A love story

Chile is a country in love.

It is a country with a serious prediliction for public displays of affection (and other drives), yes. I have seen some rather lurid scenes....in the park....at noon.

But, it is also a country in love with love. I have also nearly stepped on people who have their eyes locked on each other with an intensity that is almost more embarassing than the tangled couples. And certainly more intimate.

It is Neruda's country, or is it? I am inclined to reverse the equation. Maybe it is only Chile that could have made a Neruda, a man who could not live without love, who built monuments and houses and poems and politics all for love, who they say died of a broken heart. It seems that such a story, such a creature, would grow so naturally out of this culture. Chile speaking through its poet.

Bathroom walls here are a serious business. Declarations of love scrawled across stalls in letters four inches high. I have seen one where a girl covered one wall of the stall with her love for a Guillermo. She returned at some point later to update things. Unlike what I have seen in the states, she didn't destroy the monument to Guillermo. She just used the other wall to establish that now she loves Claudio. Just to make it all clear, she put dates on the two maybe-murals.

On the bus home from Santiago on Sunday, the windows fogged over as night fell. I leaned onto mine and watched as the teenage boy in front of me traced "te amo" in the condensation, then photographed it. Erased it, sketched out a girl's name, and photographed it. Sketched his own name, photographed it. Te amo, again. The two names. Alone. Together. Until there was no more fog left on his window. I would like to see the gift that will come out of all those photographs. Te amo, te amo, te amo.

Rosa is Katie's host mother. I stayed with them this weekend, and I was invited to stick around for an empanada and a beer on Sunday afternoon. Rosa is incredibly patient, and she is a story-teller. She's a hairdresser, which means she has access to more stories than most of us do. Modern society tells its stories to a select few, and hairdressers are near the top of the list. So Rosita told us many stories on Sunday, and one of them was a love story:

An old woman came in to get her hair styled, and she asked for a bride's hairdo. Questions were asked....was she going to a wedding? Mother of the bride? No, she was the bride. And she told the women her story:

When she was a young woman, many years ago--forty years ago, fifty years ago--she was engaged to be married. As the wedding approached, she and her fiance spent a day visiting with relatives. At each house, they were served more food, more drinks. A coffee here with an aunt, a cake there with a family friend, hor d'ouevres with a godmother. They passed the day this way and the young girl began to feel sick, but she couldn't refuse the hospitality of her various hosts.

As the car began to return to her house, she became overwhelmed by illness. She asked the car to pull over, and vomited. It happened again, and again, and she began to have diarrhea, and was staining her shirt and her skirt and the car. When they finally made it to her house, she ran inside and slammed the door in her fiance's face.

The girl was so overcome by shame that she left Santiago without saying another word to the man she had been engaged to. She hid herself away with some aunt or other sympathetic creature somewhere in the folds of Chile, and didn't return for many years. When she did, it was with a husband and two sons.

Years and years passed, and the woman was widowed, and her sons grew up. In the pharmacy one day, a man stopped her. I know you, he said. I don't know you, she replied. You do, he averred. But from where? she asked.

Well of course it was the fiance from so many years ago, now an old man and a widower himself. He gave her his phone number and she went home to ask her sons what they thought. They told her to call him.

And so time passed and the circle closed and the woman came to Rosita to have her hair done for the wedding that took fifty years to happen.