Prior to my working visit to Argentina and Chile in October and November of 1994, my entire previous experience with Spanish-speaking countries consisted of an afternoon in Tijuana and one night at a camp site in Andorra. In full view of my near-total ignorance of this subject, however, I shall nonetheless make bold and issue, based upon my two weeks of diligent research, the following proclamation:
There are no Hispanic countries in Latin America.
You can find Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America, but they are no more Hispanic than the United States is Anglo-Saxon. Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua are essentially Aztec; Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia are thoroughly Inca; I’m told that Paraguay is not really even Spanish-speaking, in that one is more likely to hear Guaraní spoken than Spanish; and Guyana, French Guiane, Surinam, and Brazil not only speak other languages than Spanish, but exhibit a bizarre voodoo mix of cultures that deserves its own study.
That leaves two categories of nations: Venezuela, Colombia, and Panama, about which I confess to a complete absence of knowledge; and Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay.
Landing at Ezeiza airport outside of Buenos Aires, and knowing even less Spanish than I do Italian, I could perhaps have been forgiven for wondering if I had taken the wrong flight, and ended up in Florence or Venice by mistake. The women, and to a lesser extent also the men, dress as if they had just stepped off the vaporetto; one sees more Fiorucci than even Levi’s. The airport public-address announcer (and every such disembodied public voice in Argentina) employed an intonation that she might have learned from a Fellini film: Each phrase starts high, then dips low like a knuckleball, making her sound to an English-tuned ear as if she were complaining. The Italian theme continued throughout my stay (Buenos Aires has, for example, the best pizza outside of Chicago), and left me less than breathless with shock when I learned later that the ethnic makeup of Buenos Aires was about 50% Italian, 20% Irish, and then several other nationalities, lost among whom were the Spanish. Given that the Capital Federal makes up seven-tenths of the population of Argentina, this statistic identifies Argentina (and, to a slighly lesser extent, Chile and Uruguay) as a melting pot similar to North America, except that the common language happens to be Spanish instead of English.
Once in the center of Buenos Aires, however, the dominant illusion turns from Italian to French. The nicer parts of town look like Paris without the Seine, or rather what Paris would have looked like if they had let the wrecker ball have its way: a block of art nouveau buildings gashed by an oversized red and black plastic box with a bank’s name on it; a row of hideously mismatched Corbusier imitations redeemed by a single, thin nineteenth-century apartment building whose stone scrollwork has been magnificently restored. And the seedier sections of Buenos Aires resemble the twentieth arrondisement, complete with half-hearted plantings of hardy urban trees whose sole function seems to be to provide the local male population with a public place to pee.
About half the cars on the roads in Argentina are French (Peugeots and Renaults); Fiats and Fords come much further behind, and German and Japanese cars are uncommon. Again, this is a singularly Parisian configuration. If, however, the eyes and ears would place you in Europe, the nose knows better: To breathe deeply of the ambient diesel-colored atmosphere is to risk immediate emphezema, and puts the Capital Federal firmly in the company of Tehran and Taipei rather than Paris and Pisa. The chassis may be European, but the carburetor is decidedly third-world.
The Argentine economy, after decades of military mismanagement and its attendant inflation and international debt burden, appears suddenly, almost incongruously, healthy. The “new” Argentine peso (the result of the third major currency reorganization since 1978) is pegged to the U.S. dollar, and to everyone’s surprise, stays there. One consequence of this is the deterioration of public utilities and services such as road repairs, since the government no longer allows itself simply to print money for these purposes. Another consequence is that Buenos Aires is no longer a bargain tourist destination: Everything except food and some local manufactures is priced at European or North American levels (regardless of whether the quality of the merchandise or service warrants such pricing parity). And a third consequence is that everyone is happy with this situation. People once again place their savings in banks, and the banks once again lend the money to businesses on terms that are likely to remain stable for months instead of hours. Inflation has been whipped, unemployment is dropping, and a wind of prosperity is beginning to stir.
The immediate purpose of my trip was to attend a trade show with the prosaic name of Telecomunicaciones 94, and here we saw the cutting edge of the new economy: cellular telephone companies offering the state telephone monopoly its first taste of competition; network service providers advertising Internet connectivity (even though the present quality of the telephone infrastructure renders that thought somewhat humorous); large international corporations spending huge sums of money on pavilions that generated virtually no business during the show, simply because, with the Argentine economy apparently poised for substantial growth, it is imperative to be seen.
One area of Argentine life in which the Spanish (or at least Mediterranean) influence is strong is in the timing of dinner. Some restaurants do not bother to open until 10:00 PM, and do not post a closing time, lest they offend a certain clientele. Meat dishes (especially beef) tend to be excellent, and are always copious: A sixteen-ounce sirloin steak is considered a “small portion.” It is expected that you will take your time eating it, and that you will drink generous quantities of alcoholic refreshments while you are at it. Hotel staff are surprised, and sometimes concerned, when a guest turns in before midnight; 2:00 to 4:00 is typical. It is just as well that no one was expected at the trade show before 1:00 in the afternoon. The busiest time was generally between 8:00 and 9:00 PM.
But the real purpose of my trip was not to attend a trade show, and not even to sample the pleasures of Buenos Aires. The real purpose was to observe the total eclipse of the sun that occurred on Thursday morning, 3 November 1994, in a 150-km-wide band that stretched from northern Chile across Bolivia, Paraguay, and southern Brazil. All else was an elaborate pretext for an eclipse expedition.
Now, generally, one views an astronomical event of this magnitude with a telescope or binoculars, or at least a decent camera. So I packed my large binoculars and camera equipment into a carry-on bag and took it on my flight from Texas to Argentina. Have you ever heard of an airline losing carry-on luggage? Of course not. It’s always right above your head. It’s the safest way to travel with valuable equipment. So it was something of a wonder when my binoculars and camera wound up in Seattle, while I was crossing the equator heading south.
American Airlines flight 901 is a direct all-night passage from Dallas-Fort Worth to Buenos Aires, making a single one-hour stop in Miami on the way. I had expected to be able to sleep during most of the trip, but was awakened in Miami by a stewardess telling me that we had to get off the plane (an MD-11) so that they could “clean it.” When we were finally allowed to reboard three hours later, it turned out that it wasn’t the same MD-11 at all, and that the original one had returned to Dallas with mechanical trouble, and also with several passengers’ carry-on luggage, including mine. How my bag got from Dallas to Seattle is still one of heaven’s unrevealed mysteries, but when American Airlines offered to fly it from Seattle to Buenos Aires as checked baggage, I had visions of my lovely Steiner binoculars, protected only by a cloth carry-on bag, trying to hold their turf against the monstrous metal trunks that returning Argentines typically load onto southbound flights.
Thus it was that I prepared to depart Buenos Aires for northern Chile equipped with nothing more than one of these disposable twelve-shot cameras that Kodak was just introducing to the Latin American market under the name of “Fiesta 35.” My travel plans called for a bus trip from Buenos Aires over the Andes to Santiago, a day in Santiago, and then another bus north across the Atacama Desert to the town of Arica, which was in the path of totality. The trip would take a total of forty-eight hours.
Long-distance buses in Argentina and Chile are remarkably comfortable vehicles. The seats resemble those of first-class sections in airlines, folding back almost horizontally; some even have leg rests. All buses are equipped with toilets that actually work, and are often even kept clean. There are always two attendants on duty, and the bus takes on an air of community shortly after departure. The price of a long-distance ticket includes all meals, which are provided either airline-style on trays, or by stopping at designated restaurants along the route. The fare also includes a seemingly limitless supply of videos, most of which are obviously pirated copies of American movies dubbed or subtitled in Spanish. You can see a lot of videos in forty-eight hours.
We struck out at night over the vast, flat, fertile Argentine Pampas and arrived at the foothills in the early morning. The ride over the Andes was a disappointment because of the drizzly weather, although the view from the border crossing was graced with the occasional ghost of sunshine. We arrived in Santiago shortly before noon, with the rest of the day to kill before the northbound bus to Arica.
I had expected to like Santiago: I’d expected a sort of Buenos Aires blessed by a Californian climate. In fact, the city looks like a third-world Melbourne, with its compact, utilitarian central district and dull-looking residential neighbourhoods cut by broad avenues. I had expected an urban vitality and an economic vibrancy at least the equal of Argentina, since Chile has been on the road of economic reform for longer than Argentina has. What I found was a quiet, circumspect populace whose standard of living was evidently lower than that of their Argentine neighbors. The beggars and loud taxi hawkers in the Santiago bus terminal provided immediate testimony to the different social climate here. The army is still omnipresent, despite nearly four years of democratic rule, and the palpable hush in their proximity bears witness as to who is really in charge in Chile.
Chile is not quite the multinational melting pot that Argentina is, but its first president was named Bernardo O’Higgins; my hotel in Arica stood on Avenida Patricio Lynch; the northern coastal towns were settled by Basque immigrant fishermen; and one way to distinguish between the wealthy land-owning class and the peasantry is by the English and French surnames of the former, and the German and Slavic surnames of the latter.
The central valley of Chile, in which Santiago and Valparaiso are nestled, is lush and fertile, but just an hour by road north of the capital, the land is dry and scruffy; and above the town of Copiapó, rainfall ceases almost completely. The coastal desert known as the Atacama stretches for nearly two thousand kilometers from Copiapó northward through Chile, Peru, and Ecuador. There are parts of the Atacama where no moisture has ever been recorded, and which have never been known to support any form of life. It never rains in Arica, roughly in the middle of the Atacama, but in the middle of this century the town supported a thriving industrial economy based on mining and manufacturing. Most of the factories were taken over for army barracks during the 1970s, and for this reason it is difficult to find local admirers of the Pinochet regime, even among the better-off Aricans, who must have loathed Salvador Allende. (Those Chileans for whom Pinochet represents a noumenal embodiment of evil seem to recognize a taboo on his name, and refer to him instead as “Pinocchio.”) The town has been trying to replace its expropriated industrial base with tourism (it has some lovely beaches), and for this endeavor, the eclipse was a godsend.
Although Arica is absolutely dry, and attracted thousands of eclipse fanatics on the promise of clear skies, clouds do occasionally roll in from the cool currents of the Pacific and stack up against the Altiplano, just inland from Arica. There is even a scrawny cactus-like plant that grows in the mountains and depends on these fogs for its moisture. My first morning in Arica (Tuesday, two days before the eclipse) dawned overcast, and the sun burned its way through only after ten o’clock – an unacceptable performance, given that the eclipse was to occur at 9:18 AM. There were a dozen or so tour operators in town who were organising minibus expeditions into the Altiplano, above the cloud level; Tuesday morning’s weather assured them of a booming business. I found a train that was running a special excursion up to the town of Pampa Central, leaving Arica at 5:00 AM on eclipse day, and I signed up.
Wednesday morning was cloudy as well, and on Thursday, as my train pulled out of the station (less than an hour behind schedule, remarkably enough), a dull dawn promised more of the same weather. The diesel train, which normally makes only one weekly eleven-hour run to La Paz, Bolivia, climbed slowly through the coastal mountain range, dipped into the shockingly green oasis town of Poconchile, then rose into the sharp peaks and long, high valleys of the Altiplano, whose craggy summits shredded the cloud cover and gave us great swatches of blue sky laced with wispy cirrus and threatened by the occasional bank of cumulus that slipped across the mountainous barrier. The train reached Pampa Central at about 8:00 and unleashed its three hundred eclipse watchers, who immediately set up their tripods and took out their mylar filters, every one of which turned and faced east, like so many silvery sunflowers.
I watched through my own filter as the moon, at 8:14 AM, took its first nibble from the top of the sun’s disc. Earth and sky grew darker as the moon advanced across her foe; the cirrus clouds seemed to condense in confusion and vanish, but the great bands of cumulus were emboldened by the sudden chill in the air, and a block of them began to advance from the west. For a while, there was some doubt as to whether we would actually see the total eclipse, but as the moon extinguished the last crescent of the sun, the clouds appeared to hold back in horror, and our expedition was saved.
There are particular phenomena for which the averted eclipse observer watches at the beginning and end of totality: “Bailey’s Beads” (pieces of the sun sparkling through the valleys of a lunar mountain range); the diamond-ring effect (a single Bailey’s Bead that will sometimes glow for several seconds after the rest of the sun is gone); solar prominences (great serpent-tongued loops of orange flame that leap out beyond the dark disc of the moon); shadow bands (diffracted patterns of light and dark that sweep at terrifying speed across the earth’s surface along the edges of the moon’s shadow). For us, the onset of totality produced none of these. The dying crescent at the bottom of the sun shrank to a mere arc, then to a thin, red, resigned-looking smile; and simply went out, leaving a stark black disk surrounded by a stunning bright silvery V-shaped corona, three or four times the diameter of the sun itself. This was set against a purple sky and surrounded by spectral clouds that seemed not to dare to move. Venus, Jupiter, and a few bright stars were visible. Since we were only two hours past sunrise, the moon’s shadow was elongated in an east-west direction on the earth’s surface, so that the mountains and clouds to the north and south of us were still lit by the sun in an eerie double dawn.
Curiously, the railroad crew chose the moment of totality to begin a series of shunting manoeuvres. A rickety old locomotive was passing me just as the corona came into view, and the crowd oohed and aahed. The train engineer just looked at me and shrugged his shoulders, as if to say, “Stupid tourists – we get these things all the time!”
Totality lasted one minute and fifty seconds. As we watched the top rim of the black disk, we saw it redden, then brighten to a fiery orange (but again, no prominences were visible). Then, with a startling suddenness, the sun pierced some lunar valley and produced a spectacular “diamond ring” – and the crowd cheered, as they must have cheered in millenia past, when their life-giving god overcame the shadow of death. The “diamond” spread into an arc, and daylight returned to Pampa Central.
There comes a point in every voyage where the purpose seems fulfilled, the summit attained, and the rest is an easy downhill ride; the stretched rubber band wins its tug-of-war and starts to pull its wanderer home to sleep. As sunlight reclaimed the Altiplano, I felt the pull begin: by train back across the high plains, through Poconchile, and down to the coast; by bus that evening back through the Atacama (where, during a night stop, the sky presented me with one last spectacular look at the southern constellations), to Santiago; then across the Andes, magnificent this time in crystal-clear morning light, to the charming town of Mendoza, Argentina; once again across the Argentine Pampas to Buenos Aires, Ezeiza airport, Miami, Dallas, and Austin, to a bed awaiting not one wanderer, but two.
Buenos Aires, 9 November 1994
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Copyright © 1994 T. Mark James