Travels in a Thin Country

by Sara Wheeler

  *

  Puerto Montt, where the ship docked, was much further north than I wanted to be, so I had to take a shorter trip by water back the way I’d come. The journey through the islands on the Puerto Eden had meant that I’d missed the whole of the Eleventh Region, the remotest part of the country, and although much of it was impenetrable I intended to tackle the slices that weren’t. I didn’t like the idea of retracing my steps, but it was unavoidable in southern Chile.

  A ship was due to sail that night, so I bought a ticket, sat down at a café on the docks and read a local paper. There was a story on the front page about a twelve-year-old girl who had given birth to her father’s child. She came from one of the isolated fishing communities I had sailed past. I often heard stories about the dark side of what looked like paradise. They seem to be told about remote settlements almost everywhere, but the nether regions of archipelagic Chile did seem exceptionally prone to such excesses: besides incest of every imaginable variant I was recounted stories of a range of highly imaginative forms of bestiality and other practices which would have done credit to a roll-call of Old Testament prohibitions.

  Although the Evangelista was owned by the same company as the Puerto Eden, the two were as different as the desert and the icecap. The Evangelista was a passenger ship, capable of transporting four hundred people in comfort and offering reclining seats, televisions and a bar, and it was as empty as the Puerto Eden had been overcrowded: there were less than forty of us on board. For the first half of the twenty-two-hour voyage to Chacabuco, a very small port in the middle of the desolate and labyrinthine Eleventh Region, we sliced through thick fog. The other passengers were all men, and when they weren’t sleeping they entertained themselves by staring at me.

  I slept on the floor, in my sleeping bag. Late the next morning the clouds evaporated and sunshine reflected off the glaciers as gulls skidded along the water, so fat with fish that their wings beat the surface as they tried to take off. There was another gringo on the ship, a Swede in his late twenties called Pontius Bratt. He was writing a paper on economic reforms under Pinochet at a university in Santiago. When we arrived in Chacabuco it was dark, and we had to wait an hour to disembark. Chacabuco didn’t have much to offer. Pontius and I found rooms above a bar lit by an orange light. There were two men in the bar, drunk beyond all sense of time and place.

  I left early the next morning, before anyone else got up, and left the money for my room on the sticky bar. Another shabby, one-night hotel, passive provider of that delicious anonymity of transience.

  I made my way then to Coyhaique, uplifted by the extravagance of the landscape, cleft by the coiled Simpson river. This was my final region of Chile, and it had been saving up the best till last.

  I had a contact in Coyhaique, an Englishman called Mark Surtees who worked as a guide for a fly-fishing expedition company. We had spoken on the phone in London, where he spent Chilean winters in his other life as a freelance management consultant. I found him in a small house with an untidy garden, drinking maté next to a stove in the kitchen. When I walked through the low door and introduced myself he said, ‘Hello Sara,’ as if he had been expecting me that very moment. (In fact he hadn’t had any idea when I would turn up, if ever.) He was about my age, and he was tall and chunky with blond hair, an entertainingly laconic manner and a Newcastle accent. I later discovered that at university, where he had read English, he wrote his thesis on Biggles.

  ‘You must stay here,’ he said imperiously. Occupation of the house was fluid in any case, and I never worked out which of the various people who came and went were official residents. Most of them came in through the window; the door often remained locked all day, despite heavy window traffic. It was great fun in that house. It was owned by a Uruguayan called Alex who also owned the fishing company, and it was called the Sheraton, a wordplay involving Uruguayan slang and the rats who were in residence when Alex and the other fishermen moved in. I felt bone tired, and slept for almost two days.

  While I was based in Coyhaique I wanted to go south for three or four days, but it was difficult. The nether regions of the celebrated Carretera Austral, a road built by Pinochet when he dreamt of linking together the fragments of his thin empire, were largely untravelled. The carretera stopped abruptly, at nowhere in particular, before the land hardened into low continental icecap, so I intended to go down it as far as I could, loop into the interior and then return for a few days more rest and recreation at the Sheraton.

  There was no bus for two days, and the one leaving on the third was already full. Everyone laughed when I suggested hitching. I broadcast a message on Radio Patagonia Chilena asking if anyone was driving to Cochrane, the only village of any size to the south; they were apparently not. Pontius Bratt materialized. We discussed renting a truck (Hertz, unfortunately, were not present) and while we were in the car-hire office an Alaskan came in, followed by a strawberry blond Austrian man. We decided to hire a small truck between us, and so it was that four strangers went on a sketchily-conceived trip.

  The first manifestation of group dynamics was a squabble provoked during a preparatory shopping expedition by the Austrian’s purchase of a carton of cigarettes. The Alaskan, who was called John, objected to smoking in the car. I was appealed to as arbitrator in this dispute, a matriarchal role to which the three of them often returned in the course of the trip and which I did not relish. A formal agreement was reached permitting smoking anywhere except bedrooms and the truck.

  We set off early the next morning. The gravel road was so deserted that if we did pass another vehicle we waved chummily. We came to a small collection of corrugated iron houses under a Gothically rocky hill pierced with glaciers, and Pontius asked a woman with no teeth if we could buy bread. She took us to a dark little house where we picked crusty rolls out of a hemp sack.

  Shortly beyond a river distinguished from the many anonymous rivers by its name, the river Nameless, we sat down on the steppe and had a picnic. The rolls were like golf balls, but our delight in the landscape and with life in general that day was unquenchable, and an Andean condor obligingly passed overhead, black against the brilliant sky.

  There were corrals, and some horses, and there must have been people living undiscovered in the nooks of the highway, but we didn’t see them. As the afternoon disappeared we arrived alongside the north Patagonian icecap, stretching for miles beyond the western mountains, and on the eastern side of the road a river became a lake, so blue it was vulgar. This lake got much bigger. It was called Lake General Carrera (though the part on the Argentinian side was called Lake Buenos Aires; they couldn’t possibly share a name), and it was the second largest lake in South America. A small man appeared on the road next to it, wanting a lift, so we took him a few miles, and he told us he was a paramedic. He had walked for four hours to visit a sick man. Then the river Baker rushed at us, wild and emerald, flowing towards the south Pacific at over 300,000 gallons per second, curling through the rock, fizzing with white water, and we watched it for many miles in silence, until it turned black in the dark, and then, after all that, the moon was full.

  The truck crunched to a stop on a bend at about ten in the evening. All three boys wanted to fix the puncture. None of them could, as the spanner for the wheelnuts was broken. We were six miles from Cochrane, where we had planned to stay, and it was too cold to sleep in the truck; we were considering our options (there were very few of them) when a van appeared. This was little short of a miracle, but although we borrowed a spanner and changed the tyre we knew that we would need another miracle the following day as both tyre and inner tube were so badly chewed we would have to find new ones.

  Cochrane was celebrating its thirty-eighth anniversary. Thirty-eight was quite a respectable age down there. It was the last part of continental Chile to be colonized, so the wandering local tribes had a long reprieve. Ninety years ago the government encouraged settlers by granting concessions to three animal-farming companies, though these isolated settl
ements didn’t coalesce into villages until the 1920s. Even Coyhaique, now the capital of the Eleventh Region, wasn’t founded until the end of that decade. Sheep and cattle still constitute the economic base. Mark the fisherman had told me, ‘Civilization is a thin veneer down here.’

  It was inaccessibility which had preserved it. The whole southern archipelago consists of what was, to the north, the coastal mountain range, which south of Puerto Montt has been flooded apart from the mainland. The Andes meet the sea, and their lower slopes are richly forested.

  We found a second-hand tyre in Cochrane. It was almost bald; Chilean tyres could win longevity records. A large and surprisingly well-stocked store on the square provided us with an inner tube. Three men wearing sheepskin on their legs were buying rope ‘on account’, and they pressed their inky thumbs on the bill before slinging the purchases round the necks of their horses, tethered to a redundant traffic light. We drove up a terrible track to Lake Cochrane, through a freaky grass plain like a golf course, and got out to climb the rocky outcrops above the part of the lake where the waters shone in a rainbow and met a solitary strip of beach. The rest of the lake was dotted with green islands, like decorations on a cake. Apart from one small hacienda at the back of the valley, the rocks overlooked an immense spread of untouched countryside, and it brought to mind the florid comparison of the country with the Garden of Eden which features in the national anthem.

  It was quite hot, and John started to behave oddly; he said all Alaskans do when they feel the sun. He was several years older than the rest of us, a carpenter, and he was sensitive and introverted. He hated the Austrian, and told me one day that he had written in his journal (he was a typical journal-keeper) ‘I feel as though I address everything I say to Sara and Pontius only.’ When it came to splitting into pairs for the twin-bedded rooms I always went with him, to minimize his contact with the Austrian. Months later he wrote to me in London to thank me. It was a beautiful letter.

  I could see what he meant about the Austrian. He was an accountant from Vienna, and had taken eighteen months off to do a world tour. He liked ticking off the places he’d been on a list he had made in a blue spiral-bound notebook. Whenever we went to a café he insisted on asking the price of every possible combination of foods (‘How much would it be without the cheese?’ ‘Can I have just a plate of boiled rice?’) and he had an unwavering conviction that the world in general was committed to fleecing him. You couldn’t call what he did living. I travelled in parallel with him, but I shared a journey with the other two.

  We returned up the Carretera Austral. At the confluence of two rivers a man with a stationary motorbike in front of a flock of buff-necked ibis flagged us down and practically forced us to load him and his broken machine into the back of the truck. Shortly after he had demanded to be dropped off we took a long, lonely route up the southern shore of Lake General Carrera, and again we were silent, then Pontius said, ‘It is not possible for it to get more beautiful,’ but it did, of course, and we climbed very high in the crepuscular light, the road a slender silver precipice above the luminous lake, and as the sun set we drove through configurations of rock as if we were travelling through pages of Dante. Around one bend half of the moon appeared over the top of an incandescent cliff, and all four of us started to laugh.

  I woke up on my thirty-first birthday in a seedy hotel very close to Argentina, and John the Alaskan in the next bed tried to wish me Happy Birthday in Spanish, but by the time he had worked it out we had both lost interest. The hotel was in a village called Chile Chico (Little Chile) because of its sunny microclimate. In Cochrane our beds had been layered with quilts and blankets like double-decker sandwiches, but in Chile Chico they gave us two thin blankets each, and we didn’t need more. The Eleventh Region is a mass of violently disparate climates, reflecting a violently disparate geography; it was very disorientating.

  We had to take an excursion back along the road, to see our lunar landscape under the sun. We hadn’t realized how precipitous this road was, and besides that there were freshly tumbled boulders along it. It had been open less than a year, and a man in a shop in Chile Chico told us later that it was often blocked; he referred to it soberly as an ‘international highway,’ a term used by Chileans for any dogtrack crossing into Argentina.

  There had been a small settlement called Fachinal, now abandoned, and we had our picnic lunch on the boardwalk, striped with crystal water where old planks had rotted. Pontius Bratt produced a bottle of champagne for my birthday; it was typical of him. He had brought it all the way from Coyhaique specially. Pontius was one of those people who are so genuinely nice you don’t mind them being near-perfect. He was tremendously bright, had won scholarships all over the world and was strong-minded enough not to take the high-profile high-salary jobs which would have been a natural progression. He had a great sense of humour, he listened carefully to other people and he had mixed feelings about his nationality, which is usually a good sign. I really enjoyed his company, but we forgot to exchange addresses, so I never heard from him again.

  I knew they’d be thinking of me at home on my birthday, just as I was of them. I could go for weeks without feeling melancholy or lonely – months, on occasion; I lived off emotional reserves like a hibernating animal lives off its fat. But a small thing could provoke a fit of grief. I might look at the date on a calendar, or hear a few bars of a piece of music, or sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night with a start, imagining that a close friend was in the room.

  That evening we drove onto a little ferry which took two-and-a-half hours to convey us across the choppy water to the other side of the lake. We had a drinks party on the tiny deck with two cartons of wine and a communal cup made by sawing off the bottom of a water bottle. It was very windy, and as the boys sang ‘Happy Birthday,’ each in his own language, a wave hit them. We moved inside to an even tinier room, where I couldn’t decide if I was drunk or seasick but feared it was both, and listened to a local in a startlingly conspicuous greatcoat rambling boringly about the differences between saltwater waves and their freshwater equivalents. There were three passengers on the ferry, besides us and The Coat.

  On the other side the Austrian drove for three hours in the dark, a terrifying ordeal for the rest of us as the road was the worst yet and he saw it as a challenge. Besides this, The Coat had asked us for a lift to Coyhaique, so there were five of us in the truck. Nobody wanted to sit next to The Coat so Pontius, John and I wedged ourselves in the back; it was much too small for three. Hares were zigzagging around in the headlights, and the moon was so bright that the Austrian made a great joke of putting the sunvisor down.

  We got to Coyhaique at eleven, and my other set of boys, the fishers, cranked themselves up for a party. I felt melancholy, and they sensed it, but they tried to deal with it by giving me a lot of whisky, and at about two o’clock I went to bed and my birthday party adjourned to a strip club.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The sense of limitless freedom that I, as a woman, sometimes feel is that of a new kind of being. Because I simply could not have existed, as I am, in any other preceding time or place.

  Angela Carter

  After the weekend I went fishing with Alex. The black-necked swans were alone on Lake Frío. On the banks dragonflies darted about and woodpeckers pecked half-heartedly at the treetrunks. Alex caught several rainbow trout, and it made him happy; he had been tense, but the river conducted all his nervous energy away. He was the kind of person I always homed in on: he was out of control. He entangled himself with women then decided he didn’t want them anymore, and when he drank too much he smashed up cars. He laughed exuberantly a lot, was depressed a lot, and was obsessive; he missed Uruguay, he was hopeless with money, and he got jealous if Mark spent too much time with anyone else. Alex badly needed approval, and, like Mark and I, he was prone to excess.

  It took some effort to persuade him that we should eat two of his catches for our tea. My new friends often spoke dispar
agingly of people who ‘killed’ fish. It was all part of the culture. Like all fly fishermen, they looked upon anglers who caught fish any other way as a lesser species.

  ‘It’s like comparing martial arts with a street brawl,’ Alex said.

  Fly fishing was about being at one with the line, the rod, the river, the wind and the air temperature, and it was about second guessing what the fish were about to do – as Mark said, it was about ‘being that trout’.

  Like rock climbing, it was Zen.

  Word got round that there were good salmon in a saltwater fjord near Chacabuco. It was the end of the season and the last client had gone, so the fishermen dropped everything and zipped through the Simpson valley. On the banks of the fjord two middle-aged ranchers hailed Alex and invited the two of us to join their boat. They were just the kind of people I had been told ‘weren’t real fishermen’: they didn’t use fly, and they loaded the boat with five bottles of wine, a bottle of whisky and heaps of salami and brie. They set up their rods with spinning tackle, wedged them along the side of the boat, switched on the motor and cruised around the lake in high good humour, shouting to other anglers and recalling impressively lengthy catches of previous expeditions.

  The big Pacific salmon, which had probably escaped young from a farm, had come in to breed, and as they were nearly impossible to catch with a fly, and other anglers were hooking them in with spinners, I noticed that Alex and my other companions from the Sheraton, in another boat, quickly abandoned their principles.