Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [59]
We were lucky. The mythology doesn’t appear to have any defining textbook, meaning that the legend of characters like Trauco is related in stories. And we had our own oral historian. If only, I thought as he started up, he didn’t speak with such an absolutely indecipherable accent. A combination of every bad habit of Chilean Spanish and his own ruggedly shaped mouth meant that something like a third of his words never emerged into the world, and those that did came out in a kind of croaking blur, minus many of their most important consonants.
He emphasized Trauco, his favorite character. Short and squat, Trauco lived in forest caves and wore clothing made of dried straw. He was small, Don Carlos said, “but he had the strength of a Hercules.” A tourist had once come in and seen Don Carlos working on a block of wood with an axe and shrieked, “Trauco!” His face lit up at the memory. “The axe, you know, is also part of Trauco’s appearance,” Don Carlos explained.
Trauco’s mischievous trick was to impregnate single women. “Not so much now,” Antonio told us, “but twenty or thirty years ago, in the countryside, if a single woman got pregnant, they said Trauco did it.”
“Always, in jokes, we say that Trauco did it,” Don Carlos added.
“And what do people think now?”
Antonio answered, while Don Carlos nodded. “What’s happening now is that in the countryside, it’s almost equal to the town,” he said. “They used to be more reserved, that kind of thing. Now, everyone has a TV. Now everyone has a cell phone. Some have Internet. They’re losing the culture as a result.” He gave us an example: Even in the countryside, kids no longer listened to folkloric music. “They’re all listening to rock music,” he lamented. I thought back to our waitress in the coffee shop.
Don Carlos agreed. “Before, the people in the countryside, the ceremonies, everything was ceremonial and respectful,” he said. “When you visited a place in the countryside, they attended to you like a king, like a prince.” He paused for a minute. “Today, no. Today, nothing distinguishes the countryside from the city.”
While mourning their lost traditions, Don Carlos and Antonio were also essentially describing the rural Chiloé that Darwin visited. An 1832 census counted 42,000 people in an area of nearly 3,500 square miles. Thick forest blanketed much of the land. “The country generally is only inhabited round the shores of the creeks & Bays,” Darwin wrote, “the road by the coast is in some places so bad that many houses have scarcely any communication with others excepting by boats.”
Darwin saw the island’s inhabitants as impoverished. Though they lived surrounded by food and had adequate clothing and plenty of firewood, they could scarcely afford European luxuries like sugar, gunpowder, tobacco, or accurate timepieces. In the margin of his journal, he wrote with astonishment, “No Watch or Clock, strike the Bell by guess!” He also recorded his distaste in a line bound to give anyone reading his journal today whiplash: “Besides the Climate, it is disagreeable to see so much poverty & discontent. Poverty is a rare sight in S. America.”
Poverty, the Dickensian kind Darwin would have known from London, is an all-too-common sight in modern South America, so much so that in places squalor has become a tourist draw. The slum tours, though, are mostly an urban phenomenon. In countryside areas like Chiloé, poverty had not yet acquired the glamour it had taken on in Rio de Janeiro.
Certainly, the farmers of Chiloé were still poor, and many of them lived off the land, or, more accurately, the sea. Van Meurs, the history museum director, told us that modernization had brought new and different jobs in the trinket shops and supermarkets of Ancud, but that it hadn’t changed the basic culture. “People still