I’m sitting in one of the main squares of this charming city. While enjoying the shade of the trees here I am going to bring my diary up to date and relate the events of the few days that have gone by since the 16th.
At about five o’clock a car came by and gave us a lift. Its three occupants were completely drunk. The road we covered was short but quite picturesque. The car described a series of S-bends, while the driver sang cuecas as tunelessly as humanly possible. From time to time he let go of the steering wheel and beat time on the bodywork with both hands. There can be no doubt but that the god Bacchus was watching over us, for in spite of everything the vehicle managed to stay on the road. At last we reached a railway station, where our ways parted. We got out heaving a sigh of relief. By then our hosts had moved on from the euphoric stage of their binge, and dense storm-clouds were gathering over their hitherto peaceful, alcoholic heavens.
We prepared to spend the night there and made our way toward the station house to ask for hot water to brew maté. It wasn’t long before all the bored inhabitants of the railway station were drawn by the presence of a couple of strangers, and they began circling us like birds of prey round a carcass, until the most impatient or the boldest ventured a question, and we answered it. One exchange led to another, and it wasn’t long before we had struck up that easy camaraderie that is always established between young people when both parties seek it.
As it had grown very dark, one of the lads brought a kerosene lamp and another a guitar, and what with the music and songs and tales of our journey, soon we were all old mates. Someone invited us to share their dinner and we went on chatting until after midnight. We were offered a bedroom, a zinc shed, which the rats seemed to find quite cozy. Dozens of them went scurrying away between the camp beds, perhaps annoyed by our intrusion.
While I was trying to get to sleep I thought back on the sculptural ensemble presented by the group of lads as they sat gathered round the guitarist. In the weak light of the oil lamp they gave the impression of figures carved from stone. With their high cheekbones, they looked like statues reflecting their Quechua heritage. I lay there thinking that all these good and generous people who have helped us all the way through Chile are the amalgam of Indians and poor Spaniards. Although the latter brought with them the vices and gold-fever of their leaders, they also brought the nobility and will power of the Hispanic race. Finally I fell asleep.
We arrived at the Empresa Salitrera de Toco the next afternoon. A group of road-builders was playing soccer, and they immediately invited us to join in, so we did. After the game we all went off together to eat dinner and sleep, with such open-handed familiarity that we could have been old friends.
We slept in the road-builders’ camp, which consisted of two rooms made out of zinc sheets. There were more than eight of us in each room. The beds are bits of wood laid on top of tree-stump supports, but all the discomfort and overcrowding paled into insignificance beside the friendliness and warmth of the inhabitants.
We went to bed early, because they work from two until ten in the morning so as to avoid the merciless afternoon sun. Before going to sleep we took part in an original, stinking and extremely loud farting contest, in which despite our reputation we found ourselves ignominiously relegated to last place.
The next day we went to see two nitrate works—Rica Aventura and Prosperidad. They use the Shank extraction method, an old method that consists of separating the different components of the caliche (soil with a high salt-peter content) by means of hot water, thanks to the fact that the different salts have different levels of solubility at particular temperatures. This allows them to separate out first the sodium nitrate, then the potassium nitrate, then the perchlorates and finally the iodine.
As soon as we set foot on the first of the nitrate fields we realized that this was a foreign company, not just because of the tenacious exploitation of the resources, which would enable them to pay off new investments in a year, but because all the staff and most of the workers to whom we spoke seemed to have their brains colonized. They don’t want to know they’re being dispossessed, that they’re being paid the lowest possible wages, and that they’re kept in the depths of ignorance by the very same people who are getting rich from their labor and from Chile’s nitrate fields.
After seeing and asking as much as we could, we went back to the road-builders’ camp, where there was something different in the air—comradeship, I suppose—that sets it apart from the workers in the nitrate fields.
There was a truck-load of timber heading north the next day, so we said goodbye to the lads and moved on. We waited for another lift in a hamlet called Laguna, where the heat was unbearable. The whole of the little village sweltered in the burning sun. A dozen threadbare, weary-looking individuals watched us with scant curiosity as we arranged our knapsacks in the shade of a corridor by the bar and the pool hall and settled down to wait until we could continue our journey.
At dawn today, just as we were washing our faces in a nearby water tank, a truck loaded with alfalfa got a puncture. We hastened to offer our services and the driver paid us back by giving us a lift.
As I lay watching the sun come up over the sandy hills this morning, wrapped up in my sleeping bag and half buried in the sweet-smelling grass, I thought to myself that this was what I had always wanted—a journey like this, with no other concern than to see and get to know our America by my own means.
Fúser lay beside me reciting lines from Neruda1 under his breath. I think he knows all the poems in the Third Residence on Earth and the Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by heart. I caught the bug myself and chimed in for a minute with the only lines I know:
I have written about time and water,
described mourning and its purple hues;
I have written about the sky and the apple,
now I write about Stalingrad.
Our poetic euphoria was interrupted by the spectacle that now presented itself before us—the sea. We were on the crest of the mountain, and from where we sat on a cushion of alfalfa in the back of the truck we could see the whole road winding and unwinding like an enormous snake that crushed the mountain in its coils, and at the end of the road lay the blue mirror of the picturesque bay of Iquique, where we now are.
We slept in Iquique and then managed to get another truck to give us a lift to Arica. The road runs through desert here too, and to get to the city you have to cross what people around here call the Seven Pampas. These are seven high desert plains separated from one another by jagged sierras. The road runs for mile after mile across a vast desert plain, and then a corniche road crosses the mountain range, which rises to about 6,500 feet. This road is extremely steep and narrow, and it climbs up and down the mountain in the space of a few miles. The sierras form immense canyons very similar to those of Cuesta de Miranda, in the Andes of La Rioja, in Argentina, but instead of deep red, the rock here is reddish-gray. In some places the road runs so high that the clouds and the condors were floating beneath our feet.
Here and there were plaques commemorating the advance of the conquistadores Almagro2 and Valdivia3 and their troops, who marched from Peru to the south of Chile. When I think how difficult it is to make this journey now, by truck and over a road built for the purpose, I have to admire the courage, stoicism and tenacity of those Spaniards who undertook such a terrible journey, weighed down by their cuirasses and suits of armor, and reached their goal. What a pity that the courage they brought to the conquest of a hostile landscape was later turned to cruelty against its inhabitants!
On the way we saw two or three valleys that have water, and there we found tropical agriculture and vegetation very different from what we are used to. There were guava trees, mangoes, avocados and particularly the curious papaya plant, which looked to our South American eyes like a little palm tree with its trunk clustered with melons.
Only the maize sown in the fields makes us think we are in northern America near the equator. In fact, we’re very near the Tropic of Capricorn.
After driving for almost twenty-four hours we reached Arica. We had a look round the port, went to the regional hospital in the afternoon and introduced ourselves to the director, who received us with deference. He is interested in laboratory work. We agreed to give him a theoretical and practical demonstration of the Ziehl-Nielsen colorimetric test using Twin 80 instead of heat.
Last night we slept at the hospital. Today we did the practical, as agreed, and ended up talking more about our journey than about science. This afternoon we went to the beach and stayed in the sea until the sun went down. Fúser hadn’t had a bout of asthma since we left Valparaíso, but he felt a bit unwell after swimming for so long.
I’m really enchanted with the port. As we wandered about there, we came across a series of shellfish completely unknown on the Atlantic coast, and not only did we see them but we tasted them too. The one I liked best is a kind they call locos, and an enormous crab. Both are delicious and nutritious.
We went to the customs post at Chacalluta, which lies on the southern bank of the River Lluta and is Chile’s northernmost point.
It seems as if it were only yesterday, but today marks thirty-eight days since we first set foot on Chilean soil at Casa Pangue, more than 2,000 miles to the south. We’ve seen the beautiful southern lakes with their cold climate and continuous rain, passed through the fertile central region full of beautiful cities and been to one of the biggest, richest and driest deserts in the world.
But more than anything we’ve found and confirmed that all the best and most generous of Chile is in its ordinary people, that we hadn’t been wrong in choosing the poor over the rich and the revolutionary over the reactionary or the conformist.
As we were talking about all this, Fúser surprised me as usual by reciting some lines of poetry about the poor of the earth and the rivers in the mountains.
“Neruda?” I asked.
“No,” he answered, “Martí.”4