Travels in a Thin Country

by Sara Wheeler

  After I had left Chile, in November 1992, the Vicaría closed itself down. In its official statement, published in several newspapers, it acknowledged that there was still work to be done, but asserted that state institutions and secular organizations must take up the baton. It was a highly symbolic move which marked the end of an era, but – as many who opposed the closure of the Vicaría said – it did not mean that the work or the healing were complete. A quasi-replacement Vicariate for Social Action was established, to work in the field on behalf of the Church.

  ‘We don’t want to relinquish the Church’s role as a champion of human rights,’ said the director I had spoken to when I telephoned him from London to ask about the closure. ‘In 1973 the poor didn’t know what human rights were; they certainly didn’t know that they had any. It’s imperative that we continue to educate, so that if it happens again …’

  Germán Claro, now Mr Fixit, invited me down to his hacienda, suggesting that it was well placed for the first night of my trek southwards, and it was this which finally propelled me into action. He decided to get out of town for a few days and come with me, and I was glad.

  He told me we would be leaving at eight in the morning, so I got up early, packed and said a grateful goodbye to Rowena and Simon over breakfast. Our departure was delayed by ten-and-a-half hours – a modest discrepancy, in South American chronology. In the late afternoon I wondered if we were going to leave at all, as one of the main reasons for the delay was a convivial lunch which showed no sign of reaching its natural end. We got away at six when Germán’s father telephoned the restaurant to say he was about to drive to the hacienda, and did we want a lift.

  ‘You can do the talking,’ said Germán as he got into the back of the car, where he immediately lay down and went to sleep. Germán père was a charming, suave and very handsome man who had enjoyed a career as a captain of industry before devoting himself to his equally handsome hacienda. His family had owned it since the King of Spain bestowed a vast tract of the central valley upon a mayor of Santiago in the sixteenth century. They were distant cousins of the British Queen. I was moderately anxious about what we might find to talk about; whether the shameful quantity of champagne we had drunk at lunch increased my anxiety or decreased it I cannot say, but it was all right, as far as I can remember, and by the time we were out of the inner city I was feeling comfortable. Don Germán had a twinkle in his eye but an otherwise inscrutable manner.

  We passed Rancagua, capital of the Sixth Region, at about eighty miles an hour. It was the site of the largest underground copper mine in the world, owned by Don Germán’s family until the late nineteenth century. The rest of the landscape resembled an enormous market garden. Several mighty US fruit producers had built outposts of their empire along the highway, impressive white constructions fronting acres of healthy, well-watered crops extending to the foothills. If it weren’t for the height of the Andes it could have been a Provençal scene, painted in dusty greens and purples and washed in evening sunshine.

  Germán the younger woke up when we stopped at a crowded diner which served (claimed father and son) the best hot sandwiches between Santiago and Tierra del Fuego, and anyway they had always stopped there, since Germán Arturo (as my friend was called to avoid confusion) was a little boy; it was a family tradition. The two of them looked alike, but they were very different, in temperament and style, and their relationship was measured. I kept quiet, as I did not want to disturb its equilibrium.

  The hacienda was called Los Lingues, after a type of tree. It was almost dark when we arrived. A servant showed me to my room, which was furnished with eighteenth-century prints, old lace bedspreads, heavy chests of drawers and antique silver. I opened the shutters, and looked out onto a veranda and a shadowy flowerbed smelling of roses. A second flunkey arrived with a silver tray which he placed on my dressing-table. On it were a bottle of Campari, a jug of freshly squeezed orange juice, a bowl of ice, a tall glass and a single yellow rose.

  I poured myself a drink and sat in a velvet armchair facing the veranda. I had apparently arrived at the Chilean equivalent of a Bavarian schloss, half-spun out of fairy tales. Taking a handful more ice from the bowl, a fine bone china antique from France, I wondered how many times over the next months I would try to recapture this delicious luxuriance in a cold, wet tent.

  The breath of Chilean colonialism filled the salons; there was no mistaking it. Germán Arturo and I ate alone in the seventeenth-century dining room at the candlelit mahogany table which could have sat thirty. He wore a tuxedo and I wore a cocktail dress borrowed from Rowena. The family coat of arms hung on the wall, and the table was laid with old French crystal, hand-printed plates and crested silver salvers. White-gloved waiters serving delectable food and a selection of wines from the 4000-odd bottles in the cellar remained inscrutable in front of an expansive Germán, still on a roll from lunch.

  When I opened my bedroom door the following morning a table in the courtyard in front of it had been laid for breakfast, a small urn of flowers in the middle. Doña Marie Elena, wife and mother of the Germáns, was already sitting down, and she waved me to join her. She was a charming, forthright and extremely Catholic woman whom I liked very much, and she had already adopted me as a kind of protégée, which meant that she frequently felt obliged to grip my arm and deliver some ruthless truth. (Once, she stated plainly that I was too fat.) She always had staff flitting around her. There were several hundred staff, as the hacienda operated as a fruit-producer, a horse-breeding centre and an exclusive country house hotel, and there was always something going on, though it tended to do so quietly. Only the peacocks and Mr Fixit disturbed the peace.

  I rode one of the horses later; they were all fine Aculeos with their manes cut short, like Stubbs’ horses. Afterwards, Don Germán took me through some of the hacienda’s ten thousand acres. He told me that the estate used to be far bigger. It had been split up and expropriated twice, latterly in 1972 during the Allende regime, in two of the many attempts to break the power of the landowners in the central valley.

  ‘It must have been a gruelling period for you,’ I said halfheartedly, but he only smiled a small, bitter smile.

  The power of the central valley élite, a constant theme of Chilean colonial history, was constructed with the bricks of Spanish empire-building, the encomiendas, grants of indigenous men and women who were obliged to pay ‘their’ conquistador (called an encomendero) services or tribute in return for patronage, protection and Christian instruction. The Crown did eventually try to abolish or limit these encomiendas, but it failed. By the seventeenth century the hacienda had evolved and was established as the predominant social and economic unit of the Chilean central valley; each was a self-contained entity, and a rigid social structure developed around them. Later, inquilinos (service tenants) appeared within that structure. It would be difficult to overestimate the extent to which this neofeudal landowner-worker system imposed by the Spaniards has shaped Chilean society. The landowners consolidated their power base in the central valley, initiating a national centralization which was never dislodged, not even as the country extended north and south. It might have been the shape of a tapeworm, but it was as centralized as a wheel.

  Feudal tradition was still so entrenched during the nineteenth century that in the 1854 census many inquilinos wrote the name of their hacienda in the ‘Nationality’ box. The clannish élite clung on, but in the twentieth century it became increasingly difficult to ignore the incompatibilities of feudalism and democracy, and by the 1960s land reform was a major issue all over the continent. In Chile the movement was not just a social reform, it was economic too, as the land was desperately under-productive; it was nitrate and copper which had transformed the economy, and agriculture had been neglected. The largest haciendas were divided up. This was a massively controversial business, and revolutionary groups seized land forcibly while the right-wing élite were outraged and centrist politicians struggled to devise effective redistribution.
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  Frei tried and Allende tried, and to a certain extent the pattern was broken. But the dictatorship reversed their policies, effecting a reconquest of the workers by the élite in a macabre quasi-recreation of the pattern established by the Spaniards in the sixteenth century.

  Germán Arturo suggested that we both stay another day or two, and of course I agreed. We played a lot of tennis, and rode the horses, or just tipped our chairs back in the gardens, a servant always positioned behind a bush with an eye on our glasses. We ate our meals outside, at night next to the fountain, around a table lit by three candles in an old gold candelabra. We usually had dinner with Germán’s parents. They were delightful company, she very quick in her speech and observations, he laconic and mischievous. At Los Lingues I looked through a window onto a very particular aspect of Chile. Life there was a manifestation of a continuous and very old tradition – the oldest tradition, except for that of the indigenous people. Once or twice someone talked about what had been taken away from them, and how much they had clawed back. I couldn’t bring myself to question too closely; among the Chilean upper classes it is the most keenly felt subject. But Los Lingues had survived, and they had survived – they always would.

  Chapter Eight

  Yes, I regret not having been tougher on the Marxists.

  Colonel Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, Pinochet’s Intelligence Chief, asked in 1989 by a journalist if he had any regrets

  When I got up the next day Germán was ready to leave.

  ‘Work,’ he said gravely.

  One of the many cousins who appeared regularly at Los Lingues was driving south, and he offered me a lift. I packed quickly, we all said goodbye, and that was it – was off.

  I planned to make Curicó my first stop. It was a small town in the central valley only an hour or two further south, and it was at the heart of a major wine region. The cousin dropped me at a turning off the Panamerican and continued his journey alone; I picked up a colectivo into town and checked into a hotel. My room had a kind of quilted wallpaper, spongy carpet and no windows, creating the effect of a padded cell. Curicó itself, I discovered when I ventured outside, was old-fashioned and provincial: shopkeepers wore white coats and fetched goods from deep wooden drawers and polished shelves, and a pharmacy where I bought a tube of toothpaste had rows of tall glass jars filled with bright liquids and white powders in its cabinets. It was a world away from Santiago.

  I found out where the wineries were, took a small bus through a few miles of fertile agricultural land and turned up at Miguel Torres, a small company which exports more bottles on a pro rata basis than any other Chilean producer. The Miguel Torres team, acknowledged to be innovators in the industry (they were the first to introduce temperature-controlled fermentation to Chile), arrived from Catalonia in 1978 when the military government was freeing up the economy. Many foreign investors followed their lead. Even Baron Eric de Rothschild has his share of the Chilean grape.

  A young man with a yellow shirt and a grave expression showed me around the cellars. Beyond the French oak barrels they were storing racks of the much-applauded Torres méthode champenoise – the only bottle-fermented Chilean champagne produced in commercial quantities. I had already learnt that there wasn’t much of a wine culture amongst domestic consumers in Chile, but champagne appreciation was worse – it was non-existent. I saw from the boxes and tins on the supermarket shelves of the rich districts in Santiago that champagne is perceived as a glamorous status symbol and that packaging is more important than taste, and I searched for a long, long time among the rows of demi-sec to find any brut.

  I walked around Curicó in the early evening, restless and wishing I were back at Los Lingues. It was a shock to be alone again, actually. There were some nice churches, but I wasn’t in a church mood. On impulse I went into the offices of La Prensa, one of the oldest newspapers in Chile. The editor was thrilled to see a foreign visitor, and showed me round the newsroom.

  ‘We still print with hot metal. But in two months we’re changing to a computerized offset system. After ninety-three years, the time has come,’ he said with a benign smile.

  The hacks shrank behind their manual typewriters and looked hunted.

  I was taken to meet Mr Oscar, executive editor and town historian. Mr Oscar sat in splendour in a palatial office on the first floor, surrounded by a set of bound volumes of La Prensa. He pulled out one of the books he had written on local history and stroked his neatly trimmed goatee beard.

  ‘Curicó,’ he told me enthusiastically, ‘is small, but it is like an Italian renaissance republic town – independent and self-contained. Have you seen the square?’

  I had. It was edged by sixty palm trees, and there was a curious cast-iron bandstand, raised off the ground by legs ten feet long, with a ladder for the musicians. It was the only one of its kind in Chile (said Mr Oscar) and was copied from New Orleans in 1905.

  We got on to earlier history. The Curi people occupied the land before the Spaniards hoovered it up in the eighteenth century. Mr Oscar presented me with a book he had written about this, and wrote a lengthy dedication.

  As the national park in the mountains was only fifty miles away, I had assumed the bus journey wouldn’t take long. This was a serious misjudgement, and I arrived at my destination after five sweaty and frustrating hours. The trouble began even before we left Curicó, when ninety-seven other people got on the bus (I counted them) including a large group of excitable scouts, pronounced scoots in Spanish, carrying paraffin lamps and their pack banner. A dozen of the ninety-seven sat on the roof, and once we left the Panamerican regular roof-banging indicated that they had dropped something which the hapless driver was required to stop and retrieve.

  The road was poor, and our speed slowed to ten miles an hour. The portion of the landscape I could see through the small area of window uncluttered by scoots or luggage turned from vineyard to forest. It was hot. Several scoots went to sleep in the luggage rack. The frequency with which we stopped was quite incredible, given the absence of any evidence of human life on the road, but I was wedged into my seat and could not observe what, if anything, was going on. A knot of scoots suddenly took an interest in the book I was reading. It was by John Shelby Spong, and it was called Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism. It was an excellent book, but I had considerable difficulty in conveying this to the scoots, who seemed to think the Bible was the exclusive province of Catholics anyway.

  After four hours I saw the stiff green hat of a carabinero travelling slowly along the bus. We had arrived at a police control post, and the policeman was checking all ninety-eight identification documents. This was almost too much for the human spirit to bear. As he worked his way towards me, the only non-local on the bus, I heard people sniggering and trying to draw closer (this was not physically possible). He held out his hand for my ID, and, with Kalashnikov delivery, spoke into the hush.

  ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘In England.’

  ‘No – where do you live in Chile?’

  ‘I don’t live anywhere. I’m travelling.’

  ‘I insist that you live somewhere.’

  I gave him Simon’s British Council business card, which exerted his mind for some minutes. After a lot of scribbling in a notebook he shut my passport, and I put out my hand to take it. He slipped it into his top pocket.

  ‘You can have it back when you return.’

  I was too hot to argue, especially with ninety-seven pairs of eyes fixed on me and a scoot taking photographs. Later my neighbour told me that the policeman kept my passport because he wanted to make sure I didn’t go into Argentina from the park. The fact that it would take me four days on a horse to do so meant that this was an unlikely scenario, but I wondered why he cared where I went anyway.

  We were eventually disgorged in a clearing in the foothills flanked by tracts of forest and a volcano. People were rippling around charcoal braziers, tents and small food stalls, and a dozen tall horses scuffed the sandy groun
d next to a cypress tree. I found the rudimentary hotel, took a single room in one of its two candlelit cabins, and went for a stroll. It was a Saturday night, and everyone under thirty-five in the province apparently headed up there for the weekend.

  ‘Hey, gringa!’

  A large, smiling man of about my age loomed towards me.

  ‘Join our party! Look! A gringa in the park!’

  I was conveyed towards a small group of people, each one kissed me, and the large man handed me a dagger with which he had speared a piece of meat sliced from a flank suspended over a fire. The whole party was from Molina, the nearest village, and they had brought their tents up for the weekend. The group changed shape like an amoeba as new friends arrived and old ones peeled off; Alfredo, the large man, functioned as a kind of human nucleus, and he shouted and laughed all night, tirelessly producing bottles of cold beer from some cache in a cool box in the bushes. A guitar appeared, and they began to sing. Alfredo leapt up.

  ‘I’m in love! I’m going to get MARRIED!’ he shouted.

  Everyone shouted back, and it wasn’t until we were all dancing in a circle to celebrate the forthcoming event that I realized it was me he intended to wed.

  The cabin overlooked the Claro river, and I was woken by two children and a large dog splashing around in it. I decided to go for a walk, and found Alfredo lurking on the bridge. We set off together, and after a few miles climbed down to the waterfall called Siete Tazas (Seven Bowls) where the river ran into a stack of seven rock basins in a narrow gorge, and three miles further downstream Alfredo took my hand and led me to a shelf above a bigger waterfall where the river plunged a hundred and fifty feet and trees were growing out of the cliff wall.