Travels in a Thin Country (36 page)

We said goodbye after one last lunch together and I waved them off, forcing a smile. I had arranged to stay that night at a hotel owned by a Santiago-based company who had invited
me to visit the Laguna San Rafael and its glacier, the most famous in Chile, in their catamaran the next day. The hotel was on the other side of a stretch of water, and a launch arrived to take me there; it was a luxurious place, built around thermal springs and peopled with bejewelled Argentinians. I tried to heave myself through this abrupt transition, but despite the comfort I felt miserable. I was tired, my knuckles were bleeding from rowing Alex all morning, my scabies had risen like Lazarus, a carton of wine had exploded in the carpetbag over the only decent clothes I had left, and, most of all, I missed Mark and Alex. It had been one of the best trips; it was hard to imagine that I had only known the pair of them for a matter of weeks. Dawdling in such good company in one of the most beautiful regions of the world had caused all my anxieties to disappear.

I tried to sleep, but couldn’t, so I swam in one of the thermal pools, in the open air overlooking the water and forest. It made me feel much better, until an Argentinian told me that exertion in hot water causes heart attacks.

By seven the next morning I was cruising the fjords again, this time in high style on board a very grand catamaran called the
Patagonia Express
. I was the only press guest: the other passengers were Argentinian tourists from the hotel. We stopped at Puerto Aguirre, an isolated fishing village I had spied from the top deck of the
Evangelista
. The locals had built the tiny houses of their cemetery on the slope of the island opposite, ferrying the dead across their own Styx.

The catamaran was delightful. There was nothing to do except sit at the bar and watch the scenery float past, and as it was a free bar and the barman had a neat line in cocktails, this was very agreeable. He shook his cocktails with panache. His speciality was a kind of Chilean
cuba libre
; I quickly forgot the name, but it had the word Patagonia in it. The
Argentinians sat down at tables in the dining area and the men produced enough photographic equipment to open a Dixons concession on board while the women read
Good Housekeeping
. The barman told me his name was Norman. He was wearing a white polyester shirt, and he looked remarkably like Douglas Hurd, even sporting the ice-cream cone quiff. The cocktails got stronger as we approached the glaciers, and in the lagoon itself, almost landlocked and one of only three places in the world where three plates meet, strangely sculpted blue icebergs appeared, and Norman added more ice to the cocktail jug in appreciation. The icebergs were as small as manhole covers and as big and pointy as the Matterhorn. The glacier San Rafael, the famous glacier, looked like a rough blue tide between the brown and green jagged mountains. It stretches over twenty miles back into the interior, is more than one-and-a-half miles wide, and it moves up to 200 feet a day. I had developed a passion for these glaciers. I believe Darwin did, too, in his understated, English way: ‘… they may be likened to great frozen Niagaras; and perhaps these cataracts of blue ice are to the full as beautiful as the moving ones of water.’

The
Patagonia Express
dropped anchor directly opposite the ice-cliffs. I cannot say it was beautiful; it was beyond all that. I stood on deck in the painfully cold air watching icebergs calve into the still water. The falling blocks boomed in the silence, like blasts of dynamite on some distant planet. It was impossible not to think of Coleridge’s vision of ice in
The Ancient Mariner
(‘The ice did split with a thunder fit’); even Norman’s eye glittered obligingly.

Some of us strapped on lifejackets and climbed into a Zodiac. The tallest ice cliffs, at least 180 feet high, revealed themselves to be cleft with deep blue caverns of cold air stretching back into the inner world of the earth. Gulls with black spindly legs landed on ice floes, and under the water I
could see spectral outlines of secret things. We motored through the pack-ice along all one-and-a-half miles of the shining glacier. It radiated coldness. A crewman shouted and pointed behind us, and we turned our heads to see a tower of ice the size of a multi-storey carpark plunging into the lagoon, the foundations bouncing upwards with ostentatious languor as the top disappeared.

Back on board Norman offered round a tray of large whiskies on rocks chipped from the glacier which he alleged were 30,000 years old and might well have been. An Argentinian with two Nikons round his neck made a fulsome speech thanking the crew for bringing us to this ‘unworldly’ place and then insisted that I make one too, ‘on behalf of the foreigners’. There are gradations of foreign, of course, and compared with me the Argentinians and Chileans felt united. The glacier experience had made me sentimental, and as I was the only fully qualified foreigner on board and no one understood English I recited Yeats’ ‘Had I the heavens’ as if it were a formal speech, which rather spoilt it, but everyone clapped. As we moved away from San Rafael the Argentinians took photographs of me on deck as if I were as rare a phenomenon as the glacier itself. I had been consorting with Norman for some time, and I lounged inscrutably against the rail in dark glasses as if I spent my life being photographed by tourists.

The sky condensed into a blue, grey and white miasma, and yellow rays beamed through like a Blake painting, diffusing themselves through titanic icebergs. It was hard to leave that place, but Norman eased the pain. As the stars came out an Argentinian bank manager tried to point out formations and constellations. People were always doing that, and I hated it; I didn’t need sordid terrestrial labels bringing the stars under control. Giving them shapes from our world (the Plough; the Hunter) robbed them of their otherness. They belonged to the land of the imagination, the most beguiling country of them
all. I had spent many nights alone with the Chilean stars, and I wasn’t going to let a bank manager turn them into agricultural implements.

The catamaran docked at Chacabuco at midnight, disgorging the Argentinians into a hotel. Several of them tried to persuade me to check in, worried about letting me loose in Patagonia, but I had a plan to make it over to Coyhaique that night and surprise Mark and Alex. It was time for me to abandon the far south and return to the civilization of Puerto Montt, as I had to start thinking about getting back to Santiago. I could take a plane easily enough from Balmaceda to Puerto Montt, and Coyhaique was en route to Balmaceda.

I wound up having to take a taxi to Coyhaique, and I climbed through the window of the Sheraton at one-thirty in the morning. Alex was sitting watching the Oscars ceremony on television, and Mark was asleep in bed, his jeans dangling onto the floor from one ankle (he hadn’t managed to get his boot off). It was a great reunion, which merited several cartons of wine, though in fact it was only two days since we had split up. I dreamt that Douglas Hurd was standing on an iceberg with a cocktail shaker in his hand, and the next morning I disappeared for good, on a bus to Balmaceda, whence a plane took me to Puerto Montt. It flew low, and the late afternoon sun turned the multitudinous rivers into gold ribbons between brown crepey mountains. The glaciers rippled, like folds of glossy cloth, and out to the west the archipelago throbbed, suffused in an amber glow.

Unable to resist one last little trip in the three days I had allocated myself before I travelled back up to Santiago, I stayed the night at my usual guesthouse in Puerto Montt and went to the bus station early the next morning, aiming hopefully for Río Negro, a village more commonly known by
the name of its local volcano, Hornopirén. I picked out the right queue immediately: the further away from an urban centre a bus is heading, the rougher the aspect of the people waiting to get on it. Teeth are an especially good guide. (In Japan, the further you travel from Tokyo, the shorter people get.) I got on, anyway. Buses are downgraded, as their roadworthiness and comfort diminish, according to the conditions of the route, and from the look of the bent metal hulk marked ‘Hornopirén’ I inferred that I was in for a long, hard journey.

The road was extremely bad, but the sun shone on the old alerce trees, and when the bus drove on to a ferry a sweaty man in a cook’s hat dispensed chipped mugs of Nescafé on deck from a grimy galley the size of a telephone box.

Five hours after leaving Puerto Montt the bus stopped with a weary grating of its brakes at a small village on an estuary overlooked by the volcano. People in Puerto Montt often spoke of this volcano – proprietorially, as if of all the volcanoes in the country, they were bound by some special relationship to this one. I found a hotel next to one of the sawmills. It was just the kind I liked: polished wood floor, plank walls, brightly coloured window frames, an erratic electricity supply, a woodburning stove batting out the heat in the spacious kitchen and a view from my room of oxen tied up on the shore, silhouetted against the wooded islands in the estuary. There were no other guests, and I liked that too.

I spent the afternoon walking to the volcano; it took about six hours to get there and back. It was a sharp, sunny day, and the air was wonderfully clear. There was snow on the grey mountains, but the fabled volcano in front of them was green. It was small, by Chilean standards, and it was glowing very faintly, as if dimly lit from within. I passed two or three wooden houses. A little girl in an embroidered frock ran out of one of them asking if I wanted to buy
küchen
. For some
odd reason it was her little face which suddenly made me very aware that the journey was ending soon and that rural Chile was slipping away from me. I wanted to spray mental fixative over my memories.

When I got back to the village the water had drained from the estuary and the owner of the hotel invited me to eat with the extensive family in the big kitchen. During the meal I was initiated into a secret of Chilean Spanish.

‘The wires are all corroded in the fuse box,’ said Mrs Hotel to her husband. ‘We’ll have to get the
gasfiter
in.’

‘What,’ I said, ‘does the gas man fix the electrics?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m talking about the electric
gasfiter
.’

‘So,’ I said, ‘if the plumbing goes wrong you call the plumbing
gasfiter
?’

‘That’s right.’

‘And if the gas … ’

But I already knew the answer.

Later, I sat on the jetty and read by torchlight. I was reading about Hayek, the conservative economist whose book lent its name to the Chilean constitution. He argued that the preservation of economic freedom is logically and philosophically more important that the preservation of the institutions of democracy. Many foreign governments endorsed the dictatorship by behaving as if the iron fist of military rule were a matter of minor or at least secondary importance. During an official visit to Chile in October 1980, Cecil Parkinson, then British Minister of Trade, said this: ‘There’s a good deal of similarity between the economic policies of Chile and those of Great Britain.’

Only when asked later by a journalist what the chief differences were did he comment,

‘Our experience takes place in a democratic context, and that of Chile was undertaken by an authoritarian regime.’

*

After two ascetic days at Hornopirén I returned to Puerto Montt, still unprepared for an even more abrupt change of environment: Santiago, where I planned to stay for five weeks. I went straight to the train station to buy a ticket on the Santiago sleeper. The opening of a Puerto Montt-Santiago rail link in the second decade of the century was perceived as an event of great historical significance, and it’s still the only passenger service which travels up and down the country rather than across. It hasn’t picked up much speed over the years, contriving to take twenty-four hours to reach Santiago, which, considering that it travels on good track all the way, is quite an achievement for a journey of about six hundred and fifty miles. I thought this famous old rail journey would provide a quiet and undemanding way to end an odyssey. Two factors were to emerge which meant it didn’t quite work out like that.

The first was that Chris Sainsbury had been commissioned to write a piece on the train for a book being published in the UK entitled
Train Journeys of the World
, and he suggested we travel together. I was delighted at the prospect of his company, though it did mean the journey wouldn’t be very quiet. The second was that one of the faxes waiting for me at the public fax office in Puerto Montt was from Mr Fixit in Santiago. He was inviting me to stop off at Los Lingues on my way back for a lunch party, and by great coincidence this party was taking place the next day. I telephoned him and arranged to get off the train at San Fernando, two hours or so before Santiago and ten minutes from Los Lingues. This was all very well, but it turned out that we arrived in San Fernando at four-thirty in the morning.

If I was going to commit the social gaffe of turning up early for a party, I might as well do it in style.

The PR department of the Chilean Railway, keen to extract maximum mileage from the illustrious reputation of their
oldest and longest service, claim that Puerto Montt is the most southerly train station in the world; Chris told me, however, that there was a little steam line further south in Argentina.

When I arrived at this station the train was waiting. It looked awful. The carriages, painted blue and yellow and looking confusingly Swedish, were rusty and didn’t match. I asked a guard on the platform how old the train was.

‘Muchos años, muchos
.’

The inside was more encouraging. Built in Germany between the wars, our carriage was upholstered in dark polished wood, heavy puke-coloured velvet and chunky silver fittings. We had a compartment to ourselves with a copper basin encased in a teak surround, a fawn carpet and an angular 1930s lightfitting with two of the four shades missing. The windows were small, and there was a fan.

There was hardly anyone on the train, and the staff started playing cards in the bar before we had even pulled out of the station. Many of the original carriages had been replaced (the regular derailments had something to do with this), but the train’s charm clung on; there was a spirit about it. The bathroom was dimly lit, and had a stately old shower with cork walls. The links between carriages were loose, and they swung around dangerously, causing the doors of the train to flap open.