My Invented Country (2 page)

L
et's begin at the beginning, with Chile, that remote land that few people can locate on the map because it's as far as you can go without falling off the planet.
Why don't we sell Chile and buy something closer to Paris?
one of our intellectuals once asked. No one passes by casually, however lost he may be, although many visitors decide to stay forever, enamored of the land and the people. Chile lies at the end of all roads, a lance to the south of the south of America, four thousand three hundred kilometers of hills, valleys, lakes, and sea. This is how Neruda describes it in his impassioned poetry:

Night, snow and sand compose the form
of my slender homeland,
all silence is contained within its length,
all foam issues from its seaswept beard,
all coal fills it with mysterious kisses.

This elongated country is like an island, separated on the north from the rest of the continent by the Atacama Desert—the driest in the world, its inhabitants like to say, although that must not be true, because in springtime parts of that lunar rubble tend to be covered with a mantle of
flowers, like a wondrous painting by Monet. To the east rises the cordillera of the Andes, a formidable mass of rock and eternal snows, and to the west the abrupt coastline of the Pacific Ocean. Below, to the south, lie the solitudes of Antarctica. This nation of dramatic topography and diverse climates, studded with capricious obstacles and shaken by the sighs of hundreds of volcanoes, a geological miracle between the heights of the cordillera and the depths of the sea, is unified top to tail by the obstinate sense of nationhood of its inhabitants.

We Chileans still feel our bond with the soil, like the campesinos we once were. Most of us dream of owning a piece of land, if for nothing more than to plant a few worm-eaten heads of lettuce. Our most important newspaper,
El Mercurio,
publishes a weekly agricultural supplement that informs the public in general of the latest insignificant pest found on the potatoes or about the best forage for improving milk production. Its readers, who are planted in asphalt and concrete, read it voraciously, even though they have never seen a live cow.

In the broadest terms, it can be said that my long and narrow homeland can be broken up into four very different regions. The country is divided into provinces with beautiful names, but the military, who may have had difficulty memorizing them, added numbers for identification purposes. I refuse to use them because a nation of poets cannot have a map dotted with numbers, like some mathematical delirium. So let's talk about the four large regions, beginning with the
norte grande,
the “big north” that occupies a fourth of the country; inhospitable and rough, guarded by
high mountains, it hides in its entrails an inexhaustible treasure of minerals.

I traveled to the north when I was a child, and I've never forgotten it, though a half-century has gone by since then. Later in my life I had the opportunity to cross the Atacama Desert a couple of times, and although those were extraordinary experiences, my first recollections are still the strongest. In my memory, Antofagasta, which in Quechua means “town of the great salt lands,” is not the modern city of today but a miserable, out-of-date port that smelled like iodine and was dotted with fishing boats, gulls, and pelicans. In the nineteenth century it rose from the desert like a mirage, thanks to the industry producing nitrates, which for several decades were one of Chile's principal exports. Later, when synthetic nitrate was invented, the port was kept busy exporting copper, but as the nitrate companies began to close down, one after another, the pampa became strewn with ghost towns. Those two words—“ghost town”—gave wings to my imagination on that first trip.

I recall that my family and I, loaded with bundles, climbed onto a train that traveled at a turtle's pace through the inclement Atacama Desert toward Bolivia. Sun, baked rocks, kilometers and kilometers of ghostly solitudes, from time to time an abandoned cemetery, ruined buildings of adobe and wood. It was a dry heat where not even flies survived. Thirst was unquenchable. We drank water by the gallon, sucked oranges, and had a hard time defending ourselves from the dust, which crept into every cranny. Our lips were so chapped they bled, our ears hurt, we were dehydrated. At night a cold hard as glass fell over us, while
the moon lighted the landscape with a blue splendor. Many years later I would return to the north of Chile to visit Chuquicamata, the largest open-pit copper mine in the world, an immense amphitheater where thousands of earth-colored men, working like ants, rip the mineral from stone. The train ascended to a height of more than four thousand meters and the temperature descended to the point where water froze in our glasses. We passed the silent salt mine of Uyuni, a white sea of salt where no bird flies, and others where we saw elegant flamingos. They were brush strokes of pink among salt crystals glittering like precious stones.

The so-called
norte chico,
or “little north,” which some do not classify as an actual region, divides the dry north from the fertile central zone. Here lies the valley of Elqui, one of the spiritual centers of the Earth, said to be magical. The mysterious forces of Elqui attract pilgrims who come there to make contact with the cosmic energy of the universe, and many stay on to live in esoteric communities. Meditation, Eastern religions, gurus of various stripes, there's something of everything in Elqui. It's like a little corner of California. It is also from Elqui that our
pisco
comes, a liquor made from the muscatel grape: transparent, virtuous, and serene as the angelic force that emanates from the land.
Pisco
is the prime ingredient of the
pisco
sour, our sweet and treacherous national drink, which must be drunk with confidence, though the second glass has a kick that can floor the most valiant among us. We usurped the name of this liquor, without a moment's hesitation, from the city of Pisco, in Peru. If any wine with bubbles can
be called champagne, even though the authentic libation comes only from Champagne, France, I suppose our
pisco,
too, can appropriate a name from another nation. The
norte chico
is also home to La Silla, one of the most important observatories in the world, because the air there is so clear that no star—either dead or yet to be born—escapes the eye of its gigantic telescope. Apropos of the observatory, someone who has worked there for three decades told me that the most renowned astronomers in the world wait years for their turn to scour the universe. I commented that it must be stupendous to work with scientists whose eyes are always on infinity and who live detached from earthly miseries, but he informed me that it is just the opposite: astronomers are as petty as poets. He says they fight over jam at breakfast. The human condition never fails to amaze.

The
valle central
is the most prosperous area of the country, a land of grapes and apples, where industries are clustered and a third of the population lives in the capital city. Santiago was founded in 1541 by Pedro de Valdivia. After walking for months through the dry north, it seemed to him that he'd reached the Garden of Eden. In Chile everything is centralized in the capital, despite the efforts of various governments that over the span of half a century have tried to distribute power among the provinces. If it doesn't happen in Santiago, it may as well not happen at all, although life in the rest of the country is a thousand times calmer and more pleasant.

The
zona sur,
the southern zone, begins at Puerto Montt, at 40 degrees latitude south, an enchanted region of forests, lakes, rivers, and volcanoes. Rain and more rain nourishes the
tangled vegetation of the cool forests where our native trees rise tall, ancients of thousand-year growth now threatened by the timber industry. Moving south, the traveler crosses pampas lashed by furious winds, then the country strings out into a rosary of unpopulated islands and milky fogs, a labyrinth of fjords, islets, canals, and water on all sides. The last city on the continent is Punta Arenas, wind-bitten, harsh, and proud; a high, barren land of blizzards.

Chile owns a section of the little-explored Antarctic continent, a world of ice and solitude, of infinite white, where fables are born and men die: Chile ends at the South Pole. For a long time, no one assigned any value to Antarctica, but now we know how many mineral riches it shelters, in addition to being a paradise of marine life, so there is no country that doesn't have an eye on it. In the summertime, a cruise ship can visit there with relative ease, but the price of such a cruise is as the price of rubies, and for the present, only rich tourists and poor but determined ecologists can make the trip.

In 1888 Chile annexed the Isla de Pascua, mysterious Easter Island,
the navel of the world,
or Rapanui, as it is called in the natives' language. The island is lost in the immensity of the Pacific Ocean, 2,500 miles from continental Chile, more or less six hours by jet from Valparaíso or Tahiti. I am not sure why it belongs to us. In olden times, a ship captain planted a flag, and a slice of the planet became legally yours, regardless of whether that pleased its
inhabitants, in this case peaceful Polynesians. This was the practice of European nations, and Chile could not lag behind. For the islanders, contact with South America was fatal. In the mid-nineteenth century, most of the male population was taken off to Peru to work as slaves in the guano deposits, while Chile shrugged its shoulders at the fate of its forgotten citizens. The treatment those poor men received was so bad that it caused an international protest in Europe, and, after a long diplomatic struggle, the last fifteen survivors were returned to their families. Those few went back infected with small pox, and within a brief time the illness exterminated eighty percent of the natives on the island. The fate of the remainder was not much better. Imported sheep ate the vegetation, turning the landscape into a barren husk of lava, and the negligence of the authorities—in this case the Chilean navy—drove the inhabitants into poverty. Only in the last two decades, tourism and the interest of the world scientific community have rescued Rapanui.

Scattered across the Easter Island are monumental statues of volcanic stone, some weighing more than twenty tons. These
moais
have intrigued experts for centuries. To sculpt them on the slopes of the volcanoes and then drag them across rough ground, to erect them on often-inaccessible bases and place hats of red stone atop them, was the task of titans. How was it done? There are no traces of an advanced civilization that can explain such prowess. Two different groups populated the island. According to legend, one of those groups, the Arikis, had supernatural mental powers, which they used to levitate the
moais
and transport them,
floating effortlessly, to their altars on the steep slopes. What a tragedy that this technique has been lost to the world! In 1940, the Norwegian anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl built a balsa raft, which he christened
Kon Tiki,
and sailed from South America to Easter Island to prove that there had been contact between the Incas and the Easter Islanders.

I traveled to Easter Island in the summer of 1974, when there was only one flight a week and tourism was nearly nonexistent. Enchanted, I stayed three weeks longer than I had planned, and thus happened to be on the spot when the first television broadcast was celebrated with a visit by General Pinochet, who had led the military junta that had replaced Chile's democracy some months earlier. The television was received with more enthusiasm than the brand-new dictator. The general's stay was extremely colorful, but this isn't the time to go into those details. It's enough to say that a mischievous little cloud strategically hovered above his head every time he wanted to speak in public, leaving him wringing wet and limp as a dishrag. He had come with the idea of delivering property titles to the islanders, but no one was terribly interested in receiving them, since from the most ancient times everyone has known exactly what belongs to whom. They were afraid, and rightly so, that the only use for that piece of government paper would be to complicate their lives.

Chile also owns the island of Juan Fernández, where the Scots sailor Alexander Selkirk, the inspiration for Daniel Defoe's novel
Robinson Crusoe,
was set ashore by his captain in 1704. Selkirk lived on the island for more than four years—without a domesticated parrot or the company of a
native named Friday, as portrayed in the novel—until he was rescued by another captain and returned to England, where his fate did not exactly improve. The determined tourist, after a bumpy flight in a small airplane or an interminable trip by boat, can visit the cave where the Scotsman survived by eating herbs and fish.

Being so far from everything gives us Chileans an insular mentality, and the majestic beauty of the land makes us take on airs. We believe we are the center of the world—in our view, Greenwich should have been set in Santiago—and we turn our backs on Latin America, always comparing ourselves instead to Europe. We are very self-centered: the rest of the universe exists only to consume our wines and produce soccer teams we can beat.

My advice to the visitor is not to question the marvels he hears about my country, its wine, and its women, because the foreigner is not allowed to criticize—for that we have more than fifteen million natives who do that all the time. If Marco Polo had descended on our coasts after thirty years of adventuring through Asia, the first thing he would have been told is that our
empanadas
are much more delicious than anything in the cuisine of the Celestial Empire. (Ah, that's another of our characteristics: we make statements without any basis, but in a tone of such certainty that no one doubts us.) I confess that I, too, suffer from that chilling chauvinism. The first time I visited San Francisco, and there before my eyes were those gentle golden hills, the majesty of
forests, and the green mirror of the bay, my only comment was that it looked a lot like the coast of Chile. Later I learned that the sweetest fruit, the most delicate wines, and the finest fish are imported from Chile. Naturally.