Chile: Capítulo 1

I won't begin to assume anyone cares enough to know every detail of my time in Chile. To be honest, I don't care enough to write it all. But if anyone wants to live vicariously through me in a more moderate way (yes, I just used "me" and "moderate" in the same sentence), I'll drop a few lines from time to time to offer some highlights. I'll also toss in a few Spanish words and phrases here and there for authenticity.

Para comenzar [to begin with], after about 16 uneventful hours of planes and airports, I landed in Santiago to be collected by the family with whom I'm staying. When I didn't see my name on any placards (and after being accosted by a host of cabbies), one demure and avuncular taxi driver offered to let me use his cellphone to call Jaime, el padre de la familia. It seems there was traffic, so I waited in the café a bit longer until he arrived. I stopped by to thank the nice taximan one more time - oddly enough, this is almost exactly how my trip to Ireland last year began - and we walked to the car. Jaime paid for his parking, but lost the ticket walking to the car. After we looked for it for a while, he found it, only to lose it again on the drive to the exit, where he apologized and paid again. I could already tell this was going to be an interesting trip.

The family I'm staying with consists of three generations: Abuela, Jaime (her son), and his son Andree (her grandson). After helping me get settled in, they told me where I could find the nearest shop to buy toiletries. I walked down to the pharmacy to get the necessities, but for some reason I couldn't find facewash anywhere - apparently los chilenos get the job done with good old jabón [soap]. Later in the evening, Andree came to tell me he had to take his shoes to the shoe shop to be repaired and that I could come with him if I'd like, just to get a feel for the area. Of course I obliged him, and we walked a few blocks to a busy street called Irarrázabal. Say that five times fast. He asked me if I needed to change money over, so we did that. He also told me I should be very careful with my possessions, as there were often pickpockets about in that area. I didn't bother to tell him that he could have told me that before I left the house with over $1,200 in my wallet. So I'm a bad traveler. So what?

The next day (yesterday), Alberto and Maria Paz, a couple of law students who met and fell in love while working at the Supreme Court, came to show me around the city and teach me how to get around using Santiago's public transport system. Turns out Santiago (which would be the fourth-largest city in the U.S. behind Chicago, bumping Houston to fifth-largest) has the best public transit system I've ever seen, a system that makes Chicago's CTA look like a fleet of rickshaws. We went to the Universidad Alberto Hurtado, where I'll be working and studying this summer, and it's incredible! It looks something like a castillo [castle], with stone walls, heavy doors of madera [wood], but with ultra-modern architecture woven in on the inside. It's not a huge place, so it should be fairly navigable, and I don't think there's much danger that I'll get lost. One quick story though. As we were walking along the street in front of the university, I heard a ping-pong ball bounce on the street. I looked up and saw a boy standing three stories up, who called to us to throw his ball back. I crossed the cobblestone street, gave it a few tries, but eventually had to apologize and tell him that I'd leave it safely at the doorstep for him. I'd been in the country for less than 48 hours and I'd already crushed the hopes of an innocent child. We also passed a protest that was making its way through some of the more important and symbolic (and heavily populated) parts of downtown. Alberto explained to me that the government wants to build a hydroelectric plant, but that the plant would require a dam that would result in the flooding of several villages and surrounding farmlands. I guess I'd march, too, if I were them.

So we saw the city: the presidential palace, the halls of government, the cathedral, a few plazas, and eventually ended up in an amazing (and very seedy) neighborhood bar. Inside, I had a cold pork sandwich, a drink called chiche made from grapes, and the Chilean equivalent of Old Style or Lone Star. Alberto and Maria Paz drank the popular local favorite, oddly called El Terremoto or The Earthquake, which was a mixture of several alcoholic ingredients topped with a few scoops of pineapple sherbet. Very strange, but whatever, right? Oh, and did I mention I ate a cold pork sandwich? Right. We went to a museum (see photos) and saw a few more awesome parts of town - including an old, winding street full of cafés and bookstalls - ate a nice dinner where I tried another drink called a pisco sour, and made our way back home. I did some grocery shopping, then read part of a Graham Greene novel at a nearby café (which serves a drink that I did not try this time called "gin con gin").

Well, that's good enough for now. I went to Mass this morning at Santa Gema, which was not much to write about. But we'll see where the rest of today finds me. Hasta luego.

Pleats and Pleadings

As I prepare to leave for Chile tomorrow, two things dominate my thoughts. First, I have seen enough pleated pants today to last anyone a lifetime, which makes me hope that people in Chile have never heard of them or this could be a long six weeks. Second, I have no idea what to expect from my time there, which I think is a good thing. People who go in expecting the worst may always be pleasantly surprised, but they are insufferable to be around before the payoff. And everyone who saw Matthew McConaughey in Sahara knows that if you go into a thing with high expectations, you're virtually assured to leave disappointed. (Sidenote: Why isn't the opposite of "disappointed" just "appointed"?)

And while I can't do anything about people who see any sort of value at all in wearing pants with pleats, I can temper my expectations by keeping them somewhere in the middle ground between optimism and indifference. In doing so, I have two powerful allies: books and people. In books, the characters are often more alive than most real people. This is, I presume, because characters in books watch less TV than real people. So my plan is simple: read a book, then have a little human interaction. Book, human interaction. And so on until my six weeks are up. It's foolproof, really.

So I'll be doing my part, and you can, too. I'll be back in six weeks. That means you have about a month and a half to toss out any pleated pants you may currently own and exchange them for flat-front pants like the ones that people in the modern era wear. And while I won't get my hopes up too high, I would like to come back and be appointed.

Murray's Morning

Saxon Murray walked the jetty silently, almost reverently, edging along the jagged brace of boulders just as he did every morning about daybreak. He was an old man, contemplative, not weak. A retired life offers little cause for hurry, and Saxon chose slowness, slowness did not choose him. Within the violet light of the pre-dawn sky he recognized a heavy truth, a middle way that governed his life. The day offered little surprise, the night too much, and the dusk left him anxious. But at this hour, in this light, was all hope and life and rest. Reaching the end of the breakwater, he paused to take in the air, salty and ageless, as he removed the satchel he carried slung over his shoulder. Without looking, he removed the bottle, hefted it, empty and scrubbed bare. Except for a curled, scrawled scrap of paper, the scurf of his pre-morning industry. Still gazing eastward toward the purple, pursed lips of the horizon, he sighed, let his eyelids fall, and lofted the bottle out into eternal Atlantic. Now he looked. He heard the bottle plash, watched it resurface, flag, bob. He looked on as another piece of his life broke away, albeit with his help. There is no pain like the pain of not knowing happiness, and there is no happiness like the happiness of being broken open and emptied out, he thought. He said it aloud, like an incantation. He was old, but he had enough bottles to see him through. So many that when we was gone, there would be just enough to curl up. And toss out to sea.

My Year in Review

Let's be honest, years that end in December are boring. And since I'm officially a student again, the only year that really matters to me ends, well, about a week ago. So let's get misty-eyed and look back on what was, for all intents and purposes, a pretty unremarkable year.

I moved home from my cushy, if arid, job in Baghdad for a quick couple of weeks in Houston before packing my car to the gills and driving to Chicago for law school. On the drive, I took lots of pictures, including one of a very fat man in a cowboy hat on a scooter, as well as about 40 adult video store signs. I got to Chicago on a Saturday night and stayed in some girl's apartment while she wasn't there, but I left her a note and left her apartment smelling like tacos, which is all a girl can ask for really.

Over those first few weeks, I moved into a room the size of an Escalade, dropped salsa in one roommate's suitcase, and walked in on my other roommate playing Naked Chef. I met some cool people in the dorms, taped leaves to their door, swiped their snowflakes, and played the purple dragon card on them. I read a book on a boat, played ping-pong until I felt moderately good about myself in general, and showed up for every class, sober or not.

I had one teacher who dressed like a suitcase, one who answered his phone in class to tell his teenage son that, yes, he could have a bigger allowance, and one who wore velvet pants and track shoes. I skated on ice for the first time in my adult life, got offered some woman's daughters, and wore flip-flops in the snow. Over the break, I drove from Houston to New Orleans and back for no reason, went to a random party when I got back - a party that involved a fruitcake the shape of Texas - and, after the break was over, I drove back to Chicago in a car packed with books, stopping for a week at a monastery in Dallas where they drink beer at dinner and teach Latin to some of the smartest kids in the Metroplex.

The spring started well, but I don't remember much of it. I know our classes were awful. I know I spent an inordinate amount of time at the library. But that's how life is. You have to spend a lot of it in the library or you will end up working in a bar for the rest of your life. Fact.

The year was a wash. That's what it comes down to. But it was my wash, for what that's worth. I'm sure I've forgotten the most important parts of it, but that's also how life is. I'm leaving for Chile tomorrow, not because I don't like Texas with all its women with big hair and men (and some women) with fire-print bandanas, but because it's something. I'll let you know how it goes.

White Flight

It's not "white guilt" I feel. That implies shame or a misplaced sense that I have done something wrong by being born white. That is impossible. I had no say in what color I was born. No one does. But I do have a stake in what color I stay. I don't mean literally, of course. But I understand that, in my country, being born white automatically affords me certain privileges (Insert privileges here), privileges I did not ask for, privileges I do not need or want. That is what I mean by the way I feel. Do I think it is unjust that I am given these privileges without having earned them? Perhaps I do. Do I think it is immoral if other people have no qualms claiming them? No, that is for them to decide. Do I think that I could ever renounce the entire privilege? Surely not. Not in this country. Not in many countries, even countries where someone with my skin color is an oddity. Only in a country where there is open hostility, or at least extreme indifference and inconvenience, could I understand what it must be like to live as a minority in the United States.

Red-Handed

“I’m leaving,” blurted Harrells as he planted his fork to the hilt in hash browns. Had there been anyone seated next to him, or across from him, or in the café at all, that person may have fired back a few well-aimed questions. As it was, having no human target nearby to absorb the blunt force of his outburst, his words glanced off the saltshaker, wound around the neon sign flashing “OPEN”, and deflated like a balloon in the wheezy, filtered light of a mid-November morning. Even as the two lumps like lead dropped from his rain-gutter lips, he had already begun to doubt that he had said them, that he had even been capable of saying them. Some internal damage control team had been thrust into motion as soon as the rogue signals hit the first neuron.

But it was out, he had said it, and like a voodoo incantation it held sway over him with a power more extraordinary than he had ever known before. In fact, Harrells had never once experienced – even seen – anything extraordinary in his life. When pressed, he would tell you of a time he shot a deer, a deer that bounded over a fence and landed dead in a heap. For a split second, he had felt the sick thrill of a battle to the death, and in the heat of the brief god-like fever he had prayed for resistance like a criminal prays for capture. But as the deer wheeled and leapt the barbed wire, something primordial and unnamable bounded out of Harrells and breached a defense designed, most likely, to keep him in.

What gets to Harrells isn’t just that the deer never noticed him. After all, the sign of a sly hunter is that the prey never knows that it’s prey, but for Harrells there is always something more. He took it as a slight that the deer never looked at him, didn’t see him shoot, didn’t turn his head when it was hit, even died with its eyes closed. The idea that it was unfair or uneven, one-sided, never surfaced; that he was merely exercising his God-given dominion over the earth had never occurred to him. Instead, he felt he was denied something, something was taken from him, something he wanted back desperately. The dumb look of cool indifference, the glassy gaze that declared oneself indomitable, belonged to him and not to the damned deer; the sting of victory rightly belongs to the victor, not to the trophy.

Harrells would tell you that he still dreams about that day with the deer. He dreams the sounds like colors: the footsteps golden-wheat, the report bright blue, always ending with the low moan, a burnt umber. What he won’t tell you about his dreams, what he’ll deny even to himself, is that, after field dressing the deer, instead of throwing it over his shoulders like the good shepherd, he lifts it by the antlers and steps into it; he wears the deer like a suit. But these are only dreams. And isn’t it normal to dream about the only extraordinary moment of one’s life?

As Harrells rises to pay his tab – feeling uncommonly generous, he leaves eight dollars instead of the usual six – he feels a peace like warm blood wash over him. With two words, he has altered the course of his life, and he has done it himself. From the stifled stillness of the café, into the golden glow of the day, Harrells finally feels his victory. It’s in his eyes, gleaming blue, and they shine with it. Swaggering, full of life, he half-marches to his old Ford pick-up – Brownie, he calls her – slams the door behind him, and drives.

For the Saints

There's no question that I spend so much time at law school, I feel like I live there. As if that wasn't enough, when I do finally go home at night, I lie in my bed and look out my window, only to find that it dominates my view from here as well. Living in a high-rise across the street from the law center, my bedroom is actually closer to my classroom than it is to my own lobby downstairs. So I may as well live there.

But someone already lives there. In the lobby of the law school is a statue of Mother Teresa of Kolkata. Her eyes are wide and pleading, her arms are outstretched. If you know her at all, you know that she's not begging, she's not asking for anything from you. On the contrary, she wants to give you something: her love, nothing less than her very self. Of course, it's just a statue, and a statue can't love you. But it's a memorial to a woman who spent her entire life (literally spent it) loving the unloveable. And the fact that they let her love them at all goes a long way to suggest that they're one step ahead of me.

I rode a bus today after dropping my car back off up north. It was only later that I realized I must have touched the same handrails and handholds as a hundred other Chicagoans who rode that bus before me. I looked at my hands - actually looked at my hands - as if I could see the germs I had caught from some sick mother, some coughing kid; as if I had just taken some foolhardy sortie out into the masses of natives and was sure to come back ravaged by some exotic malady.

Then I thought about Mother Teresa, about how she would hold the sick, the suffering, the dying, how she would bathe their bodies, trying to give them peace through the cool water or through her simple human touch. I thought about how she had it all figured out. She wasn't afraid of the disease you can pass from touching; instead, she worked her whole life combating the disease you pass by not touching. "Death is not the enemy, gentlemen. If we're going to fight a disease, let's fight one of the most terrible diseases of all: indifference." - Patch Adams

Our lives are still so distinct here, still segmented and closely guarded. We're still afraid we'll catch something from someone, something we can't see, something there's no immunization from. But what kind of life is that? What kind of lonely, self-protectionist existence awaits us by holding ourselves apart from people? Mother Teresa knew something we still don't know. And so did the suffering wretches she cradled in her arms as they died smiling. Life without the most basic love for the human standing next to you is hollow and shallow and void. This love is what I see in her eyes each morning and each evening, even as my own are bleary and clouded. This love is written on her tomb in these words:

"People are often unreasonable, illogical and self centered;
Forgive them anyway.

If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives;
Be kind anyway.

If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies;
Succeed anyway.

If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;
Be honest and frank anyway.

What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight;
Build anyway.

If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous;
Be happy anyway.

The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow;
Do good anyway.

Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough;
Give the world the best you've got anyway.

You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and your God;
It was never between you and them anyway."

That's the life I choose.

-JM

"Now, we must all fear evil men. But there is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men." - Monsignor, The Boondock Saints