Travels in a Thin Country

by Sara Wheeler

  1999 Modern Library Paperback Edition

  Copright © 1994 by Sara Wheeler

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Modern Library and colophons are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in Great Britain by Little, Brown and Company (UK) in 1994 in hardcover

  eISBN: 978-0-307-56076-6

  Maps by Neil Hyslop

  Modern Library website address:

  www.modernlibrary.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Map

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Select Bibliography

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Introduction

  Hard work and geographical isolation once earnt the Chileans the epithet ‘the English of South America’. A dubious distinction, perhaps; but anyway, I went and lived among them for six months and I found them delightfully un-English.

  You will see from the first chapter why I went to Chile rather than any other place. What I fear I cannot do is convey to you adequately at the beginning of the book how passionately I felt about the country at the end of the journey. I had never been there before. I set off with two carpetbags and a desire to find out what Chile was about, and I carried all three for thousands of miles, from the desert to the glaciated south. The book which has emerged is offered as a subjective and impressionistic portrait; painting it was a rich and joyful experience.

  It was not one long idyll. I struggled to understand a society which had been so deeply divided by fear and hatred that in some circles human rights still means the same as Marxism. The extraordinary polarization of politics confused me: people were always eager to tell me what was black and what was white, but very few shaded in any grey. I have done my best to make some sense of it.

  Although I made several visits to offshore Chilean territory, and these were among the most revelatory and entertaining episodes of the journey, I did not visit Easter Island. Rapa Nui, as it is called by its own people, does belong to Chile, but its culture is Polynesian, and as it really has nothing to do with anything else in the thin country I decided it would distract me from the task I had set myself. I was game for distraction – but not if I had to travel 2500 miles for it.

  People often ask whom among the many travellers who have boldly gone before me I would cite as my heroes. Let me pay homage to one by using his words to cast some more light on the genesis of my journey. I have said that the primary reason I went to Chile was to paint a personal portrait of a country. Peter Fleming set down a similarly sober motive for travelling 3500 miles through Tartary with a stranger in 1935, and then he said, ‘The second [reason], which was far more cogent than the first, was because we wanted to travel – because we believed, in the light of previous experience, that we should enjoy it. It turned out that we were right. We enjoyed it very much indeed.’

  Chapter One

  Noche, nieve y arena hacen la forma

  de mi delgada patria,

  todo el silencio está en su larga línea

  Night, snow, and sand make up the form

  of my thin country

  all silence lies in its long line

  Pablo Neruda, from ‘Descubridores de Chile’

  (‘Discoverers of Chile’), 1950

  I was sitting on the cracked flagstones of our lido and squinting at the Hockney blue water, a novel with an uncreased spine at my side. It was an ordinary August afternoon in north London. A man with dark curly hair, toasted skin and only one front tooth laid his towel next to mine, and after a few minutes he asked me if the water was as cold as usual. Later, the novel still unopened, I learnt that he was Chilean, and that he had left not in the political upheavals of the 1970s when everyone else had left, but in 1990; he had felt compelled to stay during the dictatorship, to do what he could, but once it was over he wanted space to breathe. He came from the Azapa valley, one of the hottest places on earth, yet he said he felt a bond as strong as iron with every Chilean he had ever met, even those from the brutally cold settlements around the Beagle Channel over 2500 miles to the south.

  I told him that I had just finished writing a book about a Greek island – I had posted the typescript off two days previously. I explained that I had lived in Greece, that I had studied ancient and modern Greek, and all that.

  The next day, at the lido, Salvador said:

  ‘Why don’t you write a book about my country now?’

  I had wanted to go back to South America ever since I paddled a canoe up the Amazon in 1985. The shape of the emaciated strip of land west of the Andes in particular had caught my imagination, and I often found myself looking at it on the globe on my desk, tracing my finger (it was thinner and longer than my finger) from an inch above the red line marking the Tropic of Capricorn down almost to the cold steel rod at the bottom axis. Chile took in the driest desert in the world, a glaciated archipelago of a thousand islands and most of the things you can imagine in between.

  After Salvador had planted his idea, I sought out people who knew about the thin country.

  ‘In Chile,’ a Bolivian doctor told me, ‘they used to have a saying, “En Chile no pasa nada” – nothing happens in Chile.’

  He paused, and bit a fingernail.

  ‘But I haven’t heard it for a few years.’

  I went to the Chilean Embassy in Devonshire Street and looked at thousands of transparencies through a light box. The Andes were in every picture, from the brittle landscape of the Atacama desert to the sepulchral wastes of Tierra del Fuego. I took a slow train to Cambridge and watched footage of Chilean Antarctica in the offices of the British Antarctic Survey; the pilots, who came home during austral winters, told me stories about leave in what they described as ‘the Patagonian Wild West’.

  I was utterly beguiled by the shape of Chile (Jung would have said it was because I wanted to be long and thin myself). I wondered how a country twenty-five times longer than it is wide could possibly function. When I conducted a survey among friends and acquaintances I discovered that hardly anyone knew anything about Chile. Pinochet always came up first (‘Is he gone, or what?’), then they usually groped around their memories and alighted on Costa-Gavras’ film Missing. The third thing they thought of was wine; they all liked the wine. Most people knew it was a Spanish-speaking country. That was about it. Our collective ignorance appealed to my curiosity.

  I told Salvador that my Spanish had gone rusty, and that anyway it was the Spanish spoken in Spain.

  ‘Well, you must learn a new Spanish! Do you want everything to be easy?’

  Duly chastened, I persuaded Linguaphone to sponsor the project by donating a Latin American Spanish course and shut myself away with it for three hours a day for the first month. One afternoon, at the lido, I surprised Salvador with it.

  ‘You have to go and see for yourself now,’ he said.

  I left three months later, to the day. I was anxious that the trip should be a natural pr
ogression from one end of the country to the other, but I was obliged to fly to Santiago, the capital, which was unhelpfully situated in the middle.

  ‘Make it your base camp!’ said an enthusiastic adviser, so I did.

  I had been invited, via a mutual friend in London, to stay with Simon Milner and Rowena Brown of the British Council. They met me at the airport, she sitting on the barrier and smiling, holding a sign with my name on, and as we walked together through the harshly lit hall and the automatic glass doors and into the soft, warm air, fragrant with bougainvillea, she put her arm around my shoulder and her face close to mine and she said:

  ‘Your Chile begins here. Welcome.’

  Simon and Rowena were about my age, and had been in Santiago for a year, living in a penthouse on the thirteenth floor of a well-kept block of flats set among manicured lawns and acacia trees in the north of the city. It wasn’t really their style – I had the idea that they thought it was quite a joke – but it was clear that they loved their Chilean posting, and their enthusiasm steadied my wobbling courage. I nurtured a sense of arrival for a day or two, contemplating the Andes on one side and the urban maw on the other from their spacious and safe balconies. When I did venture out I found a city discharging the usual international urban effluents – exhaust fumes to McDonald’s hamburgers – though it had a delightful insouciance about it which was quintessentially South American, and it was impossible to imagine I was in Rome or Amsterdam or Chicago. I badly wanted to explore, but I was too impatient for the journey to begin; the city would wait.

  I was going to save Santiago until its proper place, half-way down the country, so after two indolent days I bought a bus ticket to the far north. The plan was to travel up to the Peruvian border straightaway, in one leap, and then work my way south, leaving the continent right at the bottom and crossing over to the slice of Antarctica claimed by Chile – though I had no idea how I was going to do that. I was also determined to visit the small Chilean archipelago called Juan Fernández, half-way down, four hundred miles out in the Pacific and the prison-home of the original Robinson Crusoe. I had two arrangements to meet up with people from London, one in the north, which would coincide with Christmas, and one in the south, and these I saw as punctuation marks on the journey.

  The only big decision I had made – to leave Santiago immediately – was almost instantly overturned. A South African photographer called Rhonda telephoned to say that she was working on a feature about a sex hotel for a London magazine and had been let down by the journalist doing the words: could I step in? The subject was irresistible, though a bizarre introduction to the complex and apparently paradoxical Catholic moral code, so I changed my ticket and stayed an extra day.

  Alongside the shifting sands of Santiago’s public and private lives stands an institution of such permanence that it is difficult to imagine the city without it. Inscrutable and silent, its patrons anonymous but its services widely appreciated, the Hotel Valdivia is the example par excellence of what is inaccurately known as a love hotel, a concept inured in Japan but perfected west of the Andes. Rhonda had made an appointment with the manager of the Valdivia at ten the next morning, and she told me that I would have to pose as her assistant, as the man had specified photographs only; he didn’t want anybody writing anything. She had only wheedled her way that far round him by promising she would never sell the pictures to any paper or magazine within Chile.

  The hotel was disguised as a discreet private mansion, and I was obliged to ask a man in a kiosk for directions. He winked at me, and leered a spooky leer. I met Rhonda in the street outside the hotel. She was about my age, was wearing army fatigues, and she gave me an affectionate slap on the back. At ten o’clock exactly a young woman scuttled out of the hotel, sideways, like a cockroach, and hustled us in.

  ‘We don’t like people waiting in the street,’ she said. ‘It attracts attention.’

  She showed us into a small, windowless office where a man in his mid-thirties wearing a dark suit and a herbaceous tie stood up to shake our hands and introduce himself as Señor Flores. He didn’t look like a sleazebag at all; I was disappointed. His hair was neatly parted, and he had frilled the edge of a silk hanky half an inch above the lip of his breast pocket. He reminded me of an insurance salesman who used to live next door to us in Bristol. There were two photographs of brightly dressed children and a smiling wife on his desk, and four enthusiastically executed oil paintings of rural scenes hanging behind him which I feared were his own work. A VDU stood on one side of the desk, and neatly stacked piles of paper on the other.

  I was introduced as Rhonda’s assistant, and Señor Flores meticulously copied down the details on our presscards. Rhonda asked a question. Señor Flores clasped his hands in front of him, narrowed his eyes and looked earnest.

  ‘We take a great pride in the authenticity of our rooms’, he said. ‘We have fifty-four, each a different theme. We have to get it right – I mean, we might get an Egyptologist here, and he could complain or not come back if he noticed that the hieroglyphics in the Egyptian Suite were wrong.

  ‘We employ indoor gardeners to get the flora right and landscape designers for the waterfalls,’ he continued confidently, ‘and we have created a microclimate in each suite.’

  When Rhonda suggested a tour, Señor Flores led us through an open courtyard to a series of drive-in cubicles. ‘A curtain is drawn behind each car,’ he explained, ‘so that the driver cannot be seen when he gets out. Our main aim is to protect the privacy of our clients.’

  Most of them checked in as Juan Peres, the Hispanic John Smith. The cubicles opened onto booths upholstered in grey velour, whence a corridor of straw-matting partitions led to the rooms. The whole complex was covered with a perspex dome.

  The lobby of the Egyptian Suite revealed a flight of stairs with a banister inlaid with bronze, and alongside it a ten-foot waterfall sprayed a fine mist over tropical vegetation. Señor Flores hurried ahead to turn on the dimmed lights and Egyptian music. The room had a sauna off one side (saunas, I would learn, are closely associated with sex in the Chilean mind), a minibar cunningly concealed in a Sphinx, and, past the huge bed, a jacuzzi with little Pharaoh heads on the taps. Behind the jacuzzi someone had painted an elaborate mural of feluccas sailing down a river in front of a sandy landscape dotted with pyramids. The standard of workmanship was excellent; I had expected a plastic tack-palace.

  I had forgotten that I was a photographer’s assistant. I thought Señor Flores might be suspicious, so I fiddled with a tripod leg. Later I asked Rhonda if she would like me to go out and get her a coffee. She looked at me as if I were barking mad.

  The jacuzzi and waterfall in the Blue Lagoon Room had been niftily fused together, and two digital light panels were set into industrial-sized ceramic butterflies. The sound of parrots chattering emanated from a speaker disguised as a banana tree, and a stained-glass parrot panel concealed a bidet. This was the only room offering a vibrating bed, and Señor Flores switched it on and sat on it. He told us that it also lifted up at the top, and at the bottom, and demonstrated by zapping both ends up at once. The movement reminded me of a dentist’s chair. I wondered why anyone would pay money for the use of a V-shaped bed, but Rhonda told me later that the idea was to raise either one end or the other, and that Señor Flores had only put both up at once to show us the range of options. She seemed to know a lot about it.

  The Indianapolis Room had a car in it. The Arabian Room had a minaret above the bed. The Inside of a Snail Suite (an oblique appeal, I thought) was spotted with flashing red lights and furnished with gold sofas and so many mirrors that I had to lie on the floor holding the flashgun. I got a headache.

  Back in the office Señor Flores spoke authoritatively about cleanliness, even describing the special fungal cleaner run through the jacuzzi pipes. The hotel employed eighty full-time staff as well as a phalanx of freelance workmen, and the busiest periods were lunchtimes and Friday nights.

  Señor Flores took a clear
moral position. Pornographic videos were off-limits, no one under twenty-one was admitted and the only combination allowed in each room was one man and one woman. He claimed that many clients were married to each other.

  ‘The subterfuge and excitement inject new life into their marriage,’ he said, ‘especially for the women.’

  Dream on, I thought. I must have begun to think aloud, because Rhonda stood on my foot. He used the phrase ‘Disneyworld for couples’.

  ‘What we are trying to do,’ he continued, now in full throttle, ‘is create the right atmosphere between a man and a woman. We employ a psychologist for this purpose in the design of each room.’

  This was a man with a social mission, the Mother Teresa of the mattress.

  When we stood up to go he produced two black carrier bags from behind his desk.

  ‘Souvenirs for you,’ he beamed.

  He escorted us to the door, shook our hands and kissed our cheeks; I thought he might invite us home for tea to meet the family.

  We couldn’t wait to see what was in the bags. As soon as we got round the corner, blinking in the glare of a Santiago noon, we unwrapped the long thin objects sticking out of the top. They were porcelain vases. Each bag also contained a cigarette lighter, ashtray, pen, keyring and even a T-shirt, all tastefully proclaiming ‘Hotel Valdivia’.

  It was an odd marketing concept, that people would display their allegiance to a knocking-shop, even if it was a high-class one.

  I spent one more day in Santiago before starting my journey, as I remembered that I had to buy a camera. I had achieved the feat of having all my valuables stolen before my plane landed in Chile. Air Portugal had been kind enough to upgrade me from London to Rio; there we parted company, I to pass eight hours in a champagne-induced fog of misery waiting for a connection. An hour before my plane was scheduled to leave for Santiago I tried to elicit information as to how I might check in. Nobody knew anything about the flight. Then someone started paging me. I could hear my name being repeated, followed by a jabber of Brazilian Portuguese, so I approached random officials and said, ‘I am Sara Wheeler’, pointing at the air to make a connection with the announcement. A woman directed me to the Ladies.