Travels in a Thin Country

by Sara Wheeler

  The first Anglican baptism on record in the settlement took place in 1891, and St James’ church appeared in 1895. At that time the Anglican Church in South America operated as a two-pronged venture: one prong provided chaplaincies for British residents and the other organized missions among the indigenous people. The evangelical tradition of this second prong has never been abandoned. A month or two later in my trip the Anglican bishop in Santiago told me that he had decided, on a point of principle, to instruct the flock to tick the ‘Evangelical’ box on the national census form rather than ‘Protestant’.

  In Punta Arenas I went to a service in English, my first since mass at St Mark’s in Regent’s Park the day before I left home. It was very low at St James’–several thousand feet below St Mark’s. Over the ubiquitous Anglican cup of tea afterwards a friendly young man said to me, ‘You came on a very formal day. Sometimes – like today – we’re more traditional than usual, to keep the old expats happy.’

  The sermon (with handouts), concerned fasting, and it was good, though I couldn’t imagine Father Tom daring to suggest a fast in Regent’s Park. John Hervey, North American pastor of the Anglican Church in Punta Arenas and the man responsible for the sermon, kindly asked me over to his house for an ‘informal talk’. When I arrived he was behind his desk in a cosy office at the bottom of the garden. He thought the Catholics had their backs to the wall. ‘Twenty per cent of Chileans are Evangelical Protestants,’ he told me. ‘There is tremendous religious upheaval here. The country has been very well evangelized by Protestants, and as a result the Catholics are putting the heat on.’

  This Catholic ‘heat’ was being generated by an institution if not in crisis then at least deeply divided. The Church in South America had spent several decades trying to decide whether its responsibilities lay with the here-and-now or the after-life. To a certain extent it was a debate provoked by the Second Vatican Council, which in the early 1960s turned the global Catholic spotlight onto social concerns – more specifically, onto poverty, teaching the uncomfortable lesson that the rich and influential have a responsibility towards the poor. A hundred and fifty South American bishops met at Medellín in Colombia in 1968 and committed their Churches to a more active role in national life. The progressive priest saw himself as a protagonist in the struggle to liberate people from their daily misery, and the theology of liberation which he espoused acknowledged the complex reality of the human condition, something which many people felt the ossified structures of Catholicism had never even attempted.

  Even before the 1960s, although religious practice in Chile had consistently been identifiable with support for the right, the Church had allied itself with the Christian Democrats, who represented social Catholicism and reform. After 1958 it moved further still towards the centre, and involved itself in secular projects. So it was understandable that the ideas of the Second Vatican Council settled easily in some parishes west of the Andes.

  Many South American churchmen went much further than the Vatican had intended, however. Front-line staff – those facing the pain of the South American slums every day – became increasingly alienated from the hierarchy. Liberation theology, which taught that spirituality and social oppression are inseparable facets of human existence, was much mistrusted, and as a result the most visible characteristic of the Chilean Church after 1964 was fragmentation. Liberation theology, I was repeatedly told, was always more popular among the priests than the bishops. The US administration equated it with Communism: by 1980 this prejudice had become so enshrined that the Council for Inter-American Security was quite explicit about it. Its policy proposal that year, perceived by some to be associated with the Latin American policy of the Reagan administration and known as the Santa Fé document (though its real name was A New Inter-American Policy for the Eighties), stated: ‘US foreign policy must begin to counter … liberation theology as it is utilized in Latin America’.

  Tensions within the Chilean Church were greatly exacerbated by the prospect of a Communist or Marxist regime. Most of the bishops spoke out against both ideologies throughout the 1960s. Despite the fact, however, that in previous decades the writings of Marx and papal encyclicals had each stated a total rejection of the other (and Castro was excommunicated in January 1962), the concept of Christian Marxism was taken very seriously in some quarters, and by the end of the 1960s many people had hope for an eventual rapprochement of Communism and Christianity. But as the middle political ground collapsed in Chile at that time, the Church polarized still further, much as the country did. Just how little liberation theology had impinged upon many Catholics was revealed in a survey conducted among regular attenders of mass throughout the country in 1971. Two-thirds of them said they wanted the priest to speak only about the life of Jesus and the importance of Christian love and never to mention issues relating to poverty, injustice or the necessity to participate in efforts to change social structures. This was the most depressing little nugget of information I ever uncovered about Chile.

  For the first half of Allende’s presidency both the Church and the Marxist-Socialist coalition worked positively for coexistence and cooperation, encouraged by a 1971 apostolic letter indicating a softening of the Vatican line on Marxism. Cardinal Silva publicly endorsed the nationalization of copper, for example, and Allende told the New York Times that he believed the Church was going to be on his government’s side. When Castro made his famous extended visit to Chile in 1971 he said in his farewell speech that there were ‘many points of coincidence’ between ‘the purest concepts of Christianity and Marxism’.

  Towards the end of its curtailed tenure the Popular Unity administration proposed educational reforms which the bishops didn’t like. (Education was an extremely sensitive issue, as to a certain extent Catholics saw their school system as the last hope of Christian influence.) The reforms were never passed, but the tensions were never resolved, either. The country was in chaos by that time, and while the Church didn’t officially move from its position of tacit support for the regime, by the time the coup came many of its members – not only the right-wingers – thought it was necessary. There was a widespread feeling in the country that something had to happen; nobody knew, then, how much it was going to cost.

  At the far end of the cemetery in Punta Arenas a corrugated iron fence overlooked the steel grey Magellan Strait and a ghostly Tierra del Fuego on the horizon. The ever-accreting gravestones and elaborate mausolea (the names carved on them revealed the city’s cosmopolitan past) were interspersed with hundreds of twenty-foot high tumescent bushes cut to a rounded tip, a fine example of the most outré Freudian topiary.

  Although Magallanes is Chile’s largest province it is home to less than 1 per cent of the population. Vast expanses of ice and steppe separate it from the rest of Chile and a thick slice of it is simply omitted from most maps. North of these wastes there is a vague and unspoken perception that the country proper ends at Puerto Montt. The citizens of Punta Arenas deeply resent what they call ‘the ignorance of northerners’. I lost count of the number of times people told me irritably, ‘In Santiago, you know, they think that down here we have penguins in the plaza and Indians on the streets’.

  I had the telephone number of an elderly man of German descent whose father had played a key role in the vanishing act of the Dresden in the Chilean fjords, and when I called he invited me to tea. The house was in a quiet street in the north of town, and a neatly dressed man wearing a tie and hand-knitted cardigan opened the door.

  ‘¡Wilkommen. Welcome. Bienvenida!’ I was afraid he was about to launch into ‘Cabaret’.

  I was introduced to his wife and, during the course of the afternoon, a range of children and grandchildren. There was a kind of yard at the back of their home, and nine cars or jeeps in varying stages of decay were wedged within its brick walls.

  Gerd swiftly got onto the topic of the Word of God. I asked what his religion was. I had long since given up saying, ‘Are you a Catholic?’ when the subjec
t arose; it seemed very likely that my interlocutor wouldn’t be.

  ‘I am a Jehovah’s Witness,’ he said.

  It wouldn’t have surprised me if he’d told me he was a Palestinian falangist.

  There was a bar upholstered in cream vinyl in the lounge with a tall ceramic bierstein on top. Albert Pagels, Gerd’s father, was a Lutheran from Rügen Island in the Baltic. He had arrived in Punta Arenas as a young quartermaster in the merchant navy in 1903, and stayed, making his way first by hunting and goldpanning and later by providing field experience on foreign scientific expeditions. He appears frequently in Carl Skottsberg’s The Wilds of Patagonia, published in 1911. He was a self-taught man, serious and eminently capable. Shortly before the First World War broke out five German cruisers arrived in southern Chile under von Spee, and one of them—the Dresden – was soon in urgent need of expert local knowledge to dodge the pursuing British. The German authorities got in touch with Albert Pagels, and what he and a handful of others achieved in concealing the massive cruiser from the enemy for ten weeks and keeping its supply line open has entered the annals of German naval history. Pagels twice refused to be bought off by the desperate British, and although a mere civilian, he was awarded the Iron Cross, First and Second Class, in 1919.

  Albert had been in Germany during the Second World War, and although he had never joined the Nazis, he had been proud to help ‘Germany’. Gerd was devoted to the memory of his father, and behaved as if he were oblivious to the embarrassing matter of what ‘Germany’ represented at that time. I asked him if he would be proud to help Germany (where he had never been).

  ‘Yes! Most certainly yes. Even my children feel German, though they don’t speak the language. My youngest son feels more German than Chilean.’

  A pregnant granddaughter appeared with a plate of sopaipillas (squarish doughnuts) and a dish of cherry jam. Unfortunately, said Gerd, she was not a ‘Bible student’, as he referred to the Witnesses. None of the family were, though he had stuck to the faith for 37 years, and he said, in English, ‘I am alone in the trenches’.

  After the invitation to Antarctica was delivered the logistics of the trip had involved, over a six-week period, a succession of inconclusive telephone calls from sweaty phone boxes and hand-written faxes to generals, as well as the expenditure of a good deal of nervous energy. Everyone in Santiago had told me I’d never get there, and their words mocked me as I haemorrhaged money, time and mental health on the project. I had come to feel that the whole trip would be left dangling if I didn’t get to the southernmost point of what Chileans think of as their country.

  The problem was not a lack of goodwill, or of authority: I was an official guest of the air force, and nobody disputed it. The problem was communicating with the right people at the right time to make the necessary arrangements. Often I had walked three miles to a telephone at the appointed hour of eight in the morning to find it broken or that the person I needed had been called away.

  As soon as I arrived in Punta Arenas I had begun groping around, if one can grope on the telephone, for a departure time: air force scheduling was erratic under any circumstances, and when it had Antarctic conditions to take into account it was almost a minute-to-minute business. The uncertainty made me agitated. In addition, there had been no mention of equipment. A set of thermals had been languishing at the bottom of the carpetbag since the journey began (and had been carted doggedly through the Atacama desert) and I had a professional jacket and boots: that was it. I asked, over the phone, what I should bring.

  ‘Oh, just pack your woollies – and don’t forget your camera!’ said an amiable sergeant as if I were going to Skegness for a winter break.

  I was finally instructed to present myself at Air Base Chabunco at eleven o’clock one Tuesday morning. Only then, with a celebratory flourish, did I allow myself to rip the cellophane packaging off the thermals.

  I turned up at the windy airfield overlooking the Magellan Strait at nine-thirty, almost paralysed by anxiety. At least the airman at the high-security gate had my name – or something approximating to it when pronounced in Spanish – on a short list. I was told to wait at the civilian airport a mile away, and a lieutenant drove me there in a jeep.

  Other members of the party trickled in. The first were two builders employed in the construction of the first Antarctic church. What mattered most down there to the Chileans was assertion of their national identity, because that, as they perceived it, validated their claim to the land. The Catholic Church was an integral part of that identity, despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of them had rejected it.

  A dapper army officer on a business trip followed the churchbuilders into the terminal. He was being sent to investigate a military plane which had crashed on the runway at the main Chilean Antarctic base two days previously, and later he told me enthusiastically about this crash and the perilous conditions in the Antarctic. The next person to come in was a petrochemical engineer from ENAP, the national petroleum company, who was supervising the construction of a diesel pipeline from a maritime terminal to the base, and he was accompanied by his beautiful seventeen-year-old daughter. Arrival six was a young woman from Valdivia who knew someone in the air force.

  We sat around. The army officer flossed his teeth. A captain appeared and said there was a problem with an engine. There were only two civilian flights that day, both to Santiago, and I watched the airport fill and empty, fill and empty, like a cowshed at milking time. A kiosk opened during these brief periods of activity offering a listless selection of confectionery and a limited range of reading material. Popular magazines in Chile of the Hello! variety were much like their counterparts everywhere else in the world except for their titles: one magazine which I often observed people reading was named Things and another Very Interesting.

  Seven hours passed. Assuming that Hercules planes are not equipped with a Ladies I had put all the thermals on in advance. These included ankle-length longjohns and a longsleeved vest. By lunchtime I was in danger of passing out from heat exhaustion. In the middle of the afternoon I was standing outside, taking some air, and through the glass doors I saw an official appear in front of my hopeful fellow-travellers. They leapt up. I rushed in. The man had asked them to move so that the cleaners could sweep that area of the airport. It was the most exciting thing that had happened all day. The fraying cord of hope unravelled a little further at six when the captain came back and said there was another problem, this time unspecified, and told us to go home and come back at six-thirty in the morning. The sergeant in charge of the church-builders was driving them to their boarding-house in town, and I decided to instal myself in a room in their lodgings, working on the assumption that the plane wasn’t going to leave without them.

  The churchbuilders weren’t particularly interested in Antarctica. What they were interested in was when they might finish their work there, the football champions Colo Colo and the marital status of the young woman from Valdivia. To pass the evening they hired a video called Retorno al Futuro II which the obliging family who owned the boarding-house watched with us in their living room; a ten-year-old son insisted on the presence of the family chicken in the room.

  Something went wrong with the television screen, causing the subtitles to disappear, so the churchbuilders prevailed upon me to provide a simultaneous translation of their video.

  The next morning we went straight to the door of a Hercules built in the United States in 1980. A perishing wind cut across the airstrip, stinging our faces, and a jeep arrived loaded with cargo for Antarctica, including a vacuum cleaner and crates of Coca-Cola. The young woman from Valdivia turned up, controversially, with the dapper crash-inspector. We boarded, and strapped ourselves into red webbing fold-down seats.

  Even when the plane took off I was convinced it was going to develop engine trouble, and turn back, and that all flights would be suspended indefinitely and I would never see the seventh continent and never finish my Chilean journey. The cabin did actually
fill with acrid smoke, but nobody looked very worried about it so I supposed it was normal. We advanced over the gunmetal Strait, the sky, more enormous now, streaked with salmon pink and petrol blue clouds. The Strait was so narrow that I began to appreciate Magellan’s achievement in finding it. Tierra del Fuego followed shortly, then water – the Pacific, and the Atlantic.

  A contingent of air force personnel had come with us. The plane was very noisy, and every single person except me had brought protective ear-phones. The bastards could have told me, I thought. I asked to go into the cockpit. It was large, up a ladder, and there were seven people in it. After chatting to a couple of them for a few minutes I noticed an elderly man wearing dark glasses hunched in a seat sunk into the wall. His hands were jammed into the pockets of an expensive – looking black wool overcoat with gold decorations on the shoulders. He was sitting absolutely still, his skin pale against the black fabric, and he looked deadly, his jowelly face expressionless. My God, I thought, it’s him. But it wasn’t Pinochet. It was a naval captain rejoining his ship, anchored in Antarctica.

  There was a man in the cockpit who had been living at Teniente Rodolfo Marsh, the largest Chilean base in Antarctica, for two years. He was very enthusiastic about it. ‘It’s a paradise,’ he said. ‘No crime, and no danger. My children are innocents.’ He had three young children, and he took them to the continent once a year to expose them to microbes. The entire family caught a cold as soon as they landed in Punta Arenas. They had everything at Marsh, including a school. There were a couple of hundred residents in the summer and about ninety in the winter. Antarctic service is voluntary, and there is no shortage of takers.