Travels in a Thin Country

by Sara Wheeler

  ‘The only reason the industry is taken seriously inside Chile is because of our export success,’ he said as we strolled out among muddy rows of vines. ‘Domestic consumption is not only relatively indiscriminating, but it has also dropped off dramatically over the past two or three decades from about sixty litres [eighty regular-size bottles] per capita per annum to about twenty-eight [thirty-seven bottles].’

  I thought, That’s nothing.

  ‘Beer has become more popular, and sugary fizzy drinks have appeared from abroad. Besides, the standard of education is far higher than it used to be, and that’s created a heightened social consciousness. In other words, a number of factors have contributed to vastly reduced wine consumption. I might add that between 1938 and 1974 certain laws virtually prohibited the planting of vineyards – that was the government’s way of controlling alcoholism!’

  Every vintner I spoke to complained about the absence of a wine culture in the country. ‘No one in Chile knows anything about wine,’ one said. ‘They think it can’t cost more than a thousand pesos [less than £1.50] a bottle.’

  Later I found that I couldn’t buy the fine wines I tasted on my tour in the supermarkets. It was all being sent abroad.

  Traditionally, they were great wine drinkers, consuming prodigious quantities made from the país grapes brought over by the conquistadores. Much of the wine drunk is still produced from these grapes, cultivated largely on unirrigated land; quality wines, including almost all exports, are made from pre-phylloxera grapes shipped from Europe in the nineteenth century.

  Arturo told a story which showed that the authorities and the winemakers take the industry seriously, even if the punters don’t. When a freak frost struck the Maipo valley in October 1991, the army offered their helicopters for hire, and they duly took off over the vineyards, creating a wind to thaw the frost. It was one of Pinochet’s more heartwarming acts (he was still commander-in-chief of the army).

  The thin branches were already bending under the weight of a heavy crop.

  ‘Yes,’ said Arturo, when I remarked on it. ‘And although our average yield here is extremely low for Chile, it’s still far higher than a Bordeaux yield. If we can make wine like we do with our abundant crops, just imagine what we could produce with a low yield like they get over there!’

  We arrived at a row of brand new stainless steel vats outside the brick cellars. The country won its reputation with red wines, largely because no one had enough money to purchase the technology required for fine whites, but most top producers went on, in time, to acquire state-of-the-art equipment, and their subsequent success has occasioned a rush of foreign investment and joint ventures. Cousiño Macul, which claims to be the only winery in the Maipo valley not to buy grapes to supplement its own crop, was wooed by Moët & Chandon, but having been independent since 1856 the family were anxious to remain so. As Arturo put it to me, ‘We can make a good wine alone.’

  Germán came with me when I visited Errazuriz Panquehue, the only quality winery in the Aconcagua valley north of Santiago. The oenologist took us to lunch at a local restaurant owned by an old gaffer who used to sell pigs door-to-door in Santiago. He had started the restaurant with one table in his front room, and now turned over about four million pesos a month. The food was famous, and it all came from the fields at the back. He was particularly proud of his arrollado, a boneless roll of pork served with raw onions in wine vinegar. When we thought we had finished he lurched out of the kitchen carrying a dish of alcayota with chestnut puree and walnuts. Alcayota, which looks like a melon, is a dark green squash-type vegetable with white crunchy flesh. We ate it with jugs of chicha, partially fermented grape juice, which was dark orange and very sweet.

  When I went down to Concha y Toro, by far the biggest wine producer in the country, the staff were in a panic, as it had been raining hard for two days and the vines were beginning to spoil. I panicked myself later that day when I was driving back (Hertz had again obliged, though with a car, not one of my Rockies) and discovered that the streets of Santiago have no drainage. The speed with which the whole of the south of the city virtually stopped functioning was astonishing: roads turned into torrents and cars were abandoned, up to their doorhandles in water. A black economy loves a crisis, however, and out of nowhere sprang an army of men riding tricycles with high platforms attached to convey people across the streets.

  It took me hours to get home, and even in the heavy rain people on crutches limped to the car window asking for money. I sat in the darkness in a stationary line of traffic in a rough and anonymous part of the town, the reflections of streetlights distorting into oily rainbows on the surface of the water swirling around outside. Cold and totally unable to move the car, I was shocked that this could happen to me only a few miles from the city centre, and for the first time in months I was afraid.

  In the days following the wine tour the Chilean newspapers, which I read nursing cups of Nescafé at noisy pavement tables, were full of stories about a new development in the long-running drama of the political prisoners. Out of almost four hundred presos políticos in jail when Patricio Aylwin’s government took over from the military in 1990, approximately three hundred and fifty had already been released. As most of those who remained had been charged with or convicted of blood crimes (they were called political prisoners nonetheless), the government – who would have been delighted to get shot of this emotive issue once and for all – was compelled to keep them locked up. Some were awaiting trial, some had been convicted, some were up for multiple charges, and all their cases were complex.

  It was clear from the newspaper stories, and from a number of conversations I had at the pavement tables, that the question of what to do with the political prisoners was tremendously important; it had become a symbol of the national healing process. The jail most of them were held in was in central Santiago, and it occurred to me that I should visit it, and meet some of these famous prisoners. I had a feeling that this was not something on which I should consult Mr Fixit.

  One unusually cold summer morning I stood outside the monolithic old jail itself, more Victorian in appearance than anything built under the auspices of Queen Victoria, and when I knocked two dark-eyed men opened a hatch in the door and pressed their noses to a grille. A queue of women stood in a line by this door, waiting in silence for visiting time. They weren’t allowed to take anything in with them, so a crippled woman with an eye for the main chance had set herself up in business, squatting on the pavement guarding handbags, baskets and pushchairs for a small fee. Wielding my press card like a weapon and repeating faceless names culled from numerous telephone calls and frustrating visits to offices within the Department of the Interior I got in, and was shunted from one room to the next by ‘prison guards’ who looked suspiciously like soldiers. After a lot of doorclanking I was dispatched for a final administrative check to the Dirección Nacional, a kind of state department, in order to obtain one of the papels (pieces of paper) so beloved of Chilean bureaucracy. After sufficient authority had been exercised on the various floors of this building I was sent back to the prison with a message that the governor had been telephoned: I was in.

  The governor was a short, balding man with a squint and an eggstain on his tie, and he seemed to be under the illusion that I wanted to talk to him. I fidgeted on the dralon sofa in his office for half an hour until I was delivered to a member of staff, frisked and escorted across a high-walled courtyard reminiscent of Colditz. A hatchet-faced guard held open a grey metal door, and I stepped into a room with cracked plaster walls and a high ceiling, bare except for a formica table and three chairs. Sunlight from a single, high window gilded the opposite wall, and in an arc of this light stood two men.

  They were wearing jeans and sweaters, and they walked towards me, cold hands outstretched, and kissed me on both cheeks, introducing themselves as representatives of the National Coordinating Committee for Political Prisoners. We sat down.

  ‘Thank you,’ said the younger
one, ‘for coming to us.’ He had shoulder-length frizzy hair and large, deep brown eyes, and he was a mirísta – a member of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left – in his late twenties. The other man, about forty, was larger set with short black hair plastered to his head. He told me that he was a Communist, and I later learnt that he was a member of the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front, the armed wing of the Communist Party, formed in 1983 and named after an Independence hero. (This man was subsequently offered voluntary exile in Belgium in exchange for a life sentence, and left Chile later in 1992.) They had both been inside for six years.

  ‘Our organization,’ said the mirísta in a soft voice, ‘is made up of Communists, Socialists, mirístas and independent leftists. It campaigns for fair punishment for everyone tried and found guilty of torture and oppression during the dictatorship, recognition of human rights – to be more specific in this last field, action against poverty – and liberty for all political prisoners.’

  They thought the Rettig Commission, set up to document human rights abuses during the dictatorship, was a joke; they said the government wasn’t prepared to confront the right, because it was frightened. They were both unimpressed by the Aylwin regime, and said repression was as bad as it had been under Pinochet. This sounded like an absurd statement – people weren’t disappearing anymore, after all – but what I think they meant was firstly repression of justice, as exemplified by the difficulties involved in bringing prosecutions against the torturers, and secondly the lack of basic human rights within certain sectors of the population, for example stigmatized ex-prisoners of conscience or simply Chileans caught in the poverty spiral. They talked at some length about despair in the slums.

  ‘Many of the people who once protested for democracy while others were silent,’ said the Communist, ‘are the dispossessed of today’s democratic Chile, and although it is often proudly stated that human rights abuse no longer exists, in the wider interpretation of that concept it’s difficult to maintain that these people have any rights at all.’

  The mirísta had been tortured in 1989; they had put currents through his head. He was still on medication. The Communist had a perforated kidney from beatings in the early 1980s and needed microsurgery. His wife had died in a detention centre. I never found out exactly what they were in for, but I knew that in both cases they had been found guilty of a serious crime.

  Purity of vision is often seductive. I made myself think about the terrorist murders committed by both the FMRP and Mir – for all I knew, by these two sitting in front of me. That was where absolute commitment had led their groups – to the intellectual arrogance and political suicide of terrorism. But I couldn’t help feeling that everyone else, who wasn’t passionate about the poor, and about justice, was leading a compromised existence.

  They had no complaints about the conditions they were held in; they were treated well in prison. When I asked if I could bring them anything they said they didn’t need personal stuff; I asked again, and they said blank cassettes, which they record on and send to supporting organizations abroad. I lived with their faces inside my head for days, and all the anguished novels I had read, written during the Pinochet years, came into focus in my imagination.

  The Chilean government has no policy on female incarceration; over a century ago it handed over responsibility to the Church, presumably with a deep sigh of relief, and there it has resided ever since. The flank of the Church in question was the Order of the Good Shepherd, founded in Angers. Sheila Cassidy was placed under the care of Good Shepherd nuns when she was imprisoned in Santiago in 1979. She was a British doctor, and she had been arrested in a house belonging to the Columban Fathers for treating a wounded revolutionary. The housekeeper was murdered and Sheila Cassidy was taken away and repeatedly tortured. Later, after three weeks in solitary confinement, she was moved to Tres Alamos prison. There were eighty other women there with her, and on Christmas Day they stood on tables at the appointed hour of ten in the evening and sang songs like ‘Take Heart, Joe, My Love’ to prisoners in the men’s jail over the spiked concrete wall. The men were waiting, and shortly their song of reply drifted across, faint on the wind. The British ambassador took Sheila Cassidy a Harrods’ Christmas cake.

  The women’s prison I visited was the largest in Chile. The Mother Superior and prison governor, grey-haired and benign of face, explained that the objective of the prison was to reconcile women with God. It would be interesting to put that forward as government policy in the West. Many of the prisoners were in for armed robbery, and many for trafficking and possession; these were the areas Madre had seen explode in her many years in the service. This prison was not austere, or even institutional; it was a small, modern community. We strolled between the buildings chatting politely and taking in impromptu and embarrassing visits to sewing and pottery groups, and as we crossed a garden in the sharp sunlight I asked Madre if she thought the government should exercise more responsibility towards the penal system.

  ‘I have no opinion on that,’ she said, as if I had asked her whether one should put limes or lemons in a pisco sour. Shortly after this she stopped, placed her hand on my wrist and looked serious.

  ‘There’s something I want to ask you,’ she said conspiratorially. ‘Is it true that Andreas and La Fergus are separating?’

  Before I could answer we were interrupted by a sunny young woman in a red striped dress who, I later learnt, was a lautarísta (member of another terrorist group) and had already done eight years for murdering an old woman.

  Chapter Six

  Yet all these things had no effect upon me, or at least not enough to resist the strong inclination I had to go abroad again, which hung about me like a chronic distemper.

  Daniel Defoe, The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

  It was one of those days … when I forgot all my cares, all my failures, all my anxieties about writing. I was exactly where I wanted to be, doing what I liked most. I was far enough offshore …

  Paul Theroux, The Happy Isles of Oceania

  A contact of a contact at a travel agency called me one morning at Simon and Rowena’s flat.

  ‘There’s one seat left in an air taxi leaving for Juan Fernández tomorrow. You have to decide immediately.’

  Deciding immediately wasn’t a problem. I had been trying to fix up a trip to those notoriously inaccessible Chilean islands since I first arrived in the country. They were located between three hundred and fifty and four hundred miles out in the Pacific, and they were occupied by five hundred and fifty people and two cars. The largest of the three islands, and the only one which was inhabited, was called Robinson Crusoe, as for four years it was the home of the man Defoe based his character on, the mercurial Scottish mariner Alexander Selkirk.

  Early the next morning, therefore, I arrived at a small airport on the outskirts of Santiago thronged with air force personnel. It didn’t take my pilot long to locate me; I was one of the only people not wearing a light blue uniform. He was a middleaged man with an affable face and hair the colour of cornflakes.

  ‘Hi,’ he said, taking the carpetbag. The weather had broken, and a gold-coloured six-seater was waiting in the sun on the tarmac. The pilot put me up in the cockpit, in the passenger seat, as it were; four islanders were already strapped in behind us.

  Once the plane had lifted out of the Santiago basin and over the coastal mountains it cruised over the melted blue candlewax of the Pacific, set in gleaming folds with a light dusting of white ash. Figueroa, the pilot, had been flying the same route for twenty-five years. Before they blasted an airstrip in 1977 he used to do it in a sea-plane. When he lowered us through a bank of dense cloud later a spectral outline appeared ahead. It was a small mountain range sticking out of the ocean.

  ‘Robinson Crusoe!’, shouted Figueroa over the noise of the engine.

  I could see why it had been so difficult to find a site for an airstrip. The land-mass consisted of high cliffs, peaks like spikes and almost perpendicular slopes,
and as we approached the uniform brownness transmogrified into a myriad delicate hues in stripes, blocks and pools. It must have come as a shock to Juan Fernández himself when he spotted it from the mast of his ship. He was a Spanish priest and navigator, and he arrived some time between 1563 and 1574, though Spain didn’t take legal possession of his islands for almost two hundred years.

  Figueroa landed us on a reddish brown strip of earth next to a wooden hut, and chickens scarpered from the runway. Two men in woolly hats came out of the hut. Cold, damp winds whipped around the plane as we jumped down and piled luggage onto a rusty pickup, and there was a frosty bite to the air. As the only ground flat enough for this airstrip was at the western tip of the island and it was out of the question to get to the only settlement in a vehicle and took five hours on foot, anyone arriving by air was obliged to travel round to the north coast by boat. Figueroa, also the pickup driver, drove the cargo down to the shore, and we followed on foot.