Travels in a Thin Country by Sara Wheeler Read Free Book Online

stopped the jeep in order to get the dictionary out of the back, but I had left it under my camp bed. When he got back in, he shut his foot in the door.
    At Nama we parked outside a small, newish bungalow. A young woman wearing jeans came out. ‘Hi’, she said. I was afraid Matthew was going to ask her about the verb. The woman told us that she was the village teacher, and showed us the school, which was in the bungalow. She had twelve pupils, and there was a framed photograph of Pinochet on the wall next to their crayon drawings of themselves. Matthew and I glanced at each other furtively as we stood in front of this sinister juxtaposition; the teacher said she wasn’t allowed to take the photograph down, but didn’t elaborate, and the moment passed.
    A sign on a decrepit building next to the school said ‘
MUSEO
’. The teacher told a loitering child to run and fetch the man in charge of it, who duly arrived, followed by two associates, and this triumvirate shook our hands and observed us closely as we perused the two small rooms of the museum. Someone had handwritten a catalogue in an exercise book. A mummified woman was propped up against a small adobe house, fleshless fingers clutching a
zampoña
, a musical instrument like panpipes. One of the old men took it from her, and gave us a tune.
    We ate our salmon sandwiches on the wall of a small church on a knoll, and a middle-aged woman joined us from the fertile plots of land below. ‘You mustn’t drink,’ she said peremptorily, ‘or fornicate. The bible says so.’ I took the opportunity of remarking airily to Matthew that she would approve of his attitude to drinking. The woman informed us, in parentheses, that she was a Seventh Day Adventist, and concluded a list of other biblically prohibited activities with ‘watching television’.
    Before we left the teacher asked us if we would take a box back to Camiña for her. I was often entrusted with errands like this in rural Chile. The villages were so remote that each vehicle was obliged to operate as a kind of public freight facility. I donated three pens to the schoolroom and we drove off under the large ‘Nama’ written on the hillside in white stones. Chilean villagers often proclaim themselves in mosaic writing, just as they lovingly tend their diminutive museums; they cherish a sense of community.
    We delivered our consignment to the municipal offices in Camiña, as instructed. As in any good office the week before Christmas, the staff had been drinking for some time, and the parcel’s addressee propelled us inside for a glass of
cola de mono
, a seasonal beverage made of milk, clear brandy, coffee and cinnamon. After a few minutes a nun entered the room, and our hosts pointed at us and jabbered. A man began to play the national anthem on a pair of teaspoons. The wide-eyed nun turned to us and said in a Yorkshire accent, ‘Is it true then? Are you really English?’
    Matthew and I choked on our cocktails and introduced ourselves. The nun, flapping her hands and beaming, invited us home for dinner. The villagers clucked approvingly at this happy gringo reunion.
    We reclaimed the camp beds we had relinquished in the morning from the mayor, who had spilt
cola de mono
down his crisply pressed shirt, and spent the evening with two Sisters serving in the County Wicklow-based missionary order of St Columban. Matthew, keen to establish our moral credentials with the nuns, was anxious to advertise the innocent nature of our relationship. He said we had decided to make an Andean trip together ‘for mutual support’, and I could see the nuns’ eyes glaze over as he extrapolated about this support, none of which sounded very familiar to me. I’m sure they didn’t believe a word of it; he was protesting too much.
    The nun with the Yorkshire accent, whose many years on the continent had taught her not to expect much, told us that the valley had been priestless for over a hundred years. Besides the fact that it