*Mapuches are an indigenous people of Chile.
POLIZONES
stowaways
We passed through customs without any difficulties and bravely headed toward our target. The chosen boat, the San Antonio, was at the center of the port’s feverish activity. Because of its small size it didn’t have to come right up alongside for the cranes to reach it and there was a gap of several meters between it and the docks. We had no choice but to wait until the boat moved closer before boarding, and so, philosophically, we sat down on our bags to wait for the propitious moment. With the midnight change of shift the boat was brought alongside, but the harbormaster, a nasty character whose face disclosed his ill temper, stood squarely on the gangplank checking the arriving and departing workers. The crane driver, who in the meantime we had befriended, advised us to wait for a better moment because, he said, the master was a hostile bastard. So we began a long wait which lasted the whole night, warming ourselves in the crane, an ancient contraption that ran on steam. The sun rose to see us still waiting on the dock with our bags. Our hopes of boarding by stealth had almost completely dissipated when the captain turned up with a new, restored gangplank, and with it the San Antonio was now in permanent contact with dry land. Well-instructed by the crane driver, we slipped on board easily, making ourselves at home, and locked ourselves and our bags in the bathroom of the officers’ quarters. From then on, all we had to do was say in a nasal little voice “excuse me, can’t come in” or “it’s occupied,” on the half dozen or so times someone tried to open the door.
Twelve p.m. came fast and the boat sailed, but our joy was fast disappearing because the toilet, apparently blocked for some time, gave off an insufferable smell and the heat was intense. By 1 p.m., Alberto had vomited up everything that had been in his stomach, and by 5 p.m., dying of hunger and with the coast long out of sight, we presented ourselves to the captain as stowaways. He was surprised to see us again and in these particular circumstances, but to conceal his surprise in front of the other officers, he winked at us flamboyantly while asking in a thundering voice: “Do you two seriously believe that to go traveling the only thing you have to do is hide away in the first boat you find? Have you not thought through the consequences of doing exactly that?”
The truth is we hadn’t thought through a thing.
He called the steward and charged him to give us work and something to eat. We devoured our rations contentedly, but when I learned that I would have to clean the famous toilet, the food caught in my throat. As I went below, swearing behind closed lips and followed by Alberto’s amused glance, who was assigned to peel potatoes, I confess I felt tempted to forget everything ever written about the rules of friendship and request a change of jobs. There is no justice! He adds a good portion to the accumulated filth and I clean it up!
After conscientiously completing our work, the captain summoned us again. He recommended that we say nothing about our previous meeting and that he would ensure nothing happened when we arrived in Antofagasta, the ship’s destination. He let us sleep in the cabin of an officer on leave, and that night invited us to play canasta and have a drink or two. After a rejuvenating sleep we got up, participating with full consent in the phrase, “New brooms sweep cleanly.” We set to work with great diligence, determined to earn the price of our passage, with interest. By midday, however, we felt we were overdoing it and by the afternoon we became firmly convinced we were the purest pair of bums around. We thought we should get a good sleep, ready for work the next day, not to mention washing our dirty clothes, but the captain again invited us to play cards and that killed our good intentions.
It took the steward, sufficiently unfriendly, approximately one hour to get us up to begin working. My job was to clean the decks with kerosene, a task I worked at all day and still didn’t finish. Alberto’s string-pulling found him back in the kitchen, eating better food and more of it, not being too discriminating about what he was pouring into his stomach.
At night, after the exhausting games of canasta, we would look out over the immense sea, full of white-flecked and green reflections, the two of us leaning side by side on the railing, each of us far away, flying in his own aircraft to the stratospheric regions of his own dreams. There we understood that our vocation, our true vocation, was to move for eternity along the roads and seas of the world. Always curious, looking into everything that came before our eyes, sniffing out each corner but only ever faintly — not setting down roots in any land or staying long enough to see the substratum of things; the outer limits would suffice. As all the sentimental themes the sea inspires passed through our conversation, the lights of Antofagasta began to shine in the distance, to the northeast. It was the end of our adventure as stowaways, or at least the end of this adventure now that our boat was returning to Valparaíso.
ESTA VEZ, FRACASO
this time, disaster
I can see him now clearly, the drunk 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 it 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’s 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.* 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 fro
m 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, comrades, 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 Ibáñez 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’s 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.
*The Chilean Communist Party was banned and many members persecuted under the so-called Law for the Defense of Democracy (1948–58).
*Carlos Ibáñez del Campo was Chilean President from 1952 to 1958. He was a populist, who promised to legalize the Communist Party if elected.
CHUQUICAMATA
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 true 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 3,000 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 hands) 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.
KILOMETRAJE ÁRIDO
arid land for miles and miles
Now that we’d lost our water bottle, the problem of crossing the desert by foot became even worse. Still, without apprehension we set off, leaving behind the barrier marking the limits of the town of Chuquicamata. Our pace was incredibly athletic while within sight of the town’s inhabitants, but later the vast solitude of the bare Andes, the sun that fell harshly across our necks and the badly distributed weight of our backpacks brought us back to reality. Until what point our actions were “heroic,” as one policeman put it, we’re not sure, but we began to suspect, I think with good reason, that the definitive adjective was approximating something more like “stupid.”
After two hours’ walking, 10 kilometers at the most, we planted ourselves down in the shade of a sign saying I’ve no idea what, the only thing capable of offering us the slightest shelter from the rays of the sun. And there we stayed all day, shifting around to get the post’s shade in our eyes at least.
We rapidly consumed the liter of water we had brought with us and by late afternoon, with gargantuan thirst, we set off back toward the sentry post at the town’s limits, totally defeated.
We spent the night there, seeking refuge inside the little room, where a bright fire maintained t
he pleasant temperature despite the cold outside. The nightwatchman, with proverbial Chilean hospitality, shared his food with us, a pathetic feast after a whole day of fasting, but better than nothing.
At dawn the next day the truck of a cigarette company passed and took us closer to our destination; but while continuing directly on to the port of Tocopilla, we were thinking of heading north to Ilave, so it dropped us where the roads crossed. We started walking enthusiastically toward a house we knew was eight kilometers up the road, but only halfway there we became tired and resolved to have a little nap. We hung one of our blankets between a telegraph post and a distance marker and got under it — a Turkish bath for our bodies and a sunbath for our feet.
Two or three hours later, when we’d lost about three liters of water each, a small Ford passed by containing three noble citizens, all roaring drunk and singing cuecas* at full blast. They were striking workers from the mine called Magdalena, celebrating the victory of the people’s cause a little prematurely by getting happily plastered. The drunks took us as far as a local railroad station. There we encountered a group of laborers practising for a football match with a rival team. Alberto took a pair of running shoes out of his backpack and started to sound off. The result was spectacular. We were signed up for the match on the following Sunday; in return: food, board and transport to Iquique.
Two days later Sunday arrived, marked by a splendid victory for our team and a barbecue of goat prepared by Alberto, astounding the assembled gathering with the art of Argentine cooking. Those two days we dedicated to visiting some of the many nitrate-purifying plants in that area of Chile.