Between Extremes Read online

  For several minutes we chatted about why I had come to Chile. The barman seemed to think it even more funny than my joke about Bernardo. While he talked I devoured another plate of the massive olives, still catching glimpses of bemusement on my new friend’s face.

  John came dazzling through the door in one of those waistcoats that you sometimes see seasoned travellers, coarse fishermen and camera crews on location wearing, awash with pockets and very professional.

  ‘Must say you’re looking very dapper this evening, John.’

  He ordered a beer and in the same breath said, ‘Sorry, I can’t say the same about your good self, old man.’

  John knew of my fascination with Bernardo O’Higgins. During our captivity in Lebanon, I had talked about him repeatedly. When you spend time imprisoned in tiny rooms, and an even longer time imprisoned inside your own mind, people come to visit you. Bernardo was one of my visitors. In such circumstances you make them stay, imaginary or not.

  I had since learned much about him. Bernardo was born in Chillán on 20 August 1778, the only son of a strict hard-working father, Ambrose O’Higgins, an Irish-born soldier and trader in the service of Spain. Ambrose was a Cecil Rhodes of his time. In Chile he saw a truly new world thriving with life and vast potential. He began making a reality of his dreams. He improved roads, built harbours and cities. He provided education and introduced new farming methods. Encountering the resistance of the colonial aristocracy who would not admit an Irish peasant into their social circle, he effortlessly countered their xenophobic ostracism by the simple expedient of returning to Spain to purchase a title, thus becoming Don Ambrose O’Higgins.

  Late in life he had a son, Bernardo. The mother was a seventeen-year-old, Spanish, middle-class girl. Overcome with a mixture of Catholic guilt and perhaps confused with fatherhood and a wife young enough to be his granddaughter, Don Ambrose refused to share his home with his son though he visited him occasionally and maintained him. He was known to the young Bernardo only as his benefactor. No doubt some of the stories of Ireland and of his benefactor’s dreams drifted into the young man’s consciousness. But Bernardo grew up alone, desperately questioning his paternity but receiving no answers.

  Though history has recorded Bernardo O’Higgins as the hero who finally defeated and expelled the Spanish from Chile, I was fascinated more by the man than where history had placed him. History for me is a human occurrence. The imperialist litanies that I was taught at school, the catalogue of dates and incidents and names, replete with births and deaths of long-departed kings and queens, meant nothing to me. They were merely something I was forced to learn by rote and have long since gratefully forgotten.

  ‘Does the statue look like anything you imagined?’ John asked.

  ‘No, but then I’m not sure what I imagined him to look like. I suppose I expected a younger man with gaunt features and drawn eyes.’

  ‘So what do you think?’ John persevered.

  ‘He looks too handsome, too mature, avuncular even, but I suppose all that paternalism is part of the package when you are the founding father.’

  John ordered another two beers and said, ‘If I was you, I wouldn’t complain about paternalism.’

  I smiled – John was the only other soul I had told about my wife Audrey being pregnant.

  After a meal, I sat at the window and watched the ugly beige of the desert hills turn into a soft pink and pull together the flat pastels of violet, blue and black and bleached blue. The new high-rise buildings painted blue, yellow and a washed-out emerald green seemed to soak up the desert night. All around the square young lovers were promenading; mothers and fathers with their young children in little pedal pushchairs were walking them round and round the tiny space. I thought of my own child waiting to be born and smiled contentedly at John’s earlier comments.

  That night I slept fitfully, shunting back and forwards between bed and toilet, cursing my overindulgence in those huge oily olives. The travelling of the last few days was beginning to catch up with me. I also was growing anxious about our journey into the deeper reaches of the desert. I lay back on my bed and listened to the noise of the square outside. Though I was desperately weary my restless mind had created a dreamy sense of displacement in me. On the bedside table I had left a copy of Pablo Neruda’s poetic opus, the Canto General. I feverishly hunted through the book to find a favourite poem, hoping that it might lull me to sleep.

  SPRING IN THE CITY

  The sidewalk has been worn till it is only

  a network of dirty holes

  in which the tears of the rain gathered;

  then came the sun, an invader

  over the wasted ground

  of the endlessly riddled city

  from which all the horses fled.

  At last, some lemons fell

  and a red vestige of oranges

  connected it with trees and feathers,

  whispered falsely of orchards

  which did not last long

  but showed that somewhere

  the shameless, silvered spring

  was undressing among the orange blossoms.

  Was I from that place? From the cold

  texture of adjoining walls?

  Did my spirit have to do with beer?

  They asked me that when I went out,

  when I entered myself again, when I went to bed,

  they were asking me that, the walls,

  the paint, the flies, the carpets

  trodden so many times

  by other inhabitants

  who could be confused with me.

  They had my nose and my shoes,

  the same dead, sorrowing clothes,

  the same pale, neat nails,

  and a heart as open as a sideboard

  in which accumulated bundles,

  loves, journeys, and sand.

  That’s to say, everything in its happening

  goes and stays inexorably.

  Listening to the noises percolating through my open window, I seemed to know the streets of which Neruda was writing. I had been down them a hundred thousand times. These streets are metaphorical as well as literal. Like a wonderful Impressionist painting, they are closely observed and richly sensuous. Yet they pose questions. And they are the eternal questions about identity, place, meaning and purpose. Like a fine work of art, Neruda’s poems are simple and direct, yet they hold you, and you reread them again and again. I have always believed all of life is a journey and felt myself to be a perpetual exile. With Neruda I felt I could travel into many landscapes: the metaphysical, the existential, and the simply exquisite landscape of Chile and South America.

  But it was not simply the finely wrought craftsmanship of Neruda’s poetry that made me choose him as my spirit guide. I felt a closeness to him that in some inexplicable way had preceded the gift of his poetry to me. There were many aspects of his childhood and adolescence that seemed to echo my own. I turned them over in my mind, trying to bring the man closer to me. Behind all his political protestation and historical iconography, there lives a great hunger.

  He was baptized Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, but adopted a pseudonym at the age of sixteen to hide his poetic inclinations from his father. Neruda was his mother’s first and only child. She was a teacher in a local school and suffered from tuberculosis. She died a month after giving birth to her son.

  His father, Don José del Carmen Reyes Morales, was a foreman on the railroad. He was blond and blue eyed, a stern, hard-working man used to giving orders and having them obeyed. Two years after his wife’s death Neruda’s father remarried and the family moved south to the small frontier town of Temuco.

  Neruda’s stepmother, Dona Trinidad Candia Marverde, became the centre of the young Neruda’s life. She provided the love and gentleness that was so missing from his relationship with his father. Later Neruda described her as his ‘more-mother’ and sometimes the ‘guardian angel of my childhood’. When he was six years old, Neruda was sent to t
he local school for boys. It was a large, rambling mansion with sparsely furnished rooms and a gloomy basement. By the time he was ten he was already composing poems. Because many of his schoolmates mocked him for his love of poetry, Neruda kept to himself after school, either staying at home or taking long walks in the woods. He read anything and everything he could get his hands on. He later wrote about these precious moments of solitude: ‘I go upstairs to my room. I read Salgari. The rain pours down like a waterfall. In less than no time, night and the rain cover the whole world. I am alone writing poems in my maths notebook.’

  I too was a child poet who spent many hours alone or going for long walks and had spent many nights alone in my room at home in Belfast, composing poems. I too felt different from my childhood peers and for many years never spoke of my nocturnal scribblings. And now, here I was so many years later, sitting up in my bed at five o’clock in the morning feverishly writing metaphors and similes to capture my first few days in this intoxicating land.

  Somehow the choice of Neruda as a spirit guide was not one chosen out of reason, but was an instinctive one, something given to me.

  I reread the opening lines of the second stanza of the poem:

  Was I from that place? From the cold

  texture of adjoining walls?

  Did my spirit have to do with beer?

  They asked me that when I went out,

  when I entered myself again, when I went to bed,

  I sensed that I too would be asking these questions in whatever city or whatever place my travels between extremes would land me.

  The sun was coming up outside the window, declaring first light. I had not noticed the noise abate in the square beneath. I had forgotten sleep, for, like that first light, I was only slowly becoming aware of the fascination O’Higgins and Neruda held for me and the pull that had brought me to their native land.

  It was inevitable, I suppose, that I should begin hunting through the Canto, to find Neruda’s first mention of Bernardo. I went to the window unconscious of John sleeping solidly and snug in his bed, but knowing there was no-one in the square to see me. Looking across at the statue of Bernardo, I read Neruda’s words of acknowledgement and celebration.

  BERNARDO O’HIGGINS RIQUELME (1810)

  O’Higgins, to celebrate you

  in the twilight we must light up the room.

  In the South’s autumn twilight

  with an infinite tremor of poplars.

  You’re Chile, between patriarch and cowboy,

  a poncho from the provinces, a child

  who doesn’t know his name yet,

  iron-willed and shy in school,

  a sad little country boy.

  In Santiago you’re ill at ease, they

  stare at your baggy black clothes,

  and when they placed the ribbon across

  your rustic statue’s breast, the flag

  of the country you gave us, it smelled

  of wild mustard in the early morning.

  Youth, Professor Winter

  accustomed you to the rain,

  you received your degrees from

  the university of the Streets of London

  and an impoverished wanderer,

  wildfire of our freedom,

  gave you a prudent eagle’s counsel

  and embarked you in History.

  ‘What’s your name?’ laughed

  the ‘gentlemen’ from Santiago:

  child of love, on a winter’s night,

  your forsaken condition

  shaped you with rough mortar

  with the seriousness of a home or

  of wood, definitive, worked in the South.

  Time changes all, all but your face.

  O’Higgins, you’re an invariable clock

  with a single hour on your candid sphere:

  Chile’s hour, the last minute

  left on the red timetable

  of combatant dignity.

  So you’re one and the same amid the rosewood

  furniture and the daughters of Santiago,

  as surrounded in Rancagua by gunpowder and death.

  You’re the same solid portrait

  of him who has no father but fatherland,

  land with orange blossoms

  conquered by your artillery.

  Over breakfast John commented on my drawn appearance. I explained that the night and the noise had made sleeping difficult. And that in any case I had kept awake all night in the company of Pablo Neruda and Bernardo O’Higgins. John remarked, ‘This Bernardo has had a hold on you for some time.’ In return I told him about my early morning thoughts that I would love to write the real story of Bernardo, not the historians’ version. I was gabbing, I suppose, full of ghost-filled sleep.

  We moved on to the itinerary for the next few days over the remains of our breakfast. The real purpose of our stopover in Iquique was to travel out into the desert pampas and visit the ghost mines of Santa Laura and Humberstone. When John mentioned them they sounded to me like characters in a gothic romance. He had already ascertained from the hotel staff that the quickest and easiest way to get to them was by taxi. We decided to look over the town of Iquique before business started.

  At what seems like the crack of dawn I wake to the growl of large masonry drills. Our hotel is undergoing refurbishment. I reach for my earplugs and for once give thanks for Brian’s snoring, which makes them such a necessary precaution, as I drift back into the cocoon of sleep.

  Later, we saunter around the town. Iquique is a busy, friendly place with many wooden, balconied buildings, once the homes of the nitrate magnates, which overlook the wide avenues in the town centre.

  ‘I like this town.’

  ‘Yes, “a place of rest and tranquillity” it is.’

  ‘I’m glad we’re not moving on until tomorrow.’

  ‘Yeah. Travelling like this, you never develop much of a routine. It’s wearing after a while.’

  Most of the time we have spent together in the past has been dominated by a mind-numbingly dull routine: wake up from fitful sleep, guards bring breakfast, take us to bathroom, read, if we have books and light, or talk, guards bring lunch, chat or doze, guards bring sandwich, hope for sleep. Occasional terrifying bouts of activity and moving gaols. In those days there was no time, no chance to prepare for anything, we just had to try to hang on amid the physical and emotional roller-coaster of miserable transfer. Our moves, bound and gagged, allowed no exchange of views, just the reassurance of the warm body close by. Here no such strictures exist. We can make our own plans.

  The main street of colonial clapboard houses was interesting enough if one had an architect’s eye. The dryness of the climate here had maintained them, but I was disappointed to find that none of these houses was open to the public. They were still occupied and part of the living environment of the town. Happily the museum was open, even though we seemed to be the only tourists. It was a small affair, adequately laid out, every nook and cranny stuffed with the rusted architecture of Chile’s industrial age. Bits and pieces of engineering machinery and what seemed acres of hand tools filled the place. It had the feel of a tomb about it, but there was more than sufficient evidence in this small corner of Chile of how Europe had plundered the mineral wealth of this country like a ravenous wolf. European capitalism was the new conquistador. It had sweated the life blood out of the Chilean people and had left nothing in recompense but these rusty relics.

  Everywhere the walls were lined with old sepia photographs of the mine owners and entrepreneurs. They stared out from the walls. Dylan Thomas’s words were never more cogent or real than they were here with those staring, pious, ‘dickie bird watching pictures of the dead’. This was the Victorian aristocracy of iron, with their tight starched collars and equally starched suits that looked two sizes too small. They displayed long lavish beards turned brittle with the dry climate and also huge curled moustaches. To my mind, still fevered from the previous night’s imaginings, the
y had the look of the conqueror or overlord about them. And here I could imagine the rust like the dried blood of the labourers who had dug huge fortunes out of the earth. In those staring faces, I thought I could see the shadow of Neruda’s father.

  It was curious to me that the mines in this northern area of Chile had produced millions upon millions of tons of nitrate, mainly saltpetre. This same saltpetre is the principal constituent in the making of gunpowder and had undoubtedly supplied the armies for the slaughter of the First World War. Contrastingly, one of the mineral barons, Pedro Gamboni, became a multi-millionaire by producing iodine from the saltpetre. Iodine is a crude antiseptic and must have been used in thousands of field hospitals throughout the theatre of that same world war. And when the nitrates were not feeding the war machine, they were being bought in huge tonnage to support the nitrate fertilizer industry which was rapidly expanding in North America and Canada. Either way the nitrate barons won. They could produce the essential element which fed humanity, which contributed to human slaughter and which at the same time made the medicine that might heal the maimed.

  Conversely I thought how paternalistic the portraits of those nitrate barons were. With their flowing grey beards and plump faces they had the look of a kindly Santa Claus, but it was far from the truth. The harsh exploitation of the labour force in the mines, the farms and in industry had been the persistent characteristic of Chilean society since the sixteenth century. From the first years of conquest well into the 1980s Chilean society reflected a dichotomy between attempts to create better living conditions and the realities of an economic and political order which rested upon the foundations of conquest, subjugation and coercion of the labour force. The museum was pallid evidence of all that.

  I was momentarily thrown by the double-take these portraits had occasioned in me. One minute they were kindly and even lovable, like a favoured grandparent; the next they were the bloated, arrogant faces of the exploiter, the parasites who fed on gullibility and innocence.