by Sara Wheeler
Rafo was waiting on the beach when we got back. The fishing boats were coming in. Pepe bought armfuls of clams, but I was too afraid of cholera to eat raw shellfish. Rafo tried to persuade me.
‘Look, the ocean’s pure here. The shellfish are only contaminated near conurbations. You can eat anything from this water.’
The fishermen, surrounded by cats, began gutting large fish like fat rainbows. Rafo, his two friends, Pepe and a small boy started prising clams open on an upturned boat, loosening their bodies from the viscous muscles, squeezing a lemon on the pearly flesh and tipping them down their throats, chased with cans of cold beer. It was, of course, too much for my constitutionally low reserves of restraint.
The next day, walking through miles of red flowers which mottled the dunes, we came across the much-publicized new project for obtaining water from the camanchaca sea mist. This mist is caused by cold, upswelling water landward of the Humboldt current which cools the stable air and produces condensation. In order to trap it they had hung something similar to thick black net curtains between poles along the top of a hill, with halved drainpipes below them to collect the water.
We had planned to move on that day, and we did, but we set off too late, and had to pitch the tent a few hundred yards from the Panamerican, in the savannah. At sunset the temperature dropped so fast you could have watched the mercury moving on a thermometer. We couldn’t see what we were doing, and the tent blew down in the night. I fell onto a cactus in the rescue operation, and a jab in the arm from a needle later went septic.
When we drove past a sign indicating that we were leaving the Fourth Region Pepe registered his disgust at the colourless numerical toponyms invented by bureaucrats when Chile was divided into fourteen regions in 1977. I remember that in Bristol we were similarly outraged when Avon was invented. We scorned it as a construction of civil servants, devoid of character, meaning and history. But it was better than Region Four.
Travelling north, I felt like a salmon going the wrong way up a river. There were mountains joining the Andes and the coastal cordillera there, like rungs on a ladder. It was just as well, as we were almost out of petrol, and had to cruise the downhill parts. We filled up at Copiapó, a town on the edge of the transition zone before the desert gets serious, built with mining money and still flourishing. Pepe told me it was rich, violent and full of cocaine. The first mass ever held in Chile was said in the Copiapó valley, when Diego de Almagro rode down in 1535.
The Panamerican touched the coast at Caldera, an ugly village where they had just finished building a fruit-loading bay. They were funnelling iron-ore into a hopper: there were pockets of minerals everywhere in the interior. The village had a wooden church with a Gothic spire. It looked familiar, and I found out later that it was built by English carpenters working on the railway.
We camped that night in the Pan de Azúcar National Park, obliged to pitch the tent in a regulation red brick bay. This bay was only twenty steps from the ocean, and ours was the only tent. In the morning we went out with a fisherman from the small community living in the park. The original occupants of the zone, the Chango (probably our man’s great-grandparents), who were nomadic fishermen, had built their shelters on the rocky slopes of the sugarloaf – the pan de azúcar – island in the bay. On this island, its promontories spread with South American fur seals, Conaf was monitoring the breeding habits of the largest colony of Humboldt penguins in the country.
The next day we collected razor clams and washed our clothes in the ocean. I had special eco-detergent for ocean laundry, and I washed myself with it too. The worst part was not the cold or the salt, but the cormorants and grey gulls swirling purposefully above me. That day a Pacific marine otter paddled nearby with a baby clinging to its neck, portions of its long back appearing above the water like the curves of the Loch Ness monster.
I very much wanted to explore the interior of the park, but Pepe was unusually hesitant about planning a long trip as the terrain was hostile, even with four-wheel drive. At dusk I climbed up to the Conaf offices on the top of the cliff and persuaded the amiable head ranger to lend us a guide the following day.
We set off early with a ranger who had been working in the park for ten years. The hard ground was exploding with cacti. There were hundreds of different types of cacti, taller than us and smaller than our little fingers, unwieldy and delicate, smooth and warty. The most prolific were cacti of the copiapoa genus, and there were tens of thousands of these, short and tumescent with wrinkly folds of flesh and flaccid spherical fruits, and out of a tiny hole in the rounded tip leapt a yellow waxy flower.
We travelled from plain to gully to volcanic escarpment, through dried mudflats and on top of cliffs. Guanacos lowered their ears and slid away. Guanacos can live in totally rainless zones. They eat plants which absorb the sea mist, and cactus fruits, which lay on the ground with a fluffy white coating, like a certain type of tennis ball. The Conaf rangers have their water brought in by truck.
Pale mauve and yellow long-stemmed desert flowers bent in the wind, fragile against the harsh landscape, and suddenly a mass of the brightest tangerine stretched into the distance. But the camanchaca crawled in from the sea as we drove, obliterating everything with opaque whiteness.
We had decided not to push further north, as we wanted to stop over on the return journey. A cluster of wetsuited shellfish divers engaged in conversation at the edge of the water waved us off. We travelled south as far as Bahía Inglesa (English Bay), a village whose name harked back to the landing of the English pirate Edward Davis in the Bachelor in 1687. According to the guide books, there was an ‘English pub’ in the village, and I had been away from home long enough to think of such a thing fondly. It turned out to be something of a mystery, as it didn’t appear to have ever existed – though it was marked on two of my maps, and the South American Handbook went as far as detailing its attractions (‘darts, dominoes, pints …’) and gave the name and address of its English owners.
I knocked on the door of the house where the pub should have been. No response. We drove out of the village, beyond a group of campers, and put our tent up on a beach the size of a small national park. Pepe went off to find fishermen and shellfish, returning an hour later with bucketfuls of locos and crabs. I was drawn back to the non-existent British pub. This time a tall, attractive woman appeared at the door of the blue wooden house, and I asked if she was the owner of the chimeric pub.
‘Yes, that’s us,’ she said in an accent that wasn’t English. ‘I’ll get my husband.’
Before she had time to turn around a person resembling a caveman shot out of the house and skidded to a halt in front of me.
‘Yes?’ emerged a voice from the long beard.
‘Um, I’m looking for the English Pub and I wondered if …’
‘My God, you’re English!’
He said it as if it implied I was extra-terrestrial.
‘But how did you get here?’
He was expecting his lawyer to arrive at any minute, so we arranged that I would pick them up later; they said they would prefer to come to the tent than meet anywhere in the village. I returned triumphantly to Pepe, who was grappling with a scrubbing brush and locos in the heavy waves.
The caveman’s name was Tom Clough, and he used to be a trombonist in London. When I arrived at his house later to collect him, he carried out a large brown box.
‘Have I got a surprise for you,’ he said.
It was a case of Bateman’s Triple X which he had imported, together with crown-and-seal glasses and a Tetley bottle opener. It was a rhapsodic moment on a hot, windy beach in what Tom later described as ‘the black hole of the Third Region’.
‘Is it beer?’ asked Pepe as we drank a toast in front of the tent.
Tom had achieved notoriety in Britain several years previously during a live radio broadcast of a new Edward Cowie piece by the BBC Symphony Orchestra. He was the lead trombone. He was also pissed, and when a reverential BBC presenter fin
ished the announcement at the end with the words, ‘This was the first performance,’ a voice from the pit shouted, ‘and the last!’ I had read about this in the Guardian (it was a music critic’s dream). When summoned, Tom had denied it, until they played his voice on the tapes. But he kept his job.
A strong wind off the ocean meant that the gas cooker had to be lit in the tent, but Pepe was not easily deflected and he produced a supply of shellfish while Tom told the story of the ‘English Pub’.
We researched the project really carefully, bought the house and imported all the important stuff from the UK – we had a great pub sign painted with Mrs Thatcher on it, got some umbrellas for the beer garden and all that and worked out an arrangement with Bateman’s to import their Triple X on an exclusive basis. [He was a founder member of CAMRA.] It was all small-scale; we were aiming at the locals.’
He poured four more bottles of Bateman’s.
‘When we first arrived there was tremendous goodwill – everyone invited us over, dropped round. We had a contract drawn up with a builder from two doors down for the conversion, and for the two-bedroom b & b we planned out the back. We paid him quite a lot in upfront instalments – it was written into the contract. We gradually began to worry about his work. On the day we made another big payment – we would have been breaking the contract if we hadn’t—the municipality stopped the work because it was illegal. Two neighbours are taking us to court because the builder infringed upon walls that were theirs. We can’t recover any money – we’re waiting for a court case, of course, but it could take five years, and we’re not allowed to rectify the damage until the case is heard. So we can’t go forward or back, we have an open sewer in the yard, and our business is ruined. We’ve been told lies from start to finish. What really hurts is that the villagers have closed ranks. Nobody talks to us anymore. We’re totally isolated – you can’t imagine.’
Even the architect had allegedly displayed gross professional incompetence. The story went on to include anonymous phone calls and all the symptoms of a personal vendetta. Tom and Teresa (she was Bolivian) said they had never experienced such cruel people.
‘We’ve had so many revolutions in Bolivia that nobody is affected by them anymore. But here – I’ve never seen such paranoia.’
We were invited for breakfast on our way out the next morning and were offered real coffee, one of my more conspicuous addictions and something which I never got used to living without. I failed to understand why Chileans had not developed a taste for it, especially with such great coffee-producers on the continent. Even the best restaurants in Santiago served Nescafé, distinguishing themselves from lower-grade establishments by proffering the powder in a small silver dish and inviting customers to help themselves.
It was Sunday and the village was still quiet when we left except for the voices of two or three workmen painting a holiday complex purple in the main street. In Santiago the word ‘yuppie’ is often used to describe the clientele of Bahía Inglesa. They only overrun the village in February, however. The Chilean concept of summer is remarkably short; it is a state of mind rather than a season. Often, in December and January, people had said, ‘When summer comes …’, whereas I in my gringo ignorance had been under the illusion that it was already summer.
Tom and Teresa waved us goodbye as we drove down the straight road, still waving when it eventually veered south and they disappeared.
‘Some days,’ Teresa had said, ‘it’s just too hard to get out of bed.’
On a detour from Copiapó, up a fertile valley, we passed hundreds of vineyards where millions of the earliest grapes were already spread out on swathes of cloth, turning themselves into raisins. We drove into one vineyard, and after a few minutes a man appeared. When Pepe asked if we could buy some grapes, the man passed amiably under the trellises, clipping off purple bunches, and we paid in shellfish we had brought from the beach. Next to the vineyard there was a house with broken windows, a veranda and a wooden lookout platform with small doric columns around it. It overlooked one of the finest churches I saw in Chile. It had a pediment, fluted columns and a hexagonal wooden tower, but everything had collapsed behind the facade, which stood on its own, like a film set. A woman appeared from behind a jacaranda tree, and when Pepe said we were admiring the house, she took us inside. It was built around a courtyard full of aloe vera, and was originally the casa patronale, or landowner’s home, expropriated in 1942 in one of Chile’s many attempts at land reform, and the estate had been parcelled out in small lots. In the hall they had an olivewood telephone which still rang a bell.
The woman asked my name.
‘Ah! Sarah Ferguson!’
I had already noted the Chilean fascination with the British royal family. I had experienced the same phenomenon in lots of places around the world. On the day of the Royal Wedding in 1981 I was hitching from the Sea of Galilee to the Lebanese border (I thought that was far enough away) and an Israeli army officer picked me up. When he found out where I was from he told me immediately that I looked like Lady Diana. It would take considerable effort to find a Caucasian woman who looked less like Princess Diana than I, but it made me realize how closely Britain is associated with the royals.
Much further up the valley, among the vestiges of an Inca foundry, we stood on the chiefs’ platform, the sun burning like stage lights. The platform looked towards miles of hills tinged green with copper deposit. Nothing much had happened in the hills since the Inca arrived, led by Topa Inca, in the second half of the fifteenth century. They got about half way down the country, and conquered the Aymára, and probably other groups, but although they exacted tribute and influenced most of the northern and central tribes, their power was limited, and their impact on the subsequent development of the land and people minimal.
It was the last stop before a long journey home to the Elqui valley and so we lingered, just to prolong the trip. After depositing Rocky the next day I had to get to Santiago, my midway point. I would be seeing Pepe later, when he too was back in Santiago. It was hard to believe that I was half-way down already.
Pepe’s sister and her family had gone to Santiago, and the Elqui valley cottage was empty. I was very tired, and after we had unloaded Rocky we ate the last two crabs and I went to bed. I had just blown out the candle when ten hippies crashed into the house whistling the Mr Men theme tune. They were friends of Pepe’s from Santiago, and had been staying in the house all weekend. It was the Elqui valley, after all.
Chapter Five
saldremos para negarte el pan y el agua
saldremos para quemarte en el infierno
We shall emerge to deny you bread and water
We shall emerge to burn you in hell
Pablo Neruda, addressing the
United States in Canto general, 1950
Like a child, Latin America was to be seen and not heard.
Seymour M. Hersh, Kissinger: the Price of Power
A book read on a journey usually sticks to the ribcage of memory. Such associations are closely formed. I got on a bus back to Santiago having just finished three novels by the Chilean writer Isabel Allende, each more overblown than the last, and I turned in gratitude to a copy of Heart of Darkness which was becoming dog-eared in the carpetbag.
In Santiago I was again looked after by Simon and Rowena, who behaved as if it were perfectly normal for strange British women to pitch up from the bush. Beatriz, their amiable maid, took Rowena aside.
Beatriz (conspiratorially): ‘I’ve put Miss Sara’s clothes in the machine on a pre-wash. They smelt.’
Rowena (breezily): ‘Well, I’m not surprised. She’s been living in the mountains and camping on the beach for almost two months.’
Beatriz (shocked): ‘She didn’t camp alone, did she?’
Rowena: ‘No, she met a Chilean man and camped with him.’
Beatriz (appalled): ‘I see.’
Decently dressed for the first time in two months, I made an appointment to visit La Chascona, onc
e a residence of Pablo Neruda, the colossus of modern Chilean literature and the best-known poet ever to emerge from South America. He was also a Communist, a diplomat and a committed bon viveur with roots in the green and fecund south; he said that he didn’t understand the language of the desert. When he died, shortly after the coup, his disciples liked to say it was of a broken heart, but he did have cancer of the prostate at the time. The house was closely associated with his great love and last wife Matilde Urrutia and named ‘The Tangled-haired One’ after her. She became an icon in her own right to the generation of left-wing writers to whom Neruda was a god; Pepe Donoso’s novel Toque de queda (Curfew) is written around her funeral.
La Chascona was at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac at the foot of San Cristóbal hill in the centre of the city. A disciple from the Pablo Neruda Foundation showed me round; he was a passionate man with strong opinions, and he was very knowledgeable about the master. Neruda picked the spot for the house in 1953, and everyone told him he was mad, as it was on the slope of the hill – very bad for his phlebitis. It was not so much a house as a collection of small buildings around an irregularly shaped courtyard spread over several levels. More than anything else it was a testament to Neruda’s obsessive desire to collect things. He used to press requests for particular pieces upon friends in a position to acquire them for him – and he didn’t forget if they failed him. His many collections included glasses (he said that even water tasted better out of coloured glass), ships’ furniture, belle époque postcards, paperweights – and books, of course. On the library wall he had put up four portraits of his literary idols: two of Whitman and one each of Rimbaud and Baudelaire. Despite the proliferation of objets d’art from around the world, if the house did have a unifying theme, it was Neruda’s love for what he called the thin country.
He was an extremely sociable man. There were bars everywhere, and a long dining table. The walls were hung with affectionately inscribed works by distinguished Chilean artists. The paintings included two large and very wonderful images by Neruda’s second wife, Delia del Carril, an Argentinian twenty years his senior. He met her in 1934, and left her twenty-one years later for a much younger woman.
