Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [62]
(Obviously, we didn’t make it all the way.)
In fact, we hitched a ride to Quicaví, walked up to the first house we found, knocked on the door, asked the matronly woman who answered about the cave, and were immediately stymied.
“You can’t get there anymore,” the woman said. “It’s caved in.”
“Is there anyone around town we can talk to?”
She directed us to find an unpainted two-story house and ask for the retired schoolteacher who lived there. We thanked her, walked across the street, and found the house as described. Another old woman answered the door, and when we told her about our quest, invited us into the living room. She sat us down, poured us two cups of orange Fanta, brought us cookies, and told us to wait while she fetched her husband.
Marcelo Marcias emerged a few moments later and sat down opposite us at a wooden table. As he introduced himself I realized that while I had thought Don Carlos and Antonio’s accents were difficult, they had actually been models of enunciation and clarity compared to this more rural Chilotan accent. If languages are digital things, with distinct words, then the best way I can describe Marcelo Marcias’ language is to say that he spoke in analog. I asked him about the witches, and although I missed much of his answer, I did understand one important line.
“The people who told those stories have died,” he said.
In 1883, Marcias said, the mayor of Chiloé conducted a good old-fashioned witch-hunt. Witches were identified by their neighbors, and the mayor “killed all the witches.”
“And what about the cave? People have told us it doesn’t exist.”
“Seguramenteenestamomentono,” he said, which I think translates to, “Nope.”
Marcias said he thought he had an idea where the cave might have been, and when we looked later, we found newspaper articles that claimed to know of a cave, if not the cave. But even that cave was off-limits now, separated from Quicaví by a treacherous ravine and a washed-out road.
I asked Marcias if he thought the witches still existed.
“Oh, yes, they exist,” he said.
“So what would happen,” I asked, “if the witches met Trauco?”
“Oh, that’s not very likely,” he said. “The witches have far more power. Trauco is weak.”
At night, he said, people would see lights out on the water—the lights of Caleuche ferrying witches around. Josh and I didn’t plan to stay the night to look for lights on the water. “So the mystery of the witches remains,” he said later. “I sort of like it better that way.”
Before we left, we went to visit one last trail: The Senda Darwin, a small biological station on the north shore of the island. The morning dawned beautifully. A full rainbow spanned the green fields, and a second half-rainbow stretched up behind it. We could see right to the end of both. “There’s no pot of gold,” Josh later declared. “That’s another capitalist lie.”
We found a ranger, Emer Mencilla Díaz, standing out front of a small visitor’s center. He invited us in, and the second we crossed the threshold it started pouring outside, drumming on the windows and roof and splashing up from puddles in the mud.
“Is it like this all the time with the weather?” I asked. “A little sun, a little rain?”
“Yes.” Emer paused, smiled, and corrected himself. “Well, a lot of rain, a little sun.”
We looked outside. The sun had come out, but the rain still fell. A small flock of sheep across from the visitor’s center had turned black about halfway down their coats from the mud. At this point, they looked rather as if they had turned white from the necks up. Emer told us that the station used to be a study spot for biologists with an office in Santiago but that eventually