Ritoque

The bus journey from Santiago to Ritoque was three times longer than stipulated. Along the way we passed by a gas refinery, which looked like something from a bad post apocalyptic movie – huge black steel towers, scaleless steel cylinders, and there was an excess gas burner, where random bursts of flame spewed out every few seconds. I didn’t think these things existed, they had always seemed too improbable. We arrived in the town and a taxi driver took us out to the beach where we were staying. As we pulled up to the gates an old Saudi-looking merc pulled up beside us and a flaky couple get out – Angie and her boyfriend who, as it turned out, were our hosts and were waiting for us at the bus station, but didn’t see us. They had a car that was so much full of random shit – there were baby rattles, egg cartons, a small buoy, and a pack of gravel that was permanently weighing the car to the left, appropriately. They took us up the hill to the house which was entirely for us – an incredible A-frame building, a living room and kitchen downstairs and a bedroom up on the mezzanine. There was a full height window looking out onto the Pacific Ocean roaring dimly beyond the sand. We met Will the night porter, an American guy from Seattle who visited the place 4 months ago travelling through the continent and hadn’t left yet – he was given a kind of job by Angie looking after the place at night; he was playing beer pong with Canadian guy staying in another house. Beer pong is a game of skill and beer. Two people stand either side of a table, each with ten small cups of beer in front of them in a triangle. The idea is to throw a table tennis ball into the other person’s beer cups, and then you drink the beer. The person who drinks the most amount of beer wins. Either that or he loses, I can’t remember but they were playing this outside our place when we got in.

There was a little restaurant beneath us by the beach, owned by a really cute couple, she was an actress and he was a surfer and they lived in their restaurant. His father had been one of the first surfers in Chile, but he moved out during the dictatorship. When he found himself back again, he started a surf school and restaurant with his son, and the son has been running it since his father died last year. They told us what they had left in the kitchen (fish), so we said we would have that. She made the dinner while he stayed out with us and talked and talked. I hadn’t realised the word huevon was used so much in Chile (typical example: uuuiii huevon, estos huevones son unos putos huevones, huevon). Maybe he was just making up for lack of usage, either way it was funny. The food arrived about an hour later and it was spectacular, a real surprise and maybe the best fish we would have over there, in a soy sauce, uber-stylishly presented on the plate and tasting incredible. By then it was nearly 12; we had always been the only ones in the restaurant but when dinner was over he and she both sat with us and we talked and drank Bolivian beer. He told me how sad he was with the right wing switch in the government, that they were doing things wrong, that people are slow to see the truth, that there is a better way to live he wished other people would see. I liked these people, I liked the way they lived. I certainly felt more on their side than on the Lemaitre`s but something bothered me that I couldn’t articulate until I heard what Zizek said – that ecology is the new opium of the masses (as Marx called religion); its next (logical) step is to tend towards fascism. I wonder if there will ever be a point at which the two couples we met on this strangest of days would appear to be the same. We left full and laughing and went back to our new and great house.

We had breakfast on the terrace the next morning; our house, it seemed, was the centre of ceremonies for the surfers in the area, they would meet up with Maurice and get what they needed from the garage below us. The food was good and nobody seemed bothered about the large wasps that chaved over the honey. After breakfast we all (8 of us) piled into the merc and Angie brought us into town but we only made it as far as the main road where the police were parked; ewa and I bailed out of the car and walked the road till she left the others in and came back for us. A strange thing happened as we made our way – a condor exploded out from the field beside us, enormous and gnarled, like a huge black sheet flung towards us. It was too big; the signifier “bird” didn’t seem to apply. I followed it as it became real in the sky, like the condors I had seen previously. It came into focus as it became a shape hovering a million miles above the huge pacific.

We found ourselves in a dull town, thinking about the compromises made in living here, like they do. There was a wonderful market though with food and a spectacularly random second-hand stuff section, anything that you could never need. We got food for dinner and a useless adaptor. We hitched back to the beach and will the Seattler was there on his own, kind of just standing there. We talked about making decisions and committing to things, I told him about myself and my iniquities. Ewa and I went inside to make dinner; a bit later on he came in and said that he had been thinking about what we had talked about and that he felt ready to start making choices about what he wanted to do. I looked at ewa – we were waiting for a huge revelation, some grand statement, but that was it. He spoke softly – his name was will. Around this time the surfers came back – Maurice and Sasha and Angie and some kids looking for body boards. There was a full moon that night and the plan was to go horseback riding over dunes. Angie organised it – it was cheap and she even said that she would throw in a 3 litre of wine and some spliff – it ended up as being one of the great moments of the trip. We got picked up by the same taxi driver that left us to the hostel the day before, with the same Elvis record playing, and he took us to the stables. We were given our horses and we headed off in tandem, ewa`s horse taking her time, mine a little too eager, Will`s too small, Angie`s crazy and Maurice`s an aristocrat. The moon was low and buttery that night. Even now as I write this I can feel the horse between my legs, its roundness. Surely the horse is the greatest of animals. We rode in tandem through fields and the moon followed slowly, and when we arrived at the beginning of the dunes we stopped for wine and drugs. They joked about poor Will`s non-spanish, and I did some impressions of the guy from the restaurant the night before. The wine was heady and gloopy but we managed to finish the whole bottle; a joint was handed round, and we got back on our horses to make our way over the sand dunes.

Things I will remember from that night: the colour of the sand in full moonlight that put the sky blue-green, the low quake of the ocean in the background, ewa`s laugh, a child`s laugh, which fixes a spring stream in my mind. Angie at the back complaining that her horse has “gone mad”, the sight of the girls behind us, arriving over the peak of a dune, and holding it, silhouettes now, watching us watching them, basking in the moon. A horse will go slowly down a dune, but to climb one the horse will charge, and the feeling is glorious. I have felt nothing in my life like this, a childish rapture that made me roar and cry laughing. We would drop down into huge craters from which you could see nothing but the rim of the dune and the sky, and the moon. We would make our way up the far side, surrendering to the horses, who would show us the power of their hind legs. All this for hours. It was easy, with the full moon, the movement of the horses, the wine, and the weed, to entertain the notion that this was the lunar surface and the milky light in the sky was a ruse. Eventually we made it to the beach, and another moon appeared far out on the surface of the black ocean, the reflection of reflected light. We charged the beach, its full length, the sand firm and giving. I could feel that the horse wanted to run as much as me; I don’t know who enjoyed it more. A glorious memory, one of the finest moments of the trip.

We had arrived back to the beach beside the hostel. It was maybe 1 in the morning and we were heading to Valparaiso the following day so we said our goodbyes to the guys and headed to bed. We had organised a taxi from the night before, and he came at 7 am (same guy, same music).