Walking (and Riding) Santiago

It wouldn’t have been that hard to find a way to get out into the Andes, they’re that close. Or to the ocean, about an hour away, or, well, to any number of places besides skinny Chile’s capitol city. But I had been so far off the grid — I wanted city time. I wanted the noise and distraction and color of a big city. So I stayed in town, in the center, mostly, and enjoyed the excellent company of my hostess, Eileen, and I walked — we walked. And walked. And walked some more. No wonder I am so tired.

We started with the market, where we picked up many pounds of produce — avocados rich as butter. And melons, two, a watermelon and a honey dew that was so full of juice that it left a great puddle on the counter when Eileen cut it open. And tomatoes, fire engine red and full of the smell of summer. Basil and cilantro, bright green. Prickly pears, melon-y green, full of crunchy seeds and spikes. I had a fresh squeezed orange and grapefruit juice and I eyed the giant carrots and I made a produce vendor laugh by saying, “Everything is so BIG, the fruit here is GIANT!” It felt friendly and the buildings were painted bright colors and everywhere there was graffiti and some of it looked like art.

The following day we rode bicycles everywhere, past Pablo Neruda’s house (one of three) where he lived with his last love, and through the market, again, where butchers flirted and a big guy held up a great purple octopus and said “PULPO!” to me, and I said “OCTOPUS! ” to him, and he answered back, awkwardly but with great humor, “OGG-DO-POOS!!!” I drank a sweet concoction of dried peach and a barley like grain and ate a fried squash cake with some kind of spicy salsa and mustard, and again, the produce was giant, just huge, corn like my forearms, and baseball bat zucchinis, and football sized beets that were maroon and dirty.

That afternoon, still on our shiny green bicycles, we rode out to the cemetery to visit the shrines to Santiago’s dead. Elaborate stone houses held the remains of fire fighters and the air force and, in other places, little children, gone too soon, their graves marked with pinwheels spinning in the wind. A woman in an apron, watering a clover covered grave gave us directions to the Memorial for the Disappeared while Amy Winehouse sang — “They tried to make me go to rehab…” —  from a tiny speaker in a blue apron pocket. A guard admonished Eileen for taking pictures of a splendid roman crypt, damaged in the quake, while I wandered the colonnade reading names and wondering how long it had been since anyone visited.

And I spent another two days walking, walking, walking, into courtyards that were full of red and pink bougainvillea and through shiny shopping malls, and across the hard surfaces of exhibition spaces, and up and down the stairways of the subway, through twee craft shops and crowded pedestrian malls.

For a brief period I was alone, but mostly, I was with Eileen, who patiently explained what was where and what happened when and who was who and, importantly, what was for lunch. We covered her city in increments measured by footsteps or the turn of a bicycle wheel. We rode into a crowd of barking dogs and shouting men, and out again, past shuttered Sunday stores. We walked into a church courtyard, built around an enormous ancient tree. Once, we rattled to the end of the subway line and appeared in a line of palm trees, another time we got wet in the sprinklers at the sculpture park.

My eyes ran around everywhere — I was never lost with Eileen leading the way, so I didn’t miss the guy in the piano tie t-shirt holding hands with his girlfriend outside the cemetery, or the rainbow colored graffiti bird, or the old Roloflex camera on the flea market table, or the sound of Black Hole Sun — a classic track by Seattle band Soundgarden — pouring out of an upper court yard, sung in Spanish. I followed along, and if my eyes are tired, and my ears tired also, and my feet even more so, it because I had, for the last five days, the absolute luxury of wandering the city of Santiago. I could have gone out to the country, or seen more of Chile. I could have done that. But I didn’t.