Concepción

The first time I was in Concepción was with my brother … and it (the whole thing, the whole time, the whole enchilada) was all still new, in this old kind of way. At dusk our train had left Santiago's Estación Mapocho, Track 7, and I was living in my thoughts, filming in my thinking that old trains might be my future, that reality might become a sort of permanent cinematic.

After all, it had only been a little over two years since I had moved to Philadelphia for school, and even commuter cars packed with impatient office workers were still a bit magical. The idea – the mere suggestion – that steel-wrought antebellum (well, not before the War of the Pacific) infrastructure might be relevant, un-abandoned by passengers, was exciting to the point of sexy. In my hometown tracks and rail yards mean freight cars, and forgotten neighborhoods, a romantic feel to be sure, but perhaps more in that western panorama sort of way.

The movement of the train underneath me and the flicker of hazy sunset light convinced my body that the reel-to-reel camera was in fact running. My brother and I sat side-to-side, actors in two completely different films, both ordered by the strangeness of overnight travel, where everything that happens is off-script. I was in an indie, having a non-sequitur conversation with a 40-something Concepción woman who had spent the day buying Christmas presents in the Parque Arauco, the capital's largest American-style mall in the American-style neighborhood of Las Condes, the real downtown for Santiago's élite and an homage to the American-style architectural additions of the dictatorship. (In the 70's they built large residential towers that would have fit well in a 1970's suspense movie; in the 1980's they built garish commercial centers that would have pleased Ronald Reagan's 1980's … for example, the “caracoles,” malls made of continuous inclining ramps in the shape of snails, a wheelchairer's ultimate wrist workout). My brother was in an abstract musical interlude, rocking his head between the sunset's licks, the floors vibrations, and the uninteligible gibberish of the talking housewife. We were both cinematic as we bumped and slid the incongruence of our realities against each other's sweaty shoulders.

Concepción was our first stop on a trip without plan nor pre-conception, so I guess we were honoring a city named for an unplanned pregnancy. It's the southern end of a line that used to go further south, before planes, and we just wanted to to take the train. It was not so much a trip as an invocation, a practice run for a trip we were to take later to Argentina and Brazil. What would it be like just to live straight ahead, following a forward-pointed arrow, if only for a long weekend?

Maybe it wouldn't be so strange for my brother and me; after all, we had spent plenty of time simultaneously bearing down on the right-hand buttons of game controllers, propelling our avatars ever rightwards in 2-D 8-bit universes, most compellingly in Nintendo's “River City Ransom” (“Got punched and lost your crow bar? I'll grab it for ya', bro'. I'll be your wingman assailant!”.) River City Ransom was about two hotheads out to save a girl from gangsters in some sort of post industrial urban decay … maybe in Jersey City on the non-river river that is Newark Bay?


Because of a very different kind of lawlessness, a State of Emergency (called “State of Exception” in Spanish) was declared in Concepción the day after the February earthquake at the end of the Chilean summer, announcing like our Pennsylvania groundhog a longer winter. Not a longer wait, nor a deeper wait, but a depth-ier wait. Chile has seen her shadow: Like Beltrán, the seismologist Chilean-Californian protagonist of Alberto Fuguet's The Movies of My Life who lives life as a cinematic resonance of 70's and 80's Hollywood, Chile has a seismic hippocampus, a shadow drawn ahead of it that makes it constantly look into its past and future. Beltrán built his expectations for the future on the cinematic images of the past, just as Chileans would often speak of 1960, 1985 and “the next one.”

And, thinking of it now, my brother and I took our trip as though it were something outside of the present … a resonance of the past, a look into the shadow, a rehearsal for future buddy movies. It was a good place and time to celebrate our arrival to adulthood.

I was 20 and he was 18.

And, pulling into Concepción very early in the morning, ten days before a hot summer Christmas, it felt good to be – at 20 – a person who already realized that that sentence, “I was 20 and he was 18,” was by itself already a much more compelling story than anyone could write. A full novel.

We stayed very few hours in Concepción on the way down. I really, really want to tell you about my memories of the downtown, but they are obscured by 3 readings of Roberto Bolaño's Distant Star, (Estrella distante). Bolaño tells the story of a Concepción literary klatch that becomes dispersed in the weeks following the 1973 coup d'état. It's a diverse group of students and lost souls victimized by a military infiltrator, a bad poet who later launches a surreal photo exhibition for facha (Chilean: fascistic) night-goers in a Santiago under curfew. (The exhibition consists of a bedroom papered in photographs of the agent's murder victims.) The drama for the main character of the novel, a writer who has been released from an improvised military prison, is that he can't pick up the pieces/ can't mourn/ can't take full stock of what has happened because he still doesn't know who has been lost and how, and his personal inquiry into the matter is endless and fruitless. There is no way of knowing who has been killed and nothing to grab a hold of but rumors. The part of the novel that made its Concepción stick with me more than my Concepción were the narrator's vividly plastic memories of one of the last nights before the coup, when he went to visit the military infiltrator (known by his false poet name) in his apartment. The apartment itself was a terrifying harbinger. There was too much sparseness, too little furniture, too much cleanliness. The narrator (Belano) should have known, but didn't realize, that this was a faker's pad. With time, he comes to feel the violence of that place , and sees it clearly for what it was: the perfect symbol of a Chile that was to be wiped clean. Scrubbed. Purified of dissent and scoured of art. It reminds me of AP dispatches I read now: a landscape of victims, robbed by violence of their daily poetry.

Concepción I don't know who she is. In Concepción, as Fiona Apple said, I only woke to dream. My bother can tell you. I was the guide, the director of a scene I had not choreographed and he was the looker. Like the fascistic poet I only knew to move us forward to the Future, so we were on a bus by mid-afternoon.

We bused to Lota.

Lota (Chile), 2 mar (EFE).- Mitzi y Ricardo, vecinos de la localidad costera de Lota, ubicada en el Gran Concepción (Chile), comenzaron hoy a retirar del patio de su casa los escombros que en la madrugada del sábado terminaron con la vida de sus dos hijas, de nueve y catorce años.

[Lota (Chile), 2 March (EFE news wire). – Mitzi and Ricardo, inhabitants of the coastal town Lota, in Greater Concepción, today began to clear their patio of the rubble that took the lives of their two daughters, 9 and 14 on Saturday.]

She was 14 and her sister was 9. It's a novel by itself.

Lota was, for me, my very first anonymous place. It was not on any map in my mind. It was simply where the bus ended, not a city, just some place where working class Concepción folks might arrive for vacation after Christmas. It's name sounded a little bit like lote (“lot” or “plot”), another empty landscape for me to direct the scene based on the book of where my thoughts wanted to go anyway. My memory of the empty beach, and the empty restaurant where we ate fried shellfish under a Fanta sign, reminds me of two movies of my life: (1) my favorite Chilean movie, an adaptation of Antonio Skármeta's Ardiente Paciencia (precursor to Il Postino), featuring a scene where a poor postal worker sits in such a beachfront restaurant, eying a curvy waitress as he watches the poet Pablo Neruda receive the Nobel Prize for Literature on a black-and-white screen, and (2) my unplanned stop, years later, along Highway 1 not far from California's Concepción, where I got a call from my brother telling me he had ditched his New York life on a whim to take a bus to Denver, desperate to get out and to figure things out.

My brother and I treated Lota as you might a Hollywood lot. We walked around, loafed and talked, and imagined objects as props, to be molded into something. For me it was a relief. Like an empty country club I once saw in Rancagua, a few hours north, that reminded me of the dead officer's club at a closed Memphis military base where my father worked when I was in middle school.

I can't finish this piece, because I don't know what we were looking for there, and I can't sum it up. No more than I can tell the future of River Cities. I don't know what all these inhóspito spaces meant for us, nor what they might still mean. And, in the aftermath of an 8.6 earthquake, I don't really want to know.