by Sara Wheeler
The owner of the house was waiting when we returned to the jeep, and he introduced himself as Señor Keith, the Chilean grandson of an Irishman and his Scottish wife who had pitched up in 1875. His great uncle had been big in nitrates, and the pine walls of the house were hung with dusty photographs of flourishing mines. Señor Keith, who couldn’t speak a word of English but referred to me as his compatriota, said I looked like Jackie Kennedy, and called me Jackie while we drank tea; she wouldn’t have been very flattered by the comparison, and Matthew laughed immoderately.
We pressed on down the Panamerican, past the turning to Pisagua, where mass graves, dug during the dictatorship, were discovered in 1990. The uncovering of mass graves became a fairly common occurrence after democracy was restored in March of that year. Following one such discovery, Pinochet was asked what he thought of the fact that several unidentified corpses had been found stuffed into one grave. He said, ‘What economy!’
Turning inland, we tackled forty-three miles of poor road, hoping to end up at Camiña, a mountain village which one of the maps confidently told us offered accommodation. ‘Turning off the Panamerican’ was to become as much of a concept as a road direction. It meant starting to travel, rather than simply getting from somewhere to somewhere else; it meant being free to move as slowly as I wanted (or constrained to move much slower than I would have liked), and it meant a dramatic deterioration in the quality of the road. Nowhere was it more apparent than up there in the baked, dead desert that the Panamerican was the umbilicus of Chile, and you strayed from it at your peril.
We picked up a farmer and his wife, walking from their square of land on the valley floor to a meeting at a Seventh Day Adventist church. I was amazed to find this church in what I had thought were the Catholic heartlands.
The track ran next to a drop of several hundred feet. When it got dark we felt dwarfed by the black cliffs and prolific constellations, and we didn’t speak for a long time, listening to the engine, willing it to keep going. Matthew produced a Talking Heads tape, and the first song was ‘We’re on a Road to Nowhere’. It was very, very black. At about ten o’clock a light flickered in the foothills. Matthew punched the air. It was Camiña.
The guesthouse really did exist, but two men stirring a tureen in its open-air kitchen explained indifferently that the owner was away and all the rooms were locked. We sought assistance at the mayor’s house (an old trick), and the incumbent, a well-fed man of Pickwickian geniality, listened to our story, took a key from a hook next to his front door and led us to an unoccupied adobe cottage on the other side of the street. ‘Have you got candles?’, he asked, scratching his crotch. We had, and we fetched them from the jeep and followed him inside, seeing off several dozen mice. Matthew lit the candles, and we sat on two camp beds positioned in the middle of the front room.
The mayor eyed a mouse in the corner. ‘I hope you’ll be comfortable here,’ he said, his expression indicating that he thought this was unlikely. ‘When you leave, pay me whatever you like. If you want food, ask for Violeta at the top of the street. Er, I’ll be off now.’
In the absence of a single bar, café or restaurant in Camiña, Violeta, whom we visited later, cooked for anyone ‘passing through’. (This must have constituted an extremely erratic income, as I shouldn’t imagine more than a dozen people passed through in any one decade.) She ushered us into a room built of unpainted concrete blocks and furnished only with three high-backed chairs and a table covered with a plastic cloth. As we waited, five or six men came in, shook our hands and exclaimed loudly and unintelligibly, whether to each other or to us, we did not know.
Violeta brought the meal in. It consisted of boiled rice with a crusty fried egg on it, stale bread and coffee substitute made out of barley (the latter produced by Nestlé, like so many products which enter the Chilean mouth). It was at this stage that Matthew revealed that he had forgotten to buy the wine. We had divided the labour preparations for the trip between us, and the purchase of water, salt tablets and wine had fallen to Matthew. He casually remembered this omission when I asked for the jeep keys so I could fetch the first bottle. He seemed to think it was some small matter. I saw him in a different light after that.
We breakfasted in the bare room, now throbbing with sunlight, on condensed milk, still moulded in the shape of the tin and served in a blue plastic dish with two teaspoons, and the same bread, eight hours staler, though eight hours constituted such a small percentage of its life that the difference in taste was negligible. Afterwards we settled our account in the shared courtyard at the back of the house, where we found our hostess turning a mangle in the middle of a scene of Brueghelian vigour, fires smoking and dented kettles steaming, small children playing with empty tins, babies crawling on dried mud, women kneading, men drinking beer and a policeman fiddling with a gun in a corner.
Before leaving the village we visited the church on the square, replete with the obligatory garlanded statues and plastic accoutrements beloved of South American popular religion. The building had been under more or less permanent restoration since 1935. Two men working on the flagged floor told us that there was a shortage of sand for the cement to lay the stone tiles. We thought it was a queer thing to be short of in a desert. Next to a Pentecostal chapel around the corner we found a shop resembling a large wardrobe, and stocked up on provisions: tins of salmon, suspiciously familiar hard bread and a kilo of wrinkled apples.
Next to the track we followed into the mountains villagers were clearing garlic fields while their alpacas, tied to adjacent tree trunks, stared impassively into the middle distance. We began a long, slow ascent up a serpentine and precipitous dirt road in candent tropical heat, both glancing regularly at the temperature gauge of the jeep, a snappy Japanese model called Rocky which didn’t seem to mind the conditions as much as we did.
The road degenerated. The land we wanted to reach, around the Isluga National Park, was still many hours ahead of us, and Rocky got a puncture; the sun seemed particularly malevolent while we were fixing it. After a side track down to a place called Nama which didn’t feature on any of the maps the road deteriorated exponentially until it resembled a casually discarded trail of large and sharp stones. A sign for drivers coming the other way warned of the perils of illegally importing fruit from Bolivia. Anyone who had made it along that road from Bolivia deserved an endurance medal. We had already used our spare tyre, and we didn’t fancy the axle’s chances. I was instinctively in favour of continuing, but Matthew, always the pragmatist, persuaded me that we should turn back and try to reach the park from another angle. In a spirit of appeasement he suggested that we visit Nama, on the valley floor three miles below us. I was bitterly disappointed, and we drove in silence.
A casual remark which eventually broke this silence led to an argument over the future tense of an irregular Spanish verb. Matthew stopped the jeep in order to get the dictionary out of the back, but I had left it under my camp bed. When he got back in, he shut his foot in the door.
At Nama we parked outside a small, newish bungalow. A young woman wearing jeans came out. ‘Hi’, she said. I was afraid Matthew was going to ask her about the verb. The woman told us that she was the village teacher, and showed us the school, which was in the bungalow. She had twelve pupils, and there was a framed photograph of Pinochet on the wall next to their crayon drawings of themselves. Matthew and I glanced at each other furtively as we stood in front of this sinister juxtaposition; the teacher said she wasn’t allowed to take the photograph down, but didn’t elaborate, and the moment passed.
A sign on a decrepit building next to the school said ‘MUSEO’. The teacher told a loitering child to run and fetch the man in charge of it, who duly arrived, followed by two associates, and this triumvirate shook our hands and observed us closely as we perused the two small rooms of the museum. Someone had handwritten a catalogue in an exercise book. A mummified woman was propped up against a small adobe house, fleshless fingers clutching a zampoña, a musical instru
ment like panpipes. One of the old men took it from her, and gave us a tune.
We ate our salmon sandwiches on the wall of a small church on a knoll, and a middle-aged woman joined us from the fertile plots of land below. ‘You mustn’t drink,’ she said peremptorily, ‘or fornicate. The bible says so.’ I took the opportunity of remarking airily to Matthew that she would approve of his attitude to drinking. The woman informed us, in parentheses, that she was a Seventh Day Adventist, and concluded a list of other biblically prohibited activities with ‘watching television’.
Before we left the teacher asked us if we would take a box back to Camiña for her. I was often entrusted with errands like this in rural Chile. The villages were so remote that each vehicle was obliged to operate as a kind of public freight facility. I donated three pens to the schoolroom and we drove off under the large ‘Nama’ written on the hillside in white stones. Chilean villagers often proclaim themselves in mosaic writing, just as they lovingly tend their diminutive museums; they cherish a sense of community.
We delivered our consignment to the municipal offices in Camiña, as instructed. As in any good office the week before Christmas, the staff had been drinking for some time, and the parcel’s addressee propelled us inside for a glass of cola de mono, a seasonal beverage made of milk, clear brandy, coffee and cinnamon. After a few minutes a nun entered the room, and our hosts pointed at us and jabbered. A man began to play the national anthem on a pair of teaspoons. The wide-eyed nun turned to us and said in a Yorkshire accent, ‘Is it true then? Are you really English?’
Matthew and I choked on our cocktails and introduced ourselves. The nun, flapping her hands and beaming, invited us home for dinner. The villagers clucked approvingly at this happy gringo reunion.
We reclaimed the camp beds we had relinquished in the morning from the mayor, who had spilt cola de mono down his crisply pressed shirt, and spent the evening with two Sisters serving in the County Wicklow-based missionary order of St Columban. Matthew, keen to establish our moral credentials with the nuns, was anxious to advertise the innocent nature of our relationship. He said we had decided to make an Andean trip together ‘for mutual support’, and I could see the nuns’ eyes glaze over as he extrapolated about this support, none of which sounded very familiar to me. I’m sure they didn’t believe a word of it; he was protesting too much.
The nun with the Yorkshire accent, whose many years on the continent had taught her not to expect much, told us that the valley had been priestless for over a hundred years. Besides the fact that it didn’t have any money, the Chilean Church had experienced a chronic inability to recruit priests throughout the century. In 1968, the worst year, only two had been ordained in the entire country. No wonder the Adventists had enjoyed so much success: they had moved into a vacuum.
‘The Pentecostals,’ she went on, ‘have caused a lot of friction, especially in the altiplano. There are masses of them.’ Like many fundamentalists before them, the Pentecostals’ vision of the world did not extend to religious tolerance. ‘They set up a stage outside a church in a large village on the coast once during a Catholic mass and outblasted us with their music! You have to hand it to them, though – they achieve great things among the people. They can reform the hardest of drinkers, once they get their hands on them.’
Catholic men – many of them, at least – continued to put it away.
‘But the Pentecostals want to jettison the entire culture of the villages’, the nun continued. ‘They even forbid fiestas, and you can imagine what a psychological necessity they are in a poor rural community.’
Religious observance throughout the continent was, in general, weak; it had always been weak. The indigenous population had never been properly Christianized: they were ‘Churchized’. The conquistadores turned their pagan shrines into churches and told them they were Catholics. Naturally, pagan practices were swiftly grafted on to Christian stock, and they took hold. On 1 November each year, we were told, the people of Camiña still proceed to the cemetery to deposit food, drink and cigarettes on the tombs of their dead.
However lukewarm many Chilean Catholics were about the faith, everyone I met, up and down the country, seemed to have a strong sense of the importance of the Church as a national institution, both historically and in their own time. It was different from faith. It was a sense, or an awareness, which had been bred into their ancestors. It had survived the arrival of the secular age, which by the mid-nineteenth century had dislodged the Church from the privileged position it had inherited from medieval Europe, and it had outlived the 1925 constitution, which officially separated Church and State after almost fifty years of political controversy on the subject. (Disestablishment was characteristic of a trend in Europe as well as South America, and in Chile the transition was a particularly smooth one.) Despite the fact that over the next decades the Chilean Catholic Church moved towards the centre, it remained close to the ruling and landowning élite until the 1960s – and then it was overtaken by a small revolution.
Before we reached their front door we could smell bacon cooking; it was a smell which took me very far from the Andes. The Sisters had invited us for breakfast, despite our early start, and they had managed to prepare an English one. Up there, this was something of a feat. Given my profound attachment to real coffee I never thought that I would be glad to see Nescafé, but the barley substitute had put it into a different perspective.
We made the Panamerican again before eleven, grateful for the comfort of tarmac, got the tyre fixed at a garage and tried to reach our Andean destination by a more southerly route. Turning off at a truckstop called Huara, the kind of place where nothing has ever happened and you expect to run into a serial killer, we followed a wide and deserted road painted with troubling white lines. Neither of us spoke for a while, then Matthew said, ‘I don’t want to be alarmist, but I can’t help wondering why this road is marked out as a runway.’ The tarmac petered out soon afterwards, and this bizarre piece of Chilean highway design remained an enigma.
A track careered off to a hill on the pampa, and we took it: on the southern side we found the Giant of the Atacama, 350 feet long and the largest human geoglyph in the world. It had a head like a box, with twelve rays coming out of it, and struck an angular pose, with a creature like a monkey at its side. Nobody knows what these geoglyphs were for, or if they had a function at all. Matthew, a utilitarian at heart, was adamant that the drawings in the soil once had a purpose. It seemed to me perfectly plausible that they were simply aesthetic, and that the hills were a kind of early art gallery. It didn’t strike me as an odd concept, having grown up in the English west country where there are plenty of images carved in the chalk. Those white horses galloping through my childhood seemed as appropriate to the benign English hills as this sinister alien-man did to the harsh and spooky desert.
The hot wind which had been blowing through the jeep all day picked up speed in the late afternoon as we took a loop of road to a high village called Chusmiza where, our Chilean guidebook told us with a descriptive flourish, we would find a delightful hotel near a warm mineral spring. This seemed as likely as finding a French restaurant, but we had learnt to keep an open mind. At a small water-bottling plant a man jogged across a yard and flagged us down.
‘Hello’, he said.
‘Hello’, we answered.
There was a pause. The three of us smiled inanely.
‘Is this the right way to the hotel?’ Matthew eventually asked.
The man pulled a key out of his pocket with the figure seven carved on it.
‘Yes’, he said, holding out the key. ‘One thousand pesos. Just follow the road and you’ll come to it.’ He smiled again. ‘It’s a very quiet hotel. There aren’t any staff. Haven’t had any guests for quite a while now, either.’
We drove on, each constructing this Marie Céleste in our imagination. The track ended at a long thin building on a spur of land above a shallow valley. We left the jeep on a small forecourt and let ourselves
into the hotel through the door painted with a red seven. It led into a high-ceilinged room with three single beds, and in the en suite bathroom we found a five-foot deep white-tiled bath fed by hot sulphur springs and occupied by a wooden stopper and a family of salamanders. The toilet flushed with hot water too, and it ran from the single tap in the basin. We had discovered a hotel without cold water.
The village was so poor that the roofs of the shacks were made of orange crates. We met a priest called Father Miguel outside the water-bottling plant later, and he took us to a truckers’ café. A man disappeared into the back and returned suggesting roast llama and rice. Father Miguel enthusiastically explained that llama is cholesterol-free.
We made another attempt to reach the Isluga National Park. It was a hard three-hour drive to 12,000 feet, the tracks so corrugated and pitted by Bolivian juggernauts that we were frequently obliged to slow down to ten miles an hour. We had bought some packets of strawberry wafers for breakfast from the roast llama man. They were a scientific triumph, as they had absolutely no taste at all. We were thirsty all the time. The jarring discomfort and the heat made us both irritable. Matthew made his hundredth joke about women drivers, and I snapped at him. Underneath a cosmopolitan and right-on exterior he was deeply conservative. He freely admitted to what he referred to as a ‘fundamentally right-wing perspective on life’; he thought having a liberated attitude towards women meant feeling okay if I poured the petrol while he held the funnel. While we were driving along one day he asked me what impression I had got, in general, of Australian men when I was down there for a couple of months earlier that year. After I told him he didn’t speak to me for two hours.
