Sweeter Than All the World (44 page)

July 25 is my saint’s day, Anne. In the Eastern Church tradition they say Saint Anne was the wife of Joachim and mother of Mary of Nazareth. All I needed to do was drop the Green Gables
e
.

And Spanish is the most necessary second language in the southern hemisphere, which is big enough for any lifetime of disappearance.

“But why learn Spanish in Australia, of all places?” Jorge asked me, and I brushed it away with a laugh and a question myself: “Well, why are you teaching it here?” And he growled, “That’s easy—exile by our glorious Generalissimo Perro-chet!” He had already taught me enough to understand his mispronunciation of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s name in that twisted pun, “General Dog-shit,” and our burst of laughter was loud, even for a harbour bar during the Sydney January Festival.

But today is December, the unavoidable festival is Christmas, and I am in Santiago where Jorge refuses to return as long as the General is alive. At a street kiosk among the streaming shoppers on the Paseo Ahumeda, “the capital city’s main pedestrian throughfare” as the
Lonely Planet
guidebook informs me, I choose a map of Chile for its title,
Travel Vision Map, Rutero Chileno
. A thin booklet for an extremely long, dagger-thin country, its tip buried in the ice heart of Antarctica at Polo Sur. I need vision, perhaps there is one here, why have I never walked in Chile before? Why only Peru and Ecuador, even the close tip of Argentina (Mennonite Paraguay is more than easy to avoid). And as I count out 2,900 pesos—ten Australian dollars, or Canadian too, if it still mattered—I feel fingertips touch my arm: a woman
in the vicious sun of the street’s canyon. Her slender hand offers me a paper. Before I look up at her, I sense like breathing that her face will be worn grey from staring at it:

“My dearest Josepha.” And then the single English sentence explains that “All my Love! John,” is now at home and he will not be able to return to her from the United States. Dearest indeed. The woman’s black eyes, so beautiful with tears about to slip over her ivory skin.
“Schade,”
I apologize quickly, and hand the paper back.
“Ich spreche nur alemán.”

The wide, flowing Santiago street shrieks with voices, diesels roar and fume at crosswalks, vendors offer everlasting Coca-Cola and empanadas
fritas
. Under plastic shelters down the middle of the crowds street painters swiftly smear canvases with snow-lined peaks, bucolic forests. A barrier wall is sprayed:
“Pinochet asesino”
and below it, trailing into the broken sidewalk,
“Clinton asesino igual que Pinochet”
an elementary political debate neither the daily
El Mercurio
nor
El Epocha
will ever make public. Over the heads jostling past I can barely recognize the square surround of the classic Spanish Plaza de Armas: one side of its park has been ripped out into a gigantic hole swarming with yellow-helmeted workers who are filling it in again, slowly, with the concrete and black steel prongs of a subway extension. But beyond that devastation, the plaza fountain still sprays and drips under superb, giant trees. Around the fountain Santa Clauses sit with sweating children on their laps in cardboard sleighs attached to wooden reindeer, and from high in the gnarled pepper trees, dangling pods like giant ebony earrings, “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer” resounds with a Tex-Mex rhythm—inescapable—I slip by, shove, manoeuvre myself away.

Beside the steps of the cathedral the thick crowd eddies
around a small space: two Mapuche grandmothers tap a hand drum, quietly, relentless as a clock beating. “Return Our Land” says their sign wrapped in weathered plastic. In 1541 their ancestors very nearly obliterated Pedro de Valdivia and the town he first laid out on this very spot in Spanish squares, but as Jorge always said, with Europeans in the Western hemisphere nearly was never enough, not nearly. And even completely is inevitably reversed sometime.

Nothing is forever, he told me, not even time.

And I find a high, amazing silence. Arched, cavernous Catedral Metropolitana built on the sometimes shaking earth of faith in Santiago del Nuevo Extremo, as they still called this place in 1745. So mercilessly far from the beneficent Santiago de Compostela of pilgrimage Spain that you had to pass through the ocean hells of Tierra del Fuego to settle among its earthquakes; the terror of God’s shuddering, arbitrary and fathomless wrath.

Nevertheless, on this afternoon of Christmas Eve, 1995, the tile floor does not suddenly crumple, the immense pillars lean and split. I hear only an infant laughing, delicate as a scatter of beads in the near darkness of this world extremity I have searched out; I am beginning to fear, uselessly. I may have gone too far at last. Along the transept of the aisle ahead shines Mary’s perfect china face crowned with a golden cross, the Jesus on her arm her tiny mirror image, exact to crown, eyeshadow, pertly bowed lips, long curly hair and brocade dress down to his toes. A long banner over them:

Yes, Mary, Mary, sweetly favourite daughter of God the Father—your mother’s name mine, does that make us daughters, and
sisters?—plead, please plead and never cease, you and your perfect baby, who in this late light appears to be an exquisite daughter Jesus, her tiny right forefinger pointing forever upward to heaven, oh, plead for me, pray for what until now I have never yet known or acknowledged I need.

There are coloured bulbs ahead, blinking. They outline the roof of a huge crèche to the right of the golden altar burning with seven golden candles. Donkeys, camels, shapes of people and adoring sheep larger than life, lights blinking electrically like an Edmonton December house memory, here where the only snow can be cotton, the manger with its waiting hay empty. Tonight during the mass the necessary plaster, or perhaps plastic, baby will be borne in and deposited there.

Suddenly, loudspeakers crackle along the cavernous nave and aisles, they mutter into a Wurlitzer “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” Man’s desire indeed. Ineradicable Bach shoves me past altars and stations of the cross, past a “Relique San Macrim Martyris” exposed in glass below a side altar, its naked legs brown like polished wood and half-naked torso contorted as if hanged, past an altar dedicated to “Santa Teresa de los Andes, 1900–1920,” her anorexic image blessed—so declares the letter screwed onto the wall—by Pope John Paul II on 24 March, 1993, the unrelenting tin racket declaring in Johann Sebastian undulations forever and forever that the bleeding wounds of Jesu Christi have set him, him at least if no one else, free, free forever!

Down Avenida O’Higgins, in one glance thundering past the superb iron filigree of Gustave Eiffel’s Central Railroad Station, in twenty-five minutes I’m back where I arrived this morning: the essential airport. I point to the largest name on the first page of my map. “Iquique,
si!”
the woman sings; my
knapsack is on my back, no need for a passport. The plane rises into a red Pacific sunset, crimson light fleeing to Australia but we are all belted in place and pointed north, fleeting north. I consider my map and see Iquique is only twenty degrees south of north, getting too close, and I concentrate on the stark, shadowed mountains below me, black blocks and pyramids with twisted rivers blazing gold long enough to satisfy any obsessive Spaniard. Abruptly the light cuts into the ragged lines of brilliant surf, seemingly motionless, but I know waves are smashing at the continent, breaking it. The sea has endless edges but never an end. To fall from the sky here, to smash, fuse indistinguishably into cinders of volcanic sand, as Jorge’s blessed Pablo Neruda wrote in “Yo Volvere”:

To be so lucky.

“Wohl mir! Jesu Christi Wunden”
—Good for me, the wounds of Jesus Christ—red cinder Chile momentarily stopped that song in my head; but not the memory. Mother, mother, I know very well that there are two quite different poems for that Bach harmonization because you told me, always an incarnation of a comp lit prof. You explained so clearly that the older poem was
“Jesu, meiner Seelen Wonne,”
a continuous contemplation of the soul’s glorious rapture brought on instantly and forever by Jesus. But the other text, used with exactly the same melody and harmonization, was all chain bondage and gaping wounds. You said, “In English they sing mostly the rapturous joy of the soul
soaring to uncreated light, but in German it’s always the sin and bloody guilt one, see. The only difference between them is the key. The bright G for ‘Jesus, joy,’ and this sombre F.”

And you bent over me at the piano, translated the last line to the very rhyme as you played so darkly:

Mother, why did you make me understand this? The music was enough.

At the plane window below my left elbow, west is grey space and black ocean. Nothing remains possible but east; perhaps in that direction, over the thin blade of this continent and then more ocean, finally Africa? How can it be final, continual east can finally only carry me west again? The plane trundles down to land on the Tropic of Capricorn, the Aeropuerto Cerro Moreno outside Antofagasta. In the shadow of the airport’s largest building I leave the file of passengers disembarking and turn left into darkness; wait. Finally the plane roars away, north towards Iquique where my ticket, if it should be traced, will say I landed. No one will trace it.

Silence. A white simmer of night insects I will never, thank god, recognize. I can search for stars. The sky is unrecognizable, I cannot even find the Southern Cross where I sense it should be. It seems momentarily as if I have never before looked up into the night sky. Christmas Eve. Perhaps I am lucky.

The
Lonely Planet Travel Survival Kit
still holds true next morning:

I know I look Scandinavian, but overnight in Antofagasta I have not yet had to try and put a Chilean man (they can be “very
machista
but rarely violent in public behaviour towards women”) to shame by “responding aggressively” in my memorized Spanish. Perhaps they are all resting from their Christmas midnight mass. Or drunk. And no one, not even the massively mothering concierge at the residence off the Plaza Colón, asks me about running away. She has her teenage daughter to shout with.

The empty Christmas morning bus crawls northeast up the two-hundred-kilometre incline into the sun of the Atacama Desert. We follow the narrow railroad; the highway over the bus driver’s shoulder is a black tar ribbon in a stunning abstraction of grey and tan and reddish ridges that lift to cliffs, long plateaus, hills, mountains. It cuts through the thick adobe and rock warrens of nitrate towns left roofless on the sand and whistling, moaning wind in the staggering light. The eventual city of Calama is wiped upwards against the slope of hills below the mountains of the largest hole ever dug into the earth; even on Christmas Day the copper dust drifts east from it high and splendid as the unreachable clouds of heaven. On the grey road beyond dusty Calama, the city irrigated into green by the Rio Loa flowing from the Andes, the driver tells me over his shoulder
that a four-hundred-year drought ended here in 1973, only to begin again immediately.

In 1973. “They made you hear the screaming,” Jorge told me. “From under the stadium seats, especially at night. You had to smell the terrified. The CIA Americans taught them very well: torture is first of all a place in the mind.”

The perfect desert, Atacama, not a cloud to rain, not a single sprig of green plant visible anywhere. Though they say enough morning dew is possible to open grey sticks into sudden flowers, possibly once or twice a year on a spot somewhere. The perfect cone of Volcan Lincancabur rises blue into six-thousand-metre snow on the approaching spine of the Andes. In the first and last oasis, trees sheltering the village of San Pedro de Atacama, the bus stops behind the adobe museum, where skeletal bodies hunched inside clay urns hug their bone and leather knees against their bony leather chests. What relative is looking for them? Whom do they remember? The giant algarrobo and pepper trees of the Plaza de Armas separate Conquistador Pedro de Valdivia’s mud house from the narrow whitewashed Iglesia de San Pedro, its dark waves of algarrobo rafters overlaid with pale slices of cactus logs.

As the stupendous heat of Christmas cools a little, people stroll along the paths of the plaza arm in arm. Bars begin to blare Tex-Mex, dogs smell each other intimately at street corners and fuck fast in circles of staring attention. Dogs and men and children only, never hurrying women. I join a small bus tour onto the Salar. Thirty-nine degrees, forty-two in cloudless sun, flat baked salt and pale water two centimetres deep. The impossible jointed legs of flamingoes walk in the water as if on transparent skin, their luminous, doubled bodies meet, bowing to themselves at their
black beaks when they feed. I kneel in the salt baked round and jagged as coral boils. It gleams against my brown knees, blinding me, smashingly white, far whiter than snow … Lord wash me and I will be whiter … they say salt water is closer to human blood than—who told me that?—I begin to walk slowly back towards the empty bus, concentrating on the stark distance of the farthest volcano, but I am the bare, tanned skin of my arms, my long legs, the crunch and dark spread of saltwater-blood oozing at the crust where I place my feet. I can only walk faster.

“Everything happens,” Jorge said. His chest and armpits and inner thighs were circled by thick knobs, as if screws with gnarled, ragged heads held him bolted together in burn patterns. “And it all stays inside you,” he said, “like a splinter, like rusty steel. It gets worse, it never just heals out.”