For some time I sat trying to resolve with myself what this was the beginning of. There were 3,000 miles in front of us, always heading further south, from the foothills of Bolivia and Peru to the wastes of Tierra del Fuego. It was a dizzying thought. Contemplation of this journey might have filled up many months of our captivity but the actuality of it was another thing. I looked around the room and then out into the vista from the balcony to confirm the reality.

  The hotel had left some food for us, fruit, biscuits and some local cake. I wasn’t hungry, so I brought the biscuits and cake out to the balcony and fed the desert sparrows which darted in and out of the eaves of our hotel.

  When I joined John on the terrace, I wasn’t surprised to find that he had dressed for dinner. I recalled the day John arrived at Lyneham air force base after being released from his captivity. As I stood watching him descend from the aircraft, I remember remarking quietly to myself, ‘Well, he would have to look like a film star, wouldn’t he!’ The memory, combined with his immaculate appearance, now confirmed who was to be Don Quixote and who was to be Sancho Panza on this trip.

  Thanks to the combination of our own weariness and excitement and the strangeness of the place, our conversation over dinner was inconsequential, circling around the fact of us being here and the reason for it. Could anyone believe where this trip had its origins, when two half-naked men, blindfolded and chained to a wall, discussed with fevered enthusiasm the possibility of setting up a yak farm in Patagonia?

  We discussed the various travel books we had read as if trying to fit ourselves into the appropriate mould. John has a particular fondness for travel writing and is much more widely read on the subject than I. I felt somewhat out of place. As we discussed what travel writing should be I remember remarking that the travel writer has to engage the reader with a new and imagined present. He has to convey the essence of an incident or a place rather than the fact of it. The history of the continent we were in and indeed the history of Arica, as we were to learn, had shown how the facts of history were transcendent.

  John seemed to be listening intensely but was obviously in no mood for such academic debate. In a broad Belfast accent he mocked my words with a taunt: ‘Ah, would you ever go and give my head peace.’ We both laughed and decided to retire to the patio near the pool.

  Arica is a holiday resort for wealthy Bolivians and there were some people still swimming in the pool or sitting, like ourselves, to enjoy the evening. We were intrigued by the faces of our fellow guests and tried to discern the signs of Indian, colonial Spanish or other European ancestry in the people about us. There is something distinctly lovely in faces that display a mixture of bloodlines. They have a beauty that is their own.

  We looked out over the pool to the sea beyond. It was becoming dusk and for what seemed more than an hour we watched as a lone trawler to-and-fro’d across the horizon as if sucking up the very innards of the ocean.

  That night I lay on my bed listening to the monotonous drone of the fishing boats and in the subsequent hours those ships roared through my sleep. For a while I lay awake thinking of the faces in the hotel and I remembered something of what D. H. Lawrence had said in his dismissal of what he called a ‘Dead Europe’. He spoke of the ‘passion’ of Catholic countries where women had not lost their identity in the gender-bending emotional and sociological war of the sexes. Lawrence’s own sexual confusions were no panacea. I remembered looking at his paintings in the desert of New Mexico and I thought, Here I am also in a desert but a lot less sure of myself. I was far from home and feeling lonely, my thoughts maudlin, and I suspect trying to find a first foothold for our oncoming expedition.

  I wake abruptly at five. One of my earplugs has come adrift and the Keenan nasal buzz-saw is droning at full throttle.

  ‘Shut up!’ I bark, switching on a light.

  Brian pops up from the horizontal saying, ‘Is it time to get up already? I haven’t slept with that ship making all that row out there.’

  I ignore him. Brian’s snoring and this subsequent reaction is a throwback, and while irritating and recalling broader frustrations from the past, it is also reassuring.

  We go back to sleep and then, on reawaking. I try to make sense of my bags and belongings. Whichever way you look at it, my main bag is not sufficiently large for the amount of gear I have with me.

  ‘Do you not think maybe you’ve got too many things?’ asks Brian, lying on his bed as I re-sort various bits of kit into piles. ‘What are they? Swimming trunks?’

  ‘No. Cycling shorts.’

  ‘Cycling shorts!’ he snorts, jumping up and rifling through my bag. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve got a fold-up bike in there too!’

  I cannot help laughing with him but have to explain, ‘No, smart-arse. Anna gave them for the horse trek in the mountains.’

  ‘Oh well, that seems pretty sensible, I suppose. Good on her.’ Then he starts laughing anew.

  ‘What now?’

  ‘I was just thinking that you’d have been better off if we’d gone straight to Tibet to check out the yaks’ – his voice becoming high and throaty as he revels in his joke – ‘then you could have had a sherpa to lug all that gear for you!’

  The motto of Chile is ‘By reason or by force’ which I suppose m
eans, ‘if you don’t agree with us we will make you’. And that in itself could be an adequate definition of colonialism of any description.

  In Arica there is a long wall facing the sea. Someone had painted a mural outlining that colonial history. Here were images of the native Indian culture, the Spanish colonial conquest and through to the present day, including what is called ‘the War of the Pacific’ in which Arica was taken from Peru and became Chilean national territory. But there was one glaring omission. There is nothing to denote the events of the Pinochet regime, one of the most ruthlessly fascist governments in the history of South America.

  Near the harbour were the beached remains of a shipwreck which looked oddly like a gingerbread cake. Beside it, a Spanish fortress sat crumbling on a promontory into the sea, circled by and infested with what the locals call TVs or turkey vultures. The gingerbread shipwreck and the turkey vultures nestling in the ruins of Spanish colonialism seemed to be an apt comment on the history of this place.

  Overlooking the town was a hill, El Morro, on which stood an old fort housing the Arms Museum dedicated to the War of the Pacific and the taking of Arica from Peru in 1880. There remains to this day some dispute between Peru and Chile about the rightful status of Arica. This was interestingly summed up on that hill.

  Just off from the museum was a plinth-like structure, something like a miniature Mayan temple. Our guide Katia told me it is awaiting the erection of the Christ figure when all the political problems are solved. This confusion of faith with politics is one I still fail to understand. But it remains a means which every right wing and arch conservative organization has used to subjugate the minds and imaginations of their people. I speak with some authority, having been on the receiving end of minds poisoned by such thinking.