Travels in a Thin Country (32 page)

In the stretch of leaden water between Lennox and the Wollaston islands, the latter dripping from the end of the continent like drops of water from a leaky tap, I went up to the bridge. The black, curved back of a whale broke the surface straight ahead (it was a finback, one of the biggest) and the captain made a joke about the Britishness of the Malvinas.

‘Our air force was grateful for Chilean help,’ I said.

That shut him up.

‘Isn’t that right? Chile helped Britain, at your bases?’

After an awkward pause this civilian sailor said,

‘We don’t talk.’

I was again amazed at the acute public awareness of the need for secrecy over events in 1982. Chile was, admittedly, officially neutral in the Falklands War, but the Argentinians must have known what went on, ten years later. Perhaps I, a child of the 1960s, didn’t appreciate the depth of patriotic secrecy fostered by war. It was very near home, for them.

Two more islands appeared out of the mist, the last visible remnants of the longest mountain range on earth – 4300 miles from the Caribbean down to the Horn, and it doesn’t stop there, it just goes underwater. It began to rain, and I was
summoned below deck for lunch. The
Ñandú
had begun to seem very small, as if it were shrinking, and it was no longer gliding smoothly. I didn’t feel much like lunch, but as their only guest I was ceremoniously placed at the head of the table; I simply didn’t know what to say to get out of it. Now I knew what George Bush had felt like immediately before his display of emetic diplomacy in Tokyo. The captain and five of his crew set about a four-course meal culminating in pieces of meat the size of shoe-soles. Someone made a joke about the British constitution; I could see they were warming up for a treat.

Hornos
itself, an island rather than a cape and as dark and lugubrious as the others, was meanly spiked with dwarf beech trees and coated with tussock-grass. We dropped anchor there in tumultuous winds and waited for the ship we were supplying, squinting through binoculars at the few lonely buildings above the cliffs. Out on deck the German seaman, confounding the laws of nature by keeping his cigarette alight, shouted into my ear, but the only phrase I caught above the squall was ‘corruption at the highest levels’. I had it all planned, if the
Ñandú
started sinking. I was going to hold on to the coffin. Remember
Moby-Dick
? It was the empty coffin which saved Ishmael when the Pequod went down.

The cruise ship appeared and three of its Philippino crew lurched over in a Zodiac inflatable. We could have docked directly with the ship if its captain hadn’t wished to protect the sensibilities of his elderly US passengers, claiming that our cargo, now wrapped in a fluorescent orange tarpaulin, would be less conspicuous if loaded from a dinghy. I gripped the rail and through a curtain of rain watched the coffin being lowered, and just as one end banged into the Zodiac, the crew of the
Ñandú
straining at the ropes and waves slapping the leaning deck, I was sick.

As the ship moved back into the mist the German appeared
proffering a mug of
café a punto
(spiked coffee). One sniff of whisky sent me straight back to the rails, and the next five hours passed in delirium as I sank into a slough of misery and thought of an anecdote recounted by the halitosic Frenchman with the
Légion d’bonneur
in Juan Fernández involving a troopship he had taken to Singapore on which six men died of seasickness.

At ten at night we docked for half-an-hour at Puerto Toro on the east coast of Navarino. An agitated shoal of people darted around on the quay, lit up against the tar blackness by the
Ñandú
’s bright lights. They scrambled over themselves to load boxes, chairs, children and dogs. Toro was inaccessible by land, and it was time for the eight kids to go back to school in Williams.

When we left, the children leant over the rail as adult faces lined with anxiety dissolved into the darkness. The crew all decided they were hungry, and the German set about making a goulash, his cigarette set between his lips at a jaunty angle. I retired quickly to my bunk below deck.

If one doesn’t get birthday presents it can remobilize very painfully the persecutory anxiety which usually follows birth.

Henry Reed, The Primal Scene as it were

I had to go north, but from Punta Arenas it wasn’t going to be possible to continue very far by land, as the country soon disintegrates into an archipelago. The land simply runs out on you. I could have travelled over the Andes, through Argentina and then back into Chile further up, but I felt it would be disloyal to abandon the thin country at this stage of my journey, and anyway I wanted to sail through the islands. Someone had told me there were a thousand of them.

I flew back from Williams to Punta Arenas, horrified to see a familiar object laid down the middle of the Twin Otter. The North American cruise ship had docked at Williams and offloaded the now full coffin for speedy dispatch to the nearest international airport. At least I would be able to get a lift into town with the hearse at the other end.

Tucked into the car nicely next to the head of the coffin, I noted that my unwitting pursuit of this dead stranger was taking on a macabre fascination, and as I got out and watched
the hearse disappear I wondered if I was about to follow the man’s soul to Purgatory. As it happened, I believe I did.

I picked up my visa and spent a wet Monday running between cold shipping offices, trying to persuade intransigent officials to convey me up the coast in their vessels. A naval ship was leaving that night for Tortel; I had never heard of the place, but I saw on a map that it was suitably positioned in the middle of an empty white space representing ice. A man at the naval headquarters announced triumphantly, on my fourth visit, that he had secured me a passage on this ship. I returned later for the final details. Another man came into the room, and when he saw me he let out a kind of sharp hiss.

‘But we can’t take
you
.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because you’re a
woman
.’

Later that afternoon I heard a naval officer who was present describing this incident to a colleague. ‘Then,’ he said, ‘there was a very small explosion.’

The captain was not at any of the mess halls, or on his ship, the
Orompello
, or in the naval offices, and I was beginning to consider loitering outside the brothels of Punta Arenas. Finally I discovered another wing of the naval headquarters and asked the duty officer if this captain could be located. The man told me to take a seat in the waiting room, and disappeared with my passport. I sat on a bench between two marines.

‘All bosses are bastards,’ announced the marine on my left, kicking an innocent radiator. The pair of them had been put ashore for bad behaviour and were waiting to hear what their punishment would be.

‘What I need is a good night out and lots of bottles of pisco. Fuck the bosses.’

This sentiment hung in the air as the three of us sat there, damp, miserable and planning our revenge, until the door
swung open and a tall captain appeared, immaculate in crisp navy blue and polished gold. He stopped in front of me, saluted, clicked his heels and handed me my passport.

‘
Capitán Lathrop, Señora, a sus órdenes
.’

The marines leapt to their feet and looked from the captain to me and back again with abject horror, obviously deducing that I was a plant. They stood like saluting statues as I shook hands with the captain, looked him in the eye and tried to compose myself. There is much truth in the cliché about men in uniform.

‘Dismissed.’

He put the marines out of their misery. I cast around for my very best Spanish and told him it was my life’s ambition to reach Tortel and that my only hope was aboard his ship. He in turn looked me in the eye.

‘I would be delighted to take you, but the ship is very overcrowded and cramped, and there is no room except in the marines’ quarters, and I could not under any circumstances whatever put you in there.’

That did sound rather gruelling.

I found that a gas-carrier was leaving for Chacabuco, but the manager of the shipping company that owned it told me, after I had waited two hours for him to return from his cousin’s wedding reception, that it was against international regulations for such a vessel to carry passengers. My only hope, at five o’clock, was the regular cargo ship which left every ten days for Puerto Montt and which carried a few passengers in portacabins on deck. These places were taken weeks in advance, but with some desperate lobbying I procured a passage, and to celebrate I went for a farewell drink with William, one of the footballing yachtsmen. He had left the
Creighton
to continue his journey overland, and he had with him a British white-water rafter. It was 9 March, and all three of us had picked up mail from home that day. The boys were
crowing over their Valentine cards, and thought it was inordinately funny that I didn’t have any. They went on to entertain me with stories about the rough passage I was to endure on my cargo ship for four days and rushed to their dictionaries for a translation of
Golfo de Penas
, the name of a notorious stretch of water I had to cross in archipelagic Chile.

‘Gulf of Miseries,’ cried William, delighted.

‘Gulf of the Torments,’ said the rafter with obvious glee.

Bloody men, I thought.

I caught the last bus to Puerto Natales, a port three hours away to the north whence my ship departed and the end, virtually, of the road. After that it was fjords, islands and icecaps. It was still pouring with rain, and the light faded on a dark blueish-grey and cadmium yellow Patagonian landscape. We stopped to pick up a man waiting next to a single cinnamon tree, the pair of them illuminated in a pool of light spilt through the window of a saloon bar. Most of the passengers on the bus were Natalians who had travelled from Puerto Montt via the long Argentinian loop. When the first lights of Puerto Natales glittered on the horizon against the background of Last Hope Sound the passengers shouted ‘
Las luces! Las luces!
’ (The lights! The lights!), and it was a hopeful introduction.

It was wet in Puerto Natales. I checked into a wooden boarding-house with huge rooms and a woodburning stove in the hall around which people had draped damp clothes, and the sweet smell of wet wool drying opened doors in my memory. The owners of these clothes, I learnt later, were waiting for my ship. Everyone who came to Natales seemed to do so in order to get somewhere else. It was a basic kind of place: bars with steamed-up windows and dripping horses tied to telegraph poles in the wide mud streets. A lot of the men looked like John Wayne.

I took one organized tour during my six months in Chile. It
was a daytrip to the Torres del Paine national park, the only place in the country known to all tourists and travellers and one where it is essential to spend at least a week. An authoritative and normally po-faced book called
South America’s National Parks
published in the United States by a company called The Mountaineers says this about Paine:

‘Resist the temptation to take a one-day tour,’ the book went on to recommend. I didn’t like being given that kind of advice, and took a small-minded pleasure in refusing it, although the fact was that I genuinely didn’t have time to do the park properly because my cargo ship was leaving the next day. I rather hoped that to make up for my failure to devote a respectable period of time to the park, the tour would at least be spectacularly bad, but it wasn’t. The guide was called Fabien, and he was young, helpful and very well informed. He drove me from Natales to the park in a Japanese car with two elderly Argentinians. These latter were themselves Patagonians, and a debate simmered for the first hour about the relative merits of Chilean Patagonia (of which Fabien was a native) and its Argentinian counterpart. I asked about the Patagonian boundaries – where it began and ended – and this provoked a furious exchange of views. It appeared that Patagonia possessed the ultimate in topographical mystique: like Tartary and Christendom, it wasn’t pinned down by boundaries. It was outside the mundane administrative framework of provinces and countries; it existed on a higher plane.

I asked if they could sum up the difference between Chilea
Patagonia and Argentinian Patagonia in one sentence.

‘Absolutely none at all except the Chilean bit has mountains,’ said the Argentinian.

‘Quite,’ said Fabien, and that was that.

At the Milodón Cave between Natales and the park we saw a fibreglass replica of the fěted prehistoric Giant Ground Sloth, an apologetic cross between a dinosaur and a bear. The cave was rather beautiful. The Argentinians, I noticed, had acquired the habit of calling each other ‘mammi’ and ‘pappi,’as if their relationship had been subsumed in its entirety by their numerous progeny. Pappi videoed us standing next to the fibreglass model.

We followed the cordillera then, the landscape still rimed, and Fabien waved at ponchoed men on tall horses driving immense flocks of sheep. He pointed out large lone ranches, the focal points of vast tracts of dry yellow land. For several miles the sun shone into clear air, and the dull and dreamy colours sharpened. But then a dun wall of vapour appeared, and the hillsides swirled in the mist. Mammi never stopped talking, though she was obviously used to being ignored as she never seemed to expect a reply.

As soon as we entered the park we saw hundreds of tawny guanacos. These animals had got rather a bad press. Their habit of spitting when cross was so well-known in Chile that the water-canons used on protestors during the dictatorship were named after them. The rheas were more difficult to spot – but we did find some, ungainly quilted ostriches silhouetted against a pale granite mountain, the peak of which had a slate coating, like chocolate sauce frozen on an ice-cream cone. It wasn’t until much later that the three granite towers (the
Torres
of the park’s name – actually crystallized rock masses) solidified in the mist. One of them was over 7500 feet high.