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

didn’t have any money, the Chilean Church had experienced a chronic inability to recruit priests throughout the century. In 1968, the worst year, only two had been ordained in the entire country. No wonder the Adventists had enjoyed so much success: they had moved into a vacuum.
    ‘The Pentecostals,’ she went on, ‘have caused a lot of friction, especially in the altiplano. There are masses of them.’ Like many fundamentalists before them, the Pentecostals’ vision of the world did not extend to religious tolerance. ‘They set up a stage outside a church in a large village on the coast once during a Catholic mass and outblasted us with their music! You have to hand it to them, though – they achieve great things among the people. They can reform the hardest of drinkers, once they get their hands on them.’
    Catholic men – many of them, at least – continued to put it away.
    ‘But the Pentecostals want to jettison the entire culture of the villages’, the nun continued. ‘They even forbid fiestas, and you can imagine what a psychological necessity they are in a poor rural community.’
    Religious observance throughout the continent was, in general, weak; it had always been weak. The indigenous population had never been properly Christianized: they were ‘Churchized’. The
conquistadores
turned their pagan shrines into churches and told them they were Catholics. Naturally, pagan practices were swiftly grafted on to Christian stock, and they took hold. On 1 November each year, we were told, the people of Camiña still proceed to the cemetery to deposit food, drink and cigarettes on the tombs of their dead.
    However lukewarm many Chilean Catholics were about thefaith, everyone I met, up and down the country, seemed to have a strong sense of the importance of the Church as a national institution, both historically and in their own time. It was different from faith. It was a sense, or an awareness, which had been bred into their ancestors. It had survived the arrival of the secular age, which by the mid-nineteenth century had dislodged the Church from the privileged position it had inherited from medieval Europe, and it had outlived the 1925 constitution, which officially separated Church and State after almost fifty years of political controversy on the subject. (Disestablishment was characteristic of a trend in Europe as well as South America, and in Chile the transition was a particularly smooth one.) Despite the fact that over the next decades the Chilean Catholic Church moved towards the centre, it remained close to the ruling and landowning élite until the 1960s – and then it was overtaken by a small revolution.
    Before we reached their front door we could smell bacon cooking; it was a smell which took me very far from the Andes. The Sisters had invited us for breakfast, despite our early start, and they had managed to prepare an English one. Up there, this was something of a feat. Given my profound attachment to real coffee I never thought that I would be glad to see Nescafé, but the barley substitute had put it into a different perspective.
    We made the Panamerican again before eleven, grateful for the comfort of tarmac, got the tyre fixed at a garage and tried to reach our Andean destination by a more southerly route. Turning off at a truckstop called Huara, the kind of place where nothing has ever happened and you expect to run into a serial killer, we followed a wide and deserted road painted with troubling white lines. Neither of us spoke for a while, then Matthew said, ‘I don’t want to be alarmist, but I can’t helpwondering why this road is marked out as a runway.’ The tarmac petered out soon afterwards, and this bizarre piece of Chilean highway design remained an enigma.
    A track careered off to a hill on the pampa, and we took it: on the southern side we found the Giant of the Atacama, 350 feet long and the largest human geoglyph in the world. It had a head like a box, with twelve rays