Santiago · Valparaíso
Santiago de Chile
In his introduction to Ernesto Guevara’s Diarios de motocicleta, Cintio Vitier tells us that Che’s youth matured without wilting (“supo madurar su juventud sin marchitarla”). I love that… I arrived in Santiago de Chile, ancestral land of the Picunche, on day 90 of the Israeli attack on Gaza. I wonder how to mature without wilting in the face of immense oppression. In the face of genocide.
Santiago reminds me of my native Bogotá. The mountains, the architecture, the smog, the chaos of a big city, el rock en español. My Chilean friend who studied with me at the London School of Economics took me to the cablecars and we visited the Virgin of Cerro San Cristóbal. She is beautiful and very big. I thought of mi mamá, as much a believer in the Virgin Mary as her mom, mi abuelita. Later on this journey I plan to visit la Virgen de Guadalupe in Mexico City to deliver on a promise I made to her with my grandma some years ago.
I went to the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos (Museum of Memory and Human Rights) with my friend, and I was covered in goosebumps throughout the visit. X is a sociologist and is very knowledgeable about September 11, 1973 and the coup in general. In the museum a sign reads, “¿Cómo llegamos a negar la humanidad de las personas?” (How did we come to negate the humanity of people?) I can still see the recreation of the torture room and the countless pictures displayed behind a huge glass near the entrance; the faces of those disappeared or killed by the military regime. The words “NEVER AGAIN” are written in many languages on another glass facing the photos.
And yet here we are.
Valparaíso, ancestral land of the Picunche, is beautiful in a different way from Santiago. I went for the day, from the city center up to the mountain and on the funicular down to the pier. As I rode the bus to Pablo Neruda’s house in Cerro Florida, I remembered being a teenager in Bogotá and taking the buseta to school: the sign on the windshield with the bus number and route, paying cash to the driver and getting all my change in coins, the loud music on the radio. Many things are quite different from my hometown too, of course, like the palm trees and the port and the sea.
I have scarcely read Neruda but I greatly admire Gabriel García Márquez and he greatly admired the poet. His Valparaíso house is one of the most beautiful homes I have been to. The wooden carousel horse in the living room is the perfect accompaniment to the circular shape of the floor. Of particular interest to me, given this journey I embarked upon, was a large map, “America,” created in 1698 by French geographer Nicolas de Fer. The map is in Neruda’s studio, on the fifth and top floor of his house, hanging on a wall across from the most magnificent view of the seaport and the mountain with its many colorful clifftop houses. It contains drawings of boats and sea monsters, as well as annotations on the margins from the Royal Academy of Science in Paris. The annotation on Chile talks about its people being “robust and cruel.” Genocide comes to mind again.
Neruda wrote, “El hombre que no juega perdió para siempre al niño que vivía en él y que le hará mucha falta” (“He who doesn’t play has forever lost the child that lived inside him, whom he will dearly miss”). This to me is related to Che and this idea of maturing and not wilting, and on this life path it is my intention to further connect with the child inside me. I am reminded of Maya Angelou, who tells us that we should be angry but we must not be bitter: “Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. It doesn’t do anything to the object of its displeasure. So use that anger. You write it. You paint it. You dance it. You march it. You vote it. You do everything about it. You talk it. Never stop talking it.” Perhaps the distinction between maturing and wilting, between play and no play, lays precisely in the abyss between anger and bitterness.
Valparaíso