Travels in a Thin Country

by Sara Wheeler

  Shortly after this episode at the bar a hotelier ran out of his kitchen and onto the street to greet Chris, who, being a tour guide, was well-known (and well-liked) on the island. The Chilotes were keen on the idea of him getting married, and they were sorry to hear that he brought no news in that department. The hotelier remonstrated and dispensed consolatory tots of licor d’oro (liquid gold), a local speciality which always appeared in unlabelled bottles. It was mild, sweet and amber, and although it was translucent, the main ingredient was cow’s milk.

  Afterwards we waited for a bus back to Castro outside a shop where a boy was pouring petrol into wicker-clad wine bottles. On the journey we passed a salmon farm. Salmon – big business in Chiloé–have attracted massive foreign investment over the past decade. Chris said we could visit some friends of his who owned a farm, and explained how it worked.

  ‘So you mean,’ I said, ‘that it’s intensive cultivation of an introduced species?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But if we meet my friends I don’t want you getting on your environmental high horse.’

  I heard a lot about these salmon farms later from fishermen in Patagonia who told me that the companies rear the fish to smolt in cages in freshwater lakes before moving them to seaboard farms. This not only produces water contamination but also leaves a lakebed deposit under the cages and transmits disease to the indigenous fish. I couldn’t help feeling indignant, whatever Chris had implied about my inappropriate western liberal soapbox. As with the infamous Bío Bío dam project, I was made aware of the growing tension throughout the ‘South’ between development (and the neo-liberal economics which had begotten it) and environmental protection. Lever Chile and other multinationals in the salmon trade deny that salmon farming causes pollution; but they would, wouldn’t they?

  We were lucky with the weather; the sun shone. (The island has a dreary microclimate, and wooden sledges are still used all year round to cross the mud plains.) We stayed in Castro for three nights, in a boarding-house with a restaurant decorated with embossed pictures of kittens. I was pleased to see that in the South American Handbook this boarding-house was designated ‘F’ (the rankings descended from ‘A’). Generally, the lowest category in any town or village was an ‘E’ (I was very familiar with the ’E’s), and staying in an ‘F’ constituted something of an achievement. Shortly afterwards I spotted a ‘G’ in the book, and was disappointed not to be able to enjoy its pleasures.

  The mainland opposite Chiloé was still largely uninhabited, despite attempts at forced settlement during the dictatorship. It was patterned with fjords, and the Dresden had hidden in one of them in 1914 before sailing to its destruction in the peaceful bay of Robinson Crusoe Island. The man who ran my guesthouse in Puerto Montt had told me an elaborate story about his grandfather smuggling food to the beleaguered ship in the middle of the night. The captain had already outwitted his British assailants for several months and the Dresden had crept over a thousand miles up the Pacific coast.

  ‘The sailors,’ said the man at my guesthouse, ‘were this thin,’ and he demonstrated with his thumb and index finger an inch apart.

  We took a bus north, and it wedged itself on a landing craft going to Quinchao, the largest of the islands between Chiloé and the mainland. The craft was a regular shuttle, but it still managed to dig itself into the soft shore, and it took the crew half an hour to unjam us.

  Quinchao was green and undulating, with an occasional excrescence of shingle-tiled extravagance. The locals of the lesser islands were drawn to its capital, a tiny port called Achao, for everything they couldn’t produce themselves, and a flotilla of brightly painted boats in varying states of disrepair jostled around the sloping jetty, loaded and unloaded by dark-skinned islanders anxious to get home. They moved their goods however they could: heaped in wheelbarrows, stacked in metal carts attached to bicycles, piled on wooden-wheeled wagons drawn by nags, heaved on handcarts, loaded in the back of pickups and pressed down on overladen shoulders. They brought sacks of flour, crates of Coca-Cola, bundles of shiny fish held together by a reedy cord, brown smoked fish stiff and flattened like table-tennis bats, wicker-clad bottles of pungent local wine, sheets of corrugated iron and baskets of onions with diminutive baskets of garlic lashed to the handle. Children carried industrial-sized packets of sugar, and shifts of salmon workers loitered in their uniform white wellingtons and lifejackets. A man threaded among the crowd with a tray of popcorn balanced on his head, dispensing small bagfuls wherever he could find a taker. Along the beach, an old man was pitchforking bright green seaweed onto his oxcart, and his son was standing on the mound, stamping it down.

  I had washed my clothes and hung them out of the window of the boarding-house at Castro. A shirt had fallen off the sill, and I ventured into the back yard to retrieve it. This yard was a bottle bank waiting to be discovered, full of hideous shards. After recovering the shirt I was picking my way back when the ground collapsed beneath me. Once I was up I instinctively checked my wrists first, and then I looked down and saw a red map of Africa swiftly forming on one leg of my jeans.

  I had fallen straight onto a broken bottle. I held the leg under a cold shower for twenty minutes, then made a tourniquet out of a T-shirt. The wound took weeks to heal, as it was right on the knee, and it left a thick and raised red weal, which I still have, my bodily souvenir of Chiloé.

  There was a shingle house at Cucao with a sign outside saying ‘se venden fósiles’–fossils for sale. The village had only had a road for ten years, so there were still plenty of fossils. Before the road the villagers had to sail through two interconnecting lakes to get to the other side of the island.

  Four hundred people live in the middle of the lonely west coast of Chiloé. They farm, fish and pan for gold in the river, and they do without most things, like electricity, for example. It was raining when we arrived. They had built Cucao around a big patch of a tiny light green fern, like a communal prayer mat. Chris bounded into a house with a sign in the window offering beds. When I got there he was sitting next to a stove in the middle of the kitchen, a can in his hand, and he was laughing. A haggard woman in a pinny stood with her hands on her hips trying not to laugh too.

  ‘How many times have I told you not to come here without giving me advance warning?’

  There were three rooms to rent; she slept on the bench around the stove when she had guests. Her name was Vera Luz – True Light – and she had four grown-up daughters. Her husband had been killed in an accident. She told me all this immediately.

  ‘I’ve had to be the man and the woman in this house – double the work. I never stop working.’

  She had hung plastic bags of water from the rafters, like the ones fairground goldfish come in. It keeps the flies away, or so they say down there.

  I rented a horse that afternoon. There were plenty of horses on the island, and they didn’t have a very enjoyable life. In a hamlet north of Castro I had watched a horse towing a car up a hill. The car had got to the bottom of the steep hill, but it couldn’t get back up, and a farmer appeared with a horse and a long leather strap. He attached one end of the strap to the towbar of the car and another to a pommel on the horse’s saddle, instructed the driver to sit in and drive, and himself mounted the horse and whipped it until both beast and car began to move.

  ‘These hills are so steep,’ he said to me afterwards, ‘I have to use the horse all the time to get my own pickup to the top.’

  My horse, who selected our route, took me through rows of shingle huts with tiled roofs which I eventually realized was a cemetery. They buried people in these little houses all over the island. Presumably it was partly a function of the inclement climate: you couldn’t linger over your devotions in the open air if it were pouring down. A clammy mist swirled around the gravehouses; I could see where the myriad Chilote myths of dismembered spirits had come from.

  There were six hippies in the cemetery. Cucao beach is a favourite hangout for young Chileans seeking to commune with n
ature. I had met one on the bus; he worked for the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank in Santiago.

  There was a boy in the house called Christian. He was twelve, and he was always working, ferrying pails of water from the well, peeling potatoes, sweeping, running errands – he worked until eleven or twelve at night. He was very shy, and tried to run away whenever I spoke to him. It turned out that True Light had taken him in when he was abandoned by his parents. He had a number of half-brothers and sisters, and one of the girls had just had a baby. She was ten. True Light told me all this as she sipped maté tea through a flat silver straw. Maté is a bitter infusion made from the leaves of a shrub tamped down in a wooden bowl like tobacco in a pipe. I had grown to like it. It always seemed as if the ceremonial and laborious tamping, sucking and water-replenishing were as much a part of its attractions as the refreshment of the beverage itself, like a Chilean version of the Japanese tea ceremony.

  Saturday was the first day of ‘Cucao Week’ (any excuse for a fiesta). In the afternoon the church on the fern green held a perfunctory mass and two rival huts swiftly set themselves up on either side of it, both offering live music and warm beer. All the men were pissed, lounging inside the huts or loitering next to their horses, wearing ponchos and ritually swapping bottles in the drizzle. The women stayed outside, clutching babies and looking anxious. Some of them sweated in small tents attached to the huts, frying empanadas over a fire.

  I woke early the next day and sat in the kitchen with True Light. It was permanent Armageddon there. I listened to her incantation of misfortunes while Chris snored on, and tried unsuccessfully to extract information about the south west of the island, owned by logging companies and virtually uninhabited.

  Above Cucao, in the north west, there was a coastal mountain range. I had kept the horse, and set out to explore these mountains with the horse-owner’s young son. It was a sharp and sunny morning and the village was silent except for the southern lapwings, aural hooligans of the Pacific coast. To get to the beach we crossed a pedestrian suspension bridge over the river, a noble construction of steel cables and wooden planks which the elements had beaten into an arch. The boy was unaware that his skills on a horse outweighed mine by a wide margin, though he soon found out. My feet kept losing the heavy wooden clog stirrups. It wasn’t very good for my wounded knee. It wasn’t very good for my bottom, either, as the saddle was a thin affair made of metal, wood and leather and covered in several layers of threadbare sheepskin.

  We dismounted and let the horses walk free when we reached the beach. Other horses were pulling in bulging nets, and Magellanic oystercatchers were picking razor clams from the frothy waves. Later, in the mountains, the boy took us on a circuitous loop through a dense bamboo forest, and I remember the primeval smells, the barberry and the yaps of invisible forest birds.

  The bus from Cucao to Castro failed to appear that afternoon so we got a lift in the back of True Light’s brother’s pickup. The sun was shining on the lakes. At Castro the Salmon Olympics were in progress. These did not involve performing fish, but competitions between five teams of salmon workers, each representing a different company. The rest of the islanders, crowded on the quays to watch, had organized themselves into lines of cheerleaders. The teams raced around the bay in rowing boats, pulling in nets and depositing divers.

  When we returned to Puerto Montt from Chiloé Chris took me to his local bar in the residential hill district of Bellavista. It was in a small wooden hut at the end of his street, the inside kippered by smoke. A large man was standing behind the bar, and five women and two boys leant in front of it. There was an overwhelming smell of fish. ‘Drink!’ said one of the women, thrusting a filthy cup of wine at me. A plastic drum behind the door furnished the toilet. Chris was a regular at this bar, and he said that he had never seen a sober person in there. Often, by mid-afternoon, the owner and clientele were slumped on the floor, rendering entry into the bar impossible. We bought a litre of beer (it was only available in litres) and tried to maintain a conversation. It was a taxing occupation.

  Several women came in and spoke quietly to the barman. He passed them dented newspaper-wrapped parcels from under the bar and they handed over crumpled banknotes. One engaged in more protracted negotiations. The owner reached under the bar and flopped a salmon on top. He chopped it up and gave two large and unwrapped slices to the woman, who concealed them under her mac and left.

  As we left ourselves I saw that the glass was missing from the door panels, and remarked on it to Chris.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that hazard, at least, has been removed.’

  Chapter Eleven

  The ice was here, the ice was there,

  The ice was all around:

  It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,

  Like noises in a swound!

  Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

  The greatest practical difficulty of my trip was Antarctica. After travelling hopefully down numerous culs-de-sac, both in London and Santiago, I had reached the conclusion that the only way I was going to get there was with the Chilean Air Force. In Santiago I faxed letters of reference around to judiciously selected air force mandarins and waited. Nothing happened, so I did it again, and I organized meetings with them too, explaining gravely in their cavernous offices that my journey would remain forever unfinished if I didn’t make it to Antarctica. I tried to conceal a threat that if I didn’t go it would look as though that bit of Antarctica wasn’t Chilean after all. One day a general told me over the telephone that I was invited to travel to Antarctica in a Hercules aircraft. When this might take place, and where I should find the Hercules, took a very long time to establish. I was eventually instructed to present myself at a base in the far south on a certain day at the end of February.

  This base was just outside Punta Arenas, so I took a commercial flight down there from Puerto Montt. It meant I was spoiling my plan of a nice logical journey from top to bottom as I was now going straight to the southernmost point of the mainland, jumping a third of the country. But I couldn’t start asking the air force if they could change the date of the Antarctic trip. I would have to fill in the gap later; the only point of having a plan, I reasoned conveniently, was to allow the contingency of things to change it.

  It was a cloudless day and the archipelago looked like a set of geoglyphs on a blue field. I amused myself by picking out shapes – a small llama, a boomerang, a set of geometric figures. We flew over Patagonia, khaki and spotted with ochre pools. It was very flat. Finally we circled the Magellan Strait, the same dull silver as the plane’s wing. The Strait and the cold waters around the tip of the continent evoked the names of great voyagers: Ferdinand Magellan in the Trinidad, Francis Drake in the Pelican, which he renamed the Golden Hind while he was down there, Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa in various ships, Pringle Stokes in the Beagle (Stokes shot himself on board), Robert FitzRoy, also in the Beagle (he committed suicide later) – and the list goes on. But it was the Mariner’s spectre-ship I saw when I looked out of the thick pebble window towards the Southern Ocean: ‘We were the first that ever burst/Into that silent sea’.

  The sky was huge down there. As I walked down the steps of the plane I thought, You’ve reached the bottom of the world, and for some reason I thought of the street I grew up in and the long row of red chimneys I could see from my bedroom. I was surprised, because the air was warm, but I caught a bus into the centre of Punta Arenas and when I got off and turned a corner a wind made me falter as I walked. I checked into a private house offering rooms; it was small, and clean, with no locks on the doors and a set of dentures in the toothmug. For the first time in weeks I unpacked completely. Mould had grown in pleasing patterns on T-shirts rolled up into the carpetbag too hastily while damp. I washed all my clothes by hand, pegged them on the line in the garden and hoisted them up into the white and grey expanse, diminutive fragments of colour flapping energetically.

  People from Magallanes, the twelfth and southernmost region of Chi
le, promote the theory that the country was first discovered by Europeans in the south, when Magellan appeared in 1520. That was fifteen years before Almagro rode down through the north. Magellan entered his Strait from the Atlantic, coming round the Cape of Eleven Thousand Virgins. In 1583 Sarmiento founded two settlements on the Magellan Strait, largely to protect Spanish territory from the British, but all the inhabitants of both places died except one, and it was a British ship which saved him.

  A couple of centuries later scientific expeditions began arriving at the tail of the continent, and in 1843 John Williams, the Bristolian in the Goleta Ancud, claimed the Magellan Strait for Chile. Punta Arenas was founded in 1848. It was used largely as a penal colony at that time, and was totally dependent on Santiago. It was coal that really brought it to life, in the 1860s and 1870s. In this last decade sheep were shipped over from the Falklands – they could adapt to the climate, whereas sheep from the central valley of Chile itself couldn’t – and a great Magellanic industry was born.

  Europeans arrived to carve out a new life for themselves in that austere place, especially towards the end of the century. In 1892 the gold rush began. Export trade flourished, and by 1906 the territory of Magallanes was sending well over ten million pounds of wool annually to Britain alone. The community was impressively sophisticated: by 1896–fifteen years ahead of the capital – it had electric street lighting. The numerous foreign colonies all published their own newspapers, and they vied with each other in their cultural activities. Large and beautiful houses were built, many of which remain, converted into offices, clubs and museums and recalling the solidity of Victorian London or Manchester.

  The first decade and a half of this century were the golden years for Punta Arenas, and the two largest colonies were British and Croatian – the Brits, naturally, in the managerial posts. But when the Panama Canal opened in 1914 ships didn’t have to sail right the way round the continent anymore, and the docks at Punta Arenas went quiet. People didn’t know what to do about it, and their newspapers grew thin and morose. Between the wars a large number of British families left. But the Croats proliferated.