Las cosas son simples. No sé diseñar, yo invento todo, y todo el mundo puede hacerlo. (These are simple things. I don’t think about designing, I invent everything, and anyone can do it.)
—Violeta Parra
Our last full day in Santiago, Michael and Lucy and I started out at an underground museum, el Centro Cultural Palacio la Moneda. It’s located under a sweep of grass and walkways, the Plaza de la Ciudadanía, on the back side of Chile’s presidential palace, la Moneda. Current Chilean presidents no longer live there, but it remains the central governmental building. Expensive cars line up along the plaza, motors running, their drivers waiting for some important person to emerge from la Moneda. Although an eerie, dark olive-green van with a riot squad inside also sits, all day, alongside the palace, la Moneda’s tall wooden doors stand open, guarded by a handful of elegant soldiers—no automatic weapons in sight.
On the stairway down into the museum, we dropped, step by step, from bright, yellow summer heat into the coolness of a cave. A wall of water spills over white stone along the stairway, replacing the loud hum of traffic, construction, and urban energy with a stillness and reflective shadows. Inside the museum, signage is sparse—what a relief! Skylights flood the concrete-colored space with gray-blue light. The central hall is maybe three stories tall, but everything about the place—joists, walkways, pillars, benches, glass partitions—emphasizes horizontal rather than vertical lines. I felt as though I had dropped down into a lake and was floating there, looking around.
We went that day to see a specific exhibit, Obra Visual de Violeta Parra, on the visual art of Violeta Parra. She is best known for her music and for reviving Chilean folk music in the 1950s and 60s. But she was also a prolific artist. Her images—in large embroidered wall hangings, oil paintings, and papier mâché reliefs—are fantastic and alive. Birds emerge from the fret ends of guitars, flowers grow from people’s heads, the dead and the living intermingle, and household objects open their throats to join in the singing. Something in her loose representation of human beings seems to suggest that we’re no more important than every other kind of thing in the world. The pairing up of surrealism with intense color reminds me of Hildegard of Bingen’s art. The two have some surprising overlaps: twelfth-century German abbess, artist, author, poet, activist, visionary, and composer; twentieth-century Chilean musician, composer, singer, social activist, visionary. And these two women artists so distant in time, somehow, also mirror Native North American images, designs, and sand paintings—an impossible-to-explain series of juxtapositions.
You can hear Violeta Parra performing a song—her voice is reminiscent of Joan Baez’s—with some of her artwork in the background at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJ9CeICphL8. For just artwork, go to: http://www.ccplm.cl//index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=72&Itemid=4; the artwork is small but gets a little larger when you single-click on each piece.
We emerged hungry and thirsty from the museum and ambled slowly in dry 90º heat through the downtown paseos to sit outside at a favorite café in Barrio Lastarria for almuerzo (lunch): jugos naturales (of course, Michael had a frambuesa), iced coffee, and cooling salads. Two days before, we had stumbled upon a French film crew on this same block along Avenida Merced. We watched them film several takes: first, they stopped traffic, then the dozen-or-so actors unfroze and moved through the brief scene as a camera rolled down the street on a makeshift cart, focusing on a young woman with short red hair. I asked in my limited Spanish what movie this was. A crew member explained in his limited, French-accented Spanish that it was a commercial for a French optical chain. The “optical shop” had been set up across the street; our café had been a “charcuterie.” Today, the signs in French were gone, the optical shop was returned to an empty, peeling storefront, and our café served Chilean food again.
After lunch, we walked slowly back to our little departamento in Barrio Belles Artes and took naps. As we gradually returned to consciousness, which takes longer in the warm breeze from open windows than in air-conditioning, we watched the last third of a movie, Stranger than Fiction, in English with Spanish subtitles. By 4:00 pm or so, it felt safe to venture out again. Not because the air is any cooler yet, in fact the hottest part of the day is still ahead, but because one knows the heat will soon start to lose power and give way to yet another mild, blessedly cool Santiago evening.
Michael took off to climb Cerro Santa Lucía, a green hillside of trees, grass, walkways, and elegant European fountains rising up in the center of the city. On a clear day, one can see out to the snow-topped Andes. We planned to meet up again, along with Eduardo, for a free outdoor play, part of Santiago a Mil, the annual summer theater festival. This particular performance was by Arka, a theater group from Poland. Initially I was reluctant to attend—what language would the play be in? how would I understand it? But, maybe because we were close to the end of our visit, Michael and I decided to just go along and see what might happen.
Meanwhile, Lucy and I caught the subway to Barrio Quinta Normal and rambled back from there on foot, through a park and then through neighborhoods of old row houses. Many of the homes were run down, one even reeked of garbage and human waste, windows all broken out, after obvious abandonment by squatters. But the energy of renovation was clear: a handful of the houses, here and there, had been meticulously restored. Some of the streets are still gray cobblestones, and the stucco houses have beautiful, varied wooden windows and balconies, each a gem with great architectural bones. The area felt both unsettling and beautiful, all mixed up together.
As we ran out of time to meet Michael and Eduardo for the play, Lucy found a subway stop to get us back more quickly. We found Michael at the entrance to el Centro Cultural Palacio la Moneda, once again, which was just closing, and then we headed to the front side of the palace where the play would take place, in la Plaza de la Constitutión. Many people were already gathered, a multigenerational group, from tiny babies in strollers to old people.
The stage was confusing, as it looked wide but very shallow. The objects behind the stage were even stranger: tall, blackened window-frame shapes made out of metal pipe, and two huge ship-like objects, also made primarily out of metal pipe. I wondered what was going to happen. We made our way to the side and a little behind the stage, to take advantage of a rise in the pavement and some grass to sit on. Shortly after the 9:00 pm start time, the entire crowd in front of the stage suddenly stood up and crushed together, making room for even more people to stand there. Only later did we understand that the theater troupe must have instructed them to do this.
Eduardo arrived to join us, and the play started: a bride and groom, a wedding crowd, dancing, drinking, accompanied by blaring folk music. But the wedding scene was abruptly ended by a loud, fiery explosion. Scary, marauding intruders appeared. Then we saw the metal window frames set on fire, the stage split in two—the crowd roared!—and giant burning windows were pushed out into the crowd, as if a town was on fire in our midst. From that point on, successive props—some burning, many huge—were pushed, or seemed to drive themselves, repeatedly through the packed, standing crowd. People waved, cheered, and yelled in successions of fear, elation, or wonder. The language problem was solved by doing away with language; this was a theater of action and reaction.
What constituted the stage? The shallow ramp where a wedding feast began was broken open and expanded to include the entire audience space and, from our vantage point, la Moneda in the background. I thought of our own White House and wondered at the difference: here in Santiago a crowd of thousands thronged, roaring in the dark amid burning props, within a few yards of the presidential palace, and no one seemed to think it odd or unsafe.
In addition, la Moneda as a backdrop added specificity to the universal story of carnage that can take over ordinary life: it can happen anywhere, it can happen in Eastern Europe, it can happen here in Chile, it has happened here. We carry a visual memory of la Moneda itself on fire during the Pinochet take-over and Salvador Allende’s death inside. But, this night, the palace doors remained open. The play’s final, moving object—a huge ship “flying” through the crowd on scarlet dragon wings—seemed to symbolize the joyous return to civility after a time of barbarity. La Moneda’s wide-open doors communicated, in a more subdued way, a similar message.
Friends of Lucy and Eduardo’s also attended the play—Pedro and Evalina, a young Chilean-Polish couple—and we met up with them afterward. Evalina was carrying a large Polish flag (though she explained that she is not normally a flag-waver), and this had attracted other Polish playgoers and interactions with the actors.
It was late and a weeknight, but evening is Santiago at its best, so we decided to find an open restaurant for some more conversation and food. We walked along the side of Cerro Santa Lucía into a quiet residential cul-de-sac with two small, late-night cafés: Café Llave Baja (Cafe Low Key) and Café Oscura (Hidden Cafe), where we found a table. Michael and I felt proud to have discovered these secret spots on our last visit and even more pleased to be able to share them with locals!
We had met Pedro and Evalina before, at Lucy and Eduardo’s wedding. Now, we heard stories of their wedding in Poland. Before the ceremony, following Polish custom, Evalina had to put on a blindfold and find her groom among other young men by feeling their noses. “Fortunately,” she said, “Pedro has a distinctive Chilean nose, so it wasn’t too difficult.” Pedro had to locate his bride by identifying her knee. This was more challenging, but he succeeded with the help of his father-in-law, who held his arm to guide him from one woman to another and eventually hinted at the correct choice non-verbally. It sounds like a fairy-tale in which completing the impossible task depends on finding the right helper and accepting his or her help.
We shared jugos naturales together, our last Kunstmann beers of the visit, sandwiches, and empanadas. Sadly, the evening wound down—one doesn’t want those Santiago summer nights to ever end—and we all wandered home to bed and to sleep. As I drifted off, I felt rejuvenated—washed—by the easy proximity of Chilean art, culture, music, storytelling, theater, and history. It doesn’t feel like work, there, remembering the connection.
Las cosas son simples. No sé diseñar, yo invento todo, y todo el mundo puede hacerlo. (These are simple things. I don’t think about designing, I invent everything, and anyone can do it.)
—Violeta Parra
I want to keep on remembering.
—Jane
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