Travels in a Thin Country (6 page)

We ate our salmon sandwiches on the wall of a small church on a knoll, and a middle-aged woman joined us from the fertile plots of land below. ‘You mustn’t drink,’ she said peremptorily, ‘or fornicate. The bible says so.’ I took the opportunity of remarking airily to Matthew that she would approve of his attitude to drinking. The woman informed us, in parentheses, that she was a Seventh Day Adventist, and concluded a list of other biblically prohibited activities with ‘watching television’.

Before we left the teacher asked us if we would take a box back to Camiña for her. I was often entrusted with errands like this in rural Chile. The villages were so remote that each vehicle was obliged to operate as a kind of public freight facility. I donated three pens to the schoolroom and we drove off under the large ‘Nama’ written on the hillside in white stones. Chilean villagers often proclaim themselves in mosaic writing, just as they lovingly tend their diminutive museums; they cherish a sense of community.

We delivered our consignment to the municipal offices in Camiña, as instructed. As in any good office the week before Christmas, the staff had been drinking for some time, and the parcel’s addressee propelled us inside for a glass of
cola de mono
, a seasonal beverage made of milk, clear brandy, coffee and cinnamon. After a few minutes a nun entered the room, and our hosts pointed at us and jabbered. A man began to play the national anthem on a pair of teaspoons. The wide-eyed nun turned to us and said in a Yorkshire accent, ‘Is it true then? Are you really English?’

Matthew and I choked on our cocktails and introduced ourselves. The nun, flapping her hands and beaming, invited us home for dinner. The villagers clucked approvingly at this happy gringo reunion.

We reclaimed the camp beds we had relinquished in the morning from the mayor, who had spilt
cola de mono
down his crisply pressed shirt, and spent the evening with two Sisters serving in the County Wicklow-based missionary order of St Columban. Matthew, keen to establish our moral credentials with the nuns, was anxious to advertise the innocent nature of our relationship. He said we had decided to make an Andean trip together ‘for mutual support’, and I could see the nuns’ eyes glaze over as he extrapolated about this support, none of which sounded very familiar to me. I’m sure they didn’t believe a word of it; he was protesting too much.

The nun with the Yorkshire accent, whose many years on the continent had taught her not to expect much, told us that the valley had been priestless for over a hundred years. Besides the fact that it didn’t have any money, the Chilean Church had experienced a chronic inability to recruit priests throughout the century. In 1968, the worst year, only two had been ordained in the entire country. No wonder the Adventists had enjoyed so much success: they had moved into a vacuum.

‘The Pentecostals,’ she went on, ‘have caused a lot of friction, especially in the altiplano. There are masses of them.’ Like many fundamentalists before them, the Pentecostals’ vision of the world did not extend to religious tolerance. ‘They set up a stage outside a church in a large village on the coast once during a Catholic mass and outblasted us with their music! You have to hand it to them, though – they achieve great things among the people. They can reform the hardest of drinkers, once they get their hands on them.’

Catholic men – many of them, at least – continued to put it away.

‘But the Pentecostals want to jettison the entire culture of the villages’, the nun continued. ‘They even forbid fiestas, and you can imagine what a psychological necessity they are in a poor rural community.’

Religious observance throughout the continent was, in general, weak; it had always been weak. The indigenous population had never been properly Christianized: they were ‘Churchized’. The
conquistadores
turned their pagan shrines into churches and told them they were Catholics. Naturally, pagan practices were swiftly grafted on to Christian stock, and they took hold. On 1 November each year, we were told, the people of Camiña still proceed to the cemetery to deposit food, drink and cigarettes on the tombs of their dead.

However lukewarm many Chilean Catholics were about the
faith, everyone I met, up and down the country, seemed to have a strong sense of the importance of the Church as a national institution, both historically and in their own time. It was different from faith. It was a sense, or an awareness, which had been bred into their ancestors. It had survived the arrival of the secular age, which by the mid-nineteenth century had dislodged the Church from the privileged position it had inherited from medieval Europe, and it had outlived the 1925 constitution, which officially separated Church and State after almost fifty years of political controversy on the subject. (Disestablishment was characteristic of a trend in Europe as well as South America, and in Chile the transition was a particularly smooth one.) Despite the fact that over the next decades the Chilean Catholic Church moved towards the centre, it remained close to the ruling and landowning élite until the 1960s – and then it was overtaken by a small revolution.

Before we reached their front door we could smell bacon cooking; it was a smell which took me very far from the Andes. The Sisters had invited us for breakfast, despite our early start, and they had managed to prepare an English one. Up there, this was something of a feat. Given my profound attachment to real coffee I never thought that I would be glad to see Nescafé, but the barley substitute had put it into a different perspective.

We made the Panamerican again before eleven, grateful for the comfort of tarmac, got the tyre fixed at a garage and tried to reach our Andean destination by a more southerly route. Turning off at a truckstop called Huara, the kind of place where nothing has ever happened and you expect to run into a serial killer, we followed a wide and deserted road painted with troubling white lines. Neither of us spoke for a while, then Matthew said, ‘I don’t want to be alarmist, but I can’t help
wondering why this road is marked out as a runway.’ The tarmac petered out soon afterwards, and this bizarre piece of Chilean highway design remained an enigma.

A track careered off to a hill on the pampa, and we took it: on the southern side we found the Giant of the Atacama, 350 feet long and the largest human geoglyph in the world. It had a head like a box, with twelve rays coming out of it, and struck an angular pose, with a creature like a monkey at its side. Nobody knows what these geoglyphs were for, or if they had a function at all. Matthew, a utilitarian at heart, was adamant that the drawings in the soil once had a purpose. It seemed to me perfectly plausible that they were simply aesthetic, and that the hills were a kind of early art gallery. It didn’t strike me as an odd concept, having grown up in the English west country where there are plenty of images carved in the chalk. Those white horses galloping through my childhood seemed as appropriate to the benign English hills as this sinister alien-man did to the harsh and spooky desert.

The hot wind which had been blowing through the jeep all day picked up speed in the late afternoon as we took a loop of road to a high village called Chusmiza where, our Chilean guidebook told us with a descriptive flourish, we would find a delightful hotel near a warm mineral spring. This seemed as likely as finding a French restaurant, but we had learnt to keep an open mind. At a small water-bottling plant a man jogged across a yard and flagged us down.

‘Hello’, he said.

‘Hello’, we answered.

There was a pause. The three of us smiled inanely.

‘Is this the right way to the hotel?’ Matthew eventually asked.

The man pulled a key out of his pocket with the figure seven carved on it.

‘Yes’, he said, holding out the key. ‘One thousand pesos.
Just follow the road and you’ll come to it.’ He smiled again. ‘It’s a very quiet hotel. There aren’t any staff. Haven’t had any guests for quite a while now, either.’

We drove on, each constructing this Marie Céleste in our imagination. The track ended at a long thin building on a spur of land above a shallow valley. We left the jeep on a small forecourt and let ourselves into the hotel through the door painted with a red seven. It led into a high-ceilinged room with three single beds, and in the
en suite
bathroom we found a five-foot deep white-tiled bath fed by hot sulphur springs and occupied by a wooden stopper and a family of salamanders. The toilet flushed with hot water too, and it ran from the single tap in the basin. We had discovered a hotel without cold water.

The village was so poor that the roofs of the shacks were made of orange crates. We met a priest called Father Miguel outside the water-bottling plant later, and he took us to a truckers’ café. A man disappeared into the back and returned suggesting roast llama and rice. Father Miguel enthusiastically explained that llama is cholesterol-free.

We made another attempt to reach the Isluga National Park. It was a hard three-hour drive to 12,000 feet, the tracks so corrugated and pitted by Bolivian juggernauts that we were frequently obliged to slow down to ten miles an hour. We had bought some packets of strawberry wafers for breakfast from the roast llama man. They were a scientific triumph, as they had absolutely no taste at all. We were thirsty all the time. The jarring discomfort and the heat made us both irritable. Matthew made his hundredth joke about women drivers, and I snapped at him. Underneath a cosmopolitan and right-on exterior he was deeply conservative. He freely admitted to what he referred to as a ‘fundamentally right-wing perspective on life’; he thought having a liberated attitude towards women
meant feeling okay if I poured the petrol while he held the funnel. While we were driving along one day he asked me what impression I had got, in general, of Australian men when I was down there for a couple of months earlier that year. After I told him he didn’t speak to me for two hours.

In Isluga itself, a typical altiplano village and the eastern gateway to the park, narrow streets of thatched adobe cottages formed a semi-circle around a church painted white with marsh lime. At the top of the uneven stairway of the belltower I rang the angelus on two copper-green bells. Next to the church they had built a bandstand in a green meadow. There was nobody in the bandstand, or the meadow; in fact there was nobody anywhere. The shepherds of the altiplano used to build their villages for festivals and funerals, living ordinarily near their llamas and alpacas and returning only on special occasions. It was a tradition which had been eroded in most places, as the villages had acquired schools, and other institutions, and the populations had stabilized.

After an argument about whether a distant camelid was a llama or an alpaca we picnicked by a fast stream, both remarking how different the park was from the landscape around Chungará only sixty or so miles to the north (but requiring hours and hours of hard travel). There was hardly any snow, to start with, more animals, more water, an abundance of short green grass and an irritating profusion of flies. It was less harsh, and not quite so other-worldly.

At one village we were closely observed by a small gang of Aymára children who had been playing in the potato fields. Their parents, said a small fourteen-year-old wearing a black hat with a narrow brim, were at the market at Colchane. Other children clutched their younger siblings protectively. One girl took us into a shack, hoping to sell a meagre bundle of woven goods. Her mother was crouched in a corner, suckling a baby with a shock of shiny black hair. I bought a bright strip of thick
woollen ribbon, and when the girl gave it to me I saw that the skin on her hands was dry and scaley, like a reptile. The children stared at us, unsmiling, as we drove off and whipped up the dust.

We approached the Salar de Surire, a great salt flat, and walked for a while, short of breath. The cone of the Isluga volcano was smeared with snow. When we turned back, later, we travelled up to the border village of Colchane, a dusty, straggling place cluttered with trucks and decaying cars piled with Bolivians, their possessions bulging out of cardboard boxes. The road from Bolivia to Chile through Colchane is a well-known cocaine route, or at least a route for cocaine base or paste. People walk across with a pound or two in their pocket, or else drive shipments through in lorries. Peru and Bolivia – both on Chile’s doorstep – supply a very high percentage of the world’s coca-leaf crop. While Chile doesn’t produce cocaine in any quantity, it does supply precursor chemicals, and both use and trafficking of the final product are common. Local dealers sell it in units called
empanadas
, the name of the pastry envelopes stuffed with meat, vegetables or shell-fish which are ubiquitous (and delicious) throughout the continent.

On the long drive back down to our hotel we passed open trucks with large families huddled in the back, shivering as the evening set in, their alpaca earflaps pulled under their chins while they bounced along. The sun slipped behind the most westerly ridge of the Andes, straight ahead, and conferred a halo upon the mountains while the sky turned itself into an excited configuration of pinks, reds and purples.

At a truckstop we ate a bowl of
cazuela
perfumed with a mound of coriander, but it was not a good one; it was tepid and greasy. There were two posters next to each other on the adobe wall, one showing Christ in close-up, wearing the crown of thorns, and the other, equally close-up, the glamour
model Samantha Fox, wearing a pair of yellow knickers. This was less of a surprise than the Adventists: I had been expecting to find religion comfortably coexisting with trash culture. Both functioned at the centre of public life; religion – as a concept, if not a living faith – had not yet been pushed out to the margins. I thought then that perhaps I had underestimated the reality of their faith. It was easy to see the failings of Catholicism, and more difficult to appreciate the bedrock it was for many Chileans. Going to mass wasn’t everything.

The dust, when we reached the hotel, had coated us and our possessions like fur. Besides that, we were burnt by the sun, chilled to the bone marrow by the cold night air and battered by the tortuous roads. It had been a hard day.