by Sara Wheeler
Another problem defined itself. I was desperate to go to the loo. I considered various strategies, but they all risked capsizing the vessel. Although I tried to focus on desert landscapes, the desert seemed a very long way away; it’s not easy to think of dry things when you are surrounded by thousands of miles of water.
It was eight o’clock when we got back. We had been out for thirteen hours. I quickly paid for a langosta to take to Rowena and Simon and ran off.
At dinner that evening the patrons of the café were gripped by consternation over the fate of my gift. They weren’t used to selling their crustaceans to real consumers – usually they sent them off in boxes to anonymous wholesalers. The entire village mobilized in its anxiety about what the foreigner was going to do with her langosta. They were afraid it would die in the carpetbag on its way to the continent. Eventually, exhausted by the toll this was exacting upon my Spanish, I agreed to cook it straightaway in my cabin. A green nylon net sock was immediately produced for the purpose. I considered burying the langosta in a deep hole when they were all asleep. But I did not do this. I cooked it, and I was very grateful to it for not squealing as it died.
I woke with burnt and swollen eyelids, presumably the result of falling asleep in the boat. I looked like a langosta. It had rained in the night, and my newly washed clothes were damp even though I had left them under the roof of my balcony. I had no others, so after making a pot of tea I tried to dry a pair of knickers over the gas flame. They soon caught fire, inevitably, and Manolo appeared at the window to see me brandishing a pair of flaming pants. Another man on another, larger island might have interpreted this as a gesture of feminist solidarity; but not Manolo.
The Frenchmen arrived at the window next. I had them in to share the tea. The grief-stricken one asked me if I had plans for other expeditions, after Chile. At the time I was plotting a sojourn in the South Seas, and when I told him he said, ‘Would you mind if I came with you?’
I thought about Selkirk as I prepared to leave. He had been roughly my age when he arrived on his island, and he lived alone there, mainly eating goat flesh, for four years and four months. When the Duke and Duchess – both Bristolian ships – dropped anchor in February 1709 there was a famous seaman aboard called William Dampier who knew Selkirk and could vouchsafe for his skills as a sailor. So Selkirk went home.
He had taken a Bible onto Más a Tierra, and on his return was often quoted as saying that he ‘believed himself a better Christian while in this solitude than ever he was before, or than, he was afraid, he should ever be again.’ This realization didn’t stop him drinking and whoring his way around Bristol and London for quite some time. (He also said, ‘I am now worth 800 pounds, but shall never be so happy, as when I was not worth a farthing.’) When he went home to Scotland he built a kind of cave in his parents’ back garden, and down in Bristol he was taken to court for assault. In the end he had to go to sea again; there was a kind of unappeasable unrest within him. On that voyage, he died.
There had been others before him. A reputable account exists of a man called Will from the Mosquito Coast who was abandoned on Juan Fernández by privateers in 1681 and picked up three years later by the Bachelor’s Delight. William Dampier was there on that occasion too, and he wrote a touching memoir of Will’s reunion with another Mosquito man who rowed ashore from the ship to greet him. Similarly, a story was handed down about a survivor of a shipwreck, many years before Will, who lived on the island for five years before he too was rescued. It isn’t surprising that they were all rescued: the archipelago was sometimes used as a refitting station after the trip around the Horn.
Defoe, writing machine par excellence, transformed Selkirk’s story; it was even relocated thousands of miles away, to a more exotic island somewhere east of Trinidad. He extended Selkirk’s stay to twenty-eight years, and gave him Man Friday. But one sentence he wrote for Crusoe could have been Selkirk’s epitaph: ‘I, that was born to be my own destroyer …’
On my second day on the island I had lost my watch; it had fallen off on the way up a mountain, and I was sorry, as it had a sentimental association. It was valuable, too, and would have raised more cash in Santiago than several hundred langostas. As I picked up the carpetbag to board the boat to the airstrip a woman came running up, breathing heavily and holding something out to me.
‘I found this in the forest. It must be yours.’
*
Besides two hundred langostas, four islanders were flying to Santiago with me. Watching the plane land, they said,
‘Good, it’s Figueroa.’
‘What,’ I said, ‘can you tell who the pilot is just by looking at the plane coming in?’
‘Of course,’ they replied, as if I were foolish.
One of them was a Jehovah’s Witness. Two-and-three quarter hours of enforced company suited her purpose nicely. I noticed that the other three soon feigned sleep, and the pilot kept his earphones clamped on. Shortly after boarding he had indicated the in-flight facilities with a wave of his hand: a bottle of Johnny Walker wedged behind his seat. I availed myself of this service, and the Jehovah’s Witness fell silent, realizing that she was looking at a lost cause.
Chapter Seven
I believe in Chile and in her destiny. Other men will survive this bitter and grey moment … sooner than you think avenues shall again be opened down which free man shall march towards a better society … These are my last words. I am convinced that my sacrifice shall not be in vain. I am convinced that at least it shall serve as a moral judgment on the felony, cowardice and treason that lay waste our land.
Salvador Allende, 11 September 1973
I went to visit another Nerudian house while I was still in Santiago, my mid-journey base, and Rowena came with me. It was the most famous one, in Isla Negra, a coastal village a couple of hours’ drive away. The population of Santiago shifts westwards during February and colonizes the coast, which we met at Algarrobo where men were gutting fish on trestle tables on the beach in front of the summer houses and the yacht club, eyed by a large statue of Jesus proclaiming optimistically that he would make them fishers of men.
At Isla Negra we drank coffee at a hostería festooned with bougainvillea. A poster in the bar displayed a big photograph of the poet Vicente Huidobro. Neruda would have hated that –they were terrible enemies. I wondered if that was the tavern immortalized by Antonio Skármeta in his novel and film Ardiente paciencia (Burning Patience), which is about a postman in Isla Negra with only one client (Neruda), poetry, and the events of 1973, when the postman was taken away and the poet died; and it is about the power of ordinary people to survive, to overcome and to hope.
The house was built on a high outcrop of rock, overlooking the Pacific. Neruda had a collection there of golden-haired figureheads culled from shipyards. He loved to surround himself with beautiful things, and carried it off with such style; he had a fine aesthetic sensibility which I couldn’t help reflecting is often absent from his poems. The guide, referring reverentially to Don Pablo, waved his hand at numerous framed photographs around the house, and in all of them Neruda bore a striking resemblance to Nabokov. As if he were aware of it he had framed a small collection of butterflies.
To the south one resort village melted into the next, and in Cartagena I forced Rowena to climb with me high above the plethora of shabby boarding-houses and cheap cafès to find Vicente Huidobro’s tomb. He died in 1948, and had chosen for his grave a solitary spot overlooking the dusty green hills and the ocean and surrounded by iridescent violet thistles. It also overlooked the Isla Negra peninsula, on which Nerudian pilgrims converged in their hundreds every day. I hoped he couldn’t see it from wherever he was.
That evening it was warm and clear in Santiago with a light breeze and a brilliantly blue sky even at eight o’clock at night. I met Pepe. A small group of his friends had planned a special dinner in my honour, and we got on a crowded bus and headed south, towards the poblaciones where hundreds of thousands of poor Chileans
cling to the urban conglomeration.
The friends lived in a five-storey tenement block, and in front of it a pile of plastic rubbish sacks had been ripped open, spilling their glistening innards onto the street. A smiling man in shorts opened the door, and he kissed me on both cheeks. I saw his wife behind him, picking children’s toys off the floor. When we went in, a tray of long pisco sours appeared, and we drank them wedged into the kitchen while Enrique, the man in shorts, prepared three large fish. I could see through an open door that the couple shared a single bed, and that their child slept in the same room. Two more people arrived, arms full of pale orange melons, and the fish were dispatched to the oven.
Conversation turned, as it often did, to the international status of Chile. Everyone always wanted to know what we of the West thought of the country, and it was hard to tell them that the majority of the West never thought of it at all. I often thought that I noticed a kind of national insecurity and identity crisis. Relentless foreign influence in almost all sectors of society presumably contributed to it. Victor Jara, a leftist folk singer murdered in the National Stadium a few days after the coup, said this: ‘The cultural invasion is like a leafy tree which prevents us from seeing our own sun, sky and stars.’ After a newspaper ran a small piece about Jara’s death, the authorities banned his name from the media. But they couldn’t obliterate his spirit. A day or two later, an unknown employee at the television studios inserted a few bars of Jara’s ‘La Plegaria’ (The Prayer) over the soundtrack of a US film.
After dinner pisco was supplanted by wine and tobacco by marijuana (most Chileans I met seemed to have a little bag of the latter about their person). They took off Pink Floyd and put on Chilean blues, and two people danced. Later Pepe began reciting a Neruda poem, and the others joined in. They knew it by heart. I couldn’t think of a poem which all the guests at a dinner party in London would know. Pepe and Enrique and their friends were all leftists, and Neruda had given them hope; he was able to raise their souls above their suffering. He affirmed their identity, too, and made them feel their dreams were valid, dreamt through long years of austerity and exploitation, a rosary of broken promises. Neruda had been an inspiration to many people, not only in Chile. He spoke for the continent. When he was awarded the Nobel Prize he was cited by the Swedish Academy for ‘a poetry that with the action of an elemental force brings alive a continent’s destiny and dreams’. Che Guevara always carried two books in his duffel bag, and one was Neruda’s Canto general. He used to read it to his guerillas at night in the Sierra Maestra. Neruda gave them something to cherish, in the Bolivian mountains, and in their tenement blocks.
I liked the idea of him so much that it took me a long time to admit to myself that I didn’t think he was a very good poet. Once I’d read more of his prose I decided I didn’t like him much, either. He was tremendously keen on himself, and had a dubious attitude towards women. He could be amusing (in mid-sentence, in his Memoirs, he slips in, ‘… Hitler, the Nixon of that era …’) and, on isolated occasions, painfully moving. He wrote about his grief at the death of his friend Alberto Rojas Giménez, another Chilean poet. It was a particularly searing grief, as Neruda was away in Spain at the time. He describes taking a tall candle to an empty church and sitting watching the flame, drinking a bottle of white wine and feeling that although he didn’t believe, the ‘silent ceremony’ brought him closer to his friend.
Neruda was committed to the idea that a writer should be interested in truth, and that it was more important than style. His poems are not lean; they are fat. He paints word pictures, sometimes with great charm, of things you and I recognize, both from the inner world and the outer, but he does not compress the meaning of language until it vibrates, or take you where you have never been. But a great poet – a Hopkins, say – wouldn’t have been much good to them, night after grim slum night.
This is what the exiled Argentinian newspaper editor and writer Jacobo Timerman wrote:
The common destiny of lovers in Latin America is to return again and again to Pablo Neruda. He accompanied us from our first kisses; he helped us to get through, with sensuality, our early adolescence; he was with us during our first major political upheaval – the civil war, the fall of the Spanish Republic, and the fascist inferno that followed. With Neruda we were able to grasp and understand the earthy romance and magic of Latin America … Not even the bad poems … could diminish in any way the presence of Neruda in our dreams and our romances. No particle of our sensibility could be separated from the poet. His words and his rhythms will forever be the only expression that we Latin Americans have when our heart overflows with love for another human or with love of the universe.
Timerman was an exceptionally cultured man.
‘This is what you need to know of our country,’ said Enrique, sliding another cassette into the machine and passing me the case. The label said Violeta Parra, and showed a bad drawing of a woman with large eyes and long black hair.
‘Now our culture is to consume,’ he said. ‘But this is what we were, and we still know it. She sings our north, our south, our centre.’
What she was singing about was pain and betrayal.
Although he was by now quite drunk, I was struck by the words ‘our north,’ ‘our south’ and ‘our centre’ from a man who had barely left the central valley. I had, in my ignorance, looked at the shape of the country, considered the massive social, economic and climatic differences between the north and the south and concluded that there couldn’t be much of a national consciousness. But the reality was that their sense of nationality bound them together as closely as if the country were a perfect circle.
‘Violeta, Neruda and La Gabriela, these are the ones who express what we are,’ said Enrique’s wife, swaying slightly. ‘Their work is an expression of our culture – our real culture.’
When I left, Enrique stood at the door.
‘This country, it has many problems. We want to be more like you. But underneath there is pride. Sometimes it’s difficult for us to find it now, that’s all, because there’s so much junk on top.’
I had been invited to stay in the country for a weekend, and I was pleased to get out of the city again, as Santiago was oppressively hot, and the choking smog had thickened. It was also an opportunity to experience a very different side of Chilean life from everything I had seen up until then.
The bus south west to Peñaflor was too hot. I got off at the red bridge, as I had been instructed, and left the tarmac behind, following a track into a green and sun-flooded valley. An empty corn truck picked me up, and I stood up in the back as it lumbered up a steep dirt road, great bowers of eucalyptus hanging over my head. The flat, squared floor of the central valley shone out, and the Andean foothills beyond it quivered.
The Mallarauco valley was transformed during the last quarter of the nineteenth century by an innovative and energetic landowner called Patricio Larrain Gandarillas. By tunnelling through a hill he built a canal which fed off the Mapocho river, and it irrigated the land for miles. This feat of engineering took him twenty years. He brought over expertise from the European Alps, and the workers dug from both sides of the hill. The locals still tell the story that the two teams were only a few inches out when they met. It was polluted water now, as it ran down from Santiago, but it still watered the land all right.
I stayed with the canal-builder’s grand-daughter-in-law, a stately English woman from Kent who married a Chilean fifty years ago and shocked his parents by wearing trousers. When I arrived she was sitting under the front porch, reading the Guardian Weekly with a large red dog asleep under her chair. She had invited me to stay whenever I liked, but I hadn’t told her what day I was coming, and as she didn’t have a phone she wasn’t really expecting me. Pepe, who had introduced me to her a week before in a cafe in Bellavista, Santiago’s bohemian quarter, had laughed when I had told him I was worried about just turning up.
‘Don’t be so English!’ he said.
The ancestral
farmhouse had adobe walls a foot thick, spongy high beds, heavy, creaky wooden furniture and an abundance of assorted books, paintings and pieces of tarnished old silver. It was roughly a hundred years old, typical of a period when there were huge fortunes in Chile. The flaky turquoise swimming pool was decorated with a child’s white handprints, and around it the estate flourished with bending trees of fruit and avocados, bushes of berries, thick stalks of corn, a citrus grove and tall red hot pokers.
The châtelaine was exceptionally hospitable; she ignored her guests most of the time, which was actually quite refreshing. She was a widow, and had embraced Chile, for better or worse, like a marriage vow. On the first evening she interrogated me about Britain, as exiles usually do. Talking about the state of it made both of us depressed.
Grandchildren and dogs roamed around unchecked and unmatched cane chairs with stained cushions, open books and crumpled articles of clothing idled in lush long grass. Houseguests appeared, and others vanished. We ate corn and potato stews, tomato and basil salads and slabs of dark pink watermelon at wooden tables on the banks of the river, shaded by willows. Conversations broke out spontaneously in the cool kitchen or the hushed library. I thought of novels set in the 1930s peopled by the British upper classes. This was what life had been like for the old landowning families of the central valley. No wonder they didn’t want it to change. It was very agreeable.
When I went back to the city it was on the daily bus out of the valley, an old boneshaker which had been rattling up and down the steep Mallarauco roads for years. Next to the sign displaying fares there was a yellowing list of prices for other items passengers might wish to bring with them. These included a bed (450 pesos), a gas cooker (350), a television (250) and a sack of flour (150).
Up in the north I had met a woman who was organizing local branches of the Alianza, an up-and-coming alliance of Greens and Humanists, both fashionable words in the Chilean political vocabulary. She had urged me to call a colleague of hers when I was in Santiago who was one of four vice presidents of the Alianza, a candidate in the forthcoming municipal elections and a feminist to boot. The colleague’s name was Sara, too, and I met her in a crowded coffee bar near the party office opposite Santa Lucía hill.