Between Extremes

by Brian Keenan

  Before moving on we have a drink and snacks in the restaurant. Against the background of the grey sea, pelicans swoop over the waves and we talk of art and writing. Jorge, whose natural good spirits have revived, suddenly remembers that he met the great man as a little boy.

  ‘My mother took me to see “Tío Pablo”. I remember only that he had a deep voice – oh yes, and that he wore a poncho! How strange that I had forgotten this until today; maybe it’s because I am angry with the Foundation.’

  Brian has picked up a brochure containing Neruda’s self-portrait in words. Jorge translates it for us. It sounds good and yet, with the mix of feelings I have here, perhaps more pompous than purely honest. One phrase sticks in my head, though: ‘a rust-proof heart’. I like that. A noble notion. Certainly the general adoration of Neruda nowadays makes him the nation’s rust-proof heart. They seem to have jumped back to lionizing him while ignoring the intervening years that so devastated his ideals – indeed broke that heart. The accepted view appears to be that Neruda represents the real Chile: a place of poetry, freedom of spirit and international enterprise. The persecution and oppression was just an aberration, according to most. Timerman argues in Death in the South that this nostalgia allows people to deny the failure of the country and ignore the fact that the golden age of Chilean culture, the age of Neruda and others, was a precursor to the terror. Writing in 1987 he said that in order to understand and move beyond horror you have to dive into it, yet at that time Chile remained locked in a ‘cultural blackout’ where no artist was able to look beyond the banal aspects of the period of turmoil and create something profound. In an era of national tragedy, no-one was writing tragedies. Perhaps this lack of emotional engagement is not so surprising given the trauma of the terror.

  ‘Tomorrow I hope you will come to my house – I am having friends round for a barbecue. I think you will be interested in their view of these things,’ says Jorge, adding, ‘and they are all interested to hear about the Lebanese years.’

  Suddenly, his eyes flashing from his handsome, bearded face, Jorge speaks of his admiration for An Evil Cradling, becoming almost angry. ‘I was really pissed off at the end. What happened after your release? You had taken us on this incredible journey and then left us high and dry.’

  I could understand exactly what Jorge meant but my book was a story about imprisonment. Life after incarceration is another story altogether. For a start, I had not been sure how to write it. After all, I had needed a few years of liberated normality before I could write the epilogue to my experience. My years in Lebanon had taught me one thing and it remains with me today: life is not a race.

  ‘Things happen at their own pace,’ I said to Jorge. ‘Perhaps if you wait until we write our book about Chile, you might get some answers.’

  Valparaíso is a curious mix. The Navy Headquarters, where the ’73 coup was given the green light, dominates the main square. You turn from its broad classical façade, see the monument to the heroes of the War of the Pacific and there, just a hundred yards away, large ships loom up beyond the low-level harbour buildings. This was a great port until the Panama Canal was opened and still there are the office blocks for the stock exchange and the big banks. The country’s new parliament building is on the way out of town. A monster of a bunker, it looks more like a hideout for the powerful in times of unrest than a place where the people’s representatives will plan a healthy future.

  The city becomes more interesting as you rise up the steep gradients immediately behind the coastal strip. There are some monstrous 1960s blocks but also some elegantly faded colonial-style mansions. Up the steep hills the narrow streets twist and turn. The buildings are high and give the sense of a medieval hill town in Tuscany, though here the buildings are mostly constructed of wood and corrugated iron. There are hardly any cars and there is a mysterious atmosphere. We came across the graffiti ‘Muerte Romo’ (‘Death to Romo’). Osvaldo Romo was one of the Pinochet regime’s most notorious torturers. Before the coup he was a left-wing activist in a shanty town. Then, suddenly, he switched sides and found an awful calling in destroying the minds and bodies of his former comrades. It is easy to imagine that this city would have witnessed furtive scurryings during the dictatorship: it was a place to disappear in and in which to be disappeared.

  Now, though, the atmosphere feels friendly and I realize Brian is smitten too when I overhear him asking Jorge, ‘So what sort of prices do you pay for apartments round here?’ He turns to me: ‘Wouldn’t this be a great place to come during our winter and do some writing?’

  Jorge had told us that the Valparaíso views are better as you get poorer. Certainly as you go up, the neighbourhoods descend towards the shanty level. High above all there is another ship of a Neruda home. I do not care that it is closed. It looks ugly and ostentatious amid the small dwellings surrounding it.

  I was only partly aware of John’s antipathy towards Neruda but I could not imagine a more suitable place for the poet to have built a home for himself than on this Valparaíso hillside. The whole corpus of his poetry was dedicated to the poor and oppressed of Chile. Indeed he had put his own life at risk by his poems of political condemnation. If he was self-indulgent and flamboyant, then so be it. Life was one long love story to Neruda and perhaps he did see himself as a type of Byron, a romantic hero fired with idealism. Perhaps his ship-like house pushing out of this hamlet of poverty was inspiring and gave the people who lived in the shanty town surrounding it something to dream about . . . or maybe it’s me, maybe I’m the dreamer!

  But Valparaiso had that effect on me. The name itself carries a hint of mystery and romance, like the name ‘Scheherazade’ or the music of Ravel’s Bolero. I loved winding my way endlessly up and down the maze of street stairways and back alleys. They were everywhere, making a warren of the place, and each one ended in or opened out onto a different picture, a minute cameo of life and landscape. I felt I was walking through a picture book.

  Neruda sometimes described his fellow Chileans as having about them ‘the melancholy of a pain-haunted people’ but I thought it was only a poet’s fancy. In these side streets and open-air staircases you sensed life was teeming and that there was a story in every worn step.

  I still remember the smells of coffee, black pepper, ripe tomatoes and cinnamon mixed with the aroma of old, stale wine and tobacco. It was an irresistible perfumery of human tales waiting to be told. Like the one of Gauguin’s Peruvian grandmother who lived here for a while. What a tale she had to tell. And then there was Ben Gunn, the character in Treasure Island who first landed here after his long sojourn on the Juan Fernandez Islands. How well I remember that name! It was the first thing that McCarthy said to me in that Lebanese hell-hole.

  But the harbour of Valparaíso must have as many stories salted into its stonework. It was the home port to those fabulous whaling vessels that hunted Leviathan and spawned such masterpieces as Moby Dick. From this harbour much of the wealth of South America was shipped. In return it received vessels laden with the treasures and spices of the Orient.

  A statue of Arturo Prat, hero of the Chilean Navy, surveyed it all. From under his statue I look up onto those fragrant wooded hills. The shanty houses blur into a pastiche of colour, yellows and reds, cobalt and purple. The washing lines strung across the stairways and hung from balconies echo the ships’ flags fluttering in the harbour.

  This is a city of the muses. For poets, painters and composers. This is the artists’ enclave. This is Venice and Florence waiting to be discovered. This is a dream city waiting to be explored, and I dream it still.

  Jorge and Eunie have a great house in a shady street just ten minutes’ drive from our apartment. It is quite a party with their children Martin, Santiago, Domingo and Maria Jesus, and other relations and friends there. As we enjoy the food and wine the conversation wanders between mountains and what they do to us, the mountains we find to climb in ourselves, and past terror and present forgetting.

  One of the other gues
ts, Rodrigo Jordan Fuchs, led the Chilean expedition that scaled the Himalayan monster K2 in 1996. Jorge has produced a film of this successful adventure. Rodrigo is delighted that we are going to get a taste of the mountains, albeit the lazy way, on horseback. Forever concerned about gear, I ask his opinion on our lack of botas: would it be a problem? Rodrigo has a very pleasant face with a big grin and, for a hardened mountaineer, a surprisingly light build. He, who has overcome the logistics of mounting a massive expedition into the wilds of Jammu and Kashmir, manages not to laugh at my curious obsession and gravely advises that, in all probability, it is not a great cause for concern.

  As often on this trip we are fortunate that so many people speak good English. It gives us a chance to ask some of the many questions that have occurred to us as we have travelled. In captivity, when we so rarely had any sources of information, we often had to live in a land of accepted supposition. Whether this concerned our immediate predicament and Middle East politics or the development of the internal combustion engine, we sometimes just tried a good guess and carried on with our discussion of the topic on that basis. I always liked having access to reference books and now I feel at a loss without them.

  Easily available research sources do not, of course, ensure an understanding of the world in which we live. News Review has been covering the current debate over Pinochet’s retiring as commander-in-chief of the army and, as a former President, taking up a position as Senator for Life. Thanks to his own 1980 constitution, the senate already has guaranteed places for leading military figures. It seems astonishing that this old man, after the crimes of his regime have been made public through a national commission, can still have access to such power. Before that, in 1978, after five years of torturing, killing and ‘disappearing’ thousands of people, many innocent of even the mildest political thought, he instigated an amnesty law that absolved him and his henchmen from any charges of human rights abuse. Given that Pinochet is now old and that democracy has apparently returned strongly, it is extraordinary to an outsider that such laws are not overthrown and justice sought to heal the nation’s wounds.

  ‘You remember what I was saying about the Chaos?’ Jorge asks. ‘Well, many people still believe, as you have found in your travels, that Pinochet saved the country. For many he is a hero.’

  ‘President Frei says he will not tolerate any interference with the march to full, democracy,’ I quote from an article I have been reading. ‘So, if even the President thinks things need to be done, why can’t his government just change the appropriate laws?’

  ‘Well, on top of many people supporting Pinochet there is still the power of the military,’ picks up another guest, a journalist. ‘Many still worry that if we push too far too soon they will take power again. It is difficult, they weren’t beaten in a fight. They had their time, then handed back to civilians after Pinochet lost a plebiscite.’

  ‘But still, the torture and killing of thousands of people isn’t seen as having been necessary, surely? Whatever the rights and wrongs of the initial coup, the subsequent abuses can’t just be forgiven.’

  ‘No, not by many. You see the debate in the papers and people keep working to get justice. But,’ continues Jorge with a shrug, ‘many who don’t care for one side or the other often just don’t want to remember. I have a friend. In 1974 he was walking in Santiago, beside the Mapocho River with his father. They looked down from one bridge and saw many bodies – all victims of the regime. Just rubbish thrown away. Both men were profoundly shaken, terrified of what was happening on their doorstep. Recently they were talking about the need for justice and the old man said that things were exaggerated, that they hadn’t been as bad as all that. When his son reminded him of the walk by the river and the bodies he just said, “I do not remember that walk.” Some minds, you see, become closed. Too difficult to deal with the horror and the guilt.’

  ‘So you just have to wait until Pinochet and his cronies die off?’

  ‘Maybe it will come to that,’ agrees the journalist. ‘When they aren’t there to be tried, we can safely find them guilty.’

  The talk turns again to mountaineering. Rodrigo tells us that they found many parts from the bodies of previous climbers who had fallen down ravines and then been torn apart by the ice.

  Rodrigo explained how a particular Japanese climbing team had simply left an injured climber to his fate – a lonely death on a snow-swept mountain. My admiration for the stoic samurai mentality quickly evaporated. I could not understand how the conquering of a mountain was more important than the life of a companion. Could such resolve obliterate the ghosts which would surely come to haunt the climbers in later life? Suicide and even sacrifice were comprehensible in some way but this act did not sit comfortably with me.

  When Rodrigo told the story of having found the body of another climber who had been missing for some years, my interest revived. On occasions when the spring melt or an avalanche reveals a body, they ascertain the identity and leave a simple marker at the spot, so that other climbers may acknowledge the mountaineer in whatever way they see fit, perhaps passing in silence or saying a prayer. But they never inform the families of the bereaved. Rodrigo thought it was easier to live with the knowledge that those missing had been lost in the snow. Most of the bodies were beyond retrieval, and in any case it was rare to find a complete corpse. When he described finding the head of a climber with his face frozen in a grimace that was half smile and half scream, I could understand the rationale behind the tradition.

  Later that night, as I tried to sleep, I remembered the frozen head in the snow and thought of the shock of that moment in our cell when I caught sight of my head and face reflected in the surface of a spoon, the first time I had seen myself in months.

  Although the expedition was ultimately successful, Rodrigo tells us of the appalling strain that came after four of his colleagues had finally triumphed and become the first Chileans on the summit of K2.

  ‘We were all so happy, though worried that they make a good descent. Then Cristián called on the radio to say that Miguel had just sat down and did not want to walk any more. We all knew that to stop there was to die – but with the exhaustion, dehydration and limited oxygen, Miguel had lost his focus. The other two were ahead of them but no-one knew where exactly. Somehow Cristián had to find the oxygen Miguel had dropped, make him drink some water and get him back on his feet.’

  ‘God!’ I say. ‘Trying to get through to someone who can understand what you are saying but no longer wants to see reason, that’s tough.’

  ‘Yes, I was shaking, but knew I had to appear calm. I was three thousand metres lower than these men and quite safe, but I had to ask Cristián to risk his life to go back and help his partner. I knew I might be signing his death warrant.’

  This talk of getting to the very top of the world only to reach the depths of one’s experience brings back sharply my own dark climbs. I recall how, in an underground prison in Beirut, Bri and I had to deal with our American fellows, Tom Sutherland and Frank Reed, when they were so depressed they thought they were about to be killed or, in Tom’s case once, he had wanted to kill himself. They were alone in cells across a wide hall from ours. We could communicate only through hand signals, words spelled out using a code deaf and dumb alphabet.

  ‘My heart was breaking for them,’ I say, ‘but also I was angry with them. Their vulnerability was ours too.’

  Rodrigo nods as I go on: ‘I felt desperate and impotent. I was using the most obvious emotional blackmail to keep them going: “What about your wife, your children?” I felt sort of cheap waving my hand about saying things like that. Somehow I was demeaning them and their decisions.’

  ‘What happened?’ asks Rodrigo.

  ‘They got through it. They hung on.’

  Rodrigo nods again then his face breaks out in a big grin. He indicates Jorge. ‘He gave me An Evil Cradling when we left Chile for the K2 expedition. I started it on a plane but stopped then passed it on to another in
the team. He gave it back a couple of days later saying, “This is remarkable, but it is too depressing with the pressures we are facing now.”’

  Chapter Eight

  ‘Holy fuck!’ I hear myself murmuring through fiercely popping ears. ‘We’ve got seven days up here!’

  Our convoy climbs steeply up winding valleys. I have to sink low in my seat to be able to see the sky. We are very high already; there is still a long way to go. Brian, Tom and I had been getting slightly anxious about the seven days in the saddle given our extreme lack of experience with horses. Altitude sickness was also a concern, especially with Bri unable to shake off his cough. Some of our fears were allayed last night when we met up with our fellow trekkers. As well as we three there are Lian and Carmela (Mellie) who have known each other for ages and work in the City, and Marcus who has his own pottery design business. The man in charge is Nigel. We were hugely relieved that Mellie and Marcus had not ridden before. Tom revealed that while he had ridden in Bhutan, he had never mastered horse management as the beasts there grazed on cannabis plants and were pretty much a law unto themselves. Lian is an experienced horsewoman but not on the sort of terrain we are facing and has expressed an encouraging lack of confidence. Nigel is small, softly spoken and very laid back. I had dreaded that we might be locked into a week with ghastly macho egos but as we ate dinner last night the fact that, bar Nigel, we were all likely to disgrace ourselves, as Tom put it, by being ‘a load of Wendies’ was a great reassurance.