Travels in a Thin Country (18 page)

The Mallarauco valley was transformed during the last quarter of the nineteenth century by an innovative and energetic landowner called Patricio Larrain Gandarillas. By tunnelling through a hill he built a canal which fed off the Mapocho river, and it irrigated the land for miles. This feat of engineering took him twenty years. He brought over expertise from the European Alps, and the workers dug from both sides of the hill. The locals still tell the story that the two teams were
only a few inches out when they met. It was polluted water now, as it ran down from Santiago, but it still watered the land all right.

I stayed with the canal-builder’s grand-daughter-in-law, a stately English woman from Kent who married a Chilean fifty years ago and shocked his parents by wearing trousers. When I arrived she was sitting under the front porch, reading the
Guardian Weekly
with a large red dog asleep under her chair. She had invited me to stay whenever I liked, but I hadn’t told her what day I was coming, and as she didn’t have a phone she wasn’t really expecting me. Pepe, who had introduced me to her a week before in a cafe in Bellavista, Santiago’s bohemian quarter, had laughed when I had told him I was worried about just turning up.

‘Don’t be so English!’ he said.

The ancestral farmhouse had adobe walls a foot thick, spongy high beds, heavy, creaky wooden furniture and an abundance of assorted books, paintings and pieces of tarnished old silver. It was roughly a hundred years old, typical of a period when there were huge fortunes in Chile. The flaky turquoise swimming pool was decorated with a child’s white handprints, and around it the estate flourished with bending trees of fruit and avocados, bushes of berries, thick stalks of corn, a citrus grove and tall red hot pokers.

The châtelaine was exceptionally hospitable; she ignored her guests most of the time, which was actually quite refreshing. She was a widow, and had embraced Chile, for better or worse, like a marriage vow. On the first evening she interrogated me about Britain, as exiles usually do. Talking about the state of it made both of us depressed.

Grandchildren and dogs roamed around unchecked and unmatched cane chairs with stained cushions, open books and crumpled articles of clothing idled in lush long grass. Houseguests appeared, and others vanished. We ate corn and
potato stews, tomato and basil salads and slabs of dark pink watermelon at wooden tables on the banks of the river, shaded by willows. Conversations broke out spontaneously in the cool kitchen or the hushed library. I thought of novels set in the 1930s peopled by the British upper classes. This was what life had been like for the old landowning families of the central valley. No wonder they didn’t want it to change. It was very agreeable.

When I went back to the city it was on the daily bus out of the valley, an old boneshaker which had been rattling up and down the steep Mallarauco roads for years. Next to the sign displaying fares there was a yellowing list of prices for other items passengers might wish to bring with them. These included a bed (450 pesos), a gas cooker (350), a television (250) and a sack of flour (150).

Up in the north I had met a woman who was organizing local branches of the
Alianza
, an up-and-coming alliance of Greens and Humanists, both fashionable words in the Chilean political vocabulary. She had urged me to call a colleague of hers when I was in Santiago who was one of four vice presidents of the
Alianza
, a candidate in the forthcoming municipal elections and a feminist to boot. The colleague’s name was Sara, too, and I met her in a crowded coffee bar near the party office opposite Santa Lucía hill.

She was exactly my age, and I liked her at once. She had in her hand the proofs of an article she had written about the background to the Chilean women’s movement. This latter had been nourished during the fight for suffrage in national elections, but when that was granted in 1949 the victory failed to lead to wider reforms or even to begin to challenge male ideas about the role and value of women in public life, and the women’s movement disintegrated. I wondered where it had got to after another forty years.

‘Still very fragmented,’ she said after a long pause, during which she stirred her empty coffee cup. ‘And to a certain extent the movement has withdrawn into itself since the dictatorship fell. Its role for all those years was to promote the notion of non-violence, and now it has to reconsider its position. But there is a good network, yes, with a strong working-class constituency.’

(Most organizations with any kind of social concerns were grappling with the question of what to do now they had achieved what they had campaigned for over so many years.)

She had hope for a better future for Chilean women.

‘Though not for our generation. The men still had a very
macbista
upbringing. But younger ones can see the flexibility of roles. Yes, I am hopeful.’

I wasn’t sure I could have been, in her position. There were three women senators and seven
diputadas
(members of the lower house), and although Chilean politicians had recognized that it was fashionable to show themselves to be prowomen and almost all the parties of the centre and left had instituted women’s sections, the trend had translated itself into reforms that were purely cosmetic. Pinochet had appointed numerous women mayors, but Sara dismissed them as ‘honorary men’; that, in the political context, was at least a concept I was familiar with. A recent public opinion poll among both sexes had revealed considerable resistance to women in power at parliamentary level (they liked them being on municipal councils, though; that was a projection of the domestic role, running the local scene like the house, no really big decisions involved). During my visit a drama was being played out involving the eventually aborted presidential campaign of Evelyn Matthei, an eminently capable politician. I heard many sexist comments about Matthei, even from leaders of her own National Renewal party. Although some male politicians would deny it, the whole complex business of
her failed campaign demonstrated to many liberals that the country simply wasn’t ready to allow women into the upper reaches of power.

I was supposed to be leaving the luxuries of the metropolis for the southern half of the country, but there was always a reason to stay another day, and then another. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go – I felt a leap of excitement whenever I thought of the glaciers and the fjords of the far south – but Santiago was a cornucopia, and I was very happy.

Pepe and I went to Valparaiso, Chile’s second city and first port, only two hours from the capital. The first building I saw there was an old hat shop with elderly assistants in white coats serving at vast polished wood cabinets and counters, round hat boxes piled on shelves behind them twenty-five feet up to the ceiling. We took a tram past the magnificent pink customs house on the quay and rococo houses built in the nineteenth century during Valparaíso’s glory days as one of the leading ports on the Pacific rim (though most of these houses were reconstructed after an earthquake in 1906). The former government house, a grand and elegant confection, had been turned into naval offices and in the square in front of it Arturo Prat, most revered naval hero, was buried under an elaborate monument.

I had heard the port called Pancho (the familiar version of Francisco). A sailor in a café where we stopped for a late breakfast told us that the spire of San Francisco’s church was the first thing seamen saw when their ships sailed into the bay. Pepe, however, thought it was a reference to Sir Francis Drake, ‘your pirate’.

‘He wasn’t a pirate,’ I said. Pepe opened his eyes very wide and laughed. He was laughing at me.

I had absorbed all my history in Britain; I had the idea that Drake was a hero. In reality, his conduct up and down the
Chilean and Peruvian coasts was so barbarous that his name entered the language as a synonym for terror and destruction. A nineteenth-century traveller records, ‘The mothers on the coast, when trying to hush their babes, cry, “
aquí viene Draake
” ’ [sic] – Here comes Drake. It wasn’t just him. The British had recently transformed themselves into an oceangoing nation, and the close relationship that existed between trade and violent theft failed to dampen the admiration in which the heroic expansion was held at home. By the 1560s, before Drake, routine plunder of places the Elizabethans had never heard of was apparently
de rigueur
– especially if they were Spanish. Some history books call the privateers armed, privately owned vessels commissioned for ‘war service’ by a government; in fact they frequently operated as officially sanctioned looters. Three centuries after Drake, Darwin travelled extensively within Chile during his expedition on HMS
Beagle
, and he tells a story which illustrates how profoundly English pirates had impinged upon the Chileans. He heard of an old woman who, at a dinner in Coquimbo in the north, remarked how wonderfully strange it was that she should have lived to dine in the same room as an Englishman, because she remembered very well that on two separate occasions when she was a girl at the mere cry ‘
Los Ingleses
!’ everyone hastily packed what they could and fled to the mountains.

There were so many British in Valparaíso during the nineteenth century that it was often referred to as a British colony. The city’s importance in the establishment of the Chilean Jewish community is a lesser known aspect of its past. There are probably not many more than half a million Jews on the whole continent (and over half of those are in Argentina) but, in Chile at least, they played a vital part in the modernization of the country.

Despite the Valparaiso settlement in the nineteenth century
and an influx of Jews after the Californian gold rush, by about 1910 there were still fewer than 500 in Chile. During the interwar period, however, approximately 15,000 Jews settled in the country, mostly from Eastern Europe and Germany. Few Chileans appreciate the role these immigrants and their descendants played and continue to play. Not only were most people, in my experience, anti-Semitic, but they were openly so; even otherwise liberal types paraded a distinctly un-raised consciousness regarding Jews with equanimity. This was a facet of a broadly Catholic society within which cultural pluralism was only a shade more visible than in Iran. Later in the trip I asked a well-known Jewish MP about this.

‘You can be a Jew here,’ he said candidly, ‘but you can’t be Jewish. The culture is so powerful that it occupies the entire space. Society doesn’t see diversity – it doesn’t see anything except itself. There’s no such thing as multi-culturalism in Chile.’

Above the flat strip of land occupied by offices, venerable buildings, old-fashioned shops and the straggling port, a series of steep hills revealed an entirely different Valparaíso. We took an odd single-carriage funicular, and afterwards walked up uneven steps through quiet cat-filled streets where washing was drying outside multi-coloured houses jammed together in aleatory confusion.

Neruda called Valparaíso ‘a filthy rose’, and bought a house there. He was fascinated by the sea. Disliking him and his poetry didn’t mean that I disliked his houses. On the contrary – and furthermore I had a strong feeling that I would be leaving the picture unfinished if I didn’t find his third home. It was concealed at the end of a narrow passage up in the peaceful hinterland, next to a narrow pink 1930s theatre. The facade of this theatre was pure art deco, ‘Teatro Mauri’ written at the top in angular black and silver letters, and as the old
stage door was ajar, I tiptoed in, hoping to spy on a rehearsal.

It had been turned into a dog biscuit factory.

He had persuaded two friends to buy half of the house – called La Sebastiana – and one of them was a ceramicist who used uncut pebbles like a mosaic. Neruda had examples of her work in all his homes, and in La Sebastiana he had got her to copy an old map of Patagonia and Chilean Antarctica. The house was tall and thin, and Neruda had made his part of it a jumble of cluttered and brightly coloured nooks, bulges and unorthodox shapes, as if he were trying to copy Valparaíso itself.

The numerous Argentinians strolling in the streets vexed Pepe. All over Chile, people regularly launched into the Argentinian-bashing routine for my education, and it was always backed up by confused historical data centring on 1878, when Argentina ‘stole’ most of Patagonia (in reality a treaty was signed). This episode had burned itself into the national consciousness, and it was trotted out with grossly exaggerated rollings of ’r’s to mock the Argentinian accent. The mutual antipathy reached back a long way. I had read about it in nineteenth-century editions of
The Times
. Even then the Argentinians had considered their country preeminent on the continent, and I detected more than a trace of an inferiority complex on the part of the Chileans, though I generally kept this opinion to myself. For many years the Argentinian economy had been vastly superior to that of its thin neighbour. That was presumably why the Chileans only looked down on the Bolivians, and didn’t hate them: the Bolivian economy was quite a joke even by the demanding standards of South America.

We ate lunch in an old restaurant near the port. It had dark wood panelling and embossed, peeling wallpaper, a high ceiling with two large whirring fans, colossal gilt-framed mirrors, a tiled floor and tables draped in starched white linen
with tiny darns. The barrels behind the bar breathed a winy smell over the room, and the waiters wore bow ties and white jackets. It was the kind of place to drink a bottle of heavy red wine and snooze behind newspapers in the lounge after lunch. With unusual restraint we did not do this, but we did eat a bowl of especially pungent shellfish, and afterwards, full and content, we lay down on the grass in a palmy park next to the monstrous new parliament building. An old man in a cream jacket, as old fashioned as everything else in Valparaíso, offered to take a photograph of us with a box camera.

I had intended to visit a museum, but it was hot, and the perfume of the flowers in the park was like a narcotic; the museum was altogether too much trouble.