Travels in a Thin Country (17 page)

I woke with burnt and swollen eyelids, presumably the result of falling asleep in the boat. I looked like a
langosta
. It had rained in the night, and my newly washed clothes were damp even though I had left them under the roof of my balcony. I had no others, so after making a pot of tea I tried to dry a pair of knickers over the gas flame. They soon caught fire, inevitably, and Manolo appeared at the window to see me brandishing a pair of flaming pants. Another man on another, larger island might have interpreted this as a gesture of feminist solidarity; but not Manolo.

The Frenchmen arrived at the window next. I had them in to share the tea. The grief-stricken one asked me if I had plans for other expeditions, after Chile. At the time I was plotting a sojourn in the South Seas, and when I told him he said, ‘Would you mind if I came with you?’

I thought about Selkirk as I prepared to leave. He had been roughly my age when he arrived on his island, and he lived alone there, mainly eating goat flesh, for four years and four months. When the
Duke and Duchess
– both Bristolian ships – dropped anchor in February 1709 there was a famous seaman aboard called William Dampier who knew Selkirk and could vouchsafe for his skills as a sailor. So Selkirk went home.

He had taken a Bible onto Más a Tierra, and on his return was often quoted as saying that he ‘believed himself a better Christian while in this solitude than ever he was before, or than, he was afraid, he should ever be again.’ This realization didn’t stop him drinking and whoring his way around Bristol and London for quite some time. (He also said, ‘I am now
worth 800 pounds, but shall never be so happy, as when I was not worth a farthing.’) When he went home to Scotland he built a kind of cave in his parents’ back garden, and down in Bristol he was taken to court for assault. In the end he had to go to sea again; there was a kind of unappeasable unrest within him. On that voyage, he died.

There had been others before him. A reputable account exists of a man called Will from the Mosquito Coast who was abandoned on Juan Fernández by privateers in 1681 and picked up three years later by the
Bachelor’s Delight
. William Dampier was there on that occasion too, and he wrote a touching memoir of Will’s reunion with another Mosquito man who rowed ashore from the ship to greet him. Similarly, a story was handed down about a survivor of a shipwreck, many years before Will, who lived on the island for five years before he too was rescued. It isn’t surprising that they were all rescued: the archipelago was sometimes used as a refitting station after the trip around the Horn.

Defoe, writing machine
par excellence
, transformed Selkirk’s story; it was even relocated thousands of miles away, to a more exotic island somewhere east of Trinidad. He extended Selkirk’s stay to twenty-eight years, and gave him Man Friday. But one sentence he wrote for Crusoe could have been Selkirk’s epitaph: ‘I, that was born to be my own destroyer …’

On my second day on the island I had lost my watch; it had fallen off on the way up a mountain, and I was sorry, as it had a sentimental association. It was valuable, too, and would have raised more cash in Santiago than several hundred
langostas
. As I picked up the carpetbag to board the boat to the airstrip a woman came running up, breathing heavily and holding something out to me.

‘I found this in the forest. It must be yours.’

*

Besides two hundred
langostas
, four islanders were flying to Santiago with me. Watching the plane land, they said,

‘Good, it’s Figueroa.’

‘What,’ I said, ‘can you tell who the pilot is just by looking at the plane coming in?’

‘Of course,’ they replied, as if I were foolish.

One of them was a Jehovah’s Witness. Two-and-three quarter hours of enforced company suited her purpose nicely. I noticed that the other three soon feigned sleep, and the pilot kept his earphones clamped on. Shortly after boarding he had indicated the in-flight facilities with a wave of his hand: a bottle of Johnny Walker wedged behind his seat. I availed myself of this service, and the Jehovah’s Witness fell silent, realizing that she was looking at a lost cause.

I believe in Chile and in her destiny. Other men will survive this bitter and grey moment … sooner than you think avenues shall again be opened down which free man shall march towards a better society … These are my last words. I am convinced that my sacrifice shall not be in vain. I am convinced that at least it shall serve as a moral judgment on the felony, cowardice and treason that lay waste our land.

Salvador Allende, 11 September 1973

I went to visit another Nerudian house while I was still in Santiago, my mid-journey base, and Rowena came with me. It was the most famous one, in Isla Negra, a coastal village a couple of hours’ drive away. The population of Santiago shifts westwards during February and colonizes the coast, which we met at Algarrobo where men were gutting fish on trestle tables on the beach in front of the summer houses and the yacht club, eyed by a large statue of Jesus proclaiming optimistically that he would make them fishers of men.

At Isla Negra we drank coffee at a
hostería
festooned with bougainvillea. A poster in the bar displayed a big photograph of the poet Vicente Huidobro. Neruda would have hated that
–they were terrible enemies. I wondered if that was the tavern immortalized by Antonio Skármeta in his novel and film
Ardiente paciencia
(Burning Patience), which is about a postman in Isla Negra with only one client (Neruda), poetry, and the events of 1973, when the postman was taken away and the poet died; and it is about the power of ordinary people to survive, to overcome and to hope.

The house was built on a high outcrop of rock, overlooking the Pacific. Neruda had a collection there of golden-haired figureheads culled from shipyards. He loved to surround himself with beautiful things, and carried it off with such style; he had a fine aesthetic sensibility which I couldn’t help reflecting is often absent from his poems. The guide, referring reverentially to Don Pablo, waved his hand at numerous framed photographs around the house, and in all of them Neruda bore a striking resemblance to Nabokov. As if he were aware of it he had framed a small collection of butterflies.

To the south one resort village melted into the next, and in Cartagena I forced Rowena to climb with me high above the plethora of shabby boarding-houses and cheap cafès to find Vicente Huidobro’s tomb. He died in 1948, and had chosen for his grave a solitary spot overlooking the dusty green hills and the ocean and surrounded by iridescent violet thistles. It also overlooked the Isla Negra peninsula, on which Nerudian pilgrims converged in their hundreds every day. I hoped he couldn’t see it from wherever he was.

That evening it was warm and clear in Santiago with a light breeze and a brilliantly blue sky even at eight o’clock at night. I met Pepe. A small group of his friends had planned a special dinner in my honour, and we got on a crowded bus and headed south, towards the
poblaciones
where hundreds of thousands of poor Chileans cling to the urban conglomeration.

The friends lived in a five-storey tenement block, and in front of it a pile of plastic rubbish sacks had been ripped open, spilling their glistening innards onto the street. A smiling man in shorts opened the door, and he kissed me on both cheeks. I saw his wife behind him, picking children’s toys off the floor. When we went in, a tray of long pisco sours appeared, and we drank them wedged into the kitchen while Enrique, the man in shorts, prepared three large fish. I could see through an open door that the couple shared a single bed, and that their child slept in the same room. Two more people arrived, arms full of pale orange melons, and the fish were dispatched to the oven.

Conversation turned, as it often did, to the international status of Chile. Everyone always wanted to know what we of the West thought of the country, and it was hard to tell them that the majority of the West never thought of it at all. I often thought that I noticed a kind of national insecurity and identity crisis. Relentless foreign influence in almost all sectors of society presumably contributed to it. Victor Jara, a leftist folk singer murdered in the National Stadium a few days after the coup, said this: ‘The cultural invasion is like a leafy tree which prevents us from seeing our own sun, sky and stars.’ After a newspaper ran a small piece about Jara’s death, the authorities banned his name from the media. But they couldn’t obliterate his spirit. A day or two later, an unknown employee at the television studios inserted a few bars of Jara’s ‘
La Plegaria
’ (The Prayer) over the soundtrack of a US film.

After dinner pisco was supplanted by wine and tobacco by marijuana (most Chileans I met seemed to have a little bag of the latter about their person). They took off Pink Floyd and put on Chilean blues, and two people danced. Later Pepe began reciting a Neruda poem, and the others joined in. They knew it by heart. I couldn’t think of a poem which all the guests at a dinner party in London would know. Pepe and Enrique and their friends were all leftists, and Neruda had
given them hope; he was able to raise their souls above their suffering. He affirmed their identity, too, and made them feel their dreams were valid, dreamt through long years of austerity and exploitation, a rosary of broken promises. Neruda had been an inspiration to many people, not only in Chile. He spoke for the continent. When he was awarded the Nobel Prize he was cited by the Swedish Academy for ‘a poetry that with the action of an elemental force brings alive a continent’s destiny and dreams’. Che Guevara always carried two books in his duffel bag, and one was Neruda’s
Canto general
. He used to read it to his guerillas at night in the Sierra Maestra. Neruda gave them something to cherish, in the Bolivian mountains, and in their tenement blocks.

I liked the idea of him so much that it took me a long time to admit to myself that I didn’t think he was a very good poet. Once I’d read more of his prose I decided I didn’t like him much, either. He was tremendously keen on himself, and had a dubious attitude towards women. He could be amusing (in mid-sentence, in his
Memoirs
, he slips in, ‘… Hitler, the Nixon of that era …’) and, on isolated occasions, painfully moving. He wrote about his grief at the death of his friend Alberto Rojas Giménez, another Chilean poet. It was a particularly searing grief, as Neruda was away in Spain at the time. He describes taking a tall candle to an empty church and sitting watching the flame, drinking a bottle of white wine and feeling that although he didn’t believe, the ‘silent ceremony’ brought him closer to his friend.

Neruda was committed to the idea that a writer should be interested in truth, and that it was more important than style. His poems are not lean; they are fat. He paints word pictures, sometimes with great charm, of things you and I recognize, both from the inner world and the outer, but he does not compress the meaning of language until it vibrates, or take you where you have never been. But a great poet – a Hopkins,
say – wouldn’t have been much good to them, night after grim slum night.

This is what the exiled Argentinian newspaper editor and writer Jacobo Timerman wrote:

Timerman was an exceptionally cultured man.

‘This is what you need to know of our country,’ said Enrique, sliding another cassette into the machine and passing me the case. The label said Violeta Parra, and showed a bad drawing of a woman with large eyes and long black hair.

‘Now our culture is to consume,’ he said. ‘But this is what we were, and we still know it. She sings our north, our south, our centre.’

What she was singing about was pain and betrayal.

Although he was by now quite drunk, I was struck by the words ‘our north,’ ‘our south’ and ‘our centre’ from a man who had barely left the central valley. I had, in my ignorance, looked at the shape of the country, considered the massive social, economic and climatic differences between the north
and the south and concluded that there couldn’t be much of a national consciousness. But the reality was that their sense of nationality bound them together as closely as if the country were a perfect circle.

‘Violeta, Neruda and
La Gabriela
, these are the ones who express what we are,’ said Enrique’s wife, swaying slightly. ‘Their work is an expression of our culture – our real culture.’

When I left, Enrique stood at the door.

‘This country, it has many problems. We want to be more like you. But underneath there is pride. Sometimes it’s difficult for us to find it now, that’s all, because there’s so much junk on top.’

I had been invited to stay in the country for a weekend, and I was pleased to get out of the city again, as Santiago was oppressively hot, and the choking smog had thickened. It was also an opportunity to experience a very different side of Chilean life from everything I had seen up until then.

The bus south west to Peñaflor was too hot. I got off at the red bridge, as I had been instructed, and left the tarmac behind, following a track into a green and sun-flooded valley. An empty corn truck picked me up, and I stood up in the back as it lumbered up a steep dirt road, great bowers of eucalyptus hanging over my head. The flat, squared floor of the central valley shone out, and the Andean foothills beyond it quivered.