Travels in a Thin Country

by Sara Wheeler

  I stayed in the slums for ten days, moving from house to house wherever I was invited to spread my sleeping bag. In the poky shops (there were no supermarkets) I wasn’t surprised to see people purchasing single cigarettes; I had observed this practice many times in southern Europe. They caught me out, however, when they counted their peso coins to buy one teabag and three matches. Much later, I learnt that the single teabag routine had been used by the opposition parties in the 1988 election campaign. They had made a television commercial showing a Chilean woman buying one teabag in a corner shop.

  Nobody lived in a cardboard box. All the houses I visited had sanitation. Acute poverty is less visible in urban Chile than in the shanty towns of Brazil and Peru – but it is no less deadly. Chronic unemployment and chronic overcrowding lead to endemic social dysfunction and endemic misery; I didn’t have to look far to see that. Substance abuse, alcohol abuse, drug-related crime and wife-beating were commonplace. Petty thieving to finance addiction was simply a part of daily life. The nuns told me that in one chapel the toilets had been stolen three times and that they had to take the taps off the sinks when they locked up. The local drugrunning ringleader was in prison standing trial for murdering a mourner at a funeral party, so at least life was quieter; the nuns had learnt to be grateful for such things.

  According to the United Nations, 5 million Chileans (almost 40 per cent of the population) live in poverty, and 1.7 million in ‘absolute poverty’. In that suburb there was no hospital, and one chemist serviced many thousands of people. There was no school for the over-fourteens; those sufficiently dedicated had to take long bus journeys into the centre of the city.

  What they enjoyed in abundance were off-licences, and these remained open till three in the morning (the chemist shut at nine-thirty in the evening). There were also plenty of bars, though few of them were legal: most people drank in dens called clandestinos. Two or three times I was invited into one of these stygian rooms smelling of wine and marijuana. I never saw another woman there; women were part of the despair the men were erasing. Although I was always made welcome, I felt uncomfortable in the clandestinos, as if I had strayed too far into their vortex of poverty.

  I talked to some of the young people about politics, but they had no passion; they were tired before their time. A decade or two earlier those communities had been powerhouses of political energy. No one had any confidence in politics anymore; the junta’s programme of depoliticization might have ultimately failed, but to a certain extent it had succeeded in weakening the general will to resist, and along with Chile’s imported consumer culture it had stifled the imaginations of the disaffected youth.

  I stayed for three days with a young woman called Evelyn. One of the nuns had introduced us. Evelyn was a committed member of the local church, and she was open, good-natured and always cheerful; the latter quality was particularly humbling as the youngest of her three children had gone blind at the age of one. Pablito was three now, and he was always with her. She didn’t have any money, as her husband had been unemployed for six years. He skulked around the house during the day doing what Evelyn called d-i-y but which looked to me like nothing. The family lived in a lean-to on the side of Evelyn’s in-laws’ small brick house. One day she took me to her church to meet the priest.

  ‘He’s like you – Australian, or North American, I forget which. Most of the priests we get round here are foreign. Chileans don’t like the job. The foreign ones help us a lot, you know, they don’t just do churchy things, they get involved in our lives and problems. Then the bishops get nasty about it – they think we’re being too political. What do I care about the bishops?’

  The priest was an Australian in his thirties, and looked like a teddy bear. I asked him why there were so many foreign priests.

  ‘A lot of reasons. After Cuba the Pope made a formal request to orders abroad asking them to send 10 per cent of their priests to Latin America. It’s caused a lot of trouble – suspicions and that. There’s been years of argument about where foreign money to the Church comes from, too. I mean, besides the fact that here you have an institution in a critically dependent situation, you also had self-confessed CIA front organizations working with groups within the Church.’

  ‘So it’s a political thing – the left don’t like you?’

  ‘No, it’s more complicated than that. Frankly, nobody’s keen on foreign priests. The right hate us too. The military regime got stuck into the popular South American pastime of expelling us left, right and centre. Just get on with the job as long as you can, that’s my view.’

  Evelyn was dusting the trestle table altar. We had brought little Pablito along in his oversize pushchair, and he was gurgling in a corner. Father Tony was arranging tables for catechism classes.

  ‘Don’t you ever feel you’re taking on an impossible task, I mean amid all this suffering?’

  ‘I don’t think macro. I play my little role. I’ll never leave them now. Eh, Evelyn?’ He switched to Spanish. ‘We do OK, don’t we?’

  I offered to take the children to the park. She was pitifully thrilled. She had a week’s washing to do, by hand and in cold water. We had to take a bus to get to the park, and she tried to press the children’s fare on me. The park was a small, scrubby piece of wasteland with a few tufts of yellow grass. There were some old tyres scattered around which other children were crawling in and out of, and Pablito’s brother and sister joined in immediately, while I attempted to keep him amused with ‘This Little Piggy’ though I had trouble finding a cultural equivalent for roast beef.

  All three of them fell asleep on the bus back. Pinned to the seat by their bodies, I tried to work out how I felt about being in the slum. First of all I felt alienated; I believe that emanated from disgust at my rich and privileged life. I also felt despair. Nobody except the likes of Father Tony was ever going to do anything for them – and there were few like him. Their lives were never going to get any easier, or less anguished, or more comfortable. The power of despair to diminish struck me very hard during that bus journey.

  Once the two eldest children were running along their street, bursting to tell their mother what they had been doing, I thought, conversely, that being with Evelyn gave me hope for the human spirit. I suspect now that hope was my bourgeois luxury.

  I went back to the Sisters for Easter, but to another house in another suburb. On Saturday evening, after the vigil and procession, the congregation built a fire outside the church and stood round it holding candles. We crowded into the diminutive building for mass, the priest’s voice competing with the beat of a neighbouring disco. Three babies were baptized, and afterwards sponge cake and Fanta were dispensed next to the altar. One set of parents invited a group of us back to their home for a meal – they must have been saving up for it all year – and after we had eaten the tables were cleared away and we danced until the sky was light.

  Before I left on Easter Sunday I joined a private communion service at a missionary house. The priest was Irish, as were the three Sisters present, so mass was said in English. The man didn’t offer me the host, Ninevite that I was.

  Over the weeks in Santiago, installed again in my football-pitch sized flat, I spent a lot of time with German, often together with his cousin Felipe and my friends Ken Forder and Sylvie Bujon, whom I had met during my first few days in Chile after a mutual friend in London had put us in touch. Sylvie was a French journalist, and her husband Ken was a political officer at the US Embassy. They were about my age, and they were easy-going and fun. Sylvie was very bright, very stylish and typically French in her habits, but Ken wasn’t typical of his country at all – he was the kind of person who rose above nationality. He was an unusual diplomat, in that he was frank, open and relaxed, and did not defend the United States with the Pavlovian zeal of some of his colleagues. They both had a well-developed sense of humour, they were sensitive, and generous hosts, and we had some very good times together.

  We often went to Spandex, my favourite nig
htclub in Santiago, which was open on Fridays only and located in a cavernous old theatre in the centre of town. It was a great place to go at one or two in the morning after doing something else, and, as in all good nightclubs, it was perfectly acceptable to have a nap on one of the many sofas if you felt tired. Spandex exemplified counterculture, and it was full of eccentrics; I couldn’t help wondering where these people were during the day, as I seldom saw anyone like them on the streets.

  ‘Probably working as minor civil servants, or librarians,’ said Ken.

  Most of the nightclubs in the city were located in the barrio alto, lair of the rich, and were peopled with glamorous society types and wealthy poseurs. The nouveau riche syndrome in Santiago was repellent. It was particularly unpalatable when observed among the young: men and women of twenty who had lived almost all their lives under Pinochet and whose aspirations were to own a Landrover and eat in Pizza Hut, their cellular phones at their side, worshipping at their dual shrines of conformism and ostentation. Anyway, Spandex was different. Small podia were provided for solo dancing per formances by anyone who felt the urge, and the evening was punctuated by the occasional floor show. These shows seemed to be based on the concept of cramming as many taboos into one act as possible. We saw men dressed up as nuns acting out a ritual which involved simulated oral sex and shooting up (not simultaneously), and a bizarre dance by three people dressed up as rabbits stretching condoms between their teeth. I didn’t care much for the acts, but I enjoyed Spandex very much, as its laid-back flavour and sense that you could do anything or nothing without being watched were unusual qualities for a nightclub.

  I never made it to closing time, though; the latest I managed was five, when it was still pulsating with energy. One night we ran into some Frenchmen there whom I knew; they were botanists, and had been working in Chile for eight months. I had first met them in the north, and had seen them socially two or three times in the capital. They were leaving for Paris the next morning, and had booked a private bus to take them and their friends from home to the airport so the party could continue for as long as possible.

  After Spandex we went to their flat and had pisco sours for breakfast; the bus, inevitably, failed to turn up. Undaunted, a botanist strode out onto Apoquindo, one of the main streets of Santiago (it was rush hour by now), leapt on to a bus and offered the driver approximately twenty pounds in cash to collect everyone from the house and proceed to the airport. ‘Everyone off!’ shouted the driver without a moment’s hesitation, and the disgruntled and besuited passengers disembarked into the polluted morning air.

  The buses of Santiago are a phantasmagoria. Over a thousand per hour travel in each direction along the city’s major artery at peak time. It is difficult to understand what Pinochet’s total deregulation meant for the city. A transport economist at the Catholic University told me that average vehicle ownership among bus-service operators is two, and that as there are several large fleets this means that many, people own just one clapped-out bus which they loan to a hapless driver who works on commission. It isn’t surprising that both congestion and pollution stand at record levels. As the autumn set in, the newspapers filled up with stories of increased air pollution. The winters are the worst, and after I returned from Chile almost every letter I received from Santiago included a paragraph about respiratory or other problems suffered by my correspondents as a direct result of the murderous air. During those few months alone, contaminant levels exceeded World Health Organization limits on fifty days, sometimes reaching ten times the readings of cities such as Los Angeles, and a prominent biochemist I had met wrote telling me that the intake of particles was akin to smoking between sixty and eighty cigarettes a day but details were being suppressed to avoid public panic.

  Ken had access to a flat in Viña del Mar, the biggest coastal resort in Chile and a stereotypical playground of the rich and famous, and the three of us stayed there one weekend. It was less than two hours from Santiago, and we only slept there, as we spent our time in neighbouring Valparaíso, unlike most normal people in Chile who find Viña so desirable that if they can’t afford its hideous prices they stay in sleazy Valpo and commute the other way.

  There were some great bars in Valparaíso which didn’t appear to have changed for thirty years. In our favourite a woman in her fifties in a crocheted cardigan sang the South American equivalent of Edith Piaf accompanied by a pianist with Brylcreemed hair and a nylon shirt and an accordionist with a wooden leg. Between numbers all three stared morosely at the audience. They hated us. Later on the woman was replaced by a man who looked like Einstein in an ill fitting grey suit. He clutched the microphone to his face as he sang his angst-ridden songs, squeezing his eyes tight and occasionally rushing outside to the pavement, returning through another door. Besides ten small round tables there was an enormously long zinc bar at which a motley collection of eccentrics lingered, waited on by inscrutable staff in dinner jackets with shiny elbows, all as much a part of the place as the tarnished gilt mirrors. It was a typical Valparaíso style, redolent of spivs, hard times and the society of the South American urban underclass before it was subsumed in an electronic superculture.

  When we returned to the car, our carguarder failed to appear. Often the quality of this ‘work’ is less than satisfactory. When I was out with a British diplomat once we returned to his vehicle and the carguarder accepted his cash with a cheerful, ‘está bien!’ (Everything OK!). It was only when we drove off that we noticed the offside wing mirror hanging by a wire. It was unusual to find that the man had abandoned his post, as generally the guarders spring out of nowhere at the scent of cash. We drove towards Viña and two miles on there was our man, weaving among the traffic, indiscriminately demanding money from passing motorists.

  I managed to get up to the Andes one last time. I went for the day from Santiago. The poplars were glowing yellow against the evergreens – my first autumnal Easter. It didn’t feel a bit like autumn: as Darwin wrote in one of his poetic moments, when he was very near where I was then, ‘… that pensive stillness was absent, which makes the autumn in England indeed the evening of the year.’

  The bus followed the river Maipo, and the landscape changed abruptly to bare rock streaked with mineral deposits. We stopped to let off a passenger next to a memorial to Pinochet’s survival when he was ambushed in 1976. FMRP terrorists had hidden behind the rocks and waited for the general and his entourage, but the bullets hit the wrong people. To a certain extent it did him good, as it weakened the opposition, the various factions of which were already embroiled in disputes which threatened the United Accord they had signed in an attempt to present a single, democratic alternative to the junta. He made people suffer for it, anyway.

  There was even a glacier ahead. It was mostly very beautiful up there, but every so often an expanse of slag or the apparatus of a hydroelectric power station made it look very ugly – as ugly as it had been beautiful. The bus driver was a lively character, and when he found out that I was English he shouted ‘Las Malvinas!’; I was really getting tired of that. There was talk of the royal family, and an inspection of my passport fuelled speculation, as I was christened Sara Diana, that all British citizens are named after royalty.

  I sat in a thermal pool later. It overlooked the white water of the Volcán river, and was itself overlooked by multicoloured mountains and a band of higher snowscapes. The water was opaque ochre, and a dozen Chileans lounged contentedly at the edge.

  The days slipped away from me. People started calling from London, saying, ‘When are you coming home?’ and familiar faces began marching across the landscape of my dreams. On my last Friday I climbed Santa Lucía hill in the centre of the city in the late afternoon ready for the thirty minutes or so when the sky turned salmon pink. I always made a point of stopping to observe this; half the sky became a slow gradation of colour from dark to light, the glow concentrating behind the black hills. When there were clouds, they formed a ridged panoply of blue and pink.

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p; The next evening I had a dinner party for four people who had been particularly helpful to me. There were in their late thirties, and their money was very old. They certainly knew how to party: the first guest left at a quarter to five, despite the fact that at three o’clock there was an earthquake. As we were on the thirteenth floor it was quite noticeable (the glasses clinked together, anyway), but they brushed it aside – ‘It’s only a baby one!’ One of them brought me an envelope of cocaine as a present, proudly presenting it as ‘the best’ as if he had produced a bottle of vintage Krug.

  Ken and Sylvie threw a farewell party for me. I had a long history of having parties the night before I left on big trips, and it was always a mistake, so we decided to hold this one on my penultimate night, to be sensible. Germán and his cousin Felipe were the first to arrive. They turned up in suits and ties, looking immaculate. Ken, Sylvie and I were wearing jeans.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me it was casual?’ hissed Germán, later.

  ‘We usually only mention it when it isn’t,’ I said.

  But it was all right. The party was great. Felipe made a speech in Spanish, I replied in English, and Germán, exuberant and generous, finished off.

  ‘And for her last night,’ he announced, ‘I invite you all to my house for champagne and oysters tomorrow.’

  Being sensible had its advantages.

  The next day – my last – was Labour Day, so Ken, Sylvie and I drove to Zapallar, summer residence of the seriously rich. All the heavyweight politicians disappear to elaborate houses on the coast north west of the city at the weekend; even the leader of the Chilean Communists has a house in Zapallar. The streets exuded money, class and exclusion. I had heard Zapallar called ‘the Southampton of Chile,’ a baffling comparison (I had obviously missed something in Hampshire) until I discovered that the Southampton in question was the one in upstate New York. We ate swordfish and dozed off our hangovers on the beach. It occurred to me as I was lying there that it was a bank holiday, and I wondered where Mr Fixit was going to get oysters and champagne. Fortunately it wasn’t my problem, and I went to sleep.