Thursday, October 30, 2008

Lost lyrics

I am not a fish out of water. I am a fresh water fish too far down the river, the salt of the estuary entering my respiration.

I am sitting around a crowded table at the port bar that celebrated its centennial recently. At the far end a man in a dowdy green sweater is reading poetry from sheets of paper that swish loudly as he switches them in front of the silent crowd. He is awkwardly hunched at the microphone under a liquid orange beam of light. Dim lights shine under the bar, and the tea lights on the tables cast twinkling glares, and the pulsing ends of cigarettes move without hurry back and forth from mouths to ashtrays. I sip my beer in the dark, staring at the man.

I understand most of his words. I cannot hear poetry. Poetry is such a function of intimacy with language. The breath-catching moments are the combinations of words that have seemed always to have no relation to one another until suddenly they appear together, perfect, like a secretly eloped couple. I know nothing of common or uncommon modes of expression in this language. It is only recently that 'expression' could even be applied to my functioning in Spanish.

All I can follow is the tone in the reading, the signs of emotion and rythym in the words. This man reads like a lecturer--steadily, clearly, but dully. His poetry sounds like a town hall opening ceremony if I close my eyes. I look around the table to see how the others are responding. One poet leans to another and they whisper something and laugh: is the poetry bad? Or is it only friends sharing a beer, ignoring the speaker for the moment? I remember in the beginning days when I would sit at the table with the host family, wondering if they were talking about me. It's a similar kind of paranoia. I am a lone gringa listening to poetry in Spanish. I feel superfluous, worthy of mockery: a poser. The room is dead silent. No one speaks, claps or whispers betwen poems. We sit staring at the man as he shifts his papers and begins again. There is a lot of staring in this country. Too much, I think, wishing someone would comment or drum or even do that terrible snapping of fingers.

The man finishes and finally the crowd claps. I lean over and tell my friend about the poetry slams that used to be popular; how I would go and sit in the back quietly while the older, hipper crowd would shout and cheer and hoot. Once I wore leather pants from a second hand store, a push towards cool. The poet noticed these and used me in his act. I blushed like I still do when something embarasses me or catches me off guard. They asked me to judge and I lied and told them I had to leave, but sat, bright red, through the rest of the show. I lost that poet's photocopied booklet years ago, but would have liked the chance to look back on it now.

Other than the silence, the atmosphere is familiar, making me feel all the more alien. I look around my table at all of the figurines that have decorated my life so many times, in so many guises. The three young poets: one man in a velvet jacket, hair dishevelled; another in button-up plaid with curly hair combed out to be large; the woman beautiful with wild waves in her hair and dark eyeliner on both lids. At her shoulder, the affectionate and flamboyant film student gestures, wearing an antiquated suit with a silk vest, his lined eyes and labret piercing signalling his contemporaneity. Then there is the painter in his argyle sweater and page boy cap, leaning precariously over the candle to hand me scraps of english to edit, bits and pieces to be sent to an uncertain love in Canada. At my side, the unexpected arrival still carrying his camping gear is awkwardly above us on a scrambled-for bar stool. Finally, at the end of the table, an old and muttering poet in a knitted skullcap, papers somewhere within his worn leather bag. He is talking across me to the young poets. They are discussing flowers in Santiago in spring. This relates to women, somehow, and then to ways of perceiving.

I am sure that I have been here before.

One of the trio of word gamers from my table is called to the front by the announcer. A few copies of his recently published book make their way from bags onto our table. The person next to me flips through with purpose to find the poems as they are spoken, to help me. I explain that seeing the words won't make them anymore electric to me than hearing them. I prefer to listen. His poems punch the air with the impression of meaning. The improvement in style leaves me with a lower comprehension, but I enjoy his reading better than the last.

The young man returns, the bar claps loudly, and the old man is called. He rustles through the bag a little too long and then makes his way to the front of the room. He begins speaking, but the mike is on the table. He realizes this after a few sentences, whether of his own accord or from a tip I cannot tell. Rearranged, he begins to read in the rocking, near autistic way of those who live their lives fully within their art. It is, needless to say, unintelligible to me. I like it though, better than the lecturing fumbler, better than the confident and snapping man my age. The tones rise and fall and whatever these words are, whatever they might signify to the people sitting with me, I sit watching them mean absolutely everything to the poet.

I am watching a man read his poetry; I am watching a man deliver his art; that is all. Without signification, without relationship to me, I watch the words matter to him. When he returns to the table I tell him how much I enjoyed watching his reading despite understanding nothing. The film student throws his head back and laughs, delighted, clapping at the joke. I light his cigarette and laugh too, even though I wasn't joking.

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Dancing in the Streets

Walking between one outdoor dance performance and another, the crowd began to realize that it was being directed. As we pushed onto the stairs of Paseo Yugoslavia, a man directed us to split into pairs. As we slowly advanced in our new formation, another gave us further directions. I linked arms with my friend and she closed her eyes while I guided her, as we had been told. As we bumbled half blindly, literally, up the stairs, members of the German dance troupe splashed couples as they emerged with water from the fountain.

At the top we followed our choreographers and joined hands to form a chain. We circled in around the large tree at the center of the small plaza overlooking the port. In front of me was a boy of about three. We circled in, tightening around the layers of people in front of us as more links in the chain emerged from the stairway and coiled around us. I stretched my friend's arm in order to stay just behind the little boy, providing the other half of the support that his mother's hand gave him from in front. We circle-danced over the uneven bricks and the little boy, in the way that small children have of trusting anyone significantly larger than them, allowed me to use our locked hands as a means to lift him over gaps and slants.

A crowd watched from the sides, skeptically, but walking in the circle I could see the sense of the dance. The warmth of sharing movement with strangers. We broke apart slowly and looked up to find the troupe arranged in the tree.







We stood around them as they dropped pieces of paper inscribed with heartfelt messages in broken Spanish, about dreams and clean water. Balloons drifted down and a man played the accordion. After we had all received a few of the small paper airplanes and paper balls, we began to drift away, chattering. The dancers climbed uncertainly down from the tree.

So ended the VII Festival Internacional Danzalborde de Valparaiso, a yearly October event in the city. It had been a week-long event featuring dance troupes from several different countries. Like the final circle around the tree, it was an event that was heartfelt, experimental, occasionally hokey and at times a flop. As things tend to go, here, there was the occasional lapse in the audio equipment, the fact that the locations of the dances were nearly impossible to find out, and a touch of over-earnestness. The awkward moments, though, never overshadowed the wonderful feeling of living in a place that would organize such a thing: a week of contemporary dance spread out through the streets of the city.


Work and the scarcity of information caused me to miss out on all but the final weekend of the festival. That Saturday afternoon, I joined a friend in an attempt to track down the performance that she had finally found a listing for. We wandered around Cerro Bellavista, until finally we discovered a crowd hanging around a stage-like section of the Museo de Cielo Abierto.


A Columbian dance troupe began with a duet. The man and woman, in black street clothes, mixed the occasional classic dance form with angular, disjointed movements. The music was sometimes harmonic, sometimes little more than ambient noise. These contrasts worked extremely well in some segments of the dance; in others I couldn't help but see hints of the infamous Robot dance. The dancers played out various conflicts and reconciliations that can occur in a relationship. At times the woman would collapse, the man urging her up with a series of pushes from his feet. Sometimes he would fall and she would catch him.





The following dance, from the same troupe, showed the same strengths and weaknesses as the first. A group of people crawled, wiggled, and occasionally spun in arabesques across the space. A woman dropped her bright pink pants and hobbled forwards and backwards before pulling them up halfway and rushing forward to the stairs.




After the performance, the dancers left and the crowd dispersed. A small girl took the stage and mimicked the wide, dramatic jerks and thrusts of the dance she had just seen.



That night, the same friend and I went to an indoor performance by a Mexican group. The listing labelled the style as "Minimal Movement." Given that it was in Spanish, I translated it in my mind as "Minimalist Movement." I should have trusted my first reading.


The hall, the auditorium of a local university, was in fact a converted old church. My friend and I found a spot up in the back corner of a crowded set of wooden bleachers. In front of us, underneath the saints looking down from stained glass windows, a woman sat in a chair. She was surrounded by glowing orange globes, strung together like Christmas tree lights. Three antique lamps sat next to the chair. As the crowd settled in, a strange series of sounds began to play and the dancer moved her hand slowly towards her face in a dramatic gesture. The shadow cast by the spotlight hitting her hand made the appearance of a small black tulip opening on her chest. We waited.


A few minutes later, she moved her head slowly to the side and extended her arm. We waited.


She traced her foot across the ground. She opened her mouth, closed her mouth. The music was the sound of dripping water, echoing tones, and wind, intercut with a sudden scream or the sound of a train. I began to consider the fact that bleachers have no side exits.


The visual effect was striking, but after twenty and then thirty minutes passed, I arrived at the critical opinion that perhaps the "voyeurism" mentioned in the description referred to a sort of mirror effect. As I watched the performer squirm around, miming in extreme slow motion the effects of inner turmoil, I began to feel supremely uncomfortable. Trapped. I switched on my art theory and concluded that perhaps this was intended: the audience sharing the stress of the character being danced.


After forty minutes, I was sure that I would much rather be writing an analysis of this piece than experiencing it.


After fifty minutes, I was considering if perhaps the intended effect was to cause someone in the audience to break down and yell for it to stop, as a sort of peak to the anxiety of the dance.


After an hour, I had decided that no analytical approach to this piece could give me back the time I'd lost sitting uncomfortably wedged between college students, on a piece of wood, watching a woman sit in a chair.


Finally, finally, she stood up. In strange, jerky movements, she made her way to a side door and lurched out of the room. The door remained open for several minutes, shooting a plank of white light into the space dominated by dark and glowing orange. Then suddenly, it slammed loudly shut. The visual effect was beautiful.


I didn't really care. I was scarily close to a temper tantrum when the dancer and the other members of her group--who had been working the sounds and the lights--came out to answer questions.


They explained that interaction with the audience was an essential part of the show and asked for input. Students raised their hands with detailed questions about composition and form. The group proudly explained that other than several key points which were choreographed, the rest was entirely improvisation on the part of all three. While looking carefully over the work for 'key points,' I could settle only on a moment when the sounds stopped and the woman kicked the lights, scattering a pile of forks with a metallic sound that was refreshing in the sense that it was the only sudden thing to happen within an hour and a quarter's time. The man who improvised the sound for the piece exclaimed several times over how he hadn't known that the dancer would leave through the door; she modestly explained how it just came to her. More questions were asked. The group discussed the time a cat had entered the performance space in Buenos Aires and thus became part of the performance. They explained how each piece is different, depending on the location in which it will be performed. The dancer elaborated by detailing how in each new city they go to find costumes and props, and these new pieces contribute to the choreography as well. I mentally threw a quick curse at the vendors of antique lamps, black bell skirts, and victorian-style white blouses, wherever in Valparaiso they may be.


When we were released, my friend and I walked at a near-running pace away from the building, laughing and exclaiming. She thought perhaps there had been a helicopter involved in the idea at some point; I wondered about nightmares. We decided that all of that not-moving made us want to walk widely and swingingly back to her place.

The next day I met her and another friend for another performance and was very concerned to find out that it would be the same group once again. Upon determining that we could not possibly be trapped in the pedestrian road on which the stage was set, we all decided to stay and see what happened. Thankfully, the woman is far more interesting when she moves.

This time the inspirational pieces were a large plastic tablecloth set with a birthday cake and six place settings with plates and empty bottles. The costume was a flouncing purple satin dress, a bright red bike helmet worn backwards, black stockings striped with yellow, large boots, and a yellow fly swatter. The character that arose from all of this seemed to be some kind of combination between a martian and a small child.


The man who had been working the lights the night previously was involved this time, scurrying around in a plastic apron. He beckoned members from the audience out from the sides of the street to take the places around the tablecloth.



At the end, he carried her, kicking and screaming, cake demolished on her boots, out of a side door wrapped in duct tape. I was glad not to be forced into artistic appreciation, and felt much warmer towards the group as I followed the file of people up the stairs towards the circle around the tree.

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Unsolicited Advice

"You need to clean your room," my friend said. "It's a complete mess. Also, you shouldn't have been sleeping so late. It's not healthy. You worry me."

I stirred my tea while he ran through a list of my various failures, inconsistencies, and insecurities. Each one made me cringe--he held up to the light every missed deadline, every late night, every unpaired sock and half-finished assignment. I found myself silently thanking all stars and gods that he didn't know me well enough to dredge up anything too horrific, because he surely would have. To top it all off, he spun every negative into a symptom, weaving for me a massive interrelated web of my inadequacies.

You might be wondering how I managed to spark such a disastrous fight in a language I speak poorly, in a country where I have few close friends who are not foreigners. In fact, though, I wasn't having an argument with anyone. The source of my detailed failure report: I told a chileno friend that I was feeling unsatisfied with a few aspects of my life.

Advice-giving in Chile probably accounts for a huge percentage of the country's collective interaction. It is a way of showing people that you care about them. In many ways, Chilean culture can be binary, and this is one of those instances. If you are not in the inner circle, you are Not In The Inner Circle. It is a reserved culture--friendships can be difficult to build. This is very different from US culture. For example, the first time that I met Kacy, a fellow US gringa, and saw that we clicked, I gladly told her various highly personal stories regarding my departure for and arrival in Chile. Less than four months later, she knows nearly all of the major personal details of my life.

At some point, though, you finally cross some invisible line and become a Good Friend. And this means that your life is now shared property. Chilenos will get themselves involved in every detail of their friends and families' existence. They point out the extra weight. They warn each other about pimples or a haggard look. They launch into monologues on the way that a situation at work ought to be handled.

And don't worry, you don't need to ask. The chilenos in your life will jump to give you the advice you need without hesitation, because they care about you and are paying attention.

To cope with this, I try to relate it to those great friends who show up to take you out for coffee without you having to call when you're feeling down. They're special because they care enough to notice.

This, I believe, is the spirit at the heart of the Chilean epidemic of minding other people's business.

I am, however, from a culture that, alongside the concept of minding one's own business, abhors Unsolicited Advice, reprimands the Bossy, and constantly reminds one not to Stick Your Nose Where It Doesn't Belong. Like Inuit words for snow, English has a wealth of vocabulary designed to deter the unwanted consejo. Small children all across my nation, without knowing that there is any precedent to their expression, burst out, "You're not the boss of me!"

The Spanish word for crash is chocar, and it is perfect to me that culture shock has the same sound. Things like this are like a car accident, a conversation flowing like easy traffic until two people run their respective stop signs and: smash. Glass all over the intersection. Watch where you step.

So I stewed for awhile. How was I meant to deal with a person who only wanted to help me feel better, but in the process made me feel worse? Meanwhile, knowing that what I was experiencing was culture shock didn't make me feel any warmer towards the lecture I'd felt I'd received.

Then I tried something absolutely radical in my confrontation-avoiding existence: I arranged a conversation. I explained, as best I could, how I saw the issue in terms of our respective cultures. My friend was amenable but somewhat confused. "But then," he asked, "how can I help you?"

"Just be my friend and hang out with me?" I suggested.

So I'm going to give that a shot. Culture shock might not be a preventable occurence, but if both parties can see it for what it is, then perhaps it doesn't have to cause so much drama. Hopefully these things can stop feeling like a high-speed crash, and start feeling like people stumbling into each other in a dark room, laughing, and helping each other up again.

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Choque

At first I irrationally thought that the car was on fire as it came screeching by. We were walking home from work along Avenida Brasil, Elisa and I, complaining about the day and chattering in relief of release. The silver sedan began skidding well behind us, the rubber literally burning into the clouds of smoke that distracted me for a moment until I looked ahead to the cross-walk. Caught in the middle of a legal crossing were two people. A man and woman were running, hand in hand, she in front pulling, he behind pushing. The car had slowed only to perhaps 30 miles an hour when it hit her, ripping their hands apart.

She flew sideways up over the hood. We stood frozen on the sidewalk as time stopped and she flew, frame by frame, back away from the car, crashing in a heap onto the pavement of the intersection. The man stood on the other side of the car, his face a glass of red wine shattered on concrete.

At the same moment, a block away, two cars smashed head-on. For a moment, the imagined physics of our society revealed themselves as fallacies.

When the hit woman stood, screaming, staggering, I felt a shock as sure as when she had been hit. I had been sure she had been killed. But she stood, pure adrenaline, and staggered to the curb. Her mouth was open, yelling syllables without sense, and the man ran to her wildly. Three of us stood watching: Elisa and I, and across the street a man in green. I thought of my first aid training and all of the questions that I cannot ask in Spanish. The woman gave into the shock and fell backward onto the sidewalk. I stood with air rushing through my sternum watching the man kneeling over his hyperventilating partner. The man in green suddenly sprung from the shocked still life and sprinted across the street, arms pumping, to their side. Someone appeared swiftly from a side street and pushed a jacket beneath her head.

A man in a blue jacket emerged from the silver car, a middle-aged, flustered, average-looking man whose face, I felt, showed too much self concern and not enough guilt. Elisa pointed and I saw his small daughter, too young to be in a cross-the-shoulder seatbelt, in the passenger seat. Another child sat in the back. Distaste and anger flickered in the air, from me, from Elisa, from the old woman who was drawing near to draw the story out of us, and it drew people who began to circle round. The man who knelt over his woman must have felt it too. He looked up and rose, approaching the car. His face was a desperate kind of breaking rage that I hope I never see again. In this momentary world, slowed by my own surge of chemicals, I saw his heavy armed, thrusting approach intercut with scenes of his flight, pushing his love towards safety before him, and the explosion on his face when the car skidded towards the sidewalk and took her and not him into the metal and into the sky.

The man in blue stood petrified, and the broken man came full of intention, but a van of carabineros arrived as if by magic. Four uniformed, helmeted men jumped out and surrounded the reckless driver, half to keep him there and half to prevent a fight of passions too high to be contained.

The crowd thickened. Rubber-necking as a negative act is not a Chilean concept. Any time that I have seen any sort of accident victim in the street, they have been surrounded by a crowd four or five people deep. I have seen people taking pictures with their cell phones, at times. Elisa and I remained at a distance--witnesses, unsure in this foreign system of whether or not we held any role. The abuela at my side questioned me and Elisa and we explained the story, pointing to the skid marks that stretched for a third of a block, making guesses at his speed, turning our hands into bodies flying through the air. We shared exclamations with her and she lit a cigarette and wandered into the crowd. We heard her explaining to clusters of attentive listeners that the gringuitas had seen everything, gaining glory through her intimate acces to the details of the story.

From nowhere, three fire trucks appeared along the road. Where the two cars had crashed, more vehicles gathered. I could here the struck woman shout out angrily, incoherently, from time to time, but by now she was obscured by a thick knot of observers. A woman came over to us and asked if we had some sort of candy for the children in the car. We had been talking of them, of the shock of seeing a woman against the windshield of your daddy's speeding car. Elisa found the apple she had in her bag and the woman took it...better than nothing, to calm the ninitos.

An ambulance arrived and the EMTs disappeared into the now thick swarm of gawkers, around which the abuela hovered with her cigarette. Soon they emerged with the woman on a stretcher, followed by the stricken man who will never forget the image of his partner rag-dolled in mid-air. A few minutes later it pulled away.

Elisa and I explained what we saw several times to various concerned onlookers. We stood uncertainly at the border, watching the man in blue with the carbineros. The abuela wandered back and she confirmed what I had thought: the woman would be fine. She had been lucky. She wandered off, and after a moment of unsure hesitation, so did we.

I have a friend here who becomes irritated with his girlfriend and myself when we are hesitant to cross in the cross-walk when there is traffic. It is our right-of-way, he says, and so the cars need to stop for us and we are being jumpy. I'd like to take a moment for a shout-out: wrong! I would also like to request that he not urge himself or other friends in front of moving, unreliable traffic.

So Elisa and I moved on along with the rest of our plans. In the grocery store, a man dropped a crate and we both dropped the vegetables we were holding.

I am a transparent person: even my students have remarked on the fact that there is no emotion that passes through my head that doesn't show in my exterior. It could be that this is adaptation. It is the physical shape of distress that draws our empathy. I am thinking of the pictures in the paper on September 12, 2001, of the people who had thrown themselves out of the World Trade Center rather than die of asphyxiation. Their forms, blurry, small, were enough to break us all: arms out at the sides, head forward in a dive, the still-conscious desperation potent like the taste of blood in my mouth. In that file in my mind I add the woman flying backwards in the air in the shape of the letter C; her staggering, bent knees with her screaming mouth; and the face, the broken face of a man whose normal day was broken in half by the destruction and resurrection of the woman he loves.

Sunday, October 19, 2008

Lights Out



Sitting at the table with the last light of the afternoon keeping the room glowing, I didn't realize that the power on the cerro had gone out until I finally rose in the graying space and flicked the switch.

I walked down the hill to pick up the pizza I had ordered. Customers sat around candles of various sizes. For some reason, people speak more quietly in the dark, surrounded by candles. I collected my pizza and completed the transaction half under my breath. Parting from my friend at the street corner, I half ran up the steps that run along the side of the ruined stretch of Templeman, where the road has been replaced by rubble and stray bushes. The light was fading and I was thinking of my cavernous apartment and unlocatable flashlight.

I stumbled through the entry way and into the blank space of my apartment. In the dining room, the windows were still letting in a faint hint of light. I rummaged through drawers: tea lights, I know that I saw tea lights. I found them, on my knees in the invisible kitchen, and brought them back to the table. I dropped five of them into the rounded shot glasses that came with the apartment, and they made that satisfying sound: something soft and light cased in cheap metal hitting glass. The sound makes me think of my parents' dinner parties when I was a child, and of Christmas and Thanksgiving at their house.

The house was quiet and empty, my roommate sleeping in his room. My third roommate called to say that she would not come home from her boyfriend's. Lighting my candles and arranging my book, I thought back to another night without electricity. It was in a February, in Morocco, in a small apartment whose walls held no ceiling save in the small cubbies that were bedrooms. After brushing my teeth under stars of an unknown continent, I walked on bare feet across the cold kitchen floor into the tiny room with walls of stone. The bed was a shelf knocked into the wall. As I rubbed my feet under not enough blankets and spoke softly with good company, I remember the three stubs of candles that were stuck onto the deep rock sill of the tiny window at the foot of the bed. The wind picked up, but the crashing sound of waves was loudest outside the little wooden shutter behind the flames. I fell asleep that night, and the nights after, listening through these sounds for my breath and for the other breath beside me, the both of us breathing air so far away from anything previously known.

Tonight I arranged my candles in a semicircle around my chair and lone place setting. I poured some wine, took a bite of food, and opened my book. I've only just begun it, but I am far enough along to know that I am reading of a man whose past still grips him with its mysteries and pain. I know that I will read this book and feel an echo. There is something of this in the life of any person far from home without intentions of permanacy. Our lives here are a flicker; they began recently enough to be recalled in every detail; it is sure that they will end sometime soon in an airport, under flourescent light. The most intimate of friends made here can know only this short burst of time. When we mirror each other, we can see only the present tinted by the stories we tell over coffee, over tea, over wine and beer, staring out windows and tracing the rims of cups with our fingers. We tell each other that we lived before, will live later, but we exist only in the present and these other times are only stories.

I am thinking of these things in the dark, with the lights of the other, unaffected cerros of Valparaiso shining against the negative space surrounding my building. In the quiet, alone, I think of the company that is missed, and the history that cannot follow me here. In this unexpected, unadulterated space of the blackout, the shapes of that history fill the room and although it shakes me, I welcome them.

I call no one because I welcome them. Then the door to the side swings open and my sleepy roommate brings out flashlights from his camping supplies. I strap a light to my head just as my tea lights are reaching the end of their short lives. This is when I feel sad. The thin thread has snapped that had connected these temporary candles and this solitary darkness to those other misshappen candles casting dancing shadows against a stone wall, not so very long ago. But this is how we live, now, in this flare within my history. It won't be long before I sit with other candles and my heart pulls for the lonely nights in Valparaiso. So I laugh at myself, spill out my words, and return to my book and my work.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Flavor in Chile: Si, se puede!

Whoever named the chili pepper was definitely not making any reference to Chile, despite the fact that in certain languages the two words are spelled the same.

A week or two ago, I was cooking for friends, as I love to do. I was making a large stir fry that I knew would turn out spicy. Nearly everything that I cook turns out spicy--I spent three years cooking with a man who isn't happy unless he's sweating and turning colors. Ergo, my estimation of "quite spicy" is on par with most people's "inedible." My "spicy" is "on the edge of tolerance," to quote a friend.

One of my roommates, a chileno, hates spicy food. This is very much the norm: in fact, if you are living in this country, you may have read that sentence as redundant. Of course this is not the case with everyone, as I have at least two chileno friends who love spice, but otherwise it's pretty much the rule.

While cooking, I decided that I would make the sauce on the side in a special gesture in order to include my roommate. Just before the stirfry was finished, I took out vegetables for him and sent him a nice plate with rice via our third roommate. She told me later that when he received it, he made a face.

"What is it?" she asked.

"There's ginger in this. It's spicy," he said, wrinkling his nose.

Yes, my roommate is not the nicest of people. Moving on, though: ginger is spicy.

I won't blame you if you're wondering how on earth one can eat normally in a place where that sounds reasonable. It's been a struggle for me, as I've documented in this blog. While living with a family chilena, I felt as if I would die from carb and meat overload (hence my current vegetarian status). Nonetheless, I've found that it is completely possible to live a happy, healthy, flavorful life in Chile. To start, here is a nice dinner that you can easily make with ingredients from Lider (an average supermarket here):

Appetizer: Tomato Garlic Soup (gracias a C. Martinez)

Ingredients:
1 can tomates pelados (size depending on people invited)
2 cloves garlic, sliced thin
2 bay leaves
small handfull of fresh basil
Aji sauce from the jar, to taste
Boiling water

Directions:
In a small saucepan, saute the tomatoes for a few minutes, and add about a cup of water. Stir in the garlic, the bay leaves, the basil, and the aji. Cook until with water boils off, and then add more. Repeat for approximately 45 minutes.

Side Dish: Potatoes and Carrots in Honey Garlic Sauce

Ingredients:
Potatoes and carrots, to fit size of group, sliced thin and diced into small pieces
a few tablespoons of oil
1 vegetable bouillon cube
1 1/2 cups boiling water
1/4 cup honey
a few tablespoons of soy sauce
2-ish tablespoons of white wine vinegar
1 of those mini limes, juiced
Cornstarch (if you can find it) or some other thickener (if you can find it)
2 small cloves garlic, minced
1 fresh aji, minced (optional)

Directions:
Boil the water with the bouillon cube. Once done, remove from heat. If you've got a thickener, add about a tablespoon and mix well. If not, don't worry about it. I put in a tablespoon of flour and it worked out fine, so no worries! Then, add the honey, soy sauce, vinegar, and lime. Use a whisk or a fork to mix well. In another pan, saute the garlic and aji in oil for about a minute on low heat--don't brown the garlic. Add this to the other ingredients and simmer. Meanwhile, heat a bit more oil and saute the potatoes and carrots until just about cooked. At the end, add the sauce and stir until it has thickened around the vegetables.

Main Dish: Indian Stew with Couscous
Group 1:
2 medium onions, diced
Group 2:
3 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 inch fresh ginger, minced
2 large green ajis, minced
tsp cumin
tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp cardamom (this takes a bit of searching (in Chile, of course)...try Jumbo, or Korean shops if you're lucky enough to live near them)
1 tbsp salt or soy sauce
large pinch of saffron (obviously optional given the price)
Group 3:
1/2 cup squeezed orange and grapefruit juice (I squeezed about 4 oranges and 1 pomelo)
4 eggplants, roasted for 1/2 hour, then cubed
Group 4:
2 green and 1 red bell pepper, diced
1 large slice zapallo, cubed
4 medium carrots, sliced thin and then diced
1 medium size can of tomates pelados
1/2 cup or so of water
Finals:
Couscous (or rice)
Fresh basil
Yoghurt natural

Instructions:
Stick the eggplants in the oven at about 350 degrees, halfed, while you're slicing the other veggies.

When you're prepared, saute the onions in oil until transparent. Then add Group Two and saute for about one minute. Transfer from the pan to a large sauce dish. Add Group 3, mixing well so that the spices coat everything. Simmer for about 8 minutes. Add Group 4, adjusting the level of water to allow enough to cook for a while without sticking but without drowning the thing. Simmer (covered) for about 20 minutes, or until the zapallo is soft. Stir every few minutes to move things from top to bottom. Prepare the couscous or rice meanwhile (read the box). About 5 minutes before the end, add a handful of torn basil, and mix in well. When all the veggies are well cooked, serve over the couscous with a 'dollop' (don't you love that word?) of yoghurt.

This may all sound very complicated. However, it's really not when you get to it. I find cooking quite relaxing. If you don't, be content in the fact that the Indian Stew will give you enough servings to eat for ages, if you don't invite 4-6 guests the first time round. You can also easily make as much as you like of the other two dishes, giving you a fridge full of delicious, flavorful, vegetarian food. When you think about how much you have to pay for such a luxury at a chilean restaurant, it works out quite well.

I also recommend that you indulge in our wonderful abilty in Chile to buy good wine at cheap prices, and enjoy a bottle with a friend while cooking.

If you enjoy these recipes, let me know, and I'll add more!

Monday, October 13, 2008

Help a blogger out, Part 2

** As previously mentioned, I am applying for a writing internship of sorts. Based on input from yourselves and my non-text-based friends, I've put together the following blend of two previous blog posts. Let me know what you think! Kill paragraph two? Vary your vocabulary in the intro? Come up with a better bridge? I want to know what I can do to make this piece polished. Thanks to anyone who'll leave me a little constructive criticism in the comments! **

When I am delayed by some street occurrence and find myself walking home around eight or nine at night, there is a flute playing over Cerro Alegre. The location of this lonely-voiced musician is indeterminable. It is clear that it comes to me from somewhere higher up on the hill, because the sound seems to be falling down from the sky. They are eerie and beautiful, these strange little unaccompanied melodies. The air at night, now that it is autumn, is crisp and clear and the notes of the flute echo these qualities. The flutist never falls fully into song, instead sending out smoke signals, little snatches of melody. Eight bars, sixteen bars, pause. Then follows another cadence, unrelated, it seems. The notes are random, a spread pattern like broken glass, and yet all are glinting. Never does a tone fall flat, never does the clear ringing sound break into a breathy split note. This sky of sound is the layer between Neruda’s sky, shattered with stars, and the chaotic but harmonic Bartok composition that is my city. My thoughts unclench and my mind falls into dreams and poetry. I begin to think that there should always be someone playing the flute on clear autumn nights when the stars are out, and Valparaiso's lights are falling into the ocean.

From the ethereal and chill notes of the night, I arrive into the warmth of my home and the privacy of my room. Here, there is an entirely different kind of music, far from the stars and the cold purity of autumn. There is a man, whom I have never seen, whose experience unfolds daily directly below the floorboards of my room. This building, built into the hill, opens into many spaces, and so while I enter from a pasaje that runs between buildings, this man most likely enters from one of the doors that run the grade of our slope of this hill. It is unlikely that I will ever know who it is whose life I can overhear as I fall asleep. I can guess that he is young because of his voice, the race-car video games whose soundtracks invade my space, and the fact that his most active periods fall between two and five am. Whoever he is, my downstairs neighbor loves to sing. Through the thin wood, he sings me endless gospels, ballads, sometimes pop music or the occasional musical score. He does not sing the way that most people sing when they are puttering around at home--halfway, one lyric here, another there, with half a voice. Nervous about the opening of a door or the angry banging on the wall from next door, we sing in showers, sing in the car, hoping not to offend, hoping to sneak under the radar. This neighbor of mine sings as if he had an audience of 50 people. Accordingly, he gives what deserve to be called concerts. An hour or more will pass, full of resonant sound, deep baritone from below pierced by seagull cries from above. I like to listen, and I like to think about the other listeners propped up on other beds or leaned over other tables. It is an anonymous community, the singer and his audience, hidden away in cubby holes, blind to one another.

Outside, on top of the hill, the flute is cold and beautiful and still. Inside, the lone ballad singer is the warm heart of the building. And down in the flat cusp of the city at the base of the hill, in Plaza Anibal Pinto, a man bangs on a homemade bass drum while a girl dances with a tambourine and six, seven, now eight people play on panflutes and mouth-harps, and the rest dance.


Morning breaks. The midnight singer is catching up on his rest, but I am quickly moving around between my brush and closet and bag. With a class to be taught at eight am, I am out the door at seven. This would never happen by my own design, but it is a surprising gift in my days.

Outside, it is blurry silence and the click of the bolt seems loud. Between two buildings, through a rusting iron railing, I look down onto the port. It is coated in mist and fog this early. Soon the sun will burn it clear, but for now it is all in haze. At the bottom of my stairway-street, the street cleaner who works my neighborhood is taking his cigarette break. The smell of the smoke mingles with the damp sea air. Twice a week, we see each other here, a reassuring clockwork. He is doubtless well into his shift; I am pulling on sweater ends and yanking wet hair around as I stumble into my day. All over the city, the street-cleaners are awake and working silently with their brooms and mops and trash cans. The streets never seem to get any cleaner, but it's not for lack of trying.

Valparaiso is soft and sleepy in the morning. I walk through pink half-light. Two old men in wool suits push and pull until they succeed in heaving open a store's metal security paneling. Uniformed children walk to school, chattering quietly like birds. Men wait to buy their newspapers and cigarettes at the kiosks that glow like the lanterns they resemble. The streetlights, determined to fulfill every moment of their service, glow on ever less strikingly against the lightening sky.

The rumbling beasts that constitute Valparaiso's fleet of micros are not yet quite awake. A scant few scream past and are absorbed again into the quiet, exhaust puffing from rusted pipes to join the sea fog. Seagulls are the only other jarring noise. Conversations seem muted. Suited businessmen and vendors pushing carts walk haphazardly through the empty streets.

It is a temporary, tenuous tranquility. The light hits the top of the hills first. It shines off of windows and brings the brightly colored houses back to life, and then it begins to creep down into the Plan.

This is not a sedate city. It is a humming city, a pushing-and-shoving city, a city of shouts and drums and motors. No one who finds themselves falling for this place would wish it to be any other way. But there is a beauty in the contrast that I find in the early morning. Even the murals seem to have their eyes closed, waiting for day to break.

Falling in love with a new city is like falling in love with a person. Walking through Valparaiso in the morning, I am lying propped up with one elbow on the pillow, hair tousled. As the light slowly wakes the cerros and creeps down towards the water, I am biting my lip, softly touching a still cheek or a slowly rising chest, thinking, He is so beautiful when he sleeps. Thinking, Wake up. Don't wake up. Wake up.

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Que flaite.

Last night I met a young woman named Josefa.

Josefa is four years old. She arrived unexpectedly at a moment in which I was going to cause a lot of trouble for my friend, her brother, who had irritated me exceptionally. Luckily for everyone present, I can't wait to work in a preschool and the arrival of an outspoken four year old was about all I needed to let it go. Before you knew it, we had sequestered ourselves with a comic in Italian and were selling my H&M bracelets to each other (just DON'T forget the imaginary bag, that is bad customer service).

Unfortunately, while we were learning our numbers in Spanish and English and going blind unexpectedly ("Donde estas? Where are you? I can't see!") someone decided to break the window of her parents' car with a rock. They came in and told me what had happened, and then left again. Josefa thought for a minute.

"Is it true," she asked after a bit, "what my brother said, that the car is broken?" Yes, I told her (while teaching her terrible Spanish I fear), it's true, but the car is fine.

A few more minutes passed.

"Meredith," she said carefully, "como se dice 'flaite' en Ingles?"

After a bit of death by laughter I had to explain that I could not answer how to say "flaite" in English, because in the States we don't have a synonym. It is a special Chilean word, I told her.

This is quite true. I believe that it's different in England, where a similar sense of class relations exists. Tonight I was taught a few versions of 'flaite' by a British friend. Nonetheless, in USA English, there is no accurate translation. This is because there is no exact concept.

Flaite is a word that gets a lot of mileage in Chile. To itemize the various English almost equivalents, it is somewhat like low-class, ghetto, uncultured, rude, dive (as in bar), trashy, sketchy, and redneck. It is all of these things, and none of them. Flaite is a word that applies not just to a person's attitude, SES, or current position; it goes beyond fashion or cultural affiliation; it goes beyond how expensive the beer is and whether or not you're drinking it from a plastic cup.

Flaite is a noun, an adjective, and much more. Fleite is a way of life.

Chile's class system is an inherant part of the culture. This has become apparent to me in odd ways due to the fact that I happen to have blond hair. Here, paleness indicates European relations, which for years has meant power and influence. Hopefully this is changing, but the fact remains that when I walk on the street in any normal neighborhood, everyone has black hair, brown eyes, and medium colored skin. I turn on the TV to watch anything related to politics, and everyone interviewed looks as if they could be my uncle. It is one of the oddest and most disturbing factors of Chilean culture. People who are in the upper classes speak to me about their terrible household help, not realizing that my grandmother arrived in the US with no English and worked as a maid with only one half day off a month. Conversely, people in the middle class have reproached me with no end of various combative remarks, unable to accept that I make 300,000 pesos a month and will not be owning anything designer at any point that I can think of.

So to be flaite, as it is to be any other rank in the social system, is an all-defining thing. In the states, we'll go to dive bars. That doesn't, however, make us trashy. You can be incredibly educated and cultivate a ghetto style. You can live in the projects and be a bookworm. Here, these divisions don't seem to exist in the popular imagination. You ARE where you go, where you live, who you know, who your father is, who your father knows. It is indelible. You are a function of these things, and if those things are flaite, so are you.

As a gringa, this concept is difficult for me to grasp. I am never aware of what is flaite. Yes, I know what "low-class" is. However, I have been, at various times, told that the following things are flaite:

--Valparaiso
--Plastic outdoor tables at bars
--Drinks on the beach
--Picnics
--Bars frequented by the after-work (as in blue collar) crowd
--Bars frequented by people my age who, as far as I can tell, look just like me
--Micros
--Public transportation in general
--Street art
--Juggling
--Streets with inexpensive shops
--Arcades

And many, many more. I'll be walking with a friend, and suggest popping into a place for a sandwich or a beer, only to be met with an incredulous look and the response, "Pero que flaite esta lugar!" Thankfully, gringos seem to be excused for flubbing the social norms, because it's generally assumed that we have no idea what we're doing. This is a very good thing, because it seems like everything I like is incredibly flaite (ie, I ride micros for fun). Nevermind that flaite also includes mugging people, going to jail, beating your girlfriend, and other such wonders--you had a beer at that place with the plastic cutlery?!?!

Que flaite!!

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Help a blogger out

I am in the process of applying for a writing internship affiliated with a major publication. In this process, I am asked to submit a writing sample. I'm going to take something that I've written about here and polish it into something presentable.
With that in mind, please help me choose the best Note from Behind the Language Barrier (of a Serious variety)!

The leading contestants at the moment are:

Wandering
Listening
Voyaging
Dreaming
Living

Please leave me a comment and vote for the one you think would make the best starting point for a piece of creative nonfiction (of the variety that one would find in a serious-style travel collection). Please! Of course, if you've been checking in for awhile now and have another suggestion, by all means let me know.

Your help is much appreciated!

Head in the clouds

On grey days in Valparaiso, the city disappears. From my windows, there is only a palm tree, and the jumbled roofs between my spot on the hill and the sea. The lights of the boats in the nearby port are diffused in fog; the coast stretching east and north is only a mental concept. A dim light in the distance could be the other towns which are normally sitting on the horizon above the bay, or they could be ships, but for my mind filling in the blanks like the missed words in a cell phone conversation.

The color closes around the city like a blanket, softly wiping away colors, blurring the eyes of the people walking in their zigzags, irresolutely. It makes my wet hair and my makeup-less face feel at home, born from the same lethargy and lack of edges. I view the polished-dull cerros and the bumbling smoke of traffic with sleepy eyes while waiting endlessly for the micro that doesn't come. We are the same in this moment, the city and I: attractiveness washed away by tiredness, lack of care, a tousled head and a crooked outfit. Perhaps in other moments we can pull off a sort of over-punctuated, hapless kind of beauty, but when the damper is on all that remains is the awkwardness of poor planning.

And so when I wake up in Valparaiso and look out my window to see gray sky, something in me softens, and I know that my city sister and I will have a day of calm. When Valparaiso decides once again to be bright, and laughing, to love the ones that love her and ignore those who don't, I will continue my far less successful efforts to be the same. For today, though, I know that she will not judge me in my last pair of clean socks, with my chapped lips sitting amongst scattered papers. She won't bedgrudge me the slow way I edit my latest project, or the time I spend wandering in the street staring around without conviction. She will allow me to choose the slowest micro I can so that I can listen to music and stare out at the storefronts for longer. She will look on with understanding as I put off til tomorrow what can be done today and instead take refuge under lamplight, out of the cold of the fog that sedates us.

Monday, October 6, 2008

A funny thing happened on the way to my blog post...

So, apologies from the bad blogger. My personal life has been a bit of a headache lately, and as such my reflections on Chile have been on hold while I try to get things sorted. As this is not a personal life blog, most of what I've been dwelling on of late has not been suitable material.

I'll be back on this week, so check back in today or tomorrow for a real, honest, post about Chile.

In the meantime, please take the time to check out this post on Kyle's blog. She has committed to paying a young man's tuition to DuocUC, a technical university. This is of particular relevance to me because I am, at the moment, a volunteer teacher at that same institution (in another location, of course). It is an extremely respected institution for the level of training it provides (something akin to a technical associate's degree in the US). It is also, however, expensive. This has been one of the major quandaries for me over the course of this year. My students are wonderful people who are given a great opportunity to better their circumstances--but for a price. It is difficult for me to resolve the contradiction inherent in being a volunteer at an institution which is only available to people who can afford the high tuition.

As such, I'm happy to pass on the information that Kyle, who is a photographer, is giving all proceeds from her print sales this month to her friend's tuition. You can read the details of this on her site. She is a skilled photographer. If any of you would like a nice picture of the country at the end of the world, now's your chance to buy one and simultaneously contribute to someone's well-being.