Canto Chileno: Valpo!

Last week, I went to the port city of Valparaiso with my roommate Veronica (Vero) and her friends Genero and Eduardo. We woke up early in the morning, before dawn, to take the bus out of Santiago. The city is lovely at that hour – cool and clear and empty.

In fact, Valparaiso (or Valpo, as it’s known) was itself a nice respite from the ninety-plus weather in Santiago. Santiago is a heat trap, located in an interior valley and nearly surrounded by mountains. It gets hot here by about ten in the morning and doesn’t cool off until very late at night/early in the morning, and the temperature drop then is slight. No one has air conditioning and even fans are rare. Electricity rates go up substantially in the summer so people make an effort to conserve electricity.

But Valpo, like coastal cities in California, is fogged in until afternoon in the summers. We spent the day on Monday exploring the hills of Valparaiso, which are accessible through a series of rickety old ascensores, or elevator lifts. The city is known for its colorful houses on the hills, bohemian culture, left-wing politics and the port. We explored the windy streets on the hills, regarded the graffiti and stencil art, had seafood at the market, and took a boat ride around the port.

I got in trouble with my Chilean friends for remarking that the famous port was “chiquitito” (really little) because my concept of a port is the gargantuan industrial complex of Oakland or Long Beach. It became a running joke for the rest of the day: Vero would say “Mire, el gran puerto de Valparaiso!. . . y entonces la gringa dice ‘pero es muy chiquitito!’” (Look, the great port of Valparaiso!. . . and then the gringa says, but it’s so little!)

The second running joke was Vero proposing (in English) “Let’s go to the candy shop!” before we headed to any site. Apparently, this was one of the phrases she remembered the most clearly from her English classes growing up. I explained that we don’t even really have candy shops in the U.S., which made it all the more entertaining. And for anyone who has ever laughed at the inordinate number of “Marias”, “Joses” and “Juans” populating our Spanish textbooks, English textbooks in Chile are chock-full of “Billys”, “Susies” and “Sallys”.

I stayed over at a youth hostel that night because I wanted to visit La Sebastiana, the home of Pablo Neruda in Valparaiso. Neruda has three homes that are open to the public in Chile. La Sebastiana was his “Casa en el Aire”, or house in the air. It is narrow four-story home on the top of a hill that does indeed feel as though it’s floating above the city. Neruda was a prolific collector, and all of homes are full of beautiful shells, antique maps, paintings, and pottery, among other things gathered from around the world.

The next day, I visited La Chascona, Neruda’s home in Santiago (in Barrio Bellavista). “Chascon(a)” is a Quechua word meaning messy hair. It was named after Matilde, Neruda’s lover and later wife, who had a shock of curly, messy red hair. The main house is designed to feel like a ship, with wood-paneled walls, circular windows, and low ceilings, while another part feels like a tree house. Neruda loved the sea, but hated sailing (he suffered from seasickness), so he preferred a ship on the ground, or homes near the sea. La Chascona is the house Neruda lived in when he was a senator. During the dictatorship (and after his death), Matilde used the house as a secret meeting place for young, left-wing artists.

Both homes include plenty of space for entertaining. Neruda loved people and had many famous friends (including Gabriel Garcia Lorca and Picasso, from his time in Spain). He loved to laugh and wouldn’t allow his guests to be too serious. Visiting his homes, you get a sense of his good-humor and joie de vivre. You also begin to understand his appreciation of natural beauty, which he translated into verse.