Between Extremes Read online

  Katia is quietly spoken with fluent English and an engaging giggle. ‘Local legend says that the fifty-five Chilean heroes prepared for their final attack by drinking strong liquor fortified with gunpowder,’ she tells us and Bri mimes pouring a drink and handing me a glass.

  ‘Here, John, this should knock your head off!’

  Laughing, Katia leads us underground to a moving exhibition of photographs of the army of the time and a plaque to the dead draped with a flag. The sombre effect is undermined by the ludicrous martial music that belts out from tinny loudspeakers.

  From the cool of the museum we emerge into the blinding heat. El Morro has little enough scrubby vegetation, but inland the terrain is balder still. It seems a very alien environment.

  ‘How many people live here, Katia?’ I ask.

  ‘Around a hundred and seventy thousand people.’

  ‘But what do they all do?’

  ‘The main local industries are fishing, motor car plants, Wrangler jeans factory and tourism—’

  ‘Tourism!’ interjects Brian, rifling through my pockets and taking out cigarettes and lighter. ‘I don’t want to be rude, Arica seems a nice place, but who wants to spend their holidays with that appalling stench?’

  He lights up and puffs furiously – unusual for him as he smokes only occasionally. He is right about the smell: it is so thick you feel you could touch it, cut it with a knife. With the heat and humidity the effect is suffocating and my head feels as though it has been submerged in a bowl of warm, rancid glue.

  ‘What is it?’ I ask, lighting my own cigarette.

  ‘The fishmeal factories,’ she replies, declining a proffered cigarette and adding through giggles, ‘Sometimes money does not smell well, eh?’

  Descending the hill towards the centre of Arica one had to pass through a shanty town. The whole of this rudimentary community was pockmarked with tiny Methodist, Mormon and Seventh Day Adventist churches. These buildings were not much bigger than some of the appalling shanty homes, indeed, some of them may well have housed a family before becoming a structure of faith. In the middle of all this reformist zeal there was a small but robust Catholic chapel with a stubby steeple. It stood defiantly, declaring that it alone was at the very centre of people’s suffering.

  Back in the town, standing in stark contrast to these small churches was the church of San Marco or the Iron Cathedral of Eiffel. As its name declares, the church was designed and built by the same gentleman who constructed the great iron tower in Paris. It was built entirely in prefabricated iron. Even the walls and ceilings were lined with stamped, moulded iron plates. Only the door was made of wood. As this is a desert climate and it has not rained here in the memory of the oldest inhabitants, the builders of this cathedral were assured that it would never rust or decay. Entering it, one felt immediately its coldness, its impersonality and even its sterility. Metal is not the medium of passion, and in this hulk of a God house I could feel no movement of the spirit. Only standing in the patio of the grotto at the side of the church did I have any sense of religion, as I watched one little bird hop and dance around a bent old woman as she moved about sweeping leaves.

  Although I rejected the whole notion of an iron church, I was nevertheless intrigued as to why Gustave Eiffel should have bothered to design and ship one out in prefabricated sections to a remote corner of South America. Did he imagine that in this new continent he could eclipse the majesty of those medieval cathedrals and churches that litter Europe? Did he perhaps see himself as a visionary in iron? He had also designed the little Customs House, the Aduana, which now staged exhibitions. Whatever his motivation, I was completely unmoved by his cathedral. I wanted to be where living people were.

  We walked on quickly towards the harbour where big, skulking pelicans pushed and jostled among the boulders on which it was built. I remembered seeing such birds in fairytale picture books but these were an ugly and brutal travesty of my childhood imagination. Everywhere about me was the putrid smell of fish processing. My stomach was rising to my throat and I wanted to be away from the place fast. Walking back towards the town I was thinking, was this the essential dichotomy of Arica, the empty, fusty-smelling iron church in a desert city that reeked only of fish?

  Back in the town proper I was glad to be confronted by the deep reds, yellow and violet of hibiscus bushes and the soft reddish blush of lobelia flowers. I lingered by them for a while, but it was a mistake. We were quickly surrounded by some gypsy women and their children. They hobbled after us, pulling at our arms and pleading, proffering their hungry babies. We ignored them and walked on in silence. They persisted, then after some moments gave up, making some remark, no doubt, cursing the gringos. I said nothing to John but I remembered feeding the desert finches on my balcony and I remembered the little bird at the cathedral. I hate this mea culpa thing that wells up in me. Rather than say anything of how I was feeling, I stopped and took a close-up shot of a clutch of hibiscus flowers.

  A beggar woman comes towards us, muttering and pulling at our sleeves. ‘Gypsies are the same everywhere, I think,’ says Katia. Her comment strikes a strange chord. Although we are on the other side of the world, surrounded by deserts and faces with high cheekbones suggesting Indian ancestry, where everyone speaks Spanish, a language I hardly know, I am surprised at the lack of culture shock. Everything is new to me but seems familiar.

  In Colón Square there is a monument erected in 1991 by the local Socialist Party to commemorate its members killed in General Pinochet’s 1973 coup. Brian goes over to take a photograph of this and I say to Katia, ‘I’ve read that the Socialists were very strong in the north. There must have been big celebrations in ’88 when Pinochet handed over to a civilian government.’

  She looks blankly at me, muttering something about ‘the military period’ and changes the subject. This comes as a shock. I wander off a little and take a photo of the square. Brian comes up and, seeing my perplexed expression, asks, ‘Something bothering you?’

  ‘No, no, just thinking. I’ll tell you later.’

  Hidden away among all the brown earth and rock Arica has two fertile valleys: the Lluta and the Azapa. Katia takes us to visit the archaeological museum of the University of Tarapaca, the name of the province we are in. It is very hot and our surroundings make us thirsty. On the way we pass shanties built of packing cases with burned-out trucks and skinny dogs in the yard. The course of the river is little more than piles of stones. There are smallholdings, oases of olive and fruit trees and corn. It looks a hard life with the desert reaching right up to the back door. Katia, once again her effusive self, tells us, ‘They are expanding the cultivated area with Drip Watering Schemes. The land looks dead now but some green will come up.’

  Further up the valley, beyond even these spartan outposts, we get a mysterious sense of the people who were living here centuries ago. High up on the hillsides you spot what could be a pattern; you almost dismiss it before you realize it is a definite form. They are geoglyphs, figures either carved in the rock or marked out by large stones.

  The most exotic geoglyph was Cerro Sagrado, ‘Sacred Mountain’. The images of a pregnant woman, a phallus, monkeys, serpents and lizards are all clearly visible high on the bluffs above us. We stand looking in silence, a small group in a vast area, the only sounds the wind and an occasional bird cry. I feel a strange mix of the familiarity and the fear that such ancient monuments often inspire. You can imagine walking beside a trader from the mountains 600 years ago, looking up and seeing Cerro Sagrado and knowing we are near the coast and at our journey’s end. Then you realize that that world was quite alien, and mysterious; that that site was not Cerro Sagrado to the trader, for he spoke another language, had never heard a word of Spanish and had no concept of Europe. He lived in another world as well as another time. Here is culture shock after all.

  I was half listening and half sleeping when mention of the word ‘geoglyphs’ woke me. One can only wonder at the energy and imagination that it too
k to construct these images. The people who created these things would have had to stand at a distance from the hill, and there, in their mind’s eye, design the outline of the shape they sought to build, then trudge three, four miles up the hill, spend weeks clearing the rubble and create with perfect configuration that creature of their imagination or that animal of their reality. The further we travelled into the hills the more we saw of these visual messages from a people and a civilization long since disappeared. Everywhere were representations of llamas and alpacas. On one particular hill some artistic genius had described the outline of a huge lizard that bore no resemblance to the geckos that constantly stirred at the edge of the road. And beside the lizard, the outline of what was obviously a monkey. Yet there were no monkeys in Chile, so the image demonstrated the huge distances that the Inca civilization had spread itself from central Peru. I asked Katia about the lizard. Was it a native creature of Chile? She told me that the lizard was only representative, a symbol of water.

  Around the images of the lizard, the monkey and the other animals were figures of hugely pregnant women and tumescent men. The hill was a holy place, our guides explained, and all the images together represented the circle of birth and death and rebirth.

  On another hill we had pointed out to us the images of men dancing to a shaman playing his pipes. I was drawn to this figure. I thought of our own dancing days in those tiny sweaty cells in Lebanon. Like that shaman on the hill, I too believe that dancing is divine. It is the great liberator.

  I was captivated by these etched images and their stone-constructed counterparts. The energy of these vitally alive representations made the airless tomb of Eiffel’s iron church even more alien than I had first felt.

  I looked back at the pregnant women and the dancing men and remembered my lamentation on our arrival about D. H. Lawrence, Catholic passion and the beauty of ethnic women. Somehow these ritual figures were not simply stone effigies.

  My wife of a few years was at home carrying our first child and I was desperately missing her. This wasn’t just mawkish sentiment. The dancers on the hill made my loneliness back at the hotel seem foolish and adolescent. They were mocking me yet simultaneously giving me passage into the landscape. Several thousands of years after they were built they still served their original purpose, as a guide for travellers and a place for the spirit.

  We continue to the archaeological museum along a very bumpy road. The buildings there form a tranquil oasis. We look at the huddled mummies dating from the Chinchorro culture; they are believed to pre-date those in Egypt. There is also a good exhibition of ancient artefacts demonstrating the lives and links between the hunter fishermen of the coast area and the farmers of the Altiplano. I knew that horses were unknown before the Spanish but had not realized that knives were similarly absent. This seems highly unlikely but Katia confirms it.

  ‘These people were obviously good hunters,’ I say to Bri, ‘so how did they manage that without a cutting edge? With drugs or hypnotism?’ I squat down and squint up at him as if at a bird in a tree. ‘Hey you, bird! Listen to me: you are getting very sleepy . . .’

  Brian turns to our guide. ‘You see what I have to put up with, Katia. Mad dogs and Englishmen!’

  ‘Ah, yes!’ she replies. ‘Of course, vaca loco, mad cow disease. They all have it?’

  ‘Every last one!’ Brian confirms.

  I was struck by a group of mummies, which had been carbon-dated as being 8,000 years older than the mummies of Egypt. Yet this amazing fact could not dispel the poignancy of this dead tableau. Mother, father and children had been buried sitting in an upright position with all the accoutrements of their household. At first I could hardly bear to look in on this family, and one particular relic made the whole scene even more moving. It was a small box a little larger than a snuffbox. It contained the foetus of a stillborn infant. It was a powerful testament of life and of life after death. Even this stillborn child was assured of an existence in the afterworld. This was real passion, more meaningful than D. H. Lawrence’s egotistical ramblings about it.

  While I was busy with all this thinking, John was intent upon his own jigsaw. He has an insatiable curiosity about things. I’m sure if I ever possess a cat I will name the creature McCarthy after my travelling companion. While John was extracting information from our guides, I sat silently asking my own questions, trying to fathom what specifically had brought us here. The idea of the yak farm was certainly a means but were there other things compelling me?

  All travel is, after all, a journey in time and in mind. Like many people I believe that physical landscapes are a mirror of, or perhaps a key into, our inner landscape. It wasn’t simply chance or good luck that brought us to Chile. The silent messages from the images on the hillside and those unearthed from the desert had assured me of that.

  I began to wonder was there something else, something more that lay dormant in me, and only by coming here might I recognize it?

  I had brought with me the collected poems of Pablo Neruda, the fabulous Chilean Nobel prizewinner. Curiously it was the first gift I was given when I returned from Lebanon. Was that just a coincidence too? In any case I had chosen Neruda for my spirit guide, though if anyone was to ask me I wasn’t sure why.

  I also wanted to know if there was any resonance in this real landscape for the imaginary landscape I had concocted while incarcerated. Neruda’s intoxicating verse somehow seemed a familiar echo of that thinking so long ago. Why, I began asking myself; and would being here answer my questions?

  ‘My country has the shape of a great albatross with its wings outspread,’ wrote Neruda in 1972. The association of the land with the albatross is an intriguing one, for it carries with it notions of destiny. The fact that we were here was for me more to do with a fixed destiny than an act of chance. Our 3,000-mile journey between extremes of Chile’s land mass was our own albatross flight.

  We drive back to Arica at lunchtime. Katia cannot stay but drops us off at a covered market where we have delicious ceviche (raw fish) and a beer.

  ‘It was odd the way Katia clammed up in the square when I asked her about the Socialists and Pinochet.’

  ‘Was that what was bothering you then?’ Brian asks.

  ‘Yeah. She just didn’t want to know, sort of closed it off with that phrase “the military period”. I’d have thought people would have been happy to talk – there can’t be any real threat of oppression now, surely.’

  ‘No. She must have grown up during the Pinochet years. Maybe her family supported him, or maybe the Chileans just can’t deal with what happened.’

  ‘What they let happen to themselves?’

  ‘Perhaps. We’ll see what other folk think. Maybe Katia doesn’t care about politics or reckons it’s not right to talk to us gringos about it.’

  We lapse into silence, eating and sipping. The market is strangely proportioned, the roof high above – as you would expect – but everything at ground level, while being the right height, seems to have been constricted in width and depth. The narrow, cluttered passageways bustle with people selling all manner of things. About three feet from our little table is a kiosk of esoterica: candles, incense, maté tea, herbs and many mysterious packages. It looks wildly superstitious but is doing a brisk trade. The man behind the counter has an aquiline nose and thick spectacles. He looks other-worldly in his drab black trousers and nondescript shirt – not evil but, half closing my eyes, I can visualize his tall skinny frame draped in a dark cloak. The place is noisy, fun and friendly; it just feels as if you are eating in a hall of distorting mirrors.

  Everything from alabaster saints, special potions and curses to ready-made prayers, dried animal parts and God knows what else was there. This kiosk unreservedly served every religious inclination imaginable. The owner seemed to have plenty of customers and listened priest-like as they explained their needs to him. He had something in his tiny shop no matter what they requested. I was slowly beginning to understand why the iron cathedral wa
s empty and why the statue of Christ might take longer to be erected than anyone could have imagined.

  Back at the hotel that evening I slept fitfully as I usually do in strange bedrooms. The noise of those infernal fishing boats toing-and-froing across the ocean outside the window, combined with the ever-present odour of fish, did not help. The next morning I was too tired to do anything but sit and consider the journey in front of us. We were headed into the Altiplano towards Lago Chungara, one of the highest lakes in the world, some 5,000 metres above sea level. The thought of this place encouraged me. At least there we would be well away from this insidious stench of fish.

  As we finished breakfast the waiter informed us that our two guides were waiting. There was little more to do but head for the hills. We collected our baggage and loaded it onto the four-wheel drive. Karlen, who had met us at the airport, was in her middle to late twenties and was studying law at university. Her companion, Eduardo, a man in his late thirties, had come to live in Arica to get away from the smog and unhealthy conditions in Santiago. I couldn’t really imagine anyone choosing to live in Arica, but for our guide it was not a matter of choice: rather doctor’s orders. The air in this area was good for him, he told me. I might not live there, but I had breathed in enough fishy air to have doubts about the veracity of his remark.

  Chapter Two

  Heading inland from Arica, a dirt road runs up and down, sweeping across high ridges between mighty valleys. We stop on a salt flat, the sandy-looking surface firm and crisp to walk on. My spirits tingle in such space and solitude. Taking off my hat to feel the sun on my face and the breeze in my hair I stretch out my arms, welcoming a sense of great freedom.