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.