up a net what these flags meant she said they were from the time when pirates were frequent visitors, adding darkly that many of them had been British.
We found a beach, and parked Rocky on the white sand. I should have guessed that a tent borrowed from a resident of the Elqui valley would be a pre-war model with most of the zips long-since broken and attached to the fabric with rusted wire. It was a huge, thick brown canvas tent like the ones you see in films shot in the Western Desert, and it had no guy ropes. The floor had bits of marijuana stuck to it. We improvized guy ropes with lengths of plastic cord Pepe had brought (he must have known), lashing each around a rock. The tent began to sag immediately, and then the deadly combination of hot sun and cold beer conspired to cause the afternoon to evaporate.
The beach was a perfect semi-circle, framed by dunes and wrinkled grey rocks. As we were walking over these rocks in the early evening another walker greeted us. He was in his forties, tall and rangey with a deeply lined face, and he immediately introduced himself. After chatting for a few minutes he invited us for a drink at his tent. He had two women friends with him, and when we arrived they kissed us on both cheeks. Chileans are keen cheek-kissers. It seemed the perfect paradigm of the Latin temperament, especially when compared with the British handshake. I suddenly thought of a moment during the preparations for my trip, when I had gone down to Dorset to visit a half-Chilean, half-British man called Tony who was a descendant of José Miguel Carrera, one of the most influential figures in the Independence movement and a member of adistinguished aristocratic family. We were feeding Tony’s pheasants in a field when he was struck by a reflection. ‘You know, it’s awfully difficult, this business of being both Chilean and British. I feel split in two, with no point of contact between the two halves.’ He had been smoking a pipe when I arrived, like the perfect English gent. After an hour the conversation turned to Chilean history and Bernardo O’Higgins, another Independence hero, whose relationship with Carrera developed into a public feud. In 1821, amid the bitter rivalries generated by the struggle for self-government, Carrera was executed, as his two brothers had been before him. Tony leapt from his chair and strode about the kitchen, waving his arms and telling me that his family used to go to the abattoir on O’Higgins’ birthday and buy a bucket of blood to throw over his statue. ‘And of course,’ he said, pouring himself a straight Scotch, ‘we would never dream of sticking the O’Higgins postage stamp the right way up on our letters.’
We sat on the sand watching a pair of pelicans while Rafo squeezed lemons and made jugs of pisco sour. He had caught some
locos
, which one of the women boiled in seawater and handed round, shells gaping. I had eaten abalone in Asia, but it hadn’t prepared me for the sweet, nutty taste of
locos
; I could understand why they were such valuable contraband. As the pile vanished Rafo told us he was a novelist, and that he had been in exile for most of the dictatorship. Although not a member of any party, he had publicly supported Allende for many years, and had protested during the first months of military rule. It was difficult for writers to be apolitical in Chile. José (known as Pepe) Donoso, a major contemporary novelist and a member of the group which emerged during the 1960s and 1970s when the Latin American novel was ‘internationalized,’ said that ‘justified political passion relegated literary passions to a secondary position’. There was a sense that those who left voluntarily had betrayed Chile; Donoso saidthat South American literary critics ‘seldom forgive exile’. I asked Rafo if he felt that intellectuals were polarized into those who had stayed and those who had gone.
‘Definitely. Each group resents the other: they think we whimped out
We found a beach, and parked Rocky on the white sand. I should have guessed that a tent borrowed from a resident of the Elqui valley would be a pre-war model with most of the zips long-since broken and attached to the fabric with rusted wire. It was a huge, thick brown canvas tent like the ones you see in films shot in the Western Desert, and it had no guy ropes. The floor had bits of marijuana stuck to it. We improvized guy ropes with lengths of plastic cord Pepe had brought (he must have known), lashing each around a rock. The tent began to sag immediately, and then the deadly combination of hot sun and cold beer conspired to cause the afternoon to evaporate.
The beach was a perfect semi-circle, framed by dunes and wrinkled grey rocks. As we were walking over these rocks in the early evening another walker greeted us. He was in his forties, tall and rangey with a deeply lined face, and he immediately introduced himself. After chatting for a few minutes he invited us for a drink at his tent. He had two women friends with him, and when we arrived they kissed us on both cheeks. Chileans are keen cheek-kissers. It seemed the perfect paradigm of the Latin temperament, especially when compared with the British handshake. I suddenly thought of a moment during the preparations for my trip, when I had gone down to Dorset to visit a half-Chilean, half-British man called Tony who was a descendant of José Miguel Carrera, one of the most influential figures in the Independence movement and a member of adistinguished aristocratic family. We were feeding Tony’s pheasants in a field when he was struck by a reflection. ‘You know, it’s awfully difficult, this business of being both Chilean and British. I feel split in two, with no point of contact between the two halves.’ He had been smoking a pipe when I arrived, like the perfect English gent. After an hour the conversation turned to Chilean history and Bernardo O’Higgins, another Independence hero, whose relationship with Carrera developed into a public feud. In 1821, amid the bitter rivalries generated by the struggle for self-government, Carrera was executed, as his two brothers had been before him. Tony leapt from his chair and strode about the kitchen, waving his arms and telling me that his family used to go to the abattoir on O’Higgins’ birthday and buy a bucket of blood to throw over his statue. ‘And of course,’ he said, pouring himself a straight Scotch, ‘we would never dream of sticking the O’Higgins postage stamp the right way up on our letters.’
We sat on the sand watching a pair of pelicans while Rafo squeezed lemons and made jugs of pisco sour. He had caught some
locos
, which one of the women boiled in seawater and handed round, shells gaping. I had eaten abalone in Asia, but it hadn’t prepared me for the sweet, nutty taste of
locos
; I could understand why they were such valuable contraband. As the pile vanished Rafo told us he was a novelist, and that he had been in exile for most of the dictatorship. Although not a member of any party, he had publicly supported Allende for many years, and had protested during the first months of military rule. It was difficult for writers to be apolitical in Chile. José (known as Pepe) Donoso, a major contemporary novelist and a member of the group which emerged during the 1960s and 1970s when the Latin American novel was ‘internationalized,’ said that ‘justified political passion relegated literary passions to a secondary position’. There was a sense that those who left voluntarily had betrayed Chile; Donoso saidthat South American literary critics ‘seldom forgive exile’. I asked Rafo if he felt that intellectuals were polarized into those who had stayed and those who had gone.
‘Definitely. Each group resents the other: they think we whimped out
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