The flight across northern Argentina is bumpy. The Andes are smooth air, the sun has almost set, so they are in shadow and in a purple glow.
The following day, a few of us go downtown to a hill with a castle on top that Darwin climbed when he visited this city. The rocks are covered with messages of love. "I'm yours, forever and always," "Flowers in water die in a few days, my love will last forever."
We walk down a pedestrian mall to Plaza de Armas. This town is less polluted than the first time I was here. That was on the Rei Momo tour, when I brought the large Latin band to Latin America — which sounds weird, but the truth is that a lot of the audiences here weren't familiar with that music.
The venue at that time was horrific, in more than one way. It was a large gymnasium, so there was negligible ambience, the sound was terrible, and, lastly, it was the place where the military tortured Victor Jarra after the U.S.-backed coup on...Sept 11.
Victor's hands were cut off: "You'll never play guitar again," his attackers reportedly boasted. Bush I was CIA head. Kissinger asked that human rights violations go unreported. At least I'm not playing that place again, I think to myself.
In the morning, the nearby Andes peaks loom over the town, but by mid-afternoon, when we take our walk, the smog is already building up. The last time I was here the smog was so bad that these buildings would be obscured as well; this time you can still see them a little bit.
In the evening, we are all invited to a nice Tapas restaurant, where the wine flows and the plates accumulate.
The following day is show day and lunch at the Mercado Central, where numerous restaurants all serve pretty much exactly the same things. Then the museum of Pre-Columbian art. Amazing stuff. Tiny mummies, each about two-feet long. The people at that time removed the internal organs and stuffed the corpse with twigs and mud. How that results in a miniature person is not clear, but here they are, like creepy childs' dolls.
There's a fascinating string spiral on one wall – the Inkan (as they spell it) way of both keeping financial records and notating epic tales.
Ceramic sculptures reflected the aesthetic ideal, a look that guaranteed and evoked a position of local status: a deformed cranium, crossed eyes and filled teeth — filed so as to make the front two appear large, like buck teeth. So a cross-eyed, buck-toothed pinhead look was the appearance that got you where you needed to be. "Hey, ladies!"
Ames said she saw a sculpture that was a of a man in a flayed monkey skin costume. The apes toes protruded from the man's shins and he wore the monkey face over his own.
Walked over to the venue, a former train station. If I thought the sound in the gymnasium/torture chamber was atrocious, I hadn't seen nothing. The present place was a Victorian arched vault of steel, copper and glass — a massive hall. The platforms have been filled in and seats laid out across the expanse. Echoey is not the word for it. I became immediately depressed and angry.
In response, I tailor the set to songs that might survive the acoustics of this room. That means mostly ballads - a lot of the Talking Heads songs that I suspect this audience would love to hear will sound like shit in here, so out they go. A few of the up-tempo numbers remain, but not very many. I go lay on the floor of the curtained-off dressing area and sulk.
The place fills up respectably (one local newspaper review estimates 3,000) and, as we walk on stage, there is a surge of young people filling the gap between the expensive seats and the stage. I'm sure the patrician ticket holders love that.
The kids are wildly enthusiastic, some hold signs for specific songs, and they dance at the slightest provocation, which is sad because there won't be so many opportunities for them tonight.
Oddly enough, the reviews in the papers the next morning are all positive. I guess the horrendous acoustics didn't phase the critics, or the audience. This cheers me up a bit.
The next morning, a few of us go to Pablo Neruda's house here in Santiago — a lovely place with a nautical theme. There are bars in almost every room. The guide (one can only tour the house with a guide) used to live in NY and knows where I used to live on 12th Street, which is a bit of a shock. He's a young, long-haired guy with a goatee whose grandmother was the inspiration for some of Neruda's most well-known and best-loved poems. It seems she was the one who got away, the one who was never forgotten.
Our guide points out some letters on display and says, "These used to be in a drawer in my house, I'd see them from time to time."
He, our guide, left the U.S. when Bush II was elected and reminds us that Bush I was the CIA chief when Allende was overthrown by a U.S.-backed military coup on Sept 11 (!), 1973. He said seeing people all over NY with signs looking for missing loved ones after 9/11 was too familiar a sight, even though the cause of the tragedy may have been very different. It just had too much resonance with the years of torture and people who "disappeared" during the Pinochet regime. He said that Allende was not perfect, but that Chilean socialism was very democratic, and they were finding their own way until the leadership was brutally crushed. Maybe if Kerry gets elected, our guide will return to NY, a place where he has a lot of friends.
