A WHALE OF A FUNDO
The big moment came: We were at the home of our host and hostess. The big white house sits on a round natural knoll, the top of which is about 100 feet above the surrounding ground. Flower gardens practically surround the house and are about as well kept and beautiful as any you will see anywhere; some mighty tall eucalyptus trees; a fine cement tennis court with a judge's stand and seats all around for spectators; double garage; a long, turning, bowered walk leading from the base of the hill up to the front door, the bower made of trimmed and trained small sycamore trees.
A fundo in Chile corresponds to an Argentinean estancia—a big farm to a whale of a big farm. This fundo has some 3,000 acres. He has another down the road back toward Temuco. Fundo No. 1 has a big Delco lighting system, so you know what that means—three or four all time men.
I shall not try to account for the army of men and women this "fundoist" (let's just coin another new word) employs, but I'll give you a rough idea. He pays off through a window of his office in the house. From about one or two p.m. to five o'clock that Saturday, when he and his overseer knocked off for tea, they had paid 62 men and women. After tea they went back at it and then again after dinner. I was never told the full count.
He always has a long list of potential employees. He is good pay. And yet I know a smallish man back home who gets exactly 10 times the money that this man pays his overseer per month. Now maybe you can begin to account for those beautiful gardens, those precision trimmed hedges, that spick and span house, those neat walks, weedless lawn, splendidly cooked meals faultlessly served, and so ad infinituma seeming inexhaustible supply of fabulously cheap man and woman power by our standards. Not so much down here by Chilean standards, in Chilean money, made in Chile.
Our room in the Carrera Hotel in Santiago with twin beds, tub and shower, service galore, large, airy and well-appointed in every way, on the 14th floor with French windows and magnificent view— a splendid room in probably the biggest and best hotel in town— cost us 606 pesos per day, sales tax and tips included. In our money, as we exchanged it, that means $6.06. Even a Durham wouldn't kick on that.
We will get back to the fundo and go out the front door, make a right angle and have a look. Below and directly in front are the barns, barn lots, drives, pens, slaughterhouse, enormous two story wheat granary, potato houses, stables, sheds, blacksmith shop, lumber room and sawmill pretty well equipped to make any wooden thing a farm needs, the Delco building, the flour mill, the cheese factory and probably a lot of other "small stuff' like that.
He had six riding horses in one stable when I looked in. Two of them were thoroughbred Chilean horses he seemed rather proud of, although he is extremely modest about what he owns. Aura May went riding to the nearby Indian town and back on the big hills, taking a look at the Pacific Ocean off there to the west about two miles.
Beyond the aforementioned barns and so forth is the highway, and beyond that is near 2,000 acres of about the finest bottom land in all Chile. It is supreme. It extends over a mile to the river and almost three miles up and down, to a very small town, Nehuentue, his post office. The river is rather narrow, but deep and navigable—salt water up past him, and with a small tide, say two feet. He has his own private dock on the river where he loads his wheat, potatoes, cattle, sheep and whatever else he may want to ship.
He appears to think his livestock is a small part of the fundo. And yet, when he got the idea I thought a good deal of cattle, he took Sugar Foot and me into a pasture of an excellent sort of strange grass where he had 50 or 60 grassers he expected to weigh 1,000 pounds by cold weather—next July or August. They were of all colors and duo colors, but good boned, uniform, and in good flesh—the best I had seen. I saw perhaps another 300 animals, 40 or 50 good-sized hogs and a good many sheep. And still, he isn't in the livestock business—much.