Loading...On our second day in Chile, we found ourselves in the middle of the National Census. (It is only conducted once every ten years, so it was just our luck…) Chile does its census all in one day. Everything is closed. No one is supposed to leave home until the census volunteers have been there. This even includes people “in transit” (us), although we didn’t find this out until we returned home from an eerie walk around deserted Santiago and found a Citación under the door, scolding us and giving instructions on where to go to correct our delinquency.
The idea of counting everyone, even strangers and clueless foreigners, is odd but also appealing. It gives everyone the same weight and importance. We missed our chance to be counted because we assumed that our presence in the country was so fleeting as to be irrelevant. As it turned out, we undervalued ourselves.
The parallel with religion here – replace government with God and the census with the plan of salvation – is obvious enough to need little explanation. The point that seems worthy of emphasis is the way or ways in which we remove ourselves from the picture. In the Tenebrae service of Holy Week, a passage from the writing of Saint Augustine (hardly the sunniest of theologians) reminds us that only Satan and his angels are beyond all hope of reaching Heaven. It can hardly be for us to decide if we are in or out.
II
We spent a couple of days in the Colchagua Valley, one of the major wine-producing areas of the country. Rows of vines climb from the flat of the valley into the brown hills. Peaks of the Andes with permanent snow cover rise in the distance. The wealth that comes with trade in an international luxury good is apparent in the towns.
The most opulent of the wineries is Clos Apalta. Built by the French family that also controls Grand Marnier, it is sleek and perfectly turned out. And it produces only one wine, a blend of four grapes, the proportions of which are adjusted from year to year to produce a consistent taste.
The winery building, all granite, glass, and recessed lighting, is buried in a hillside and organized such that production progresses from higher to lower levels, with gravity doing the work of pumps. Presumably this and other design elements minimize energy use. No doubt foreign visitors, who wouldn’t blink at the wine’s $130-a-bottle price tag, are impressed.
My inner ascetic cringes a bit at the way this deliberate display of wealth sits alongside the poverty one sees elsewhere in Chile. I understand its function – it sells something – but it is jarring anyway. Denouncing it is fraught – someone further down the ladder could (should?) do the same to me. And it’s not my country, what do I know about it after eight whole days? Travel, like religious devotion, teaches humility as much as anything else.
III
Near the end of our trip, we spent a day in the port city of Valparaíso. It is more picturesque than Santiago and much less buttoned-down. Steep streets and funiculars carry people from the downtown flats to neighborhoods on the hills. Up above one finds 19th Century mansions, winding streets with coffee shops and artists’ studios, and nearly endless “street art.” I qualify it because some is plainly graffiti, some is likely intended as art (if your taste runs to the sorts of things that appear when the shiitake and psilocybin get mixed up in the refrigerator), and some is hard to categorize.
On one street that was so steep that it was really a stairway, some intrepid soul had painted, “We are not hippies, we are happies.” We were told that it had been the target of rival artists who had painted over part of it with the intention of replacing it with some other (perhaps more profound) slogan. By the time we saw it, the original had been restored. And a little searching on the internet showed that the affair had been prominent enough to become a popular topic in local newspapers.
The idea of dueling creative impulses seems to play out in many aspects of our lives. It’s certainly a common phenomenon when we gather in groups like church. Sometimes there’s only one wall to paint on. Who gets it? The ones who got there first? Or last? Or the ones who paint the “loudest?” The best outcome surely is to keep finding more walls. But even when that can’t happen, the least we can do is try not to paint over one another too often or too hastily. It seems like the best way to gain more happies.
Blessings
Howie+
