Travels in a Thin Country

by Sara Wheeler

  Tololo is financed by the US Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (Aura), and Chilean scientists are granted 10 per cent of the night. Astronomers visit from all over the world, and have to book a year in advance. Gonzalo told the story of a Japanese scientist who had come recently for one night, but clouds prevented him from seeing anything, and he had to go home again. Everyone laughed, and Gonzalo looked pleased.

  As I was well into the valley already, I decided to travel further inland when I left the grounds of the observatory; I had no plans for the afternoon. It was a perfect day which even a puncture couldn’t spoil. I was lying under Rocky, grappling with a hydraulic jack, when a pair of blue boating shoes appeared. A face came down to meet them, and it offered to help.

  This person was about my age, he had black hair which curled over his shoulders, and he looked like a youthful Salvador Dali. His name was Pepe, and his smile was dangerously beguiling. When we had fixed the tyre we went to his sister’s cottage to clean up. He asked me where I was going, and when I told him I planned to head straight up the valley he said,

  ‘No, don’t go there. The river’s dead up there. Polluted by the gold mine. I’ll show you a better place.’

  He was an agricultural scientist recently turned freelance, and although he lived in Santiago, he spent as much time as he could in the Elqui valley. Pepe hated Santiago. He was an ardent ecologist, and became quietly passionate on the subject of the many scandalous depredations of nature for which he held his country responsible. He knew a lot about these things, and was making it his business to learn more; the idea of illuminating me, a foreigner, who might go off and tell others, appealed to him a good deal. He was gloomy about the possibility of whipping up any concern among his countrymen.

  We walked along the bank of a clean river to a deserted grove of stiff green fronds, the ground covered with a thin layer of sweet apricots and the white fruit of the first fig crop. Further upstream we visited a friend of Pepe’s, an actor from Santiago. He had put his tent up on the riverbank for a month, and was lying in it. When we arrived he gave us a pot of warm apricot jam he had just made on a primus stove, and two spoons.

  ‘Are you North American?’

  ‘No, English’.

  ‘Es mejor, por lo menos’ (That’s better, at least). I was always chastened to remember that ‘at least’.

  Pepe took me to a cave on the hillside with a sign outside which said, ‘We villagers pay homage to our ancestors, who gave us their name.’ Inside they had made lifesize models of these ancestors. The cave overlooked a hamlet called Diaguitas, the name of the people who once occupied the valley. Most of the Diaguita, who spoke Kakan, farmed territory which is now in north-west Argentina; some of them came over the Andes, but their culture was probably eradicated by the Inca even before the Conquest.

  The villagers were working in a large shed, packing bunches of table grapes, and a long row of young women wearing hairnets sat on stools snipping off bad fruit. The men were spraying, and puffs of sulphur rose very slowly into the still air.

  We visited friends living on mountains in half-built houses, drinking herbal infusions and generally chilling out in the great Elqui valley tradition. Pepe was a hippy at heart. He didn’t own anything, he didn’t eat any refined foods, he rejected politics on the grounds that all its practitioners were corrupt, and he rejected too the values he had grown up with. His parents, who had been semi-skilled manual workers, were dead; he had two sisters, both married with kids in the city. They complained at him for not having a house or a wife or a full-time job.

  At one hippy house in the valley there was a very small slug at the bottom of my tea mug. I didn’t like to say anything; I thought perhaps it was supposed to be there. Our hosts were listening to Pink Floyd on a battery cassette player. (People often mentioned Pink Floyd as soon as they met me. Eventually I realized it was because they wanted to demonstrate the only two English words they knew.)

  Before I drove back down to my hotel in La Serena we went to watch the sunset over a glass of wine at the Peralillo social club. Peralillo is a ratty little village, but its club social was spectacular. We sat on a Raj-style raffia sofa with blue silk cushions on a balcony overlooking the whole valley, as well as the mountains beyond, and a man with unzipped flies brought a wicker flask of local wine.

  Pepe and his sister, a feisty woman living in the valley who had told her husband that he was looking after the baby for once, called for me in La Serena early the next morning and we set off on a day trip. It was a plan conceived at the Peralillo social club. Pepe had the idea that we should visit Enchantment Valley (Valle del Encanto) a couple of hours away in the semi-desert.

  When we got there a man with no front teeth emerged from a hut. Pepe went in to pay the entrance fee, and when they both came out of the hut the man looked suspiciously at me.

  ‘Is she foreign?’ he snapped.

  He’s going to say only Chileans are allowed in, I thought. Then I realized that being foreign meant I had to sign the visitors’ book. I had already signed getting on for forty visitors’ books, and I wondered if this enthusiastically pursued national obsession reflected their sense of geographical isolation.

  The valley was as still as a mausoleum and spread with a deep layer of smooth boulders. Between them spherical fruit blistered from the tips of cacti. Pepe took a great interest in the San Pedro cactus, still used for its hallucinogenic seeds – it was an ideal landscape for hallucinating, too.

  As the unusual climatic conditions of the region create the astronomical near-perfection of Tololo, so on the coast to the south they enable a small rainforest to flourish in the semi-desert. We drove on towards the ocean through familiar dry and cactus-spiked terrain, past hopeful vendors waving prawns and fat discs of goat’s cheese, and arriving at the Fray Jorge forest was like walking through the looking-glass into another world—a lush and verdant one, blossoming with tiny purple and yellow flowers and clammy creepers which clung around our ankles. Fray Jorge is a rainforest in a zone where annual rainfall may be as low as three inches. Sea-mist, produced by warm river water discharging nearby into a cold ocean, provides the equivalent of between twenty-four and thirty-six inches of rain a year, sustaining its own private tropical forest.

  All three of us were hungry, so we stopped at Tongoy, a popular resort village impressively devoid of character. Past the densely peopled beaches and rows of Coca-Cola and burger shops Pepe found a quieter beach at the poor end of town. Even the sand was inferior. But there was a shellfish market, and a restaurant where we ate paila marina, a crabby bouillabaisse which was to become my favourite Chilean food, with a mound of tiny lemons and a bottle of cold white wine. Shifty individuals sidled in to sell wet handkerchiefs’ full of illegally caught locos, a Chilean mollusc with no common name in English but usually referred to as abalone, which it resembles. Locos are so sought after that capture is illegal during the breeding season, and confiscated catches are reported in the papers as if they were cocaine hauls.

  The road back to La Serena was clogged with refugees from the beach. It was one of the most developed strips in the country, burgeoning with holiday apartments, villas, pizzerias and beach bars. At a place called Peñueles a particularly disfiguring welter of construction was occupied mainly by holidaying Argentinians (we could tell by the number plates of the cars parked outside). Pepe had it in for Argentinian drivers. He had it in for Argentinians in general, in fact, an attitude shared, as far as I could see, by the entire Chilean nation.

  *

  Pepe and I decided to go north for a week or two; this constituted my sneak back up in that direction, a one-off deviation from my steady progress southwards. He was good company, exceptionally well-informed on anything to do with the countryside, and his well-developed and dry sense of humour made him a very congenial companion. He enjoyed travelling as much as I did, so it seemed natural that we should do it together.

  We borrowed a tent and a gas cooker, bought sup
plies, found a cool-box in his sister’s shed, procured foam mats, checked Rocky’s tyres, stocked up on chirimoyas (the pears-and-honey fruit, which an old woman in Peralillo sold from a box in a windowless room at the end of a passage) and went over route maps at the social club. I was sure that I wouldn’t regret the decision to travel with Pepe.

  Besides papayas, the stalls on the highway out of La Serena were touting papaya honey, syrup, juice, sweets, cakes, bars and peeled papayas suspended in jars of sugar syrup. There was clearly nothing which could not be made out of a papaya. We bought some juice and travelled north until Pepe spotted a sandy track to a village called Choros, where everyone sat on their front step and stared at us. We stopped for directions to the headland at a ‘soda fountain’ where a man with braces holding up trousers several sizes too big served us a soft drink – warm, as usual – in a small dance hall with immaculately clean floorboards, bunting across the corrugated roof, nude calendars from the 1970s and pennants advertising the Choros football team.

  We followed a set of tyre tracks in the sand to a small, windblown memorial fenced off in the scrubby semi-desert. There was a large cross behind it, and in front someone had put a bunch of fresh flowers in a tarnished silver vase. A fisherman told me later that the memorial had been erected to honour the dead of the Itata, which sank in the bay in 1922. Seventy crewmen made it to shore, but they died later, of dehydration. Nothing grew on that arid peninsula. At the windy coast skull-and-crossbone flags flapped from one or two antediluvian shacks. When I asked a crone sitting on the sand sewing up a net what these flags meant she said they were from the time when pirates were frequent visitors, adding darkly that many of them had been British.

  We found a beach, and parked Rocky on the white sand. I should have guessed that a tent borrowed from a resident of the Elqui valley would be a pre-war model with most of the zips long-since broken and attached to the fabric with rusted wire. It was a huge, thick brown canvas tent like the ones you see in films shot in the Western Desert, and it had no guy ropes. The floor had bits of marijuana stuck to it. We improvized guy ropes with lengths of plastic cord Pepe had brought (he must have known), lashing each around a rock. The tent began to sag immediately, and then the deadly combination of hot sun and cold beer conspired to cause the afternoon to evaporate.

  The beach was a perfect semi-circle, framed by dunes and wrinkled grey rocks. As we were walking over these rocks in the early evening another walker greeted us. He was in his forties, tall and rangey with a deeply lined face, and he immediately introduced himself. After chatting for a few minutes he invited us for a drink at his tent. He had two women friends with him, and when we arrived they kissed us on both cheeks. Chileans are keen cheek-kissers. It seemed the perfect paradigm of the Latin temperament, especially when compared with the British handshake. I suddenly thought of a moment during the preparations for my trip, when I had gone down to Dorset to visit a half-Chilean, half-British man called Tony who was a descendant of José Miguel Carrera, one of the most influential figures in the Independence movement and a member of a distinguished aristocratic family. We were feeding Tony’s pheasants in a field when he was struck by a reflection. ‘You know, it’s awfully difficult, this business of being both Chilean and British. I feel split in two, with no point of contact between the two halves.’ He had been smoking a pipe when I arrived, like the perfect English gent. After an hour the conversation turned to Chilean history and Bernardo O’Higgins, another Independence hero, whose relationship with Carrera developed into a public feud. In 1821, amid the bitter rivalries generated by the struggle for self-government, Carrera was executed, as his two brothers had been before him. Tony leapt from his chair and strode about the kitchen, waving his arms and telling me that his family used to go to the abattoir on O’Higgins’ birthday and buy a bucket of blood to throw over his statue. ‘And of course,’ he said, pouring himself a straight Scotch, ‘we would never dream of sticking the O’Higgins postage stamp the right way up on our letters.’

  We sat on the sand watching a pair of pelicans while Rafo squeezed lemons and made jugs of pisco sour. He had caught some locos, which one of the women boiled in seawater and handed round, shells gaping. I had eaten abalone in Asia, but it hadn’t prepared me for the sweet, nutty taste of locos; I could understand why they were such valuable contraband. As the pile vanished Rafo told us he was a novelist, and that he had been in exile for most of the dictatorship. Although not a member of any party, he had publicly supported Allende for many years, and had protested during the first months of military rule. It was difficult for writers to be apolitical in Chile. José (known as Pepe) Donoso, a major contemporary novelist and a member of the group which emerged during the 1960s and 1970s when the Latin American novel was ‘internationalized,’ said that ‘justified political passion relegated literary passions to a secondary position’. There was a sense that those who left voluntarily had betrayed Chile; Donoso said that South American literary critics ‘seldom forgive exile’. I asked Rafo if he felt that intellectuals were polarized into those who had stayed and those who had gone.

  ‘Definitely. Each group resents the other: they think we whimped out by leaving, we think we suffered more by being away. That was one of the regime’s most potent poisons, you know – it set us against each other. Not just in a straightforward, left or right way. In more insidious ways, too. When it did that, it weakened our collective spirit.’

  ‘Can’t you strengthen yourselves again, now?’

  ‘It takes a long time. It’s like healing the body after deep trauma. Anyway, some of us – like me – feel those were our most creative years – I mean potentially – and now they’re lost.

  ‘The problem is,’ he went on, ‘that you don’t stop being an exile when you get home. It becomes a state of mind. You can be an exile inside your head. Perpetual travellers are often like that.’

  He poured me another drink.

  ‘Mind you, you don’t necessarily have to go anywhere to feel that kind of permanent alienation. Perhaps the worst kind of exile is mental.’

  The next morning a fisherman gave us a lift over to an uninhabited islet we had spotted from the tent flaps. We slung the tent, gas cooker, bread, wine and five gallons of water into the boat, and the other fishermen left off mending their nets and scraping their hulls to push us off. It took twenty minutes to get over there, and the boatman, who left us standing on a long white beach, agreed to pick us up on the way back from the following day’s trip. ‘I hope he remembers,’ said Pepe as we waved him off.

  It didn’t take long to become acquainted with our island. It was full of cactus fruit, black lizards, whales’ skulls and boobies nesting in the cliffs. We put the tent up again, and caught some fish with a length of nylon and bits of bread. The boobies eyed us suspiciously.

  There was sand in the wine; there was always sand in the wine. There was sand in all our pockets, in our ears, and in most things that we ate. Sand was always with us; we had stopped noticing it. We ate the fish as the sky turned opal before the sun set, feeling lordly, on our private island.

  It was warm enough to lie out after supper. The sea was touched by a light breeze, like a wheat field. It was unutterably peaceful. At that moment the past held no regrets and the future no fears; I could have given up everything worldly to live the rest of my life on that island – except, perhaps, the plastic tumbler of wine in my hand.

  When I put this thought into Spanish and told Pepe, he said, ‘Do it then. Change.’

  His vision of life was straightforward not because he was incapable of sophistication, but because the purity of his vision meant he was not troubled by conflicting values. We got talking about his adolescence. He grew up during the dictatorship. He said that he remembered the early years with ‘frigidity’, and told me long stories about his uncle, whom he loved very much, and who had ‘disappeared’.

  ‘I always thought he was going to walk through the door. It wore us all down to the bone, not knowing, li
ke acid dripping on our flesh.’

  Listening to him speak of the pain caused by a disappearance, perhaps the acutest pain of all, was like flossing with barbed wire.

  ‘Absence has a shape, you know. It exists.’ The whole family had lived on the far edge of anxiety for eight years, and then they received confirmation of his death. Each one had emerged from that peculiar South American darkness profoundly altered.

  ‘I sort of feel that I haven’t seen straight since,’ he said.

  *

  The boatman did come back for us, and asked if we had seen any vampires. I laughed blandly at this joke, then listened in appalled amazement as it became clear that it wasn’t a joke at all.

  ‘Up there, in those caves,’ the boatman said when I asked where these vampire bats live.

  ‘They’re all up and down this desert coast. They live off animal blood – only sealions here. But don’t worry – hardly any of them are rabid.’

  On the way back we made a circuit of Isla Choros, the largest of three islands opposite the headland. There was a small colony of Humboldt penguins living there, and they were standing in a row like clergymen queuing to vote at Synod. I had never seen a penguin outside of a zoo before. Around a corner, among a configuration of caves and rocky outcrops, a hundred southern sealions raised their fat necks and blunt faces. They hooted and grunted, and they smelt very strong. On land they were chestnut brown and suedey, and when they got wet they went slippery black, like rubber rings. The younger bulls sat together, apart from the others on a high ledge, and on one side of a choppy channel the patriarch lounged, inscrutable and alone. He was the size of a small elephant, and he had extra-long whiskers and wrinkles around his eyes like spectacles.