‘Come on then,’ she says, and the tone of her voice is suffused with euphoria, ‘let’s try and get into Chaitén after all! Maybe we’ll have some more good luck with the authorities.’
When the volcano erupted in 2008, the coastal settlement of Chaitén, the gateway to Patagonia, had to be evacuated for the most part. Half a metre of ash rained down on the town and the sea rose in a high tide of filth, sweeping away all the possessions of the people who lived along the shoreline, and all the while the volcano kept smoking so violently that even now nobody wants to live anywhere in the vicinity.
Before the eruption, this was where the large cruise liners bringing tourists to Patagonia called. A small holiday industry had grown up, with guest houses and hotels along the promenade, a school, a hospital, and parks, through which pumas would roam at night. The few people who still live in the dead town now have simply refused to leave their homes, believing neither the authorities nor the geologists, who are predicting an even larger eruption anytime soon, which will completely obliterate the surrounding region.
The thick drifts of dust on both sides of the road are the first indication that we are approaching the site of the catastrophe. The guards have set up their post in an abandoned school four kilometres from the mountain. Uniformed men in high-vis jackets are hanging around a barrier across the road; their caps are emblazoned with an emblem showing two crossed rifles.
At the checkpoint just outside the exclusion zone, there are two policemen on duty, who demand to see our passports and ask the reason for our visit. They’re negotiating. The fact that we’ve come from a long way away, that we don’t plan on taking any photographs, that two natives of this region are in the car, and that nobody’s requested access in ages – all this seems to improve our chances of being allowed to visit the ghost town.
While they’re deliberating, our eyes are fixed on the one cloud in the sky that’s not drifting by; the heavy cloud which steadily ascends into the heavens, pushing upwards into the bank of normal cloud. This has a quite different source, in the magma, in the earth’s core. It keeps billowing over the snowcapped ridge of the Andes as though it’s feeding on itself, like an autonomous, solitary creature that has no natural predators and is beyond any correction, and which no weather can extinguish or blow away. Perhaps it’s just out of a sense of respect in the presence of the volcano, but in any event the officers wave us through the barrier with their faces averted.
We enter the exclusion zone by driving over the Puente Amarillo. A plane crash-landed here forty-five years ago. The wreckage was never cleared away, and for the last fifteen years a hippy has been living in the fuselage. But now there’s no sign of him, only the smell of eucalyptus and sulphur and the sight of fruit trees left unharvested. The traffic signs point to nowhere and washing is still hanging on lines; it’s taken on the colour of the dust that’s settled all around.
We carry straight on up to the ridge of the Andes, heading towards the rock face through the grey veil of the abandoned fields. It looks for all the world like a great gust of bad breath has passed over the orchards here. The ground is covered with large, floppy, scorched leaves, and a thick layer of ash covers even the tables outside the abandoned houses. The only thing that has cheerfully revived is the robust green of the meadows.
The settlement is lying beneath a powdery shroud, but one which has solidified. The piles of ash that have been shovelled up have hardened, and the buildings have been left to their fate. Even recently-built houses are ageing fast under the grey veil. Fallen apples are rolling round the street, yellow water collects in the puddles, and the school, the monuments and the playground have all become spaces without a function, which mean nothing anymore but merely signify something. On the playground, the memorial with the frozen images of life carved into its stone surface now comes across as a mockery of the current situation: fishermen are shown fishing, while farmers till the fields. But the pathos of the religious figures of salvation flanking the monument pales when set against the sublime misery of the actual scene here. ‘Chaitén ne morirá’ – ‘Chaitén will not die’, someone has scrawled on this monument in a dead town, and they’ve written the same message with their finger in the dust on the windowpanes of the abandoned houses.
Sometimes, there are deep drifts of ash even inside the houses. In one home, it has covered the cups and filled the plates left on the breakfast table. By the side of the road, some cars that have been dug out of the ash stand waiting to be cannibalized for spare parts. A Mercedes with an invitingly open bonnet has already lost some components from its engine, despite the fact that a police car patrols the area regularly specifically to prevent looting. Two men heave a fridge onto the bed of a pickup truck, but, as far as we can see, they are the only human beings for miles around. One of them comes up to us and complains about the volcano, the government, the vandals and God, and all the while he’s talking, the mountain rumbles threateningly beyond the foothills. It’s omnipresent and unchanging, and yet in the sky, nothing changes so fast as the column of smoke rising over this running sore that reaches down into the bowels of the earth.
An empty billy-can rattles across the road, a pile of crockery lies smashed on the asphalt, and paw prints lead up to it through the dust. The walls are painted with garish graffiti from the post-eruption period, and yet the war memorial nearby, with its crossed guns, continues to admonish: ‘Siempre viven los por la patria mueren’ – ‘Those who die for their country shall live forever’ – a permanent homage to all those who laid down their lives for the fatherland. But it comes across as fey, now that the volcanic ash has also blanketed the history of conflict.
There’s an unhealthy smell coming from the sewers, and the signs reading ‘The State is Watching!’ are everywhere – which evidently wasn’t the case, as quite a few former inhabitants of the region have, in the interim, grown rich on the compensation they’ve claimed.
The traffic signs showing a woman leading a child by the hand and children crossing the road are still in place, too. Now empty warnings, devoid of meaning. A few of the houses have only been half-destroyed by the tide of volcanic ash; they stand there with their skeleton on show, revealing small bookshelves with piles of cheap novels that have tumbled to the ground. Even the sea has receded into the zone behind the embankment, where a solitary house has been picked up and carried almost to the fringe of the surf. It lies there, keeled over on its side, beyond a broad strip of some sulphurous sludge, which is seeping out onto the dirty beach and collecting in pools, and on whose periphery a cooker and a fridge have been washed up. Mattresses are piled up on the bank leading down to the foreshore, and household items are strewn all around like after an explosion. It’s only on the horizon that a narrow green strip of open, clear and unpolluted water appears.
The bridge has collapsed as well. The charming façade of the Cabañas Brisa del Mar with a view of the promenade puts you in mind of a self-indulgent life of bathing, of tea with cream and sun hats. Yet the surrounding area is so completely smothered with ash that it’s much harder to envisage it restored to good order than to imagine nature simply reclaiming all this.
The small restaurants still have their special dishes chalked up on their frontages, the Hospedaje Astoria is empty, the dusty shop window of the Farmacia Austral gapes at you, a board promotes ‘Turismo Rural’, and the church proudly announces its name: La Iglesia de Jesuschristo de los Santos de los Ultimos Dios. Hortensia bushes are growing unnaturally profusely, and in between the twitter of birdsong, the silence is complete.
This is where the road begins, which up until the eruption marked the northern gateway to Patagonia. Previously, it linked the harbour with the interior, and as a result was well maintained. Now, three horses and a foal are the only flâneurs strolling elegantly along the empty promenade where the road meets the sea. Now and then they stop, look out over the sea, bend down to crop a few tufts of poisonous-green grass from the verge before moving off again. Horses have even
taken over the dwellings here and, however surreal it may seem, make themselves comfortable in sitting rooms. They can still find things to eat all over the place, and the police leave them be. Animal rights campaigners have left behind protest messages on some of the house walls: ‘You’ve scarpered, leaving your dogs and cats behind. Shame on you!’ The evacuation programme didn’t include animals.
Finally, on the harbour breakwater, we run across two hitchhikers who’ve managed to make it here, and who are waiting for the large cruise liner that used to bring tourists. But it’ll never come.
The hiss of the distant surf forms a steady background to the crunch of our feet on the pebbly beach. Set amid grey-tinged lawns is the hospital with its lime-green barrack blocks and its doors all flung wide open. The volcanic ash has also permeated here, covering the corridors and the beds and even the two operating tables, but in the courtyard a few Israeli hitchhikers have pitched their tents and are singing hiking songs. As they do so, high above them the vultures are circling.
That’s right, even months after the catastrophe, there are still vultures over the town. They swoop down in wide arcs and strip animal carcasses of their flesh in the drainage ditches, or burst open the bloated stomach of a dog that’s lying dead outside a latrine. By and by, though, even a handful of stubborn locals have put in an appearance. Two of them are digging in the cemetery with shovels. When an old man comes by, trundling along a wheelbarrow containing something covered with a sheet that we’re not meant to see, they nod conspiratorially at him. Another keeps intoning the same phrase:
‘Una tortura, una tortura!’
Yes, it really is a torment to be uprooted and displaced, and a catastrophe to see your own home swallowed by the natural disaster. But an elderly man whom we find sitting, leaning on his stick, above the eroded bay tells us that all nature’s doing here is settling a score, because it was the only way it could respond to what humanity had been doing.
In the midst of this destruction, he’d found his niche as a prophet of the town’s downfall, and he’s determined to remain so even now it’s weathered the disaster. For who can say with any certainty, while life hits the ‘Pause’ button, that somewhere out there evil isn’t simply regaining its strength and the next disaster just waiting to strike? The sun is shining, the larks are singing, and the sea air is just a gentle breeze. Let other places at the ends of the earth stretch out helplessly towards oblivion, that’s not the case here. Here the landscape is basking in an idyll of decline.
Timbuktu
The Boy Indigo
There it lies, the land of the Sahara with its layers of scurf in yellow, light pink, blood-red; its settlements penned in, surrounded by some kind of nature which could at any moment dispatch dangers out of sparse woodlands, low-lying mountains or arid plains, while the Niger flows broad and dour, populated in one of its luxuriously wide basins by little islands with postage-stamp fields on them. Then come the marshes, and after them the broad flat expanses containing nothing, and then the hut of a recluse – but what has he withdrawn from, and to where? Has he gone into quarantine, say? Then you encounter small oases with clay buildings made from adobe-bricks grouped around a yellow pool. Yes, that’s how it keeps growing stronger, this overwhelming superiority of landscape, which isn’t exactly beautiful, but rather comes across like weatherbeaten skin, like a person’s well lived-in face.
You won’t find any modern physiognomy hereabouts. People here have the facial features of ancient prophets or idols, with their light grey eyes surrounded by a watery corona, and even the river isn’t blue or green, but rather flows in a greenish- yellow stream between banks that look like chapped and calloused skin. The fields are dusty, and the huts the colour of dust, while the ground appears scuffed and eroded because here the elements – the sun, the heavily pattering tropical rain, the heat, the desert wind and the sandstorms that arise in the summer months – degrade everything. Sometimes the water in the pools stagnates, and sometimes it’s evaporated by the sun so that only caked, baked mudflats remain.
The life cycle here is a swift affair; an abrupt blossoming, a speedy wilting sweep over the depressions of the desert floor: everything is in a state of meander – the ridges of the sand dunes, the overflow channels by the river, the margins of the fields, the bright sandbanks and the roads, all on a colour scale that has dirt as its basic shade.
Time and again, the Niger, a delta comprising countless rivulets, individual watercourses, streams, channels and outlet bays, becomes a line of demarcation between wetlands and the red desert. And then its influence suddenly wanes again, and it carries the green of its banks just a few metres inland at best. Places like desert cemeteries line its route. They appear like an irritation of the proper order of things, a wrinkle, or like fossil imprints in the sand. The airport at Timbuktu is guarded by five soldiers holding their guns at the ready. We’re meant to crouch down and make a dash, flanked on both sides by the military, for the terminal building.
Timbuktu is surrounded by a ring of woes, a ring of heat, of deprivation, of thirst, and of war, and if all that weren’t enough, there are also signs that the city’s dying from within, degenerating, wasting away. Its symptoms are in evidence everywhere: all-but-extinct nomadic peoples encamped in their rags in the shade of adobe-brick walls, lines of peasant women at poor markets, each of them offering for sale three fruits, three tubers and a small bundle of vegetables. On the fringes of the markets are scavengers, and ill and mentally disturbed people roaming free, and the war wounded hobbling about on homemade crutches or wheeling themselves along on little trollies.
But here, in this legendary location, in the midst of all this desolation, indigo is traded. It’s as if this blue is the colour of this city’s lifeblood, and even its inhabitants seem blue-skinned. Why don’t they get away from this place? Elsewhere they’d find water, healthcare, support, security. But to get there means crossing the desert, running the gauntlet of heat, massacres and ambush – in effect, making your way through an inferno with yourself as the live quarry.
Dog-tired, we stumble into a hotel room flooded with the grubby light of dawn. We’re too exhausted even to think straight. Just dumb observers, we take in the whitewashed walls, the rugs and the room decoration. On the wall there’s a picture of a bamboo hut, with a couple of half-naked natives squatting in front of it like in one of those casually racist old travel documentaries. It’s an instant snapshot, whose subjects weren’t seeking to attract the world’s attention. Look, the image seems to proclaim, here are a few Blacks we’ve caught on film. Apart from this, there’s no other decoration in the room.
Timbuktu, this city in the Southern Sahara that’s steeped in myth and which lies at the point where the Niger Delta and the Sahara meet, was once a politically important centre of learning, inhabited by scholars. Founded in the twelfth century, the town, as the seat of Qur’anic scholars and philosophers, played a key role in spreading Islam across Africa. It was also a vital trading post, with the continent’s gold being ferried here across the Niger, as well as a transport hub. Even nowadays, the caravan routes still fan out from here to the oases in the North; latterly they have been joined by the routes taken by migrants fleeing their homelands and heading for Europe.
Anna shucks off her blue and red African batik-pattern dress and, wearing just her pants, flakes out on the hard bed, which is covered with a stiff, coarse-weave throw. Her entire body – her stomach, legs, shoulders, and arms – is glistening with beads of sweat. She doesn’t move a muscle and yet still her skin keeps on perspiring frantically.
I take a look inside the bedside table, which has been occupied by a colony of ants, before stepping out onto the balcony and gazing down at the lazy pool. Two figures are moving around in it, a woman in a black bathing suit and a little girl who’s holding the woman’s hand as she wades through the murky water. Then the mother starts swimming on her back, watching her own splashing feet as she moves along. Her thrashing, trampling and trembling m
otions look like nothing so much as some kind of clumsy yet erotic choreography. Idly, I imagine a man grasping hold of her and making love to her. Meanwhile, Anna’s dozed off; in temperatures like this, sex seems a far-off prospect.
Timbuktu is sand, sand first and foremost, everything sinks into the sand, is made of sand, or takes on the colour of sand, and even its smell. The sand reflects back the sun’s heat, and the sand reclaims the city like it’s destined to return to sand. The only object that’s clearly exempted from this general decay is the bronze plaque on the façade of a building reading: ‘Former home of the African explorer Heinrich Barth. German president Heinrich Lübke visited this house in 1956.’
This will endure.
Deep in contemplation, holy men wander through the streets with the muthala root clenched between their teeth, the chewing stick which, with its natural antibacterial plant extracts, still plays a major role in dental hygiene in Africa. In a rear courtyard we watch men breaking rocks. The dust this produces is mixed into food for pregnant women as a nutritional supplement. Pissing men stand, their legs akimbo, on the riverbank or the hillsides. On griddles, bananas are transformed into something that tastes like chestnuts. The town’s cinema is nothing but a chilly garage with a few loose wooden benches and a U-matic projector. When a crudely animated trick snake appears on the screen, a woman in front of me leaps up screaming and jumps back two rows.
The bald, gold-chained, short-trousered, gay French hotelier is standing with his arms folded across his chest and is berating his simple-minded bellboy, a lad with a dull-witted, prematurely aged face. The owner is telling the boy to make sure the shutters on the hotel’s windows are closed before ten in the morning, to shut out the heat, and to get a new mosquito net and hang it without delay. The lad just stands there defiantly; the boss is getting nowhere with his orders. The next thing the bellboy’s supposed to do is to go and get some provisions in. The owner stands there, pleading and wheedling with his employee in a high-pitched whine like a woman mourner, but the boy just stares at him with undisguised contempt. Realizing that he can’t penetrate through to the boy’s consciousness, the boss suddenly grabs him by the collar, forcing him to make a slight bow. The lad looks up at him angrily, and makes out like the owner’s hurting him, squealing like a rat in a pile of garbage. Finally, the owner offers him his bicycle to go and run the errand, telling him ‘it’s better than the minister’s!’ The bellboy just scoffs at this. Their argument tails off.
The Ends of the Earth Page 13