by Steve Hely
Paloma could speak English easily. She had gone to the American School of Santiago.
“All these schools. American School, French School. My school was just school. It wasn’t even Chilean School. It was school!” said Fabrizio.
“Duh,” said Paloma, “that’s because you were poor.”
That night, Fabrizio took me to his stand-up show. Chilean Spanish is a mixed-up rapid-fire of contractions and slang, and I couldn’t understand most of the words. The comedians, though, were very expressive, so a lot of the comedy got through. One guy had a bit, for example, which unless I’m really mistaken was about the technical challenges and possible mishaps of giving oral sex to a woman. The crowd could relate. Another guy was dressed kind of like a Chilean Marilyn Manson. From the slow release of laughs mixed with groans and ooooooooohs, I could tell he was trying to find the most offensive things he could think of, lead the audience right to the very edge, pull back, and then when they got relaxed again, he’d shove them over.
“Hey, Fabrizio, I have to ask you something.” This was the Sunday after. We were driving with Fabrizio’s girlfriend to the beautiful (and UNESCO-listed) seaside city of Valparaiso, an hour down the coast. “Yesterday, I went to the Pablo Neruda house, La Chascona.”
“Oh, yes. This is one of the most famous things to see in Santiago.”
“Okay, is it possible . . . I don’t know a ton about Pablo Neruda, but . . . did you think . . . was he maybe . . .”
“Oh, yes, he was totally an asshole. Yes. My friends and I have discussed this.”
This was a huge relief. The Nobel Prize–winning Chilean poet Pablo Neruda has, like, a halo of sainthood around him in Chile. He was an advisor to Allende, he’d served as Allende’s ambassador to France for a while. He died just two weeks after the coup, and his funeral procession became a kind of protest march. Some say Pinochet had Neruda poisoned.
Neruda had three houses that are now national monuments. Each is a kind of masterpiece of 1970s collector kitsch and swinger style. The one I’d visited was named for Neruda’s longtime mistress. “The crazy-haired lady” is a cloddish translation.
“She was always attractive despite the many responsibilities she took on,” said my audio guide to the house, in a luxurious accent.
“Neruda delighted in surprising his guest by emerging from secret passageways of the house.” The audio guide went on at some length about how constantly delightful Neruda was, how he saw his house as a ship and himself as a captain, how guests stayed all night captivated by him.
Quickly, I became convinced that actually going to one of Neruda’s dinner parties must’ve been an insufferable nightmare.
Fabrizio was with me. While still driving, he managed to do a vivid impression of Neruda popping out all over the place. “It’s me! Neruda! Aren’t you delighted?” and his guests forcing themselves to act amused.
Look, Neruda is a great poet, he was a glorious artist full of vitality and the joy of life, his brief poems on love are heartbreaking, blahblahblah. I’m just saying I prefer comedians.
* * *
Before hitting Valparaiso, we strolled by the Pacific in Viña del Mar, Chile’s halfhearted version of Monaco or Atlantic City, with beachfront casinos. On the boardwalk, vendors were selling squirt guns for kids, glow sticks and beach towels, portraits of Michael Jackson, and odd pieces of folk art. A guy was offering to write your name on a grain of rice.
“The writing your name on a grain of rice—that is not so impressive anymore,” said Fabrizio as we passed by. “I mean, ‘Cool, it’s my name and it’s very small.’ I have a phone in my pocket that can play movies.”
Nearby, a guy was playing moaning versions of classical tunes on a four-foot saw. At his feet were a pile of CDs for sale. Fabrizio, his girlfriend, and I considered his art for an appropriate amount of time, say thirty seconds.
“Playing the saw—okay, yes, that is good. But: He has albums?”
Fabrizio suggested I Google image search the mayor of Viña, a woman named Virginia Reginato Bozzo, so I did.
“Yikes.” She was quite something.
“Yes,” he said, laughing. “It’s okay to make fun of her because she’s right-wing and terrible.”
We went on to the squares and old shipping buildings by the water in Valparaiso, where Fabrizio spotted a statue that delighted him. It was of Arturo Prat, a Chilean naval hero of the 1879–1883 War of the Pacific.
“This guy! We love this guy in Chile, he’s everywhere.” It’s true, you can’t go far in Chile without crossing an Avenida Arturo Prat. He looked distinguished in the statue, with a sword and flag, towering above some sailors below him. But Arturo Prat brought out a boyish giggly delight in Fabrizio.
“The thing is, he was a loser! His ship, it was getting destroyed by the Peruvians, so he jumped onto their ship, and the Peruvian sailor, he grabbed a . . .”
As he searched for the word, he mimed a pan.
“A pan?”
“Yes! Yes! They hit him on the head with a frying pan.”
“Really?”
“Yes! They killed him with a pan! Now he has a statue.” He shrugged and smiled. “That is Chile.”
“They should put the pan on the statue,” I suggested.
“Yes! Yes, it should show the moment of him getting hit with the pan! That would make a good statue.”
Chile did win the War of the Pacific, and the results resonate down to today. The war cost Bolivia its seacoast, which they’re still aggrieved about. In the years after the war, Chile had a monopoly on the nitrate trade, which allowed the country to get a lot richer a lot faster than its neighbors. In 2007, Chile gave back to Peru some books their soldiers had stolen during the war 120 years before.
As for Prat being killed by a frying pan, I suppose I could research that. But if it isn’t true, I’ll be too disappointed, so why bother?
On the streets of Valparaiso, children saw Fabrizio and squealed and pointed him out to their siblings. He played it cool, but of course he enjoyed it. His girlfriend kept him humble. Valparaiso is like a twisted puzzle version of San Francisco. A seaport bustles under steep hills packed with dense mazes of streets that you can climb and descend on rickety elevators and funiculars that creak like wooden roller coasters. We took a boat tour of the harbor, where Fabrizio and his girlfriend laughed the whole time as the tour guide, a gruff ex-dockworker, spent most of his time with the microphone talking shit about the incompetent harbor master. Back ashore, we ate huge bowls of seafood stew and drank Austral beer at an upstairs restaurant with photographs of Marilyn Monroe on the pink painted walls. Fabrizio’s girlfriend couldn’t really speak English, just Spanish and Portuguese, but she communicated very well through funny videos she showed me on her phone. She took us to a spot she knew, a former jail turned into a kind of arts collective where young people were lying out on the grass, and Fabrizio and I listed episodes of The Simpsons.
Between the wild colors on the painted houses of Valpo, the container ships moving their colored LEGOs in the harbor, and the crooked angles and the stairs and streets of the city, we took good Instagrams. It was late May, but here in the Southern Hemisphere, that was autumn. Joking around with friends, stopping for beers and meat pies and pastries, exploring an old harbor city, watching the sun go down over the water from high up—it was a great Sunday. In the darkness, before heading back to Santiago, we drove up one of Valparaiso’s steepest, most treacherous streets, built like the world’s insanest skateboard run, to La Sebastiana, Neruda’s vacation house. But it was already closed.
“Man, this guy can’t stop fucking us!” I said.
He did his best possible impression of Seinfeld cursing the name of his horrible neighbor Newman.
“NERUDA!”
Sandwiches of Chile
There is an area in which Chile is unsurpassed by any nation in the world and that is s
andwiches.
Perhaps not in “variety of sandwiches,” but in “particular excellence of their top sandwich,” Chile can hold its head proud.
I speak of the lomito, or the chacarero, a sandwich served on a round bun that is soft but with some tenacity. Inside is thinly sliced, seasoned, grilled steak, with fresh slices of tomatoes, green beans still with a snap to them, and chili peppers, perhaps sautéed. To substitute thinly sliced pork is acceptable as well.
A variation is the Italiano, so called because the mashed avocado, tomato, and white cheese creates a beautiful color combination that resembles the Italian flag.
Across Santiago and across Chile there are fuentes de soda, soda fountain restaurants where the unfriendly women wear blue-and-white uniforms, the decor is from some antipodal version of the 1950s, there are paper napkins tessellated into spiraling towers, cold beer is on tap, and you eat at the counter as fast as you can and are then encouraged to immediately leave.
The greatest of these is the Fuente Alemana. I went to the one on Avenida Libertador Bernardo O’Higgins 58 once for lunch and then the next day, right when it opened, for breakfast. If you are truly serious about sandwiches, sooner or later you want to get there, too.
In Patagonia
In Patagonia, near the bottom of the world, the wind swirls in such hard and twisted patterns that the wizened trees have no idea how to grow. Their branches contort out in confused, desperate jigjags like a many-armed, hyperactive dancer frozen in wood. They look like trees from a nightmare. Some of them are bent at the trunk and lie, alive but forever knocked over. From the bus, most of what I saw were worn-out old estancias, sheep and cattle ranches. When we got to Puerto Natales in the afternoon, it was starting to snow.
In Patagonia in 1895, a German explorer named Hermann Eberhard found, in a cave, a collection of bones of humans and prehistoric animals. He found, too, a reddish pelt. This was hung on a tree, discussed, and shown to visitors. A few European scientists heard about it and came to Patagonia and started poking around its caves. They found even more fur and skin, and they determined it had come from a mylodon, a giant sloth long thought to be extinct. Perhaps living mylodons still roamed unknown Patagonia. The English reporter H. H. Prichard of the Daily Express was sent to hunt them. He didn’t find any. Nor did I, though it wouldn’t shock me too much if I heard of one in Patagonia. The mountains don’t look conquered at all. They have a vast and looming spookiness like they could hide any number of surviving Pleistocene Megatheria. With a few Chilean women, I took a van ride to visit Eberhard’s cave. They have a good statue of the giant sloth, standing on his hind haunches, half smiling, like he’s mid–dance move.
“Patagonia” doesn’t have an exact border. It’s a term for the huge stretch of sparse grassland that makes up the southern half of Argentina and Chile. Maybe a million square kilometers with, on average, two people per kilometer. The name was given by Magellan, who got it, it seems, from a giant monster in a Spanish chivalry novel he was reading. The explorers and conquistadors, the ones who could read, were always reading fantastical novels of knights and adventures.
In Patagonia are great glaciers of ice as big as small mountains. You can climb with ladders and ice axes or be deposited on them by helicopter. And there are spires and walls of rock, like Fitz Roy, which rises up like a gigantic middle finger to rock climbers, taunting them and challenging them. The American climber Chad Kellogg climbed it in February 2014 but was killed in a rockfall on the way down.
In the Southern Hemisphere summer—December, January, February—swarms of backpackers trek in Patagonia. They hike routes like “the W,” staying at wooden refugios along the way. Lately, Patagonia’s become especially popular with Israelis, traveling for a while after finishing their military service. In 2012, a fire allegedly started by an Israeli backpacker and whipped by the Patagonian wind burned sixty miles of forest in Torres del Paine National Park.
By the time I got to Puerto Natales, though, most of the backpacker shops were closed up, and the town was very quiet. The next morning, I rode into the park with a vanload of Chilean tourists, mostly retirees. By the side of the road, there were patches of ice and snow. Herds of free-ranging guanacos, lean and spry, tugged up mouthfuls of grass. The van driver took us to a waterfall, and to perfect cold lakes dotted with a few pink flamingos. It was glorious but it got me pretty sleepy. Somewhere between stops, I fell asleep with my face against the window.
A bump to the head woke me up as the van wildly fishtailed. We’d slid, out of control, on a patch of black ice in the road. Now we wobbled helpless toward the rocky drop-off at the edge. One of the Chilean women let out a horrible, agonized scream. A true death scream, a scream like you may as well abandon all dignity or pretense to courage and wail like a baby because before you’re finished, you and everyone with you will die.
Only: We didn’t die. The bus driver calmly rode out the skid, when he could get some traction he braked, and then, danger passed, he hit the gas and drove on.
It was awkward after that. It was awkward in the van, since we’d all seen and heard this woman shriek like a dying coward at what turned out to be nothing. It was awkward at the gift shop, and it was awkward all the way home.
Where the Andes drop off into the ocean in western Patagonia, there are deep fjords where chunks of ice crack off from sloping glaciers into the black water. With what was, I think, a company retreat of drunken Chileans, I sailed out on a tour boat to Parque Nacional Bernardo O’Higgins, named for the Irish Chilean hero of the Chilean War of Independence, whose father had trekked back and forth across the Andes building shelters and creating the Chilean postal service. Bernardo became supreme director of Chile, but a coup led by his former friend deposed him and he sailed away from Valparaiso, never to see his native country again. Our boat docked at an old estancia on a remote island, where we had a barbecue and I ate with a Chilean mother and her two sons. They were both fans of Fabrizio Copano’s comedy.
The place where I stayed in Puerto Natales, Kau Lodge, claims to have developed the idea of “contemplation activity.” Wonderful term, I’m into it. One of my contemplation activities was sitting alone in the lobby, drinking good coffee, petting the lodge dog, and reading an issue of Rock and Ice magazine that profiled Edurne Pasaban, a female Basque mountaineer who decided to climb all fourteen of the 8,000-plus-meter mountains on Earth. In a bout of depression mid-quest, she tried to kill herself and was confined to a mental hospital, but after she got out, she finished. She also carried on an affair with the married Italian climber Silvio Mondinelli. (This was a good article, and can be found in issue number 204, written by David Roberts, may he prosper.)
Sometimes I walked outside, along the wrecked tracks of a railway that had once served an immense meat-rendering plant, and looked out onto the waters of Seno Última Esperanza, Last Hope Sound.
Truth is, writing about my own minuscule explorations in Patagonia seems silly when the place is already the subject of one of the best travel books of all time.
Bruce Chatwin
In his grandmother’s cabinet when Bruce Chatwin was a boy, there was a piece of leathery skin. His mother told him it was the skin of a brontosaurus. His grandmother’s cousin, Charley Milward, had sent it as a wedding present. Charley Milward was a sailor who’d been shipwrecked off Punta Arenas in Patagonia, and began life again there.
In the best version of the story, the “brontosaurus skin”—it was probably a bit of giant sloth—always fascinated Bruce Chatwin, until one day, when he was thirty-four and working as a journalist for London’s Sunday Times Magazine, he went to interview the Irish furniture designer Eileen Gray at her apartment in Paris. She was ninety-three years old. On her wall was a map of Patagonia.
“I’ve always wanted to go there,” said Chatwin. Eileen Gray told him to go there for her. So Bruce Chatwin sent his boss a telegram that read GONE TO PATAGONIA FOR FOUR MONTHS and took off.
In the book Bruce Chatwin wrote, In Patagonia, he tells of eating toffees with the Scottish owner of the Estancia Lochinver, and he has an audience with His Royal Prince Philippe of Araucania and Patagonia, an eccentric Frenchman said to have bought the title from the descendants of another eccentric Frenchman who first claimed it for himself. He walks into the remote Chubut Valley, where the descendants of settlers still spoke Welsh, and he follows the trail of two mysterious American cowboys called Evans and Wilson, aliases perhaps of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, who hadn’t died in Bolivia after all. He speaks to an old priest and doctor of theology, anthropological theory, and archaeology, who tells him that in the sixth millennium BC, the men of Patagonia hunted the native unicorn to extinction. Chatwin spins yarns about the Brujería sect from the island of Chiloé, who could change into animals, reverse the course of rivers, and see the secrets of anyone’s life in a crystal stone called the Challanco. He tells about Alexander MacLennan, the Red Pig, who hunted the native Ona people of Tierra del Fuego with his rifle, and about Jem Button, a native boy hauled away to England, where he met King William IV and then returned to Patagonia on the Beagle, traveling with Darwin. When he arrived back home, Jem Button reverted to his Fuegian name, Orundellico, and may or may not have killed some English missionaries.
Chatwin retells some of the exploits of Charley Milward, his grandmother’s cousin, and finds his old house in Punta Arenas. Then at last he visits the Cave of the Giant Sloth. Digging around, he claims he found himself another piece of sloth skin.
When In Patagonia was published in 1978, it became a bestseller. Backpackers with dog-eared copies started turning up in the Chubut Valley, to the startlement and sometimes anger of the Welsh sheep farmers. To a certain kind of literary-minded traveler, Chatwin became an icon. He was an electric presence, and photogenic: The author photo of him with his boots slung over his shoulders is exactly the look a lot of travelers aspire to. The Moleskine notebook takes its name and design from a specialized notebook he describes that he ordered from a Parisian stationer. He was onto something. When Chatwin had come, Patagonia was still rancher country. Now it is, among other things, the name of a company with $600 million in annual revenue. From their company website: Patagonia brings to mind, as we once wrote in a catalog introduction, “romantic visions of glaciers tumbling into fjords, jagged windswept peaks, gauchos and condors.” It’s been a good name for us, and it can be pronounced in every language.