EPILOGUE

 

Footsteps in the North: Arica and Beyond

I am sitting at my desk in Durham, North Carolina, many months after I apparently left the desert, many miles to the north of that North of Chile, I sit here finishing this book and wondering where it led me, that journey into my multiple origins, here I am, asking myself what I finally brought back from the desert, trying to figure out what remains of that trip.

It was supposed to end, that trip, in the Arica where the desert comes to its own end and where another part of America has its beginning—and in a sense, that is what happened, our physical journey did conclude when on May 27 Angélica and I, honoring a family superstition, each boarded separate planes back to Santiago.

But the desert has a way of staying with you even if your body has departed; the desert’s stories, having found a foothold in our memory, did not leave us alone, would never again, in some sense, leave us alone.

Over the following months we heard from many of the men and women who had accompanied our odyssey.

Mario Pino Quivira tells me that a Chilean foundation has approved a grant to secure the artifacts rescued from Monte Verde, so that in the near future the huella that has survived thirteen thousand years of inclement weather will be protected from the human depredations of the twenty-first century. Although money is, of course, still not forthcoming for the project, an architect has already drawn up plans for the museum that will grace the site.

And from San Pedro de Atacama, Carolina Agüero—who is adding a master’s degree in anthropology to her already impressive credentials—lets me know something I never thought to ask when we visited her: It turns out she had been working in Monte Verde as a student intern that day in 1983 when the footprint was found, her eyes had been among the first to see its recovery, her hands had taken it to Santiago for its first examination.

And, in other news from San Pedro, we hear that Lautaro Núñez has been given the maximum honor a historian can receive in Chile, the National Prize for History, a belated recognition of someone who has helped change the way in which Chileans view their own past.

And Miguel Roth sends me gossip from Las Campanas, about the universe and the astronomers and his own struggle against loneliness.

And I hear from our hosts in Chuquicamata that the evacuation is proceeding according to schedule and the rubble is waiting to fall upon the town and the graveyard will be spared.

And Julio Valdivia is still waiting behind his desk in Humberstone for UNESCO to approve the salitreras as a patrimony of humanity, while at night he chases away marauders who would steal the pino de oregón and steal his memories and steal his dreams.

And Hernán Rivera Letelier has published a novel on the massacre at Santa María de Iquique, the story of a love affair that manages to guiltily flourish at the very moment when the blood starts to flow.

And Eduardo Riquelme continues to spend his weekends in the abandoned oficinas in the pampas and prepares for the Day of the Dead, when he will visit the tomb of a child and the tomb of an adult and remember them in the middle of the desert.

And Rafael Gaete and Katerine Saldaña have selected a plot in the cemetery of Pisagua, the one place in Chile where they won’t have to pay for a grave, hoping to be bound together in death as they were in life.

And Sergio Bitar, who has been named minister of education.

All those friends, old and recent, who refuse to disappear, who send us information from time to time, all those friends answered by our own updates, our own news.

And then, of course, there are the dead themselves.

They have also found a way to re-emerge into our existence.

Starting with Freddy Taberna.

In Santiago, a few days after our return from the Norte Grande and just before we left for Buenos Aires, I was lucky enough to find Jinny at home with all her family. She had not told me, out of delicacy, that she was celebrating her birthday, but on the way to the apartment, I had picked up some flowers—maybe Freddy was the one who had whispered to me that I should bring some sort of offering. He had, at any rate, some surprises in store for me. One was a story about Freddy that his own children had never heard and that Jinny told me when she heard that I was puzzled that Freddy’s life had swung between the two extremes of the coast and the mountains, the sea to which he and his uncles had been born, and the Andean highlands and indigenous population that he had spent most of his youth studying. What I could not figure out was why the desert in between seemed to be of no interest to him; in all the conversations I had held with all those friends of his, not once had any mention been made of a connection to the nitrate cycle that was so crucial to the history of Iquique. Jinny had filled in one more empty space in the lost story, had revealed that, as a boy of eight or nine, Freddy would make some pesos by going up to the abandoned ghost towns to help dismantle houses, working side by side with men who were destroying the very places that had once sheltered their caliche dreams, Freddy listening at night to their stories of exploitation and suffering and struggle, Freddy tearing down memories as a child and trying to keep them alive as an adult. So Freddy had also been affected, like everyone else I had met in the North of Chile, by the enormous tragedy of the salitre, perhaps he had sworn to himself in those long nights in the desert that his children would know a different fate.

And that was the other surprise Freddy had arranged for me on this visit—those wonderful children, Daniela and Nacho, who had hardly known their father and even so managed to bring him back to me almost miraculously. Nacho, in particular, at one point in our conversation, responded to one of my fancy theories about the North with a gesture—but it was more than just a gesture, it was an attitude. Something indefinable exuded from Nacho, a sort of self-confidence, a “desplante,” we would call it in Spanish, a way of looking straight at you and not accepting immediately what you’re saying. Not that he was suspicious, but rather that Nacho was measuring you, challenging you, like Freddy always did, to back up with deeds any words you might utter. Reminding me more of my dead friend than any photo or even his amazing reincarnation in Pichón. That fluttering of Nacho’s hands that I had not seen in thirty-five years—that was how Freddy had moved his arms, that was how Freddy had jutted his jaw out just a bit, that was Freddy up and down, suddenly and entirely in front of me one more time. So without my ever being aware of it, he has been inside me all these decades, in some hiding place of memory, lodged in who knows what gonads or neurons, waiting to be jolted into visibility by the faraway surviving son.

Ways in which the past persists.

Like the Müllers in Angélica, like the Malinarich lineage.

Because they also have made a dramatic reappearance in our lives, those forefathers and foremothers of Angélica’s began flaring back into her existence in ways that we could not have imagined when we grappled with the faint traces they left behind in Iquique.

In Buenos Aires, the city where I was born and where my ninety-five-year-old father and other relatives still live, and where—the day after our arrival—we are blessed with the dramatic bombshell discovery that we had prayed for during our frantic search in Iquique.

We find Angélica’s grandfather Angel Malinarich Pinto.

Well, not the man personally, not in flesh and blood. He did, after all, die in 1974 in Buenos Aires. Though it is not true that he had come directly to the capital of Argentina. His first thirty years away from home had been spent just across the Andes, in Mendoza, where he arrived by train on May 23, 1918, with his sister-in-law, Rosa, and where they were soon joined by his mother, Carmela Pinto Benavides, and where his illegitimate son, Rodolfo, was born. And we have photos of him and his mother standing in front of a house! And she is far darker than we had ever thought she would be and he is far lighter. And other photos, some where he reminds us of our son Rodrigo and some where he seems an entire stranger. And a record he made for that mother many years later, singing happy birthday to her, reciting a poem he had composed for Mother’s Day. And we know that he squandered his fortune on elusive mining ventures in Mendoza. And we have discovered the name of his father, which is Ruperto Francisco, the nephew who came from Croatia and inherited the fortune of the Malinarich brothers, the fortune which would allow his son to escape to Argentina and never work for the rest of his life. And more, so much more—how Angel Malinarich was charming and seductive and something of a con man, how he used his forging skills to make false documents for his Bolshevik buddies, how he married several more times and begat many children, how he hocked the furs he gave to one of his wives, how he never forgot his native land and consorted with famous Chilean singers of boleros in Argentina and sang with them and danced away whole nights and … After trying to crush information out of the stone hard desert of the Norte Grande, this is like an avalanche, a rainstorm, a forest of data and dates and names, such a cornucopia of stories that I would need another book to tell them rather than this book that is drawing to its close.

And all of this is now known to us because we have found something far more important than the story of the lost grandfather. We have found his family. We have visited the house in San Fernando, a river town just outside Buenos Aires, where he spent the last twenty-five years of his life, where two of his four children live, where the last of the wives he wed in Argentina also greets us.

It was just a matter of looking up the name Malinarich in the phone book and making calls, that is how simple it is, that is how simple it could have been to speak to him the first time Angélica visited Argentina with me and my parents in 1964, meet him on any of our subsequent visits. He was, in fact, still alive when we passed through here in 1973 on our way to exile. We might have passed him on the streets of Buenos Aires who knows how often, my father may have talked to him in the early forties when Angel Malinarich Pinto first arrived in Buenos Aires.

Instead, we have been given his children and their children, a whole tribe of Malinariches, much closer to us than the distant cousins who received us with both alacrity and suspicion in Iquique.

It is around that table in that modest house in San Fernando, talking to Angélica’s aunts and uncle, to the half-brother and the half-sisters that her father, Humberto, never met or even knew existed, around that table where her grandfather Angel had so many meals, where her great-grandmother Carmela would reminisce about faraway and forbidden Chile, it is around that table as we swap stories and pass around a gourd of good Argentine herb mate and compare eyes and foreheads and hair and skin color and celebrate resemblances and remark differences, it is there that I had thought that perhaps this book should end.

What better conclusion to this voyage full of broken lives than a final image of peace, a coming together of what history had savagely separated, the two sides of Angel Malinarich’s family meeting thirty years after his death, the story that started tragically in the barren desert ending joyfully in one of the great hybrid cities of the world.

But I have another debt to pay.

There are other dead men and women who are sending messages from the desert and the past, other families and other migrants who walked the lands that Angélica’s grandfather forsook, there are voices I have not yet allowed to have their say.

They are demanding to have the last word.

What did I bring back from the desert?

There were answers in Arica.

My trip had taken me wandering through the avenues and armies of the dead and mostly what I had witnessed was violence, abandonment, betrayal, towns turned into ghosts and ghosts turned into emptiness as their destiny was decided from afar. I had watched what the desert does to those who try to squeeze out every last treasure from its rocks and leave nothing behind, I had seen greed and cruelty unveiled under the stark light, I had seen hope swallowed as if it were a drop of rain in the sand.

But that was not all that the desert showed me. It was not only a territory where the dry cesspool of our humanity was revealed for the eye of the future to see, its inhabitants stripped naked of any pretence of redemption. The same barren land with - out mercy that makes men compete with each other to the death for scant resources, also demands solidarity if they want to survive, whispers to them to draw closer if they wish to overcome the sun and the infinite stone, tells them to trust one another or die. In the desert, the only way to really escape is with someone else by your side. In an environment so unforgiving and hostile, the best, as well as the worst, of our humanity is heightened and magnified.

And of all the stories of hope and wonder I had seen in the desert, none was more moving than that furtively told to me by the Chinchorro mummies of Arica.

A missive sent to me by the oldest mummies in the world, sent to me from eight thousand years ago, when the inhabitants of the coast of Arica and the twin valleys that meet on that seashore first began preserving their dead. All hunter-gatherers manipulate the body that has died. When something that mysterious and terrifying happened to the community, the end of life of one of its members, that person could not be left alone. The body’s position was changed and arranged, eviscerated, painted, burnt, flayed, eaten, but something was always done. Death’s enigma required an active relationship. But in the case of the Chinchorro dead, according to the archaeologist Calogero Santoro and the historian Jorge Hidalgo, who guided me through the exhibition at the museum of San Miguel de Azapa and then took me to a refrigerated chamber where hundreds of other mummies and thousands of acrid skulls and bones and skeletons were kept and studied, something entirely new and different occurred, something that was not happening at that point in time in any other place on the planet. The Chinchorros took the manipulated bodies and made them form part of their living community.

San Miguel de Azapa: The warehouse of skulls at the museum

It is a disservice to call them mummies, those corpses secured against the passing of time, given the horror and ugliness that the word arouses today, degraded by Hollywood horror flicks and abhorrent evocations of Egyptian tombs. There is no terror, and no bandages or curses spill forth from the fragile clay figures of the Chinchorros, but dignity rather, and beauty and peacefulness. Out of the bodies of the dead, those who survived them carved a different body, made each corpse into a sculptural composition, made art from the skin and the bones and the eyes and the hair, graced each loved one with a death mask.

The mummies were found packed together eight thousand years after their death—not the way in which they are displayed in the glass cases of the museum, but one on top of the other, a man, then a child, then another man, then a woman, then perhaps a dog and another child, a man and once in a while a fetus, buried and then unearthed by the living each time there was another death, the newest member of the community joining the group and adding to it like a real family increases through time, immersed in a collective identity where no individual is set apart from any of the others, no hierarchy can be remarked, no necklace or favorite object or other possession is inhumed with them. The only thing those distant relatives of ours took on their voyage to the other world was their own body. Their own body and one another.

This is the way to respect the dead, I had thought to myself during my brief communion with those mummies on the day my trip to the desert was ending. This is how we should treat one another in life and in death. It was almost, I felt, as if those who were burying the dead were making love to them, caring for them, nursing them in an incubator, preparing them for rebirth, looking after them, revisiting them over and over again. As if they remembered those lives during the days and nights they worked on the motionless bodies, how they connected to each other, remembering the mother who offered milk or the grandfather who had taught the first steps. Re-creating the past in the very action of offering refuge to it with their hands and in the earth. Maybe that was how the Chinchorros wanted to imagine eternity: as a family that cannot be fractured by time or death.

Calogero—who had worked extensively with Lautaro Núñez—explained to me as I looked down onto a darkly radiant child resting not far from the long arms of two adults, that it took several days to make these dead into mummies, a not insignificant expenditure of time and resources. Which means that the moment of death must have been felt as very critical, an emergency for the group. This had to have been an occasion where the long ritual of preparing the dead for conservation reaf- firmed the principles and values that sustained that society. There was, of course, no radio, no TV, no print, no alphabet, and these men and women were scattered over three hundred kilometers up and down the coast and into the adjoining oases, and yet, for four thousand years, they kept the same way of honoring the dead, they exhibited an extraordinary sense of group cohesion. The only thing that changed over that lengthy period was that the process became ever more simple, ever more delicate. So death must have been the moment when everyone was gathered around, when the story of the group and the history of the group was dreamt over and over again, repeated so it would not be forgotten. Words were woven that reconstituted the group and, in some way we can scarcely envision, must have healed it.

As Calogero spoke, I was transported back to the beginning of my trip three weeks ago, when Mario Pino had summoned forth from the receding tides of thirteen thousand years ago the nights when knowledge had been conveyed from one generation to the next inside the toldos at the encampment in Monte Verde. It was almost as if the two extremes of my voyage were entering into some sort of echoing dialogue, the stories of the Chinchorros while they tended their dead answered by the stories the men and women of Monte Verde told each other to tend to their living, the connection I was establishing made all the more poignant because the one thing that Monte Verde had not revealed to the future was how its residents dealt with their dead. Not one human bone, not one hint at a possible ceremony, not any sense of what death meant to them had been left behind.

When I had planned my journey, I knew nothing about the lack of mortuary customs in that oldest settlement in the Americas near Puerto Montt. I only had the intuition that I needed to begin the trip to the North in that farthest moment in time, and that I had to see—and if not see, feel the weight of—the huella. I was obsessed with carrying the footprint of that child gently imprinted in my brain as I ventured forth into the vast cemetery of the desert. That decision seemed, in retrospect, to have been wise. My journey had started in a place in the South where death had not yet been conceived, where no human remains could be found, and had finished all the way at the other extreme of Chile, to the far North where five thousand years later other natives had faced that death and sung to it and tamed it and perhaps even held the illusion that it could be conquered. A dance that interlaced through my head: the child who had been laid out next to his or her relatives in the dry sands near Arica somehow calling out to the invisible boy or girl who had left that slight trace in the wetness next to the creek in the area of Puerto Montt, that first footstep left intact in the history of the Americas connecting to all the other feet that had walked this continent from the tip of Alaska to the Strait of Magellan.

Footsteps that I also found in Arica, that had yet another message for me from the dead and the desert.

Ever since my trip had begun I had been hoping to catch a glimpse of the pictographs and the rock paintings that the first inhabitants of the Norte Grande and the Norte Chico had spread over the hills and mountains and quebradas, figures in stone that still spoke to travelers and intruders and would-be dwellers so many years later. Flocks of llamas and flights of condores, totemic lizards and slow guanacos, men radiating authority like the sun and men holding up threatening staffs, an array of symbolic bodies carved into the ravines and dunes from La Serena to Arica or delineated by dark rocks silhouetted against a lighter background, thousands of years of hands pictographing intricate and complex designs onto the face of that desert. That had been one of the sights, I swore to myself, that I had to capture on this trip—and yet I had not been able to descry even one of them. On the last leg of our journey, on that May 25, the final Saturday afternoon when we would be on the road, we had stopped four, maybe five times after we left Pisagua on our way to Arica and, with increasing exasperation, had scanned the towering sides of rolling dragon hills, those long kilometers of sand ramparts cut out of the meseta wastes by millions of years of rivers that never make it to the sea, we had done our best to locate the famous geoglifos and petroglifos. But our eyes were not like the eyes of the indigenous people who used to trek through these routes, and we had detected nothing, not a picture, not a pattern. It was only to be in Arica, once I was ready to say good-bye to the Chinchorro mummies, that Santoro and Hidalgo would guide me to those figures hewn upon the three-hundred-meter walls that flank the twin green snaking oases of Azapa and Lluta and that had been waiting for me, I thought, ever since I had left Monte Verde three weeks ago.

There were endless theories about why the original inhabitants of this area went to the considerable trouble of scaling the arid slopes and leaving their gigantic artistic mark upon them. As my friends explained to me as I gazed upward in awe—again, looking toward the sky as I had done on the Cerro Las Campanas to try to press from remote origins some contemporary intimation of meaning—these figures were linked to the routes where traffic and trade used to pass through, they are the guardians of the passageways that connect the sea to the highlands and therefore signal the central incessant nomadic movement that made the desert a place of habitation, shells from the coast appearing up in the Andes, smelting techniques from the mountains being used on the shores of the Pacific. Those figures telling voyagers where they are and how to proceed. But also markers of territory, situated at precisely the point where the valley opens up and widens, placed there to stop strangers from penetrating a territory that already belonged to another tribe, a way of defending the back-and-forth caravan with tutelary gods. Here we are, the figures are saying, don’t mess with us, we are powerful, look at what we have carved up here on this mountain, if we could paint these votary bodies up here, think of what we could do to you down there. We are in communication with these spirits.

I was listening attentively to my guides and their elucidations made all the sense in the world, but what was really haunting me were other thoughts, there, at the end of my journey, at this place where so many journeys had started and ended, so many men and animals had passed through on their way to somewhere else. I was looking up at those enormous gigantones with their large square faces and a sort of hood behind their head and something like a knapsack on their back and those vertically rectangular bodies where the trunk was separated from the head and the legs splayed out, and what impressed me most, perhaps because I was looking for it, needing it, wanting to imagine it, was that these figures were extremely dynamic. It was as if they were always about to walk or had been caught in the middle of their journey, one foot on the verge of stepping forward, on the verge of moving or dancing or … The feet that had explored this desert, one step after the other, that had transformed it into a land that humans could inhabit for a while, trying to make believe they were here permanently.

And telling us something else that we had forgotten, that those who came later, searching for silver and gold and guano and copper and nitrate, had not been able to understand.

We have lost the tradition that gave birth to the deepest meaning of those figures up there.

Every voyage is perilous.

And you prepare for it by praying and you end it by being thankful.

That then is what they were telling me as my voyage drew to its conclusion, as my voyage promised other voyages, as this desert told me that there were some lessons it had taught me that I should not allow myself to ignore.

So here is my prayer, my thanks for having completed this journey. My own writing, my own signposts, my own way of marking the road we took, recognizing the lives that were given to us to remember and care for and transmit. I want this book to be a small offering, a gracias for having been steered so softly through the ghost reaches of my country, the place where Chile and the family I married into and the world I inhabit, where it all had its origin.

What did I finally bring back from the desert?

Gratitude.