The cheerful bus driver invites me to take a seat up front with him. “Every day I drive this route and it still gets me right here,” he says, whistling in wonder and punching his heart so hard he lets out an involuntary splutter.
The bucolic Elqui Valley inspired Gabriela Mistral in equal measure. Born in 1889 to a seamstress mother and a soon-to-be absent father, Mistral overcame her start in life to become Chile’s foremost female poet. She was also South America’s first female Nobel Prize-winner, an accomplished diplomat, a life-long educator and a passionate defender of women’s rights. The writer never forgot the gravelly mountains and lush vales of her childhood, referring back to them continually in her work. When she died in 1957, the country pulled its curtains closed and went into three days of official mourning.
I watch the vineyards swish by. Far, far ahead, where the road peters to a stop and the valley gives out, lies the Andean cordillera, capped with snow and silence. The Elqui Valley could be a poem itself. I imagine full sonnets trickling down its babbling rivers and rhyming couplets inscribing themselves on the stems of its grapevines.
Foreign tourists tend to skip over this picturesque corner of rural Chile. The Elqui Valley lacks the drama of the Atacama Desert in the north or the cobalt-blue glaciers of the south. Picturing Chile as a snake (which it resembles when looked at sideways on an inverted map), then it’s the country’s bulging eye and swishing tail that attract the visitor. Mistral’s birthplace is more like the field mouse trapped in its belly.
The bus finally trundles into the sedate, unruffled village of Montegrande. Mistral spent her first years in this tiny hamlet, living in the backroom of the schoolhouse where her sister taught. Today, the building acts as a museum in the poet’s honour. But it’s midday and the shutters are down. My friend the bus driver suggests we carry on to the next village. “It’ll open again after lunch. Come back at three o’clock.” I carry on with him up the winding road to Elqui Pisco.
He drops me off on the corner of a botanical square overrun with flowers and cheerful palm trees. My eye sets on the Mistral Pisco Distillery, located on a bend in the road directly in front of me. Thinking I might try a thimbleful of the region’s famed liquor, I head towards the distillery gate. I’m just shy of the entrance when the short distance between me and a cool glass of pisco sour is suddenly barred. Blocking the way is a lady of a preposterously chatty disposition. Her name, I learn, is Gabriela.
The poet’s namesake owns a fine hostel, she informs me. I’m after a drink not a bed, I respond, hoping to shake her off. Ah, well, she has a juice bar, too. Weakened by her exuberance and genuinely thirsty, I allow myself to be led towards Gabriela’s Cactus Bar. In the time it takes to prepare a banana and orange smoothie, I become fully acquainted with her life story.
EXPLORE THE ELQUI
Valleys and galaxies
Elqui’s wind-battered hillsides and lush valley floor, the childhood home of Gabriela Mistral, give the poet’s work its earthy textures and quiet eloquence. If you’re a cyclist, the narrow road along the valley floor offers a perfect two- or three-day meander through arcadian countryside (Expediciones Chile, www.exchile.com ).
Stop for sustenance in the quaint village of Elqui Pisco . This two-street hamlet owes its name to a legal sleight of hand. As a result, Chile can now vie with its neighbour Peru over the original copyright for pisco, a brandy-like liquor that both countries claim as their national drink.
A sample over a lunch of tapas and local cheeses at the Mistral Distillery (www.piscomistral.cl) explains the rivalry.
A collection of Mistral memorabilia can be found in the nearby town of Vacuña (calle Gabriela Mistral 759; tel: +56 51 411223). A good place to start reading for English-speakers is Gabriela Mistral: A Reader (White Pine Press).
Astronomers flock to Elqui for its clear, star-strewn skies. A glimpse at the galaxies can be gleaned at Mamalluca Observatory (www.mamalluca.org ).
The coastal city of La Serena provides the best jumping-off point to explore the Elqui Valley. Flights from Heathrow start at £1,492 with British Airways.
As a single mother, she moved to Elqui Pisco “on a whim” 20 years ago. She’d been reading a women’s magazine when she stumbled on an article about the tranquil valley. According to the glossy, the earth’s magnetic centre had recently shifted from the plateaus of Tibet to the dales of Elqui. The hippie inside her had decided to go and check it out. “Is it the energies that have brought you this way too?” she asks, finally pausing for breath.
“No, I’m here to find out about Gabriela Mistral.” I’m interested in whether the poet acts as a female role model of sorts. “Ah, in that case, an interesting fact you should know about Elqui Pisco is how many single women there are here.” Gabriela is one of them, which, as an aside, doesn’t worry her as she’s bound to suffer less and therefore live longer. Apparently, the high number has to do with all the dope that the local men smoke. “They call it ‘the curse of Gabriela Mistral’. The singleness that is, not the dope.”
If I am interested in Mistral, I ought to go see Widow Pinto. Word is that she was good friends with the poet in her youth. Gabriela draws me a map. Although the village only has two streets, the task somehow occupies five minutes and an entire sheet of A4 paper. “Just tell her I sent you.”
Discovering a bungalow with a goblin-sized door, I knock. A minute passes before I hear, through an open window, the steps of shuffling feet. The door opens an inch to reveal a wrinkled nose in the semi-darkness. “Doña Pinto?” I inquire of the nose. “Sí, and who might be asking?” The voice is frail and brittle. “Gabriela sent me,” I explain.
“Gabriela who?” the nose wants to know. “Gabriela from the juice parlour.” “Never heard of her.” “She told me you were friends with Gabriela Mistral. Would you have five minutes to talk?” Slowly, the door slides open, revealing the nose to be attached to a short old lady in a woven dress and slippers.
Inside, the low ceilings give the house a pleasant coolness. Doña Pinto guides me to the conservatory, which, in contrast to the shadowy interior, is bright with sunshine. Did I want to see the maté cup Gabriela Mistral drank from during her last visit? She bustles off and returns with a delicate wicker basket. Pulling back a chequered tea-towel, yellowed with age, she reveals the accoutrements of a 75-year-old afternoon tea; china sugar bowl, matching receptacle for the maté leaves, a metal straw.
“She’d call me ‘hijita’ [little daughter] and we’d go for walks together along the river.” “Ah, so you really were very close.” “Yes, of course. We were very good friends. I was four years old at the time.” The poet’s friends were really Doña Pinto’s parents. She’d come round to drink maté and chat in the cool of the veranda. That was back in the early 1930s. “Do you remember much of her character?”
“Oh, she was a wonderful woman,” Doña Pinto responds. “A big heart, very kind. But reserved, not very openly affectionate. Serious, some people used to say.”
“Why was that, do you think?”
“Hers was a tragic life, really.” Mistral’s father walked out when she was only a baby. As a schoolgirl, the poet was branded a communist for writing a feminist tract and duly expelled. Then her childhood sweetheart committed suicide. “Gabriela never loved again. No children of her own. Only sadness.” Doña Pinto carries the pain as though the suffering were her own. Years later, Mistral’s godson, whom she’d raised from his youth, also took his own life. “Imagine, the two most important men in her life, both killing themselves.”
I check my watch. It’s almost three o’clock. I take my leave of Widow Pinto and make my way back to the bus stop. Arriving in Montegrande, I find the museum doors open. Betica, the elderly curator, is enjoying a catnap in her chair by the door.
The adobe-brick schoolhouse consists of two rooms. Classes took place in the front one. The rows of wooden desks have not been moved. Nor the slate blackboard ingrained with chalk dust or the faded maps of Chile on the walls. It’s as if the pupils popped out for recess and never came back.
The walls of the second room are bare and whitewashed. It contains three iron-framed beds, which lend the room a sanitised, hospital feel. Mistral is survived by the meanest of possessions; a chipped porcelain water jug, her mother’s sewing machine, a wooden trunk, a clunky wash-basin and a dark religious painting.
I turn to leave. I ask Betica if there’s a volume of Mistral’s poetry that she would recommend. The cane-carrying curator rattles off all the poet’s published works, dates of publication, biographical snippets and translation details for good measure. And her favourite? She does own an early version of the Nobel Prize-winner’s first compilation, which Mistral wrote when she was only 19.
Great, what’s it called?
“Desolation”, Betica announces with curious delight. “We Chilean women suffer a lot, you know?”
This is an edited extract from ‘Viva South America! A Journey through a Restless Continent’ (Faber & Faber) by Oliver Balch
