Dorfman Ariel - Desert Memories

Opening in Arica: Circling Back

Monday, May 27, 2002.

So this is where my journey ends, here where my country ends and where the desert ends, here in Arica, this port at the north-ernmost tip of Chile. This is the moment, as my plane lifts up into the air to fly to Santiago, this is when the three-week road trip that Anglica and I have just taken through el Norte Grande, the Chilean North, will begin to recede into the past and start to become a memory, a memory of ours and perhaps also a memory of the desert down there below that stretches for numberless miles southward from Arica and that seems to remember everything that ever happened to it, remembers and eventually destroys everything that happens to it.

I had been in Arica before and crossed that same desert forty years ago without having left a mark on it, almost without letting it touch me. Aricawhere the South American continent begins to widen and expand to the west, inaugurating what is called la cintura csmica de Amrica, the cosmic waist of Americahad been the only city in the North of Chile that Id slept in, if only for a night. At that point in my life, a twenty- year-old convert to the cause of Amrica Latina, I had no time for the ghost towns of the nitrate boom and bust, I did not stop to see the largest open-pit copper mine in the world at Chuquicamata, I was not interested in the colonial white adobe village of San Pedro de Atacama, which had been the central oasis in the route of the Inca, andfool that I wasthe magical port of Iquique was not in my plans. No, I was on my way to Lima and Cuzco and Machu Picchu, to Lake Titicaca and La Paz and Oruro, what I understood then as the hidden heart of the South American continent.

Born in Buenos Aires and then brought up in New York from ages two to twelve, I had defined myself upon my familys arrival in Chile in 1954 as an American kid, absolutely urban and resolutely monolingual in English. If I dreamt of any desert at allmostly I dreamt, even in faraway Santiago, about the Yankees winning the pennantit would have been one of those Hollywood deserts with fistfights in tinsel saloons and cacti and buzzards speckling a sun-baked waste in Arizona, unable to understand, at that point of my impoverished linguistic existence, how crucial the Spanish I did not wish to speak had been in the creation of that West I was conjuring up.

It had taken me many years of submerging myself in Chile to fall in love with the language and the continent I had repudiated as a child, and it was not the Norte Grande that I wanted to explore once I decided to reinvent myself as a Spanish speaker and a Latin American patriot. That hitchhiking trip back in 1962 was planned as a way in which to make up for lost time, spend an entire summer seeking out the great originating Inca and Tiawanaku civilizations that lay at the source of an Amerindian identityall the rage in the sixtiesthat I had been determined to call my own.

Many years would pass before I realized that the barren surfaces I had skimmed over in the North of Chile in 1962 held many more secrets about the destiny I had picked for myself than all the ruins and canyons of the Andean highlands, no matter how wonderful they might be. My blindness, at that early date, to the pleasures and challenges of the Norte Grande should not be attributed solely to my immature search for roots where they did not exist, but also to a deep-seated prejudice against deserts in general, a prejudice which I admit only really started to be dispelled during this 2002 trip that has just come to its conclusion.

There was nothing there, I thought to myself automatically, back in 1962. Give me trees, give me greenery by the sea, give me forests next to a lake, give me a shaded valley where people feel immediately at home. I understood the attraction that a land with no vegetation and no animal life and no roads might hold for people, but it was a merely intellectual understanding and did not engage my guts, my most intimate affections. Perhaps I was afraid of precisely what so many others through history have found attractive in the emptiness: the solitude and extreme introspection that a landscape devoid of human habitation will force you to face with a vengeance, a truth about yourself that you can find nowhere elsewhich may be why so many of the great monotheistic religions have been bred in the wild. Or maybe I was merely wary of what the brutal and unforgiving light of those places might reveal about humanity, devils and saints seeking out the desert as their abode for a reason: because there are no shadows to hide behind. The desert, a place of death and testing, I thought, a place to avoid.

And yet, when I had been given a choicewhat is the one locality, region, space in the world you want to visit?I had selected the Norte Grande of Chile, the driest desert of them all.

Not an exaggeration.

Less rain falls on these sands than on any other similarly blighted expanse on Earth. I talked to men born in Arica, a woman brought up in Pisagua, men and women who had never ventured forth from the nitrate town of Mara Elena or never left the oasis of Pica, which produces the most fragrant oranges your tongue has ever rolled over, and none of them had felt one drop of rain on their bodies in their lives. And talking of bodies, in the Arica my plane was now leaving I had sniffed bodies thousands of years old, mummified by the hot sand of the desert, with the skin still stretched across the bridge of the nose and the lips parched dry and the face almost recognizable. One night in a bar in Iquique I heard about a certain university professor, Quinteros by name, who had decided to find a grandfather of his who had been buried in the cemetery adjoining an abandoned nitrate settlement in the middle of the Pampa del Tamarugal. After several days of research and excavations, Quinteros came upon a corpse that had to belong to the father of his father. No name was on the cross, but it was as if Quinteros were looking, he said, at himself in the mirror. The beard, the teeth, the nose all identical. So he took the old man in his arms as if he were a baby, caressed him, and carted him back to Iquique for reburial. Who needs DNA when you have the desert?