Travels in a Thin Country (27 page)

It was a cloudless day and the archipelago looked like a set of geoglyphs on a blue field. I amused myself by picking out shapes – a small llama, a boomerang, a set of geometric figures. We flew over Patagonia, khaki and spotted with ochre pools. It was very flat. Finally we circled the Magellan Strait, the same dull silver as the plane’s wing. The Strait and the cold waters around the tip of the continent evoked the names of great voyagers: Ferdinand Magellan in the
Trinidad
, Francis Drake in the
Pelican
, which he renamed the
Golden Hind
while he was down there, Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa in various ships, Pringle Stokes in the
Beagle
(Stokes shot himself on board), Robert FitzRoy, also in the
Beagle
(he committed suicide later) – and the list goes on. But it was the Mariner’s spectre-ship I saw when I looked out of the thick pebble window towards the Southern Ocean: ‘We were the first that ever burst/Into that silent sea’.

The sky was huge down there. As I walked down the steps of the plane I thought, You’ve reached the bottom of the world, and for some reason I thought of the street I grew up in and the long row of red chimneys I could see from my bedroom. I was surprised, because the air was warm, but I caught a bus into the centre of Punta Arenas and when I got off and turned a corner a wind made me falter as I walked. I
checked into a private house offering rooms; it was small, and clean, with no locks on the doors and a set of dentures in the toothmug. For the first time in weeks I unpacked completely. Mould had grown in pleasing patterns on T-shirts rolled up into the carpetbag too hastily while damp. I washed all my clothes by hand, pegged them on the line in the garden and hoisted them up into the white and grey expanse, diminutive fragments of colour flapping energetically.

People from Magallanes, the twelfth and southernmost region of Chile, promote the theory that the country was first discovered by Europeans in the south, when Magellan appeared in 1520. That was fifteen years before Almagro rode down through the north. Magellan entered his Strait from the Atlantic, coming round the Cape of Eleven Thousand Virgins. In 1583 Sarmiento founded two settlements on the Magellan Strait, largely to protect Spanish territory from the British, but all the inhabitants of both places died except one, and it was a British ship which saved him.

A couple of centuries later scientific expeditions began arriving at the tail of the continent, and in 1843 John Williams, the Bristolian in the
Goleta Ancud
, claimed the Magellan Strait for Chile. Punta Arenas was founded in 1848. It was used largely as a penal colony at that time, and was totally dependent on Santiago. It was coal that really brought it to life, in the 1860s and 1870s. In this last decade sheep were shipped over from the Falklands – they could adapt to the climate, whereas sheep from the central valley of Chile itself couldn’t – and a great Magellanic industry was born.

Europeans arrived to carve out a new life for themselves in that austere place, especially towards the end of the century. In 1892 the gold rush began. Export trade flourished, and by 1906 the territory of Magallanes was sending well over ten million pounds of wool annually to Britain alone. The community was impressively sophisticated: by 1896–fifteen
years ahead of the capital – it had electric street lighting. The numerous foreign colonies all published their own newspapers, and they vied with each other in their cultural activities. Large and beautiful houses were built, many of which remain, converted into offices, clubs and museums and recalling the solidity of Victorian London or Manchester.

The first decade and a half of this century were the golden years for Punta Arenas, and the two largest colonies were British and Croatian – the Brits, naturally, in the managerial posts. But when the Panama Canal opened in 1914 ships didn’t have to sail right the way round the continent anymore, and the docks at Punta Arenas went quiet. People didn’t know what to do about it, and their newspapers grew thin and morose. Between the wars a large number of British families left. But the Croats proliferated.

The first Anglican baptism on record in the settlement took place in 1891, and St James’ church appeared in 1895. At that time the Anglican Church in South America operated as a two-pronged venture: one prong provided chaplaincies for British residents and the other organized missions among the indigenous people. The evangelical tradition of this second prong has never been abandoned. A month or two later in my trip the Anglican bishop in Santiago told me that he had decided, on a point of principle, to instruct the flock to tick the ‘Evangelical’ box on the national census form rather than ‘Protestant’.

In Punta Arenas I went to a service in English, my first since mass at St Mark’s in Regent’s Park the day before I left home. It was very low at St James’–several thousand feet below St Mark’s. Over the ubiquitous Anglican cup of tea afterwards a friendly young man said to me, ‘You came on a very formal day. Sometimes – like today – we’re more traditional than usual, to keep the old expats happy.’

The sermon (with handouts), concerned fasting, and it was
good, though I couldn’t imagine Father Tom daring to suggest a fast in Regent’s Park. John Hervey, North American pastor of the Anglican Church in Punta Arenas and the man responsible for the sermon, kindly asked me over to his house for an ‘informal talk’. When I arrived he was behind his desk in a cosy office at the bottom of the garden. He thought the Catholics had their backs to the wall. ‘Twenty per cent of Chileans are Evangelical Protestants,’ he told me. ‘There is tremendous religious upheaval here. The country has been very well evangelized by Protestants, and as a result the Catholics are putting the heat on.’

This Catholic ‘heat’ was being generated by an institution if not in crisis then at least deeply divided. The Church in South America had spent several decades trying to decide whether its responsibilities lay with the here-and-now or the after-life. To a certain extent it was a debate provoked by the Second Vatican Council, which in the early 1960s turned the global Catholic spotlight onto social concerns – more specifically, onto poverty, teaching the uncomfortable lesson that the rich and influential have a responsibility towards the poor. A hundred and fifty South American bishops met at Medellín in Colombia in 1968 and committed their Churches to a more active role in national life. The progressive priest saw himself as a protagonist in the struggle to liberate people from their daily misery, and the theology of liberation which he espoused acknowledged the complex reality of the human condition, something which many people felt the ossified structures of Catholicism had never even attempted.

Even before the 1960s, although religious practice in Chile had consistently been identifiable with support for the right, the Church had allied itself with the Christian Democrats, who represented social Catholicism and reform. After 1958 it moved further still towards the centre, and involved itself in secular projects. So it was understandable that the ideas of the
Second Vatican Council settled easily in some parishes west of the Andes.

Many South American churchmen went much further than the Vatican had intended, however. Front-line staff – those facing the pain of the South American slums every day – became increasingly alienated from the hierarchy. Liberation theology, which taught that spirituality and social oppression are inseparable facets of human existence, was much mistrusted, and as a result the most visible characteristic of the Chilean Church after 1964 was fragmentation. Liberation theology, I was repeatedly told, was always more popular among the priests than the bishops. The US administration equated it with Communism: by 1980 this prejudice had become so enshrined that the Council for Inter-American Security was quite explicit about it. Its policy proposal that year, perceived by some to be associated with the Latin American policy of the Reagan administration and known as the Santa Fé document (though its real name was
A New Inter-American Policy for the Eighties
), stated: ‘US foreign policy must begin to counter … liberation theology as it is utilized in Latin America’.

Tensions within the Chilean Church were greatly exacerbated by the prospect of a Communist or Marxist regime. Most of the bishops spoke out against both ideologies throughout the 1960s. Despite the fact, however, that in previous decades the writings of Marx and papal encyclicals had each stated a total rejection of the other (and Castro was excommunicated in January 1962), the concept of Christian Marxism was taken very seriously in some quarters, and by the end of the 1960s many people had hope for an eventual rapprochement of Communism and Christianity. But as the middle political ground collapsed in Chile at that time, the Church polarized still further, much as the country did. Just how little liberation theology had impinged upon many Catholics was revealed in
a survey conducted among regular attenders of mass throughout the country in 1971. Two-thirds of them said they wanted the priest to speak only about the life of Jesus and the importance of Christian love and never to mention issues relating to poverty, injustice or the necessity to participate in efforts to change social structures. This was the most depressing little nugget of information I ever uncovered about Chile.

For the first half of Allende’s presidency both the Church and the Marxist-Socialist coalition worked positively for coexistence and cooperation, encouraged by a 1971 apostolic letter indicating a softening of the Vatican line on Marxism. Cardinal Silva publicly endorsed the nationalization of copper, for example, and Allende told the
New York Times
that he believed the Church was going to be on his government’s side. When Castro made his famous extended visit to Chile in 1971 he said in his farewell speech that there were ‘many points of coincidence’ between ‘the purest concepts of Christianity and Marxism’.

Towards the end of its curtailed tenure the Popular Unity administration proposed educational reforms which the bishops didn’t like. (Education was an extremely sensitive issue, as to a certain extent Catholics saw their school system as the last hope of Christian influence.) The reforms were never passed, but the tensions were never resolved, either. The country was in chaos by that time, and while the Church didn’t officially move from its position of tacit support for the regime, by the time the coup came many of its members – not only the right-wingers – thought it was necessary. There was a widespread feeling in the country that something had to happen; nobody knew, then, how much it was going to cost.

At the far end of the cemetery in Punta Arenas a corrugated iron fence overlooked the steel grey Magellan Strait and a ghostly Tierra del Fuego on the horizon. The ever-accreting
gravestones and elaborate mausolea (the names carved on them revealed the city’s cosmopolitan past) were interspersed with hundreds of twenty-foot high tumescent bushes cut to a rounded tip, a fine example of the most
outré
Freudian topiary.

Although Magallanes is Chile’s largest province it is home to less than 1 per cent of the population. Vast expanses of ice and steppe separate it from the rest of Chile and a thick slice of it is simply omitted from most maps. North of these wastes there is a vague and unspoken perception that the country proper ends at Puerto Montt. The citizens of Punta Arenas deeply resent what they call ‘the ignorance of northerners’. I lost count of the number of times people told me irritably, ‘In Santiago, you know, they think that down here we have penguins in the plaza and Indians on the streets’.

I had the telephone number of an elderly man of German descent whose father had played a key role in the vanishing act of the
Dresden
in the Chilean fjords, and when I called he invited me to tea. The house was in a quiet street in the north of town, and a neatly dressed man wearing a tie and hand-knitted cardigan opened the door.

‘¡
Wilkommen
. Welcome.
Bienvenida
!’ I was afraid he was about to launch into ‘Cabaret’.

I was introduced to his wife and, during the course of the afternoon, a range of children and grandchildren. There was a kind of yard at the back of their home, and nine cars or jeeps in varying stages of decay were wedged within its brick walls.

Gerd swiftly got onto the topic of the Word of God. I asked what his religion was. I had long since given up saying, ‘Are you a Catholic?’ when the subject arose; it seemed very likely that my interlocutor wouldn’t be.

‘I am a Jehovah’s Witness,’ he said.

It wouldn’t have surprised me if he’d told me he was a Palestinian falangist.

There was a bar upholstered in cream vinyl in the lounge with a tall ceramic
bierstein
on top. Albert Pagels, Gerd’s father, was a Lutheran from Rügen Island in the Baltic. He had arrived in Punta Arenas as a young quartermaster in the merchant navy in 1903, and stayed, making his way first by hunting and goldpanning and later by providing field experience on foreign scientific expeditions. He appears frequently in Carl Skottsberg’s
The Wilds of Patagonia
, published in 1911. He was a self-taught man, serious and eminently capable. Shortly before the First World War broke out five German cruisers arrived in southern Chile under von Spee, and one of them—the
Dresden
– was soon in urgent need of expert local knowledge to dodge the pursuing British. The German authorities got in touch with Albert Pagels, and what he and a handful of others achieved in concealing the massive cruiser from the enemy for ten weeks and keeping its supply line open has entered the annals of German naval history. Pagels twice refused to be bought off by the desperate British, and although a mere civilian, he was awarded the Iron Cross, First and Second Class, in 1919.

Albert had been in Germany during the Second World War, and although he had never joined the Nazis, he had been proud to help ‘Germany’. Gerd was devoted to the memory of his father, and behaved as if he were oblivious to the embarrassing matter of what ‘Germany’ represented at that time. I asked him if he would be proud to help Germany (where he had never been).