Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [58]
When Darwin arrived in June—winter, the wettest time of year—the weather had been perfectly benign for three days, and he was as surprised as we were. He recalled “the inhabitants themselves wondering at such an event.” I asked the first person I could find, a shopkeeper in a small knick-knack store, about the unusual weather. “I had read,” I said, “that Chiloé was always raining.”
“Oh, it is,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Lucky right now. But it’ll rain tomorrow. Or tonight.” He thought for a minute. “Or,” he added, “both.”
The bus dropped us in Ancud, in Darwin’s time the capital of Chiloé. Smoke rising from chimneys and metal stovepipes filled the air with the smell of burning wood and left a low lingering haze over the town. “Darwin wrote that the first dry day he was here, the ‘whole of Chiloé’ was out burning brush to clear land,” I recited to Josh as we walked downtown. Josh wrinkled his nose at the smoke and looked off into the shimmering, hazy distance, where there were supposed to be mountains visible on the mainland. “Well,” he said hesitantly, “I suppose that’s a nice parallel.”
The town boasted a small grid of streets and a ping-pong and pool hall at the top of the hill. “I don’t remember Jim Croce singing about ping-pong,” Josh joked as we walked by a group of slouching, cigarette-smoking teens loitering in front of the building. This was typical Josh: Obscure, super-smart jokes that referenced songs that no one had listened to in thirty years. We kept walking. At the northernmost waterfront edge of the town, we strolled through the Plaza de Armas, a small leafy square with statues of different creatures of Chilotan mythology. We wandered up a small hill and found a coffee shop called “The Enchantment of Chiloé,” where we ordered real coffee (a rarity in Nescafé-mad Chile) and watched as a pretty young waitress sashayed by while singing along, in stilted English, with the Annie Lennox and Aretha Franklin duet “Sisters are Doin’ it for Themselves.”
The “Enchantment of Chiloé” is a tourist draw: The island’s complex cast of folkloric characters had grown into a legend and spawned the “Magic Isle” moniker. But I wondered about it the same way I wondered about gaucho culture in Argentina. Was it something real? What was its historical basis? If twenty-something waitresses in coffee shops were serving espresso and watching VH1, how well had this leprechaun-and-Lucky-Charms-style mythology stuck?
“They are all Christians,” Darwin wrote of the Chilotans, “but it is said that they yet retain some strange superstitious ceremonies, and that they pretend to hold communication with the devil in certain caves.” He couldn’t find out more, though, because, he reported, anyone convicted of such worship was sent to the inquisition in Lima. Now, the particulars are quite in the open. The island’s belief system and tourism industry now proudly announce the virtues of Trauco, a troll-like creature whose ugliness makes him irresistible to women, and Fiura, his female counterpart (and, according to some versions, daughter). Fiura was supposedly just as ugly, but she was reported to have found a novel use for her bad breath; one huff and she’d overpower and sleep with any man she desired.
Curious to learn more about the mythology, and eager to find out whether people still believed it or just knew that it was good for scoring money off gullible tourists, we sought out the director of the regional history museum. Dutch-born archaeologist Marijke van Meurs referred us to Don Carlos Aguilar Cardenas, whose primary recommendation appeared to be that, unlike her, he was very old and had lived on the island most of his life. We found him out behind the museum, in a small stone tower with castle battlements, carving wooden ships with a chisel and chatting with a friend. Don Carlos—which, incidentally, is what Charles Darwin is often called