Between Extremes

by Brian Keenan

  This is what I wanted back in Lebanon, wilderness untainted by man. A place where there were no guards to hiss and make you whisper, where you could shout and bellow and the world would remain mute and uncomplaining. Yet suddenly I feel uncertain. This is not a landscape you could trust. The crust of salt that extends to the horizon feels as treacherous as ice on a pond and although I marvel that the crystals sparkling in the sun create a shimmering mirage that absorbs our car parked a mile away, I shiver in the morning’s heat. I turn to look for Brian. He has disappeared! Crusoelike I follow his footprints and come to the edge of another vast valley. A little way down its rocky side, I find him poking at something on the ground – skeletons.

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘Sheep, or could be a llama, I suppose,’ he replies.

  His face has that closed-down, pensive look I know so well. When we first met that look would make me feel excluded, as if I had done something to offend him. But I soon learned that it was his way of concentrating; though his eyes remain open he is looking inward, studying vistas and images in his mind’s eye. He is away in his own place, making sense of something, putting it into a context that he may want to share later. From under the brim of his straw hat, he looks around searching for an answer – perhaps unsure of the question that nags him. As he looks up and out across this great valley, to the valleys and hills beyond, his face remains inscrutable. Here is nature on the massive scale we had dreamed of, yet I sense that, as for me, the thoughts and feelings it inspires in him are by no means clear cut or simple.

  Before we entered the mountains proper, we crossed a high desert plain. I enjoy open spaces and remote places, the solitary in me calls out to them. But emptiness disturbs me. It makes me uneasy. I love silence, but even more I like to hear it filling up with first sounds that put a sense of imminence to the day. Here emptiness was complemented only by absence. It did not encourage me for the days ahead. We have an expression where I come from for such places: ‘There is a desperate want in them.’

  We stopped briefly to stretch our legs and take some fresh air. For mile after mile after mile, the empty desert’s edge surrounded us. As we left our jeep and started to walk into it, I was surprised at my reaction. I was walking on a hard salty surface. On its immense flat expanse it seemed as if you could see for ever, as if we were standing on an enormous pie-crust. Even the mountains shading out of the distance had curious indents as if they had been delicately shaped with a pastry spoon.

  ‘It’s not what I expected,’ John commented.

  ‘Nor me, but remember what I told you years ago: hope for everything, and expect nothing. And there’s any amount of nothing here.’

  We stood for a moment turning slowly and taking in the emptiness. John said something to me about the silence of things. I simply insisted on stamping my foot. I was amazed that, with all the force of my feet and legs, I couldn’t break the salt crust on which I was standing. I saw John look at me as if there was something wrong with my head. Then he said simply, ‘Well, there’s certainly nothing here.’

  ‘I’ve never seen so much nothing in all my life,’ I replied.

  We returned to the jeep and climbed aboard. As we drove on further into the hills we were both silently contemplating the fact that we had to cross 600 miles of the most utter wilderness in the days to come. I was about to comment on this to John when my eyes were attracted to something far out towards the horizon of this great salt plain, something shimmering and fluid. Could it be lights in the distance? Or perhaps light glancing off the bodywork of a car or truck travelling towards us, but some fifty miles away. And again I thought perhaps it was a rainstorm somewhere and the sunlight was shimmering in the downpour. Then I realized the idiocy of my thinking. This was one of the world’s perfect deserts. Perfect in the sense that in some parts of it there had never ever been any rain.

  I pointed off to the horizon and asked Karlen and Eduardo, ‘What’s that?’

  They looked where I was pointing, then at each other and said, ‘What?’

  I repeated again, ‘There, that bright light, it seems to be moving.’

  Again they looked at each other. There was no point in looking at what I was looking at.

  Smiling, Karlen explained, ‘It is the sun glinting off the silica that is strewn across the desert.’ I sat back feeling a little foolish and deflated. As we drove on for a few more hours, these desert lights seemed to change. On occasion they looked like small encampments glowing in darkness. I was slowly beginning to understand what the word ‘mirage’ really meant. I decided to pay little more attention to them, for, like any mirage, they had the capacity to become hypnotic.

  There is a relaxed atmosphere as we drive along, getting to know our guides. Tall and thin, wearing a black stetson above a craggy, weatherbeaten face that is often wreathed in smiles, Eduardo has some English and drives tourists around in his jeep. Karlen, we learn, was born in 1974 and works as a tour guide to earn money to put herself through college. She wants to be a lawyer. We fall silent for a while as Eduardo steers the jeep over the often rutted and sometimes very treacherous roads. Brian dozes next to me in the back. Karlen turns and nods at Brian, smiling. ‘He is very tired?’

  ‘No,’ I say, grinning, ‘just very old.’

  Her eyes flash understanding and she switches to Spanish for a quiet conversation with Eduardo. I notice that he is looking quizzically at Brian and me through the rear-view mirror and shaking his head. Karlen turns round, speaking quietly.

  ‘You say it was more than ten years ago that you were kidnapped?’

  ‘That’s right,’ I say, ‘in 1986.’

  She and Eduardo exchange glances.

  ‘How old are you?’ Karlen asks me.

  ‘I’m forty,’ I say, feeling confused myself now.

  ‘No!’ she exclaims, saying ‘cuarenta’ quickly to her colleague.

  Eduardo slows the car and starts laughing, his English suddenly more accomplished.

  ‘You are Dorian Gray, or you drink the blood of virgins!’ He laughs uproariously and I turn pink with embarrassment. Eduardo goes on, ‘Karlen, she tell me we are taking a father and son for this trip!’ Brian is suddenly wide awake, his face an owl-like expression of amazement.

  ‘Karlen thinks you are twenty years maybe, John. She say, how can Lebanon men, even terror men, take a child of ten for prison?’

  Karlen remains dubious until I show her my passport. As I put it back in a pocket I cannot resist turning to Brian.

  ‘You know, these people are very perceptive and sensitive. I think we’ll get on very well. Don’t you, Old-timer?’

  He glowers at me for a moment before performing a favourite mime he uses when he thinks I am talking nonsense. He puts his hands down by his chest and starts rotating them up to his mouth as if controlling a massive tongue.

  ‘Roll it up and put it away, John!’

  If I was beginning to feel that the desert was yielding up some of its secrets and becoming less frighteningly empty, I had yet a thing or two to learn. Climbing a steep incline in a narrow road and turning onto a short but level expanse, we pressed ahead. The road seemed to disappear between two huge boulders at either side. Suddenly Eduardo braked and pulled over, pointing to a small shelf at the side of one of the boulders. ‘Come,’ he insisted and we both climbed out of the jeep. Where he had pointed there was a small, crudely constructed grotto, the like of which I had not seen before. A single cross inside was made from the tied-together roots of some long-dead shrub. On it, several small, weird posies of flowers had been bound with gaudy ribbon. Nearby I spotted the remains of a transistor radio. There, a single green plant in a brown plastic pot, like something you would buy in a supermarket, was still thriving. The place had the look of a rubbish tip. Plastic cups, plastic knives and forks were littered about. There was the headless body of a small plastic doll and other doll-like things which looked as if they had been made from the rags of old clothing. Several small illustrations of the
Virgin Mary were framed in cheap plastic, and an equally cheap set of rosary beads was draped over the cross. At the foot of the shrine were a few Mass cards in Spanish with the faces of long-dead saints staring out of them. Other miscellaneous items were scattered about, the significance of which I couldn’t fathom.

  But the most arresting memorial was a piece of cardboard on which something had been written in red felt-tip pen. The handwriting was big and awkward. I asked Eduardo to translate. He explained that it was a warning and a curse: ‘“Anyone who moves anything will be haunted by the ghosts of the dead and many very, very bad things will happen to them,”’ he quoted to us. It had been printed in red, I was told, to make it look as though it had been written in blood.

  When I asked our guides if they believed in the curse, Eduardo lowered his eyes in a silent gesture of acknowledgement. Then he went back to the jeep and returned with an empty bottle and the huge plastic container in which we carried our own spare water. He filled the bottle and deposited it near the cross before pouring lavish amounts of water onto the plant. I completely understood what he was doing but when I asked him for whom he was leaving the bottle of water, he simply said, ‘Whoever needs.’

  ‘Even the ghosts?’

  ‘They must drink also.’

  As we prepared to drive off I thought of that little, crudely constructed memorial. It seemed to me that whoever had died here must have been a child. Though how or why it had died I could only speculate and at this moment I didn’t feel the need of an answer. Instead I wanted my spirit guide to leave a gift for the child ghost who must be dreadfully lonely waiting for people to come along this forgotten desert road and leave her some presents. I read these lines for Neruda to take to her:

  The harsh noon of the great sands

  has arrived:

  The world is naked,

  broad, sterile, and clean to the farthest

  sandy frontiers:

  listen to the brittle sound

  of the live salt, alone in the salt marshes:

  the sun shatters its crystals in the empty

  expanse and the earth rattles with the

  moaning salt’s dry and muffled sound.

  The monotony and the barrenness of these places dry up the soul a little. In a curious way, I was glad of the respite of that little memorial. In its own way, it refreshed the soul. Perhaps that’s why I asked Neruda to take those words of his. Consolation is about sharing loneliness and making it bearable.

  We are surprised and amused to see a road sign in the middle of nowhere, pointing in various directions with many place names. It seems that there are a fair few little settlements out here in the wilds. Political parties have painted slogans on the rocks. These latter-day geoglyphs really do seem ridiculous – talk about marginal constituencies.

  At around 1,000 metres, bedraggled, thin cacti appear and, as we rise higher and the temperature drops, they become profuse, increasing in size and strength to cover the valley sides. Microclimates proliferate: there are lush little valleys with fiercely running streams, much greenery and giant eucalyptus trees, alongside barren mountain areas.

  We have a picnic lunch by the old church at Tignamar. The church, thatched with pampas grass, is all that remains of the village apart from some desolate little mud-brick structures, once family homes. Higher up the hill is a newer village but we stay beside the stream that roars over the stones of its wide bed.

  ‘In 1973 there was a terrible flood,’ Karlen explains. ‘It swept away the old village.’

  Thinking of that larger, political flood, the coup d’état led by General Pinochet that swept over the whole country in the same year, I ask Karlen about the ‘military period’. Since my disappointing exchange with Katia I had done some more reading. The far north, El Norte Grande, home to Chile’s great nitrate and copper mines, had long been the centre of radical leftist politics. Much of the support for the Marxist government of President Salvador Allende, whom Pinochet ousted, had come from this region.

  ‘You were born a year after the coup, Karlen. What was it like growing up under the dictatorship?’

  ‘It was better than if Chile had gone like Cuba,’ she replies abruptly.

  ‘But what about the oppression, the torture – all the people who were “disappeared”?’

  ‘With Communism we would all have been poor.’ She speaks in a monotone as if brainwashed on the subject, unable, or unwilling, to accept that, unlike Cuba, the Chileans had voted to have a Marxist government.

  ‘The people could have elected another government without denying themselves freedom for a decade and a half,’ I argue. ‘Surely everyone thinks that now?’

  ‘Pinochet brought prosperity and stability – the Communists were destroying everything. My father says we nearly starved,’ she says in the same monotone. ‘There was no choice.’

  ‘There is always choice,’ barks Brian. Eyes flashing he says to her, ‘You want to be a lawyer?’ Karlen nods. ‘Well, doesn’t the word justice mean anything to you?’

  Impervious to Brian’s angry tone she states, ‘The Communists were not just.’

  Brian shakes his head in exasperation and walks off to the stream.

  I turn to Edurdo: ‘What do you think?’

  ‘All politics is no good.’

  We had finished lunch and were about to leave when Eduardo stood up and walked some distance, then threw down some bread and cheese and the remains of his half-eaten peach at his feet. From where she was sitting, Karlen did the same thing, casting some bread and cheese to the ground around her. She noticed my curiosity and said, ‘Something for Patcha Mama.’ She told me this was the great earth mother and we should always be kind to her for she had, after all, given us this food. I did likewise. As I cast away the remains of my lunch, I was taken by the notion from the mists of my own Irish history, that as St Patrick and those first Christians found when they attempted to convert the pagan Irish, they too would not accept Christ without Mary. The pre-Christian Irish had their own ‘Mama’ like many peoples throughout the world. They could not accept the convoluted paternalism of this new religion without a Patcha Mama.

  As we drive ever higher during the afternoon, the dull brown valley sides are now often streaked with mineral content. At times there are great swathes of colour and as we move from one small valley to the next the hue turns from green to yellow to blue and red. From a bird’s eye view this place must look like a terrestrial rainbow.

  Some areas have many caves scoured out of the limestone rock by water erosion. I try climbing up to one that has clearly a man-made wall across it. As I scramble my legs begin to feel heavy, then wobbly and I start to doubt my balance. I give up at a steep scree but am filled with archaeological fervour, thinking of the ancients who lived here hunting and trading – and building walls round caves – as much as 9,000 years ago. I look around the valley with its steep sides and many caves, hoping to make a discovery, to find something special that no-one has seen or touched for thousands of years – a mummy perhaps. Below me Eduardo and Karlen are looking among the small rocks at the road’s edge. Karlen straightens and waves me down. She gives me a little shard of patterned pottery. Although it is a common enough find, I am delighted with the discovery.

  Brian is asleep in the back of the jeep. I am surprised at this. Although I have not been able to resist encouraging Karlen and Eduardo in their growing belief that Bri does little beyond dozing, telling them about the times when he would be snoring despite great ructions beyond the door of a cell and then claim, fiercely, the next morning that he had not slept a wink, I am surprised that he is so tired today. Normally he likes to look around for old bits and pieces up for the asking – what he calls ‘honest pruck’.

  The skies cloud over and the air fills with a misty rain, giving the occasional villages a surly atmosphere. We come across them suddenly, turning a hairpin bend to see a narrow valley with a stream bustling through it and above us a narrow cleft laid out in terraces, a couple
of raggedy horses grazing by the road and then the small village itself. Many of these date back to pre-Columbian times, when this region was the home of the Aymara people.

  Since the colonial era there have been concerted efforts to destroy the old indigenous cultures and to create a homogeneous Chilean identity. Yet Karlen shows us examples of the inevitable compromise between the existing beliefs of the native population and the Christian tradition of the conquistadors.

  ‘Around the doors you see carvings like totem poles including images of nature’s gods as well as angels,’ she tells us as we stand in the deserted square of Belén before a whitewashed church. ‘Also, for the old religion, fertility was very important. In the churches of these high villages, the bell tower, as a phallic symbol, is kept separate from the “female” body of the church.’

  In case we do not grasp this idea, Eduardo points at the main building then forms a large circle with both hands which he positions over his groin. Next he points at the bell tower before clasping a hand above the elbow of the other arm and raising its forearm rigid, fist clenched in the universal sign of virility.

  ‘Thank you, Eduardo,’ sighs Karlen, eyes rolling heavenward.

  These small villages are neat and often organized on a grid system. Yet with the cool misty air about us they seem quite eerie. We wander around the side streets, mainly just dirt tracks with little streams meandering down the middle, where most of the houses are boarded up. Karlen tells us the familiar tale of remote communities the world over. Most young people have moved to the big cities, on the coast and further south, for education and work. But families do spend time in the villages tending the terraces and then sell their produce in Arica and it seems there has been an upsurge of interest in Aymara culture among the young. They meet in Arica to speak their language, play their music and eat traditional meals. As it is the villages are ghostly and remote and we walk around in that hushed way, as if in a church. It is a shock and a relief to turn a corner and hear the chattering of neighbours at the open front door of one of the houses.