A Long Petal of the Sea (Book Review)

In 1939, as the Spanish Civil War wound down, thousands of refugees fled across the border into France—which then confined tens of thousands in a deplorable detention camp at d'Argelès-sur-Mer. In partial response, poet Pablo Neruda—also a diplomat—chartered the French cargo vessel Winnipeg to carry 2,200 Spanish refugees across the Atlantic and through the Panama Canal to his homeland of Chile where, despite isolated episodes of xenophobia, they integrated themselves into local society.

Chartered by Pablo Neruda, the French freighter Winnipeg carried Spanish refugees to Chile.

That’s the historical background for Isabel Allende’s latest novel, A Long Petal of the Sea, which becomes a tale of exile and adaptation that includes several larger-than-life figures, most notably Neruda himself but also the late President Salvador Allende (Isabel’s father’s cousin) and the notorious Augusto Pinochet (mentioned only in passing). Some characters are fictionalized versions of historical figures, such as pianist Roser Bruguera, clearly based on the painter Roser Bru (who turned 98 in February).

Isabel Allende's novel focuses on one exceptional refugee family.

Bruguera is one focus of a complex family story that melds with an equally complex political history that involves her going into exile, with her husband Víctor Dalmau, from Pinochet’s dictatorship. Allende is especially good at depicting the intrigues and obstacles her characters must navigate, including neighborhood informants, imprisonment, intra-familiar conflicts that tore many Chileans apart, and the disruptions of exile.

The first Spanish refugees would have passed through Arica's customs house (now a cultural center).

Being a geographer, I try to be alert to people and place, and I found one unfortunate error. I expected that, after the Winnipeg passed through the Panama Canal, it would go directly to Valparaíso, whence the refugees would proceed to Santiago and elsewhere in the densely populated heartland. As it happened, though, the ship made a stop in the northern port of Arica, a city I know well, where Chilean officials met the vessel and some of the passengers came ashore to stay.

The nitrate port of Pisagua was the northernmost point on Chile's contiguous rail network.

Allende, though, claims the officials arrived by train, but the northern Chilean railroad network, developed to help exploit the Atacama Desert’s nitrate deposits, never reached Arica—the most northerly major station was in the port of Iquique, roughly 200 km to the south (though there was a smaller station in the nitrate port of Pisagua, only about 125 km to the south). It might have been possible to reach Arica by rail at this time, but that would have involved a roundabout route via Buenos Aires and slow trains to northwestern Argentina and then Bolivia, where the Ferrocarril Arica-La Paz connected the two countries. Given the time, distances, and often contentious relations between Bolivia and Chile, it’s unlikely that anyone would have taken this route and, as it happens, there were flights from Santiago to Arica as early as 1929.

Oficina Chacabuco was the camp where Víctor Dalmau was presumably imprisoned. 

Allende describes, but does not specifically identify, the location where her protagonist Dalmau “ended up at a camp for saltpeter miners in the north that had been abandoned for decades and was now converted into a prison.” That description fits Oficina Chacabuco, about 100 km northeast of the port city of Antofagasta, which is now a national monument and in situ museum that I’ve visited several times. She also offers a plausible description of the Dalmaus’ ostensible rural retreat, outside Santiago, when they return from exile in Venezuela.

 

All in all, Allende’s novel is a rewarding read that provides an insider’s view of refugees, immigrants, and the contributions they make to their new countries—with lessons for countries still including Chile and, of course, the United States (where Allende now makes her home).

                                                                          

  

Neruda & His Daughter

This mosaic in Santiago's Bellavista neighborhood suggests the reverence in which Chileans hold Pablo Neruda.

As a Nobel Prize-winning poet, Pablo Neruda is revered in Chile—even by many who abhorred his outspoken Communist politics. His literary and political fame, though, overshadowed what was often a messy personal life, a topic that Dutch poet Hagar Peeters tackles in her first novel, Malva, named for the handicapped daughter that Neruda neglected during her short lifetime.

Malva is Dutch poet Hagar Peeters' first novel.

Born in Madrid in 1934 to Neruda and his first wife Marijke Antonieta Hagenaar Vogelzang (known as Maruca), whom he met while serving in a diplomatic post in the Dutch East Indies, Malva Marina Trinidad del Carmen Reyes suffered from hydrocephalus. She died in 1942, spending most of her life with a foster family in the Netherlands after Neruda ignored her and her mother took what jobs she could after their 1936 divorce. Half that time was during the Nazi occupation of Holland, when birth defects denoted genetic inferiority at best.

Peeters tells Malva’s story through a sort of magical realism, with Neruda’s daughter as an omniscient post-mortem observer who, in the afterlife, acquaints herself with the children of other creative fathers who neglected their offspring: James Joyce’s schizophrenic daughter Lucia, Arthur Miller’s son Daniel (born with Down syndrome), and, oddly, Günter Grass’s fictional dwarf Oskar Matzerath of his novel The Tin Drum.

After the 1973 coup, the Chilean military vandalized Neruda's Santiago home, which is now a museum.

Neruda may have been a neglectful parent, but there’s a bit of autobiography in Peeters’ account, as her own father spent extended periods in South America during the tumultuous 1970s (Neruda died, and may have been murdered, less than two weeks after the military coup that overthrew President Salvador Allende in 1973). Born in 1972, Peeters acknowledges using her father’s diaries in reconstructing Neruda’s last days (as told by Malva). The account of Neruda’s funeral, in the house vandalized by the military, is especially eloquent.

According to Peeters, in fact, “Any resemblances between Neruda and my father, Maruca and my mother, and Malva and myself are entirely and mischievously deliberate.” In the end, there's an ambivalent admiration for them all.

Perla: a Novel

A couple weeks ago, I reviewed Roberto Ampuero’s The Neruda Case, about the final days of poet Pablo Neruda around the time of the 1973 coup against Chile’s constitutional president Salvador Allende Gossens. Translator Carolina de Robertis, a fellow Oaklander whom I have not yet met in person, provided me review copies of Ampuero’s book and her own novel Perla, which deals with the aftermath of Argentina’s 1976-83 “Dirty War” against “subversives” who were often brutally kidnapped and executed by coup-mongers such as General Jorge Rafael Videla.

Videla made the news again this week, as a federal court in Buenos Aires sentenced him to 50 years in prison for plotting the theft of babies from political prisoners and their subsequent “adoption” by supporters of the coup. The events in question took place at the Escuela Mecánica de la Armada (pictured above), the naval engineering school that was one of the regime’s most notorious detention and torture sites. It is now a museum, open to the public, where visitors can see the cell where pregnant detainees gave birth to children most of them never saw again.

The exact date when the novel takes place is unclear, but the title character Perla, a young woman in suburban Buenos Aires, has a surprise guest – a sopping wet young man who can only nourish himself with water - while her Argentine family (a naval officer and his wife) are on vacation in Punta del Este (Uruguay). As happens, Perla’s parents (whom she is due to join across the River Plate) were directly involved in the trafficking of Dirty War babies.  In the tradition of magical realism, as the ghostly figure’s presence becomes more tangible – it’s also worth noting the naval “death flight” pilot Adolfo Scilingo is a family friend – Perla has to confront truths she’d rather avoid. Just as Argentina has had to confront figures like Videla, who is already serving a lengthy prison sentence for other Dirty War crimes.

Argentina has dealt with this theme cinematically, in the Oscar-winning film The Official Story (1985), and in many non-fiction books, but Perla appears to be the first to grapple with it in fiction. One of the book’s protagonists is Perla’s crusading journalist boyfriend, to whom she eventually returns when the issue of her origins becomes too difficult to face alone. In the end, De Robertis, who hails from Uruguay via Europe, has written an absorbing novel, in elegant language, that leaves an enduring impression on the reader.

The Southern Cone Stay List: Commentary & Critique

Several months ago, the editors at National Geographic Traveler asked me to submit nominations for their 2011 Stay List that, for the first time, would include the best hotels in South America. That list finally came out, in the magazine’s April issue, and include three of the five that I nominated: Argentina’s Cavas Wine Lodge and Chile’s Lodge at Valle Chacabuco and Ecocamp Patagonia. They declined to include Argentina’s Rincón del Socorro and Chile’s Hotel Indigo, though I personally consider them superior to some others that did make the list, and would still recommend them enthusiastically.

I won’t critique the entire list here, but I have a few observations on some places that I know well and a couple others that I’d like to get to know better. Among those that made the Chile list, I would heartily endorse San Pedro de Atacama’s Hotel Awasi, an eight-room gem (pictured above) that’s so inconspicuous as to be nearly invisible despite its mid-village location. I’m less impressed with Explora’s nearby Hotel de Larache, on San Pedro’s outskirts, a 50-room monolith that dominates the landscape, has surprisingly small rooms, and indulges itself with four swimming pools in an area where every drop of water is precious. Under the same Explora ownership, in Parque Nacional Torres del Paine, the Hotel Salto Chico is a true luxury hotel that fits far better into the landscape - few visitors to the park are even aware it’s there, even as they pass within a few hundred meters on the nearby road.

In Santiago, the best new accommodations is The Aubrey, which has turned two neglected properties into a charming boutique hotel around the corner from the late poet Pablo Neruda’s landmark residence, which is now a museum. In the Colchagua valley wine district, the Residence Lapostolle overlooks its own vineyards and contains a unique gravity-fed winery where every grape is chosen individually to produce a single premium vintage. The photo below shows the lobby and restaurant building; its four suites are free-standing structures mostly hidden from view.

I have no quibbles with anything on NGT’s Argentina list, but with the caveat that anyone expecting to enjoy the rooms at Estancia Villa María (pictured below), an elaborate Tudor-style mansion on sprawling grounds outside Buenos Aires, should do so soon. Within the next few years, some of its former pastures will become a real estate development with a new hotel, and the current accommodations will become a clubhouse for golfers, riders, polo players and tennis players (under the auspices of Argentine tennis legend Guillermo Vilas).

On the Argentine side of the Andes, Finca Adalgisa hasn’t gotten the press that Cavas has, but Gabriela Furlotti runs an intimate 11-room winery hotel in the Mendoza suburb of Chacras de Coria; the grapes come from its own vines, with the production overseen by local legend Carmelo Patti. In northern Patagonia, after marrying into an Anglo-Argentine family, Londoner Jane Williams of Estancia Huechahue turned herself into a gaucha who leads hard-riding horseback trips through the backcountry of Neuquén province. To the south, on the outskirts of San Carlos Bariloche, the Aldebarán Hotel & Spa has huge rooms on a quiet peninsular isolation with spectacular views of Parque Nacional Nahuel Huapi.

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Poetic License (Real Estate Division)

Chile’s Nobel Prize poet Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) may have been a committed Communist, but that didn’t keep him from enjoying bourgeois comforts - including spacious, idiosyncratic homes in the capital city of Santiago, the beach community of Isla Negra, and the port city of Valparaíso. Today, all three of them are open to public visits under the auspices of the Fundación Neruda, a non-profit that controls the poet’s legacy. In the absence of official statistics, I would guess that Santiago’s “La Chascona” (pictured below) is the most visited, followed by Isla Negra and Valparaíso’s “La Sebastiana.”

That’s a pity because, in at least one sense, La Sebastiana is the best of the bunch, the place where visitors can feel the poet’s presence most closely. Because demand is so high at La Chascona and Isla Negra (pictured below), visiting them means taking an organized, even regimented, tour. At La Sebastiana, by contrast, visitors are free to roam around the five-storey house, just as Neruda’s own guests might have done (the poet was legendary for his hospitality and informality).

High in the hills, La Sebastiana (pictured below, courtesy of nostalgiaportena) may have been Neruda’s favorite, if only because of the scenic port city’s own informality and spontaneity. Valparaíso, he wrote, “grabbed me, she subjected to her will, to her absurdity: Valparaíso is a mess, a cluster of crazy houses.” On the slopes of Cerro Bellavista, with a view to the harbor, it was an ideal site for watching the city’s legendary New Year’s Eve fireworks, but it’s nevertheless a more orderly place today.

So orderly is La Sebastiana, in fact, that it has recently opened a 2,500-volume library specializing in Chilean poetry, including Neruda’s own works, those of fellow Nobel Laureate Gabriela Mistral, and lesser known figures - to non-Chileans at least - such Vicente Huidobro and Pablo de Rokha. For literary pilgrims, La Sebastiana bids to become an even more obligatory stop on the tourism circuit.

Meanwhile, Valparaíso got another shot in the arm with the announcement that the UNESCO World Heritage Foundation will provide a grant of some US$140 million to repair damage from February’s massive earthquake (which, however, hit other cities, such as Talca and Concepción, much harder). Valparaíso has been a World Heritage Site since 2003, and the money will go to repair and rebuild “culturally significant buildings” that were damaged in the quake. Unfortunately, Valpo didn’t get all the money it had hoped for but, at the very least, it’s a good start.