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Published: August 23rd 2008
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It is Monday in august in Santiago. Friday was a holiday in honor of the Virgin. I would assume that would be the Immaculate Conception one, but I can’t claim to know the Catholic pantheon that makes a regular habit of mercifully intervening into the ‘work’ week. (Microsoft Word apparently is more religiously sensitive. The green line has appeared under ‘immaculate conception’ recommending that it be capitalized. In case you were wondering, Krishna and Buddha get auto-corrected with capital letters. An un-capitalized mohammed gets red lined. Here too apparently). Knowing that Friday was a holiday, having no intention of going to mass, and the forecast calling for lots of rain, made Thursday night Friday night. Living overseas makes time, like linguistic meaning, somewhat open to interpretation.
Thursday night: Meet Carly on the steps of the national library around 7:30. We make the questionable decision of taking the metro to Barrio Brazil, the next neighborhood over. It really is almost impossible to explain how full the metro is at certain hours, such as 7:30 in the evening. It’s India full or full like free day at the public pool when it is 100 degrees. Anyway, you don’t board the train. When
Paseo Huerfanos
pedestrian street on way to La Moneda. Buildings in the background. the doors open, an unknown quantity of passengers is expelled, and there is a temporary state change from solid to semi-permeable. In this instant, new passengers hurl themselves into the momentarily porous mass trying to wedge themselves between bodies. At peak hours, it is very common to be repelled. I rarely have anywhere I need to be with any sort of urgency, so I wait. (Strangely, I have yet to see any metro rage. Perhaps rage comes easier in the roomy air conditioned environs of a Toyota Tundra). On the third train, we succeed, transfer, and emerge 20 blocks west, a short walk from the Plaza Brazil. The Plaza is interesting in its own right because the park equipment is very reminiscent of the whimsical colorful rotundity of the sculptures in the fountain outside of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. After sundown, the children have gone home and it has been claimed by university students who presumably feel it is a congenial place to drink beer and smoke weed. On the other side of the Plaza is an entirely too well lit bar full of sharp angles, vibrant primary colors, polished chrome, pleather upholstery, six booths and chic looking people.
I sneak in behind Carly and head for the nearest booth.
Side note: Noon day cannon shot from nearby Santa Lucia Hill. No idea why. Before the people and the smog, Darwin climbed Santa Lucia and noted that you could see both the ocean and the Andes on a clear day. Now, the mountains can be seen rising from the brown smear of smog sitting over the city. No sign of the ocean.
The only reason for noting the bar on the corner of Plaza Brazil is their means of distributing beer. Though I have been in a bar or two in life, I have never seen taps on the tables. The waiter puts in a key and restarts the counter, you pour. Brilliant! I was much impressed and highly entertained at the inability of most of the other customers to achieve more beer than foam. Then again, I am easily entertained.
Friday: Lots and lots of rain. Asuncion de la Virgin day anyway, so the entire city was closed. Lots of rain is good. It makes the pollution go away. Don’t think too much about where ‘away’ might be. We turned up the heater and didn’t leave
allende statue
on plaza in front of La Moneda the house. Thought about spring . . . in August.
Saturday: Unless you have some variety of torrential storm, American Protestant acculturation limits the number of days you can spend inside sitting on the couch alternating between reading, checking the internet, and napping to . . . one. Saturday the sky was ‘just washed’ blue . Prodded by Friday’s luxurious do nothingness, we went for some culture at the ‘Moneda’. The Moneda was a mint before being converted into the presidential palace. It’s big, white, classical, and accessible. The later being a strange quality for presidential offices even if the presidenta doesn’t actually live there. The Moneda looks pretty good considering that the air force bombed it in September of 73 before the army shock troops went in to clean up the rest of the government. Somewhere inside the (only) democratically elected Marxist president Salvador Allende ‘committed suicide’. After sixteen years of human rights abuses and some serious neo-liberal economic ‘fixing’ by the Milton Freedman prodigies called the Chicago Boys (the ‘Chilean economic miracle’ if you happen to be the USA, the IMF or World Bank rather than the vast majority of the Chilean population), the dictator Pinochet got
memorial to Los Desaparecidos
memorial to people 'disappeared' by Pinochet's dictatorship voted out of power, democracy restored, and Allende got a statue on the plaza in front of the Moneda. One can only imagine that steamed the 40% of the population that thought the dictatorship is the only thing that saved them from the Red Menace. Now the Red Menace has a statue and a martyr who was a hell of a lot more palatable than Che or Mao or any of the others. The Moneda exhibit was dedicated to Salvador Allende and comprised of art done both to commemorate his election and condemn his demise. Appropriately cultured, we went home to nap.
That evening we crossed the river and headed to the neighborhood of BellaVista. The neighborhood sits at the bottom of Cerro San Cristobal, a very large hill crowned with a marble Virgin with outstretched arms: it being a Latino rule that a ginormous Mary or Jesus must crown the hill of any city worth its salt. From the top on a (rare) clear day, the vista actually is pretty bella. The neighborhood is ‘bohemian’, whatever that might mean. Apparently, bohemian requires a slew of theaters, restaurants, bars, discotheques, and an artisan fair. Murals, a wide central avenue with
cheap beer, students with metal in their faces, a few drunks masquerading as hippies, tourists and people hawking junky handicrafts on the sidewalk are also desirable elements. One side street is home to small bars with (can they be other than bohemian?) folk singers. We duck into one of these, inexplicably called ‘10&4’ or maybe ‘4&10’. It is dimly lit and stuffed full of people perched on milking-the-cow stools hunkered around rough hewn tables punishing the vino tinto. The place is choked with smoke. There are more than a couple of berets. On the walls, old black and white pictures of Allende doing presidential things. Guernica is on another wall next to a poster that says something about changing the world. The iconografic Che stares out defiantly from the back near the bar. In the corner, a bearded singer, his eyes screwed shut (possibly due to the smoke), and a look vacillating between agony and ecstasy (also possibly smoke induced), strums the guitar and sings plaintively. Under the music is the bubbly chatter of the wine. Much of the crowd is older and in their faces, there is a mixture of nostalgia, trampled idealism, defiance, relief, hope. The songs are punctuated by shouts of ‘Bravo’ and choruses where everyone - and this means everyone except us- erupts into throaty sing alongs. Though I don’t understand much of it, the emotion and solidarity the music forged under the repression of the dictatorship is palpable. This clearly is a vestige of Santiago of the early 70s. This is the Santiago that believed it could overthrow the feudal power structure. This is the Santiago that the dictatorship tried to disappear. And though they broke the fingers of the songwriter who gave voice to their dreams before they put a bullet in his head, the music clearly didn’t die.
Sunday: Didn’t make it home til 3:30, very early in Santiago. We were some of the first to leave. Nevertheless, woke up at 9. Went down to the corner bakery for croissants, pan chocolates, and fresh squeezed orange juice. Spent the day in the cemetery. Blue skies and plum trees in bloom amongst the graves of Chile’s past. Though most of Chile’s history lays buried here, notably absent are Neruda, who asked to be buried by the sea, and Pinochet, who went up in smoke for fear of vandels' reprisals. The arcing white wall commemorating those ‘disappeared’ during the dictatorship looms on one end of the cemetery. The gratuitous mausoleums of the street names fill another corner. Despite the signs denoting personages of note, it is a history lesson I am not culturally equipped to follow.
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Jamie
non-member comment
Hey nice essay. Made me feel stupid, especially when you compaired the plaza to the paris plaza, used these words: "whimsical colorful rotundity ." I have yet to understand how the word "whimsical" can describe architechture. I also enjoyed the examination of spell check. Jamie