Between Extremes

by Brian Keenan

  Food is always a way of getting things moving, so we traipsed off round the seedy back streets of Temuco’s railway station in search of sustenance for both the inner and the outer man. It was a Sunday and everything seemed to be closed. In the side streets that suckle from the station piazza, a few down-in-the-mouth bars and cafés were open, and mainly unoccupied. Had the sirens of Homer’s Odyssey been singing there, I could not have been intrigued into them.

  I was feeling an uneasy melancholy as we wandered half-heartedly from one back street to another. I didn’t want to believe that this was Temuco’s final testimony. It seemed shabby and not worth all that Neruda had promised me. I was dejected as we tramped nearer the centre of the city.

  But then the promise came true! We chanced upon an indoor market, enclosed in an irregular octagonal square. Not knowing what it was, we would have walked past if we hadn’t seen several groups of people emerge from it. We decided to chance our luck.

  I never liked Santa or his grotto; I didn’t believe in tooth fairies, black cats or broken mirrors . . . but I do believe in angels and spirit guides!

  Inside the enclosure was a souk-like market filled with people, some selling, some buying, some browsing. Whole families were promenading through the most glorious pruck-house. I glanced at John. He rolled his eyes, as if to say, oh no, not again, only you could find a place like this. I smiled as he shrugged his shoulders and rolled his palms open in the typical Arab, ‘so be it’ manner.

  We spent a few hours there, circulating through the alleyways as the market opened up. I had my saddle, but I knew that it wasn’t by chance that we were back in Temuco. My perambulations confirmed that curious reasoning to me. This was an Indian market, and the overwhelming majority of faces and goods in the place were native. To another eye, it might be full of nothing more than cheap gee-gaws. But not for me: this was Neruda’s emporium of words, images and people vivaciously enjoying themselves.

  I wanted to buy several things at once but John’s raised, chastening eye warned me off. Instead we had a great meal in one of the small cafés that were at the centre of the place. There was something wonderfully classless and cluttered about it. It was busy with life and not just commerce. We ate slowly and indulgently, sharing the place and the moment in a grateful silence.

  We had about three quarters of an hour, allowing for our walk back to the station, collecting our bags and checking in for the train, but I still had things to do. I had earlier found a stall selling all kinds of bric-a-brac and so-called antiques. I dived back into it like a hungry horse into its nosebag. There was a plethora of wonderful things here: the remnants of beautiful harnesses, hand-worked in scrolled leather and silver, ancient stirrups and bridles embossed with figures out of a mythology I had no comprehension of; cooking pots and amulets that must have had their origin before Bernardo, Pablo or any of the prehistory of this country that we only half understood.

  I hoked and poked with demented fascination while John quietly reminded me of the time. At last I found it. An ancient, broken clay figure of a llama. It was crudely formed, with its body worked to accommodate a small fat candle. A llama light, and I knew who had found it for me!

  I remembered seeing examples of this simple artefact in the exposed graves of the desert mummies in San Pedro de Atacama’s museum, and also in an exhibition of pre-Columbian art in Santiago. There were a few tiny examples containing burnt-out votive candles in the little church at Parinacota, reminding me even then of the primitive animism that underlies even the purest and simplest of faiths.

  More significantly these creatures and their near cousins, the guanaco, had been everywhere in the extremes of this country that we had passed through. In the northern deserts, the High Andes and the Patagonian wilderness, they were watching over us. But my own little lamp had already become for me a keepsake and a symbol of Neruda’s fabulous bestiary. The man’s work and our travels had confirmed to me that ‘you don’t always find what you are looking for in the places you expect to, but you might find something else . . . and perhaps that is what you were really looking for!’

  I also knew that when I was back home and lit my own votive candle in the recess of the clay figure, the hollow of its eyes would glow softly like the inscrutable stare of the living creature and I would know again the lure and pull of Patagonia.

  ‘More pruck,’ said John as we hurried back to catch Tren 010 to Santiago.

  Exploring the train, we step nervously between the carriages where gaps open wide then slam closed with ear-splitting and potentially bone-crushing crunches. At times we bounce from wall to wall of the corridor, dodging bare wires that hang from light fittings and fuse boxes whose doors swing wildly. It is difficult to discern whether the train is being rewired or dismantled.

  We make our way to the very back of the train to find we can stand out on an open platform. There is just a thin chain, with a dangling notice ‘Treno 10’, between us and the track that runs out beneath our feet. The orange glow of sunset lights up the scrublands we pass through. At times the vegetation of thick bushes and high grasses closes in about the track as if we are passing through a sea. At others the flora becomes sparse, with wide areas of dusty, flat pampas opening up and, in the distance, the Andes rising bright in the evening sun. Every now and then we go through a village and the engine, way off to the front, drones its hooter as children cry out a greeting. We wave to them, grinning.

  ‘I’ve just realized that I’ve always wanted to do this!’ I shout at Brian.

  He shouts back an affirmative before his words are drowned out by another blast from the hooter. I lean closer to him.

  ‘You’d probably never put it on a wish list, but when it happens it’s so right – like an undreamed dream come true.’

  As we run on into the darkening night I have the sensation of being taken into another dimension. It is as if the train is creating a vortex, a whirlwind mixing up the future into which it is ploughing, our present as we stand on this little platform and our past that we watch running out behind us on the tracks. The train rattles and thunders like a demented printing press frantically laying down our life stories between the tracks, too fast to read, in a script that is at once familiar yet indecipherable.

  The dining car brings us back to the real world. At least back to the reality of this sweetly staid environment. Roof and walls are panelled in light oak and there are old gas lamps on elaborate wall brackets. Tonight illumination comes from more recent, though partial, strip lighting. The atmosphere, though slightly gloomy, is not at all depressing. We sit on free-standing dining chairs upholstered in faded brown corduroy; we admire the lace doilies on our table. The waiter cannot provide gin and tonic but kindly offers Campari and soda. In this curious time capsule even disappointments are resolved with something that is somehow more appropriate. We grin at each other as we sip our drinks, watching the cook and steward at work in the gloom of the smoke- and steam-filled galley at the far end of the carriage.

  This train, with its blend of eras and cultures, sums up much of the Chile we have experienced. In any country the past is reviewed and redefined as the present unravels. Particular periods of history lose their distinctiveness and are blended into one saga. We came here with predetermined attitudes to Pinochet’s regime and, while these have not changed, our growing understanding of Chile has brought a more subtle appreciation of how the ‘military period’ came about and how it is now being dealt with. Although I believe that the horrors of that time can only be laid to rest after a full investigation and acceptance of what happened, I have to ask myself whether we are stuck in Chile’s past more than the Chileans and if we are wrong to let our preoccupations run apparently stronger than those of the locals. Our views, after all, are informed by our backgrounds, on the other side of the world, where another history has defined our present.

  During our journey we have learned that anyone might have supported or opposed the dictatorship and that external appearances give nothi
ng away. Looking now at our fellow passengers – a group of young people chatting noisily and an elderly couple – it is impossible to know what they are thinking and whether they were victims or abusers. The nation’s motto Por la Razón o la Fuerza – by reason or force – is a strong, combative one and perhaps explains the ambivalence to and the tacit acceptance of Pinochet. It speaks of a kind of laissez-faire that can condone anything in the name of the state. That sort of attitude must help the population to persevere in the face of their natural, brutal surroundings. We have witnessed the bitter wastes of the northern deserts, stood gazing in awe from the top of the Andes and with Alfonso shared the wonder and desolation of Patagonia. But we have only been passing through and observing. We do not have to stay and come to terms with this ‘harsh homeland’. Perhaps the diversity of scales in the landscape, coupled with the mixture of bloodlines and names, explains the confusion over national identity.

  The spine of my copy of Isla Negra was broken and its pages creased and covered in cryptic notes and heavily penned lines to mark significant stanzas. The author had also made this night journey to Santiago. Wearily I ran a crooked line under these words from his poem ‘Night Train’ and felt the flush of kinship:

  Exhausted, I slept like wood,

  and when I woke

  I felt the agony of the rain.

  Something was separating me from my blood.

  As I set the book down, I considered how I had brought eight thick notebooks in which to record this journey, yet I had used only two. Instead the three volumes of Neruda’s poetry had replaced them and were now covered in a thick clutter of hastily written thoughts and observations.

  I’ve always been a traveller in one way or another. The fascination of other places has been with me for as long as I can remember, and certainly since I took my first book from the library. I remember Call of the Wild by Jack London. Only a few years ago I had made a pilgrimage to Alaska to see for myself the author’s cruel but heroic landscape. But when friends asked me of my impending trip, ‘Why Chile of all places?’, beyond John’s and my dreams of it in captivity I could only answer that South America had always fascinated me. If they pursued me about why specifically Chile, I found I lacked the cosy reason and enthusiasm that my childhood memories of Jack London’s wonderful story had locked away in my imagination.

  Rolling through this Chilean nightscape which had insinuated itself under my skin more deeply now than any fantasy, I began to mull over what those reasons might be. In the dimness of the moving train, wrapped up in myself and trying to come to terms with the fact of our journey’s end, I wanted to find again my own points of departure, so that I could, more fully, understand our odyssey.

  I remembered many, many years ago, even before I opened London’s book, sitting leafing through an ancient encyclopaedia. That sepia-tinted photograph of a group of South American Indians had remained with me unconsciously all these years. I could still see their questioning faces asking me if I had found whatever it was I came here looking for.

  But an old photo re-emerging from my childhood could not be the only reason. As I accepted the memory of it, others came flooding back: the many evenings I would sit with my father watching all those nature programmes the early years of television brought into our tiny kitchen house; the wonderfully strange animals and birds and the magnificently huge landscape were all grist to my childhood imagination, and planted the seeds of my wanderlust.

  Then all the other previously locked-away images and points of reference began to surface. During my student years, Pinochet and Allende were names constantly bandied about and the subject of much undergraduate debate.

  But for me there was one character more important than either of these: Bernardo O’Higgins, my beloved Bernardo, my ghostly companion long before I came to his homeland to find him.

  I laughed at the memory of Bernardo. For many months I had talked constantly of this character when John and I were incarcerated together. My knowledge was skimpy but my imagination was as big as the map of South America. What I didn’t know, I fabricated, to McCarthy’s confusion. Lebanon was suddenly back with me, as were those weeks and months John and I had spent travelling the continent of South America in our minds. But Bernardo would not leave me even now, with the train pushing towards his birthplace. I looked out of the window to try and catch a first glimpse. But the land was in blackout and only John’s face caught in the yellowing light of the carriage was reflected out of the dark window. When he wasn’t busy fingering his infernal Psion, he would pause and stare into the middle distance, caught up in his own rapture of reminiscence. My reflection was opposite his. We could have been ghosts ourselves. The idea made me study John’s features more closely. I tried to imagine him as the young Bernardo, in the hope that I might get closer to his story before I left his Chile.

  Bernardo was a reluctant soldier, yet the compulsive need to overcome the trauma of his father’s rejection steeled some resolve in him. Love and hate are twin emotions and sit in symbolic relationship with each other. Perhaps Bernardo sought to gain his father’s love by dreaming his dream, by recreating it and going beyond it. Even if it necessitated destroying the world his father had made.

  Defeated and frustrated, O’Higgins spent three years hiding in the Andes and Argentina. Those three years in that desolation were formative for him: suspecting betrayal at every turn, haunted and taunted by his father’s image, knowing his Irish peasant bloodlines were anathema to the Spanish in Chile. Feeling himself cheated and used by his father substitutes, Bernardo waged a private war within himself, battling with the fiercest of foes, the enemy within. With no advisers to counsel him, no embrace to reassure him, Bernardo was forced to dream his own dream of identity and purpose.

  History has recorded Bernardo a hero. But wars, I think, do not make heroes. If anything they create accidental heroes or heroes made in the mind and the imagination. We need the reassurance that tells us we can overcome adversity. If courage is part of what heroism might be, then true courage has more to do with facing the frustrations, confusion, fear and loneliness in ourselves, and overcoming it by taking control and by fusing vision with will, creating ourselves anew, to achieve what is in us to achieve. There are in our history many heroes whom the textbooks will not record because ours is more than a history of events. It is rather a history of being and of becoming what is in us to be.

  I laughed to myself as I thought of John, oblivious all the while to the metamorphosis I had imposed on him as a colonial revolutionary.

  But Don John Harrison Ford Sundance Quixote McCarthy apart, there was something Bernardo-like about my companion. A hesitancy, a kind of reluctance to put himself forward. Neruda also had to struggle with such sensitivity in his own early career. For me, his bohemian later life was a cover-up, a way of dealing with the world. He writes:

  Shyness is a kink in the soul, a special category that opens out into solitude. Moreover it’s inherent suffering as if we had two epidermises and the one underneath rebelled and shrank back from life. Of the things that make up a man, this quality, this damaging thing, is part of the alloy that lays the foundation in the long run, for the perpetuity of the self.

  Coming to terms with that solitude within yourself, whether in the High Andes or the Patagonian wilderness, lets you run between extremes and come home with the knowledge that there are no finite edges to your self. I looked once more at John’s reflection. Yes, I could see my Bernardo there.

  The train picks up speed again and the motion becomes wilder. If standing on the back of the train gave the sense of being in another dimension, sitting in the dining car is like being in a cartoon animation. The lurches of the train are so violent as it speeds on that I can be looking at Brian head to head across our table one instant then the next his head has moved three feet to one side. It hangs there, unnaturally stretched from his torso, for a couple of seconds during which my body is attacked by the demon animator and starts juddering as if I am operating a
roadworker’s compactor.

  Then Brian’s head is opposite mine once more and there is suddenly complete peace. We enter a realm of drifting tranquillity, where we seem to float in slow motion, smiling broadly as if in an ambrosial trance. Then a banshee wail from beyond the windows announces the arrival of another squall of disturbance and we try to get our drinks back onto the table as if pushing them down through a thick jelly. We do not talk much as we switch between concentrating on eating and laughing with a French couple across the way as forkfuls of food come dangerously close to being deposited in ears or up noses.

  Brian decides to have a nightcap so I head back to the compartment. Trying to ready it for the night, I first do battle with the window which has just two positions: closed tight or open wide. Closed, the small room seems stuffy; open, the noise is deafening and the curtains flap alarmingly. I settle for the breeze. Next I rig up the lower berth and settle in comfortably, hoping that the rhythm of the train will rock me to sleep. Above me is a light fitting from the Thirties, a four-lamp candelabra of which only two bulbs are working, and in the corner there is a washbasin. Our luggage, including Brian’s saddle, has stacked away surprisingly neatly. It is a cosy, safe little haven in this lower bunk; above me the varnished curve of Brian’s closed, upper berth reminds me of a giant tortoise.

  We are nearly at our journey’s end and my thoughts turn to home. Travelling, while taking you to new places, emphasizes the value of having an emotional and physical base. T. S. Eliot said that ‘the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time’. This applies equally to an internal as well as an external environment and I feel that this trip has helped me see myself more clearly.