by Sara Wheeler
A young Mapuche wearing a cap with a batman logo walked past and nodded, flicking a switch irritably at a horse pulling a wooden-wheeled cart. Later, in a small courtyard between two dry-stone rooms, the teacher introduced me to a very old and very stately woman with a large frilly collar reminiscent of the Inquisition and two long plaits tied together with a turquoise ribbon. A small group of young women and children watched impassively from the doorway of one of the rooms while we were taken into the other, my eyes watering from the smoke of a fire glowing in the middle of the mud floor. The room was bare except for a table and three shelves piled with clothes.
‘I,’ said the old woman imperiously, ‘am machi.’
Gloria had told me about machis. They were spiritual leaders and healers. The woman told a long story about her calling, which occurred in a dream when she was twelve. At fourteen she rode alone to the cordillera and was initiated. Months later I read sketchy details about machi initiation ceremonies in a leatherbound book tied up with pink ribbon at the British Library. It spoke of it as if it were ancient history.
Gripping my arm, our machi took a silver breastpiece with a double-headed eagle at the centre from underneath a pile of clothes. She wrapped a thick woollen shawl around my shoulders and pinned the breastpiece on top, finishing off the ensemble with a round head-dress with dangling nickel discs, a rosette and long ribbons. Finally she led me into the courtyard and stood me next to a wooden ladder about five feet high with roughly hewn steps. It represented a kind of altar, and was set up outside her hut when she was consecrated. I felt a bit of a prat, actually; I had the feeling she was making fun of me.
I did try to find out about the altar and where its steps led, but besides mumbling and not finishing her sentences she kept lapsing into mapu-dugun, so it was a struggle, and the teacher had opted out, placidly squatting in a corner and smoking his pipe. We did establish that although the Supreme Being was omnipotent, he was not, handily, concerned with the moral order, nor did the state of souls after bodily death depend on his reward or punishment. He was appealed to for material favours.
‘Do you have any children?’ she asked me suddenly, looking right into my eyes. Three of hers had gone to live in ‘the city’ (Temuco), and she was sad. The Mapuche still live within a sub-economy of survival, and, predictably, many young people abandon their roots and head for the urban centres, assimilating within the huincas.
The Mapuche suffered acutely during the dictatorship. According to the 1978 report of the United Nations Ad Hoc Working Group on the Situation of Human Rights in Chile, ‘On the day of the coup, the big landowners, the land barons, the military and the carabineros started a great manhunt against the Mapuche who had struggled and gained their land back.’ Of all the accounts I had read of that period, a heartbreaking one for a people whose hearts had already been broken many times, one lapidary sentence never left me. A Mapuche child recalled the day her father was taken away, the last day she ever saw him.
‘Mi mamá,’ she said, ‘se enojó porque no se puso los calcetines’ – ‘mum was annoyed because he didn’t put his socks on.’
The natural first base of the Lake District proper was Temuco, a large town still regarded as a frontier post, though it isn’t a frontier to anything except the lakes. After a long, hot and dusty journey on unspeakably bad cross-country roads to Los Angeles, a town on the Panamerican, I followed the tarmac gratefully south to Temuco, where I deposited Rocky IV at Hertz as arranged and checked into a cheap hotel next to the market, a sprawling, vaguely threatening market lined with pyramids of melons, hung with dripping carcasses and exuding exotically dubious smells against a background of high-energy noise. I lingered for the mild hit of the spice rows and later acquainted myself with Temuco, a colourful town where most activities appeared to take place in the streets rather than inside buildings. I imagined that its inhabitants didn’t have much time for events in Santiago. Neruda said, ‘Temuco is a pioneer town, one of those towns that have no past, though it does have hardware shops.’
The next day I caught a bus into the mountains. The purpose of the trip was the monkey puzzle. Quintessentially Chilean and indigenous only to a narrow Andean zone, the tree had acquired the status of a national symbol, and was much cherished. Neruda had written an ode about it. I remembered monkey puzzles very well from the suburbia of my childhood where they operated as the outdoor equivalent of the aspidistra. They were emasculated there; I wanted to see a whole forest of them. So it was that I fitted myself into the crowded weekly bus like the last sardine in the tin – though we at least were all the same way up.
Two hours later the forty people standing in the aisle got off. Not a single building was in sight, even in the far hills. A sack of potatoes was passed from the very back of the bus and left on the edge of the dirt road. Everyone got back on.
The vehicle quivered, and then stopped, at Melipeuco, a scruffy village on the edge of volcanic parkland. Nothing was happening in the village, least of all transport of any kind to the Conguillío-Los Paraguas park. I set off to the police station, an isolated ‘frontier post’ so beloved of the Chilean authorities, where I found the incumbents scrutinizing lottery tickets. Policemen usually helped me; they often didn’t have anything else to do. The young man on duty was a friendly type, and we sat on the step of the police station chatting for an hour in the watery sunlight.
‘Do you think anything will pass?’ I asked.
‘Yes, sure’.
‘I wonder if they’ll agree to take me.’
‘Sure they will,’ he said, patting his rifle.
A forester took me. No one was shot. As there was a tree-stump where the passenger seat should have been I sat in the open back of his beaten-up Chevrolet as we travelled through the black lava-fields and eyed the double craters of volcano Llaima. The forester later told me cheerfully that they usually erupt every five or six years, and hadn’t done so for eight. Pampas grass had grown strangely out of the lumpy surface, and the river had forced its way through the debris, creating cliffs striped with volcanic ash, basalt, mud and dust.
A row of araucaria pines, the trees I knew as monkey puzzles, appeared like a line of umbrellas on a ridge. I believe those which adorn small front gardens in the UK are a different type from those around Temuco, but they are Chilean; the seeds were taken to Britain by a seaman in 1795, and the trees in the park were instantly identifiable with one particular specimen from my childhood, which I could still see, through my aunt’s net curtains, in her postage-stamp garden in Weston-super-Mare.
The forestry service, Conaf, had organized a campsite next to the largest lake in the park and overlooking the Sierra Nevada, a high and snowy mountain range. After parting company with the forester I enquired about cabins, but they were all full, so I decided to have lunch in the small café, walk through the beech and monkey puzzle forests for the afternoon and hitch out of the park in whatever direction was offered first – there would be plenty of daytrippers in February.
During lunch it began to rain hard. The pintails disappeared from the lake and the parakeets from the trees. I hadn’t thought to bring my waterproof gear when I left Temuco in the sunshine. The sky became a solid grey block. I gave up any ideas of walking and when I had paid for my lunch I stood on the road to hitch a lift. I waited for two hours, and not a single car passed. Everyone who was going to leave had left early because of the weather, and the daytrippers had never appeared. The rainwater trickled down the back of my sweatshirt and made me shiver. I searched for monkeys in the branches of the trees, to see if they had made it (the shape of the branch supposedly makes the tree difficult to climb, and vexes the monkeys). But there weren’t any monkeys. My hands went a funny purple colour. I felt very, very miserable.
After an hour a Conaf ranger walked past, and he laughed at me, dripping under a monkey puzzle.
‘Come and wait at the information centre,’ he said. ‘We’ll radio to see if there are any vehicles about. You’ll catch pneumonia
here.’
I stood letting my clothes steam next to a log fire under a copper chimney hood as half-a-dozen campers without waterproof tents crept miserably in to dry their clothes. It became increasingly clear that there was no hope of getting out of the park that day. The ranger spoke on the radio. An unoccupied room was located at the back of the information centre, and a down sleeping bag materialized. At least I wasn’t going to die. More people arrived next to the fire, mainly desperate mothers with wet little children. There was a kind of Hispanic Dunkirk spirit about that day. Later another ranger gave a slide show on the fauna and flora of the park. It turned out there were pumas lurking near the lakes. The Conaf men were always helpful, and loved answering questions and solving problems. They all wore brown trousers, part of a uniform obviously designed to make them look like trees. Seeing how desperately underfunded the organization is I was surprised at how much its motivated staff achieved. Wherever I was in Chile, I was always pleased to see them, and they seemed to be the same everywhere, whether in the desert, the forest, or on a glacier. They helped keep it all joined together, in their own way.
Long before Conaf men the park was the home of the Pehuenche, the People of the Araucaria Pine. For centuries the monkey puzzle constituted their livelihood – it provided food, wine, weapons and fuel – as well as operating as a cultural and spiritual symbol. The remaining Pehuenche were fighting for the right to stay on their lands; those who lived at Quinquen were demonstrating in front of the Moneda palace in Santiago that very month to protest about their proposed expulsion by a timber company. Their land had been sold to a private concern in 1918, but their grandparents had refused to leave. Massive-scale logging followed regardless, and despite recent state prohibitions and other governmental intervention the future of the Quinquen region Pehuenche and their traditional way of life is still insecure. I could go into these disputes in great detail, but you know the story, and its themes of moral turpitude, greed and a dominant culture. You have heard it told about many countries, in both hemispheres, probably so often that the words no longer register.
The roof in my room leaked during the night, and there was fresh snow on the Sierra in the morning. The sky was the colour of sulphur. The families left. Most of them were wealthy professionals from Santiago whose well-scrubbed children already knew a few words of English. Their cars were full, so I waited around in my damp clothes. I realized that from now on I wasn’t going to be able to do whatever I wanted, whenever I chose. I had to take the climate into account. And it was going to get much worse.
At Temuco I reclaimed my gear in the nasty little hotel where I had left it, had a regrettably cold shower and washed my clothes. As I carried them back along the institutional corridor which smelt of rotting melons and looked like it belonged in a gulag I heard a phrase from a Beethoven piano sonata. It had escaped from a room off the corridor; the door was ajar, and someone inside was playing a record. Despite the poor quality of the sound the intense languor of Claudio Arrau was unmistakeable. It was the first time I had heard him in his own country (they had declared a national day of mourning when he died, a few months before my arrival), and I rested my head on the peeling wall of the corridor, embracing my wet clothes and listening to this stranger playing a Beethoven sonata on a record player in a crummy Temuco hotel room.
My clothes were still wet early the next morning when I travelled south east to the heart of the Lake District. I felt tired and shivery, and had caught fleas from a child I had taken on my lap in a bus.
The Lake District is the most popular holiday destination in the country, and Chileans speak of it as their most beautiful asset. It was certainly beautiful, replete with volcanoes, green fields and the amaranthine loveliness of the evergreen forest. There were some resorts, but I was sufficiently high-minded to think that they wouldn’t tell me much about Chile, so I stayed on the bus till Panguipulli, a village at the northern end of a lake of the same name. Six men were shifting watermelons from a heap on the ground to a heap in a truck, throwing them to each other. I began sneezing, my legs ached and I could feel my morale draining away; determined, therefore, to keep still for a few days, I went on to the smaller and, by Lake District standards, remote village of Choshuenco. The bus that conveyed me there, along the eastern shore of the long lake, was like a mobile tin furnace, and besides that after two hours a sack of flour fell off the luggage rack and split on a passenger’s head, releasing clouds of white powder which made everyone cough.
Choshuenco consisted of two long dirt streets lined with wooden houses and gardens growing runner beans and blue hydrangeas. The three guesthouses were full. There were no more buses. There was allegedly another hotel just outside the village, on the black sand beach, so I carried the carpetbags to it, certain that I would be obliged to carry them away again.
They had a room. It was a large house on its own beach, with a wide balcony overlooking two wooded hills which formed a V as they came down to the water. The eight guestrooms and two shared bathrooms were simply furnished, and someone had put twists of polished wood on the tables and windowledges. The large windows faced the lake and the Choshuenco volcano at the end of it, and the sun contrived to shine through mine all day long. The family who owned the hotel were quiet and friendly; it was their home, too, and they kept a fire going in the enormous fireplace in the dining room and a jug of cold pisco sour on the bar.
I had to call London one day. I reversed the charges at a hut in the main street which called itself the telephone office. The person I had to speak to needed to telephone me back later, so I asked the woman in charge of the hut if I could receive a call there in the afternoon. She said that would be fine. I asked what the number was.
‘One,’ she told me.
‘One?’
‘Yes, one.’
‘Is there a code?’
‘No, just ask the operator for Choshuenco One.’
A group of kayakers were staying in the hotel and one of them, who was Swiss but lived in Dallas, had broken a rib, so he was hanging around looking dejected while his friends kayaked. I went for a day-long walk with him to a waterfall. He said it was just like Switzerland – the cows, the flocculent clouds in a blue sky, the green fields broken by trees and hedgerows, and the streaked mountains behind.
I had dinner with the kayakers next to the fire one night, and stayed up late, and then I had to let myself out at six-thirty the next morning to catch the daily bus out of the village. My flulike symptoms had been getting worse despite rest and comfort, and I had a persistent pain behind my eyes and a permanently blocked nose. When the bus arrived shortly after seven it was already full, and I stood for three hours, slowly squashed against the back wall as even more people got on, and there I snivelled and succumbed to the lethal combination of self-indulgence and guilt.
I had to reach Puerto Montt that night, ready to meet my friends from London at the airport early the next morning. It meant a long day’s travelling, with several changes. On the last bus a woman crane-operator from Seattle carrying a bag of pastries sat next to me. She wanted to offload her tent, so she gave it to me, with a pastry.
‘Look,’ she said later with her mouth full of apple turnover and her finger pointing at a sign. ‘We’re there.’
Puerto Montt was a landmark in my journey. It was where the name ‘Panamerican’ ceased to apply to the highway; Pinochet’s dream road, the little-travelled Carretera Austral, took up the baton at Puerto Montt and went south. The roads were symbols of a more general transformation. From the northern borders of Chile almost two thousand miles away you can travel easily right down to Puerto Montt, as long as you don’t go off at a tangent into the mountains. You could drive the whole way at once if you wanted, in a straight line. Provided you stay on the coastal plain you have a sense of being plugged into a national network, but at Puerto Montt the plug comes out, and to the south the country hardens into a continental icecap and crumbles into an archipelago. Few people live down there, and few
er visit.
I went first to a pharmacy near the port, and described my symptoms to the saturnine pharmacist. He said he thought I had flu, and I asked if he could take my temperature. He rolled up his sleeve and said, ‘We take temperatures rectally here,’ removing a thermometer from its sleeve as if he intended to do it straightaway, next to the toothbrush display.
The next morning I picked up Rocky V from Hertz and my friends from the airport. The friends had flown from Santiago and had already been in Chile for a fortnight. We had known one another for twelve years, and I felt as if I had arrived at some small oasis of the spirit, a psychological service-station before the next long leg of the journey. We travelled north around the shores of Lake Llanquihue, through Germanic streets of wooden turreted houses. In Frutillar, the Teutonic heartlands, I saw a group of old men in a bar hunched over copies of the Condor, a German-language newspaper printed in Puerto Montt. Germans colonized southern Chile extensively in the 1850s and over the following decades. Perhaps partly as a result of that earlier connection, during the Second World War Chile was the only South American country not to declare war on the Axis. The development of modern Chile owes a good deal to the Europeans who arrived during the nineteenth century, notably the British, Germans and Slavs. In the case of the British, the majority of immigrants belonged to the middle and upper classes, and their surnames still feature prominently among influential and aristocratic types in Santiago.
We asked a farmer’s wife if we could pitch our tents on her piece of the Lake Rupanco shoreline, and she agreed with a majesterial smile. Someone occasionally passed on the track above us – a man walking next to a pair of oxen pulling a cart, another riding a white horse, another urging three cows to the milking shed. Four pigs came down to grub around among the remains of our tortillas, followed by a goat and a flock of geese. My friends had brought mail from home, and it included a batch of Christmas cards. It was mid-February, but I put them up around the tent for the night anyway, and the goat ate them.
