Travels in a Thin Country (2 page)

I told Salvador that my Spanish had gone rusty, and that anyway it was the Spanish spoken in Spain.

‘Well, you must learn a new Spanish! Do you want everything to be easy?’

Duly chastened, I persuaded Linguaphone to sponsor the project by donating a Latin American Spanish course and shut myself away with it for three hours a day for the first month. One afternoon, at the lido, I surprised Salvador with it.

‘You have to go and see for yourself now,’ he said.

I left three months later, to the day. I was anxious that the trip should be a natural progression from one end of the country to the other, but I was obliged to fly to Santiago, the capital, which was unhelpfully situated in the middle.

‘Make it your base camp!’ said an enthusiastic adviser, so I did.

I had been invited, via a mutual friend in London, to stay with Simon Milner and Rowena Brown of the British Council. They met me at the airport, she sitting on the barrier and smiling, holding a sign with my name on, and as we walked
together through the harshly lit hall and the automatic glass doors and into the soft, warm air, fragrant with bougainvillea, she put her arm around my shoulder and her face close to mine and she said:

‘Your Chile begins here. Welcome.’

Simon and Rowena were about my age, and had been in Santiago for a year, living in a penthouse on the thirteenth floor of a well-kept block of flats set among manicured lawns and acacia trees in the north of the city. It wasn’t really their style – I had the idea that they thought it was quite a joke – but it was clear that they loved their Chilean posting, and their enthusiasm steadied my wobbling courage. I nurtured a sense of arrival for a day or two, contemplating the Andes on one side and the urban maw on the other from their spacious and safe balconies. When I did venture out I found a city discharging the usual international urban effluents – exhaust fumes to McDonald’s hamburgers – though it had a delightful insouciance about it which was quintessentially South American, and it was impossible to imagine I was in Rome or Amsterdam or Chicago. I badly wanted to explore, but I was too impatient for the journey to begin; the city would wait.

I was going to save Santiago until its proper place, half-way down the country, so after two indolent days I bought a bus ticket to the far north. The plan was to travel up to the Peruvian border straightaway, in one leap, and then work my way south, leaving the continent right at the bottom and crossing over to the slice of Antarctica claimed by Chile – though I had no idea how I was going to do that. I was also determined to visit the small Chilean archipelago called Juan Fernández, half-way down, four hundred miles out in the Pacific and the prison-home of the original Robinson Crusoe. I had two arrangements to meet up with people from London, one in the north, which would coincide with Christmas, and one in the south, and these I saw as punctuation marks on the journey.

The only big decision I had made – to leave Santiago immediately – was almost instantly overturned. A South African photographer called Rhonda telephoned to say that she was working on a feature about a sex hotel for a London magazine and had been let down by the journalist doing the words: could I step in? The subject was irresistible, though a bizarre introduction to the complex and apparently paradoxical Catholic moral code, so I changed my ticket and stayed an extra day.

Alongside the shifting sands of Santiago’s public and private lives stands an institution of such permanence that it is difficult to imagine the city without it. Inscrutable and silent, its patrons anonymous but its services widely appreciated, the Hotel Valdivia is the example
par excellence
of what is inaccurately known as a love hotel, a concept inured in Japan but perfected west of the Andes. Rhonda had made an appointment with the manager of the Valdivia at ten the next morning, and she told me that I would have to pose as her assistant, as the man had specified photographs only; he didn’t want anybody writing anything. She had only wheedled her way that far round him by promising she would never sell the pictures to any paper or magazine within Chile.

The hotel was disguised as a discreet private mansion, and I was obliged to ask a man in a kiosk for directions. He winked at me, and leered a spooky leer. I met Rhonda in the street outside the hotel. She was about my age, was wearing army fatigues, and she gave me an affectionate slap on the back. At ten o’clock exactly a young woman scuttled out of the hotel, sideways, like a cockroach, and hustled us in.

‘We don’t like people waiting in the street,’ she said. ‘It attracts attention.’

She showed us into a small, windowless office where a man in his mid-thirties wearing a dark suit and a herbaceous tie stood up to shake our hands and introduce himself as Señor
Flores. He didn’t look like a sleazebag at all; I was disappointed. His hair was neatly parted, and he had frilled the edge of a silk hanky half an inch above the lip of his breast pocket. He reminded me of an insurance salesman who used to live next door to us in Bristol. There were two photographs of brightly dressed children and a smiling wife on his desk, and four enthusiastically executed oil paintings of rural scenes hanging behind him which I feared were his own work. A VDU stood on one side of the desk, and neatly stacked piles of paper on the other.

I was introduced as Rhonda’s assistant, and Señor Flores meticulously copied down the details on our presscards. Rhonda asked a question. Señor Flores clasped his hands in front of him, narrowed his eyes and looked earnest.

‘We take a great pride in the authenticity of our rooms’, he said. ‘We have fifty-four, each a different theme. We have to get it right – I mean, we might get an Egyptologist here, and he could complain or not come back if he noticed that the hieroglyphics in the Egyptian Suite were wrong.

‘We employ indoor gardeners to get the flora right and landscape designers for the waterfalls,’ he continued confidently, ‘and we have created a microclimate in each suite.’

When Rhonda suggested a tour, Señor Flores led us through an open courtyard to a series of drive-in cubicles. ‘A curtain is drawn behind each car,’ he explained, ‘so that the driver cannot be seen when he gets out. Our main aim is to protect the privacy of our clients.’

Most of them checked in as Juan Peres, the Hispanic John Smith. The cubicles opened onto booths upholstered in grey velour, whence a corridor of straw-matting partitions led to the rooms. The whole complex was covered with a perspex dome.

The lobby of the Egyptian Suite revealed a flight of stairs with a banister inlaid with bronze, and alongside it a ten-foot
waterfall sprayed a fine mist over tropical vegetation. Señor Flores hurried ahead to turn on the dimmed lights and Egyptian music. The room had a sauna off one side (saunas, I would learn, are closely associated with sex in the Chilean mind), a minibar cunningly concealed in a Sphinx, and, past the huge bed, a jacuzzi with little Pharaoh heads on the taps. Behind the jacuzzi someone had painted an elaborate mural of feluccas sailing down a river in front of a sandy landscape dotted with pyramids. The standard of workmanship was excellent; I had expected a plastic tack-palace.

I had forgotten that I was a photographer’s assistant. I thought Señor Flores might be suspicious, so I fiddled with a tripod leg. Later I asked Rhonda if she would like me to go out and get her a coffee. She looked at me as if I were barking mad.

The jacuzzi and waterfall in the Blue Lagoon Room had been niftily fused together, and two digital light panels were set into industrial-sized ceramic butterflies. The sound of parrots chattering emanated from a speaker disguised as a banana tree, and a stained-glass parrot panel concealed a bidet. This was the only room offering a vibrating bed, and Señor Flores switched it on and sat on it. He told us that it also lifted up at the top, and at the bottom, and demonstrated by zapping both ends up at once. The movement reminded me of a dentist’s chair. I wondered why anyone would pay money for the use of a V-shaped bed, but Rhonda told me later that the idea was to raise either one end or the other, and that Señor Flores had only put both up at once to show us the range of options. She seemed to know a lot about it.

The Indianapolis Room had a car in it. The Arabian Room had a minaret above the bed. The Inside of a Snail Suite (an oblique appeal, I thought) was spotted with flashing red lights and furnished with gold sofas and so many mirrors that I had to lie on the floor holding the flashgun. I got a headache.

Back in the office Señor Flores spoke authoritatively about cleanliness, even describing the special fungal cleaner run through the jacuzzi pipes. The hotel employed eighty full-time staff as well as a phalanx of freelance workmen, and the busiest periods were lunchtimes and Friday nights.

Señor Flores took a clear moral position. Pornographic videos were off-limits, no one under twenty-one was admitted and the only combination allowed in each room was one man and one woman. He claimed that many clients were married to each other.

‘The subterfuge and excitement inject new life into their marriage,’ he said, ‘especially for the women.’

Dream on, I thought. I must have begun to think aloud, because Rhonda stood on my foot. He used the phrase ‘Disneyworld for couples’.

‘What we are trying to do,’ he continued, now in full throttle, ‘is create the right atmosphere between a man and a woman. We employ a psychologist for this purpose in the design of each room.’

This was a man with a social mission, the Mother Teresa of the mattress.

When we stood up to go he produced two black carrier bags from behind his desk.

‘Souvenirs for you,’ he beamed.

He escorted us to the door, shook our hands and kissed our cheeks; I thought he might invite us home for tea to meet the family.

We couldn’t wait to see what was in the bags. As soon as we got round the corner, blinking in the glare of a Santiago noon, we unwrapped the long thin objects sticking out of the top. They were porcelain vases. Each bag also contained a cigarette lighter, ashtray, pen, keyring and even a T-shirt, all tastefully proclaiming ‘Hotel Valdivia’.

It was an odd marketing concept, that people would display
their allegiance to a knocking-shop, even if it was a high-class one.

I spent one more day in Santiago before starting my journey, as I remembered that I had to buy a camera. I had achieved the feat of having all my valuables stolen before my plane landed in Chile. Air Portugal had been kind enough to upgrade me from London to Rio; there we parted company, I to pass eight hours in a champagne-induced fog of misery waiting for a connection. An hour before my plane was scheduled to leave for Santiago I tried to elicit information as to how I might check in. Nobody knew anything about the flight. Then someone started paging me. I could hear my name being repeated, followed by a jabber of Brazilian Portuguese, so I approached random officials and said, ‘I am Sara Wheeler’, pointing at the air to make a connection with the announcement. A woman directed me to the Ladies.

I got on the plane in the end. There was a doctor next to me, the second Chilean I had ever talked to properly. He was very short and stout, and I was surprised; subconsciously I must have been expecting them all to be tall and thin. He turned out to be a weatherman with the national television company. I wondered what he told his viewers each day. ‘Tomorrow it will be cold in the south, much, much hotter in the north, and warm in the middle’? He pointed down to the corrugated brown Andes and took a slug of Scotch.

‘Look. The mountains cut us off, like a sea. My country is an island!’

My luggage appeared in Santiago, which was a pleasant surprise, and within an hour of arrival I was sitting on a balcony in Las Condes with a gin in my hand. Very late that night, after Simon and Rowena had gone to bed, I opened the carpetbags and discovered that my camera, flash unit, short-wave radio, dictaphone and minicassettes had been stolen –
presumably while the bags languished on some runway in Rio. I felt stricken with loss by the disappearance of the radio; the patrician voices of the World Service had often sustained me in places that felt a long way from home.

Lying in bed I remembered that the cassettes were old ones I had been planning on recording over. They had on them a series of interviews with Tory ministers’ wives I had done for a newspaper. I wondered what the robbers would make of them.

The night before I finally left town I met Germán Claro Lyon for the first time. Two separate people in London had put me in touch with him; he was a renegade mover and shaker from one of the most august Chilean families. I had sent him a fax before I left London, and he had replied immediately telling me to call him when I arrived. I didn’t get round to it until I was about to go north, and I told him I’d ring when I was next in the city. But he wasn’t having any of that: he came to pick me up at nine that evening and took me on a tour of drinking dens.

Most of the places we visited were chic, North American style bars in the fashionable and rich districts. The barmen nodded at Germán. He was in his mid-thirties, over six feet tall (rare for a Chilean) and quite handsome, in a raddled kind of way. For ten years he had been running his family’s sixteenth-century hacienda as a luxurious country house hotel; it was an hour or two south of Santiago, but he lived in the city and had an office on Providencia, one of the main streets. He had never married. Once, immediately after a characteristic volley of laughter, he said, looking very serious, ‘I don’t have many friends. I prefer that.’ He was outspoken, and not very tolerant, and had some unfortunate habits, like always quarrelling with waiters and not listening to what other people said. Germán loathed small talk. He was insecure about his
lack of formal education, and didn’t realise what a good mind he had and how effectively he applied it to his work. He was difficult, there was no doubt about that, and badly stressed all the time, which often made him over-critical; it was a great tragedy, as really he was as soft as a marshmallow.

We ended up sitting in a restaurant next to a large pig on a spit at four in the morning, out of cigarettes (he chain-smoked). I remember him signing the cheque for dinner with an oversize Mont Blanc fountain pen. By the time I woke the doorman to let me into Simon and Rowena’s block of flats it was five o’clock, and my bus left at eight.