The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [90]
The Chilean! The dark handsome dancer from the bullring full-moon party.
For some reason, I wasn’t self-conscious about having him see me peeing with his daughter, both of us totally naked. She explained to me that they had a camp beyond the rocks where he was standing.
Marie-Claire grabbed my hand again and ran down to the sea where the gurgling ocean waves sucked in and out over rocks covered in yellow-green algae. She beckoned me to sit on the green seaweed carpet and slide down into the water. A wave caught us and pushed us upward. We slid back and forth with the tide, laughing until tears ran down our sun burnt cheeks.
I’d completely forgotten my sorrows and desires. This happy child had invited me into her world, an enchanted playground of quirky sea creatures and hidden caves.
Then she slipped into the malachite green waters and disappeared. Her silhouette moved below the water’s surface. She looked like a mermaid. Then, there was another larger shadow with her. I worried that it was a predator and dove in swimming to her depth. The shadow was her father. They didn’t seem to need to come up for air. They showed me how to swim deep with the colder currents. These people were fantastical and mythical, dancing through their watery world like manatees or dolphins or selkies.
Marie-Claire was hungry after all her romping in the water and on land. We followed a narrow path that wound between the skyscraper-size Mesozoic boulders to where they were camping. He had created an other-worldly living space veiled in cream-colored canvas roofs, with thin slabs of pink slate as tabletops, white smoothed boulders for chairs, and Persian carpets that lay over the taupe sand.
The only way to get to their Bedouin-style encampment was by foot down the steep trail, or by Zodiac. As he prepared lunch, he told me he came here from Belgium every year and brought his boat and his daughter. They held court in this old-world quarry for the entire summer.
We grazed on large green olives, Manchego cheese, tomatoes, and fresh sardines. He had a soft yet radiant smile and told me his name was Patrice. He was from Dalcahue in Chiloé.
My mouth dropped open like an attic trapdoor. I was sitting in a dream setting of opaque rock and turquoise sea, without clothes, completely at home with a man who had terrified me several nights before. He was also blessed with a fairy princess daughter who was affectionate, intelligent and gifted.
Yet, this wasn’t the reason my mouth was gaping open. It was because Patrice was from my favorite place in all of South America—perhaps the entire world. An island floating off the southern toe of Chile, only accessible by boat or seaplane, and only for six months a year when the savage winter storms subside. A place where the fishermen’s wives knit bulky wool sweaters dyed in natural hues from the blood of walnut husks, moss, berries, seaweed, and mushrooms.
I knew Dalcahue well, as I went there many times in the 1970s to import those handspun sweaters. It took several days on planes, trains, ferries and small fishing boats to get there from Santiago, the capital of Chile. Nobody outside of Chiloé is from Chiloé.
His voice pulled me back to this island in the warmer climes of the Mediterranean. As he sliced ripe tomatoes on a stone slab, he shared that he was a ballet dancer and lived in a church in Brussels that he’d converted into an art and dance studio.
Damn!
Why couldn’t he be pompous or stupid? Or from Milwaukee? This was all too delicious and tempting (and I’m not talking about the sardines!).
He flipped through a photo album and showed me pictures of his sculptural work. Full-size men and women engraved in the sand on the beaches of Normandy. Tides in the area shift, as described by Victor Hugo, “à la vitesse d’un cheval au gallop”—as swiftly as a galloping horse. The tide comes in at one