Travels in a Thin Country

by Sara Wheeler

  The catamaran docked at Chacabuco at midnight, disgorging the Argentinians into a hotel. Several of them tried to persuade me to check in, worried about letting me loose in Patagonia, but I had a plan to make it over to Coyhaique that night and surprise Mark and Alex. It was time for me to abandon the far south and return to the civilization of Puerto Montt, as I had to start thinking about getting back to Santiago. I could take a plane easily enough from Balmaceda to Puerto Montt, and Coyhaique was en route to Balmaceda.

  I wound up having to take a taxi to Coyhaique, and I climbed through the window of the Sheraton at one-thirty in the morning. Alex was sitting watching the Oscars ceremony on television, and Mark was asleep in bed, his jeans dangling onto the floor from one ankle (he hadn’t managed to get his boot off). It was a great reunion, which merited several cartons of wine, though in fact it was only two days since we had split up. I dreamt that Douglas Hurd was standing on an iceberg with a cocktail shaker in his hand, and the next morning I disappeared for good, on a bus to Balmaceda, whence a plane took me to Puerto Montt. It flew low, and the late afternoon sun turned the multitudinous rivers into gold ribbons between brown crepey mountains. The glaciers rippled, like folds of glossy cloth, and out to the west the archipelago throbbed, suffused in an amber glow.

  Unable to resist one last little trip in the three days I had allocated myself before I travelled back up to Santiago, I stayed the night at my usual guesthouse in Puerto Montt and went to the bus station early the next morning, aiming hopefully for Río Negro, a village more commonly known by the name of its local volcano, Hornopirén. I picked out the right queue immediately: the further away from an urban centre a bus is heading, the rougher the aspect of the people waiting to get on it. Teeth are an especially good guide. (In Japan, the further you travel from Tokyo, the shorter people get.) I got on, anyway. Buses are downgraded, as their roadworthiness and comfort diminish, according to the conditions of the route, and from the look of the bent metal hulk marked ‘Hornopirén’ I inferred that I was in for a long, hard journey.

  The road was extremely bad, but the sun shone on the old alerce trees, and when the bus drove on to a ferry a sweaty man in a cook’s hat dispensed chipped mugs of Nescafé on deck from a grimy galley the size of a telephone box.

  Five hours after leaving Puerto Montt the bus stopped with a weary grating of its brakes at a small village on an estuary overlooked by the volcano. People in Puerto Montt often spoke of this volcano – proprietorially, as if of all the volcanoes in the country, they were bound by some special relationship to this one. I found a hotel next to one of the sawmills. It was just the kind I liked: polished wood floor, plank walls, brightly coloured window frames, an erratic electricity supply, a woodburning stove batting out the heat in the spacious kitchen and a view from my room of oxen tied up on the shore, silhouetted against the wooded islands in the estuary. There were no other guests, and I liked that too.

  I spent the afternoon walking to the volcano; it took about six hours to get there and back. It was a sharp, sunny day, and the air was wonderfully clear. There was snow on the grey mountains, but the fabled volcano in front of them was green. It was small, by Chilean standards, and it was glowing very faintly, as if dimly lit from within. I passed two or three wooden houses. A little girl in an embroidered frock ran out of one of them asking if I wanted to buy küchen. For some odd reason it was her little face which suddenly made me very aware that the journey was ending soon and that rural Chile was slipping away from me. I wanted to spray mental fixative over my memories.

  When I got back to the village the water had drained from the estuary and the owner of the hotel invited me to eat with the extensive family in the big kitchen. During the meal I was initiated into a secret of Chilean Spanish.

  ‘The wires are all corroded in the fuse box,’ said Mrs Hotel to her husband. ‘We’ll have to get the gasfiter in.’

  ‘What,’ I said, ‘does the gas man fix the electrics?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m talking about the electric gasfiter.’

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘if the plumbing goes wrong you call the plumbing gasfiter?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And if the gas … ’

  But I already knew the answer.

  Later, I sat on the jetty and read by torchlight. I was reading about Hayek, the conservative economist whose book lent its name to the Chilean constitution. He argued that the preservation of economic freedom is logically and philosophically more important that the preservation of the institutions of democracy. Many foreign governments endorsed the dictatorship by behaving as if the iron fist of military rule were a matter of minor or at least secondary importance. During an official visit to Chile in October 1980, Cecil Parkinson, then British Minister of Trade, said this: ‘There’s a good deal of similarity between the economic policies of Chile and those of Great Britain.’

  Only when asked later by a journalist what the chief differences were did he comment,

  ‘Our experience takes place in a democratic context, and that of Chile was undertaken by an authoritarian regime.’

  *

  After two ascetic days at Hornopirén I returned to Puerto Montt, still unprepared for an even more abrupt change of environment: Santiago, where I planned to stay for five weeks. I went straight to the train station to buy a ticket on the Santiago sleeper. The opening of a Puerto Montt-Santiago rail link in the second decade of the century was perceived as an event of great historical significance, and it’s still the only passenger service which travels up and down the country rather than across. It hasn’t picked up much speed over the years, contriving to take twenty-four hours to reach Santiago, which, considering that it travels on good track all the way, is quite an achievement for a journey of about six hundred and fifty miles. I thought this famous old rail journey would provide a quiet and undemanding way to end an odyssey. Two factors were to emerge which meant it didn’t quite work out like that.

  The first was that Chris Sainsbury had been commissioned to write a piece on the train for a book being published in the UK entitled Train Journeys of the World, and he suggested we travel together. I was delighted at the prospect of his company, though it did mean the journey wouldn’t be very quiet. The second was that one of the faxes waiting for me at the public fax office in Puerto Montt was from Mr Fixit in Santiago. He was inviting me to stop off at Los Lingues on my way back for a lunch party, and by great coincidence this party was taking place the next day. I telephoned him and arranged to get off the train at San Fernando, two hours or so before Santiago and ten minutes from Los Lingues. This was all very well, but it turned out that we arrived in San Fernando at four-thirty in the morning.

  If I was going to commit the social gaffe of turning up early for a party, I might as well do it in style.

  The PR department of the Chilean Railway, keen to extract maximum mileage from the illustrious reputation of their oldest and longest service, claim that Puerto Montt is the most southerly train station in the world; Chris told me, however, that there was a little steam line further south in Argentina.

  When I arrived at this station the train was waiting. It looked awful. The carriages, painted blue and yellow and looking confusingly Swedish, were rusty and didn’t match. I asked a guard on the platform how old the train was.

  ‘Muchos años, muchos.’

  The inside was more encouraging. Built in Germany between the wars, our carriage was upholstered in dark polished wood, heavy puke-coloured velvet and chunky silver fittings. We had a compartment to ourselves with a copper basin encased in a teak surround, a fawn carpet and an angular 1930s lightfitting with two of the four shades missing. The windows were small, and there was a fan.

  There was hardly anyone on the train, and the staff started playing cards in the bar before we had even pulled out of the station. Many of the original carriages had been replaced (the regular derailments had something to do with this), but the train’s charm clung on; there was a spi
rit about it. The bathroom was dimly lit, and had a stately old shower with cork walls. The links between carriages were loose, and they swung around dangerously, causing the doors of the train to flap open.

  We settled in, arranging our things around the compartment. It took an hour to get to the top of the hill outside Puerto Montt. I already wanted to see the glaciers again, and I knew in my heart that I almost certainly never would, which touched me with a deep sadness; I padded tragically along the empty corridors like a character in an Agatha Christie novel. We reached the shores of Lake Llanquihue, and the scenery looked tame after the landscape of the Carretera Austral; it made me feel tamed, and I didn’t like it.

  *

  I was sitting, in the middle of the afternoon, with my feet up in the compartment, reading The Road to Oxiana. We stopped with such frequency, and for such extended periods, that I had failed to notice that the train had been stationary for a long time even by its own impressive standards. Chris suddenly rushed in from the bar.

  ‘Where’s my camera? We’ve hit a cow.’

  I went to the door and saw staff prodding around on the line ahead. Portions of the cow lay on the embankment. Chris got off and set about his task with vigour. I suggested that readers of Train Journeys of the World might not want to look at photographs of cattle guts sprayed over the hedgerows; but he carried on.

  The journey continued. When the train stopped, it did not glide to a halt, it slammed on its brakes, and everything shot forward. You risked your life stepping between carriages on the way to the bar, and Chris solved this problem by staying in the bar all the time.

  By lunchtime the passenger count had reached double figures; the staff still outnumbered us, and they remained defiantly in the bar, which was also the restaurant car, presided over by an imperial chef wearing a tall white hat. The other restaurant staff wore white jackets and black bootlace ties, and the whole team spent a good portion of the journey eating. Just after the ticket collector and a waiter had sat down to a vat of mussels the train lurched to a stop at Antilhue, where women were selling floral grave wreaths on the platform. Six of the crew alighted and engaged in protracted negotiations. The train seemed to run entirely for the benefit of the staff.

  There was another gringo on the grain, and we invited him to join us for a drink. He was a Dutch chemistry teacher, and he was in a terrible state because the hotel he had been staying at in Puerto Montt had caught fire. He had been writing postcards in his room and smelt burning, and when he opened the door he was confronted by a wall of smoke.

  At Temuco (210 miles in ten hours) the chef got off to put money on the horses, and the train changed from diesel to electric.

  We pulled into San Fernando two hours late, and I called Germán, who arrived heroically soon after, music screaming out of the car speakers. We went to a café and drank pints of coffee; it was good to see him again. When we got to Los Lingues servants were marching along garden paths bearing tables and baskets of flowers, cars and vans were delivering amplifiers and oysters, small knots of singers and musicians were practising in corners, stableboys were brushing down horses and in the kitchens teams of cooks and assistants were rolling pastry for empanadas, basting suckling pigs and squeezing sacks of lemons for pisco sours. Besides feeling light-headed from lack of sleep, the abrupt contrast of this luxuriant excess with my experiences of the past two months had a curious effect. It made me feel as if I were standing outside of my body and watching myself walk through the hacienda.

  They gave me my old room. Don Germán and Doña Marie Elena embraced me as we crossed on a footpath, much too polite to comment on my general appearance. I noticed that nobody smelt of fish. I had a bath, wondering if my clothes would contaminate the room, and stayed in until the water was cold. I was rather unprepared for this occasion, mentally and physically. Rowena’s cocktail dress had been lurking in a binliner at the bottom of the carpetbag since I was last at Los Lingues, so I got it out and gave it a shake. It had looked a lot nicer when she gave it to me.

  The great and the good of Santiago were at this party, bright of plumage in their designer gear. I felt, at first, like Alice in Wonderland, but the sybarite within me soon dealt with any lingering feelings of detachment. The pisco sours tasted good. A famous Chilean saxophonist played to us during cocktails on the lawn. It was a long way from a wet tent in Patagonia.

  I woke up feeling rested, though with a slight headache, stretched out in an eighteenth-century bed on copious lace pillows. Yellow stripes of sunlight slid through the cracks in the shutters, and beyond the splashes of the fountain I heard people arriving for mass in the hacienda chapel. I got up for the service, and sat on a dark wooden pew at the back next to the maid who looked after my room. Her mother was in charge of the laundry, and her three brothers groomed the horses. Generations of the same families had worked on the estate and been baptized, married and mourned in its chapel; the turbulence of modern Chilean history had not obliterated the sense of cyclical permanence which imbued the hacienda like a kind of unreconstructed Tolstoyan feudalism.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Love many; trust few – and always paddle your own canoe.

  Billy Two Rivers, Canadian Mohawk Chief

  I arrived in Santiago just in time to take Simon and Rowena out for dinner, as they were about to fly to London for two months’ home leave; they were getting married. Sitting in a smart restaurant in a city made me feel as if I had returned to reality, and that was sad. It was good to see Simon and Rowena again though. They had generously insisted that I stay in their flat while they were gone. Beatriz was coming in three times a week to clean, so I was excellently set up. But for the first day or two, once they had left, I wandered disconsolately around the huge, empty flat, looking through the oversize plate glass windows at the traffic and the smog.

  I spread out everything I had accumulated on the kitchen floor. There wasn’t much. The outstanding feature was a handsome collection of children’s drawings. I had often made friends with children, and they had regularly offered me a specially drawn picture as a parting gift; I always liked them to draw their village or town. As I had asked each child to write the place where the picture was drawn in the corner, I was able to line them up geographicall, a string of young Chilean auto-images. They had drawn a llama with a triangular body; an approximation of a salt flat; a bush with bunches of grapes dangling from it; a bed with four stick people sleeping in it (that was from Santiago); a man fishing; a sophisticated attempt at cochayuyo (leathery thongs of seaweed); a person in a poncho and a wide-brimmed hat on a horse; an iceberg (I only recognized it because it was blue) – but every one included a row of upside down ’v’s with a blob of colour at the tip representing snow. The children had unified their collective portrait as faithfully as the high-altitude colours on the maps.

  I began making telephone calls to names I had been given or contacts I had established, planning the five weeks ahead. One invitation had been waiting at the flat for me when I got back to Santiago. It was from Paul Mylrea, the Reuters bureau chief, and his wife Frances Lowndes, whom I had met at a dinner when I first arrived in Chile. They were inviting me to a party at their home in Santiago on the night of the UK general election. I was very pleased, as, like many others, I was inclined to think that the British public were about to elect their first Labour government for thirteen years, and I wanted to celebrate with people who not only knew where Britain was, but also appreciated the significance of this great victory.

  A Reuters terminal in the house would enable us to have the results as soon as they were announced, and the congenial time difference meant that the first ones would be in by eight o’clock. I made a cake and wrote ‘Labour’ on it in almonds, and when I arrived at seven everyone was in good spirits and the party was already lively.

  By nine we were quiet. By ten we were depressed. At eleven-thirty I took a taxi home from the funereal remnants of what should have been a party. At least God gave us a small earthquake that n
ight, out of sympathy. My bed began to vibrate, and I dreamt that I was at the Hotel Valdivia.

  The Columban Sisters I had met in the north had given me the number of their colleagues in the slums of the capital, and when I called them I found that they already knew about me.

  ‘We were expecting you,’ said a cheerful Irish voice. ‘Come over, and stay as long as you like.’

  I took three buses and ended up in a part of town where all the houses looked temporary and which seemed to go on for ever, through miles of identical squalor. Within two hours of closing the door on my newly acquired penthouse I was ringing the bell on the iron gate of a clean and neat two-storey brick house surrounded by high railings.

  ‘Welcome,’ said a white-haired nun who came out to unpadlock the gate. We drank a quick cup of tea with the other nuns and left in a hurry, as it was Palm Sunday, and mass was about to begin.

  We bought crosses made of bunches of herbs from a table in the church courtyard; the modern building was sweet with delicate blue rosemary flowers. It was very crowded, and the priest walked round sprinkling water from an orange plastic washing-up bowl. I was amazed to see a group of guitarists and to recognize most of the hymns as Spanish translations of choruses I had heard in Pentecostal churches in Britain. The congregation waved their crosses enthusiastically and we processed around the block, the guitarists swaying like troubadours and pounding out ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ among the spent glue tubes on the broken roads.