Travels in a Thin Country (5 page)

A cockerel crowed, but it was a very old cockerel, and half way through his wheezy crow collapsed into a rasping cough. A small dairy farm coalesced out of the gloom. A man was chasing cows around a pen. Simón woke up with a snort, cross at having slept too long. He shouted at Rodríguez, spat on the floor of the cab, got out and stumbled around outside in the cold, climbing into the adjacent trucks and waking his colleagues. We left in a hurry with a lot of loud farting, past the man who had been chasing cows, standing now in the sunlight concentrating on a mirror hanging on a gatepost and working at his chin with a cutthroat razor.

It was no surprise when the three trucks pulled over half a mile further on. Everyone got out and started shouting. I learnt a few Bolivian swear words and figured out that the Chileans operated a weighbridge at the Poconchile customs post. Any Bolivian truck over a certain tonnage was required to pay stiff excess charges. The lumber trucks were way off-limits, and had no means of paying the charges – the plan had been to pass Poconchile before the weighbridge operators arrived at work. But the truckers had overslept, and were going to have to idle on the side of the road until nightfall, and cross the customs post in the dark, when it was unmanned.

It was tacitly and mutually understood that we had to part company. I reckoned we were about twenty-five miles from Arica. Despite the fact that I had a hard slog ahead of me to any kind of settlement, with only a brief period of pleasant air temperature between extreme cold and extreme heat, I couldn’t tolerate another stultifying day getting nowhere with the Bolivians. Simón was displaying pointed indifference towards me. He felt the rebuff of the previous night, and the delay meant that he had a problem with his schedule, so didn’t want to be bothered fussing around a gringa. My bag wasn’t very heavy, and I was fairly confident that another, better organized Bolivian truck would pass, and pick me up. If it
didn’t, I could probably break the journey at Poconchile.

As I left, Simón belched loudly. I set off along the deserted road through the Lluta valley, returning the occasional wave from straw-hatted figures intent on their fields. It was warm by the time I reached the weighbridge five or six miles further on, but the pale light of morning still hung over the valley. The weighers waved me through, grinning, and soon another Bolivian stopped for me, smirking with delight that cunning redistribution of his load of timber a hundred yards up the road had secured him a clear passage over the rudimentary Chilean weighbridge.

The remoter reaches of the north Chilean Andes require a four-wheel drive jeep, and Hertz produced one for me for the next leg of the journey, the first of many of their vehicles which conveyed me to the more difficult areas of the incontiguous Chilean landscape. My plan was to go inland again before I left the far north, which meant I was descending the country in a zigzag. There were tracts of volcanic land near the Bolivian border post of Colchane which people told me were inaccessible. That was like catnip to me.

Another gringo was heading south, so I asked him if he wanted to join me on the mountain trip. Matthew was a tall, skinny Australian in his mid-thirties who worked as a computer programmer when he wasn’t travelling, and we had shared a meal together three or four times in Arica. He was quick-witted, with a touch of pedantry about him, and always knew exactly what he thought, a trait which makes me cautious. But he was open and friendly, with a highly developed sense of humour, and he was game for anything. His Spanish was good, and he made a great effort with the Chileans. Whenever someone asked him where he was from, he used to put his hands in the begging dog position, crouch over and hop around impersonating a kangaroo.

We loaded up with essentials such as water, emergency provisions and ten gallons of spare fuel, and set out down an empty Panamerican, windows down and a dubious Australian cassette marked ‘various artists’ batting out of the speakers. We travelled at our own pace on a good road through trembling mauve mountains, smooth caramel desert and swathes of red and brown pampa, at one point required to abandon the fruit in our bags at a pest control ‘fruit check’. Matthew was handed a receipt for an orange, and wondered whether it would enable him to claim the fruit back on a return trip. Passports, driving licences and sundry documents were pored over. In the police room they had erected a board displaying photos of smashed cars and corpses.

We stopped to climb in the crispy heat to the human geoglyph at Chiza, picking among limbs like Gulliver on Brobdingnag. The hot wind stuck in our throats. When we got back in the jeep I put on a Ry Cooder tape: it was perfect desert music. Time dissolved in those empty spaces, and hours passed that afternoon without us noticing them go. Later we searched a valley below the road for a nineteenth-century British cemetery, a lonely memorial to the families who came out to make their fortunes from Chilean nitrates. Invisible dogs started barking when we drew up outside a solitary house, and an old man standing on the porch squinted at us. He guessed what we wanted, waving in the direction of the mountains, and beyond a small oasis, on the opposite side of a sandy wasteland, we found an arched iron gate.

Little children called Amy and Hubert had died before they had learnt their own names. The climate had killed off most of the settlers’ children; on one porous headstone I read the names of four brothers under two years old. They must have hated it there, those Victorians, with their layers of clothes and their inhibiting Britishness, and at that moment, the sun high and the tall tombstones casting no shadow, I hated it too; it
was murderous. I put a desert flower on a cracked flagstone, and as I turned to leave I saw an inscription. It was from the sixteenth chapter of Numbers. It said, ‘Is it a small thing that thou hast brought us up out of a land that floweth with milk and honey, to kill us in the wilderness, except thou make thyself altogether a prince over us?’

The owner of the house was waiting when we returned to the jeep, and he introduced himself as Señor Keith, the Chilean grandson of an Irishman and his Scottish wife who had pitched up in 1875. His great uncle had been big in nitrates, and the pine walls of the house were hung with dusty photographs of flourishing mines. Señor Keith, who couldn’t speak a word of English but referred to me as his
compatriota
, said I looked like Jackie Kennedy, and called me Jackie while we drank tea; she wouldn’t have been very flattered by the comparison, and Matthew laughed immoderately.

We pressed on down the Panamerican, past the turning to Pisagua, where mass graves, dug during the dictatorship, were discovered in 1990. The uncovering of mass graves became a fairly common occurrence after democracy was restored in March of that year. Following one such discovery, Pinochet was asked what he thought of the fact that several unidentified corpses had been found stuffed into one grave. He said, ‘What economy!’

Turning inland, we tackled forty-three miles of poor road, hoping to end up at Camiña, a mountain village which one of the maps confidently told us offered accommodation. ‘Turning off the Panamerican’ was to become as much of a concept as a road direction. It meant starting to travel, rather than simply getting from somewhere to somewhere else; it meant being free to move as slowly as I wanted (or constrained to move much slower than I would have liked), and it meant a dramatic deterioration in the quality of the road. Nowhere was it more apparent than up there in the baked, dead desert that
the Panamerican was the umbilicus of Chile, and you strayed from it at your peril.

We picked up a farmer and his wife, walking from their square of land on the valley floor to a meeting at a Seventh Day Adventist church. I was amazed to find this church in what I had thought were the Catholic heartlands.

The track ran next to a drop of several hundred feet. When it got dark we felt dwarfed by the black cliffs and prolific constellations, and we didn’t speak for a long time, listening to the engine, willing it to keep going. Matthew produced a Talking Heads tape, and the first song was ‘We’re on a Road to Nowhere’. It was very, very black. At about ten o’clock a light flickered in the foothills. Matthew punched the air. It was Camiña.

The guesthouse really did exist, but two men stirring a tureen in its open-air kitchen explained indifferently that the owner was away and all the rooms were locked. We sought assistance at the mayor’s house (an old trick), and the incumbent, a well-fed man of Pickwickian geniality, listened to our story, took a key from a hook next to his front door and led us to an unoccupied adobe cottage on the other side of the street. ‘Have you got candles?’, he asked, scratching his crotch. We had, and we fetched them from the jeep and followed him inside, seeing off several dozen mice. Matthew lit the candles, and we sat on two camp beds positioned in the middle of the front room.

The mayor eyed a mouse in the corner. ‘I hope you’ll be comfortable here,’ he said, his expression indicating that he thought this was unlikely. ‘When you leave, pay me whatever you like. If you want food, ask for Violeta at the top of the street. Er, I’ll be off now.’

In the absence of a single bar, café or restaurant in Camiña, Violeta, whom we visited later, cooked for anyone ‘passing through’. (This must have constituted an extremely erratic
income, as I shouldn’t imagine more than a dozen people passed through in any one decade.) She ushered us into a room built of unpainted concrete blocks and furnished only with three high-backed chairs and a table covered with a plastic cloth. As we waited, five or six men came in, shook our hands and exclaimed loudly and unintelligibly, whether to each other or to us, we did not know.

Violeta brought the meal in. It consisted of boiled rice with a crusty fried egg on it, stale bread and coffee substitute made out of barley (the latter produced by Nestlé, like so many products which enter the Chilean mouth). It was at this stage that Matthew revealed that he had forgotten to buy the wine. We had divided the labour preparations for the trip between us, and the purchase of water, salt tablets and wine had fallen to Matthew. He casually remembered this omission when I asked for the jeep keys so I could fetch the first bottle. He seemed to think it was some small matter. I saw him in a different light after that.

We breakfasted in the bare room, now throbbing with sunlight, on condensed milk, still moulded in the shape of the tin and served in a blue plastic dish with two teaspoons, and the same bread, eight hours staler, though eight hours constituted such a small percentage of its life that the difference in taste was negligible. Afterwards we settled our account in the shared courtyard at the back of the house, where we found our hostess turning a mangle in the middle of a scene of Brueghelian vigour, fires smoking and dented kettles steaming, small children playing with empty tins, babies crawling on dried mud, women kneading, men drinking beer and a policeman fiddling with a gun in a corner.

Before leaving the village we visited the church on the square, replete with the obligatory garlanded statues and plastic accoutrements beloved of South American popular
religion. The building had been under more or less permanent restoration since 1935. Two men working on the flagged floor told us that there was a shortage of sand for the cement to lay the stone tiles. We thought it was a queer thing to be short of in a desert. Next to a Pentecostal chapel around the corner we found a shop resembling a large wardrobe, and stocked up on provisions: tins of salmon, suspiciously familiar hard bread and a kilo of wrinkled apples.

Next to the track we followed into the mountains villagers were clearing garlic fields while their alpacas, tied to adjacent tree trunks, stared impassively into the middle distance. We began a long, slow ascent up a serpentine and precipitous dirt road in candent tropical heat, both glancing regularly at the temperature gauge of the jeep, a snappy Japanese model called Rocky which didn’t seem to mind the conditions as much as we did.

The road degenerated. The land we wanted to reach, around the Isluga National Park, was still many hours ahead of us, and Rocky got a puncture; the sun seemed particularly malevolent while we were fixing it. After a side track down to a place called Nama which didn’t feature on any of the maps the road deteriorated exponentially until it resembled a casually discarded trail of large and sharp stones. A sign for drivers coming the other way warned of the perils of illegally importing fruit from Bolivia. Anyone who had made it along that road from Bolivia deserved an endurance medal. We had already used our spare tyre, and we didn’t fancy the axle’s chances. I was instinctively in favour of continuing, but Matthew, always the pragmatist, persuaded me that we should turn back and try to reach the park from another angle. In a spirit of appeasement he suggested that we visit Nama, on the valley floor three miles below us. I was bitterly disappointed, and we drove in silence.

A casual remark which eventually broke this silence led to
an argument over the future tense of an irregular Spanish verb. Matthew stopped the jeep in order to get the dictionary out of the back, but I had left it under my camp bed. When he got back in, he shut his foot in the door.

At Nama we parked outside a small, newish bungalow. A young woman wearing jeans came out. ‘Hi’, she said. I was afraid Matthew was going to ask her about the verb. The woman told us that she was the village teacher, and showed us the school, which was in the bungalow. She had twelve pupils, and there was a framed photograph of Pinochet on the wall next to their crayon drawings of themselves. Matthew and I glanced at each other furtively as we stood in front of this sinister juxtaposition; the teacher said she wasn’t allowed to take the photograph down, but didn’t elaborate, and the moment passed.

A sign on a decrepit building next to the school said ‘
MUSEO
’. The teacher told a loitering child to run and fetch the man in charge of it, who duly arrived, followed by two associates, and this triumvirate shook our hands and observed us closely as we perused the two small rooms of the museum. Someone had handwritten a catalogue in an exercise book. A mummified woman was propped up against a small adobe house, fleshless fingers clutching a
zampoña
, a musical instrument like panpipes. One of the old men took it from her, and gave us a tune.