Travels in a Thin Country

by Sara Wheeler

  The only things we saw, for the first twelve hours of the bus journey to La Serena, were sand and a water pipeline. The bus made one short detour to the ocean at Antofagasta, the largest port in northern Chile, dipping through several miles of urban squalor which had seeped up from the central basin of the town. Antofagasta was a grubby, lustreless hole. I read in a guide book that ‘city tours’ were available, and that they took three hours.

  We had given Hertz their jeep back and taken another overnight bus trip, moving south of the desert to spend James’ last few days with me in a more temperate climate. It was too big a step for me to take downwards all in one go, but we needed a break from the punishing desert environment, and I planned to sneak back up a little way, after James had gone.

  The sound tracks of the US films shown on the bus were so poor that we couldn’t tell if they were dubbed or not. The vehicle smelt of turpentine (this turned out to be a woman behind us eating mangoes). I managed to sleep, but James didn’t, and he was in a very bad mood when we arrived, shortly after dawn, at La Serena, an affluent colonial town at the mouth of the Elqui valley. We almost immediately caught a colectivo up the valley to a village called Vicuña, where we checked in to a ‘hotel’ with the Tolstoyan name of Yasna. Our room was made entirely of hardboard, the bathroom locked on the outside and we had to unscrew the bulb to turn the light off. In addition, a chalked board of bar prices was propped against the doorframe, and early in the evening a drunk veered in demanding a glass of wine.

  ‘It’s green!’ said James as we strolled around the outskirts of the village. The cultivated fields were soft on the eye, after the desert. It was like switching a television from black-and-white to colour. The angles of the hills were gentle, and the proliferation of plants, shrubs and trees belonged to familiar species. We felt we were breathing more deeply, as if the desiccation of the north had constricted us, and although it was hot, it was a benign heat. It was only when I arrived in this temperate zone that I realized the implicit threat of the desert, a threat constantly hovering just below the surface. Like an intense relationship, I had loved it passionately but I felt the relief of getting away.

  The Elqui valley was burgeoning with neat and healthy moscatel vines. The grapes are eventually crushed and distilled to produce pisco, a clear brandy which is widely drunk throughout the country (and other South American countries) and probably constitutes the national drink. I myself had drunk it widely too, usually in pisco sours, mixed with egg white, a little sugar and the juice of tiny lemons.

  On the third day we took a bus up to Monte Grande through more of these vineyards and made a pilgrimage to the grave of Gabriela Mistral, among Chile’s finest poets and the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (only four others—Asturias, Neruda, Márquez and Paz—have won it since). She was born in Vicuña and went to school in Monte Grande, where they had restored her classroom, a polished wood abacus in the corner and a six-foot long relief map of the country on the wall, the tips of the Andes worn away by children’s fingers. In the back garden the branches of the pimento trees were sagging, and the papery covering of the dusky pink fruit came off in our fingers.

  ‘La Gabriela’, as they call her, asked to be buried ‘in her beloved Monte Grande’, and her tomb, in a leafy grove, was diligently polished and swept by the reverential villagers. (Monte Grande hadn’t been quite beloved enough, as she moved to New York as soon as she became famous.) A man with a wooden leg was watering the iridescent blue convolvulus. ‘I knew her, you know. When we were children, she used to play at the river with us. She left here when she was eleven, but she was always one of us.’

  She would have been pleased with that; she felt closer to ordinary rural people than to the literary establishment. Her poems are lyrical and expansive, emanating spiritual passion and a Romantic vision of nature; there was something noble about her. Her real name was Lucila Godoy Alcayaga. She was a teacher (Neruda was one of her pupils in Temuco) and, like many South American literary figures, later a consul in the foreign service. When she was twenty she fell deeply in love with a man who later committed suicide, and she never married; she always carried that within her. People thought she was eccentric. Her work has never found its translator: perhaps it will, but I had a feeling that the US critic Margaret J. Bates was right when she wrote of her, ‘She has created a plant that does not grow on English soil.’

  The next village, Pisco Elqui, used to be called Unioń, but they changed the name in 1939 to counter what they refer to soberly as a Peruvian initiative to claim international exclusivity on the name Pisco, which comes from the Quechua pisku, flying bird. Tired out by the walk, we sat under a trellis of vines in the courtyard of an inn painted tangerine orange and green. It had a large wooden balcony, and below it a man kept winding up an old gramophone and playing scratchy French 78s.

  We discovered a boarding-house straight out of a Gothic horror novel. It had a high pointed roof, an overgrown garden, arched and cracked windows and a sign painted with the flaking words ‘Don Juan’ which was obligingly swinging in the wind and creaking when we arrived. We stayed one night there, fussed over by an old woman who had lived in the house for forty years. The staircases and panelling were solid mahogany, the walls of our bedroom, at the top, were made entirely of glass, and in many of the velvet-curtained rooms downstairs thick layers of dust had settled on heavily tinted photographic portraits.

  We returned to Vicuña on New Year’s Eve on an overburdened bus which stopped every few minutes to disgorge passengers and pick up replacements, most of them clinging to battered cardboard boxes tied up with string. Children were sitting at the side of the road making floppy monkeys out of rags and cardboard; these were to be burnt as the old year passed. We were ineluctably drawn back to the Yasna, and drank a bottle of cold Chilean champagne in the courtyard. I was glad to be sharing the New Year with an old friend.

  At dinner later we got friendly with a lively young waiter. His family were throwing a party at home, and he invited us to go along with him when he finished work at midnight. We killed time very agreeably.

  The waiter lived with his mother in a small, modern house in which a variety of aunts, uncles, cousins and nieces had convened. James and I were obliged to dance with everyone, and they even made us do the cueca, the national dance (now rather hackneyed), despite our total ignorance of its steps. The general idea was evidently to imitate a cockerel and wave a hanky. Much later, most of us adjourned to the community hall, where a six-piece band was playing an exuberant blend of rock and folk music and there was a bottle of pisco on each table. The only tense moment in an otherwise delightful evening came a couple of hours later when our waiter friend told James that he was a very bad dancer; but we got over that. Almost the whole village had turned out for this occasion, and they were still making the most of it when we crept off at four-thirty and knocked up the crusty proprietor of the Yasna, who emerged in his pyjamas to unlock the door, unmoved by our New Year’s greetings.

  Chapter Four

  Chile is at least a place where one can find oneself and find other people with a compass which is that of real life.

  Victor Jara, folk singer, 1970

  There can be no better land to live in than this one.

  Pedro de Valdivia, letter from Chile to Charles V of Spain, 1545

  It was unfortunate that we had planned such an early start the next morning that we had to wake the old man up again to let us out. I was to set off on a quest to discover one of the communes reputedly concealed at the top of the valley. I had heard about them from Chileans I had met in London when I was organizing the trip; everyone seemed to know about these communes, but nobody had been to one, and I had failed to obtain any reliable information on the subject when I made enquiries in Santiago – though everyone there had heard about them, too. I just had to go. James was off to spend a week in the south, so we said goodbye in the square, too numbed by the after-effects of the previous night to feel sad.
‘I must take a photograph of you,’ he said, ‘in case you’re never seen again.’

  The location of these communes (if they existed) was not arbitrary; not at all. The upper reaches of the Elqui valley have become a kind of mystic spiritual centre, attracting a range of disparate tranquillity seekers from Vedic sects to devotees of the extra-terrestrial. We had come across various hippy types in the valley playing plangent guitar music and chanting in incense shops run by women in kaftans. A combination of geographical and atmospheric factors, notably the Humboldt current offshore, the vast cloudless Atacama desert to the north, and the laminar air flow over the Andes (whatever that is) creates the clearest sky on the planet right over the Elqui valley, and it has consequently been labelled ‘a window to the heavens’ and ‘the magnetic centre of the earth’ – hence its concentration of ‘spiritual’ disciples. Naturally the valley has attracted the scientific community too, and three of the most important astronomy centres in the southern hemisphere have been built, with foreign capital, in the region.

  Thus the Elqui valley is a kind of astronomical and spiritual Mecca.

  By some small miracle a bus arrived in the square and took me up to Monte Grande. From there I walked a mile or two; I had a hunch that if I moved upwards and away from the villages, I might find a commune – or find something, anyway. I felt so ill that I thought I might actually die, and I made the usual New Year’s resolution about never drinking again. By another, larger miracle (1992 was performing well) a shiny new car pulled up next to me. A spruce, balding man in his forties got out, skipped towards me and shook my hand enthusiastically, revealing himself to be a farmer from the south (a wealthy one, judging by the car and his appearance). Pedro was alone, wanting a few days of mental space to take stock of his life, and as such he was as anomalous as me. Neither of us knew where the communes were, or if they really existed, but we both wanted to get to one, so we naturally started looking together. This was one of my great slices of luck, as I never would have found a commune if I hadn’t met Pedro. His most salient characteristic was a tendency to talk all the time. He often wanted to discuss history. In the stifling car on a deeply rutted track half-way up a mountain near Argentina he asked my opinion on the fall of the Roman Empire.

  We came to dead ends, reversed out of them, and at midday stopped at the end of a long avenue of raspberry bushes. An old woman appeared, and we found out that her son ran a commune beyond the house. She had thirty grandchildren, and two of their offspring were persecuting chickens among the raspberries. Pedro kept talking as we picked our way on foot along a path above a river. At the end of it, in front of half a dozen huts, two children up an apricot tree were shaking branches, and the fruit was bouncing over the mud courtyard. A handsome, youngish man with white hair came out of a hut, smiled, and signalled for us to sit down in some old cane chairs in the shade.

  Pedro explained for both of us. The white-haired man said, ‘You are welcome to stay with us. We are Chilean practitioners of Agnihotra, an ancient Vedic science of healing. Only my family and I are here at the moment. Our ceremony takes place at sunrise and sunset. You can join in, or not, as you like.’

  A modest daily rate was quickly agreed, and Pedro and I were installed in two small wooden cabins on the riverbank. One side overlooked the green, fruit-filled valley and the other a path heading towards the high pass to Argentina, along which miniature straw-hatted shepherds occasionally appeared on horseback, threading their way behind a flock of ragged sheep to their pastureland in the cordillera. We ate with the white-haired Leo and his wife in their hut; the food consisted mainly of vegetable and herb stews, apricot tea and bread cooked in a hole in an outside wall. It was very good. The wall of the hut was decorated with two pictures of Hindu holymen who looked terminally ill and a lifesize poster of Christ.

  ‘The ceremony’ (correctly called homa) took place in a bare room further up the slope. We sat cross-legged on purple cushions while Leo prepared a fire in a copper pyramid using sun-dried cowdung coated with ghee, and at the exact moment of sunset he began chanting the first mantra. Precision, apparently, is crucial, and a computer printout is dispatched from Agnihotra headquarters in the United States with daily timings – down to seconds – calculated according to latitude and longitude. During this mantra he sprinkled grains of ghee-moistened brown rice onto the fire. This was repeated with another mantra, and meditation. The principle behind Agnihotra is that fire purifies the atmosphere, releasing healing energies: ‘Heal the atmosphere, and the atmosphere heals you.’ Some people eat the ash of the cowdung as a sifted powder after the ceremony, but we were spared this.

  Leo didn’t care what we did during homa, as long as we kept quiet. There is no hierarchy among Agnihotra practitioners, and no sacerdotal status; anyone can attend the ceremony, and anyone can perform it. Pedro told me afterwards that he felt perfectly relaxed sitting in the homa room (though when I asked him what he had thought about during the first ceremony, he said he had been worrying about whether anyone was feeding his cows).

  Late one night Pedro announced soberly that he was trying to decide whether to marry his girlfriend. That was why he had come to the commune: to think things over. He wanted to know what I thought.

  ‘Are you in love with her?’ I asked, casting around rather desperately.

  ‘I think so. But I’m frightened about giving up my independence.’

  He came from a small village of farmers; in that environment a single man of his age must have constituted something of a social aberration. I thought I was probably the wrong person to consult about relinquishing independence; I was still constitutionally unable to undertake joint trips to the supermarket.

  We were sitting on the riverbank, and it was rustling with its night noises. The stars were like a fine layer of icing sugar. Pedro talked about his village. He had grown up there. It wasn’t long before he got onto 1973.

  ‘They came to interrogate a man from Allende’s Popular Unity, but took another one whose name was the same, by mistake. They made him walk across the square – it’s a very old one, in our village, with beech trees round three sides – and shot him first in one knee, then the other. Then he had to drag himself forward in order to be shot in the head.’

  During the day I often sat under the willow tree next to the river, and sometimes Leo came down to catch trout. He was a calm, charismatic figure, dedicated to ‘self-realization’ and a lifestyle which in the city would be pigeonholed as ‘alternative’. I wasn’t very keen on the idea of burning cowdung, but I admired his commitment to the transcendental within himself. He could never have been a proselytizer, and that appealed to me too; he thought there were many different spiritual paths to choose from, and that they led to the same place. He drove me down the mountain after three days at the commune and dropped me at Monte Grande, and as I watched his trailer disappear, four small children waving from the back, I felt unexpectedly regretful.

  It took me a whole day, after he had left me there, to fail to hitch a lift to Vicuña, take recourse in a bus two hours later, locate my other bag at the Yasna, pick up a colectivo to La Serena, unite myself with the press pass I had arranged to get me into the observatory the following day, collected Rocky III from Hertz, and check into a hotel in town. The Regional Director of Tourism had arranged the pass for me. The observatory was famous; it had the biggest telescope in the southern hemisphere. It was famously difficult to get into, as well, and it was that, of course, which made me want to go there.

  Visiting regulations at the Tololo observatory, shrouded in a conspiratorial veil of formality, stipulated arrival at the lodge on the valley floor at nine o’clock in the morning sharp. This entrance turned out to be a forty-five-minute drive from the observatory itself, and when I drew up in front of the barrier a uniformed official appeared to check me off on his clipboard. He returned to his office, made a phone call, came back and told me that the road was extremely dangerous and that in the event of breakdown I was forbidden to lea
ve my vehicle. The man at the tourist office, the man at Hertz and the man at the hotel had already explained, patiently and with relish, how dangerous this road was. They had clearly never driven on the Andean passes to the north. The road was a hundred times better than those the Rockies and I were used to.

  Nine vehicles had been granted permission to enter that morning and we crawled up to 6600 feet in convoy, emerging above the clouds moving briskly along the Elqui valley. At the top of the mountain three white domes rested on stainless white stumps, like futuristic mosques, and a row of equally immaculate white VW Beetles glinted in the sunshine. The neat white gravel paths were roped off. The driver of one of the cars, standing between two domes, coughed to confound the silence, and when I looked over the uninterrupted view of mountains below us, I felt a visceral thrill.

  A man in a white coat came through a door concealed in a stump and introduced himself: he was an astronomer, he was called Gonzalo and he was going to show us round. We filed into the middle stump. I had assumed that I was going to be looking through large black telescopes and seeing things. But it wasn’t like that. It was like looking round a nuclear power station. The biggest telescope had a lens measuring twelve feet in diameter which could capture light as far back as fourteen thousand million years. Its movable portion weighed around 300 tons and looked like a Cyclopean blue doughnut, yet it was so finely balanced that with the brakes off Gonzalo could move it with two fingers.

  I had also assumed that I was going to be seeing stars. It hadn’t occurred to me that it was daytime.

  Scientists at Tololo reckon on between a hundred and fifty and two hundred nights a year with perfect visibility into infinity. The big telescope had taken pictures of the birth of a star. ‘We,’ said Gonzalo, ‘are those who look into the past. Astronomy is anthropology—we see the birth or death of a star, and we learn to know ourselves better.’ This last part sounded like something Leo might have said.