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Published: April 8th 2006
Arica is the northernmost town of Chile. It used to be Bolivia, but we won’t talk about that…
What really matters is that it’s in the middle of the Atacama desert - well, almost. It’s on the coast, and the waters off that coast are very very rich (Peru & Chile are still bickering about the sea-frontier. Something that paradoxical could only be disputed in South America. Or the Balkans. Or Belgium… Or anywhere there’s people, I guess. Hm). Strange that a desert could have such a sharp border. Then again, there is Texas. But that desert isn’t so much physical.
Anyways, I got into Arica at seven, four hours after the scheduled arrival (of course border control wasn’t included in the time-table. Silly me), and weaved round the bus-station with my snail-size top-heavy ruck-sack, trying to find a bus to Vina del Mar.
- No buses until Monday (it was Saturday. The bus ride was 30 hours, minimum. I had to be at orientation on Wednesday morning …).
I walked out of the station and towards the centre of town. All the sea-level air was making my head spin. Also, I was in a completely different world. The streets were wide, the houses low and evenly spaced and orderly, the people I passed wearing loose cotton t-shirts and nylon shorts and didn’t really give me more than a look. The heat was visible. Not just in shimmering waves above asphalt (asphalt!) but also in the dogs sprawled on the sidewalks, the old men in the shade, the slower pace of things. No cars honked at me; in Bolivia it had been a personal affront to the taxi-drivers that a gringo would want to walk anywhere, so they would cut the wheel over to the curb and follow me, laying on the horn and shouting out the window to catch my attention. This actually happened more when Izzy was still there - they assumed a girl, being of a deficient sex, would throw herself into the taxi, near total exhaustion. Unfortunately for them, the type of gringo girl that comes to Bolivia, and especially Izzy, is the badass kind that takes hills in La Paz (4.000m) as a personal challenge.
For the next few hours I walked round the town. I was disoriented and unsettled and feeling pretty alone, something that is pretty unusual for me. But despite the natural obstacles to a third-world country, I had really gotten to love Bolivia. In La Paz I met a belgian man, an entomologist, who had lived in 84 countries, finally settling on Bolivia to retire to (to die to, as he put it). I can empathize with why he wants to end up here. La Paz could be Bruxelles in the 60's, architecture-wise and affluency-wise ... One night I had dinner in one of those little cook-on the street (the REAL dysentery-on-the-go) places covered with tarps and with a little table and benches round it. Sort of like a post-race fest in Belgium. Anyways, I talked with a middle-aged man for a while in there (he speaks spanish, aymara, quechua, latin, greek, french, and english - works with USAID (Oos-a-eed) and reviews the efficiency of local municipalities...). He was really nice and very laid back. He´d been to Belgium as well on invitation to the Universite de Louvain and said he like the belgians a lot. That´s what made me think of the comparison.
Both countries get kicked about like a red-headed stepchild by their neighbours, both slightly corrupt, both with good natural resources but not the smarts to use them well ... but it´s the people that most resemble each other. Very nice, slightly dis-contended and grumpy, sometimes but complain about it but in an amiable way. They both have an unassuming humility but are a very strong people, both literally and mentally. Hard workers...some of the friendliest I’d ever met and just all-round good… really honest (unless they were trying to cheat you) and genuine: more than once I'd go in to a store for something and they'd tell me that there was a store up the street that would fit my needs better. For instance, when Christopher and I went to get my bag repaired, the tailor said his machine was more for leather and wouldn't do as pretty a job as the one two streets over, so why don't I go there? Funny in a country where one's store is one's survival, people were far less money-grubbing.
But now I was wandering Arica, it was getting dark, and all the hostels were full because it was Carnaval. Being alone in La Paz after a month of traveling with Izzy had been hard. I was still missing her, and missing my family after almost two months away, with minimal contact. My friends in Colorado had been in school for a month already and the tri-team was gearing up for nationals. I was also sick with what would later turn out to be typhoid. Arica was foreign and after the shy, furtive smiling people of Bolivia, it felt cold and colourless and I was not a part of it. I ate alone in a restaurant, sat on the concrete wharf and watched the waves, surrounded by dozens of couples, went to my hostal and took a cold shower, and went to sleep.
The next day I decided to leave by plane. Mom & Dad had offered it as a possibility, but I had rejected it because it didn’t fit in with my little romantic vision of traveling South America by ground.
Now I was pulling the eject lever.
This was Sunday, however, and in Latin America, even ejection seats take the day off. I walked to the LAN-Chile office - closed, of course, and wouldn’t open until 14hrs (it was 8). On the hotline was a grumpy guy whose ticketing system wouldn’t even be accessible until 10.
The town was deserted. Not even taxis were out. Since no internet cafes were to open until 13hrs, the only place I had a chance of a ticket for was the airport. Fine, I would walk to the airport. It was 22km across the desert but it had to be better than deserted lonely Arica. Better to be lonely by one’s self than surrounded by people.
Just before I joined the main road out of town I stopped into a little store that was open to get water and bananas.
Sometimes Life throws you a little cherry bomb of unreality, just to remind you that Yes you ARE in this world of infinite possibility and crazy happenstance, and Yes YOU MUST be a part of it. IT. Stepping into that store was one of those moments.
All I wanted was a few bananas and some water for the walk, and a place to put on my trusty SPF 55. But I started talking with the owners of the shop, and they asked me what I was doing, etc., and I told them I was going to the bus station for one last chance to try and get a ride and then to the airport… The man said Hey, you probably won’t get either one of those, so if you don’t, come back to the shop and we’ll let you stay in our house because our son is doing a radio show and there’s a free bed and don’t worry you won’t have to pay and … he stopped and looked at me. Yes, of course, don’t worry, I’m not tricking you, I always take in people, travelers, young people that are alone and …
What? I wasn’t sure if this was for real. I mean, people I met in Bolivia I’d tell ‘you always have a place to stay in Belgium,’ and I really meant it, except they were illiterate peasants and probably weren’t going to make it for moules-frites at Maison Edwards anytime soon. So was he for real?
I grinned and said Thank you I will if I need it, intending to spend the night at the airport on my sleeping pad, and then turned to leave for the bus station.
- Wait, he said, I’ll take you, I have some friends there and I maybe can get you a spot on the busses.
So I sat down and waited for him to go get dressed, and looked round, and saw the book he had been reading just before I walked up. The Bible.
Uh-oh.
So, he was just trying to convert me. Ok, well, I expected as much, I guess. No altruism, hey?
He walked out from behind the counter, dressed in all-white: shoes, pants, socks, shirt, hat - everything. All spick and span and ironed and sharp. Ok, let’s go, and we started walking, me a scruffy unshaven traveler with a huge rucksack, him bobbing along next to me. He is the kind of person that looks at you when you talk and needs to be in contact with you so that you both keep veering left … so I, trying to keep my face interested and attentive, was trying to watch the sidewalk (mined with dog poop, trash, broken concrete, and lamp-posts), all the while trying to gently nudge him back onto a straight line because I was having to side-ways hurdle detritus and the edge of the sidewalk, but not wanting to be offensive except he was completely oblivious and kept up his breathless, off-tempo speaking and staring at me.
Sergio was shortish, that is Bolivian-sized, but a little below the Chilean average. His head was perfectly round. It was amazing. He reminded me of the Mr. Men characters, like Mr. Strong or Mr. Noisy, a perfect caricature, except I wasn’t sure of what exactly. He talked without spaces between words, too. My head was reeling from his talk and the sun and typhoid and hopping over bushes and I was trying to keep up with his jammed machine-gun talk and answer his questions, but it didn’t really matter, because he didn’t really pause for an answer - for him, How old are you? was a rhetorical question.
I told him that I was floored (flattened was the closest translation I could do) at his generosity at taking me to the station, and that got him going on all the badness and sadness and other nesses in the world, and how there needs to be more brotherhood and humanity and faith and - he spun and looked up at me and held my gaze - believe in God, do you believe in God? (rhetorical), You know how you can tell a good person? (Well…) You can look him in the eyes and he won’t look away, all while looking in my eyes and trying to appear penetrating and observant, and I tried to hold his gaze as well except the last time I looked down the side-walk there was a lamp-post and we had to be close to that, except I couldn’t exactly look away, this being the moment of deepest soul penetration and observation. I was trying to calculate my mass and velocity to attain the g-forces that were going to be applied to my left temple when I hit the pole, but then he yanked my straps and pulled me away from it. Watch out!! Oh, young one, it’s a good thing I found you and am walking you to this bus station because see, you need help walking! Except in a totally empathetic and non-joking way, he really felt that I had a clumsy disability and he needed to be my guardian angel. The fact that I was tripping and unsteady was because of him pushing on me and talking to me didn’t even enter his periphery of thinking.
We came to the station. He didn’t have any contacts, as it turned out, he just assumed that people would see that we were good people and needed a ticket and so they would make a special exception. He went to every booth I had been to the day before and asked about tickets, and all we found out was that there were no buses until Tuesday, now. Oie. So I tried to make a phone call, but all I had was a 500 peso coin, so he left his stuff with me (books, wallet, glasses, etc) and went off to get change. He was gone for 15 minutes. Finally he came back. I had already changed a bill and made the call to the airport (no answer), but I did it again because he was so pleased with himself and proudly watched me punch in the numbers.
We had no answer - I just decided to buy a ticket online, and made the mistake of telling him, so he went off and asked for an internet café. Eventually we found one. I went in, asked for a computer, was told to go to number two, and Sergio, entering right after, told the lady that the foreigner needs a computer, please give him one, and as I was sitting down, he came running over and showed me that I was to sit at #2, #2, Ok? That’s yours.
So he sat while I sweated and tried to find a flight to Santiago, which only going through Travelocity did I find (having to break my personal boycott of Travelocity…), for Monday morning at 6 - landing at four towns before Santiago.
I had been calling him Senor, out of habit, but he got annoyed and said, No, you call me Tio, not Senor (Uncle, not Sir). Then we walked out to the road. Where are we going? To his house, of course, so I can drop off my stuff and shower and he can show me round the Illustrious Cultural city of Arica (sort of like a country that calls itself the People’s Democratic Republic of X, the more names it has the less it actually is anything like its title).
We caught a colectivo (taxi with a fixed line, that packs in minimum five people) and came to a little neighbourhood on the edge of Arica. He took me in to the house, unlocking four locks - just on the gate - and paused before we went in: it’s not big, but the heart is. Come in!
The place was some sort of cross between a 70’s style by-the-hour motel, a trailer, and road-side chapel… posters of a ripped (buff), bleeding jesus, like a gnarly comic-book hero, ceramic statues of angels and crèches and crosses. Fantastic. Sort of reminded me of our house in Belgium, full of little artifacts and family things - except his family things were of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.
He showed me Psalm 91, a good one, and then put me in his grandson’s room, I changed, and we went off to walk round town… down to the beach, where he made me take off my shoes and socks and splash round in the water, then instructed me how to wipe off the sand, and we were off again down the beach. He showed me the river that flows from Bolivia, where right now it’s dry season on the coast but wet season up high, so the river flows. Although ‘dry season’ is redundant, it never rains there.
The conversation (or, rather, his uninterrupted monologue) turned to art, music, culture. I play the guitar, announced Tio Sergio, Yes, I play very well and compose all my own music, folkloric music, you know, but you see Patricks, I don’t want to be a world-famous artist or anything, even though I have the talent, looks, and voice, because you see Patricks, a man as humble as me and with such faith does not need to do things like that. His three bottom teeth popped out from under his lip, and he sucked them back in. Yes, that is a choice I have made, not to be famous.
I found out that he was an athlete, as well, to top all things, and a vegetarian. ‘I have a very healthy lifestyle, yes, healthy, and keep myself in top physical condition and hey Patricks, how old do you think I am?’ I thought about that. He looked like he was mid-sixties, and his wife mid-seventies. I decided to aim low, because, with him grinning up at me and trying to look youthful, that’s what he wanted to hear. “Sixty-one,” I said.
He turned his head and looked straight. I’m 57, he grumbled. Whoops.
After another hour of walking we came back to the store, and had a lunch of raw vegetables, garlic, and onions, bread, eggs (suddenly the bread sucked in Chile. Across the border it was universally good. What?), and warm mineral water. I was still bewildered by this overwhelming generosity (I was sure that’s what it was now, not a scam - I trusted Tio Sergio completely). I talked with Tio Alicia Venezuela (who actually did turn out to be 73), Tio Sergio’s wife. She asked me if I believed in God. I said, Well, no, not the same one you believe in, but I believe in the things He represents - humanity, generosity, compassion, etc., what I believe is more that what we call God is in every-day life. But, I added quickly, I have read the Bible and think Jesus is great, I think he has very important things to say (I also have read the Torah, the Qu’ran, and happen to think Buddha, Gandhi, Mohammed, and Jack Johnson have some worthwhile things to say too, but kept quiet). They nodded approval and changed subjects.
We were sitting in the patio of the store, and people would come and sit down. Two guitarists dressed in red vests, one of whom was crippled. They sat down, dusty, and shared a coke, stared at the ground, then sighed and went back out to the plaza to play for coins, the cripple limping and leaning on his friend. They had been doing that for a long time: the friend’s walk was perfectly in sync with the swing and step of his partner’s walk.
After lunch Tio Sergio changed into his athletic gear: neon yellow short-shorts, a soccer shirt, and running shoes from the seventies. Not style-wise. They were from the seventies. Then he decided to play me his songs, so he scurried back inside and grabbed his guitar and stood on the sidewalk and serenaded me with his love songs. Over the past hour I had gotten over being embarrassed about Tio Sergio doing everything for me and his eccentricities, so I laughed along with the people walking by, wondering why an old man was singing love songs to a skinny gringo. Of course, I kept my face perfectly attentive.
But I think I need to clarify something. Throughout this whole time, I never felt any ill will towards him or felt any from him. He truly believed it was his duty to take me in and help me, and he was doing it because he wanted me to feel welcomed and safe and happy. I am talking about his quirks, but he was genuine - slightly embedded into his little world, but a good Christian and a good man. I really did appreciate him and what he was doing, and I wasn’t laughing at him the whole time, just mostly overwhelmed at the surrealism of the whole situation. Sitting being serenaded I really was enthusiastic and enjoying his music, but also aware of the world observing our little antics, which he most definitely was not.
He played three songs, I applauded and whooped for each, and then we went off to the Morro of Arica.
The Morro is a big bluff over the city where the final defeat of the Peruvian and Bolivian armies took place in the War of the Pacific - when Chile came to have the three northern provinces it does. It was a patently economic war, and so of course Chileans have made an extra effort to put up enourmous monuments dedicated to all things heroic and martyric (word?) having to do with the patriotic and just battle of Arica.
We walked up halfway, and then Tio Sergio made me stop and take several action shots of him running up the path, then several of me, except he didn’t quite get the digital delayed-action thing so most of what he got was me filling the lens. Also (fortunately), he didn’t know how to see the pictures afterwards, and so couldn’t tell if it wasn’t perfect. I was honest with him the first time and so we had to take four shots over just to be sure, so after that all the photos turned out Great! And so, for the next three hours, we took pictures of various landmarks in Arica, so that I could have a souvenir of each place, to show that I had been there. The pier, the view up top, the flag of Chile from four angles, the cannons, the beach, the sign telling which beach it was, the hotel where the Chilean national soccer team had stayed in once, in 1987, another beach, and when we had gone through too much of an interlude between pictures, we took pictures of each other in random spots.
He told me of his plans to spread his seed in other countries, in young blonde women, so that there would be lots of little Vera boys to spread his example of generosity and charity and faith, because his wife, being 73, could not give him a son (making me instantly regret the offer that he and Tio Alicia could stay at our house in Belgium whenever), and about his son in the south who he didn’t know much about, other than that he was 32 and was an architectural engineer (A mistake of Youth, you see, Patricks).
An interesting guy, this Tio Sergio.
We walked back to the store, finally, me still soaking and sandy from when Tio Sergio made me swim in the packed, dirty water, and stand on a cement block out in the water (You can swim, right?) in the middle of all the children and wave, which I did. Unfortunately he completely missed the island and one of the little kids out there pulled a jote (vulture), asking my name and where I was from and then for my Livestrong bracelet. I wanted to throw him over the side.
Our plans for the evening were to go to Pitichile, a little town up the road to La Paz (where, three weeks later, a van full of American tourists would plunge off a dune, killing almost everybody on board… which happens every day, it’s just they were gringos so it made the news). Tia Alicia’s son was going to do a radio-broadcast there. There was no time for me to go home and change, so Tio Sergio announced that he wasn’t going to change into street clothes either, he was going to keep his athletic gear on so that I wouldn’t feel uncomfortable (again, not to show himself as generous or whichever Christian adjective - he really didn’t want me to feel out of place).
Isabelle, the daughter-in-law, picked us up, and we drove 45 min to the village. We got there at dusk, but it was enough for me to see that we were in a town of identical wooden government shacks, spaced out at 15m intervals, with a little green patch where the river flowed through. Otherwise we were surrounded by dunes and dust and dry trash. Beyond that I couldn’t tell.
The radio show was in full swing when we got there; about ten other family members, all sitting outside on plastic chairs and jabbering and half-listening to Jose, the DJ. The set-up was a karaoke-equipped CD player that was somehow connected to the radio. A little table in a chicken-wire-fenced shack in the desert. Awesome.
I kept being awed by the friendliness everybody was showing me - coming up and introducing themselves with a firm shake, hug, and kiss, inviting me to drink tea and have a bread and cheese … Jose was in full swing, making all kinds of inside jokes about the family and what was going on at our party, and about things in general (OOoooohh!! There goes the Police!! Yeah!! Saludos to the Authority, alright!!). I got up and danced with one of the women there, and then Tio Sergio jumped in with another woman (so that I wouldn’t feel stupid, I imagine), and we twirled round in the dust and twilight and motion-activated lamps, with Jose crowing and shouting into his microphone about every move we did - ‘Go old man! Look at those hips shaking! The gringo is dancing!’ … until Tio Sergio got the idea that he was going to play guitar for the radio, and he pulled out his guitar that he’d coincidentally brought along and played the same three songs that he’d played for me earlier that day … every time we all applauded and encouraged him, but Jose cut him off and put in Saturday Night Fever, and so we all leapt up this time and danced more. Then everybody started chanting for a speech from me, so I did - using a word Tio Sergio had taught me earlier that day, ‘buena onda.’ It means good vibes… And when I used it everybody erupted and cheered and went back to dancing, just to show the world what good onda we had.
Then a little man that had been standing shyly against the wall, grinning, got called up to DJ stand. Arturo was an Indian, and from the village - Jose put in some Indian music (not Flutes of Pan, no one actually listens to that, sorry), and Arturo, trapped, started to sing.
Well - This was another moment where suddenly you become intensely aware of the sensual world, where things become really clear and you feel the desert breeze of air that's coming in, announcing the end of the day and the rising of the moon over dunes, and the smell the dust cooling off and see very clearly everyone around and take this all in in a direct line to your soul, where it’s just purely awareness of the moment. But of all the senses, it was listening to Arturo sing that made me stop where I was and focus solely on him. Everyone did. It was like reading a book so enthralling that you forget the world outside, and we all stood or sat, frozen, feeling him sing, breathing.
Obviously, words won’t do him justice. It was a lament of his people and his poverty, it was a joy of being of the earth and being alive, of reaping and sowing, of life and death, loss and renewal, sacrifice, love.
Or none of these things. It was in Quechua: he could have been singing about milking his goats, for all I knew.
But it hardly mattered the words he used, of course. The real words were in the music and the way he held the microphone, ungainly and tight, his leaning into it and scrunching up of his face and nodding of his head …
I don’t know how else to explain it except to say that it was a human moment.
When the show ended we went back to Arica. Tio Sergio played a few more songs for me (actually, the same ones again), and we went to bed. I couldn’t talk him out of taking me to the airport, even though we had to leave at 4:30. So a few hours later, he woke me up - he woke up without an alarm - and we had a little bread and tea and caught a taxi out to the airport. I got there an hour early but of course no one was there, so he sat and waited with me for people to show up. I asked him about him being a doctor. I like the idea of homeopathic/holistic medicine, which is what he did. And he did do the positive-thinking and meditation techniques, except he treated cancer, HIV, and TB. He refused to entertain the idea of using drugs for cures - even though he was a licensed physician and had been for 30 years. Later that day, he said, he was going to a woman’s house to help her get rid of a hex.
I thought I hadn’t heard him right. A hex? Like a curse?
Yes, of course. There are some bad people, bad people in this world without faith, Patricks, and some of them will use such awful things as powers of the devil to put curses on people, for whatever reason, I don’t know, I don’t do those things, Patricks, but I get rid of them.
A few impeccable LAN-Chile women showed up twenty minutes before departure time, so I checked my luggage and said goodbye to Tio Sergio, who was calling me his son. I gave him fare for the ride back to Arica, except to get a ride he had to walk the 6km back out to the main road. Amazing. I was sad to say goodbye. Despite his idiosyncrasies, which we all have - just that some are more endearing than others - I really enjoyed his company.
I boarded, found the pocket-knife I’d lost in my carry-on in security, except instead of being tackled by rent-a-cops, as I was in the Denver airport, I went to the luggage cart (outside, 50m from the plane), put my knife in, and then went back around and through security. Ok, I was ready for the next step of my life now. I suppose you could call Tio my Angel. He took me in at one of the lower points of my life, and turned me out 18 hours later with a new charge of vitality, humility, and passion. Gracias, Tio. Hasta la proxima…
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Jaime
non-member comment
Arica,Atacama, Pisagua & Iquique PERU
The cities already mentioned used to belong to Peru, not to Bolivia as you mentioned. Peru will take posesion of these territories soon. Chile stole these lands, in a low life expansionsm butchery.....and chile will have to return the land peacefully, or else, force will take its way. Nobody likes wars, but, chile is a primitive country, at least mentally speaking, where chileans feel proud of having stolen land after a campaign of 3 years raping women and children, killing civilians, and, burning down towns. Chile represents the evil .