Between Extremes

by Brian Keenan

  I was also beginning to sense, however tentatively, Pablo Neruda’s passionate commitment to the mestizo and the indigenous peoples of Chile and also his fervent support for classical Communism. There was one thing I felt saved him from the rage of the propagandist, and that was his sensuous love of the land he grew up in. At every point of his poetry he talks of ‘his’ people as the real treasure of Chile.

  The natural history section of the Regional Museum includes a freak shark embryo with two heads while an anthropology exhibit shows the curious pointed skulls of the Chinchorro people. They bound them from birth to change the shape – as part of their group identity and because it was deemed attractive. There is an extensive display of old photographs and relics from the great days of the nitrate mines. One of the leading figures of that time was James ‘Santiago’ Humberstone who ran a vast nitrate plant just outside Iquique. Here is the man’s three-piece suit. Made of black, heavy wool it makes me feel clammy even in the cool confines of the museum.

  There is no sign of such hot garb when we wander down to look at the packed beaches. There is a stench of fish but happily it is tempered, as is the heat, by a land breeze.

  On the outskirts of town, modern, brightly coloured tower blocks rise up against the coastal hills that reach almost 2,000 feet.

  ‘Those flats with all that green, blue and red look like the mineral deposits we saw in the valleys round Lauca,’ I say.

  ‘Maybe,’ muses Brian. ‘To me they speak of man’s need to bring his own colours to this dull landscape.’

  There is nothing dull about the Centro Español where we dine that evening. It is an amazing Moorish edifice with great wall paintings depicting scenes from Cervantes. Looking at the ungainly, comic figures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza riding their beasts puts us in mind of the trek we will be joining in a few weeks’ time. Sitting in such an ornate restaurant, surrounded by elegant diners, it is hard to come to terms with all the wilderness we have travelled through. There is a sense of disorientation at moments like this when we are essentially in comfortable Europe yet really just a mile from the desert. In a short while we will be going high into the mountains on horseback. At times our schedule seems to dominate everything. This is certainly true for me: I am constantly running through our itinerary, rechecking whether we need to get tickets in advance and wondering whether we are missing some important aspect of Chile.

  The Moorish building was a bar-cum-restaurant. It was full of richly carved woods and huge brown leather sofas which you could disappear into. It also had the usual Arab feature of tall ceilings. All around the bar, along the stairs and in the restaurant were fabulous representations of that intricate symmetry of which the Arab mind is such a master. And hanging on the wall above where we sat were two massive and finely executed pictures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza!

  When one is travelling non-stop for long periods you don’t really taste food when you sit down to eat it, you’re usually too tired or hungry. But whatever I had been eating up in the Bolivian foothills and now in this desert landscape was beginning to take its toll.

  ‘You’re doing a lot of running to the toilet!’ John said.

  I nodded and commented that the name of Iquique was baby-talk for my condition.

  ‘Tough shit,’ said John. ‘We really need to sort out what we’re doing over the next few days.’

  As John talked about our plans, I studied the quiet animation in his face and thought of his comic dismissal of my rumbling bowels. I thought of our time together in Beirut when I had been seriously ill and John had been anxious I might die within a few days. His ministrations to me then had been unrelenting and deeply moving. On one occasion, I remember him placing his hands on my stomach and praying earnestly for my recovery. I smiled to myself. No matter how he shrugged off my illness now, I would never forget that moment.

  I feel quite thrown when we receive a phone call just as we are turning in. Friends of acquaintances of Brian’s have just come back to their flat in Iquique from Santiago. We are leaving tomorrow so the only time to meet is now. We take a taxi to their building.

  Frank and Noni have a grand flat looking over the sea. It is one of only two occupied in a vast block owned by the company Frank works for, Anglo American. He is in charge of setting up the biggest mining project in the world, inland and high in the Andes. Frank has worked as a mining engineer in Africa and all over South America. He has been an expat for thirty years or so yet still seems very in touch with his Irish roots. A big man with neatly groomed grey hair and spectacles, he speaks in a deep, rumbling voice that often turns to a chuckle. He fights his corner well in the face of our cynicism about the multinational’s concern for the environment.

  ‘Countries like Chile could not develop their mineral potential without venture capitalism,’ he insists and goes on, ‘The days when the multinationals just dug out the goods and cleared off leaving a scarred landscape are gone. A big part of my job in preparing the mine site is to ensure that at every stage we do as little damage as possible and that we will eventually leave it as close to virgin as is humanly possible.’

  We hope he is right. Certainly he believes what he says. Noni is a teacher, an outgoing and hilarious woman who makes us very welcome indeed. It is five in the morning when we eventually head back to the hotel. As we leave their building and look up to the two isolated sets of lights from the occupied apartments I cannot help feeling that Frank and Noni, though obviously happy, are themselves isolated. Theirs is a strange life.

  One aspect of their terrific hospitality is the offer of the use of their flat in Santiago. For some reason I have reservations that I find hard to articulate. Perhaps it is the sense of obligation. Brian thinks this is mad.

  ‘I don’t want to be paying for a hotel when I don’t have to,’ he says as we get ready for bed.

  ‘But we’ve already budgeted for the hotel in Santiago,’ I argue, still not clear why I am bothered about it.

  Bri shakes his head in weary bemusement. ‘Look, in the apartment we’ll be able to come and go as we please – nobody’ll be wanting to get in and do the room. We’ll be able to relax, cook meals for ourselves when we want, and eat what we want. As for the saving we make on the hotel, we can rebudget that into some other contingencies.’

  I am noticing, more clearly than before, differences in the way we look at things. This clarity is not surprising now that we are out in the real world. In captivity they would not have been so important. There were far fewer, hardly any, real plans to make. Fantasies are endlessly negotiable: two people can sit side by side studying the same imaginary view and that mutual vision can still accommodate any number of either individual’s particular desires.

  I have been feeling responsible for our arrangements which, perhaps, is not fair on Brian. We have not argued but there are moments when he seems tense. Maybe he too is finding it hard to adapt to this new journey together.

  He hates the constraint of plans. He likes to take things as they come and, when the mood suits, run with them. On the other hand he is far more anxious about getting to bus stations or airports in good time than me.

  Despite the fact that we were out until the early hours Brian is up first thing. ‘I’m away round to Frank and Noni’s for that key,’ he chirps happily, ‘then I’ll get some boxes for our stuff. By then maybe you’ll be up out of your pit.’

  Happy to let him get organized, I slump back on my pillow still feeling exhausted. Mildly irritated by his good spirits it occurs to me that all the cat-napping he does may give him the reserves for such early morning activity. He has a remarkable ability to leave his bed.

  We are going to use the boxes to send some redundant clothes and books home. It is a relief to be lightening our loads somewhat. Either we brought too much gear or we should have larger bags. I had hoped my medium-sized rucksack would suffice, but already it needs both of us to sit on it to shut it. There is no room for anything acquired on the trip. A few T-shirts and a couple of
finished books can be dispatched home. I have been spending a lot of time trying to work out how best to distribute my belongings. Ideally everything fits into one not too large bag. I even bought a cheap waistcoat that has many pockets into which I can fit all manner of stuff. It feels good to have wallets, passports, etc. close about me. I also have a shoulder bag which takes these things if the going gets too hot. I have a huge supply of films, notebooks and batteries for my Psion organizer, with which I am writing my notes and diary. I want to be the perfect traveller, seasoned, rugged yet with a certain élan. As it is I feel slightly daft. How can one be adequately equipped in a country where you move through every conceivable type of terrain and climate?

  As we were intending to journey from the extreme north down to Puerto Williams in Tierra del Fuego, the most southerly inhabited place on the continent, we had brought clothes suitable for such climatic extremes as we would encounter. But it was becoming obvious that we had planned unwisely. Our journey south would involve many bus and train rides, sea trips and of course the terrifying adventure across the Andes on horseback. The thought of humping these bags around every point on the compass was not encouraging.

  I scoured the streets of Iquique in search of some cardboard boxes. I was taking my role as Sancho Panza to heart. There I was, in the pink light of early morning, rifling through the litter left outside the shops and offices.

  When I returned to our hotel, John was in an agitated state. He floundered about the room packing and unpacking, indecisively declaring, ‘I’ll keep this and send that home, or no, maybe I’ll keep that.’ I watched as he feverishly packed and unpacked the same clothes and laughed when the maid arrived with the freshly laundered shirts he had left with her the previous evening.

  The clean shirts added to John’s dilemma, and I could no longer control my laughter when John suddenly discovered that his smart ‘traveller’s trousers’ were missing. ‘Where are my trousers, where are my trousers?’ he cried dementedly. I left him with his wardrobe and went to sort out my own.

  My continued hopes for linguistic enlightenment receive another rebuttal at the post office. I want to ask the woman behind the counter if she speaks English. As she looks at me baffled by my few words of Spanish, I realize that instead of saying ‘Do you speak English?’ I have said ‘I speak English.’ Brian takes over with a more direct approach.

  ‘English?’ he barks.

  The lady waggles her head uncertainly. She does have a few words which is most fortunate as the posting process is quite a palaver. We have to go outside to buy brown paper and sticky tape. Brian had managed to find a couple of reasonably sized cardboard boxes, but they are in danger of splitting with the amount of stuff we have crammed into them.

  ‘Perhaps we’d better go back to the hotel to wrap this lot up,’ I suggest.

  Brian shakes his head. ‘No, let’s do it here.’

  ‘Where? There aren’t any tables free.’

  ‘There’ll do,’ he says, striding to an empty bit of floor and sitting down cross-legged. Initially we try taping up a box each, but the paper keeps unravelling just as one is about to apply the sticky tape. What’s more, as we have to move out of the way of other startled customers, we end up in wild contortions as if we are playing some new version of Twister. After a few minutes we find ourselves looking at each other’s red faces under our hats across a messy heap of exploding boxes, string and brown wrapping paper.

  ‘One box at a time, I reckon.’

  ‘Good idea,’ agrees Bri.

  Eventually the wrapping is done and we struggle to our feet to rejoin the queue at the lady’s desk. She gives us a form and points to indicate that we now need to go out of the building to another department.

  ‘What now?’ asks Brian.

  ‘Customs, I think,’ I reply, trying to listen to the woman and read the form. We locate the customs department in an alley beside the post office. Here there are no English-speakers and my frantic flicking back and forth through phrase book and dictionary, trying to communicate, word by sporadic word, makes little headway. Brian steps forward again and his loud mantra of ‘Irlanda! T-shirts!’ gets us the necessary stamp on the form. We return once more to the lady at the front desk and our parcels are dispatched.

  Maybe it is because I am still tired from our late night but walking back to the hotel I feel self-conscious and silly in my travelling gear, hat and waistcoat. People shout at us from a passing car. It may well have been good humoured but, feeling vulnerable, I assume they are taking the mick out of the gringos. Brian just mutters ‘Bugger off’ as the car speeds past.

  Santa Laura is a name full of wistfulness and romance. It made me think of a magnificent ship rolling across an ocean, not a crumbling disused mine in the desert. Approaching the mine, its silhouette against the expansive blue sky and greying desert looked more like the image its name had evoked than I could have believed. Only it wasn’t a ship but rather an old gypsy caravan riding across the sands.

  Our taxi from Iquique parked about half a mile from the site. As we neared its ghostly edifices, our boots biting hard into desert crust, the lumbering hulk of Santa Laura looked like a huge mechanical dinosaur that the winds had unearthed and given a sandy coating of dusty fur. For some reason, I thought of my school science lessons of magnets and iron filings.

  Santa Laura is the only thing that breaks the continuity of desert and sky. Without the perspective of its gaunt galleries it would be impossible to distinguish between earth and air. The place had an aura which it declared as its own.

  Fascinated, we trudged through this blasted cathedral of iron and lumber until the presence of it overwhelmed me. I felt I could almost hear the roar of its steam lungs belching out across the emptiness. I could smell the air acrid with nitrate. Everywhere was the ghostly din of hammers, gouges, shovels and pumps. The noise of iron under pressure was amplified deafeningly in the desert waste. Beneath it I imagined the voices of men cursing and sweating in the relentless heat.

  I submerged myself in this opera of agony and heard the ghosts of Neruda’s campesinos and mestizos, a chorus of the dead.

  First comes José Cruz Achachalla. José was a starving child when he walked across the great sierras from Bolivia wrapped in coca leaves to protect him from the elements. The vultures that followed him seemed kinder than the white masters who had beaten his mother daily. The miners took him in and he was apprenticed in the mine’s dark galleries. Fingernail by fingernail he gathered the hidden tin, knowing neither where nor why the silvery ingots were dispatched.

  But José had only traded hunger for hunger and poverty for poverty. For forty years he beetled in the bowels of the earth. When he joined with his comrades for another peso on his salary, he tasted the red wind of police truncheons on his back.

  Now José is out of work with nowhere to go. No-one knows him in the village he left so long ago. He is as old as the stones and cannot cross the mountains again. He lives by the roadside now, a cripple begging crusts. José has reached the end of the line. His voice screams across the still desert, ‘Let them bury me in tin, the tin alone knows me.’

  Next comes Cristobol Miranda, who tells his own story. ‘I am the shoveller of nitrate snow. We are the heroes of an acid-etched dawn, subject to the fates of death, receiving only for our reward the torrential nitrate. Into our breast the acid enters bloating hearts and rotting lungs. My eyes are burned, I see only shadows, my soul’s in the shovel that rises loading and unloading, blood and snow, while around me, only the desert stops.’

  In tattered clothes Eufrosino Ramiriz leads blind Cristobol to sit in his dark corner. He declares, ‘We took the hot copper sheets with our hands and fed them to the power shovel. Because of this men lost feet and hold out stumps for hands. But I was given the gate when my crippled hands could not lift the scalding sheets. Listen to my heart, the copper crushes it. I can hardly walk. I look for work I cannot find. I am bent still carrying invisible sheets of copper that are killing me.’ />
  From out of the shadows a broken giant of a man lumbers forward. For a moment he looks upon the ghosts of Cristobol and Eufrosino. Then with a voice crumbling like broken stones in his mouth, he says:

  ‘From afar you will see nothing but sand banks, then you will see structures, cables, railings with their trucks and miles of rubble.’ Then he gasps deeply for a breath. ‘Fatigue and suffering are not visible. They are moving underground, crushing beings. When I entered I could lift the shaft with my shoulders, but when I left I was yellow, hunchbacked and withered. Antimony consumed my innards. I walked like a starving ghost. They buried me out there unmarked, no-one can tell you where because the sand and wind batter and devour crosses. And there they left me where the nitrate still eats me, even in death.’

  I found a small graveyard adjacent to the overseer’s house. The fossilized trunks of a few trees still stand in front of it. I could also discern the long-neglected remains of a small garden. I wondered what that bleak garden must have meant to those who laboured here. Did they revere it like a holy place? Did this feeble garden make the overseer more powerful than his lash and the batons of his police? But even as I was thinking and pondering the desolate beauty of this garden I heard a soft woman’s voice behind me.

  ‘I am Margarita Naranjo. I am dead. I spent my entire life here, my parents before me and my brothers and sisters too. We gave our life-blood to the American company. One night they came for no reason and took away our men to the concentration camp. When they dragged my husband away and beat him into the truck, I felt I could no longer breathe. There is much betrayal and much injustice here. From that day I knew I could not eat until he was returned to me. When my friends remonstrated with the overseer, he roared with laughter at their pleading. I keep sleeping and dying and clenching my teeth that no soup or water can enter me.’ Suddenly the unearthly woman’s soft voice turned wondrous, and questioningly she said, ‘He never returned, he never returned, and little by little I died away and they buried me. I remember the old women weeping and singing a song I had sung so often. I look for my husband Antonio, he wasn’t there, they didn’t allow him to come. I’m here dead, there’s nothing but solitude about me. But I shall sing my wind song until Antonio comes for me.’