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