I went out into the high county east of the town the first day and came back almost empty-handed. Obviously I am not a person who finds deserts depressing, but this one weighed on my spirits as no other had ever done. It was stark and drab, just bare rock and sand in dull tones of brown and yellow, and dry beyond belief. The desiccated ground was virtually lifeless, no shrubs, no cacti, not even the tiny ground-hugging plants you find in nearly any desert—nothing. Nothing. I could have been on the moon.
I wandered for hours in emptiness, growing more discouraged as the day waned. Even though the desert gained in beauty in late afternoon, when the sun no longer bleached all color from it and the bare ravines turned dark and mysteriously rich, I sank into a somber, self-pitying mood. It was a mistake to come here, I told myself. I should be up by Iquique, perhaps, or inland on the slopes of the Andes, where plant life is more abundant. But of course the whole point of this expedition was to explore this barren and virtually unknown coastal strip, which had not been properly studied by botanists since the pioneering work of Philippi almost a hundred years before.
The afternoon winds stirred up great black clouds of dust, which had the merit of providing me with a spectacular sunset as I trudged back to Pelpel. The rays of the late sun, filtering through the murk and haze, turned from brilliant yellow to a pale violet, and then through a stunningly complex series of ever deeper purples, until suddenly there was gray and then black. Just before it became dark I stumbled over what I thought was a rock, and for some reason looked back to discover that I had tripped on an isolated specimen of Copiapoa cinerea, growing, God alone knew why, just a couple of kilometers from town. It was the only plant of interest I had seen in the past six or seven hours. I collected it and went hurrying on into Pelpel as night fell.
Dinner was waiting for me at the hotel—everything out of cans, a watery vegetable soup and some kind of meat stew, washed down by thin, bitter red wine. I ate by myself, served in silence by the Indian woman who seemed to be the hotel’s only employee. From across the plaza came the raucous sound of music out of the Greek’s loudspeaker.
When I was done eating I walked outside and stood in front of the hotel a long while, watching the townsfolk promenade. Mostly they ignored me. Those that did stare at me stared without amiability and essentially without curiosity. I shrugged and went to my room, but that made things even worse—the bare walls, the fissure in the plaster, the single dim light bulb, the sound of the dry, ugly wind. The idea of trying to work or study or even to relax in such a room until it was time to sleep was a dismal one. And so, although I’m not what anyone would call a drinking man, I found myself going across the plaza to the beer parlor, simply to have some sort of human contact and a bit of cheer on this cheerless evening in this cheerless town.
Some two dozen men were in the place, mostly gathered around the pool table, a few slouched at the warped and discolored bar. The look I got from them as I appeared in the doorway was so frigid that I nearly turned and fled. But then Panagiotis boomed out, “Hello, Norteamericano! You come in! You have drink with us!” It was impossible to refuse.
The Greek was a big thick-set man of about fifty, with gleaming buck teeth and a broad, conspicuous nose. His black hair was all but gone, combed across his skull in sparse strands between which a freckled and deeply tanned scalp showed through. He spoke a little English and understood my Spanish, and we were able to communicate. First he tapped the bottles around him on the bar—Peruvian pisco, and various local brandies and rums, and some kind of “Scotch” that was labeled Hecho in Mexico—but I shook them off, not wanting anything so strong after having had wine with dinner, and said, “Hay cerveza?” Panagiotis laughed and groped under the bar and came up with a dusty bottle of tepid beer. Getting it down was a challenge, and after that I drank pisco.
He introduced me to the other men at the bar. The very tall, almost skeletal one with the sunken burning eyes and the knifelike cheekbones was his brother-in-law, Ramón Sotomayor. The fat one beyond him was Aguirre, the lawyer, and the one with faded red hair was Nuñez de Prado, the doctor, and that was Mendoza, the pharmacist, and so on. Each, when his name was mentioned, gave me a glum, surly glare and a brief reluctant nod of salutation, and that was all.
And then Panagiotis—who, like everyone else, knew from the moment of my arrival that I was here to collect plants—asked me what I was looking for. Cactus, I said, curving my fingers to pantomime their shapes. I had been out all day, I told him, but I had had mala suerte, bad luck, I had found nada.
Panagiotis listened sympathetically. He conferred with Mendoza and Aguirre in Spanish that was too fast and idiomatic for me to understand, and then began drawing crude maps on bar napkins, accompanying his diagrams with a running commentary in broken English and a kind of pidgin Spanish. The maps were impossible to understand. I smiled and held up a hand and ran back to the hotel—a little tipsily—and got my own set of charts, and we spread them out on the bar. The others muttered and grumbled as though Panagiotis were giving me the location of secret gold mines, but he paid no attention to them and marked for me the places where I thought I would find what I was after. Then he slapped me on the back and filled my glass for the third or fourth time. He would take no payment. Eventually I got back to my room, head spinning, and not even the strident sounds of the loudspeaker music kept me awake for long.
The next day I started at dawn, going as far as I could in my battered jeep, covering the last few kilometers on foot. The Greek had guided me toward the rough ravines of the Quebrada Pelpel, ten kilometers east of town, where I already knew Philippi had collected in 1854. Sure enough, I found dense stands of Copiapoa cinerea there. That night I thanked Panagiotis warmly, and he filled me full of pisco until I begged him to stop and turned my glass bottom-side up.
And over the days that followed I went south across that silent ghostly desert into the Sierra Esmeralda, and north along the coastal road to Sabroso, the next town up, and inland along the low plateaus, and I found cinerea in a wide range of forms. In the hills above Sabroso I discovered the practically unknown Copiapoa humilis, a small plant with roots like turnips, last seen by Philippi in 1860. It’s a difficult plant to find, because its dark color is much like that of the surrounding soil. After looking in vain for it for hours, I discovered that I had sat right down on one clump of it—fortunately the spines are not very threatening—and thereafter I found plenty of them.
In this time I grew no closer to the people of Pelpel. The only one who as much as spoke to me was Panagiotis, and our conversations were limited by language barriers to the simplest themes. To the others I remained a total alien, unwanted, intrusive, resented. Their blank-eyed disdain was harder for me to take than solitude itself. I felt more comfortable by myself in the midst of a desert all but devoid of life than I did in that town. There was no reason for the locals to love me—they are a strange people, confined by the nature of their country to a narrow and rigid existence in their little oasis—but there wasn’t any need for them to treat me as if I had come to steal from them or spy on them. Unless, possibly, they suspected me of secretly being an anthropologist trying to pry into their private ways, for I knew that in these coastal towns some odd customs had evolved out of the mixing of Indian and Spanish blood—a religion in which primitive native rites had been somehow hybridized into the Christian worship—and no doubt they wanted no investigation of that. But I think I never gave them cause to suspect I was anything other than what I said I was.
One afternoon I returned to town after a particularly trying and exhausting field trip and, barely touching the pathetic dinner the Indian woman set out for me, I went to my room and fell into a deep sleep. A few hours later—it was still early evening—I was awakened by the sound of the Greek’s loudspeaker. Booming through the plaza, blurred and distorted by echoes and feedback and the crudity of the equipment, was a man’s voice, speaking excitedly and rapidly, delivering what sounded like a news broadcast or, more likely, th
e commentary on some big sporting event.
Puzzled, I peered out my window. A grand commotion was going on in the plaza. Half the population of Pelpel seemed to be out there, not just those who made the spooky, silent nightly promenades around the plaza’s edge. Hundreds of people were gathered, in groups of ten or a dozen or so, listening intently to the broadcast, occasionally cheering, shaking their heads, pointing at the loudspeaker as if arguing with it. I saw money changing hands, too—men taking crumpled wads of hundred-peso notes from their shirts and giving them to others. Every few minutes some loud outcry from the radio brought new cheers and groans from the crowd, and more bills went fluttering back and forth.
I went outside, hoping to find out what was going on. Usually when I appeared all activity halted, and the townsfolk gave me looks of dark, glowering anger, as though I were death at the feast. I was a little hesitant to leave the hotel now, not wanting to sour their festivity. But to my surprise they seemed, for the first time, glad to see me. Some of them waved, some of them grinned, some of them tossed their hats in the air. “Norteamericano!” they cried. “Hola, Norteamericano! Viva! Viva!”
What was all that about? They surrounded me, coming up close, peering right into my face and winking, slapping me on the back like old friends. The change of attitude was absolute and dramatic. And also a little frightening. I’ve studied some anthropology. I began to wonder whether I had been chosen for the starring role in some grim municipal ritual that was to be the peak of this mystifying event. I glanced around for the Greek, looking for explanations, but he was nowhere in sight, and the crowd was too thick for me to get across the plaza to his cantina.
Amid all the chaos I stood still and listened, desperately trying to make sense out of the broadcast. And gradually I began to understand a little of it. The announcer was naming local towns—Santa Catalina, Casabindo, San Antonio, Placilla—which I recognized as dusty little way-stations along the inland roads. And he was calling off names—Godoy, de la Gasca, Lezaeta, Alejandro. I gathered that some sort of automobile race was going on out there. In the harsh and forbidding wastelands of the Atacama Desert, under a black moonless sky, men were roaring across the pitted and parched terrain in motorcars, and here in Pelpel frantic wagering was going on, over the ultimate outcome, and, so it seemed, over the separate stages of the race.
As I listened with growing comprehension, I realized that one of the drivers was an American. “El Norteamericano,” the announcer kept saying, was doing very well. El Norteamericano was showing great skill. El Norteamericano was demonstrating true virtuosity on the dangerous track. And every time the announcer mentioned this unknown countryman of mine, the townspeople around me grinned and cheered and waved at me, and made V-for-Victory signs, as if they were rooting for him as a way of making amends for their coldness toward me. They pointed and shouted something at me again and again, which at first I was unable to understand, until I picked up the verb vencer, drifting to me like a word out of a vivid dream, and realized that they were telling me, “You will win!”
Me?
So frenzied and feverish was the scene that only slowly did I start to consider the baffling, inexplicable, downright impossible aspects of what I was hearing.
The road they were racing on was the same one that I had driven so many times in the past ten or twelve days—a miserable, hopeless washboard track that ran along the coast from Pelpel to Sabroso, then curved inland, practically disappearing into the dust and rocky subsoil, and hooked up briefly with the Pan American Highway. That road was a killer even for jeeps. What kind of supernatural shocks and springs did the racing cars have? How could the drivers possibly be moving at the speeds the announcer was talking about? Just to get from Placilla to San Antonio was a harrowing half-day project, with pebbles clanging against your oil-pan every foot of the way. It was absurd to think of that narrow scratchy dirt-on-dirt track as a racecourse.
Another little mystery was how the announcer was getting his information. In rapid-fire narrative he was giving continuous reports on at least a dozen drivers spread out between Sabroso and Pelpel. I suppose that could have been done by posting him in a helicopter above the scene, but this was thirty years ago, remember, when helicopters were still rare, especially in out-of-the-way corners of Chile. Perhaps observers stationed along the course were phoning in a steady flow of news that the announcer was deftly weaving together to create his running account, but there weren’t even any telephones in the town, let alone out there in the open wastelands. Radio communication? Perhaps. Smoke signals, for all I knew, or a semaphore relay? One guess was as good as another. The whole thing didn’t make sense.
It was just as hard to figure out where the broadcast was coming from. Radio stations simply didn’t exist in these parts. The music that Panagiotis played through his loudspeaker every night came from ancient phonograph records. There were radio stations in the south, down by Valparaiso and Santiago, hundreds of miles away, but their signals didn’t get up here. The nearest northern station was probably even further, in Lima, but the curve of the continent put the wall of the Andes between us and it. Short wave, then? Well, maybe. Or maybe some fluky transmission out of the Valparaiso station, although it was hard to see why they would want to devote hours of valuable air time to an obscure automobile race in a sleepy pocket of the desert.
When I looked toward the northern side of the plaza, where the road from Placilla came in, I saw the biggest puzzle of all. A length of sturdy twine, gaudily bedecked with red and green and yellow streamers, had been strung across the road to mark what was obviously the finish line. Boys were stationed on either side of the street with Chilean flags atop long poles, no doubt to wave in the victor’s face as he came thundering down the home stretch.
How, though, could they expect to conclude the long race right in the middle of Pelpel? A mere fifty or sixty feet behind the finish line was the high brick wall of the church. Did anyone seriously think that a car speeding through the line was going to be able to brake in time to avoid hitting that wall? I thought I must be mistaken, that this was no finish line but merely some kind of ceremonial halting point to which the winner would coast after passing the true finish line somewhere outside of town. But no, this certainly was decked out the way the terminus of a motor race ought to be decked out, and the townspeople were carefully keeping the road in front of it clear, as if they expected cars to go zooming into the plaza at any instant. And some of them were staring expectantly into the blackness of the night beyond the floodlit plaza, trying to make out the headlights of the finishers as they approached the end of the race.
Mystery on mystery. Bewildering, dreamlike, almost hallucinatory—I could make no sense out of any of it. This alien ritual left me feeling more thoroughly alone and out of place in Pelpel than ever before.
And yet, in the giddy and tense carnival atmosphere of the moment, nearly everyone was cheerful and friendly. They clustered around me, offering me drinks, cigarettes, rough macho handshakes, splay-toothed grins, winks, nudges. Through the air came the cracking boom of the loudspeaker, the voice furry and distorted, calling out the twists and surprises of the race. It was all but impossible for me to comprehend. Was that Alejandro in the lead, now? Or the Norteamericano? Was he saying that Lezaeta’s car had gone spinning off the track passing the quebrada? And had someone else overturned just outside Sabroso?
It was dreamlike, yes, eerie, confusing—little blips and fragments of information, alternating with static, cheering, shouting, and torrents of the bewildering local dialect. The crowd was wholly caught up in it, following each event of the race with wild excitement. They seemed to be making bets constantly—not just on the ultimate winner, so far as I could tell, but on who would be in the lead at certain key points along the course, and even on who would get through the race without a spinout or a stall—and the hundred-peso notes were going swiftly from hand to hand. Whenever the Norteamericano racer was mentioned, the cheering grew more intense and the
people surrounding me laughed and clapped as if to tell me that they liked me more because my valiant countryman was performing so well. I wondered who this American racer might be, and what he was doing in these parts, and whether he would make it safely to Pelpel that evening. It had been too many weeks since I had had a coherent conversation with someone whose language I understood.
The race appeared to be reaching its climax now.
Sotomayor, the Greek’s brother-in-law, came swaggering up out of the chaos. He loomed ominously over me, at least a foot taller than I am, though I doubt he weighed a hundred forty pounds—a knifeblade of a man, matador-thin, cold, unfathomable. He glowered at me and said icily, “You will not win.”
I had no idea what to say.
“You will lose,” he said, as though he felt he needed to clarify his first statement.
I shrugged. He was drunk and wobbling, and I was so captivated by the sudden and unexpected friendliness of everyone else around me that I resented having Sotomayor spoil the mood of cordiality. Something possessed me and I tugged my wallet out of my pocket. In a reckless way—on this expedition I had no funds to waste—I pulled out five hundred-peso notes. The Chilean peso was then worth something like three cents, so a hundred pesos was no great fortune, but I could hardly stand to lose even the fifteen dollars that the five bills represented. Nevertheless I glared up at Sotomayor and said, “On the Norteamericano to win. Cinco cientos.”