Travels in a Thin Country (23 page)

Nina had arrived on the island with her husband and children three years previously.

‘I’m afraid all the professionals here come from the mainland. The
mochanos
don’t have access to training,’ she said, lighting candles as the thin sunshine drained away. Besides power, there were a lot of things they didn’t have on the island, like a doctor, for example. They did have eight motorized vehicles, but they had to bring petrol over in small cans on private planes. They didn’t used to have any crime either, but thieving had recently made its ugly appearance among them. The farmers made a living, but only just, as the cost of transporting produce to the continent was virtually prohibitive, and besides beef the only real export was garlic.

It rained hard all night before the day of the census, and at seven o’clock in the morning, when we walked to the school, now the census headquarters, it was through deep muddy puddles. Nina sat behind a child’s desk assigning groups of houses to the island’s state employees, converted into census takers, and they stuck printed discs to their lapels and set off, most of them on horseback, tucking their chins down into their buttoned-up coats. I was handed over with a bundle of census forms to two men bound for the remotest zone and we were conveyed to a cold southerly point in a police jeep. The tide was low, and we walked across the sand to a smaller island and our first house, a wooden one built on a spit of land permanently blasted by a brutal wind. One of the officials, an amiable post office worker, struggled through his questions next to a baking tray of small and shiny trussed pink birds while a pig outside headbutted the door and complained noisily.

The policeman abandoned us and we began our trek up the west coast, where the forest lay closer to the plain and the
wind had the whole Pacific to build up speed. The houses, built in hollows among the sand dunes, were small and cluttered, with sombre 1950s furniture and nylon lace doilies. The censors were required to read out a list of consumer durables and tick those found in each household, and so they doggedly did, asking people whose toilet was a hole in the garden and who had never had electricity whether they owned a video, microwave, music centre or cellular telephone. At least in the transport section the National Bureau of Statistics revealed that it was not entirely out of touch, as after a list of more sophisticated forms of transport it had printed
carretón
(horse-drawn cart), and the
mochanos
brightened up when they found something to say yes to.

What they all had in abundance were apples, and an apronful was pressed on me as we left each house. I was not permitted to refuse this gift, as each orchard was different (they claimed) and I had to try them all. I was soon dragging round a sack of apples that would have provided me with enough roughage for a year. I started trying to feed them to the cows, but they didn’t want them either.

People were asked if they could read and write, and most of those under fifty said that they could, and although the young
mochanos
hadn’t received much education, they had all completed more years of schooling than their parents, which constituted progress, at least. A twenty-five-year-old with a physical handicap had received no education at all.

The last house required us to climb several steep sandbanks. These people did not even own a
carretón
. Three men lived there with their common-law wives and extensive progeny; one couple and their four children slept in the kitchen.

A cluster of dirty and barefooted children followed us until we emerged on a headland overlooking a wide beach of honey-coloured sand. During the long walk home over bright
green moorland spotted with animals it began pouring with rain. A decent track covered the very last stretch, built by the munificence of the national petroleum company; they had found gas on Mocha and had been obliged to construct a basic infrastructure to facilitate their labours. The gas has not been exploited; not yet.

Nina, her husband and I sat up late most nights in the dark drinking pisco close to the fire. I shared a bedroom with Tía María and little Salome. A cow tied up outside usually kept me awake. One morning, idling outside a neighbouring farmhouse with a trail of children who had attached themselves to me as if I were the Pied Piper, I heard a rumour that bad weather was drawing in, and that people anticipated a couple of weeks without contact with the mainland. I thought I had better get out while I could. Nobody knew when a plane might come, they simply told me to wait at the airstrip and see, so I walked there, passing four farmers engaged in the consumption of
ñache
, a popular dish consisting of freshly drawn lamb’s blood, lemon juice and vegetables. I waited for six hours, and a plane did land, eventually, and later it took me back to Cañete and a very amused Gloria.

She had introduced me to the local schoolteacher, an elderly man who had lived among the Mapuche for fifty years, and he had offered to hike around with me for a day. He lived in Quidico further down the coast, and I drove there early in the morning to meet him. It was not an enjoyable journey, as Rocky and I were frequently forced off the deeply rutted road by logging trucks.

Shortly after setting off on foot together through the dewy, fertile fields a line of
huasos
appeared on horseback on an eastern ridge.
Huasos
, the Chilean equivalent of the gaucho, the South American mounted herdsman, were described by
George Pendle as ‘the human expression of the vast and desolate pampa’. They came down towards us wearing short ponchos, black wide-brimmed hats and knee-length boots with elaborate metal spurs. ‘Rodeo,’ said the teacher disapprovingly, and we changed direction.

We came to a Mapuche house (a
ruka
). It was only a half-
ruka
really, as the wooden frames which used to be thatched to the ground like a wigwam were only used for the roof, meeting a simple stone wall. A barefooted woman greeted the teacher with an embrace, and shook my hand, watched by three small children with their mouths open and a few geese pecking optimistically at the hardened mud. A man left off harnessing a pair of oxen and came to talk to the teacher about the latest development in a local dispute about land rights, and I loitered in the background feeling uncomfortable.

We sat cross-legged on the grass later to eat sandwiches we had brought filled with
manjar
, a Chilean staple consumed in prodigious quantities from the desert to the icecap.
Manjar
, if you will believe it, is sweetened, boiled condensed milk, and looks like caramel. I hated it.

A young Mapuche wearing a cap with a batman logo walked past and nodded, flicking a switch irritably at a horse pulling a wooden-wheeled cart. Later, in a small courtyard between two dry-stone rooms, the teacher introduced me to a very old and very stately woman with a large frilly collar reminiscent of the Inquisition and two long plaits tied together with a turquoise ribbon. A small group of young women and children watched impassively from the doorway of one of the rooms while we were taken into the other, my eyes watering from the smoke of a fire glowing in the middle of the mud floor. The room was bare except for a table and three shelves piled with clothes.

‘I,’ said the old woman imperiously, ‘am
machi
.’

Gloria had told me about
machis
. They were spiritual leaders and healers. The woman told a long story about her calling, which occurred in a dream when she was twelve. At fourteen she rode alone to the cordillera and was initiated. Months later I read sketchy details about
machi
initiation ceremonies in a leatherbound book tied up with pink ribbon at the British Library. It spoke of it as if it were ancient history.

Gripping my arm, our
machi
took a silver breastpiece with a double-headed eagle at the centre from underneath a pile of clothes. She wrapped a thick woollen shawl around my shoulders and pinned the breastpiece on top, finishing off the ensemble with a round head-dress with dangling nickel discs, a rosette and long ribbons. Finally she led me into the courtyard and stood me next to a wooden ladder about five feet high with roughly hewn steps. It represented a kind of altar, and was set up outside her hut when she was consecrated. I felt a bit of a prat, actually; I had the feeling she was making fun of me.

I did try to find out about the altar and where its steps led, but besides mumbling and not finishing her sentences she kept lapsing into
mapu-dugun
, so it was a struggle, and the teacher had opted out, placidly squatting in a corner and smoking his pipe. We did establish that although the Supreme Being was omnipotent, he was not, handily, concerned with the moral order, nor did the state of souls after bodily death depend on his reward or punishment. He was appealed to for material favours.

‘Do you have any children?’ she asked me suddenly, looking right into my eyes. Three of hers had gone to live in ‘the city’ (Temuco), and she was sad. The Mapuche still live within a sub-economy of survival, and, predictably, many young people abandon their roots and head for the urban centres, assimilating within the
huincas
.

The Mapuche suffered acutely during the dictatorship.
According to the 1978 report of the United Nations Ad Hoc Working Group on the Situation of Human Rights in Chile, ‘On the day of the coup, the big landowners, the land barons, the military and the
carabineros
started a great manhunt against the Mapuche who had struggled and gained their land back.’ Of all the accounts I had read of that period, a heartbreaking one for a people whose hearts had already been broken many times, one lapidary sentence never left me. A Mapuche child recalled the day her father was taken away, the last day she ever saw him.

‘
Mi mamá
,’ she said, ‘
se enojó porque no se puso los calcetines
’ – ‘mum was annoyed because he didn’t put his socks on.’

The natural first base of the Lake District proper was Temuco, a large town still regarded as a frontier post, though it isn’t a frontier to anything except the lakes. After a long, hot and dusty journey on unspeakably bad cross-country roads to Los Angeles, a town on the Panamerican, I followed the tarmac gratefully south to Temuco, where I deposited Rocky IV at Hertz as arranged and checked into a cheap hotel next to the market, a sprawling, vaguely threatening market lined with pyramids of melons, hung with dripping carcasses and exuding exotically dubious smells against a background of high-energy noise. I lingered for the mild hit of the spice rows and later acquainted myself with Temuco, a colourful town where most activities appeared to take place in the streets rather than inside buildings. I imagined that its inhabitants didn’t have much time for events in Santiago. Neruda said, ‘Temuco is a pioneer town, one of those towns that have no past, though it does have hardware shops.’

The next day I caught a bus into the mountains. The purpose of the trip was the monkey puzzle. Quintessentially Chilean and indigenous only to a narrow Andean zone, the
tree had acquired the status of a national symbol, and was much cherished. Neruda had written an ode about it. I remembered monkey puzzles very well from the suburbia of my childhood where they operated as the outdoor equivalent of the aspidistra. They were emasculated there; I wanted to see a whole forest of them. So it was that I fitted myself into the crowded weekly bus like the last sardine in the tin – though we at least were all the same way up.

Two hours later the forty people standing in the aisle got off. Not a single building was in sight, even in the far hills. A sack of potatoes was passed from the very back of the bus and left on the edge of the dirt road. Everyone got back on.

The vehicle quivered, and then stopped, at Melipeuco, a scruffy village on the edge of volcanic parkland. Nothing was happening in the village, least of all transport of any kind to the Conguillío-Los Paraguas park. I set off to the police station, an isolated ‘frontier post’ so beloved of the Chilean authorities, where I found the incumbents scrutinizing lottery tickets. Policemen usually helped me; they often didn’t have anything else to do. The young man on duty was a friendly type, and we sat on the step of the police station chatting for an hour in the watery sunlight.

‘Do you think anything will pass?’ I asked.

‘Yes, sure’.

‘I wonder if they’ll agree to take me.’

‘Sure they will,’ he said, patting his rifle.

A forester took me. No one was shot. As there was a tree-stump where the passenger seat should have been I sat in the open back of his beaten-up Chevrolet as we travelled through the black lava-fields and eyed the double craters of volcano Llaima. The forester later told me cheerfully that they usually erupt every five or six years, and hadn’t done so for eight. Pampas grass had grown strangely out of the lumpy surface, and the river had forced its way through the debris, creating
cliffs striped with volcanic ash, basalt, mud and dust.

A row of araucaria pines, the trees I knew as monkey puzzles, appeared like a line of umbrellas on a ridge. I believe those which adorn small front gardens in the UK are a different type from those around Temuco, but they are Chilean; the seeds were taken to Britain by a seaman in 1795, and the trees in the park were instantly identifiable with one particular specimen from my childhood, which I could still see, through my aunt’s net curtains, in her postage-stamp garden in Weston-super-Mare.

The forestry service, Conaf, had organized a campsite next to the largest lake in the park and overlooking the Sierra Nevada, a high and snowy mountain range. After parting company with the forester I enquired about cabins, but they were all full, so I decided to have lunch in the small café, walk through the beech and monkey puzzle forests for the afternoon and hitch out of the park in whatever direction was offered first – there would be plenty of daytrippers in February.

During lunch it began to rain hard. The pintails disappeared from the lake and the parakeets from the trees. I hadn’t thought to bring my waterproof gear when I left Temuco in the sunshine. The sky became a solid grey block. I gave up any ideas of walking and when I had paid for my lunch I stood on the road to hitch a lift. I waited for two hours, and not a single car passed. Everyone who was going to leave had left early because of the weather, and the daytrippers had never appeared. The rainwater trickled down the back of my sweatshirt and made me shiver. I searched for monkeys in the branches of the trees, to see if they had made it (the shape of the branch supposedly makes the tree difficult to climb, and vexes the monkeys). But there weren’t any monkeys. My hands went a funny purple colour. I felt very, very miserable.