Travels in a Thin Country (15 page)

‘Our organization,’ said the
mirísta
in a soft voice, ‘is made up of Communists, Socialists,
mirístas
and independent leftists. It campaigns for fair punishment for everyone tried
and found guilty of torture and oppression during the dictatorship, recognition of human rights – to be more specific in this last field, action against poverty – and liberty for all political prisoners.’

They thought the Rettig Commission, set up to document human rights abuses during the dictatorship, was a joke; they said the government wasn’t prepared to confront the right, because it was frightened. They were both unimpressed by the Aylwin regime, and said repression was as bad as it had been under Pinochet. This sounded like an absurd statement – people weren’t disappearing anymore, after all – but what I think they meant was firstly repression of justice, as exemplified by the difficulties involved in bringing prosecutions against the torturers, and secondly the lack of basic human rights within certain sectors of the population, for example stigmatized ex-prisoners of conscience or simply Chileans caught in the poverty spiral. They talked at some length about despair in the slums.

‘Many of the people who once protested for democracy while others were silent,’ said the Communist, ‘are the dispossessed of today’s democratic Chile, and although it is often proudly stated that human rights abuse no longer exists, in the wider interpretation of that concept it’s difficult to maintain that these people have any rights at all.’

The
mirísta
had been tortured in 1989; they had put currents through his head. He was still on medication. The Communist had a perforated kidney from beatings in the early 1980s and needed microsurgery. His wife had died in a detention centre. I never found out exactly what they were in for, but I knew that in both cases they had been found guilty of a serious crime.

Purity of vision is often seductive. I made myself think about the terrorist murders committed by both the FMRP and Mir – for all I knew, by these two sitting in front of me. That
was where absolute commitment had led their groups – to the intellectual arrogance and political suicide of terrorism. But I couldn’t help feeling that everyone else, who wasn’t passionate about the poor, and about justice, was leading a compromised existence.

They had no complaints about the conditions they were held in; they were treated well in prison. When I asked if I could bring them anything they said they didn’t need personal stuff; I asked again, and they said blank cassettes, which they record on and send to supporting organizations abroad. I lived with their faces inside my head for days, and all the anguished novels I had read, written during the Pinochet years, came into focus in my imagination.

The Chilean government has no policy on female incarceration; over a century ago it handed over responsibility to the Church, presumably with a deep sigh of relief, and there it has resided ever since. The flank of the Church in question was the Order of the Good Shepherd, founded in Angers. Sheila Cassidy was placed under the care of Good Shepherd nuns when she was imprisoned in Santiago in 1979. She was a British doctor, and she had been arrested in a house belonging to the Columban Fathers for treating a wounded revolutionary. The housekeeper was murdered and Sheila Cassidy was taken away and repeatedly tortured. Later, after three weeks in solitary confinement, she was moved to Tres Alamos prison. There were eighty other women there with her, and on Christmas Day they stood on tables at the appointed hour of ten in the evening and sang songs like ‘Take Heart, Joe, My Love’ to prisoners in the men’s jail over the spiked concrete wall. The men were waiting, and shortly their song of reply drifted across, faint on the wind. The British ambassador took Sheila Cassidy a Harrods’ Christmas cake.

The women’s prison I visited was the largest in Chile. The
Mother Superior and prison governor, grey-haired and benign of face, explained that the objective of the prison was to reconcile women with God. It would be interesting to put that forward as government policy in the West. Many of the prisoners were in for armed robbery, and many for trafficking and possession; these were the areas
Madre
had seen explode in her many years in the service. This prison was not austere, or even institutional; it was a small, modern community. We strolled between the buildings chatting politely and taking in impromptu and embarrassing visits to sewing and pottery groups, and as we crossed a garden in the sharp sunlight I asked
Madre
if she thought the government should exercise more responsibility towards the penal system.

‘I have no opinion on that,’ she said, as if I had asked her whether one should put limes or lemons in a pisco sour. Shortly after this she stopped, placed her hand on my wrist and looked serious.

‘There’s something I want to ask you,’ she said conspiratorially. ‘Is it true that Andreas and
La Fergus
are separating?’

Before I could answer we were interrupted by a sunny young woman in a red striped dress who, I later learnt, was a
lautarísta
(member of another terrorist group) and had already done eight years for murdering an old woman.

Yet all these things had no effect upon me, or at least not enough to resist the strong inclination I had to go abroad again, which hung about me like a chronic distemper.

Daniel Defoe,
The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

It was one of those days … when I forgot all my cares, all my failures, all my anxieties about writing. I was exactly where I wanted to be, doing what I liked most. I was far enough offshore …

Paul Theroux,
The Happy Isles of Oceania

A contact of a contact at a travel agency called me one morning at Simon and Rowena’s flat.

‘There’s one seat left in an air taxi leaving for Juan Fernández tomorrow. You have to decide immediately.’

Deciding immediately wasn’t a problem. I had been trying to fix up a trip to those notoriously inaccessible Chilean islands since I first arrived in the country. They were located between three hundred and fifty and four hundred miles out in the Pacific, and they were occupied by five hundred and fifty people and two cars. The largest of the three islands, and the only one which was inhabited, was called Robinson
Crusoe, as for four years it was the home of the man Defoe based his character on, the mercurial Scottish mariner Alexander Selkirk.

Early the next morning, therefore, I arrived at a small airport on the outskirts of Santiago thronged with air force personnel. It didn’t take my pilot long to locate me; I was one of the only people not wearing a light blue uniform. He was a middleaged man with an affable face and hair the colour of cornflakes.

‘Hi,’ he said, taking the carpetbag. The weather had broken, and a gold-coloured six-seater was waiting in the sun on the tarmac. The pilot put me up in the cockpit, in the passenger seat, as it were; four islanders were already strapped in behind us.

Once the plane had lifted out of the Santiago basin and over the coastal mountains it cruised over the melted blue candlewax of the Pacific, set in gleaming folds with a light dusting of white ash. Figueroa, the pilot, had been flying the same route for twenty-five years. Before they blasted an airstrip in 1977 he used to do it in a sea-plane. When he lowered us through a bank of dense cloud later a spectral outline appeared ahead. It was a small mountain range sticking out of the ocean.

‘Robinson Crusoe!’, shouted Figueroa over the noise of the engine.

I could see why it had been so difficult to find a site for an airstrip. The land-mass consisted of high cliffs, peaks like spikes and almost perpendicular slopes, and as we approached the uniform brownness transmogrified into a myriad delicate hues in stripes, blocks and pools. It must have come as a shock to Juan Fernández himself when he spotted it from the mast of his ship. He was a Spanish priest and navigator, and he arrived some time between 1563 and 1574, though Spain didn’t take legal possession of his islands for almost two hundred years.

Figueroa landed us on a reddish brown strip of earth next to a wooden hut, and chickens scarpered from the runway. Two men in woolly hats came out of the hut. Cold, damp winds whipped around the plane as we jumped down and piled luggage onto a rusty pickup, and there was a frosty bite to the air. As the only ground flat enough for this airstrip was at the western tip of the island and it was out of the question to get to the only settlement in a vehicle and took five hours on foot, anyone arriving by air was obliged to travel round to the north coast by boat. Figueroa, also the pickup driver, drove the cargo down to the shore, and we followed on foot.

In the brilliant indigo bay Juan Fernández fur seals were swimming around a rotting jetty.

‘Your countrymen,’ said Figueroa, ‘hunted them almost to extinction.’

I was quite used to being held responsible for the actions of the entire British nation. It was part of the job description. He was referring to the sailors who skulked in and out of the Pacific in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and killed the double-coated Juan Fernández seals for their thick underfur and their blubber. The pelts were dispatched to China to be turned into felt, and the blubber was boiled down for oil. Entrepreneurs from North America couldn’t resist it, either, and within a five-year period at the turn of those two centuries three million fur seals were killed off Juan Fernández.

The boatman, waiting next to his small blue boat, lifted the lid of a box Figueroa had unloaded from the plane.

‘Tomatoes!’

It was a highly dependent community: almost everything had to be flown in or sent on an infrequent sea cargo service. We even had a gross of eggs with us.

It rained. Wind and rain are as much a feature of life in the archipelago as they are in the Shetlands. As we pulled round the bay and out into the ocean the cliffs and rocks, spotted
with seals and striped ochre, veiled themselves in a fine mist. It was a cold, wet ninety-minute trip. About half way, the first wooden boats appeared, fishing for
langostas Juan Fernández
, large red crustaceans like pincerless lobsters which dominate the island economy and fetch a hefty price in the wealthy districts of Santiago.

Cumberland Bay and the wooden buildings of the settlement were circumscribed by forest. It was not an inhospitable sight, and it presumably gave Selkirk some measure of courage when he was rowed ashore in 1704. He was the sailing master (like a first mate) of the
Cinque Ports
, a British privateering vessel circumnavigating the globe. It had not been a happy journey, and at Juan Fernández Selkirk had a row with the unpopular captain over the ship’s seaworthiness. When the captain insisted on continuing, leaks or no leaks, Selkirk demanded to be set ashore. (Defoe decided that a shipwrecked but innocent Crusoe was a better idea.) The story goes that Selkirk’s courage failed him as his colleagues rowed back to the
Cinque Ports
, and he shouted that he had changed his mind. The captain had not. Selkirk was not a man of phlegmatic disposition, and when he realized what he had done it nearly killed his spirit.

Later, the island was named Más a Tierra (Nearer Land), and the second island over a hundred miles away became – obviously – Más Afuera (Further Out). It was Crusoe, not Selkirk, who became an international star, and Más a Tierra was renamed after him in the 1970s. Further Out was simultaneously transformed into Alejandro Selkirk.

The first person I met on the island was an old salt called Robinson Green. For no reason except to welcome me as I stepped ashore he shook my hand enthusiastically, so I took the opportunity of asking his advice on where to stay; I wanted to rent a room in a cottage. Robinson thought for a few moments, then spoke to Manolo the boatman, who, it
turned out, had built a cabin in his garden. A workman from the electricity board was staying in this cabin until the next day.

‘But you can rent it after that,’ said Manolo, wiping grease onto his trousers. ‘Come and stay at our house tonight.’

Robinson was delighted, which I later found out was particularly generous-spirited of him as his family owned a ‘hotel’ on the island. After Manolo had dealt with the boat we walked along a wide mud street which turned into a coastal path, and at a small house next to an even smaller pine cabin Manolo said, ‘Welcome’.

Inside we sat on chairs covered with penguin pelts and drank pisco while Mrs Manolo made six loaves of bread. I learnt that I was to share a bed with a twenty-two-year-old daughter. Manolo told island stories. Even isolation wasn’t what it once was.

‘Now the government pays for schooling on the mainland for all children over eight – didn’t when I was young. They’re brought back by the navy in December, and leave again in March. Mind you, we still don’t have a doctor.’

They did have a nurse, and she was one of the most important people on the island as it was she who decided who was sick enough to require a free flight to the continent.

‘We still don’t have telephones, but we have access to a radio phone sometimes. There’s no crime here, you know – none at all. We can leave our doors open.’

In the evening I went to a café on the waterfront and ate a fried fish under a naked bulb, rain and wind pounding on the cracked windowpanes. People came in and out, and chatted over congealed sauce bottles. When I got back, Manolo and his wife were studying their accounts on the kitchen table, the Sony system between them pumping out the music of the Smurfs.

The next morning was bright and clear, and after moving
the carpetbag into the vacated cabin I set off for Selkirk’s lookout, in a saddle in the mountains where he climbed each day to search the horizon for rescue vessels. The vegetation translated itself from eucalyptus groves to rare indigenous ferns and creepers, and then to pungent rainforest, and the smell of the rainforest hit the back of my throat like nitroglycerine. At the top I stood among red hummingbirds looking out at tiny
langosta
boats crawling around the rich sapphire of the bay.