Despair hit quickly – I thought that we would be at least out of the valley before we found trouble, but our first turn up the track was the steepest and the worst. The car got immediately stuck, and I had to get out and push while Ewa floored it. This didn’t work and I started to realise that the car was just ploughing through mud and veering scarily close to the edge of the path (the drop was a sheer one down into thick forest). I found big flat stones with the light from my mobile and laid them out under the front wheels and wedged two huge branches behind the back ones, bb revved it and I gave it one mighty push and we made it out. As I got back in the car I realised a few things: that there is just the two of us in this, no one else can help, that to do this will take hours, many hours, and that it is going to test us. But I saw other things two, that my girlfriend had a level of grit and seriousness that I hadn’t seen until now, and that I would do anything to keep her safe. The road continued as it began but we learnt to read the path and keep the car in the middle. The car was taking such a beating though, from stones and craters that the right headlight packed in which meant I had to get out at most right hand turns to see where we were going. Most dips in the road were completely flooded, which involved me getting out and checking the depth of the water with a stick, and guiding ewa through the shallowest way. We got used to the low thuds under the car, but every so often there would hit a terrible clank, stone on metal, and we would look at each other thinking is that it so? But it wasn’t, each time the car continued and every flooded dip that bb flew through, now confident after 3 hours of beating this fucking path, I would think, Christ, I love this girl!
We were both avoiding the truth though, the awful truth, that we made 15km in 3 hours. Something had to give, the car or our patience. It was here though, where fate entered, and the events that transpired, or the significance of these events, are still floating in my mind, and my heart, looking for anchor. Even if this appears as merely a story I can only say that, interpretations aside, the events that I write about are all true.
At one of the moments I was out of the car, I took my time walking back to it after ewa raced through a sodden pothole. It was a clear and beautiful night, mercifully dry, and I found myself looking to the sky and talking to Paul, and asking for help as I have done a few times before, with the promise that if it arrived it would be recognised as such and acknowledged. We had discussed parking the car and sleeping in it, but till now there was literally nowhere that we had seen to pull over, and in any case, I had noticed that the forest was making strange sounds. So I suppose I was looking for something extraordinary. As got back in the car we set off slowly and made our way around a few bends until, as the road started to flatten out, we saw in front of us a thick low cloud sitting on the road. It was 11 at night, and in the one headlight it looked impossible, but there is was, hanging eerily in front of us until the car drove through it, and it parted. If we hadn’t spent time in Pucón and Coñaripe we wouldn’t have known the truth – that somewhere near here the earth had opened up and there are hot springs around us. At night the water vapour gathers in heavy sods and the cold keeps it low and clotted. We passed through three or so of these, registering their weirdness but perhaps being already too on edge to be scared. And then, 10 minutes further, we see a sign on the road, the first that we had seen. It said LahuenCo Hotel Spa 100 metros. This was 20 km into no-man´s-land in the Chilean Andes, but improbable as it seemed, here was a hotel. We took the turn into a driveway down to a low building, modern, timber framed, and totally empty. We entered into a lobby with leather sofas and a huge mahogany coffee table, but no reception, no desk, nobody. To our left there were rooms, numbered, but nothing else. A huge window behind the couches looked out onto blackness. I checked the doors to two of the rooms; all closed. The corridor faded away in the dim light; I thought of the corridors of The Shining but thought it sensible not to share this with ewa. We thought for a while of just sleeping on the couch and leaving a note beside ourselves, but we decided to explore outside. We lapped around the outside of the building, nothing, and we walked back up to the road to see if we missed a turn. Sure enough, there is a small sign saying reception 200 metres.
LahuenCo, as it turns out, is Quechua for “miraculous water”. The reception, restaurant and health spa is in a totally separate building of the same design further down the road, but is connected to the residential building by a wooden path. We make our way into a huge reception and ring a gong. The manager, young looking but grey haired, grey eyed, greets us. His dark eyebrows pointed in a gothic arches. We told him of our adventure, and he smiled and welcomed us, and told us to relax, that we would spend the night here. His name was Daniel.
He showed us back to the rooms along the path; it wasn’t lit but he had a torch. He checked the first room on the corridor, 14, but I knew we wouldn’t be sleeping there. He came out and told us that it was missing towels, so he showed us into room 13. It couldn´t have been any other room under the circumstances. On his way out, he asked us did we have a torch ourselves; we said no – well now you do – he said, and left us with his light. We showered and lay on crisp linen sheets and laughed. The previous night we slept in a tent. As ewa got ready, I went out to look again at the sky; the same sky as always but now incandescent, the stars cast shadows and the planet Venus (the Morningstar!) shone low and firm. I paid my respects and offered my gratitude. Daniel came up to get us at 11.30, the chef was about to leave so we went back to eat. The one other couple staying in the hotel had left about an hour ago apparently; the restaurant was ours. We had an onion soup and a fine steak and red wine, and then a lemon tart. Daniel took our orders and served us the food, and when we finished he cleared the plates. If the chef left, we didn’t see him go; it seemed that our friend the manager was the only person in the building.
Flushed after red wine, we had tea and felt complete. Red meat in no man´s land – it all fed an atavistic hunger inside us. Our surroundings were the most lavish we had experienced by far and the whole affair was spectacularly expensive, but inventions like money and national boundaries seemed to be all too human this night. We asked Daniel to join us; we were intrigued by him and curious. Where we are at the moment, geographically (he smiled as he explained), comes under the law of Argentina, but we were outside of the two borders. Basically it's complicated, he said. He kind of left it at that, and looked out the window, but in any case it seemed best to leave it nebulous. We asked him about himself, where he lived. He had been living here in the hotel since it opened 3 months previous. Before that there was just the forest. He was born in Buenos Aires but he seemed to hate the place. He had lived in hotels quite a bit, working as a manager in the Sheraton at the Iguassu Falls for 10 years (a hotel that sits directly on another border, between Argentina and Brasil). He was extremely open, telling us about his life, personal things – his split from a band he sang in, the break-up of his relationship with the mother of his kids, how he lives here and they live in Buenos Aires. The more he told us the stranger it felt, pity not being the first sentiment that a hotel manager usually inspires. And there were weird things, inconsistencies – he would say something and then deny it, or contradict it. He became strangely animated when we talked about frontmen in bands and I said that only someone like Jagger can really pull off a song like Sympathy for the Devil. He said he loved football but when I mentioned Henry´s handball against Ireland, he told us he didn’t know much about football. He chose to live away from his children so as they wouldn’t see him unhappy. Nothing freaky, but it was enough for me to think, and say to ewa, there´s something strange about Daniel. We finished up at half one. He told us that the hot baths outside were there to be used if we wanted. I tried to persuade ewa but I was a half-hearted attempt, we were both drained. So with our new light, we wandered slowly to our bedroom.
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