Chile Gets Warmer

I am having such a nice time.

Don and Bridget have really built themselves a joyful, wonderful nest of warmth and kindness all around them here. It’s hard to remember all the specifics of the people and the places I’ve been with them in this little comarca since I arrived, so I’ll try to talk in generalities:

Don and Bridget and the kids take me to the home of one of their friends in the area for a meal, and invariably I wind up having a smile on my face the entire time, a drink in my hand most of the time, warm food in front of me, laughter bubbling out of me, and conversation churning around me while we play cards or learn to make pizza in an old steel barrel. They have so many friends here who remember them from their days as volunteers, and who clearly adore and appreciate them – and it’s absolutely mutual: D & B know these folks inside and out, and can tell you all their many exceptional qualities in detail and from very specific memory. I have to say, I am very envious of the depth and sincerity of the relationships they’ve forged with these folks over the years. They have second homes all over this little valley – it seems they could fall with eyes close through just about any doorway in any direction and have a decent chance of  being caught in the embrace of an old friend.

Today: Up at the crack of 7:45 and out to a breakfast of oatmeal, prepared by Don (why don’t I eat oatmeal more?), a quick hello to Bridget when she returned from taking the kids to school, and then Don and I were out the door to go hiking in the hills.

We walked to the top of a local hill and took in the gorgeousness. The best way to describe this place is as a desert of crumbly hills that miraculously never fall down on the broad, flat valley beneath. Brilliant white peaks all around send endless rivers of snowmelt toward the sea – but the clever residents have guided them instead to the desert soil and made it blossom into an almost obscenely productive series of orchards and fields, embarrassing in their bounty. Tree-lined canals rush through between the fields with water that’s too clean to be brown, but too busy to be clear. Quietly prosperous but humble homes dot the sides of well-maintained roads, where every bus driver grins at Don and waves as they whip past us. It’s brilliantly sunny and warm in the daytime, and downright bone-chilling once the sunshine slips past you and you’re in the shadows.

Back to the house, where we lunched with Bridget and the kids; then Don took me on a short walk down the lane where Wenceslao and Lucy live, to meet Lucy’s parents, the original grantees of this land-reform parcel that’s now been subdivided into four or five neat little homes replete with avocado, walnut, and apple orchards. We didn’t have much luck meeting people, as only the matriarch, Doña Olivia, was home (watching a very racy telenovela, which she was quick to turn off when we came in). And then we were off for a 4:30 meet-up at the home of Gladys, another of their friends whose husband, like many in the area, is off working in the north, where the mines are. She had us over to make us pisko sours and feed us “las onces”.

“Las onces” are what you have in the late afternoon before the VERY late supper that a lot of people eat around these parts (Uruguay was the same) – though I think often las onces are enough, and people never get around to eating supper. Gladys lives in a lovely ramshackle house overlooking the valley from a slight rise, and her door is always open, figuratively – at least 15 people came in and stayed for some length of time while we were there – and literally: she can never seem to keep her new puppy, or the cold night air, outside. People stream into her house because she’s constantly laying plates of eg-and-potato tortas and freshly fired cheese empanadas in front of them, and re-filling your glass of pisko sour. A drink, by the way, that I find divine. Which is why I should probably not drink it any more.

The plan for the evening was to teach Don and me how to play “brisca”, a Chilean card game which is remarkably similar to euchre. There’s trump (called “triunfo”, or “triumph”, which is, of COURSE!, I say, smacking myself in the head, where “trump” comes from); odd, counterintuitive cards are the most powerful in a suit; aces are high, and you play tricks (“jugadas”) – nine in a series, as you start off with nine cards. Final scoring is done by adding the incidental ten-spots one wins over the course of the game into your final total, arrived at by assigning ten points to all the aces (ases) and threes you have in your pile of won tricks at the end. If the score is close, you then also count your monos (face cards): a 10 is worth 2, an 11 is worth 3, and a 12 is worth 4. And I think you also count the aces and threes in there, each worth a point.

We played many a round, with several men, among them Gladys' son - a man of about 24 who's married and has a child, both of whom live there in the house with him and his mother. He has a rock-and-roll haircut, a slow and confident demeanor, and a deep, subtly commanding voice that seems to come out of the hollow of an oak tree that he apparently keeps hidden in his chest. Another player was a big, round fellow who couldn't stop telling Don and me the most basic elements of the game over and over. God bless him, he was trying to help us, but after a while we had to reassure him that we knew it was our turn, that we knew we had to distribute nine cards to each, etc. Friendliest guy around. The third main player - there are four, but people switched in and out as bathroom requirements dictated - was a big, powerful fellow with some missing teeth that you just knew had a fantastic story behind them. He was there with his wife and kids, and kept answering his phone during the game, which nobody minded at all. He was the cleverest player, and insisted on getting me to adopt his way of holding his cards, which involves the standard fan arrangement up top, but then a column of cards that descends the length of one's palm and is held in place with the thumb.

I adopted it, somewhat grudgingly, and was then convinced that this is a far better way to do it.

I hope to have all these rules much more perfectly in my head before I go back, because brisca has taken over for la conga as my favorite Latin American card game.

Sorry, Natalia. Sidewalks and cards: Now there are two areas where Chile distinctly has Uruguay beat.