Ten Things in Valparaíso

1        1. I watched an elderly couple say goodbye to each other on the sidewalk. They shared the traditional cheek-kiss upon parting, and the woman stepped into the street. And very nearly got hit by a micro. (Micros are the brightly colored public busses. On the busier streets, the stream of micros is almost constant, like a school of giant, urgent fish. Once while trying to stand in a micro, I almost hit a seated woman in the face with my backpack, which was swinging wildly away from my shoulder as we made a 90-degree turn without decelerating.) This micro screeched to a stop so instantaneous I was sure the back wheels lost contact with the street, the front grate eleven inches probably from the old woman’s elbow. I stood frozen in horror next to her husband on the sidewalk. Without flinching or glancing at the bus, the woman completed on her slow, graceful jaywalk, her companion placidly watching.

2. This is a Colombian band that our Colombian friend Abril recommended. They’re really good.

3. When someone enters a room here, they greet each person individually with a cheek-kiss. Even if there are eleven people in the room and the person entering knows only a one of them. Cheek-kisses are strictly cheeks only, lips don’t make contact with skin. If they do, it’s weird and inappropriate.

4. The security guards on the metros are all beefy men dressed in blue military style suits who carry guns and handcuffs. I approached a couple of them the other day in Estación Bellavista and asked what their job was like. They said they are vigilantes privadas, private security for the metro company and that they walk the trains at all hours watching for ambulantes, or vagrants. I asked them what they thought about the musicians that play on the metros. They said it’s an annoyance and it’s not permitted. When I told them I liked the music, they said, “That’s because you’re extranjera (foreign). To you the music sounds good, but really they aren’t very talented.” One day I was forty-five minutes late to my class because I was enjoying the music so much that I missed my stop.

5. This is my mosaic lady with a giant bush. Not mine I guess but I really love her. She’s in the Paseo de los Sueños in Cerro Bellavista, the Promenade of Dreams. I don’t know what she’s doing, not dancing really but she’s thrilled about something enough to be naked and throwing her arms up, which I think is a good way to be.

6. On Friday I was exploring Cerro Playa Ancha with my friends Bridget, Jennie, and Kendall. Bridget noticed this graffiti: “Muerte al violador,” death to the rapist. We crossed the street so Bridget could take a photo of it. We continued walking, talking about the word violación, rape. Two men dressed in all black were walking toward us on the sidewalk. They shouted “Fuck me! Suck my dick!” in heavily accented English as they passed us by. I flipped them off. Bridget swore at them in Spanish.

7. This week I went to a Dunkin’ Donuts in the Ikea-Walmart equivalent in Viña del Mar called Jumbo. I hated that I felt so at home in that super-store but I did. Like I was right back in America, bathed in florescent light, wandering down aisles and aisles of things. My donut was a Boston Cream one but with manjar instead of cream. I was talking about it for a few days afterward.

8. I’m really enjoying my drawing class. The professor says things like “We’re collecting lines right now. Follow the line. Each line is a journey.” We all sit on the floor for the whole two hours and the room is warm due to the space heater for the naked model. Here’s a semi-blind contour drawing I did last week.

9.Every Saturday I do my laundry. No one has dryers here so I hang it on our makeshift clothesline on the balcony. It’s one of my favorite things to do. I love standing in between my damp, translucent sheets and looking out over Valparaíso and the sea.

10. Every morning for breakfast we eat a giant bowl of oatmeal and sliced fruit (peaches, pears, apples, kiwi, oranges, prickly pear) and raisins and cornflakes and home-made strawberry marmalade. The raisins here are the size of nickels.

Ojalá

Thanks to my friend Bridget and her host parents Ariel and Patty, I have been introduced to Silvio Rodriguez. This is his most famous song "Ojalá." The other day I listened to it like eleven times in a row while I was eating lunch. It's so sad. The Chileans say "cortavenas," vein-cutting, when songs are sad this way, which is one of those "as an American my eyebrows are involuntarily rising" things But it's true! It is cortavenas!  There are all these beautiful live versions where he barely sings at all because the whole audience knows every word and sings it for him. He's coming to Santiago in May and I really want to go but tickets are kind of expensive so I'll keep you posted on that one. 

 Here's my translation of the lyrics.

I pray the leaves don't touch your body when they fall
So that they won't transform into crystal
I pray the rain will no longer be a miracle that falls from your skin
I pray the moon can move without you
I pray the earth won't kiss each of your steps

I pray that you're constant gaze will end
The perfect word, your perfect smile
I pray for something that will erase you now
A blinding light, a bullet of snow,
I pray for at least the arrival of death.
So I don't see you so much,
So I don't see you always,
In every second, in every vision.

I pray that I won't even be able to touch you in songs.

I pray the dawn doesn't fling insults that fall on my back.
I pray that this voice forgets your name.
I pray that these walls don't preserve the noise of your tired steps.
I pray that this desire follows you as you leave.
Following your ancient reign of corpses and flowers.

I pray that you're constant gaze will end
The perfect word, your perfect smile
I pray for something that will erase you now
A blinding light, a bullet of snow,
I pray for at least the arrival of death.
So I don't see you so much,
So I don't see you always,
In every second, in every vision.

I pray that I won't even be able to touch you in songs.

Espíritu Santo

Hi everyone! I made a blog! Mostly to motivate me to write more and explore more. Here's a piece I wrote shortly after arriving here in Valparaíso.



When the Spanish arrived to South America in search of gold and something more that they probably couldn’t define, they almost universally reported that the people who already lived in this new part of the world ate each other. Regularly. It is difficult to determine the accuracy of these accounts. Modern anthropologists still argue about the extent to which cannibalism among the indigenous people of this continent was practiced and whether it existed at all. In his book Canibalia, Carlos Jauregui explores the idea that perhaps we can benefit more not by arguing about the existence of cannibalism, but by examining the fear itself. What can we learn about the Spanish from their gruesome reports? Obviously, they were used to justify brutal behavior, but perhaps the fear—and fascination—with the practice of eating human flesh also indicates a carnal urge to consume buried within the conquerors' unconscious. Or perhaps, as Jauregui suggests, it is a desperate attempt to make sense of the other by introducing the idea that the other can be consumed into the self. In any case, it is our fears upon plunging ourselves into a place we can’t understand that will ultimately teach us about our own delicate psyche.

Like the Spanish 500 years ago, I have arrived on this strange continent with little to no context from which to understand it. Like the Spanish, I have arrived in a swell of exhilaration. But I wonder what kind of dark projections are surfacing in my mind. What is my cannibalism? What haunts me here that actually comes from the shadows within? I’ve tried to be attuned to the quieter, fragmented thoughts, the “bits of burnt paper” that flutter through my brain since my arrival, especially in moments of discomfort. And I keep coming back to seismology.

Chile is a country situated directly on a fault line. The Nazca plate beneath the Pacific Ocean is subverting beneath the South American one, causing small earthquakes to occur regularly, large ones about once a decade in the last fifty years. The largest earthquake ever recorded (a 9.5 on the Richter scale) happened in Southern Chile in 1960, and caused a tsunami with waves almost 40 feet high. I love the Spanish word for earthquake: terremoto, vibrating across the tongue with it’s own disconcerting momentum. So this is how my disorientation manifested in Valparaíso. I imagined earthquakes. Everywhere. The Nazca plate being forced like meat down the throat of the South American one, and the resultant geological gagging causing the very earth beneath me to undulate. I saw bridges crumbling, trains derailing. Glass like Jell-o in shop windows. The solemn retreat of the ocean from the city and, some minutes later, a giant tsunami silently advancing over the water. These images, while lurid, were fleeting, almost subconscious.  

The most terrifying place to imagine an earthquake is inside of an ascensor, one of the outdoor elevators that crawl up the impossibly steep hills of this unlikely city. Unlike an indoor elevator, the mechanisms of these ones are completely exposed, and the elevator room itself has large windows from which one can look out over the city. As the ascensores ascend, one can watch through the window as the giant metal wheels at the top and bottom of the hill turn against the steel cables, hauling the tin compartment up the wall of earth hundreds of feet tall. One can hear the screeches of metal on metal, the moaning of a sisyphean machine that for almost 100 years has diligently challenged gravity.

While riding inside the ascensor, I would imagine an earthquake so dramatic it would somehow wrench the gears from the station where they were rooted into the earth, or perhaps cause the steel cable to snap, sending the fragile metal box and its fragile human contents hurdling toward the bottom of the nearly vertical track. Falling wildly as the earth itself bucked and shuddered. Killing us. This was my fear.

And then, one Wednesday night, I found it, the trust. It came to me in the form of a small, round, old woman wearing all purple. It was dark, about 10:00pm. I was nervous about getting back to my host family’s apartment alone. We had heard so much in orientation about the criminals, the robberies, assaults, what happened to the women who walked alone.

She was already sitting happily inside the ascensor when I arrived, grasping her cane. I sat next to her, and said a polite, “Hola, buenas noches.” She responded similarly, but in native, Chilean Spanish, the vivacious kind. We waited there quietly for the ascensor operator to flip the switch and send us up the hill, sharing this dim square of silence in the midst of a whirling, fanged city. For a moment, the lights in the little station went out. This particular ascensor is called Espíritu Santo, Holy Spirit. We passed a moment in the breath of darkness, and when the lights flickered back on, the dimmest ones inside the box itself last, the operator sent us on our way.

The woman began chatting over the creaking of the machine, too quickly for me to understand. Her words like a little cat. I thought I understood something about a demonstration, something about the youths, but I could have invented those things. She showed me her left wrist, which had obviously been broken and healed imperfectly, with a prominent scar and bulges where bones had rearranged themselves. I didn’t understand why she did this. When we arrived at the top, she continued to talk rapidly to me as we left the station and stepped into the night. I was on the verge of parting ways but she continued to talk, beckoning me toward her, down a dark street in the opposite direction. I followed her, my brain bristling with whispers of warning, and we slowly made our way up the empty road, past anonymous buildings with anonymous graffiti.

We arrived at one which she gestured to, indicating that it was her apartment. She continued to gesture, and I realized that in order to reach the front door, she had to step up onto a concrete landing, a front stoop of sorts. But, for some reason, the concrete was covered in a thick layer of loose earth. Probably from a nearby construction project. The step up from the street onto the dirt-covered stoop was high, even for me at five and a half feet. For her four-foot, aged frame, it was insurmountable. Without help.

I understood then why she had brought me here. I grasped her arm, and together we heaved her up onto the step. She had me hold her purse while we did it. It took two or three tries. When we finally succeeded, she thanked me, took her purse, and hobbled into her home. It occurred to me that someone must help her do this every time. 

I no longer imagine the earthquakes.