The Ends of the Earth

by Willemsen, Roger; Lewis, Peter;

  This mood pervades every journey, a mood dominated by a sense of escape. You still haven’t arrived anywhere, nor do you have any desire to do so. Your sole impulsion is to be underway, enucleated, and you’re happy to be homeless. This departure from the familiar corresponds to all the transitional spaces and waiting rooms where foreigners are already present, letting their parts of the world flow in, and banding together into a society of international faces; but behind this façade, all that’s really there are tired and unpainted faces that seem to have no ambition.

  They’re just like that in the waiting area at Lima Airport, for instance; next to me, an Asian man with dyed blond hair is looking at pictures of rhinoceroses on his laptop and sighing. Right in front of where I’m sitting, the metal shutter covering the shop window of H. Stern the jeweller rolls up at 6.45 a.m. Behind it, a television set has already been switched on, showing an old game involving the reigning World Cup holders Brazil.

  Places like this keep spreading inexorably. Even shopping malls barely have any regional distinctiveness anymore, but instead have taken on the status of landmarks. They’ve reduced what little architectural features they ever had in favour of expanding their display areas. The most appropriate people to fill these spaces are those who also make a public show of everything internal. They stand around in these shops, and their bling is their camouflage.

  On arrival in Santiago de Chile, at first the foreign scene that confronts me is nothing more than a road, a strip of grass and a row of houses. Primulas are wilting next to a container. A man who is the spitting image of Pinochet, somehow exalted by the nobility of cruelty, emerges from one of the houses and dumps waste paper in a wheelie bin. On a terrace above the newest shopping mall, I sit and drink two Pisco Sours, and suddenly feel all fired up and find everything fantastic. Back in the hotel, I doze away the first part of the afternoon and then wake myself up under the effect of a shower gel which goes by the name of ‘Magellan Breeze’.

  As evening falls I find myself out on Santiago’s main corso. The Colo-Colo football team has just beaten the local favourites, and the streets are thronged with jubilant crowds. The cripples without arms or legs lie alongside one another by the hats they’ve laid out and snap eagerly with their mouths at the brims, but hardly anyone has dropped a coin in. Nearby there’s a man holding the misshapen stump of his leg out into the flow of traffic like a marzipan log. A dance troupe is busy practising some new routines, and as she sails through the air, the prettiest dancer opens her eyes and arms wide and arcs towards the pavement, but never comes into contact with it.

  A karaoke singer in hot pants enthralls the gawpers, a conjurer has just humiliated a mortified lad in glasses for the third time in front of a hundred onlookers, and an accordion player descends into a wild cacophony. But where the two main arteries of the pedestrian zone cross, several teenagers are parading back and forth, holding up colourful placards with the hand-painted legend Abrazzos gratis: ‘Hugs for free!’ For fear of having their pockets picked, hardly anyone stops, so the kids take to hugging each other over and over again to show that they mean no harm.

  By this time, I’ve been wandering round for some time on my own, and the cheerful sight of the kids embracing one another only makes me feel all the lonelier. As I head straight towards their group, a corpulent girl in her twenties with a peasant’s face suddenly blocks my path. I spread my arms, she does likewise, and we walk towards one another over the final couple of metres smiling like people who just don’t belong together but who nonetheless have got betrothed, and passionately embrace one another for a few seconds. She’s got a strong grip, and locks me in it before pushing me away with both arms; in unison, we both say ‘Gracias’ and break into laughter.

  Later, when I delve into my pocket for my pen, I don’t find it missing – to the contrary, there’s another, newer pen there as well, a small black metallic ballpoint pen. I use it to write down this account.

  The name of the province I move on to – the southernmost in Chile – is Aísen. The name goes back to Darwin, who supposedly said that the ‘Ice ends’ here; this remark was corrupted by those who heard it into its present form. At the small airfield at Coyhaique, I descend the aircraft steps directly into the wind, a wind that has every kind of nuance: it can be either full or wan, or it dabs or sweeps like a paintbrush, it breathes, it propels, it blows, it buffets, it comes panting round corners, it’s a dimension all of its own and is truly the breath of nature. It can even flatten flowers in their beds.

  Lili is standing in this wind in bright clothes that she’s sewn and knitted herself. She wastes no time. Her brief gestures hop over the mountains, while her large eyes take stock of the landscape. This is the old empire of the Tehuelche, the local aboriginal inhabitants, who shared the same fate as the Indians of North America. Drawn into conflict by the colonists and almost entirely wiped out, the survivors were packed into reservations and exposed to the ravages of alcoholism; at best, their memory continues to exist on a folkloristic plane. They left handprints behind on rocks in either red or blue pigment. Sometimes, they would press down with the flat of the hand, and sometimes use their palm as a template and draw around it to leave an outline. In this way, they marked places that they used as lookouts. We latecomers lack their clarity of vision. Night falls, and we retire early.

  A Tehuelche doll has also made it onto the mantelpiece of our guesthouse. Peoples die out, and then they get resurrected as souvenirs. The other ornaments above the flickering hearth on which maté tea is brewed each morning, are: two carved drakes, a pair of wooden cut-out fish with drooping mouths swimming above a varnished board, and, beneath these, collections of miniature bottles of spirits, coffee mills, two carved boats containing mineral geodes, a stuffed cockerel and a ram’s horn. The house is still shrouded in night and wind, but when Lili comes in from outdoors in her rubber boots, a sliver of morning light also shines in momentarily through the open door, and the howling wind makes the lid of the enamelled teapot rattle as it heats up on the fire.

  Today’s plan is to take a trip through the town; a small, insubstantial settlement with utilitarian housing, distribution depots, a single main shopping street and a few monuments, all of them several centuries younger than the events they commemorate. There are settlements that are self-sufficient and then there are others that can only be understood by looking at the countryside surrounding them. Coyhaique belongs to the second group.

  At lunchtime, we repair to the ‘Casino de Bomberos’, the fire station canteen, because here, so the rumour goes, they do the best food in the neighbourhood. The place has a wooden floor and wood panelling, from which copper bas-relief panels and landscape paintings look down on tables laid with green and white tablecloths. Everyone who comes into this room seems either to have come straight from the wilderness or to be getting ready to disappear into it once more. The homecomers greet one another, going from table to table dispensing information on the levels of various rivers and the weather conditions in other parts of Patagonia, giving people the latest updates on the state of certain roads, and also imparting news: two people have been killed, one of them drowned because he fell into a whirlpool dressed in clothing that was too heavy, while the other fell over a cliff. Today’s menu consists of ugly-looking fish with a mouldy smell served with avocado, and for dessert conserva – tinned peaches.

  There are three of us at our table. Lili has invited Manuel, a father of three children who’s barely thirty years old and who has a perpetually mobile face. As our driver, he starts telling us about the condition of the car and of the 1,500-kilometre route that lies ahead, 1,400 of which will be on dirt tracks; this is his professional persona talking. But in actual fact he’s a true romantic, who dreams of love, the sanctity of the natural environment, and humanity, and who expends all his curiosity and intelligence on thinking about these concerns.

  Later, I’ll get to hear about the great love story that was his marriage, and learn how he and his wife
became estranged. Manuel himself fell in love with a mountain guide. But she never came back from a course of study in the USA involving park rangers from several countries. Her body was found washed up on the banks of a river and no one could or would explain exactly what had happened to her.

  Meanwhile, though, his wife had also fallen for one of the local rangers. But before the affair really came to anything, he drowned in a river during one of his tours of duty. He had underestimated the strength of the current. So now the husband and wife find themselves forcibly cooped up with one another again, and when they look in each others’ eyes all they can see are the remnants of a story that they have no wish to revisit, and both of them make strenuous efforts to shield the children from the knock-on effects of their shattered dreams.

  ‘Stories here are always like that,’ Lili says. ‘It’s the country. Things have a way of panning out dramatically here.’

  Her own life bears this out just as forcibly. She was living in Santiago and was nine years old when the military coup was staged in 1973. It was several days, however, before she began to recount what had happened during her childhood:

  ‘There was a curfew then that started at eight in the evening. My little brother and I, we were supposed to pick over lentils and beans until it was time for us to go to sleep. But one day my mother wasn’t there at our bedtime, so I took my brother out onto the street to look for her. There were soldiers posted on the top of every high-rise building and they had orders to shoot at anything that moved after curfew, and that included us. But that night we managed to find Mum and get her and ourselves home unscathed. My stepfather had been interned in the football stadium, like so many others. They tortured people there. Every day, we’d ask my mother where he was. Outside the stadium, people would call out the names of their relatives, and you could hear the screams of those who were being interrogated. You could smell the blood, too. I was skinny enough to slip through the bars of the pens. So I shimmied through and started calling out my stepfather’s name. You had to shout out the name so that everyone knew that there was someone mourning a loss, that at least someone was awake and cared. The torturers couldn’t have cared less, but it meant a lot to the victims when their names were called out. I saw all these hopeless wretches, who had resigned themselves to their fate and were wracked with pain. They’d given up. The screams of people being tortured rang unceasingly through the air. I can still picture the mother whose son was torn from her arms; later, she had to listen to his piercing screams from behind a screen. Then the torturer emerged with bloody hands, and the mother kept shouting: “You pigs, you pigs!” And all the time I was going from cell to cell calling out: “Is there an Antonio Cavallos here?” I’ll always remember the blank, fearful eyes of the detainees; the looks they gave will be seared on my mind forever. As a child I was so disillusioned with humanity. All that hatred! Those looks horrified me, both those of the torturers and of the tortured.’

  ‘And yet you’ve still come back to this country, where many of the torturers are still living?’

  ‘I wanted to make my peace with the place. I wanted to change myself so I could change other things around me. Plus I also wanted to start the process right at the source, with animals, with nature. You become more and more part of this earth; I must preserve that and pass it on. I won’t even leave so much as an avocado stone behind in nature, so that a tree doesn’t grow where it shouldn’t. And I make things from Alpaca wool and sell them at the market.’

  Her face was constantly etched with worry. Just think how much the Chilean government is spending on reafforestation – but what’s it doing? Undertaking all the ecological programmes with non-native trees! These push out the local varieties; for instance, the wild brier has already displaced the Magellan barberry, and even the unassuming little thorny, round-berried Neneo plant is becoming a less common sight.

  ‘That’s right: all you see now are rose hips everywhere.’

  ‘We’re altering the whole balance of nature. We must protect the eagle, the flamingo, the condor and the ibis. Red deer, rabbits, wild boar, pheasants – they were all imported in the first place, so we could export them again as game meat. Trouble is, these species don’t have any natural predators, so they’re threatening the survival of indigenous species, and one day the outcome will be completely devastating. I can see the balance changing daily.’

  ‘Maybe the country’s too caught up in dealing with the political Chile of the past, and considers such concerns a luxury?’

  ‘But it’s a different Chile nowadays.’

  ‘And is your son part of this new Chile?’

  ‘He’s about to become a detective. At first, that was a dreadful thought for me, but then he must do what makes him happy. He’s helped me open my eyes to the changes that have taken place. In fact, I now see him as part of the new start. Given that we need a police force, then better that it’s made up of people like him.’

  Lili lives on a farm. At least, that’s what she calls it. But when we arrive there the following day, it turns out to be an adobe house with a corrugated iron roof, just thirty square metres in size and with no electricity. The fridge consists of a small wooden crate outside with fresh air blowing through it. She and her husband are self-sufficient; they slaughter their own animals, make jam, produce goods from felt, and only buy things that they can’t possibly make or barter for themselves. Occasionally, they travel for many kilometres just to get hold of a few bottles of beer or some second-hand books from a guesthouse. And even the beer they’re planning to brew themselves in future.

  Lili’s got a pretty face, which her black lashes, eyebrows and hair somehow make look like a bit of graphic design. For a moment, she has an impish expression, but it soon gives way once more to her habitual careworn look, a deep-seated anxiety that focuses in turn on the environment, nature, our route, the weather, food, and sometimes just on life in general.

  We set off the next morning, heading away from Chaitén into the depths of the wilderness whose expanses lie north of the much visited southernmost tip of the continent: largely unknown tracts of land in the shadow of that tourist honeypot. We soon get off the beaten track, and I learn to read landscapes.

  The topsoil is sparse hereabouts, and the bedrock below roughly volcanic. The towering pyramid-shaped peaks, rock needles, steep table mountains, elegant hills, concretions of blocks and isolated cones succeed one another as though in a steady rhythm, in that dynamism of a landscape which commutes everything into pressure and movement, compression, swerve, momentum and fluidity. The weather, meanwhile, supplies the soundtrack: the Castillo mountain chain has just shrouded its sublime peaks in cloud, as if to protect the dignity of its anonymity.

  Makeshift wooden bridges sway above watercourses, and wherever there are poplars, you’re sure to find a settlement in their lee, since poplars are grown round these parts primarily as windbreaks. In their shadow, huts and tin shacks defy the great breath of nature, standing there cowed by the land, like they don’t want to be any bother. Before the broad horizon, nature left to its own devices stretches into a distance that only desires to be distant, putting up rows of silhouettes just made for distance vision. Everything moves away from the viewer and in an ever-changing way, the landscapes stretch out so as to become backcloths. By contrast, the human being, made small by the sheer superabundance of nature, loses himself in this panorama of the uncommon, of unexploited nature and of a landscape that seems to want to continue on into the sky.

  Sometimes, by the side of the track there are little shrines with water bottles in the middle of the wilderness.

  ‘Those,’ Lili says sentimentally, ‘are votive offerings to Difunta Correa: in the war, she set off across the pampas from Argentina to Chile to show her newborn baby to her husband. The child survived by suckling at her breast, but the mother died of dehydration en route.’

  And so she is commemorated in a totally secular cult, with people placing water bottles at wayside chapels and bend
s in the road so that her spirit shall not die of thirst.

  Yes, it’s still a country where such stories and such heroes abound: They come over the mountains and through the rivers, the gauchos with their neckerchiefs, berets and canvas shoes, their baggy pants and their red sashes. They always carry a knife tucked into their belt, either for the constant animal slaughtering they have to do or to clear stones out of their horses’ hooves. Lots of modern gauchos also carry chainsaws. Time was that they would spend weeks driving their cattle to market. Nowadays, though, all they do is ride for a day at most to the nearest store. They are always shrouded in an air of solitude, for whatever it is that they do, they do it alone.

  A person can’t really conceive of a landscape that is remote even from the dirt tracks hereabouts, the landscape of their homeland on the far side of the mountains. The kind of characters that can bear such solitude, without any distractions such as books or films, are unsociable and immersed in their own world. Sometimes, they’ll appear from over the hills with their wives in tow, who like them are of small stature; on such occasions, they’ll come striding along in the midst of a gaggle of kids and dogs.

  We’ve been driving for hours when we finally come across the next store, a dismal shed with shelving all round the walls and fruit in woven baskets on the floor. The store owner is perfectly happy for all the farmers from the surrounding region to offer their produce for sale here – provided, that is, that they bring their own price labels with them. As we pull up, a man in a cowboy hat is busy splitting a pumpkin on the floor, while another is unwrapping eggs from a cloth. The shopkeeper tells us that jam, vegetables and cigarettes always fly off the shelves, and the man with the pumpkin says people snap up whatever happens to be in stock at the time, be it mixed pickles in a plastic tub, children’s aspirin, spirits or even a mouldy lemon.