by Sara Wheeler
Alex gave me his rod as the ranchers slid through the whisky. After a few minutes I felt a sharp pull on the line and a surge of panic. The three men shouted instructions simultaneously, pointed wildly at reel, rod and water, and then a pink and grey back arched out of the fjord and I struggled clumsily with the flailing rod and the straining reel, fighting to keep my salmon until one of the ranchers landed it with a gaffe. They were still shouting after they had whacked it over the head, thrust it, cold and convulsing, into my arms and lifted the spinner with which I had caught it to my lips, followed by the whisky bottle.
My salmon weighed eleven-and-a-half pounds, and it was the first fish I had ever caught.
Still flushed with triumph, I cooked the fish in the wood-burning oven that evening, with capers and black butter. It made up for having had scabies diagnosed that morning. My hands and lower arms had been itching for some time, and when I found myself awake for half the night clawing at my legs too I sought medical advice. Scabies, the doctor informed me crisply, are mites which live under the skin. They come out at night and run around.
Lurking in the shadowy recesses of my mind was the notion that scabies is a sexually transmitted disease.
‘How does one acquire these … creatures?’
‘From mattresses, normally. Very common around here.’
Well, I’d slept on a lot of mattresses. The treatment involved applying a special lotion and not washing for forty-eight hours. I was also told to boil my bedding, but the idea of boiling a sleeping bag on a primus stove defeated me. I procured an iron from a neighbour instead – it was an iron iron which had to be heated up on the stove – and ironed the bag to kill the mites residing within it who were waiting anxiously for my return. I also ironed the mattress I slept on at the Sheraton, and while I was doing so the postman appeared at the window. He looked surprised. I locked myself in the bathroom.
A skin parasite is hardly a social asset, and under most circumstances you might feel shy about possessing such a thing in the company of people you’ve only known a few days, particularly after you’ve gone forty-eight hours without washing. But it seemed a routine part of life in the Sheraton, and I was so grateful to them for not making me feel like a leper. I learnt that in Uruguay a common cure for certain skin lice is kerosene. One of the fishermen, a peripatetic North American horticulturalist, knew a good deal about transmittable mites and diseases, having had most of them, and he generously dispensed his painfully acquired wisdom on the subject of my condition.
Mark and Alex wanted to go off to fish for a few days without any clients; it had been a long season. They invited me to join them, and one morning we loaded Alex’s pickup with camping and fishing gear, waved goodbye to the North American parasite expert, and headed north.
All roads out of Coyhaique cross millions of acres of lush grass strewn with the husks of hardwood trunks, vestiges of southern beech forest cleared by the farmers who took the first land grants. Our road, the only one going north, was devoid of cars and of any sign of human life; it was a concept, the Carretera Austral, not a road. It was a dream made real, linking two-thirds of a tamed country with its lost tail and bringing communication to an unimaginably beautiful hinterland.
It was a part of Chile that touched my soul. As I sat in the back of the pickup I grappled with the notion that Pinochet was responsible for opening it up; he had seen construction of the road through, despite massive opposition even from his own team. He was still so present in Chile; I had often felt it, from the first day. Besides the fact that he actually was still around in his role as commander-in-chief of the army, featuring frequently in the media, he stalked inside everyone’s head too. They often referred to him, by name or allusion.
I had come expecting a black-and-white country. For anyone exposed to the western media, Pinochet was a symbol of evil and opposition to his regime had become identified with the noble battle of right against wrong, oppressed against oppressor. Less than a week after the coup, the Guardian ran a story on its news pages which commented, ‘For Socialists of this generation, Chile is our Spain.’ But from my first week in the country I had met all kinds of Chileans – not only rich ones – who regretted Pinochet’s demise and had no trouble at all in consigning the unsavoury facts to oblivion and telling me that he had been good for the country, and for them. On his birthday, several hundred people still turned up outside his house with flowers. Large sectors of the population had felt safer with him than with what they perceived as the alternative. He and his colleagues (he emerged out of a collegiallyled junta) had always exploited public fear of a return to the economic chaos of 1972–3. The people had irrefutable evidence that leftist governments were a disaster, after all, and the failure of Allende’s economic policy had become so enshrined that the massive external destabilization which exacerbated it had dissolved in the further reaches of national memory. They had forgotten a lot of other things, too. According to one of the most cautious academic sources, between 3000 and 10,000 Chileans were killed in the immediate aftermath of the coup. The Rettig Commission recorded less than 3000 deaths and disappearances, but a new national reparation and reconciliation corporation has subsequently added many hundreds of cases to that figure. Somewhere between 40,000 and 95,000 people were taken prisoner for some period in the first three years. Hadn’t the Pinochetistas I met (43 per cent voted to keep him in 1988) read all those accounts I had read about torture and depravity and murder? Hadn’t they met the woman whose three sons had been killed, as I had, or the hideously disfigured man who had set fire to himself in the village square to draw attention to the disappearance of his daughter, who at that moment was being raped by the eleventh man that day? Well, hadn’t they?
Of course, the fact that he was no longer in charge showed that he had failed in his attempts to depoliticize them. He had a spirited try: during his rule, the longest continuing presidency in the nation’s history, he banned just about everything he could think of. Fiddler on the Roof was prohibited because it depicted military abuses. He fuelled rumours of armed uprising and manufactured a wartime atmosphere. Even when the nation voted against him in the plebiscite of October 1988 it found he had ensured that the new president wouldn’t be elected for fourteen months and wouldn’t take office for three more after that. He had set things up so that whatever happened he would retain at least some power. His constitution, approved in a stage-managed plebiscite in 1980 and named Constitución de la Libertad, presumably in homage to Friedrich Hayek, the anti-Keynesian economist who wrote a book with that title and whose economic and political philosophy profoundly influenced the Pinochet team, remained in place after his demise, and this meant, effectively, that he still controlled the Senate. The ones who had voted him out had learnt that they couldn’t have everything at once. As a Socialist MP had told me wearily, ‘It’s not perfect. But we are living through a transition from dark to light.’
‘Zorro!’ said Alex loudly, and stopped the pickup. It was a fox, an animal rarely spotted in Chile, and it stood on the road with a hare in its mouth, silhouetted in front of a snowy mountain bisected by a thin waterfall. We entered rainforest soon after that, and the Queulat national park, where we got out to walk down a steep and muddy cliff path to the Padre García waterfall, spectacular even by Chilean standards and exuding a thick jungular smell of wet and rotting vegetation. It felt good. Droplets clung to the burnt orange trumpets of the waterfall flowers like to a car after rain, and humming birds skated over the bamboo.
A perfectly triangular glacier hung between two mountain peaks to the east, bright white and blue against a cloudless sky, and the byzantine slopes of the mountains below it were sprayed with deep pink magellanic fuchsias.
There were rivers everywhere, and Mark and Alex discussed their troutiness earnestly. But we pushed on northwards, leaving the Carretera Austral just before sunset, and headed east in search of the Figueroa river. First we had to cross the Rosselot. The Ministry of Public Works had obligingly provid
ed a wooden platform attached by chains to two overhead cables and operated by a pair of dour locals; the current propelled it, us and the pickup to the opposite bank. Eighteen miles up the valley a handwritten sign told us we couldn’t go any further: the road was under construction right up to the Argentinian border. A man came out of an operations hut, and once we forced him to admit that it was in fact possible to continue some way further up this road, he was persuaded to radio the chief in Coyhaique and let us petition our case. The chief was cross because we interrupted his dinner. ‘You can go through,’ his voice eventually crackled, ‘at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.’
It was very black and very cold, so we decided to return to the nearest village to spend the night in a guesthouse. When we got back to the Rosselot the pontoon bridge was floating on the opposite bank. We mentally limbered up to get the tents out. Suddenly the platform began to move: the operators had seen our headlights from their cottages, and reluctantly came to our rescue.
In the morning the mud streets of the village were touched with frost, and as we sat waiting for the pickup to warm up, watching a man guiding a flock of sheep down the road, I reflected that waking up in a tent wouldn’t have been much fun. We crossed on the pontoon while men with wide brimmed hats pulled down over their ears led their horses to drink at the sepulchral bank of the dark green water. Against the blue mist, thin rivulets of smoke trickled from chimney pipes on steep shingle roofs.
The river valley cut through rainforest burgeoning with ferny undergrowth, the silence punctuated by the musical prattle of the chucao, a smallish bird with a vertical tail, its trill part of the daily background noise. We followed the Figueroa upstream, along sheer banks of colossal evergreens. Mark and Alex tried to fish, but only found diminutive brook and brown trout; they were both convinced we had to move even further upstream, to the next lake, so we picked laboriously through the forest on the closed road, eventually confounded by an intractable mound of earth. Dynamite exploding ahead made the windows rattle. The two men were bitterly disappointed. We cooked sausages later over a fire near a small bridge, and watched a black mink grubbing among a pile of stones. Mark and Alex hated minks; they were an introduced menace, and destroyed the ecosystem of the riverbank.
The pontoon operators narrowed their eyes when they saw us again. We crossed, drove away quickly and continued examining rivers to the north until we reached the upper limit of the Eleventh Region; the mountains seemed to be getting even higher. My companions were restless, because they were longing to fish; they both suddenly decided they didn’t want to camp. They were tired of camping, by the end of the season. Mark was soon going back to the UK for six months. They were very close. Alex was the butt of all the jokes at the Sheraton, but it belied a deeply felt friendship, most of all between these two I was travelling with. When I heard Alex talk in English, I heard Mark’s inflection and Mark’s idiom.
We stopped, later, at cabins rented out by a friend of Alex’ in a clearing at the northern tip of Lake Risopatrón. The two of them fished from a rowing boat for a couple of hours at dusk while I read in the long grass, and they returned transformed; the sight of rainbow trout on the end of their lines had made everything all right.
They had found fish, we were all relaxing, and besides that the owner of the cabins was a gourmet. She made everything herself, from unsalted butter to crisp cheese bread, goose liver pâté, wild raspberry compotes and coconut cake, and she smoked her own salmon. There was no question of moving on after just one day.
We ate a great deal, drank far too much wine, and we fished. I was the gillie, rowing them up and down the lake. My scabies left me. We kept a woodburning stove going in the cabin, and a supply of wine cartons outside. I wrote out the words to Sylvio Rodríguez songs sitting in the car, and ran the battery down, eyed by a flock of fat white geese. I looked up at the mountains a lot, and thought how much I was going to miss them.
Mark and Alex dropped me at Puyuhuapi, a strangely prosperous village with wooden shingle houses and a carpet factory. The carpet factory was actually a shingle house too, and its products, hand woven on magnificent looms, were famous. Many of the residents of the village had German names; it was founded by Germans in 1935, and until the advent of the Carretera Austral in the 1980s it had been entirely cut off. There were rumours, in other places in the region, about where the money had come from, and a man in Coyhaique told me a long tale about a war criminal who had lived alone at the end of a fjord to the north. My informant also said that one of the Puyuhuapi elders had been Hitler’s chauffeur, but I thought that was unlikely.
We said goodbye after one last lunch together and I waved them off, forcing a smile. I had arranged to stay that night at a hotel owned by a Santiago-based company who had invited me to visit the Laguna San Rafael and its glacier, the most famous in Chile, in their catamaran the next day. The hotel was on the other side of a stretch of water, and a launch arrived to take me there; it was a luxurious place, built around thermal springs and peopled with bejewelled Argentinians. I tried to heave myself through this abrupt transition, but despite the comfort I felt miserable. I was tired, my knuckles were bleeding from rowing Alex all morning, my scabies had risen like Lazarus, a carton of wine had exploded in the carpetbag over the only decent clothes I had left, and, most of all, I missed Mark and Alex. It had been one of the best trips; it was hard to imagine that I had only known the pair of them for a matter of weeks. Dawdling in such good company in one of the most beautiful regions of the world had caused all my anxieties to disappear.
I tried to sleep, but couldn’t, so I swam in one of the thermal pools, in the open air overlooking the water and forest. It made me feel much better, until an Argentinian told me that exertion in hot water causes heart attacks.
By seven the next morning I was cruising the fjords again, this time in high style on board a very grand catamaran called the Patagonia Express. I was the only press guest: the other passengers were Argentinian tourists from the hotel. We stopped at Puerto Aguirre, an isolated fishing village I had spied from the top deck of the Evangelista. The locals had built the tiny houses of their cemetery on the slope of the island opposite, ferrying the dead across their own Styx.
The catamaran was delightful. There was nothing to do except sit at the bar and watch the scenery float past, and as it was a free bar and the barman had a neat line in cocktails, this was very agreeable. He shook his cocktails with panache. His speciality was a kind of Chilean cuba libre; I quickly forgot the name, but it had the word Patagonia in it. The Argentinians sat down at tables in the dining area and the men produced enough photographic equipment to open a Dixons concession on board while the women read Good Housekeeping. The barman told me his name was Norman. He was wearing a white polyester shirt, and he looked remarkably like Douglas Hurd, even sporting the ice-cream cone quiff. The cocktails got stronger as we approached the glaciers, and in the lagoon itself, almost landlocked and one of only three places in the world where three plates meet, strangely sculpted blue icebergs appeared, and Norman added more ice to the cocktail jug in appreciation. The icebergs were as small as manhole covers and as big and pointy as the Matterhorn. The glacier San Rafael, the famous glacier, looked like a rough blue tide between the brown and green jagged mountains. It stretches over twenty miles back into the interior, is more than one-and-a-half miles wide, and it moves up to 200 feet a day. I had developed a passion for these glaciers. I believe Darwin did, too, in his understated, English way: ‘… they may be likened to great frozen Niagaras; and perhaps these cataracts of blue ice are to the full as beautiful as the moving ones of water.’
The Patagonia Express dropped anchor directly opposite the ice-cliffs. I cannot say it was beautiful; it was beyond all that. I stood on deck in the painfully cold air watching icebergs calve into the still water. The falling blocks boomed in the silence, like blasts of dynamite on some distant planet. It was impossible not to think of Coleridge’s vision of ice in The Ancient Mariner (‘The ic
e did split with a thunder fit’); even Norman’s eye glittered obligingly.
Some of us strapped on lifejackets and climbed into a Zodiac. The tallest ice cliffs, at least 180 feet high, revealed themselves to be cleft with deep blue caverns of cold air stretching back into the inner world of the earth. Gulls with black spindly legs landed on ice floes, and under the water I could see spectral outlines of secret things. We motored through the pack-ice along all one-and-a-half miles of the shining glacier. It radiated coldness. A crewman shouted and pointed behind us, and we turned our heads to see a tower of ice the size of a multi-storey carpark plunging into the lagoon, the foundations bouncing upwards with ostentatious languor as the top disappeared.
Back on board Norman offered round a tray of large whiskies on rocks chipped from the glacier which he alleged were 30,000 years old and might well have been. An Argentinian with two Nikons round his neck made a fulsome speech thanking the crew for bringing us to this ‘unworldly’ place and then insisted that I make one too, ‘on behalf of the foreigners’. There are gradations of foreign, of course, and compared with me the Argentinians and Chileans felt united. The glacier experience had made me sentimental, and as I was the only fully qualified foreigner on board and no one understood English I recited Yeats’ ‘Had I the heavens’ as if it were a formal speech, which rather spoilt it, but everyone clapped. As we moved away from San Rafael the Argentinians took photographs of me on deck as if I were as rare a phenomenon as the glacier itself. I had been consorting with Norman for some time, and I lounged inscrutably against the rail in dark glasses as if I spent my life being photographed by tourists.
The sky condensed into a blue, grey and white miasma, and yellow rays beamed through like a Blake painting, diffusing themselves through titanic icebergs. It was hard to leave that place, but Norman eased the pain. As the stars came out an Argentinian bank manager tried to point out formations and constellations. People were always doing that, and I hated it; I didn’t need sordid terrestrial labels bringing the stars under control. Giving them shapes from our world (the Plough; the Hunter) robbed them of their otherness. They belonged to the land of the imagination, the most beguiling country of them all. I had spent many nights alone with the Chilean stars, and I wasn’t going to let a bank manager turn them into agricultural implements.
