Travels in a Thin Country

by Sara Wheeler

  The clouds dissolved. I no longer felt homesick for the hacienda, or indeed for anywhere else. We passed a small farm with a white flag flapping from the gate. ‘Bread,’ said Alfredo, pointing at the flag, and he went in, returning with a large blackened loaf under his arm. There were parrots in the tallest branches of the trees, and with his mouth full of warm fragments of bread Alfredo told me stories, festooned with graphic detail, about the pumas he had seen in the forest during his highly eventful childhood. The park was called Parque Inglés – English Park – by a nameless observer who visited the area in September when the grass was so green and smooth and the trees so luxurious and abundant that the traveller thought he was in England. Alfredo was a great talker. I learnt that he owned a restaurant on the main square of Molina; he even told me the turnover and profits of the business, confident that I would be impressed by his financial status. Would I like to settle in Molina?

  ‘Er, well, I …’

  ‘Don’t worry, you don’t have to make any quick decisions.’

  That was a relief.

  ‘We can talk it over this evening.’

  When I got back to the cabin I sat with a beer and wrote out the numbers one to thirty on a piece of paper, to plan the month ahead. The only commitment I had was the rendezvous with the two friends from home in a couple of weeks. It was intended as a holiday together; a staging-post for me. Apart from that, the plan was simply to pick my way south, but as I crossed off the days and wrote little pencil labels of where I might spend them I realized how much ground I had to cover before my Antarctic goal. I had to go.

  As there was no bus, I was forced to hitch. Alfredo wouldn’t leave me. I waited for two hours on the edge of a makeshift volleyball pitch where twenty people were playing in bare feet. A van emerged from a thicket just as Alfredo went to buy ice-creams, so I never got to say goodbye. But I thought perhaps it was best.

  I sat in the back of the open van until we reached the police control post, where I collected my passport from my friend, and down on the Panamerican once more I stood on the tarmac in the early evening sun, still fierce enough to burn. I got a lift to Chillán in a juggernaut carrying twenty-eight tons of iron. As soon as I saw it on the horizon I knew it would stop for me, and I knew it would be slow. I had calculated that I could get to Chillán before dark, but once again I hadn’t taken into account the extraordinary slow speeds at which I often moved in Chile. But I found a hotel late at night.

  The buildings of Chillán, a colonial town, are modern, like all the buildings in a long portion of southern central Chile, as even if the old ones survived the earthquake of 1939 they were finished off by its successor in 1960. In that year, two hundred miles of Chilean coastline sank six feet into the Pacific. After a day sitting in cafés at the market and dipping my feet in thermal springs near a bleak out-of-season ski resort, I decided to see if I could continue the trip by train. There was nothing to detain me further in the central valley; the landscape I had been travelling through hadn’t changed a great deal since the outskirts of Santiago, and I was impatient for the dramatic transformation ahead. I wanted to get to Concepción, a major city a little further on and the start of the south proper.

  *

  I found out that a train did run from Chillán to Concepción, but everyone thought it was peculiar foreign madness that I should take it in preference to a bus, claiming that it took much longer. How long could it take them to convey me seventy miles?

  When I arrived at the station I found the old arched ticket windows boarded up and an employee sitting behind a computer dispensing tickets in a new office. It took seven minutes to issue a ticket: the specially-written programme was so slow it constituted a technological achievement. I wondered if they had done it to emulate the speed of the trains.

  The route followed the east bank of the river Bío Bío right up to Concepción. Thick clumps of grass, sprouting between the rusted gauges of a pattern of tracks, revealed the dereliction caused by the dogmatically applied deregulation and self-financing policies of the late 1970s and 1980s. Both freight and passenger rail carriage had declined dramatically since they reached their peak in 1973, and between 1975 and 1985 the number of railway staff had fallen from twenty-six thousand to eight thousand. The network hadn’t been administered particularly effectively before the dictatorship, however, and naturally a thin rural population meant that branch lines were expensive to run. One study had shown that it would be cheaper to buy all the villagers in a certain province a car than maintain their rail service.

  The river, half a mile wide and streaked with sand flats, was more than a physical feature: it was probably the most potent symbol in Chilean history, for generations constituting the southern boundary of Spanish territory. The conquistadores were consistently pushed back up to the Bío Bío by the Mapuche, and the lands to the south were not brought under the control of the governor in Santiago until towards the end of the nineteenth century, after hundreds of years of violent struggle. The previous day I had read a story on the front page of a national newspaper concerning a plan to dam the Bío Bío which was provoking widespread opposition; although the project had become an important symbol of the Chilean green movement, the emotive power of the Bío Bío in the national consciousness was stirring passions well beyond the confines of the environmental lobby.

  The Mapuche, a people of the Araucanian tribal group, were the only Amerindians able to resist the Spaniards throughout the long haul of colonialism. Their heroism is enshrined in the sixteenth-century poem La Araucana written by the Spaniard Alonso de Ercilla y Zuñiga and cited as America’s first epic. Mapuche bravery still functions as an emblem of national pride: Allende spoke of the warrior Lautaro in his first speech as President. But Ercilla’s peers and descendants officially sanctioned the mutilation and enslavement of the Mapuche. By ‘mutilation’ I do not mean that they were wounded in battle. I mean that they had their ears, noses, feet and hands cut off and their eyes gouged out. The Mapuche were systematically deprived of their lands by theft and discriminatory legislation for generations. Little has changed. The Majority of Chileans remain indifferent to the distress of the marginalized, impoverished Mapuche and their culture, and to call someone an ‘indio’ is a great insult. And actually the Mapuche weren’t and aren’t warlike by nature. They just happened not to go for the idea of their own genocide.

  The mackerel sky melted after Quilacoya, and the sun set over the glassy water. On the near bank a wooden boat crept through the reeds.

  The cheap hotel I had intended to stay in at Concepción had apparently dematerialized, and as it was late (the journey had taken four hours) I was compelled to take a room in a more expensive one nearby, optimistically called the Ritz.

  Concepción, the country’s third city and capital of the major zone of heavy industry, looked, when I left the Ritz the next morning, like a northern French manufacturing town in the 1950s. In the main street, near the hotel, there was a large and weatherstained statue of Juan Martínez de Rozas, an adopted son of Concepción and with José Miguel Carrera and Bernardo O’Higgins a dominant force in the early struggles for self-government. Martínez de Rozas was deported by Carrera and died at Mendoza on the other side of the Andes in 1813. O’Higgins, the illegitimate son of an Irishman who had risen in the service of Spain to become Captain-General of Chile and Viceroy of Peru, was to become the first ruler of independent Chile.

  Napoleon’s invasion of the Iberian peninsula in 1807 and his usurpation of the Spanish throne precipitated a heady rush towards independence in the South American colonies. The first junta was formed in Santiago in 1810, but personal and political rivalries sapped the country’s power to unite in opposition, and the strife of the next seven years included a period of renewed royalist supremacy called La Reconquista.

  The real liberator of Chile, warmly supported by O’Higgins (but not by Carrera), was the Argentinian general José de San Martín, who, in 1817, led his famous Army of the Andes over the mounta
in passes to defeat the royalist army at Chacabuco and subsequently, in April 1818, to set the seal on Chilean independence at Maipú. O’Higgins, meanwhile, had been elected Supreme Director, and had set about the creation of the Chilean navy, which was to take San Martín and his troops northwards to the liberation of Peru.

  San Martín now enjoys the distinction of a blue plaque not far from Mornington Crescent, marking the house where he lived during a sojourn in London.

  Independence didn’t make much difference to most Chileans, or to the country at large, except for the opening of the ports. The social structure remained unchanged, as did the hacienda system. O’Higgins sought to institute reforms, but with no great success. The instigators of freedom were irreconcilable, and a chaotic period of government changes and even civil war ensued: O’Higgins was forced to abdicate in 1823, and he left for Peru, never returning to the country he had fought so hard to liberate and dying in exile, like many of the great men in the history of South American independence.

  Carrera was executed at Mendoza in 1821. I saw the note he wrote to his wife on a scrap of paper on the day of his death. It was smuggled to her in a timepiece, written in brown ink in a neat, tiny hand. It read, ‘Miro con indiferencia la muerte; y solo la idea de separarme para siempre de mi adorada Mercedes y tiernas hijos despedaza mi corazón.’ (‘I face death with indifference. What breaks my heart is the idea of being separated forever from my darling Mercedes and our dear children.’) If it broke his heart to write it, I wondered what it did to hers, reading it after he had died.

  Despite the turmoil of the period, independence was less disruptive for Chile in the longer term than for many countries on the continent. It settled, relatively speaking, in the early 1830s and became one of the most stable South American nations, often referred to as ‘the aristocratic republic’. The 1833 constitution remained in place until 1925, except for a brief interruption in 1891–an outstanding achievement, and not just by South American standards.

  It was grey and cloudy that day, sky and buildings merging into one drab whole, and destitute people curled in doorways reminded me of London. A middle-aged woman wearing a red dressing-gown on top of a coat looked up at me as I passed, and our eyes met as a slow rivulet of her urine crept towards my boot. I was about to go into the cathedral, but as I walked through the porch I remembered a story Salvador had told me at the lido. It was about a man called Sebastián Acevedo who had set fire to himself on that spot in 1983. He had repeatedly asked the authorities to stop torturing his twenty-two-year-old son and twenty-year-old daughter, but they didn’t, so he poured petrol over himself, as he had warned them he would, and incinerated himself in the cathedral doorway.

  When a large wooden cross was raised in his memory, the military sawed it off at the base.

  I decided to call on the Regional Director of Tourism for advice. He insisted on furnishing me with a guide, though I didn’t really want one. I couldn’t bear the idea of a whole drizzly day in the city, so I told the guide I was interested in the surrounding region as well and went to Hertz, who, reliable as ever, came up with Rocky IV.

  Hortense, my twenty-three-year-old guide, showed me round the rather boring gardens of the university before we were allowed to leave town. ‘Here,’ said a graffito, ‘was born the immortal Mir.’ The once-powerful Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (Movement of the Revolutionary Left) was founded by students at Concepción University in 1965. It was a Castroite group committed to violent revolution, and among other things it promoted land seizures, especially by Mapuche, and it was soon driven underground. The mirístas rejected the Allende regime as ‘a reformist illusion’, and were particularly active during his leadership. But they were hunted down with brutal efficiency by Pinochet’s henchmen, and fatally weakened.

  The art collection at Concepción is much vaunted, and determination gleamed in the Hortensian eye as she led the way. I’m afraid I didn’t much care for the paintings; they were very bad. Hortense and I were getting to know each other, however, and by mid-morning we had abandoned the city centre and called in to the decrepit housing project where she lived with her parents so that she could change out of her uniform into a pink mini-skirt. We headed for the coast then, Fine Young Cannibals blasting out of the cassette deck and Hortense in dark glasses leaning over to toot the horn at the boys.

  At Talcahuano, the fetid port servicing Concepción and the industrial zone, we went on board the Huascar, a Peruvian iron-clad which sailed into Iquique on 21 May 1879 at the beginning of the War of the Pacific and was met by Captain Arturo Prat and two small, wooden Chilean ships. The latter didn’t last long, but Prat, undaunted, charged onto the Huascar and fought until they killed him. The battle has become a central feature of Chilean history and Prat a national hero – probably the national hero; towns and villages from Arica to Puerto Williams are bedecked with statues of the Heroes of Iquique and bisected by many thousands of A. Prat streets. This is surprising, seeing that Prat was, in reality, a fairly nondescript naval officer who sacrificed his life rather pointlessly. But the climate was ripe for a hero, and Prat was the man. When he died a Peruvian newspaper said the Chileans had gone mad and become idolaters of a new religion called Prat, and the word Pratomania was coined, while Chilean hacks came up with comparisons with Leonidas at Thermopylae and Nelson at Trafalgar. Prat has subsequently been transformed into whatever the Zeitgeist demands – there is even speculation in the press during election campaigns as to whom he would have voted for ‘if he were still with us’.1 Small groups of excitable middle-class families enjoying a day out pushed their way around the Huascar. They were less interested in Quiriquina, an island skulking in the bay. Darwin was landed on it in 1835. One hundred and forty years after him, monopolized then by a naval training camp, it was used as a torture centre. I read an account of this centre by a Protestant lay preacher called Camilo Cortés who was held there. When he had recovered his health he became the unofficial prison chaplain. He said his faith became real in prison.

  The skies obligingly cleared as we crossed the new road bridge over the Bío Bío, and we started down the coal coast, stopping to eat baked clams at a table on the sand between Coronel and Lota, overlooking the bay where, as the waiter reminded me cheerfully, the British warships Good Hope and Monmouth were sunk in 1914. Later in the afternoon, at Lota, the heart of the coalmining community, we walked alongside rows of wooden terraces, the second storey extending out on stilts forming a kind of industrial cloister, and thin black dust clung to the leaves of the etiolated trees silhouetted underneath the hallowed black wheel of the mine itself. Hortense’s grandfather had been a miner; he had died of a lung condition when he was fifty-one.

  Coal had transformed the region in the 1860s. It was lowgrade stuff, but it did the job. The number of employees at the Lota mine had fallen dramatically over the previous decades. Before nationalization in 1972 it was owned by the Cousiño family whose winery I had visited in the Maipo valley; they controlled the area around Lota feudal-fashion for many years, and at the end of the nineteenth century built a large palace and park there. The palace was destroyed in the earthquakes, but the park, designed by two British landscape gardeners, continued to be tended as if the family were still in residence. Carlos Cousiño, buried there in 1931, was an unpopular employer with the reputation of a slavedriver, and as we touched the damp walls of a configuration of caves within a hillock Hortense whispered stories about devil worship.

  The coal towns were different from anything else I’d seen in Chile. They were grimmer than the copper communities; dirtier, and more familiar to my European eyes. I had a real sense that the long and lush central valley had ended, and that I had entered a harsher environment where people had to work harder. It came as quite a shock, and it suddenly seemed to me that I had covered a great distance to get there.

  We left town as a long high-pitched siren brought a shift to an end, and the road penetrated miles of pine forests, for long stretches uninterrupted
then suddenly and ominously punctuated by charred red scars and logging plants. The Chilean forestry industry was the success story of the 1970s, especially after a new afforestation law in 1974 granted the loggers fiscal exemptions. Heavy investment saw the natural hardwoods increasingly giving way to the Monterey pine, introduced to Chile, where it grows faster than anywhere else in the world, in the nineteenth century.

  Hortense caught the bus back home from Arauco, and I continued south alone. She had to meet her boyfriend, whom she revealed was a Mormon (though apparently not a very conscientious adherent). There were a lot of them about. On the road south I gave a lift to a middle-aged woman who immediately launched into a speech of missionary zeal about the one true god. She and her associates, she said, had set up on their own – the other religious organizations were all ‘dead’. I asked her if she’d mind if I switched the radio on. I couldn’t stand any more of that.

  I stopped at Cañete at dusk, checked into a small hotel in the main street and then followed the suggestion of the tourist man at Concepción and called the curator of the Mapuche museum. She told me to come straight over.

  Through the window of her old wooden house I saw two women of about my age weighing into a bottle of pisco while engaged in what looked like a spirited conversation.

  Gloria was in her mid-thirties, and single. She had one of the best jobs in the Chilean Arts Department, a wide range of interests, and she was liberal in outlook. This kind of woman is not often observed in rural Chile, and it was my good fortune to meet her. She must have been surprised when I turned up, but she didn’t flinch, and both she and her friend Cecilia simply took me on as one of them. It felt like coming home.