Between Extremes

by Brian Keenan

  The labourers were oblivious of me and I alone seemed free of the frightening lure of the idol. I looked up to the uppermost ridge of the mine’s cliff-like walls. The perimeter lights were indistinguishable from the stars in heaven.

  But morning came and I awoke unmindful of where I had been. On my way to breakfast I passed the picture I had seen the previous evening, and briefly images of my dreaming sleep echoed back to me. I bumped into John as he was leaving for the mine, and returned to my room to pack for our onward journey. Neruda’s poetry lay open on the bed where it had fallen as I drifted into sleep.

  It was a grimy multitude,

  hunger and shreds, solitude,

  that excavated the gallery.

  That night I didn’t see

  the countless wounds file by

  along the mine’s cruel rim.

  But I was part of those torments.

  It is early in the morning as I sit outside the office for the Chuquicamata copper mine along with a few other tourists, Chileans, Germans and French. Brian decided against coming and is back at the hotel reading Neruda, or more likely kipping, I suspect. I am jealous, having slept badly last night despite being very tired. After driving for ages virtually on the flat, it is easy to forget how high we still are here – 2,700 metres – and I could not get off to sleep since every time I lay down I had to take deep breaths. When I did get off to sleep I woke every hour or so and had many strange dreams including one in which my watch was broken. The dream had been so clear that this morning I checked my watch against Bri’s. They were wildly out.

  ‘God,’ I had exclaimed, ‘that’s amazing! I dreamed my watch was bust and it is. No, wait a minute, mine says seven o’clock which sounds right, yours says one o’clock. The dream was almost there – it’s your watch that’s bust!’

  ‘No, it isn’t!’

  ‘Look!’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, I know. Mine is still on Dublin time. I like to know what time it is back home, know what Audrey will be doing, keeps her close. You know?’

  Curiously enough, as I wandered round this town before coming to the mine I noticed that all the clocks on the major buildings had stopped. Odd.

  I was driven here from Calama by Carlo. A nice, chubby man in his late fifties, he tells me he was born and bred here but is now a US citizen.

  ‘So have you come home for good now?’

  ‘No. I am here every September to April and drive the taxi. Then I go back to Connecticut and drive a truck.’ He has one of those high-pitched, lisping voices that would be bang on for a Hollywood Central Casting ‘Mehican bandeetoh’.

  ‘Do you have family in the States?’ I ask as we near the mine.

  ‘Been married fife times! But now I alone, last wife she die.’

  ‘Oh, I am sorry.’

  ‘No problem. Thass life, inneet? I meet you here after you do mine.’

  We tourists file into a room where we are issued with hard hats and sit down to watch a video, in Spanish then English, about the mine. It is all very technical stuff. Suffice it to say they dig up a hell of a lot of rock, process a hell of a lot of copper, and make a hell of a lot of money. The mine is a colossal hole; the largest open-cast mine in the world. It has been going since the early years of the twentieth century and has another thirty years’ reserves. It is over 5 kilometres wide already and 750 metres deep. It will be 1,100 metres deep at the end which means, I think, that it will be deeper than the height of anything in the UK except Ben Nevis. Given the altitude they’re starting from, even when they reach the bottom the Chuqui miners will still be higher than anywhere in Britain.

  Despite the scale the mine is, surprisingly, not exciting but depressing. The refining area is like a city; a nightmare vision of huge sheds, conveyor belts, rock-crushing pyramids, pipes and chimneys spewing smoke and flame. The dull green slag heaps ooze wreaths of black smoke as great trucks crawl across them like cockroaches. It looks what it is, a perversion of nature. I am as glad as anyone that we have plenty of copper but, environmental concerns aside, watching the workers, covered head to foot in overalls, hard hats and breathing apparatus, I have the feeling that human beings have created something here beyond their control. This is the ultimate consequence of the industrial revolution.

  On the way back to Calama, Carlo tells me he left in 1970.

  ‘Oh,’ I say, ‘before the troubles?’

  ‘Yes, my family suffer very much in those time.’

  ‘They were socialists?’

  ‘Eh? No! Is before Pinochet they suffer. The Chaos!’

  ‘I heard that times were very difficult. But wasn’t the dictatorship the wrong way to go?’

  ‘Sure, many bad thinns happen – here and other places. But is all secret. Mose people juss wan food. My family have money, but no food. When you ungry you donn care who give you bread. Yes?’

  His pragmatism is more convincing than Karlen’s dogged acceptance of Pinochet. The situation was obviously dire. It still seems odd though that all the oppression and torture gives rise to so little comment. We carry on in silence until we reach Calama when he whizzes me round the town, pointing out the busy bars where the waitresses, wearing shorts and tight tops, stand at the doorways. This is a novel sight in Chile; mostly people seem to behave and dress with great decorum. But this is a big mining town so perhaps one should expect things to be a little wilder here.

  When John returned we had a light lunch and he complained about his trip to the mine. He had paid a few dollars for a tour which simply amounted to being loaded onto a truck and driven around the periphery. All he could see were yellow trucks moving about the mine floor like they were Dinky toys. It had obviously been a real anticlimax. I told him about my dream.

  ‘Thanks a bunch. Maybe I should have stayed here and given you and Pablo Neruda the few dollars instead,’ he said.

  It was time to move on and leave Chuquicamata’s gaping hole behind. We waited for several hours in Calama’s dust-choked streets. The booking office for the bus doubled as a grocery store-cum-café. It was hardly an office as such but more a corner shop that sold everything including tickets. So we had to queue for our travel passes along with the locals queuing for everything from babies’ dummies to back-breaking bags of flour. Grateful to be rid of our baggage we stashed it behind the counter and went walking.

  Despite the element of wildness there remains an overriding sense of safety and honesty and we do not worry about leaving our bags at the rather chaotic bus company office while we kill time waiting for the next departure for San Pedro. We stroll around a large market where you can buy almost anything from live poultry to music tapes. There are many, many clothes stalls whose stock is pretty old-fashioned. We look at hats.

  ‘I’d like something more substantial than this straw thing for the mountains,’ says Brian, trying on various types. He scowls at the tiny mirror the stallholder puts in front of him as he dons a wide-brimmed stetson. ‘Nah, I don’t think so, what d’you reckon?’

  ‘Ludicrous!’

  We saunter on through the arcades until I spot a stall selling the knee-length, stiff leather chaps some of the cowboys or huasos wear.

  ‘Now they would be really good for horse trekking,’ I say. ‘They are a bit pricey though.’

  I hold up a pair, the black leather glistening, and know I want them. It’s partly because I love having the right gear but also because I can see myself looking the part wearing them up on a horse. Brian is watching me and knows I am about to buy.

  ‘Where are you going to put them?’

  ‘On my legs, you fool!’

  ‘Not on the trek! Where are you going to put them now? Don’t you think you’ve got enough clobber already? We’ve just sent a load of stuff home. Do you really want to cart those things all over the Atacama Desert and beyond?’

  He’s right, of course; it would not be sensible. Damn him for his practicality.

  We were on time for the bus, but obviously the bus was not on time for us. We w
alked in a radius circling the depot, fearful that we would miss our connection. Each time we returned the numbers of people waiting had grown. Our anxiety made our perambulations shorter. It wasn’t the number of travellers so much as their baggage that worried us. Whole families were here with generations of luggage packed in massive blue and white bags that looked like squat mattresses.

  Calama was obviously a transit town. It was important because of Chuquicamata and drew many people because of the work and the availability of goods. But to me Calama was not a place to live. It was only a place to work. Curiously, as we walked about the town, I noticed that, apart from the market and a few mediocre grocery shops, only the hairdressing emporiums were open. I suppose wealth brings with it affectation, or whatever it is that dissociates people from their natural landscape. Everywhere we walked were billboard hoardings advertising well-known trade names which were synonymous with North America.

  Back at the bus depot, European backpackers were obvious among the raucous family groups of Chilean travellers. I had forgotten how skinny a land Chile was, and that these ‘real’ travellers could have been en route from Argentina or from anywhere else in Chile or South America.

  As I watched the underbelly of the dilapidated bus being stuffed with baggage and belongings, I wondered if it would ever be able to move. The locals had no time for us incomers and noisily jockeyed to ensure their voluminous bags were stored before any of ours. It wasn’t the fact that Don John had packed away some of his apparel in my bag that worried me, it was where it might be stored and how long it would take to unpack this whale of a bus to find it when we reached our destination. One look at the faces of our fellow travellers told me that they were going far beyond where we would leave them. Don John nonchalantly did not bother his backside about my worries.

  After some anxious moments jostling with the locals, I finally got our bags carefully stowed away near the front of the overstuffed luggage compartment. I was insistent that they remain close to the door. When the driver who was half-heartedly overseeing the loading tried to shove them to the rear, I hastily dragged them back to the front. He seemed unimpressed and left me to my idiosyncrasy.

  After all the luggage had been packed and the doors locked, I boarded the bus and flopped into my seat. Some of the locals were looking at me questioningly. I knew that my concerns were irrational and that I hardly understood them myself, never mind explaining them to others.

  Our buckled bus roared out of Calama in a burst of black smoke. It didn’t bode well for our onward journey, but the many faces ranged about me seemed unperturbed. For endless miles we were inundated with the driver’s battered radio blasting out tijuana brass band sambas, chattering Indians and crying children, while our very own San Pedro Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang moved on and on through the Atacaman landscape.

  The monotony of what passed outside my window made me yearn for the confusion of voices and faces at our destination. No matter where I looked, I could see no sign of life. The word ‘desert’ derives from the Latin desere meaning to abandon or forsake, and ‘wilderness’ may have given rise to the verb ‘wilder’ meaning ‘to cause to be perplexed’. The names of some of the world’s deserts reflect these terms. I thought of the Skeleton Coast, the Empty Quarter and the Devil’s Playground. For the several hours of our journey, it seemed that the meaning of those names was written on the scorched earth before people had even found these words or their significance for themselves.

  In my reverie, suddenly I began to understand my worries about our bags locked in the underbelly of the bus. I was sweating, and not simply from the heat. Rather it was from a memory of those terrifying journeys we made through the Lebanon, squashed in the undercarriage of a lorry, taped up like mummies, baking in our own sweat and smothering in the stench of diesel fumes. But the memory washed over me as quickly as it had arrived. I looked out onto the burning landscape.

  The Atacama has only one counterpart in the whole of the earth’s geography, the Namib in Africa. They are the world’s only coastal deserts. For millennia, waves from the world’s largest oceans have hammered the coasts of Africa and South America making them among the most untamed and desolate places on earth.

  Paradoxically for a desert, the atmosphere of the Atacama is directly influenced by the sea. The presence of the icy Humboldt current flowing from the Antarctic and following the west coast of South America creates a layer of moist air directly above the surface of the desert while a blanket of air heated by the sun hovers above it. This phenomenon is an inversion of the accepted laws of physics which state that air temperature decreases as elevation increases. But the Atacama is a contrary place in more ways than one because of this peculiar quirk of physical laws. It is a desert constantly immersed in thick fog blown in off the sea by prevailing winds caused by the rotation of the earth. Thus for many hours and for distances of up to fifty miles inland the desert is locked in the grip of fog-shrouded aridity. It is the kind of place where you could shave your beard off without any lather on your skin.

  And this inversion of the physical laws is not restricted solely to the interplay between land and sea but also between the air, the mountains and the land behind them. The Atacama resides in what scientists call a reversed rain shadow. Simply translated, this means that the extreme altitude of the Andes prevents moisture from crossing over to slake the parched wastes beyond.

  What could anyone expect from a place that turns natural law on its head and is persistently and remorselessly antipathetic to human needs?

  The bus ride to San Pedro de Atacama was long and tedious. I found the monotony of the recurrent landscape increasingly irritating. John, on the other hand, was oblivious to my state. He was furiously fingering his miniature laptop. What could he be writing about? What inspiration was framed in the window he was forever looking out of? I sat back to probe the source of my irritation. The emptiness of the landscape was certainly unstimulating but that did not satisfactorily explain my own feelings. Perhaps they had their origin in disappointment or even something stronger, like disillusion.

  I was expecting to be moved by the mystery of it all. Where was this magical desert that had illuminated the mind of the mystics? The literature of every language writes of the desert as a place of inner enlightenment and spiritual awakening. The American Wallace Stegner once wrote, ‘Deserts are not the country of big returns but are the country of spiritual healing, contemplation, meditation, solitude, quiet, awe, and peace of mind and body.’ I don’t know from where Stegner received his information, but at this moment I was feeling the complete opposite. I was not looking for religious affirmation, I was looking for inspiration, the inspiration that moved the pens of men like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry with his quasi-mystical night flights over the deserts of Africa. Where were T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom? I would have leaped through the roof of this baking bus just to see the shadow of one of them. Where was it all? Where was it? And what had so intrigued McCarthy that his fingers kept caressing the keyboard like it was some sacred tabulator? I saw nothing, and felt only the heat multiplying as it drummed on the window. For another hour I suffered while John’s fingers gently tapped away, until I could bear it no longer.

  ‘What do you find so fascinating anyway?’ It was more an explosion of my own frustration than a question.

  John looked at me for a moment and then without speaking, he winked slyly and tapped his nose with an all-knowing gesture.

  ‘Bollocks,’ I hissed as he returned to his keyboard and I lay back sweltering and uncomfortable, my head as empty as the desert outside.

  I tried to sleep but the air percolating into our bus made it impossible. In any case, John kept nudging me in the ribs.

  ‘Brian, we left the camanchaca behind many many miles ago, but your foghorn is disturbing everyone else on this bus!’

  I had given up on the desert and my expectations of it. Perhaps it had given up on me too. Even sleep, it seemed, had abandoned me. Only irritation and d
isillusionment remained.

  Thinking Neruda might give me some comfort, I leafed haphazardly through my copies of Isla Negra and the Canto General to see what I might find there. One of his poems, entitled ‘Atacama’, was too rich for me. It was swirling in such sensual and oblique imagery that I could not reconcile it with the landscape through which we were passing. It only added to the torment of my heat-baked brain.

  In another of his homages to the desert, he seems to fall on his knees in abject worship. His description of it is tinged with a bittersweet, overblown romanticism:

  A thousand years of silence in a wine glass

  Of calcareous blue, of distance and moon

  shape the night’s naked geography.

  Neruda declares he loves this wilderness but it is more than love, it is adoration and he states it repeatedly, mantra-like: ‘I love you, pure land, like so many contrary things I’ve loved’, and again, ‘I love you, pure sister of the ocean’. His chants of adoration build up like the response to the Mass, until he concludes:

  This was the world’s virile bosom

  And I loved the system of your unswerving form

  the extensive precision of your emptiness.

  It was enough. Here was John tumbling out acres of words beside me, while the desert around us crushed me with its nothingness. Every desert mystic from the invention of the written word was a frigging liar, and now even my confederate and invisible companion presented me with visions as sumptuous as a tropical night. How could this be the ‘world’s virile bosom’? Nothing could be nurtured here. Nothing would want to be nurtured here, for that matter.