jornada chilena

Talca. Here I sit in my humble room in the sprawling, pieced-together, mold-darkened house on the corner of 5 Norte and 24 Oriente. Here I roll sloppy joints and smoke on the swing on the back patio, vines from the neighbor’s yard creeping over the high wall, the starry sky quiet and cold. Here I burn things on the large gas stove and then I sit in the big white kitchen sipping coffee, listening to Isak talk to me about kitchens, about construction, about a small town outside of Pichelemu, mouth half-closed, wrapping each word tightly around his tongue, dark small black eyes furious and alive.

Here in Talca, we stalk down the corner of 5 Oriente, knock at dark doors and step into Toareg, where we sip wine and Brahma beer, pushing soggy rice and tomatoes around small plates, letting the local drunk slur his words into our ears until he can’t hold himself up. Here we slip out to the side street and smoke a quick joint, before sitting back down at our small table in the corner, tapping our fingers lightly on packs of cigarettes.

Here Phillip and I hop off the Taxutal bus near 1 Oriente, cross the Plaza de Armas from corner to corner, and march down the Diagonal toward the Alameda. We climb up and down the broken curbs, cross the street for a quick mote con huesillos, then continue down the sandy tree-shaded thoroughfare toward the river. We cross the old bridge on foot, looking up at the new bridge, down at the horses trotting through the shallow water, nosing at tall grass, and we stop and we ask for directions. The old men, white shirts and sunbrowned skin, point us under the bridge and down the riverbank “a dos cuadras”. At Los Olivares we sit under grapevines sipping house wine and listening to the old man and the young man play tonadas, play cuecas. We look at each other and we look at the river. Bees attracted by the sweet sour grapes on the vines hover over our chancho en piedra, our pollo mariscal.

We take a colectivo up into the hills to a supposed Peruvian restaurant, but once the cab drops us off at the edge of the highway and we climb the steep grade up into the sad circle of old guesthouses, defunct shops, a man comes out of a warehouse and tells us, “Se murió.” A dog barks at us from behind a low fence, and I almost walk onto someone’s terrace by mistake. Talca spreads itself out before us, the broad plain, the distant Cordillera. It’s still late summer, so Descabezado, the other, nameless volcanoes, aren’t yet dusted with snow. We try to thumb it back down the hill, but no one’s picking us up. Luckily it’s only about six kilometers back to the river, to the bees and the slow-moving water and the comida típica. Phillip and I drink wine, we drink beer, we drink ponche, we trudge back to town slowly in the languid heat. The men with damp red faces move about the sparse lumberyard they keep under the bridge. A horse pulls a large cart down the slope toward the boats waiting to bring tourists across the river. The boats are small, wooden, brightly painted, with names like “La Teresita” and “Titanic”.

We sleep lightly in the late afternoons, sun slanting through the dusty skylight, the children in the house continuing their usual chatter. A cat scuttles across the laminate roof, the plastic buckling, rustling under its weight. The metal shop next door is quiet. All of a sudden, a low rumbling, a heavy truck outside, a train across the street. Nothing is perceptibly shaking, there is only noise, noise, noise that lasts less than ten seconds, then everything is quiet. Phillip looks over at me. He raises one eyebrow. “Earthquake?” He says. I shrug my shoulders. “I guess,” I say.

At the Católica, my shoes squeak always on the polished ceramic walkways, and María Eugenia’s heels echo through the departmental hallway as she sprints down the corridor to Diego’s office, to the print room. On my first day I sit aimlessly at the front of the Audio Lab, running my thumb along the wooden edge of a desk, watching the Social Work students outside in pairs of two, one partner blindfolded, the other leading from an arm’s length, the uninterested leading the blind. Later on I sit in the Multimedia Lab, shocked, as thirty students stare at computer screens and cling tightly to headphones while Rodrigo sings “Build Me Up, Buttercup” into a crackly microphone. Oh, these students love karaoke, and while they line up reluctantly for my low-tech group discussion activities, they flock to the English Club Meetings and chant away like Japanese schoolchildren as the tinny music comes across the headphones, words flash across the screens. Here Sebastián mystifies me with his studied cool, the smart subtle eyebrow raise, the cigarette he flicks away carefully, the peace sign he somehow pulls off as he breezes past my office door. And Roberto, with his hesitant voice, his peasant’s hands, his shy critique of “imperialismo,” reminds me far too much of another person whose parents were of the fields, whose shy smile concealed heat and passion and sadness. My office is clean and sleek and cold, and my window looks out on the red tiles of the building across the lawn, the trees of the courtyard. Students visit me there and we sound out readings together, I heavy-handedly edit their papers, business memos. I make Nescafé with the tetera in María Eugenia’s office, I chortle with colleagues in the hallway; I attend departmental banquets for visiting Canadian professors, where we sit across long tables from each other, pouring soda into glasses, picking at pineapple rings with small spoons, trying not to betray the department’s lack of organization. We mutter small talk, we fake the educational jargon, we light up when Diego wheezes gleefully at a bit of a joke.

a couple of weekends ago the american professor who works in my department (there's an american professor who works in my department) invited me out to a vendimia in a small town called nirivilo that sits in the low mountains between talca and the sea. it was a small family farm, they had grapes and other crops, and every year they celebrate the vendimia, the wine harvest. it was a tiny farm out in the middle of nowhere, and the light was really beautiful. it felt so much like autumn.

first we sat down at a long table on the porch of the house, and at the other long table were all of the people from around the countryside who had come to pick grapes. they were solemn, aged. they ate and drank heartily without talking. we had cazuela, a hearty soup with chicken, potatoes, carrots, squash, and cilantro, and then we had lomo--rice and vegetables with sliced beef on top. we drank the too-sweet unprocessed red wine from last year's harvest. we drank good white wine from a bottle. afterward, for postre, we had bread with cheese and coffee. then we went out to the campo. we walked down the hill, down the dusty-two lane track, and then up into the winefields. the grapes off the vine were so sweet! the fat children of one of the patrona's sons climbed into the ox-pulled cart. the campesinos picked quietly, quickly.

and that was it, really: the light, the crisp air, the smell of woodsmoke. the agreeable task of picking grapes, putting them in wooden crates, eating every second bunch or so. we were still drunk from the wine, still full from the meal, so we felt a comfortable, easy sort of exhaustion up in the fields. we worked until the patrona, the matriarch of the family, sent word down that we should come in, that the sun was going behind the mountains, that the cold was coming in. we trudged contentedly up the cart tracks to the house. the campesinos kept on working. a small, grinning man in the bodega was dancing, dancing, on top of grapes that two workers put beneath him, over canes stretched tightly across the top of an enormous wooden vat. one weak bulb hung from a cord in the ceiling, and one radio played scratchy sentimental music, wedged in the rafters somewhere up where the small man danced endlessly. he was wrinkled and slight, but when he looked down at us there was light in his eyes.

after that, we walked up to the house. had coffee again, more bread. the señora tried to put plates of lomo in front of us, but most of us shooed them away. and then, the drawn-out goodbyes, the happy, tired walk down to the car, the treachorous path up to the main road, the long quiet ride back to talca in the dark.

hello! i made a promise to carolbruce hewitt not two months ago, and by god am i going to keep it. do i think this blog merits reading? no, most of the time i do not. do i like attention? yes, most of the time i do. do i want to keep in touch with loved ones back home, and around the globe? yes, absolutely, always. ¡adelante!