ONCE/ Chistes y Errores (Jokes and Mistakes)

In Chile, I find myself making up corny jokes in Spanish, maybe because everything about the language is still fresh and surprising. So, for example, after watching cattle grazing on the ocean beaches north of Niebla:

“Porque la carne sabe más salteado en Chile que en los Estados Unidos? Porque en Chile las vacunas pasten en la playa.” (“Why does meat taste more salty in Chile than in the United States? Because in Chile the cattle graze on the beach.”)

The small cattle herd next to Huequecura, the cabañas on Lago Ranco, having their daily, late afternoon drink from the lake, sometimes followed by an hour-long stroll on the beach with the cowherd, his little grandson, and their dog. On the ocean beaches, it was also common to see cattle grazing on the beach, though mostly without anyone tending to them. Photo by Lucy Engle.

And noticing horse manure on a bridge named “Descarga” over the Río Calcurrupe just before it spills into Lago Ranco: “En la Puente Descarga, los caballos descargan.” (“On the Discharge Bridge, the horses discharge”—slightly funnier in Spanish than in English.)

Here are a couple of mistakes we made in Spanish (obviously there are many more we don’t know about, and polite Chileans have refrained from sharing): Michael went to the grocery store for a bit of beef to go into a soup I was making with zapallo y habas (winter squash and fresh fava beans), and he asked for “cuatro kilo de lomo.” Even in large grocery stores in Chile, meat is cut on the spot in the amount requested. So, Michael watched as the butcher pulled out a slab of beef and started stripping off the fat, then prepared to cut off a huge chunk, which cued Michael to quickly re-state the request as “un cuarto kilo”—a quarter of a kilo rather than four kilos! The butcher looked crestfallen but complied. This is a mistake compounded by the fact that Chileans regularly drop the final “s” from most words in spoken Spanish. So, “cuatro kilos,” the correct way to say “four kilos,” would still be pronounced kwa´tro ki´lo, with no “s” sound. It’s taken me a long time to begin to hear this not-quite-silent “s” in spoken Chilean. I say not quite silent because a tiny space is left for the unspoken “s.” An air “s,” a tiny breath. A fraction of the space a sound would take up if it were spoken. Silent letters in English, which take up no aural space at all, must be even more difficult to learn.

Tiny Café Hausmann to the left, here, of La Sombrería 'La Capital', a great hat store.

On our last visit to Café Hausmann in Valdivia for crudos, I ordered “tres por dos,” gesturing to Michael and then back to myself, intending to ask for three crudos for the two of us. I always try to add body language to reinforce my stumbling Spanish, and it fits in with the more expressive culture. The waitress, who was new to me, gestured back and repeated, “tres por dos,” nodding, so I thought I had done rather well. But when she returned again, after delivering the beers, and dropped a plate piled high with six crudos in the center of our table, I realized the misunderstanding. She heard “three for each of us,” reinforced by my gesture. I should have asked for “tres por todos,” “three, total,” with the gesture. I’d eaten two crudos at a sitting before but never three. We decided to eat the mistake this time, however, as it was our last chance to taste such excellent raw beef for a while.

—Jane

DIEZ/ Escote y Cuerpos (Cleavage and Bodies)

Chileans tend toward the short and stocky, with small, flat butts, a bit of round belly in front, and little side bellies (what we call “love handles”) pushing out just above the hips—the Mapuche influence, perhaps. On my first visit, I thought they just carried their bellies softly, without tightening the stomach muscles as we are taught to do. But now I think rounded bellies are the Chilean standard.


Chilean women have large breasts for their height and weight. (Although, as Lucy says, “All women have bigger breasts that we do.”) And they display a lot of cleavage: daytime, nighttime, dressed up, dressed down, anytime. They carry their breasts proudly, without shame, as if they’re valuable jewels, which of course they are. It’s shocking to return to the United States in winter—where’s the cleavage that surrounded me? I feel deprived.

Also, in Chile, bodies, male AND female, are much more exposed on television, in ads, on book covers, in museum exhibitions. It’s easy to think of the United States as sex crazed and using sex to sell everything, which is true. But we remain a prudish culture at base, while many others, even a traditionally Catholic culture like Chile’s, display explicit visual body images much more calmly. We saw a photo of male genitals, for example, on the cover of a paperback standing up on a bookshelf in the Valdivia public library.

Mostly, I prefer this more relaxed attitude. At the same time, however, I was uncomfortable watching five violent Hollywood action movies on a daytime bus from Santiago to Valdivia with many young children on board. The sound was piped loudly throughout the bus, and the movies were not “edited for content.” One included a violent, drawn-out rape scene. I didn’t see any obvious discomfort among parents on the bus, although I’m also not sure I would know what that discomfort might look like.

At the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino in Santiago, we saw a very sexually explicit exhibit on Moche ceramics, “Morir para Gobernar: Sexo y Poder en la Sociedad Moche” (“To Die in order to Govern: Sex and Power in Moche Society”). The Moche lived in northern Peru from around the beginning of the common era to 750 or 800. They left behind elaborate ceramics showing men and women engaged in non-reproductive sex acts and body mutilation. This particular exhibit was based on one anthropologist’s attempt to make sense of the pottery. His take is that the Moche had to help their king—who was believed to be water/rain incarnate—return after death so the culture could continue to grow food effectively and survive in a very arid climate.

The people’s contribution toward his renewal involved two types of behavior: (1) non-reproductive sex—oral, anal, in all possible postures, carefully and explicitly represented in small ceramic water vessels and free-standing figures; and (2) body mutilation—decapitation, collection and drinking of the blood, and removing noses, ears, fingers, etc., from captives—to make them look more like skeletons and strengthen the culture’s identification with the dead. These practices were believed to facilitate the very difficult passage of the dead king from purgatory into heaven, from where he could begin to act powerfully again, aid the survivors he left behind, and be reborn as the new king.

Like all the special exhibits I’ve seen at the Precolombino, the pottery was presented in darkened rooms. I’ve assumed in the past this had to do with protecting fragile, ancient artifacts. However, in the case of the Moche ceramics, the darkened space also facilitated taking in their content. None of the other viewers spoke above a whisper while I was there, no one commented or snickered. The atmosphere invited quiet consideration.

What impressed me most about the Moche exhibit was not the ceramics themselves, which were stunning and strange and beautiful in muted terracotta colors, nor the theory, also fascinating, but the fact that such an explicit exhibition was shown so calmly and straightforwardly. No warnings about sexual explicitness or checking IDs at the door, no evangelicals protesting outside (though their presence in Chile is quite obvious), just the ceramics—“this is part of our history”—and one interpretation of their story. Just that.

Note: You can see some beautiful (and not sexually explicit) examples of Moche ceramics in a recent New York Times article, and in the accompanying slide show, at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/05/arts/design/05amer.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

—Jane

NUEVE/ Pebre (Chilean Salsa)

FOOD PORN WEEK ON THE BLOG

Q: What advice would you give to people who are looking to be happy?
A: For starters, learn how to cook.
—Charles Simic, Poet Laureate, interviewed in the New York Times Magazine

This was the year of pebre verde (green salsa) for me in Chile. I adore the traditional tomato-based salsa versions: finely chopped tomato, ají (the ubiquitous, pale-green Chilean pepper, called ají verde or just ají, which is similar to an Italian pepper but smaller and narrower, with a unique taste all its own), cilantro, and onion, with lots of lemon juice, a bit of olive oil, and salt; eaten before a meal, slopped up with the small, everyday Chilean yeast breads; or slathered on whatever else one might be eating at the time. And there are many different versions: at a Brazilian restaurant in Las Condes, mango- and piña-based pebres, for example. Every pebre adds freshness, a taste of living-in-the-present, to the meal.

A morning's haul from the Feria Fluvial and a favorite bakery, Mi Pueblita, in Valdivia.

But, this year, I fell in love with the ají verde–based pebre, sin tomates.

(1) At a seafood restaurant in the Mercado Central in Santiago: Chilean peppers, finely chopped, along with equally finely chopped onion and cilantro, flavored with lots of lemon juice, salt, and a little olive oil, and then slopped up with bread ahead of eel soup, caldio de cóngrio, the dish Pablo Neruda celebrated with an ode.

(2) At Café Hausmann, the minuscule German café where the Valdivian specialty, crudos, is king: a smashed layer of raw, deep-red, sweet, grass-fed beef on a thin piece of white yeast bread, topped with a bit of raw onion and, then, for Chileans, slathered with a healthy squeeze of fresh lemon juice (if one can say “slathered” about lemon juice), and a bit of salt. A dollop of their pepper pebre adds a delicious sharpness to the crudos. This is a pebre made of Chilean peppers, maybe a bit of onion, very pale green overall, with some salt, lemon juice, olive oil, and nothing else. No tomato, not even cilantro. A travesty, possibly, if you love the tomato-based pebre, but nevertheless delicious.

(3) At Eduardo’s aunt Kika’s in Barrio Ñuñoa in Santiago for lunch: chopped Chilean peppers, garlic (no onion), cilantro, lemon juice, salt. Yet another variation.

When I tried making versions of this pebre myself, on New Year’s, at Lucy’s, at our hostal on Pérez Rosales, it was initially, invariably, much too hot. The Chilean ají verde peppers vary in hotness but usually fall in the middle range, like Anaheims or New Mexican green chilies here, but they seemed to take on extra hotness initially in the pebre. However, after sitting for a time, the juices of the peppers are drawn out by the salt, and the taste softens and ripens to a delicious, sweeter, more gentle hotness. Fantastic and addictive. Here’s a recipe for the United States:

Pebre Verde

2 Anaheim peppers (or 1 Italian green pepper and 1 jalapeño), seeds removed
¼ to ½ of a large, sweet onion (or 2-3 cloves garlic instead)
½ to all the juice of a lemon
¼ to ½ c. chopped cilantro (optional)
1 T. olive oil
plenty of salt to taste

Slice the peppers as finely as possible. Then rotate the cut strips 90º and chop again, to make very fine dice. Do the same with the onion. The amount of onion is entirely dependent on your taste; I like to chop a pile about as big as the pile of peppers. Squeeze the lemon and add juice along with pulp. Add chopped cilantro, or not; both versions have their virtues. Add the olive oil and salt. The salt draws out the pepper juice, which is really the essential taste of pebre. Enjoy with chips or bread or on potatoes or omelets, or with any other food.

Note: The more traditional tomato-y pebre includes 1 medium or 2 small ripe tomatoes, very finely chopped, and about half as much pepper. It's a juicier pebre, and the cilantro is probably not optional.

—Jane

OCHO/ Nuevas Comidas (New Foods)

Each new food we taste adds two weeks to our lives.
—Japanese saying

Damascos. The biggest, most perfect damascos (apricots) I’ve ever seen or eaten, from the Mercado Central in Santiago. I ate them for breakfast three days straight along with smashed avocado on fresh bread and coffee—is there a better breakfast? And between meals, apricots with perfect English walnuts from the same fruit stall. At home, I’ve eaten as many fresh apricots as I can manage. Some years, we get small, local apricots here at the Ithaca farmer’s market. But I’ve never had enough. So, even though the apricots I ate in Santiago don’t qualify as a “new” food for me, each one added weeks of color and satisfaction to my life.

Inside the Mercado Central in Santiago.

Lúcuma. One day in Santiago, our favorite fruit lady at the mercado had a box of fat, dark-brown fruit, about tangerine size, sitting out front. So I asked her what they were: fresh lúcuma. My first encounter with lúcuma was in the form of lúcuma helado (ice cream), a large scoop filling the center of a half-cantaloupe, the stunning dessert Eduardo’s mother, Jenny Cavalieri, served each of us in Curicó on our first visit to Chile in 2004 when we met Eduardo’s family. The maple-y taste of the ice cream combines energetically with that of cantaloupe. Lúcuma ice cream is often made with walnuts as well: lúcuma y nueces. And lúcuma is used to flavor the cream layer in tortas and kuchens.

But I had never seen the actual fruit before; we must have missed the window of lúcuma season on previous trips. So, I asked the fruit lady what they taste like. Without speaking, she chose one, held it under my nose for a sniff—a faintly tropical smell—then pulled it apart to reveal the startling pale, golden-orange flesh. The texture looked dry, stringy almost, like the inside of a squash, but obviously much softer since it pulled right apart. She gestured for me to take a bite. The taste is not sweet but not tart either, almost neutral on the sweetness scale. I thought of mild squash, but that seemed odd, and I wasn’t sure I liked it. But then I took another bite, and hints of vanilla washed in, and other mysterious fragrances I can’t yet name. Now I liked it very much and ate the rest.


Ojos. The blackest cerezas (cherries) I’ve ever seen, from the Feria Fluvial (riverside fish-fruit-vegetable market) in Valdivia. Even the darkest bing cherries I’ve eaten before were actually dark purple with flecks of lighter red-purple. These ojos are really almost black, another significant notch darker than bings. Ojos means “eyes,” and most Chilean eyes are very dark, so the name makes sense. They taste like the cherriest bing cherries ever, a more concentrated cherry taste, like a food some great chef might come up with, although in this case the chef is nature and horticulture working together.

Nectarines, smashed avocado on bread, and coffee for breakfast.

Durazno-plátanos. The words mean, literally, “peach-bananas,” but these are pale-colored nectarines. Very juicy and fragrant, with an added tropical banana flavor. I had previously eaten “only” duraznos (yellow peaches), exquisite nectarines (Chileans don’t have a separate word for nectarine), and conserveros (paler canning peaches, what we would call white peaches). What a delicious array!

Peruvian food. On the eve of Lucy and Eduardo’s first wedding anniversary, the four of us walked to a highly recommended Peruvian restaurant, La Calesa, in an elegant, pumpkin-colored building on General Lagos near downtown Valdivia.

La Calesa serves an excellent pisco sour, the classic Chilean drink: fresh lemon juice, pisco (Chilean brandy), and powdered sugar topped with whipped egg white. If you click on the upper photo to enlarge it, you can see to the left of the lawn chair a stunning, several-years'-old rosemary plant. Smell that?

The restaurant is small and by-reservation-only, and it has two season-dependent seating locations: indoor winter rooms with 15-foot tall ceilings and Peruvian appliquéd wall hangings, and the summer terrace and garden overlooking the river at sunset.


Of course, we sat outside, despite the cooling evening air and eventual darkness. A two- or three-year-old boy and a cat (both belonging to the owners, I imagine) roamed the garden and terrace during dinner. By the time our food arrived, the sun had set, and I couldn’t make out all the different mariscos in my spicy mixed seafood over rice, but they were delicious. Unfortunately, none of us knew to order the classic Peruvian dish, Ají de Gallina. But we did get a first taste of delicious Peruvian spice mixtures, and it will not be the last. I have already ordered a Peruvian cookbook; so far, what I’ve learned is that the base for their spice mixtures is the Peruvian ají—a yellow-orange pepper.

Iranian food. Lucy, Eduardo, Michael, and I were invited for dinner by a Bahá’í Iranian family. Both parents are teachers who met in the United States before moving to Chile, and they speak fluent Farsi, English, and Spanish. The housing development in Valdivia where they live is clean but visually boring. The inside of their small house, though, is decorated with colorful, delicate Iranian art and fabrics. Their two sons study guitar and piano with Eduardo. We ate a multicultural meal together: pilaf—rice with saffron and, from the bottom of the rice pot, darkly browned slices of potato; a spicy lamb and tomato main dish (topped with French fries—an adaptation to make Iranian food attractive to teenagers?); the typical Chilean tomato salad (peeled and sliced tomatoes, slices of onion, lots of lemon juice, salt); pebre verde (green Chilean pepper salsa); and for dessert a tray piled with slices of sandía (watermelon).

Muchos tipos de pescados y mariscos en el Mercado Central, en Santiago.

Pescada. The “ordinary” fish (pescado) Kika cooked for us, her favorite. Poached with peppers, onion, garlic, and served with Chilean tomato salad (minus the onion), pebre verde, Chilean rice, jugo durazno, and sandía for dessert.

Merquén pizza. In Barrio Belles Artes in Santiago, we found a small Italian-style pizza café, Verace, that serves a Chilean/Italian pizza with a very thin, chewy crust, a thin layer of mild tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese, and a sprinkling of merquén. Merquén (also merkén) has a slightly smoky taste, like chipotles, and I use it at home on anything with avocados, potatoes, or eggs. And I have now added pizza to that list.

I had assumed merquén was made from Chilean ají verde chiles, ripened to red, then dried, smoked, and crumbled. But in The Chilean Kitchen, Ruth Van Waerebeek-Gonzalez calls it a spice mixture from southern Chile made with ají cacho de cabra—maybe this is the larger, dark-red, dried chile I’ve seen in the mercados? Her recipe, adapted for what’s available in the United States: 4 T. dried oregano, 2 T. ground coriander, 1 T. cayenne pepper. I have doubts about so much oregano, though, since the Chilean merquén looks and smells essentially like smoked red pepper.

Wikipedia en español describes merquén as an ancient Mapuche spice (the word merquén comes from Mapudungun, “merken” with a flat-line accent over the n) made from dried and smoked ají cacho de cabra, semillas de cilantro (which we call coriander), sal (salt), y otros especias (unnamed additional flavors). Ha! And a site about the mercado in Temuco (northeast of Valdivia) shows a photo of the ají cacho de cabra chiles—they are the dark-red ones! “Cacho de cabra” means a little bit or horn of the goat. Ah!—why didn’t I bring some home? Next time.

—Jane

SIETE/ Siestas (Naps)

At my age sleep takes you when you least expect it and never when it should. I mean at midnight, when you’re in your bed, which is just when the damn thing disappears or plays hard to get, and leaves old people wide awake.
—Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

We read out loud from The Savage Detectives in Chile, and I recognized the wakeful nights Bolaño’s character Amadeo describes (in the quote above) but not the “sleep takes you when you least expect it” part. However, that was about to change.

I haven’t been a daytime napper since the 1980s, when I stayed home with young children, so I was amazed to find myself happily falling asleep most afternoons on the trip, even in strange positions and in other people’s spaces: upper body slouched across Lucy’s couch with legs awkwardly propped on a wooden stool; flat on the floor at the beach house; on the sand at various beaches; in bed at our hostal in Valdivia right over the busy, noisy dining room at mid-day; sprawled on a bed in a small, very warm apartment in Santiago; on Eduardo’s aunt Kika’s bed.

Michael and I happily asleep on the floor of Roger and Magdalena's beach house, above the Playa de los Amorados.
—Photo by Lucy Engle.

It didn’t seem to matter where. I would be up and fine and doing things and then, early-to-mid-afternoon, it was as if small weights suddenly appeared and attached themselves to my arms, legs, eyelids, jaw, pulling me toward the horizontal, and I would think, “Oh, a nap would be good.” If I closed my eyes, three minutes later, I’d be out. Maybe for only fifteen minutes. Maybe for two hours. Sometimes when I woke up, the weights would still be exerting a downward pull, so I just let myself sink right back in again. Maybe for a few minutes. Maybe for another hour.

I have several theories.

(1) We were in the culture of siestas. Others were doing the same thing at that time, or had in the past, whether I saw them or not. Stores close in Chile between 1:00 or 1:30 in the afternoon until 3:00 or 3:30 or later. What are people doing during that time? Eating lunch, meeting a friend, having sex, taking a nap? The opening-back-up time for stores seems to vary from day to day, maybe because the storekeeper took a longer nap that day?

(2) It is exhausting to struggle day after day with hearing and speaking a new language. Maybe there are people who just get more energized from the task, but I’m not one of them—I find it tiring. It’s helpful to just let the whole project fall away regularly.


A view of sleepy leaves out the window of our bedroom in the cabaña on Lago Maihue.

(3) We were on vacation for five weeks, the longest Michael and I have taken time away together in at least thirty years, or maybe ever. We slept ten hours a night despite paper-thin walls at the hostal in Valdivia AND took naps, during summer. Although we had come from winter, when it’s natural to sleep more hours. We both experienced a flood of dreams, many per night often. And the dreams seemed to be constructed primarily from fresh, immediate, day-before materials—where we’d been, what we’d seen, how it felt in that recent moment—without many biographical threads. Maybe one is already halfway asleep, living in another language on a long vacation far from home. It’s a relief to live for a time outside the U.S.-influenced view of the world. And, it’s also another kind of relief to step out of one’s personal life and anxieties and established patterns. In Chile I’m more extroverted and more focused on the here and now, so long-term worries can move to the back burner.

Sometimes after waking up from a short nap, I’d test this new nap ability. I’d think, “Wow, I just fell hard asleep. Can I do it again?” So, I’d deepen my breathing and let go. And, bam! I’d fall back in and wake up some time later. Sometimes I tested it three or four times in a row, for fun. And it just kept working. Now the question is whether it was solely a long-foreign-vacation phenomenon. Or has the doorway into sleep been nudged open a little wider after a month in the southern Chilean summer?

—Jane

SEIS/ Views from a Santiago Apartment

I love the color of this building seen out our Avenida Mosqueto apartment window in Santiago de Chile. It's a summer morning in mid-December 2007, just before the solstice.

In the upper left of this photo you can see the green hut and the tile roof that appear in this next photo:

A little complex of roof and wall angles. There is a Chilean palm among the trees in the nearby Parque Forrestal. Childishly, I imagine living in the hut with that large stovepipe sticking up from the roof. Staying warm by a wood stove in the chilly winter. Note: no central heating in most Santiago buildings. Wood heat would be very lovely on a gray day.

Leaning out the window a bit and looking further to the right, I see the hills north of the city in the background. Nearer on the right is a little part of the roof of the Museo de Bellas Artes with an interesting ornamental object projecting from the top.

A little lower down and back to the left is this little apt:


Further left, facing northwest:

I love the Chilean palm tree shadow splashed on the red roof. I see various types of construction in this photo: the stone building on the left (a common type downtown), the mortared bricks in the nearer buildings, and the pale mauve brick apartment building on the right. Someone has added a nice penthouse porch to this building. Now look at the parallel curving shadows cast on the corrugated metal roof in the far lower right corner.

I believe that shadow is cast by one of these railings on this apartment building.

No need for a clothes dryer in the Santiago summer. The dry air quickly sucks the moisture out of your wet clothes. And you!

Oops. I was wrong about that shadow. It comes from the patio railing at the very bottom center. I can just see the corrugated metal roof at the lower left. How about that honker black chimney/flue thingy just beyond the patio wall! At the upper left I see a closer view of the penthouse porch I mentioned earlier. And I notice, if I click on the photo to enlarge it, that this building does appear to be brick.


I must have fallen asleep. It's late afternoon already and the sun is in the west. The city air is cooling down. Siesta is over. The streets are beginning to fill with walkers. The best time of a summer day in Santiago is just beginning. Time to head to a café for jugo de frambuesa!

—Michael

CINCO/ Mimos y Malabaristas (Mimes and Jugglers)

Cada uno da lo que recibe
y luego recibe lo que da,
nada es más simple,
no hay otra norma:
nada se pierde,
todo se transforma.
(Each one gives that which he receives
and then receives that which he gives,
nothing is more simple,
it’s really okay,
nothing gets lost,
everything is changed.)
—Jorge Drexler, “Todo Se Transforma”

As Michael, Lucy, and I walked in Barrio Bellas Artes one warm evening in Santiago, suddenly many more people filled the street, all walking in the same direction. So we followed. There, in front of el Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, two mimes were performing in the street, in the middle of six lanes of one-way traffic.

We had seen mimes before in Chile. They wear white face paint and dress in a Charlie Chaplin style. They tend to be smallish young men and are always very slender and fit. I haven’t yet seen a female mime. Some mimes remain silent; some “whistle” word-like sounds through a tiny kazoo inside their mouths, adding a tonal commentary to their performances.

A favorite mime performs in the early evening along one side of Santiago’s huge main square, la Plaza de Armas, where a block-long bench provides seating for spectators. He has a few props—a suitcase, cane, hat—but only resorts to them when the preferred prop—unsuspecting pedestrians who happen to walk onto the “stage”—isn’t available at the moment. He propositions young women, luring them away from their companions. He gets down on one knee to propose marriage. He mimics peoples’ mannerisms, gestures to the audience at the largeness of a woman’s rear end, and exaggerates a businessman’s determined stride. He even steals babies in strollers from their parents.

It’s tricky to photograph a mime, because getting close enough for a good picture means you risk becoming part of the show. So watch out! This is the mime in la Plaza de Armas, Santiago.

A mime aims his worst mockery at those who resist or ignore him. One evening we watched him engage a small, elderly woman walking slowly along the plaza with the help of two arm-gripping canes. First, he mimicked her slow, stilting walk. He might have stopped there. But she turned to scowl at him, and the movement lifted one of her crutches somewhat. So, he jerked in fear, as if she had threatened him. She rolled her eyes, and he scolded her for the threat. She continued to frown and press onward, trying to get past him. So, now, he moved way ahead and pretended to pull her along by an invisible rope, pausing to check his watch and tap a foot in frustration at her slow progress. She still continued to frown and, next, he joined her, walking alongside very chummily as if they were now close acquaintances. As she—finally!—passed beyond the stage, he gestured a grand goodbye, as if to an illustrious friend. “Wow,” I thought, “making fun of a handicapped, elderly woman in public, it doesn’t get a whole lot more transgressive than that.”

Michael and Lucy were recruited by this same mime:

On my 2005 visit to Santiago, Lucy and I walked out of the Paseo Estado and into the mime’s territory in the Plaza de Armas. One minute we were having a lively conversation with each other, anonymous in a crowd, and then suddenly there were no more people around us. Where did they all go? Uh oh. We were alone on a stage with a short, white-faced man, being watched by him and a lot of other people. I felt helpless. Was I being taken advantage of by the mime? Was it dangerous? I had to make a quick decision. (As Babar says, “Three seconds in which to act—and no gun!”) I decided to play along. I felt an attraction to give in to the show, to accept being made fun of. I don’t remember what happened next. I sorta passed out. When I woke up, the mime was releasing us to the sidelines. I felt a little foolish and a lot of relief. In retrospect, I see that working with defensiveness and resistance is the mime’s trade. He makes fun of you and, if you resist, he makes fun of your resistance. It’s useless to try to escape: I once saw him jump onto the back of a fast-moving bicycle in order to engage the rider: the mime engages everyone who enters his space.
—Michael

Children always sit in front at the mime shows, fascinated and laughing uncontrollably. The mime acts out what we are forbidden to do, and children love it. Sometimes, they get up and race toward the mime and then back to their watching parents, as if on a dare. They breathe a visible sigh of relief as they sit back down again, having survived proximity to a fire without getting burned. Sometimes they’re drawn more slowly toward the mime. A powerful, hypnotic magnet appears to pull them; they can’t resist it. He, in turn, receives them happily, uses them as assistants or in brief skits, and afterward turns them loose again. Whew!

The first time we saw a mime working in traffic was in Valdivia, alongside the main Plaza de la República, with the crowd gathered on either side of the street. We were astonished that such a thing is allowed. The mime stepped in front of cars to stop them and make the drivers wait, he pulled objects out of the back of a pick-up truck before dropping them back in, and he even hitched a ride for a few seconds on a truck bumper. Drivers looked as if they felt annoyed at being made to wait—the alternative was to risk running over the mime—but they tried to keep their cool, while the kids in the audience howled.

The two mimes working together in front of el Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago went a significant notch further, though. Maybe it seemed this way, in part, because we were sitting on the museum steps and could look down across the full depth of the stage. They danced between lanes, keeping an eye on the traffic flow. I found myself imagining bullfighters. The mimes stretched out flat on the roadway at times, keeping cars waiting, making cars stop, start, stop, according to their whim, then stepping deftly aside to let one pass. When the red light at the next intersection halted traffic, the mimes would climb into the back seat of a car and gesture for the driver to get going, which of course he couldn’t do. They exited one car waving women’s lacy underwear, scolding the driver, even sniffing the underpants in an act of mock outrage. And all this in six lanes of active traffic.

When I stopped laughing, I realized with a shiver that mimes working in the street really are like bullfighters. They are small and slender and fit because they have to be in order to stay alive. We get to feel temporarily heroic with them, but from the safety of our seats.

That same evening, after the mimes ended and moved on, a payaso (clown) set up in front of the museum for a show of jokes and magic tricks. He also juggled and did something I don’t have a word for, even in English, a kind of slithering of three-to-six transparent “glass” balls (silicon or acrylic plastic?) of various sizes over and under one finger after another, which made them look magically, eerily alive. Then he balanced the clear balls on a series of body parts—knee, elbow, finger, ear—and finally on the top of his head. I thought of a line from Tomie dePaola’s The Clown of God, “… and now for the sun in the heavens!”

We watched a lithe, Asian-looking woman juggle flaming sticks at the intersection in front of cars stopped for each red light. In growing twilight, the juggling sticks circled high in the air like fireworks. She aimed to end each sequence just before the light turned green. Then another juggler, a male apprentice, took her place as she instructed and corrected his routine between red lights.

Other jugglers practiced with balls on a sidewalk next to the museo. One young man kept seven balls in the air, over and over, for maybe an hour of quick repetitions—mostly very successful. Then he teamed up with a young woman: First, the man stretched out horizontal on the pavement. Next, the woman—holding three juggling clubs—placed her pointed toes in his hands. Together he lifted and she jumped so that she now stood on and was held in the air by his vertical arms. From there, she began to juggle the clubs. The attempts didn’t always work—so many angles and positions needed to be just right—but when they did it was an impressive sight, a confabulation of dance/acrobatics/juggling.

We never found out why so many street performers were out that night, maybe something to do with Santiago a Mil, the month-long summer theater festival in the city. Even though it was a Sunday night, children of all ages stayed out late with their parents, enjoying this playful, art-filled evening. The arts are more visible in everyday Chilean life than here in the United States. Every Chilean seems to play music or sing or dance or paint or write or act. What a treat to happen upon art.

—Jane