Between Extremes

by Brian Keenan

  I wondered what held this Indian woman transfixed. Why did she venerate this statue more than Mary or Christ? Yet her stance was neither devotional nor pleading. She was more idol herself than the image she stood before.

  Quietly I moved towards the pair, wanting to be part of the moment. I looked closely at the nun. The aged wood had given her face the same leathery texture as the Indian woman. In places it had cracked, but the whole figure was carved from a single trunk. I stood spellbound, not knowing what I was witnessing, but unable to pull myself away.

  There was only the graveyard left to see and as I walked among its huge mausoleum-like monuments, some of them like miniature basilicas, I was impressed and appalled. Impressed by the majesty of death, and appalled that it should be so worshipped. The sight of the Indian and the wooden woman was obviously yet to be resolved in me.

  We walk further out, passing a series of statues of a shepherd, a horse and a sheep in the middle of the wide boulevard. A plaque records that this fine piece was erected by one of Alfonso’s Campos forebears.

  We wander back into town via back streets, desolate and rutted, bleak in the grey light. Mangy-looking dogs follow us for a block or two before losing interest.

  That night we dined in a local restaurant with Alan, a young Englishman, one of our fellow travellers from the boat. As he relaxed into the wine he talked about his travels. He thought that the Chileans did not have the same sense of passion or love as he had found in other South American countries. But then Chile was economically far in advance of some of its neighbours. He had been reading books about the Pinochet and Allende years and was trying to understand what had happened. One woman he had been staying with had had her 21-year-old son ‘disappeared’. He felt confused by her resignation and acceptance of her son’s obvious murder. She spoke of that period as the ‘evil years’ and said that ‘there was a time before’. As he continued to talk, I felt that here was a man more in search of the embrace of love than he was in search of great journeys. He was one of the misfits, roaming the continent but less a traveller than a soul searcher.

  I wanted to talk about the Indian woman in the church but found I couldn’t express myself as I wished. I could only say that perhaps some people understand love and passion differently. It wasn’t as though they were instinctively or culturally less passionate.

  ‘How then do you recognize love?’ Alan asked poignantly.

  ‘There can’t be rules. You’ll recognize it in its moment!’ I replied.

  The transfixed face of the Indian woman suddenly reappeared in my imagination, dispelling any ready-made answers I might have had.

  Later that evening, I read Neruda’s ‘The More-Mother’ and thought that maybe, just possibly, I had glimpsed something of the intense communication between the Indian woman and her nun.

  My more-mother comes by

  in her wooden shoes. Last night

  the wind blew from the pole, the roof tiles

  broke, and walls

  and bridges fell.

  The pumas of night howled all night long,

  and now, in the morning

  of icy sun, she comes,

  my more-mother, Dona

  Trinidad Marverde,

  soft as the tentative freshness

  of the sun in storm country,

  a frail lamp, self-effacing,

  lighting up

  to show others the way.

  Dear more-mother –

  I was never able

  to say stepmother! –

  at this moment

  my mouth trembles to define you,

  for hardly

  had I begun to understand

  than I saw goodness in poor dark clothes,

  a practical sanctity –

  goodness of water and flour,

  that’s what you were. Life made you into bread,

  and there we fed on you,

  long winter to forlorn winter

  with raindrops leaking

  inside the house,

  and you,

  ever present in your humility,

  sifting

  the bitter

  grain-seed of poverty

  as if you were engaged in

  sharing out

  a river of diamonds.

  Oh, mother, how could I

  not go on remembering you

  in every living minute?

  Impossible. I carry

  your Marverde in my blood,

  surname

  of the shared bread,

  of those gentle hands

  which shaped from a flour sack

  my childhood clothes,

  of the one who cooked, ironed, washed,

  planted, soothed fevers.

  And when everything was done

  and I at last was able

  to stand on my own sure feet,

  she went off, fulfilled, dark,

  off in her small coffin

  where for once she was idle

  under the hard rain of Temuco.

  I reread the poem over and over. Never has a poet’s work had such an effect on me. The place, the moment and the words, all burned into that long evening with a strange incandescence.

  Chapter Twelve

  Next morning I walk down to look at the Straits of Magellan. Their notorious fierceness is quite absent and all is tranquil. Back at the hotel I meet Brian talking with the concierge who has tracked down a vehicle for us – an unfeasibly tall, four-wheel-drive Toyota Hi-Lux. I am elected driver.

  We take possession of the car late and it is 6.30 in the evening before we head out of Punta Arenas. As the light thickens, I try to get used to the vehicle. The young man from the car-hire firm, named Ricardo and sporting a yellowing black eye behind wraparound sunglasses, had warned me that the height of the chassis made the truck unstable at any sort of speed. Not having absorbed this advice properly, I am cruising at a little over 50 m.p.h. when a moment’s inattention has the nearside wheels moving off the tarmac onto the not-so-hard shoulder. Correcting the steering makes us rock scarily across both lanes of the road with a squeal of tyres. When my heart stops pounding and the vehicle is once more under control I settle down to a steady 40 m.p.h. Brian, stretched out in the back, raises his head to observe, ‘That’s much better. How am I meant to sleep with you careering all over the place?’

  I look ahead confidently to reaching San Gregorio at about nine o’clock. A few miles out of Punta Arenas we take the right fork eastwards towards Argentina. Almost immediately the road becomes a single track, with priority given to the oncoming traffic. If someone approaches I have to pull off onto the gravel to the side.

  The light fails and with it my nerve. I grit my teeth to endure the whole ride at 30 m.p.h. when Brian pops up in the back seat.

  ‘Why don’t you put on the other lights?’

  ‘What, there are others?’

  ‘Your man Ricardo pointed out another switch. Down there on the left.’

  Suddenly I can see reasonably clearly and set off again with somewhat restored faith. But then the road falters as we weave around roadworks in terrain rutted and flooded like a scene from the Somme. We persevere.

  We come up behind an overloaded truck that teeters and lurches around the potholes. I manage to overtake it, my mind full of memories of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s film The Wages of Fear where a number of drivers, including Yves Montand, make a disastrous trek across some godforsaken Latin American landscape with a cargo of nitroglycerine. It all comes back to me. One by one they die. Except Montand who survives. Momentary relief, until I remember that, having delivered his deadly cargo, he too crashes and is killed.

  Suddenly buildings loom out of the darkness. They all look deserted, derelict. Moonlight adds to the ghostliness of the scene. But there on one building are the words ‘San Gregorio’. We have made it. Now to find the estancia. No lights anywhere: we drive on, confused by the lack of any sign of life. We know the farm is to our left. It has to be, as
to our right, looking ominous in the moonbeams, the Magellan Straits shift soundlessly.

  We go on, and on again.

  ‘This can’t be right. Surely the farm wouldn’t be so far from the village,’ I say after fifteen minutes. Brian is now up with me in the cab.

  ‘Look there, ahead. There’s a light!’

  We stop and clamber over muddy earthworks to a little shack. As we come up to the door a pig scuttles off round the building. What is it about pigs appearing before me on troubled night drives? Looking in the window we are amazed. It is a bar! Here, in the back of nowhere, a lovely snug bar. We go in. Two young men play table football, and a smartly dressed couple are drinking at the counter. Where on earth had these people come from? I hardly dare look at Bri, the sense of fantasy is so great that I fear he will have dematerialized. But the people are real. They tell us we must go back three kilometres and cheerily wave us off into the night.

  Back at the village we now see a light on the porch of a small house. Brian hops out and knocks on the door. A tall, elderly man appears who, after bending to listen to him, straightens and points up a track. The drive is long, maybe a mile before we arrive, cheering at the sight of a mansion glowing white in our headlights beyond elegant iron gates. Brian hops out again and stands fiddling, for an age it seems, trying to open this last obstacle.

  ‘Can you believe it?’ he says, coming up to my window. ‘They’re chained and padlocked! Honk the horn.’

  After a few minutes a woman appears out of the darkness, happily shouting, ‘Gringos importantes.’ The epic drive is at last over. It is nearly half past ten.

  The house was huge and not at all like the hacienda at Los Lingues. It looked vaguely like a palais de danse or one of those 1950s cinemas with would-be Roman names like the Lyceum. It was something of an anomaly in this barren landscape.

  We follow the woman’s bustling form into a huge kitchen. This area seems strangely vast to modern eyes and speaks of a much busier household. The old range stands idle, perhaps just too big to move. Most of the business is done now in a former pantry where a modern cooker and fridge appear toylike in the high-ceilinged room. We walk through a number of passages lined with fading photographs of proud farmers standing beside rosetted sheep with fleeces of phenomenal proportions. An old hand-cranked telephone is fixed to a wall above a shelf of ultra-modern mobile phones.

  The woman, who identifies herself as Maria and is clearly the maid, leads us into a large hall where there is a vast front door that obviously faces down the drive. It looks as though it has not been used for a long while. A staircase, eight feet wide, leads up to the next floor. Massive mahogany double doors lead off in various directions. Maria opens one pair and bids us wait in the vast reception room beyond. It is filled with antique furniture and portraits of ancestors. I open another door at the far end of this room and discover a conservatory that appears to run all down this side of the building. Within the pool of light coming from the room behind me I can make out the shapes of wicker furniture but beyond that there are just indistinguishable forms. Thinking of the wild empty spaces that come right up to the house I shiver slightly, half expecting ghosts to come tapping at the windows. I close the door again and sit next to Brian on a sofa.

  After a few minutes Isabel appears and greets us warmly, offering us pisco sours. She explains that Alfonso too is late but is expected any minute.

  ‘He has been to the farm at Torres del Paine.’

  ‘Ah,’ I say, ‘the dispute?’

  ‘The dispute,’ she confirms with her tired smile.

  We talk a little about living in such a remote place and learn that with their three small children and Maria they live here in isolation at weekends but that she and the children move to Punta Arenas during the week for school. Isabel teaches in the city and also serves on the local council. When she says that she studied Chilean history at university, Brian seeks her view on Bernardo. It is not entirely favourable.

  It is always difficult to question the icons of a nation too closely, especially in one of the nation’s repositories, which this house undoubtedly could lay claim to being. The whole atmosphere of San Gregorio was that of a museum, a place embalmed in time, stubbornly refusing to accept the imperatives of modernity.

  But Isabel was a different creature. Her mind was more pragmatic and focused. She had based her master’s thesis on Bernardo and I listened intently as she spoke. She had very fixed views on the man. He was not a democrat but an autocrat, she insisted, and lived at a great remove from those he governed. People hardly knew him, she said.

  I couldn’t understand Isabel’s insistence on his autocracy or his supposed distance from ‘the people’. Was she referring to the people who had betrayed him on the battlefield and those same people who had undermined him when he finally took possession of Chile? It was not my place to challenge. In any case I did not want to, for, although the portrait she was painting of Bernardo was on first consideration far removed from my own image of the man, it was also paradoxically affirming. When she explained that Bernardo consistently refused to make himself part of the aristocratic and governing class, I ceased my silent debate with her. Now she was coming close to the man who had travelled with me. And when she said that Bernardo refused to marry into the colonial establishment but kept a ‘harem’ of native women, my heart sang. I could not avoid declaring aloud, ‘That’s my boy, Bernardo!’

  There was a moment’s silence at my sudden remark, then relieved if nervous laughter. Bernardo had kept the faith! He had remained his own man, surrendering to the dictates of no-one but his own experience, a rebel, a lover, an outsider to the end.

  The sound of tyres on gravel announces Alfonso’s return. He joins us for a drink before we share a very late supper in the huge dining room. Mention of the problems with his other farm prompts a brief outburst against lawyers and the admission that he had been a lawyer himself in Santiago until six years ago when he came back south to rebuild the farm. He subsides into one of his reveries then abruptly perks up and looks at Brian.

  ‘You said you liked Neruda?’

  ‘Yes, certainly I do. A great poet!’

  ‘I hated him. A useless man! Weak!’

  ‘How so?’ asks Bri, restraining himself.

  ‘He was a lousy Stalinist. One day he praises Nobel Prize award to Pasternak. Next he changes the story, says Pasternak not worthy for it. Why?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Brian.

  ‘Because it is condemned by Stalin!’ Alfonso goes quiet again for a while then looks up, grinning broadly. ‘You know Neruda was sent to exile?’ We both nod.

  ‘By President Gabriel Gonzalez Videla. He was my grandfather!’ he announces proudly. There is another pause before he reiterates, ‘Lousy Stalinist!’

  I listened intently. I was beginning to understand Alfonso’s idiosyncratic dismissal of Neruda and Isabel’s constant reference to Bernardo’s denial of ‘the people’. It all fitted with our young lawyer guide in the far north who did not want to discuss Allende’s revolution and considered that Allende’s regime would only have made Chile into another Cuba. There is a cultural crust on Chile that is not at first evident, but it is as permanent and thick as the salt flats of the Atacama.

  I took in the huge room and the monstrous dining table at which we sat. The table could accommodate a dozen or more people with ease; as it was, the four of us were seated with several feet between us. I thought of the lavish dining room in Los Lingues. At one time San Gregorio would have been equally resplendent but now it reminded me of an old mirror whose ornate gold frame was broken and chipped. There was no reflection in it, for the silver that gave it this reflection was faded, and the looking-glass revealed only the woodwormed boards that held it in place. This was Miss Havisham’s house and I was a naive Pip Pirrip entranced by its otherworldliness. While John chatted to our hosts, my thoughts wandered out of the room.

  History had been rubbed out or reordered to fit the atrocious machina
tions of the Pinochet regime and its ghoulish backers in the White House in Washington. It was absurd for Isabel to state that Bernardo was not a democrat, absurd for Alfonso to decry Neruda as a Communist, and absurd for our young lawyer guide in Arica to compare Allende’s government with Cuba. Such reordering of history necessarily carries with it the kind of contamination that limits vision. Visionaries are always considered heretics, apostates, despots, demigods, by those who sometimes unconsciously suffer from the very poison which they attribute to others. In such a world everything is absurd, and maybe there it is easier to believe lies than confront a horrible and insidious reality. In such a shadowy world, ‘Stalinists’ and ‘dictators’ might well hold hands in hell, sickly smiling at their bloody handiwork while accepting the adulation of closed minds.

  A secret cable to the CIA station chief in Santiago, published in Washington in 1998, states: ‘It is our firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup prior to October 24th 1970. But efforts in this regard will continue vigorously beyond this date. It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that the US government and American hand be well hidden.’

  The operation of this clandestine world of covert intelligence cares nothing for people. It insidiously feeds the monster that created the death squads in Pinochet’s Chile which were only another manifestation in another time and place of Stalin’s purges, the pogroms of Nazi Germany, the gulags and internment camps, and the ethnic cleansing and tribal genocides of contemporary history. Both Pinochet and Stalin were the reverse faces of the same coin, blood money of the most evil perversion. Give me Bernardo and Neruda and let those who choose to bow and scrape at the feet of despots do so, for such minds have chosen the myopic comfort of slavery against the life-enhancing challenge of freedom.

  After dinner, as Isabel and Alfonso showed us around the house, I noticed a small framed letter hanging obscurely on the wall. It was embossed with the crossed guns and anchor of the Chilean military and had an impressive and very regal seal on it. It was in Spanish, so I couldn’t understand it – but it carried an equally impressive signature. Pinochet! Everything was falling into place and I almost felt as if Bernardo was smiling over my shoulder! Pinochet had done his job well – in true ‘lousy Stalinist’ fashion.