Just about to start packing for San Pedro de Atacama.
I’ve been there before, so it’s a relatively familiar spot, though I didn’t spend long in the town. So this time I’m going to explore the locality a little more. I’m even thinking of sticking with it for a week or so and treating as a relaxing holiday, with a trip planned to Salar de Uyuni for a few days (if I can find one) as well as other shorter jollies.
I had been thinking of heading to La Paz, but I’ve been warned that Bolivia’s a bit of an unstable place right now and, just two weeks ago, a group of travellers were stranded in Uyuni for 19 days due to a blockade by local protesters.
As a consequence, I feel that I may be better off not spending more time than strictly necessary in the country. Although I’ll miss out on La Paz and some other sights I’d rather make sure I can get home in a timely manner and without stress or hassles.
Anyway, one highlight is that because this is an El Niño winter it has rained in parts of the desert and that means the chance of seeing a so-called ‘blooming desert’ when all the flowers come out.
If that’s the case I could be returning for a day or so to Arica. This isn’t a bad thing as one piece in my father’s puzzle still needs to be researched, and I will be able to attend to that on my return. It’s not a big thing, but something I’d like to do if possible.
Then it will be on to Lima for a night or two depending on flights, and home. Can’t wait to get back to the family, to be honest, and it’s just 12 days away now!
So, tonight, after another little spell at the English Institute giving students some practice, I’ll hop on a bus for a twelve hour ride to San Pedro. Of course, this brings up people saying that I’m a hard core traveller. But really, this is what you probably think I’m riding on http://www.contemporarynomad.com/2008/09/ whereas the reality is that I’ll have a semi-cama seat as shown here: http://www.turbus.cl/servicios.html and riding in a modern, well maintained coach. It’s not so bad!
Had my father’s headstone delivered and installed yesterday.
It was a fairly sombre moment, and my last goodbye to him. I won’t go back soon.
Unfortunately the computer I’m trying to upload my photos to won’t play ball, so no pictures for the moment. Sorry. Maybe tomorrow when I get to San Pedro de Atacama.
Edit – 08/07/2011: Finally added the picture, nearly a year later. Some kind of mental block for me when it comes to gravestones. Here it is. I’ve also added a gallery with images from the cemetery in general.
I struggled to find somewhere to eat this evening, and in the end decided that some more bad food would have to do. I have at least found a source of decent fruit at the market, so I’m getting vitamins and fibre now. Woo!
The smells of Telepizza were calling me in, and I succumbed. I went in. I watched them making a pizza… and lo, it looked like pizza! And verily, I ordered.
While I was waiting for it to be made I sat down and combined reading and watching a telethon for Un Techo Para Chile which has been fundraising like mad lately around here. I’d thrown a few coins into a collection box without really knowing what it was about.
A wino kept wandering in and out, watching the TV for a bit, and then ambling out. He’d just stand there, near the door. I studiously avoiding catching his gaze.
The program then showed a short film about a young family moving from what was essentially a corrugated board shack into a newly built, if somewhat spartan, apartment. That’s when I heard the blubbing. I looked and saw the wino, just standing there, mouth turned down, tears streaming down his cheeks, and blubbing like a three year old that’s been denied another sweet.
It was heartbraking.
If you have a moment, consider making a small donation by following the link above. Since the strong earthquake recently a lot of families and individuals here have lost their homes. Others are just living in absolute poverty. They need your help, and once they have decent living conditions they can do more with their lives, educate their children better, and bring themselves a better future.
Just a quick gallery showing pictures I’ve taken over the past few days in Arica.
My only disappointment is that I’m still failing to get focus perfect on wide apertures and autofocus gets itself mixed up – so some otherwise great pictures aren’t usable at large sizes. I’ve just discovered that you can get a focussing screen for the EOS 550D. When I get home I’ll be doing a little shopping.
I’m still trying to decide what to do next, but I think I’m forming a plan.
I did debate staying here for all the time I have, teaching some web stuff maybe, for free. But nobody seemed that interested when I mentioned it, so I think it’s worth heading off.
I’ve already been to San Pedro de Atacama, but heck, it’s a nice spot on the planet and is on the way to Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni the world’s largest salt flat. I love extremes, and that’s as far as it can get, I reckon.
My only worry is that it’ll probably be bloody cold up in the mountains, so I’ll go and buy another fleece and a hat, methinks. Maybe a pair of gloves to?
After that, La Paz and a bit of exploring there, then take the boat across Lake Titicaca to Puno, then to Cuzco. If I have time there and feel up to it I can do the Machu Picchu trail as it’s the right season to do it and the weather’s pleasant there right now. Puno to Machu Picchu are already known to me, but the trail would be new, as would be crossing the lake. I also know it’s quite easy to get flights from Cuzco to Lima or from La Paz to Lima, should my itinerary slip a little.
I’m staying put while I wait for the headstone to be finished and fitted, and consequently got to see an Arican weekend.
There’s not a lot for me to do in many ways, so yesterday I spent some time going through all of my father’s papers and notebooks. I found evidence of one email address he’d used from five years ago, but it no longer existed. So I returned from the computer and continued… until I found painstakingly detailed notes on how to use Yahoo mail. Including a password.
Bingo!
I felt that if he had e-mail perhaps he’d been in touch with people and I could work out more of his life. I ran down to the computers they have here in the hotel, logged in and… he’d only ever emailed one place – the Department of Work and Pensions. It was all about his pension, along with a couple of emails explaining that they had his address wrong (and which they never seemed to correct!) and that was it. Nothing else, nothing in the sent folder to anyone else. It was a dead end.
Ah well. So I went back to the notes and worked out a fair few things. I’ll note what I’ve learned in full at the bottom of this post, as the whole day taught me things.
The Letters
One of my disappointments was to find no detail of any personal life, anywhere. But I did bring with me all the letters he sent me from 1988 to 1991. These covered his crisis period. I decided to get them in order, photograph each one, for posterity, and then read them one after another.
Ouch. This caused another period of getting down, because I realised some things. I remembered how, in the letters, were statements which were essentially threats to commit suicide. The incredible emotional blackmail. His feeling of injustice over what he thought was some kind of inheritence. In part that my memory hadn’t formed a perfect impression of the order of events (although I wasn’t too far out) and that his crisis had clearly been real enough, but largely because towards the end of the letters he stopped being so demanding and so hard on me. In fact, the very last letter was more about caring for me than himself. He was almost upbeat and looking to the future.
That was the moment. He’d realised what he’d done and he was trying to repair it. Problem is, he was too late. I was still upset at him, and I’d now rejected him completely. At the time I couldn’t forgive him for what he’d done. The letter is in quite a sorry state as I’d crumpled it up ready for the bin, but interestingly it looks like I changed my mind, flattened it out and put it with the rest.
Page one of the last letter.Page two of the last letter.
And so I found myself wondering. Should I have forgiven him sooner? I’d certainly have stood far more of a chance of finding him, and maybe he’d learned. But at the same time I do believe I was still scared of him. I never told him I’d moved, and I never checked again with the neighbour who’d been taking my post in.
I think, to me (and maybe to others) that this is a valuable lesson in the dangers of losing the trust of those closest to you. If you want to get it back a letter isn’t enough. You have to earn it. Really work at it. He could have forged the connections once more, the stupid bugger, but he couldn’t stop me walking away. My own instability at the time meant he had no chance of finding out where I lived…certainly not from South America.
It’s also taught me that communication is everything. Sometimes those around you know little about what you do and what you think. For example, he didn’t really understand the repossession of my grandmother’s house or the intense solitude I felt at the time.
Maybe if I’d simply told him? But I needed to protect myself as well.
I did originally plan to place the letters online in their entirety, but that will have to wait. I saw some things there that could cause real issues for some people and which need to be cleared first. Maybe in the future. But it’s a thin maybe.
At 9pm, after the terror pizza, I headed to the pool hall to meet more of my father’s friends and acquaintances. There was Oliver (or Oscar, my notes aren’t clear on this and I need to check tomorrow) who met him over ten years ago on the La Paz-Arica train. Or Pablo, who’d known him since 1991… from the time of that last letter.
Obviously I had questions. I asked if he’d mentioned family and they only had one mention… a daughter, in Quito, Ecuador, who died in a road traffic accident at the age of about 13. But I couldn’t find any more detail than that. No names, no known addresses, and there’d been nothing in the notes. Back home we suspect he may have been using this as a way of blocking conversation about family, but who can be sure? He gave the story consistently, everyone reported it as the same, but something occurs to me… it’s an old story. If he was reporting this 19 years or so ago, then the age wouldn’t be possible as I’m not aware of him having been to South America prior to around 1983.
So, after all this, and without the help of an interpreter, I only had vague echos of the man. Nothing so firm other than that he was, it seems, generous with friends, selective about his company, and a creature of habit. I sat where he sat, chatted with his friends, enjoyed a beer, and learned to spell ‘jote’, the red wine and Coke mix, correctly.
This all cheered me up. Apart from the odd mentalist (my father did hang around with a diverse group) I found that these friends he had were pleasant, intelligent people with things to share. We drank to my father, I tried to explain the story in as sensitive way as possible, and we laughed and joked.
Here’s something… a smiling, happy and charming man who knew my father in Arica, lives just around the corner from the hotel I’m staying at.
He actually lives in the cabin that guards a car park. Just him. He’s been married twice, I believe, but that’s all I know.
So how can I tell his story?
I can’t, not really.
But it made me realise – he had many things in common with my father. Two marriages, keeps quiet about his personal life, and a very modest lifestyle. And truth is, I see people like this all the time. And they all have a story. It’s just that it is, largely, untold.
Even when it is told, you only have their take on it. Given how fragile memories and emotions can be it’s almost impossible to extricate what’s really happened.
Pushing Away
I think it’s entirely possible that anybody can end up alone and relatively marginal. Worse, some can even end up utterly destitute and on the streets. Something makes this happen to people. They destroy their personal relationships. Before too long, they are relatively alone. They have friends, for sure, but not close ones. And drinking friends, as we all know, are the ones who aren’t there when you need them.
If we look at my father, he ended up being rejected by me. If you look at the picture of me with my father, you’ll see something that I’d never noticed until a psychologist here noticed it and mentioned it to Joaquin… my father is touching me, but I’m distant. I could be just another surly teenager, but here’s the thing… I wasn’t a surly teenager. I just hand’t formed many attachments.
At the pool hall
There were two points when I pushed away from my father. When I was around 11 years old he’d split up with his second wife and I was living with my grandmother. I’d struggled to settle into the new school – a rather rough school that was failing its pupils, and the bullying and harrassment had become quite extreme. Yet some level of that had happened at every new school. So I stood firm and when my father suggested I went with him to Belgium I opted not to. Enough was enough.
Wasn’t easy.
That was the first stage. He was obviously angry with his mother who supported me in the process of requesting her to be my guardian, and consequently their relationship deteriorated even further.
He’d already pushed away from his second wife and daughter, simply by failing to cope with certain aspects of the relationship.
Then, years later, when he was demanding money from me, I couldn’t handle it. He was too hard on me. I had to reject him even more. Not so easy, really.
Suddenly, he’d lost all familial contact. Nobody wanted to deal with him or support him. He was a lost soul.
We Judge on the Negative
One thing I’ve realised is that most people form relationships with other people based on the good character traits. They find the other person attractive, or intelligent, or caring… that kind of thing. But they break relationships based on the bad. That may be stating the obvious, really, but it’s important because the bad things are usually a very small part of that person’s character.
Think about it – your average burglar probably spends no more than a few hours a week breaking into house. A wife beater doesn’t beat his wife every day. It just doesn’t happen that way. It’s why sometimes women find it so hard to break away because “he’s a good father” or “he’s so generous most of the time.”
People aren’t black and white, no matter what films and the media appear to suggest. My father wasn’t generally a bad man. Remove the mood swings and the occassional domestic violence and you had a charming, intelligent and thoughtful man. Everyone I’ve met here considered him a good man. If anything, they found him a little naive – he got ripped off and let down on a number of occassions because he trusted too much.
He wasn’t evil.
He just had flaws that made him impossible to live with.
And Juanito?
I know I made the title of this post misleading, but it’s relevant. I don’t know his story. I can’t even suggest that he was pushed away from his family. All I know is that he’s living alone, in a small hut in a car park, and that he’s a personable and kind man.
All I know for sure is that there is a story in everybody, and no matter what mistakes they or others made they’ll feel the pain of their past.
What Have I Learned?
Value your friendships and relationships. As far as I can see, they’re one of the primary things that keep us from ending up alone and in poverty like my father did. It’s important to accept that although they can be a pain sometimes, and oh so restrictive, we need those boundaries and checks that they bring to us. Being told you’re wrong, or being stupid, or hurtful… that’s something we all need to hear now and again because we can all be wrong, stupid or hurtful.
Without that, we can’t limit ourselves, and we can’t free ourselves from our mental barriers. It’s often said that children need boundaries, or they can become insecure. I believe, very much, that adults need them also.
Now, I must apologies for the random keyboard psychology above, and promise that normal service will be resumed soon!
Anyone who’s experienced the death of someone close to them will know that there is often a lot to do. No exceptions here, plus the added pressure of limited time. However, I’m not entirely unhappy about the time thing… makes me get things done.
Cementaria Parque de Arica
Center stage, as ever!
So, following the funeral I went yesterday to the cemetary to finish off the paper work. The tomb is owned in perpetuity by me, although a typical arrangement, that may seem strange in Europe, is to simply rent a tomb for a number of years. Once that time is up the coffin is disinterred and transferred to a shared grave. I also had to sort out maintenance again, in perpetuity. It’s not a lot each year, but with no easy way of paying fifteen pounds to an account in Chile every now and then I had no option.
I actually saw this happening on my second visit. You could see a clearly subdued couple watching as the coffin was lifted from a tomb, cleaned up, sealed in plastic, then loaded onto a hearse. It was a sad sight.
And it’s all made slightly bizarre by the music that’s piped into the cemetary. If you have a funeral it does seem to be suitably sombre, but at all other times they appear to often play cheerful music for the workers to enjoy.
Piping out the tunes
It’s tricky feeling sombre and respectful when you can hear an Abba song.
Still, at father’s tomb it wasn’t so audible.
I took some photos, walked around, paid my respects, and headed back to town for a meeting with the reverend David Hucker who carried out the bilingual service. He’s clearly a nice man, and initially refused my attempt to pay for the service. It had to be turned into a donation to his church before he’d accept. Given the service included a singer, I was amazed. The kindness of people here doesn’t cease to amaze me. We chatted about why he and his wife came here, my own background and so on. All very pleasant.
Headstones
I felt like I’d taken enough of Joaquin’s time so I decided I’d make the effort to arrange the headstone entirely on my own. With limited Spanish and nothing more than a vague idea of where a stonemason may be, I set off.
Now, this is where you have to admire the Chilean desire for efficiency. The hospital is at one end of a road approximately 1km long. At the other, lies the municipal cemetary (not the one Chris is in). Along this road are numerous funeral directors and various parked hearses, ranging from custom made examples to tired looking old American station wagons. Given this is one of the more important routes to the hospital, I can’t help wonder if it helps reassure incoming patients. Still, it’s efficient.
After some aimless wandering I spotted a suitable stone mason, went inside, and did my best. On Monday morning I’m either getting exactly what I wanted, or a very rough approximation with some crazy typeface. Let’s see. Again, Chilean flexibility and a can-do attitude helped. I explained I wasn’t likely to be around for much longer and that I couldn’t wait the usual week. He made it happen.
The House
It was very dark when I took this picture of the house Chris lived in.
The next job of the day was to visit the house where my father lived. He’d rented a room here for over ten years.
I had a real shock when the first item brought in was his suitcase. It’s the only recognisable item I saw in his belongings – the same cream coloured Samsonite suitcase he’d used throughout much of the eighties. It was a touch battered, but it even still carried a sticker for a hotel in Sluis in the Netherlands (a small, sleepy town once notorious for having the highest density of sex shops in the world) at which I remember him buying me waffles with cream and strawberries each time we visited on his tours.
From there on in it went a little downhill. There was no wallet, no photo album, no sign of his early past in South America. Apart from a couple of postcards from his days in Belgium(!) and his passports going back to the mid-eighties there was nothing. None of my letters to him were there, nor any photos of me or any of his children. I still have to visit another place where he apparently kept some stuff, but mostly I believe they were just things he sold on the market where had a small spot.
The old suitcase
So what did I find out about him?
Looking at his passports he travelled an awful lot up until around 2006 when he broke his hip-bone in a fall during a tussle of some sort. He’d been trading in clothes and, for a while, also appeared to be running some sort of homeopathy service. He was buying significant quantities of remedies from a german supplier in South America whose exact location I’ll be working out shortly. He had three books in his belongings, two of which were on homeopathy, with the other being an encyclopaedia.
The rest was mostly junk. Old lottery tickets, some snacks he sold, a collection of out of date milk cartons, old clothes (though mostly in good condition – looks like he still preferred to be smart!) and a lot of random notes. No notes, however, spoke of feelings, interestingly. There was no journal, no address book even. Just accounts of his work, routes he was taking and so on.
To a twelve year old, this hotel did the best waffles in the world. Ever.
There weren’t any signs of written correspondence with friends anywhere. I did, however, find a printout with what would appear to have been an e-mail address. So I now know that at least sometimes he went online. Maybe he did find me after all but opted to keep quiet? Who knows.
The house itself was relatively clean, with the downstairs occupied by the landlady and her son, and upstairs by various lodgers. But my father didn’t really spend much time there – as had been the case when I knew him, he preferred to be out at bars or selling at the market, using his modest room as merely a place to sleep at night and to store a few things.
And that’s really it, so far. There’s little more evidence.
The Wake
After this it was off to the bars where my father liked to hang out. He had a few acquaintances and friends there. People he would drink and play billiards with whilst arguing about sports, politics and any other subject that caught his attention. It’s fair to say he hadn’t changed much, in many ways.
Myself, Rafael, and a guy whose name is evading me right now. I’m drinking pancho.
So we’d agreed to meet up at the pool hall and have a few drinks and a game of billiards (or pool or whatever it’s called) in his honour.
It was fascinating to sit in the places my father sat, and play the tables he’d have played at. I didn’t get somber. In fact it reminded me that his life, whilst poor, wasn’t terrible. He had friends, and he had things to enjoy. That’s a big part of what we all need. So we drank a little, and I learned the favoured drinks of his friends – one called pancho, which is basically beer and Fanta mixed together, and another called hota which is a mix of wine and, believe it or not, Coca-Cola. Yes, I was surprised by that one too!
Later, as I tried to encourage one particular drunk friend of my father’s to NOT play with my camera, Joaquin told me he’d a call for his mariachi band to play a serenade. “Would you like to come,” he asked.
How could I refuse?
The bar and stools where he often sat
About two hours later I concluded that Chilenos are, essentially, completely mental. But in a nice way :o) They arrive, in their slightly too small costumes, from different directions at the specified address. And they must keep quiet outside and not be discovered. Because nobody expects the mariachi.
At the allotted moment they all pile into the house and the singing starts. The lady whose 50th birthday it was seemed bemused at first, but appeared to enjoy. Her husband, however, was a strong, surly type who looked like someone who made a living from ripping lorry tyres from their rims with his bare hands.
Still, he didn’t kill any of us so I gues it was OK for him.
And then it was off for a burger. I was granted my wish of a vegetarian sandwich, which turned out to be a chip sandwich with salad and avocado in it that tasted suspiciously meaty (cooked on the same griddle, no doubt)… but I had to chuckle at many of them ordering nothing more exciting than a cup of tea with their meal. Which was, of course, served in china, with a saucer. Don’t see that much in English burger bars at 2am in the morning…
A burger and a nice cup of tea at the end of a night out.
It’s now Saturday here and I’ll admit to a slightly lazy day. I got up late, wandered around town, had yet another terrible breakfast (they’re better in Peru, I have to say) and generally felt slightly subdued. The day before had been quite happy, really, and now it was simply about going back to normal. I have no tasks left until Monday, and attempts to find options such as teaching people how to create websites have failed to elicit much interest.
So I’ll go through the small bag of items I took from my father’s place, take some notes, and generally meander today. Don’t expect an exciting post tomorrow! I also have to decide what to do next. I still have two weeks to use up, but no clear leads in other countries. I suspect once I’m finished here it might just be time for a bit of a holiday. I just need to decide – relaxed, or exploratory? Any thoughts?
And so it came. In a way it’s weird… I always felt there were only two likely things to happen.
First, I would find my father (or he would find me) and a period of reconciliation may take place. Closeness, perhaps never, but reconciliation would be fine.
Second, I would never find him, and that would be that. Finito.
I’d actually come to the conclusion a few years ago that maybe he’d died some time ago. In some ways it was an easier conclusion… it stopped me feeling guilty for not continuing a search or trying harder.
I don’t think I was ever ready for this. And this morning I woke up very early at around 5am. Partly because I went to bed very early, but also because my mind was spinning. I decided to put some music on. And this piece came up:
And I took a moment to try and remember what was really good about my father. I’ve told the story that shows the negative in him. The curious thing is that our negative moments in life tend to be far fewer in occassion than our positives, yet they often define us.
So I remembered:
Football in the garden when I was very young.
Him teaching me pinball – and his pride when I started to beat him, and most people, from the age of about five. I still love pinball and if I ever have the space, I’ll have one!
Going to watch Liverpool play at Anfield on several occassions.
Learning about different cultures through him, that there was more to the world than the area(s) I was growing up in.
When I was 16 I met a girl in Oostende and, late in the evening, him quietly handing me enough money to take her clubbing. He then made his excuses and dragged away others to give us space. He continued in this vein all week. It was just a holiday romance, but hey…
There was more… but those are what sprung to mind. And I had my first ‘moment’ there in bed at about 6am this morning.
The next came during the funeral. But first, a little about Chilean funerals…
Culture Shift
Chile doesn’t feel wildly different to Spain, in so many ways. The climate, the landscape even… at least, when I compare it to Alicante where my family lives. Culturally it’s similar enough that you expect things to be reasonably similar. And I suppose they are. But that’s still quite different to Britain.
First things first, you arrive at the hospital with all your paperwork a little before the funeral directors come to collect the body. In our case we then had an hour or so of waiting before heading to the cemetary. I’ve already mentioned that instead of burial plots, niches are used.
And in our case, as there were only two of us at the undertakers we could ride in the hearse, up front. I was disappointed, in a way, as the hearse was simply a silver Ford Taurus Estate. With BMW hubcaps. As a car geek I was disappointed! But then in the UK we use Fords for hearses as well, so I can’t complain… but I’d still prefer to head off in a Daimler, if anyone’s listening….
In the back was the coffin, wrapped in the skin of Bungle.
I realised that if we had an accident (not entirely unlikely) the coffin was unrestrained. It would be… messy, to say the least. Still, we made it to the cemetary where I met the kindly David Hucker from the Anglican Church, his wife, a singer he’d brought along, my father’s landlady, and several of his friends.
Given that funerals tend to be arranged very quickly here, and that he had no family at all here, it was a good turnout.
We then slowly walked behind the car to the tomb, where two rows of plastic garden chairs were laid out. The Bungle-Coffin was then placed on a support, and the car left. Nearby a bell tolled.
Rev. Hucker gave a simple ceremony in both English and Spanish with accompaniment and song from the delightful guitarist. And then the moment I was completely unprepared for. Everyone who knew my father stood up to say a few words of remembrance. When it came to my turn, I fell apart. I didn’t even start talking, just sobbed.
It’s so unlike me. A few tears, sure. But sobbing? Proper, wobbly belly, heaving chest sobbing? Nope, not since I was a little kid.
Every time I remembered the good parts of my father, I went again. More than in the morning which was a single burst of tears.
After a few minutes and a few tissues I managed to compose myself to string together a barely articulate sentence. It would have to do, or I’d just be off again. I patted the Bungle-Coffin, sat down, and the ceremony was then brought to a close.
Of course, the English bits didn’t make sense, entirely, in the context, but they were familiar, which helped, I think.
Then the next new part – the coffin was then pushed into the tomb, and we got to watch the workers carefully seal it up. The flowers were then placed in front of the stone, and we took turns to quietly pay our last respects.
My thoughts have also drifted to my brother and half-sister back in Europe. The five grandchildren my father never even knew about, and the joy he missed out on with all of them.
One day I’ll explain this whole story to my new born son (and any others) and maybe I’ll be back in Arica once more.
And when we come back, I’ll give Joaquin Alvarez, the British Honorary Consul, a call. He has been amazing, taking a lot of time and trouble to help me with arrangements. He came to the funeral with us as a friend of my father’s, and has touched me with his kindness and generosity of spirit. A true giant amongst men.
