Travels in a Thin Country

by Sara Wheeler

  Cecilia, who had the corkscrew curls of a Pre-Raphaelite, worked as a teacher; she was married with two children, and lived nearby. Gloria was less striking: there was something old-fashioned about the way she looked, like a Forces sweetheart. Neither of the women was from Cañete; they had moved there with their jobs from elsewhere in the south. They seemed to like it well enough, though I got the impression that they relied on each other a good deal. When I answered their questions about myself I didn’t see the blank amazement I often noticed on the faces of my interlocutors. They only asked a few questions, too; they didn’t interrogate me, like most people. We sat around the table in the neat house and talked about our families, the community in Cañete, my journey – all kinds of things, and they told me that when I arrived they had been planning a skiing weekend. We laughed a lot; they loved to laugh.

  Gloria’s house was on one of the outermost streets of the small lattice of the village. Cañete still had a kind of frontier feel about it. The streets were made of mud, and the houses were wooden. The few shops were poky. It had a makeshift appearance which belied its history: it was founded on the site of a Spanish fort in 1558, in the Mapuche heartland. At that time Mapuche territory extended north of Santiago up to Copiapó and south as far as Chiloé. The horse, brought by the Spaniards, transformed the lives of the indigenous people and they copied metal spurs and stirrups with wooden replicas. Between 1598 and 1604 they destroyed every Spanish settlement south of the Bío Bío.

  I went to Gloria’s museum the next day. It was the only Mapuche museum in the country, and it was on its own in the lumpy fields, large, cool and airy. After she had briefed two of her staff about arrangements for a school visit, she showed me round. She was a very good guide. I was more interested in what she had to say than in the exhibits.

  ‘The sub-groups within semi-nomadic Araucanian society shared a broadly similar culture, though they were never united, either physically, politically or culturally. They were spread around central and southern Chile, and also Argentina, and together with the Inca and the Chibcha represented the most important Andean cultures at the time of the Conquest. Estimates of their numbers at that time are weak, but we can say at least that there were between half a million and a million of them.’

  Other academic sources went as high as two million. Yet the authoritative Handbook of South American Indians says, ‘The Araucanian is probably the most scientifically neglected tribe in the hemisphere’.

  Most Araucanian sub-groups had been extinguished. In the ethnic minority section of the 1992 census three choices were offered for the whole country: Mapuche, Aymára or Rapa Nui (the Polynesian name of Easter Island). The country was like a richly dyed piece of fabric whose colours had been bleached out.

  Gloria introduced me to a Mapuche musician. I listened to him sucking air into a long thin wind instrument made of cane; it sounded like a trumpet, and was called a ñolkín. He said he used to play it during hockey matches. His first language was mapu-dugun (‘language of the people of the land’); Mapuche land (map), which in their communal and collective culture belongs to everyone, is a vital part of the Mapuche person’s identity, a fact which casts a particularly tragic light on their history as most of their land was stolen from them. From the sixteenth century many thousands of Mapuche in their northern territories, already penetrated by the Inca, were taken from their own land as forced labour for encomiendas, the trusteeships dished out to the Spaniards. Within a hundred years of the arrival of the white man the northern limit of Araucanian territory had been pushed down to the Bío Bío.

  The musician embarked on a laborious explanation of a folk song which included mysterious references to ‘the island’. I looked on all my maps later: no island.

  ‘Yes,’ said Gloria when I asked her about it. ‘It’s sort of off the map in every way. A thousand people live there – that’s a lot for rural Chile, you know. It’s called Isla Mocha. I excavated on it once – the Mapuche lived there. There’s no public transport to it. It’s like Chile was fifty years ago.’

  My plans evaporated. Gloria thought it was quite a joke, and took up my new expedition as a personal challenge. We toured the village, finding out which of the three privately owned single-propeller planes which constituted Mocha’s only link with the mainland was planning a trip. One of them was leaving immediately, so Gloria wrote a note to her friend Nina, who was the headmistress of the school on the island (there were no telephones). The plane returned that evening with an invitation to stay at Nina’s. Another plane was leaving in two days, and would take me for the equivalent of ten pounds; this meant I would be on Mocha for the muchpublicized national census.

  While I waited I drove through the forests around Lake Lanalhue and on to Contulmo. The road was very bad, and so dusty that I had to keep the windscreen wipers on. Lanalhue was the first lake I saw. It was a stirring moment, as now only the Lake District, large though it was, lay between me and the glaciated south.

  Contulmo was colonized by Germans in 1884, and the teutonic architecture revealed that they had brought their culture with them and passed it on to their Chilean-born children. Beyond the village I followed a narrow lane along the shore of the lake, stopping after an hour outside the isolated Posada Alemana, a congenial old hotel with its own section of beach, owned by a descendant of the German colonists. It was far enough from the capital, I supposed, not to have been spoilt by squads of rich santaguinos seeking a holiday spot. The manager was a cheerful man wearing a peaked cap who claimed to be ninety-three, and he offered me onces in the dining area, under an awning and overlooking the lake. Onces (elevenses) are taken at five o’clock. There are several theories about their origin, but I believe the word was coined as a code for the eleven letters of aguardiente (clear brandy). It may have begun in the factories, where the workers liked to sneak off for a snifter at five without revealing their intention to the bosses, or perhaps behind the net curtains of little old ladies in the capital, anxious to preserve their genteel image and drink their brandy out of teacups.

  Onces are no longer associated with alcohol; they are ‘tea’. A maid served Liptons and apple küchen on a linen tablecloth embroidered with homely German proverbs. While the old man was reminiscing a boy at the water’s edge rang a handbell, and twenty carp swam up and ate bread out of his hand, exactly as it happens in Kurosawa’s film Dreams. They moved right up onto the sand, most of their bodies out of the water, and the superannuated manager never even stopped talking.

  On the second evening, the last before my departure to Mocha, I was invited to a birthday party – Cecilia was thirtyfive. It began at ten-thirty at night. Six of us sat around a circular table drinking pink panthers, a special cocktail made in a liquidizer from pisco, orange fanta and condensed milk. I thought with a stab of our birthday parties at home, and how different they were.

  1. I acknowledge a debt to the Pratologist William F. Sater and his book The Heroic Image in Chile (Berkeley and London, 1973).

  Chapter Nine

  The Brazilian anthropologist Darcey Ribeiro estimates that more than half the aboriginal population of America, Australia, and Oceania died from the contamination of first contact with white men.

  Moritz Thomsen, The Saddest Pleasure

  Streets full of water. Please advise.

  Robert Charles Benchley, in a telegram to his editor on arriving in Venice

  The day I left for Mocha was damp and cold, and everyone told me cheerfully that it would be worse on the island. I waited at the airstrip all morning with the venerable Cessna’s pilot, and when the weather cleared we left, levering in a pair of thuggish eight-year-old twins who were so similar that the configuration of dirt clung to their faces in the same pattern.

  The plane smelt of shampoo. By the time we reached the beach a small smudge had appeared on the horizon; when the earliest Araucanians looked over and saw the island, they were spooked, and they said it was where you went when you died. They constructed a whole community of t
he dead over there.

  It took half an hour to get to the outcrop of islets at the southern tip of Mocha. The island itself was an eleven-mile spine of virgin forest, rising to almost three thousand feet at the highest point and surrounded by a coastal plain, itself fringed with sandy beaches. The pilot twice tried to land on a strip of grass near the tip, banking sharply over the ocean, but a cow was asleep on the runway, so we set off for another airfield, where a crowd of people were waiting for a different plane.

  Fifteen horse-and-carts were parked behind a wooden fence, the latter sagging with the skinned carcasses of cows, heads resting on the grass and filmy eyes staring from ribena tendons. The owners of the carts, about to dispatch their beef to the mainland, stood in a group nearby, men with high, flat cheekbones and shiny black hair, wearing heavy ponchos and cracked boots.

  The pilot now looked on me as his personal responsibility, and as the headmistress’ house was several miles away he took me first to a farm where we installed ourselves in a large kitchen with four women who sat knitting and commenting on island affairs like a Greek chorus. Somebody, the pilot said, would show up who would take me to Nina’s. I thought this was rather a desultory plan, but as no one else did I kept quiet and drank my tea. The chorus discussed me as if I weren’t there. They spoke about a North American woman who had come to Mocha five or six years before. They all remembered the smallest details about this person.

  ‘She had a small cassette player she plugged into her ears,’ said one.

  ‘Do you know our apples?’ said another woman, suddenly addressing me and pointing to a tree right outside the window.

  ‘Do you sell them to the mainland?’ I asked.

  ‘Sometimes’.

  ‘What else do people do here, besides sell apples?’

  ‘Nothing much!’ said the first woman, and picked up her knitting again. I opened the carpetbag to take a map out and study the topography of the island, to work out where I was going. A bottle of shampoo had spilt, hence the smell in the plane.

  Drake stopped on Mocha in 1578 when he was circumnavigating the globe in the Golden Hind. The locals mistook him and the rest of the shore party for Spaniards, and arrowed them; Drake was wounded in the face. Francis Fletcher, a priest on board who wrote a narrative of the voyage, enthused about the gold and silver on the island, and suggested that Mocha stood in relation to the mainland opposite like a protective door, as the Isle of Wight does in England.

  The Isle of Wight did not leap to mind.

  A horse-and-cart lurched into the courtyard and one of the women stood up, signalling me to follow.

  There was one road, and it went about two-thirds of the way around the island. An occasional low farmhouse stood back in the misty fields, and women in aprons looked up from their washing troughs and waved soapy arms.

  We stopped by a clump of trees.

  ‘This is Nina’s! Behind the trees!’

  I climbed down, and the woman threw the carpetbag after me.

  The house was long and low, and it had a wide porch stacked with old bikes and wellington boots. The headmistress was standing at a window, and when she saw me she broke into a big smile. By the time I reached the front door she was there.

  ‘Welcome!’ She took the bag, and led the way to a kitchen where a number of saucepans were permanently maintained at boiling point on a giant wood-burning stove. Chickens pecked around the stone floor in between the intermittently spread sealskins, and Tía María, a resident aunt, pounded a glob of dough. Nina’s two children sat at my feet and stared.

  Nina had arrived on the island with her husband and children three years previously.

  ‘I’m afraid all the professionals here come from the mainland. The mochanos don’t have access to training,’ she said, lighting candles as the thin sunshine drained away. Besides power, there were a lot of things they didn’t have on the island, like a doctor, for example. They did have eight motorized vehicles, but they had to bring petrol over in small cans on private planes. They didn’t used to have any crime either, but thieving had recently made its ugly appearance among them. The farmers made a living, but only just, as the cost of transporting produce to the continent was virtually prohibitive, and besides beef the only real export was garlic.

  It rained hard all night before the day of the census, and at seven o’clock in the morning, when we walked to the school, now the census headquarters, it was through deep muddy puddles. Nina sat behind a child’s desk assigning groups of houses to the island’s state employees, converted into census takers, and they stuck printed discs to their lapels and set off, most of them on horseback, tucking their chins down into their buttoned-up coats. I was handed over with a bundle of census forms to two men bound for the remotest zone and we were conveyed to a cold southerly point in a police jeep. The tide was low, and we walked across the sand to a smaller island and our first house, a wooden one built on a spit of land permanently blasted by a brutal wind. One of the officials, an amiable post office worker, struggled through his questions next to a baking tray of small and shiny trussed pink birds while a pig outside headbutted the door and complained noisily.

  The policeman abandoned us and we began our trek up the west coast, where the forest lay closer to the plain and the wind had the whole Pacific to build up speed. The houses, built in hollows among the sand dunes, were small and cluttered, with sombre 1950s furniture and nylon lace doilies. The censors were required to read out a list of consumer durables and tick those found in each household, and so they doggedly did, asking people whose toilet was a hole in the garden and who had never had electricity whether they owned a video, microwave, music centre or cellular telephone. At least in the transport section the National Bureau of Statistics revealed that it was not entirely out of touch, as after a list of more sophisticated forms of transport it had printed carretón (horse-drawn cart), and the mochanos brightened up when they found something to say yes to.

  What they all had in abundance were apples, and an apronful was pressed on me as we left each house. I was not permitted to refuse this gift, as each orchard was different (they claimed) and I had to try them all. I was soon dragging round a sack of apples that would have provided me with enough roughage for a year. I started trying to feed them to the cows, but they didn’t want them either.

  People were asked if they could read and write, and most of those under fifty said that they could, and although the young mochanos hadn’t received much education, they had all completed more years of schooling than their parents, which constituted progress, at least. A twenty-five-year-old with a physical handicap had received no education at all.

  The last house required us to climb several steep sandbanks. These people did not even own a carretón. Three men lived there with their common-law wives and extensive progeny; one couple and their four children slept in the kitchen.

  A cluster of dirty and barefooted children followed us until we emerged on a headland overlooking a wide beach of honey-coloured sand. During the long walk home over bright green moorland spotted with animals it began pouring with rain. A decent track covered the very last stretch, built by the munificence of the national petroleum company; they had found gas on Mocha and had been obliged to construct a basic infrastructure to facilitate their labours. The gas has not been exploited; not yet.

  Nina, her husband and I sat up late most nights in the dark drinking pisco close to the fire. I shared a bedroom with Tía María and little Salome. A cow tied up outside usually kept me awake. One morning, idling outside a neighbouring farmhouse with a trail of children who had attached themselves to me as if I were the Pied Piper, I heard a rumour that bad weather was drawing in, and that people anticipated a couple of weeks without contact with the mainland. I thought I had better get out while I could. Nobody knew when a plane might come, they simply told me to wait at the airstrip and see, so I walked there, passing four farmers engaged in the consumption of ñache, a popular dish consisting of freshly drawn lamb’s blood
, lemon juice and vegetables. I waited for six hours, and a plane did land, eventually, and later it took me back to Cañete and a very amused Gloria.

  She had introduced me to the local schoolteacher, an elderly man who had lived among the Mapuche for fifty years, and he had offered to hike around with me for a day. He lived in Quidico further down the coast, and I drove there early in the morning to meet him. It was not an enjoyable journey, as Rocky and I were frequently forced off the deeply rutted road by logging trucks.

  Shortly after setting off on foot together through the dewy, fertile fields a line of huasos appeared on horseback on an eastern ridge. Huasos, the Chilean equivalent of the gaucho, the South American mounted herdsman, were described by George Pendle as ‘the human expression of the vast and desolate pampa’. They came down towards us wearing short ponchos, black wide-brimmed hats and knee-length boots with elaborate metal spurs. ‘Rodeo,’ said the teacher disapprovingly, and we changed direction.

  We came to a Mapuche house (a ruka). It was only a half-ruka really, as the wooden frames which used to be thatched to the ground like a wigwam were only used for the roof, meeting a simple stone wall. A barefooted woman greeted the teacher with an embrace, and shook my hand, watched by three small children with their mouths open and a few geese pecking optimistically at the hardened mud. A man left off harnessing a pair of oxen and came to talk to the teacher about the latest development in a local dispute about land rights, and I loitered in the background feeling uncomfortable.

  We sat cross-legged on the grass later to eat sandwiches we had brought filled with manjar, a Chilean staple consumed in prodigious quantities from the desert to the icecap. Manjar, if you will believe it, is sweetened, boiled condensed milk, and looks like caramel. I hated it.