Working North from Patagonia / Being the Narrative of a Journey, Earned on the Way, Through Southern and Eastern South America

by Harry Alverson Franck

The stream that had trickled from under the snows at the summit had grown to a considerable river, watering a fertile valley

The bewhiskered conductor of the express which snatched me on into the night looked like the Bowery at five in the morning. Indeed, one noticed at once a wide difference between the prosperous spick-and-spanness of the Argentine and squalid, uncheerful, roto Chile, whether in the crowds of poor people quarreling over the few crumbs of coal to be found in the cinder heaps at the edge of town or in the general appearance of the government railway and its rather unkempt employees. I fell asleep soon after the train started at seven, woke once when we seemed to be rushing through high hills and over deep valleys, and again at a station where the one employee and the two policemen were wrapped to the eyes in ponchos heavy enough for the Arctic circle. Then myriads of lights flashed up out of the night ahead, the brakes ground us to a halt, and we were set down at a station named “Mapocho,” which turned out to be one of three serving Santiago, capital of Chile.

CHAPTER V
CHILEAN LANDSCAPES

Santiago rises late. I had wandered a long hour before I found a café open, and when I dropped in for coffee the man who spent half an hour preparing it grumbled, “Eight-thirty is very early in Santiago.” My second discovery was that the Chilean capital was squalid. Landing at the most northern of her three railroad stations—which turned out to be no worse than the other two—had been like dropping into Whitechapel; and the electric sign toward which I headed had brought me to the lowest type of slum hotel. Had I come down the West Coast and been familiar with nothing better than Lima, Santiago would perhaps have seemed less oppressive, for it is a trifle more modern and only a few degrees more shabby in appearance than the City of the Kings. The change from the Argentine, however, or, more specifically, from Buenos Aires, was like that from the best section of New York to the lower East Side.

This contrast, I was soon to discover, is to a large extent true of all Chile. The roto who makes up the bulk of the population, in or out of the capital, always looks like a very low-paid brakeman on a coal-train, who has just come in from an all-night run through a waterless country. With this class as a basis, Santiago was dirty, unkempt, down at heel. The cobbled streets were in many cases only half paved, full of dusty holes with loose cobblestones kicking about in them; the very house fronts were covered with dust; nothing seemed to have been cleaned or repainted since the last century; the city looked as if the civic feather-duster had been lost—though there was no lack of ragged vendors of this implement making the day hideous with their cries. The great difficulty seemed to be that few could afford them, for it was another shock to find that prices were almost as lofty in Santiago as in Buenos Aires.

The region was, to be sure, suffering for lack of the rain that eastern Argentine had received in such superabundance, but this did not wholly account for the general appearance of disrepair, suggesting a place once of great importance that had lost all ambition to keep its social standing in the world. The huge checkerboard town, with immense blocks of those straight, though narrow, streets required of his colonial builders by Charles V of Spain—perhaps because he had grown weary of losing himself in the Bostonese labyrinths of Spanish cities—contained an extraordinary percentage of slums. Miles upon miles of cités or conventillos, ground-floor tenements of single rooms opening off blind alleys, stretched away in every direction from the central plaza, giving off the odor which emanates from cheap lodging-houses and overcrowded, unwashed families. It was the squalor of cities, too, as distinguished from the comparatively agreeable uncleanliness of the country.

The main business section of Santiago is relatively small, with the more important stores, banks, and offices within a few squares of the Plaza de Armas. Even this was considerably down at heel. The building material being chiefly mud plastered upon wooden slabs, there are many half-ruined buildings near the center of town, while “way out there where the devil lost his poncho,” as the Chilean calls the far outskirts, some of the conditions were incredible. Unlike the capitals of Argentine and Brazil, Santiago has never been made over and modernized by the federal government, for all its abundance of “saltpeter money,” and, as elsewhere on the West Coast, there is no distinctly residential section. Some parts are a trifle more fashionable than others, but the uniformity of the town is on the whole monotonous, doubly so because there are few buildings of interest either architecturally or otherwise. A square surrounded by the chief public structures; the capitol, covering an entire block behind the cathedral; the more distant Museum and Art Gallery, make up almost the entire list of imposing buildings. Long galerías, roofed passages that are virtually public streets, are almost the only unusual feature. Though its architecture is what might be called modernized Spanish, with sometimes more decorative street-toeing façades and more roomy patios than in Spain, it lacks some of the attractiveness of Spanish buildings, and at the same time makes little provision for plumbing, and none whatever for artificial heat. In Chile, to all appearances, the social standing of soap and water has not yet been recognized. The River Mapocho runs through town in a cobble-paved channel, but like those of all the west-coast capitals, it is insignificant either as a stream or a laundry and bath. Even boarding-schools and colleges take no account of that strange modern habit of “washing the body all over”; it is a rare house of even the “proud old families” that has a bathroom.

Of late years many of these old families have found that they can materially augment their ever less adequate incomes by renting the lower stories of their “palaces” as shops, with the result that the always slight line of demarcation between business and residence has now been almost wholly obliterated. Under the portales of a palatial, red-brick building covering one whole side of the main plaza, its upper stories once the “Hotel de France,” but now a dingy vacancy, are dozens of petty little shops, fly-swarming fruit and peanut and sweetmeat stands, uncleanly male and female vendors of newspapers. As elsewhere in the Andes, there are many little cloth-shops run by “Turks,” as South America calls the Syrians. Street after street is crowded with dingy little hole-in-the-wall merchants; street stands abound in which are sold the favorite dishes of the gente de medio pelo, the ragged masses,—mote molido (boiled and mashed ripe corn); mote con huesillos (the same with scraps of bones and meat thrown in), and the thick, greasy soup known as cazuela. The half-trained tailors, to whom no doubt is due the fact that few men of Santiago are in any sense well-dressed, squat in little one-room dens, gazing out upon the passing throng like the craftsmen of Damascus. To make matters worse, the women commonly seen on the street are almost exclusively mujeres de manto, dressed in crow-black from heels to the fold of cloth wrapped about their heads, leaving only the front of the face visible, the lack of color adding to the general gloom of the town.

In contrast there is much sartorial display by the small well-to-do class, and at the other end of the social scale there are many hints of the picturesque. Each morning heavily laden ox-carts of country produce, drawn by four, and even six, oxen, led rather than driven by men walking ahead and prodding them over their shoulders with long, sharp, often gaily painted goads squawk into town and almost to the central plaza. The wielders of the goads wear the short, ragged ponchos, sometimes of velvety vicuña cloth, the invariably soiled felt hats, and the alpargatas, or, more likely, the simple leather sandals called hojotas common to the roto class. Some of these countrymen come riding in on horseback, their half-bare feet thrust into large wooden closed stirrups, and adorned with immensely rowelled spurs, frequently with a woman sitting sidewise on the crupper behind them. Milkmen—who are often mere boys—use what we call a police whistle, and make the morning hideous with their deliveries.

It is only from Santa Lucía that the Chilean capital gives a suspicion of its great extent. This crowning glory of Santiago, a tree-clad rocky hill rising abruptly in the center of the flat city, a sort of perpendicular park of several stories, is the only place in which it may be seen in anything like its entirety. There, four hundred feet above the housetops, one realizes for the first time that it may, after all, have four hundred thousand inhabitants. To climb any of the zigzag rock-cut stairs leading upward from the imposing main entrance is to behold an ever spreading vista of the city, stretching far away in every direction, monotonously flat and low except for several bulking old churches of the colonial Spanish style. The chief charm of the town, if that word can be used of a city that has little of it, is its proximity to the Andes. It lies well up in the lap of a plain more than two thousand feet high, at the northern end of the great central valley of Chile in which most of its population is gathered, with large hills in the far distance cutting it off from the Pacific, and, so close at hand as to seem almost above it, the everywhere dominating background of the main Cordillera of the Andes. But for this great white overhanging horizon, Santiago would be commonplace indeed; with it, its most dismal scenes have the advantage of a splendid setting. It is never uncomfortably hot; its brilliant winter days are magnificent, chilly rather than cold, even in the mornings and evenings. Except for a few kerosene heaters in the more luxurious homes, where foreign travel has broken the ice of costumbre, artificial heat is unknown. The wealthier classes keep warm from June to August by wearing overcoats and wraps indoors or out, at the theater or at their own dinner tables; the great ragged masses accomplish the same end by crowding together in their single-room dwellings, tightly closing all windows—and succumbing early and often to tuberculosis.