Travels in a Thin Country (37 page)

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.

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 night, 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.

I stayed in the slums for ten days, moving from house to house wherever I was invited to spread my sleeping bag. In the poky shops (there were no supermarkets) I wasn’t surprised to see people purchasing single cigarettes; I had observed this
practice many times in southern Europe. They caught me out, however, when they counted their peso coins to buy one teabag and three matches. Much later, I learnt that the single teabag routine had been used by the opposition parties in the 1988 election campaign. They had made a television commercial showing a Chilean woman buying one teabag in a corner shop.

Nobody lived in a cardboard box. All the houses I visited had sanitation. Acute poverty is less visible in urban Chile than in the shanty towns of Brazil and Peru – but it is no less deadly. Chronic unemployment and chronic overcrowding lead to endemic social dysfunction and endemic misery; I didn’t have to look far to see that. Substance abuse, alcohol abuse, drug-related crime and wife-beating were commonplace. Petty thieving to finance addiction was simply a part of daily life. The nuns told me that in one chapel the toilets had been stolen three times and that they had to take the taps off the sinks when they locked up. The local drugrunning ringleader was in prison standing trial for murdering a mourner at a funeral party, so at least life was quieter; the nuns had learnt to be grateful for such things.

According to the United Nations, 5 million Chileans (almost 40 per cent of the population) live in poverty, and 1.7 million in ‘absolute poverty’. In that suburb there was no hospital, and one chemist serviced many thousands of people. There was no school for the over-fourteens; those sufficiently dedicated had to take long bus journeys into the centre of the city.

What they enjoyed in abundance were off-licences, and these remained open till three in the morning (the chemist shut at nine-thirty in the evening). There were also plenty of bars, though few of them were legal: most people drank in dens called
clandestinos
. Two or three times I was invited into one of these stygian rooms smelling of wine and marijuana. I never saw another woman there; women were part of the
despair the men were erasing. Although I was always made welcome, I felt uncomfortable in the
clandestinos
, as if I had strayed too far into their vortex of poverty.

I talked to some of the young people about politics, but they had no passion; they were tired before their time. A decade or two earlier those communities had been powerhouses of political energy. No one had any confidence in politics anymore; the junta’s programme of depoliticization might have ultimately failed, but to a certain extent it had succeeded in weakening the general will to resist, and along with Chile’s imported consumer culture it had stifled the imaginations of the disaffected youth.

I stayed for three days with a young woman called Evelyn. One of the nuns had introduced us. Evelyn was a committed member of the local church, and she was open, good-natured and always cheerful; the latter quality was particularly humbling as the youngest of her three children had gone blind at the age of one. Pablito was three now, and he was always with her. She didn’t have any money, as her husband had been unemployed for six years. He skulked around the house during the day doing what Evelyn called d-i-y but which looked to me like nothing. The family lived in a lean-to on the side of Evelyn’s in-laws’ small brick house. One day she took me to her church to meet the priest.

‘He’s like you – Australian, or North American, I forget which. Most of the priests we get round here are foreign. Chileans don’t like the job. The foreign ones help us a lot, you know, they don’t just do churchy things, they get involved in our lives and problems. Then the bishops get nasty about it – they think we’re being too political. What do I care about the bishops?’

The priest was an Australian in his thirties, and looked like a teddy bear. I asked him why there were so many foreign priests.

‘A lot of reasons. After Cuba the Pope made a formal request to orders abroad asking them to send 10 per cent of their priests to Latin America. It’s caused a lot of trouble – suspicions and that. There’s been years of argument about where foreign money to the Church comes from, too. I mean, besides the fact that here you have an institution in a critically dependent situation, you also had self-confessed CIA front organizations working with groups within the Church.’

‘So it’s a political thing – the left don’t like you?’