Between Extremes

by Brian Keenan

  ‘Is John Bruton Fianna Fail or Fine Gael?’ I ask when we finally settle down.

  But I am clearly destined to remain ignorant on this matter. Brian has already adopted his favoured travelling position: head on chest, eyes closed.

  Once on the road you will be entertained with music or, very often on the longer runs, with a video. Here, as elsewhere, the popularity of the movies of Sly Stallone and Bruce Willis is clear; I guess grunts and expletives are simplest to dub. Brian can – or at least he makes every attempt to – sleep through this when he wants to. I can only do it with my earplugs screwed in. Despite feeling groggy I decide to remain awake and watch the world rolling by.

  The warm morning sun burns off the mist from last night’s rain – and smoke rises as the fires in the small houses are rekindled for another day. Every now and then we take a detour from the main road to drop people off outside the bus companies’ wooden chalets in one of the small towns. Once off the Pan American Highway the farmsteads and villages are fewer and farther between and many of these places look run down. While the buildings and streets are shabby, you do not get a sense of real poverty as the people appear healthy and are well dressed.

  At times the road peters out into a single-lane dirt track at roadworks. At one such place I get out for a cigarette and am struck by how precarious civilization can seem here. Looking at the tree-covered hillsides, often shrouded in mist, I feel an air of the primeval, of raw nature close by. If one wandered far from this ribbon of communication one could easily be lost to the modern world. Then the sun breaks through and everything is reassuringly pretty again. This region is called La Frontera. It seems appropriate.

  A light rain begins to fall and it gets cooler as we move through an ever more verdant landscape. We cross the wide Bio-Bio River, the old border between Spanish control and the wild country of Araucania, home of the Mapuche people, ‘people of the earth’. They were never defeated by the Spanish, and were not finally broken by the independent Chileans until 1881. They were clearly great guerrilla fighters but not, as often portrayed, a naturally violent people. I am reading The Happy Captive, the true story of a conquistador held hostage by the Mapuche. He came to love and admire his fiercely independent captors.

  After the last uprising in 1881 their lands were taken over by the state and settled by immigrants from Germany, Switzerland, Italy and many from Croatia.

  I slept until John woke me up. ‘This is the Bio-Bio!’ I looked out sleepily. In half-flood and marked contrast to the dried-out river beds of the north, the Bio-Bio was a broad river. Huge stones which would normally have formed its bed now sat exposed. They were massive and round. This was big country. These stones had arrived before the waters rounded them and their bulk and weight clearly expressed the power of the river that moved them.

  We crossed another wide, more slow-moving river. I remembered my feeble attempts at fishing with my father. We would never have left a river like this. It sat waiting and, I imagined, full with fish. A road sign informed us we were entering the land of the Mapuche Indians.

  Beside us a young woman and her child were sleeping. The baby could not have been more than a few months old. It looked like the Eskimo babies I had seen in Alaska. The mother slept with her hand in her child’s, its tiny fingers wrapped tightly around hers, and in each ear a gold stud glinted.

  I have never been to Canada, but I imagined that this landscape of deep, wet, green forest was similar. The houses, set here and there among trees, looked like 1950s seaside bungalows or tiny Swiss chalets. But the occasional faces of the people along the roadside declared quite clearly where we were. We were the gringos and this was their land. Their faces were round and silent like the boulders along the Bio-Bio. They had been here as long as those stones, tumbling and rolling in the river bed. There were no apples, oranges, peaches, tomatoes, pumpkins or grapes growing at the side of the road. The sunny north was far behind us. The windows began to steam up. Outside the temperature had dropped.

  Here and there, the tight forest opened up to small hills. For a moment, looking through the misted window, I felt I was in the drumlin country of my own homeland, or even the Wicklow hills near to where I now live.

  I looked out on the forest and the timber yards, the black heaps of charcoal, the rusty-coloured stumps and rings of trunk-wood set against the painted clinker-board walls of the houses. We were going to Temuco and I read Neruda’s poem about his first journey there.

  I don’t know when we came to Temuco.

  It was vague, being born, and a slow business,

  being truly born,

  and slowly feeling, knowing, hating, loving.

  All that has both flowers and thorns.

  From the dusty bosom of my country

  they took me, still an infant,

  into the rain of Araucania.

  The boards of the house

  smelled of the woods,

  of deep forest.

  From that time on, my love

  had wood in it

  and everything I touched turned into wood.

  They became one in me,

  lives and leaves,

  certain women and the hazelnut

  spring, men and trees.

  I love the world of wind and foliage.

  I can’t tell lips from roots.

  From axes and rain, it grew up,

  that town of wood

  recently carved, like

  a new star stained with resin,

  and the saw and the sierras

  made love day and night,

  singing away,

  working away,

  and that sharp chirp of the cricket

  raising its plaint

  in the unyielding solitude turns into

  my song, my song.

  My heart goes on cutting wood,

  singing with the sawmills in the rain,

  milling together cold, sawdust, wood smell.

  I consult the guidebook for a place to stay in Temuco. It recommends the Continental Hotel.

  ‘Here, Bri, this sounds like us: “excellent restaurant, the bar is popular with locals in the evening, clean, friendly, colonial-style wooden building”.’

  Brian laughs, showing me the Neruda poem he has been reading. ‘The Continental it has to be,’ he agrees.

  Temuco was a special place for me. For it was the major city of the Mapuche and it was the place where Neruda grew up. I am a firm believer in the saying, ‘find the child and you will discover the man’, and his childhood memories of Temuco had infiltrated his poetry and formed part of the intricate symbolism of the work.

  Neruda identified and sympathized with the indigenous peoples. Maybe his sensitivities were heightened by the fact that his father distanced himself from his children. I hope that Temuco will bring me closer to him.

  In his Memoirs, Neruda is scathing about what was called the policy of the pacification of ‘Araucania’. He writes:

  Every kind of weapon was used against the Indians, unsparingly; carbine blasts, the burning of villages, and later, a more fatherly method, alcohol and the law. The lawyer became a specialist at stripping them of their fields, the judge sentenced them when they protested, the priest threatened them with eternal fire. And hard spirits finally consummated the annihilation of this superb race.

  In another part of his Memoirs, he declares,

  Temuco is a pioneer town, one of those towns that have no past, though it does have hardware stores. Since the Indians can’t read, the stores hang their eye-catching signs out on the streets: an enormous saw, a giant cooking pot, a Cyclopean padlock, a mammoth spoon. Farther along the street, shoe stores, a colossal boot.

  In a sense, Neruda wrote with an Indian’s eye. If you ‘saw’ his poetry the way the Indians ‘read’ the shopfront symbols, the work became less obscure. And as in Neruda’s poetry, rain was everywhere, patient and falling endlessly from the grey sky.

  Having spent his childhood on the frontier, he never los
t the sense of wonder he felt while observing the Mapuche and exploring the dense, majestic forests that surrounded Temuco. He later recalled that when he travelled back and forth to the city as a student, ‘I always felt myself stifling as soon as I left the great forest, the timberland that drew me back like a mother. To me, the adobe houses, the cities with a past, seemed to be filled with cobwebs and silence.’

  Our rain-soaked arrival in what seemed a dismal city did not encourage me to share Neruda’s sense of wonder. As I stood bedraggled and a little cast down by my first impression of Temuco, the great cartographer McCarthy was still working his magic and pulling all the right things out of his bag of tricks.

  ‘OK, Sancho, just a few blocks this way and we’re home and dry!’ Don John declared.

  ‘You’re a little late with the dry bit,’ I answered, shuffling after John’s rapidly disappearing figure.

  The hotel squeaked and creaked as we were shown to our room. Wood was indeed everywhere, polished and glowing. Nothing much had changed here since it was built. It had the feel of the frontier about it. As I stood on the landing overlooking the foyer I could imagine it in busier times, buzzing with ranchers, travellers and businessmen.

  Before dinner we decided to change and go for a walk. The deafening roar and explosion of the pipes in the bathroom made us laugh. Outside it was lashing down, and inside the plumbing gave every indication that it was about to join in.

  As we walked through the dark wet streets I saw again those enigmatic Indian faces staring out from the shadows of doorways. I remembered a photo I had looked at as a child in an old encyclopaedia. A sepia-tinted group of South American Indians had intrigued me and somehow locked itself away in my memory, only to emerge as I contemplated this city. The strangeness of their coarse ethnic faces. The women in their pork-pie hats drawing heavily on short, crude pipes. They were posing for the camera and yet they weren’t. There was something very distant about them, and here they were back with me again after thirty-five years. These were the same faces. Some of them were sheltering from the rain; others were packing up the woollen sweaters they had been selling. As we ventured further into the back streets I expected to see more of them and to be accosted for money. But I was wrong, there were no beggars here. I suppose I had an idea of a marginalized people, drinking in doorways or sitting wrapped in an old blanket, a hand outstretched.

  But I remembered that the Mapuche have never been defeated at any point in their history. Not even the imperialism of the Inca or the Spanish had subsumed them. Colonialism and modernization had never broken or pushed them to the sidelines. I had expected to see pride and perhaps even arrogance in the faces. But no, there was only quiet confidence that this was their town. I thought again of the sleeping mother and child on the bus and remembered how they clung to each other, even in sleep. These people needed no-one but themselves. That evening I ordered a meal of vicuña meat which was a staple of the Mapuche people. I didn’t want to make myself feel any more alien.

  Our walk through the rain-filled streets had revealed the last remnants of those giant shopfront symbols that had so intrigued the young Neruda. On our perambulations I had spied huge shoes, scissors, knives and cooking pots, and I had been drawn into the fascination of the Mapuche Indian with something of the same curious admiration as Neruda.

  The poet tells a story of how, as a timid child, he was playing in the back of his house when a hand reached through a hole in the wooden fence and placed a small toy lamb in his palm. Neftali quickly ran into his house and retrieved one of his favourite treasures, a pine cone, and handed it to the unknown child on the other side of the fence. He later wrote about this experience that ‘maybe this small and mysterious exchange of gifts remained inside me also, deep and inexhaustible, giving my poetry light’.

  In a strange way I could understand that story. I was glad we had come to Temuco in the rain. It had made me look harder. In a way I can hardly explain, encountering those dark, passionate, ageless faces, I too had received a ‘mysterious exchange of gifts’ which I know will remain with me and provide a light into Neruda’s poetry and the Chile I was only now learning to see.

  Our time was short and we had to leave the next day but we had pencilled in another stop on our return. Perhaps by then I would be better prepared to uncover the secrets of this city at the edge of the green forests.

  From Temuco we want to drive south through the Lake District and take a look at the island of Chiloé before catching a ferry down to Patagonia. Patagonia: the name holds such mystery for me that it takes on the mantle of a sea-level Shangri-La. Yet we are going there after all, no longer just dreaming.

  We set about organizing transport. Before entering the first car hire office I consult the phrase book and rehearse my lines. We go in.

  ‘Quisiera alquilar un coche para seis dias con devolución en Puerto Montt, por favor!’ (‘I’d like to rent a car for six days and return it in Puerto Montt, please.’)

  Brian stands beside me nodding wisely. The man behind the desk nods also, smiles and replies with a rapid burst of Spanish.

  ‘Ah,’ I say, ‘um. Habla usted Inglés?’

  No, he does not speak English.

  ‘OK. Seis días, bueno?’

  Six days is good.

  ‘Devolución en Puerto Montt es OK?’

  That is OK too.

  ‘Bueno. Cuánto?’ (‘Good. How much?’)

  The man gets out his calculator, does an elaborate series of sums, then shows us the result glowing on the small machine’s LCD. He gives us a solemn nod and says, ‘Muy bueno, señores!’

  We go through an increasingly fluent version of this exchange at the various hire companies around town, and settle on a Toyota Tercel at 450 dollars all in. It is no great roadster but then there are no great roads so we reckon it will suffice.

  At first the landscape looked like how I remembered Tipperary, but there the similarities ended. Lonache, Lanco, Los Lagos, Rio Reno, Osorno. They all seemed lifeless and forgotten. But at about ten o’clock the streets and roads came to life. It was the Easter Festival and throngs of people arrayed in their Sunday best were walking to church, clutching bunches of palm leaves.

  Sitting on the balcony of a cabin on the edge of Lago Villarrica in the evening sun, I look across at the perfectly conical peak of Volcán Villarrica and the twin peaks of Volcán Llaima glowing pink above the dark green hillsides across the water. We had a gentle drive here through open country of pasture and woodland. There are some fantastic houses in the middle of nowhere; from mansions that look like they should be on the set of The Addams Family to romantic, turreted, modern whimsies. Churches in particular seem often to be remote from any settlements, to cover as wide a catchment area as possible. We passed a tiny, wooden Mormon church with a few faithful sitting outside it and others, more intricate, with the onion domes of east European and Russian orthodoxy.

  This cabin is a great find. We did some shopping at a supermarket and Bri has elected to cook tonight’s supper. I begin browsing through the guidebooks thinking of where we should head for the next day. Brian appears with a bottle of red wine to top up my glass.

  ‘I’ll throw those bloody books in that lake!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Jesus, John, you drive all day, we stop in a fine place and all you can think is, where next? Give me a break! Instead of where are we going tomorrow, think about where we are now.’

  ‘But there are still so many places to see!’

  ‘Yes, but you know most places are like the last place and anyway we can’t see everything. Take it easy, soak up the atmosphere a little.’

  ‘You want to stay here tomorrow night then, loaf about a bit?’

  ‘Sounds good to me.’

  I take a deep sip of Tarapacá, feel the sun warm on my face as I look at the lake and volcanoes.

  ‘Bugger it! You’re right – I’ll go see the manager and tell him.’

  ‘Now you’re whistling Dixie! The steaks will
be ready in five minutes.’

  On our way out the next day we bump into the manager, a nice, middle-aged gent who speaks good English. He tells us he originally came from Santiago but has made a good life here in the tourist business. ‘You still want to stay, my friends?’

  ‘Sure, we’re having a grand time,’ says Brian.

  ‘So you are not worried about earthquake?’

  ‘Should we be?’ I ask.

  ‘You didn’t notice it last night? The tremor?’

  ‘No, we must have slept right through it,’ says Bri.

  As we walk on I feel cheated.

  ‘One tremor and we completely miss it! How?’

  ‘Very strong red wine, that Tarapaca.’

  We saunter into town down the wide, calm and friendly streets of Villarrica, one of the most popular resorts in this, the Lake District. As with our cabins, much of the architecture could have been transplanted from the Alps and there are Germanic names over many shopfronts. We buy some basic supplies. The bread shop is far more confusing than one would guess. There are three ladies working in it, all standing around the till. The many loaves, cakes and rolls are on open shelves around the walls and in a central unit. Plastic bags are available from dispensers. An elderly couple meander about pointing out delicacies to each other. Bri is across the road buying some water so I swiftly decide on some rolls, take a bag and pick up a pair of tongs.

  The three ladies all start squawking at once. I turn to them as one descends on me, earnestly shaking her head, to take the tongs from me. Her colleagues become calm again and the old couple, visibly shocked too, also relax and turn back to their perusing. I do not move. I feel as if I have just been halted by airport security; guns might even be trained on me. Without making any sudden movements I nod slowly in the direction of the rolls and cautiously raise four fingers with what I hope is a winning smile. All goes well and the rolls are tonged into my bag. Lady Number One nods kindly and gestures towards her colleagues at the till. I murmur gracias a few times and go to Lady Number Two, behind the till. This time there is no outcry, just laughter and much shaking of heads. Clearly they have realized that I am not dangerous or malicious but merely a very simple gringo.