Chile 1

After a less-than-two hour flight from BsAs to Santiago, we´re in Chile. The hotel is right next door to the UChile where we have an appointment tomorrow. The flight was wonderful in the day time, because we could see all the way from BsAs, over the Pampas, over the Andes, and down into Santiago. How different could Chile be? It´s right next door to Argentina, right? Well, if BsAs is the Paris of American, Santiago is its San Francisco. (just another saint, right?) It´s drier, looks and feels like California, and isn´t the skinny, spaghetti country. Somehow I had expected to be able to see the mountains and the sea simultaneously. Not so. The Andes are much wider than I had expected. We flew for miles over them. The pilot flew over, around, and through mountain passes. It´s just in the middle of them that he has to begin his descent, so we flew by mountains higher than the plane. And they are barren, but not unpopulated. In the middle of nowhere, you could see paths that people had worn into them. I couldn´t see any evidence of plant life, though. What would attract people to live in such a place?

The landscape made me think of Pablo Neruda´s Canto general, his massive poem about America. Primordial, before the existence of man. The Andes could be confused with moon landscape. While Neruda has always tried to get to the essence of things, the most salient recent writers of Argentina, Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, had more intellectual, literary purpose. Borges was raised speaking English in Argentina, and his word is soaked with allusions to everything not necessarily Latin, but more on a world scale, e.g., Norse mythology. Cortázar was out of Argentina so much that he even spoke Spanish with a French accent. Argentina seems to look to Europe, and Chile, to the rest of America. If you want to get a taste of the differnce, read Borges´ story El aleph and Neruda´s Odas elementales. Neruda is attached to America.

On the way to the hotel from the airport, we passed by the Palacio de la Moneda, where the US-supported military lead by Augusto Pinochet attacked and killed the duly-elected president, Salvador Allende, thus beginning a years-long dictatorship with its own story of the disappeared. I have ambivalent about most things in America with respect to the role of the US government, but not this. How can I live in a country that is so arrogant and bellicose as to destroy the will of the people of another country? Most US people do not even know what we have done, and continue doing. I just think of the braggadocios with their “We’re number one!” In what? The US does not play well with others.

Chile’s profile is more like that of the rest of America, with fewer Italians, more mestizos and indigenous people. The streets of Santiago are not unlike, at least where we are now, cleaner and not unlike any other modern city that is doing business in the world.

More later