In the doorway of La Gioconda we were waiting patiently for our compatriot to show up, who gave no sign of appearing, when the owner invited us in out of the sun and treated us to one of his magnificent lunches of fried fish and watery soup. We never heard from the Argentine again throughout our stay in Valparaíso, but we became great friends with the owner of the bar. He was a strange sort of guy, indolent and enormously generous to all the riff raff who turned up, though he made normal customers pay colossal prices for the paltry cuisine he sold in his place. We didn’t pay a cent the whole time we were there and he lavished hospitality on us. “Today it’s your turn, tomorrow it’ll be mine” was his favorite saying; not very original but very effective.
We tried to contact the doctors from Petrohué, but being back at work with no time to spare, they never agreed to meet us formally. At least we knew more or less where they were. In the afternoon we went our separate ways: while Alberto followed up the doctors, I went to see an old woman with asthma, a customer at La Gioconda. The poor thing was in a pitiful state, breathing the acrid smell of concentrated sweat and dirty feet that filled her room, mixed with the dust from a couple of armchairs, the only luxury items in her house. On top of her asthma, she had a heart condition. It is at times like this, when a doctor is conscious of his complete powerlessness, that he longs for change: a change to prevent the injustice of a system in which only a month ago this poor woman was still earning her living as a waitress, wheezing and panting but facing life with dignity. In circumstances like this, individuals in poor families who can’t pay their way become surrounded by an atmosphere of barely disguised acrimony; they stop being father, mother, sister or brother and become a purely negative factor in the struggle for life and, consequently, a source of bitterness for the healthy members of the community who resent their illness as if it were a personal insult to those who have to support them. It is there, in the final moments, for people whose farthest horizon has always been tomorrow, that one comprehends the profound tragedy circumscribing the life of the proletariat the world over. In those dying eyes there is a submissive appeal for forgiveness and also, often, a desperate plea for consolation which is lost to the void, just as their body will soon be lost in the magnitude of mystery surrounding us. How long this present order, based on an absurd idea of caste, will last is not within my means to answer, but it’s time that those who govern spent less time publicizing their own virtues and more money, much more money, funding socially useful works.
There isn’t much I can do for the sick woman. I simply advise her to improve her diet and prescribe a diuretic and some asthma pills. I have a few Dramamine tablets left and I give them to her. When I leave, I am followed by the fawning words of the old woman and the family’s indifferent gaze…
Alberto had tracked down the doctors. At nine the following morning we had to be at the hospital. Meanwhile, in La Gioconda’s filthy room which serves as kitchen, restaurant, laundry, dining room and piss-house for cats and dogs, a miscellaneous collection of people were meeting: the owner, with his basic life philosophy; Doña Carolina, a deaf and helpful old dear who left our mate kettle as good as new; a drunk, feeble-minded Mapuche [indigenous] man who looked like a criminal; two more or less normal customers; and the queen of the gathering Doña Rosita, who was quite crazy. The conversation focused on a macabre event Rosita had witnessed; it appeared she alone had seen a man with a large knife stabbing her poor neighbor.
“Was your neighbor screaming, Doña Rosita?”
“Of course she was screaming, who wouldn’t! He was skinning her alive! That’s not all. Afterwards, he took her down to the sea and dragged her to the water’s edge so the sea would take her away. Oh, to hear that woman scream, señor, scared the living daylight out of me, you should have seen it!”
“Why didn’t you tell the police, Rosita?”
“Oh, what for? Don’t you remember when your cousin was beat up? Well, I went to report it and they told me I was crazy, that if I didn’t stop inventing things they’d lock me up, imagine that. No, I wouldn’t tell that lot anything!”
The conversation turned to the “messenger from God,” a local man who uses the powers God has given him to cure deafness, dumbness, paralysis, etc., passing the collection plate around afterwards. The business seems no worse than any other, and though the pamphlets are extraordinary, so is people’s gullibility. But that is how it is, and they continued to make fun of the things Doña Rosita saw with all the conviction in the world.
The reception from the doctors was not over-friendly, but we gained our objective: they gave us an introduction to Molinas Luco, mayor of Valparaíso. We took our leave with all the required formality and went to the town hall. Our dazed and exhausted expressions didn’t impact favorably on the man at the desk, but he had received orders to let us in.
The secretary showed us a copy of a letter written in response to ours, explaining that our project was impossible since the only ship to Easter Island had left and that there wouldn’t be another ship leaving within the year. We were ushered into the sumptuous office of Dr. Molinas Luco, who received us amicably. He gave the impression, however, of acting out a scene in a play, taking a lot of care to pronounce each word perfectly. He became enthusiastic only when talking about Easter Island, which he had wrested from the English by proving it belonged to Chile. He recommended we keep up with events and said he would take us the following year. “I may not be in this office, but I am still president of the Friends of Easter Island Society,” he said, a tacit confession of González Videla’s impending electoral defeat. As we left, the man at the desk told us to take our dog with us, and to our amazement showed us a puppy that had done its business on the lobby carpet and was gnawing at a chair leg. The dog had probably followed us, attracted by our hobo appearance, and the doorman imagined it was just another accessory of our eccentric attire. Anyway, the poor animal, robbed of the bond linking him to us, got a good kick up the ass and was thrown out howling. Still, it was always consoling to know that some living thing’s well-being depended on our protection.
By this time we were determined that traveling by sea we could avoid the desert in northern Chile, and we fronted up to the shipping companies requesting free passage to any of the northern ports. The captain at one of them promised to take us if we could arrange permission from the maritime authorities to work for our passage. The reply, of course, was negative and we found ourselves back at square one. In that split second, Alberto made a heroic decision, which went something like this: we would sneak on to the boat and hide away in the hold. For our best chance we would have to wait until nightfall, try to persuade the sailor on duty and see what would happen. We collected our things, evidently far too many for this particular plan. With great regret we farewelled all our friends and afterwards crossed through the main gates of the port; burning our bridges, we set off on our maritime adventure.
This Time, Disaster
I can see him now clearly, the drunken captain, like all his officers and the owner of the vessel alongside with his great big mustache, their crude gestures the results of bad wine. And the wild laughter as they recounted our odyssey. “Hey listen, they’re tigers, they’re on your boat now for sure, you’ll find out when you’re out to sea.” The captain must have let slip to his friend and colleague this or some similar phrase.
We didn’t, of course, know any of this; an hour before sailing we were comfortably installed, totally buried in tons of perfumed melons, stuffing ourselves silly. We were talking about the sailors, who were the best, since with the complicity of one of them we had been able to get on board and hide ourselves away in such a secure spot. And then we heard an irate voice, and a seemingly enormous mustache emerged from who knows where and plunged us into an appalling confusion. A long line of melon skins, perfectly peeled, was floating away Indian file on the tranquil sea. The rest was ignominious. The sailor told us afterwards, “I’d have got him off the scent, boys, but he saw the melons and i
t seems he went into a ‘batten down the hatches, don’t let anyone escape’ routine. And well,” (he was fairly embarrassed) “you shouldn’t have eaten so many melons!”
One of our traveling companions from the San Antonio summed up his brilliant life philosophy with one fine phrase: “Stop arsing about you assholes. Why don’t you get off your asses and go back to your asshole country.” So that is more or less what we did; we picked up our bags and set off for Chuquicamata, the famous copper mine.
But not straight away. There was a pause of one day while we waited for permission from the mine’s authorities to visit and meanwhile we received an appropriate send-off from the enthusiastic Bacchanalian sailors.
Lying beneath the meager shade of two lampposts on the arid road leading to the mines, we spent a good part of the day yelling things at each other now and again from one post to another, until on the horizon appeared the asthmatic outline of the little truck which took us halfway, to a town called Baquedano.
There we made friends with a married couple, Chilean workers who were communists.2 By the light of the single candle illuminating us, drinking mate and eating a piece of bread and cheese, the man’s shrunken figure carried a mysterious, tragic air. In his simple, expressive language he recounted his three months in prison, and told us about his starving wife who stood by him with exemplary loyalty, his children left in the care of a kindly neighbor, his fruitless pilgrimage in search of work and his compañeros, mysteriously disappeared and said to be somewhere at the bottom of the sea.
The couple, numb with cold, huddling against each other in the desert night, were a living representation of the proletariat in any part of the world. They had not one single miserable blanket to cover themselves with, so we gave them one of ours and Alberto and I wrapped the other around us as best we could. It was one of the coldest times in my life, but also one which made me feel a little more brotherly toward this strange, for me at least, human species.
At eight the next morning we found a truck to take us to the town of Chuquicamata. We separated from the couple who were heading for the sulphur mines in the mountains where the climate is so bad and the living conditions so hard that you don’t need a work permit and nobody asks you what your politics are. The only thing that matters is the enthusiasm with which the workers set to ruining their health in search of a few meager crumbs that barely provide their subsistence.
Although the blurred silhouette of the couple was nearly lost in the distance separating us, we could still see the man’s singularly determined face and we remembered his straightforward invitation: “Come, compañeros, let’s eat together. I, too, am a tramp,” showing his underlying disdain for the parasitic nature he saw in our aimless traveling.
It’s a great pity that they repress people like this. Apart from whether collectivism, the “communist vermin,” is a danger to decent life, the communism gnawing at his entrails was no more than a natural longing for something better, a protest against persistent hunger transformed into a love for this strange doctrine, whose essence he could never grasp but whose translation, “bread for the poor,” was something which he understood and, more importantly, filled him with hope.
Once there, the bosses, the blond, efficient and arrogant managers, told us in primitive Spanish: “This isn’t a tourist town. I’ll find a guide to give you a half-hour tour around the mine’s installations and then do us a favor and leave us alone, we have a lot of work to do.” A strike was imminent. Yet the guide, faithful dog of the Yankee bosses, told us: “Imbecilic gringos, losing thousands of pesos every day in a strike so as not to give a poor worker a few more centavos. When my General Ibánez3 comes to power that’ll all be over.” And a foreman-poet: “These are the famous terraces that enable every inch of copper to be mined. Many people like you ask me technical questions but it is rare they ask how many lives it has cost. I can’t answer you, doctors, but thank you for asking.”
Cold efficiency and impotent resentment go hand in hand in the big mine, linked in spite of the hatred by the common necessity to live, on the one hand, and to speculate on the other… we will see whether one day, some miner will take up his pick in pleasure and go and poison his lungs with a conscious joy. They say that is what it’s like over there, where the red blaze that now lights up the world comes from. So they say. I don’t know.
Chuquicamata
Chuquicamata is like a scene from a modern drama. You cannot say that it’s lacking in beauty, but it is a beauty without grace, imposing and glacial. As you come close to any part of the mine, the whole landscape seems to concentrate, giving a feeling of suffocation across the plain. There is a moment when, after 200 kilometers, the lightly shaded green of the little town of Calama interrupts the monotonous gray and is greeted with the joy which an authentic oasis in the desert richly deserves. And what a desert! The weather observatory at Moctezuma, near “Chuqui,” describes it as the driest in the world. The mountains, where not a single blade of grass can grow in the nitrate soil, are defenseless against attacks of wind and water. They display their gray spine, prematurely aged in the battle with the elements, and their wrinkles that do not correspond to their real geological age. And how many of those mountains surrounding their famous brother enclose in their heavy entrails similar riches, as they wait for the soulless arms of the mechanical shovels to devour their insides, spiced as they would be with the inevitable human lives—the lives of the poor, unsung heroes of this battle, who die miserably in one of the thousand traps set by nature to defend its treasures, when all they want is to earn their daily bread.
Chuquicamata is essentially a great copper mountain with 20-meter-high terraces cut into its enormous sides, from where the extracted mineral is easily transported by rail. The unique formation of the vein means that extraction is entirely open cut, allowing large-scale exploitation of the ore body, which grades one percent copper per ton of ore. Every morning the mountain is dynamited and huge mechanical shovels load the material on to rail wagons that take it to the grinder to be crushed. This crushing occurs over three consecutive passes, turning the raw material into a medium-fine gravel. It is then put in a sulphuric acid solution which extracts the copper in the form of a sulphate, also forming a copper chloride, which becomes ferrous chloride when it comes into contact with old iron. From there the liquid is taken to the so-called “green house” where the copper sulphate solution is put into huge baths and for a week submitted to a current of 30 volts, bringing about the electrolysis of the salt: the copper sticks to the thin sheets of the same metal, which have previously been formed in other baths with stronger solutions. After five or six days, the sheets are ready for the smelter; the solution has lost eight to 10 grams of sulphate per liter and is enriched with new quantities of the ground material. The sheets are then placed in furnaces that, after 12 hours smelting at 2,000 degrees centigrade, produce 350-pound ingots. Every night 45 wagons in convoy take over 20 tons of copper each down to Antofagasta, the result of the day’s work.
This is a crude summary of the manufacturing process, which employs a floating population of 30,000 souls in Chuquicamata; but this process only extracts oxide ore. The Chile Exploration Company is building another plant to exploit the sulphate ore. This plant, the biggest of its kind in the world, has two 96-meter-high chimneys and will take over almost all future production, while the old plant will be slowly phased out since the oxide ore is about to run out. There is already an enormous stockpile of raw material to feed the new smelter and it will begin to be processed in 1954 when the plant is opened.
Chile produces 20 percent of the world’s copper, and in these uncertain times of potential conflict copper has become vitally important because it is an essential component of various types of weapons of destruction. Hence, an economic and political battle is being waged in Chile between a coalition of nationalist and left-wing groupings that advocate nationalizing the mines, and those who, in the cause of free enterprise, prefer a well-run mine (even in foreign h
ands) to possibly less efficient management by the state. Serious accusations have been made in Congress against the companies currently exploiting the concessions, symptomatic of the climate of nationalist aspiration surrounding copper production.
Whatever the outcome of the battle, one would do well not to forget the lesson taught by the graveyards of the mines, containing only a small share of the immense number of people devoured by cave-ins, silica and the hellish climate of the mountain.
Chile, A Vision from Afar
When I made these travel notes, hot and fresh with enthusiasm, I wrote some things that were perhaps a little flashy and somewhat removed from the intended spirit of scientific inquiry. And it’s probably not appropriate now, more than a year after writing them, to give my current opinions about Chile; I’d prefer to review what I wrote then.
Beginning with our area of expertise, medicine: the panorama of health care in Chile leaves a lot to be desired (although I realized later it was by far superior to that in other countries I got to know). Free, public hospitals are extremely rare and even in those, posters announcing the following appear: “Why do you complain about your treatment if you are not contributing to the maintenance of this hospital?” Generally speaking, medical attention in the north is free, but hospital accommodation has to be paid for, and prices range from petty sums to virtual monuments to legalized theft. Sick or injured workers at the Chuquicamata mine receive medical attention and hospital treatment for five Chilean escudos a day, but someone not working at the mine would pay between 300 and 500 escudos a day. Hospitals have no money and they lack medicine and adequate facilities. We have seen filthy operating rooms with pitiful lighting, not just in small towns but even in Valparaíso. There aren’t enough surgical instruments. The bathrooms are dirty. Awareness of hygiene is poor. It’s a Chilean custom (afterwards I saw it across practically all of South America) not to throw used toilet paper in the toilet but on to the floor or in the boxes provided.