Smoldering Lascar by Kevin Galvin

Smoldering Lascar turned violet against a desert sky lit pink by the setting sun. As evening  slid over the Andean foothills and across the desert floor, Tomás sat on an ancient stone wall, smoothing dollar bills against the leg of his jeans. After a bleak start it had turned out to be a good week, with enough paying tourists in town to cover his room and board and put gas in his Jeep. There was enough money left over for a trip into Antofoghasta at the end of the month. Maybe there would be work there this time. Maybe there would be news.

Things hadn’t looked so promising at the start of the week. All of the tourists had stayed in the village, complaining of sore throats and fever. Then on Wednesday he convinced a group of Italians that a visit to the hot springs before sunrise would alleviate their symptoms. The biting cold of the desert morning drove them back to the village in time for Tomás to run a few Frenchmen out to the thermal baths and back before lunch. On Thursday, they were all feeling well enough to take a few sightseeing trips, and on Friday they were gone. The weekend would bring new visitors into the village, and he would begin all over again. He stubbed out his cigarette on a flat red stone on top of the wall and watched the wind blow the glowing ashes into the failing light.

Tomás and Ana Luisa had dug in these Atacapeñan ruins with great success. They had always chosen digs just out of earshot of the other students; just beyond the group’s relentless chatter, where they could be lost in the sound of their brushes coaxing history from the dirt. They would work quietly together for hours, scraping knife blades against the earth, brushing dust away from the small arrowheads and discarded rabbit bones that spoke to the past. When they were together, the silence was light and sweet. Together, they barely felt the desert sun and they were oblivious to the plumes of ash that flowed heavenward from the cone of smoldering Lascar in the distance.

They were working hip-to-hip on their hands and knees one day, scraping carefully along the curved stone walls of a home that an Atacapeñan family built in an era before Christ was born to a world apart, when the earth below them seemed to soften, beckoning. Ana Luisa laid her thin knife aside and took up a brush. Tomás stopped working and watched as she gently brushed along five lines in the earth. Her strokes revealed the outline of a finger, and then a whole hand, a woman’s left hand. Ana Luisa pulled her long black hair back into a ponytail to keep it out of her eyes, and then she returned to coaxing the bones from the earth. After days of careful work, they saw that the arm was protruding from a bundle of tightly wrapped blankets which held the mummified corpose of an Atacapeñan woman. “She was beautiful,” Ana Luisa whispered when their work was done. Tomás put his arm around his partner as she began to softly sob.

The creek by the ruins ran blood red in the last light of day and then Tomás and his memories were swaddled in darkness, alone beneath the stars. He followed the telephone line to find his way back into the village.

Tomás was waiting in the plaza when the bus from the coast arrived the next morning. He removed his sunglasses and stood smiling calmly as a half-dozen kids sent from the village hostels clambered aboard the bus, squeezing past the descending passengers to grab their bags and persaude the weary travelers to follow them back to their employers. Tomás watched as a timid young man followed a fair-haired woman off the bus. The two had met on the pier in Valparaiso where Kenny saw Margaret feeding the pelicans that waited for the fishermen to unload their catch in the afternoon. Tomás liked a woman who had made a few friends on the ride into town. Where she went, they would follow.

“Do you speak Spanish?” Tomás asked her.

“Unpoquito,” she replied.

“Don’t let any of these kids carry your backpack for you. You can’t tell the workers from the thieves,” he said. “One block from the plaza, right beside the pharmacy over there, there’s a good place to stay. La Estancia.”

“Is it nice?” she wanted to know.

“This a small village, Señorita. It has a warm bed and the roof doesn’t leak because it never rains. That is everything we can hope for.”

The guidebooks lured young adventurers to San Pedro with rapturous descriptions of the region’s volcanoes and thermal baths, with images of the giant salt lakes filled with flamingos. Once they arrived in the tiny town, they began to appreciate the vastness of the desert: There was nothing to see at all if you didn’t have four-wheel drive. Tomás was an old hand at the trade. It was best to not pressure them when they first arrived. He knew that eventually, they would go with him. The questions were how much they would pay and how big a bite out of his profits would the local police chief take.

Margaret turned to Kenny and a Spanish couple who had rode behind them on the bus and, after collecting their bags from below, they headed off in the direction of La Estancia. Tomás tipped his hat with a smile and walked to the little archeological museum at the opposite end of the plaza.

Turning the brim of his hat nervously in his hands, Tomás stood in San Pedro’s tiny museum, where the mummified woman he and Ana Luisa had unearthed so many years ago was now installed in the center of the main hall. Tears welled up in his eyes as he gazed on the mummy, who was set in a little recess next to an earthenware jug containing the remains of a young man some classmates found just a few months after Tomás and Ana Luisa had made their discovery. The room was lined with cases of small red and gray arrowheads uncovered by other students over the years, as well as an assortment of stone tools and fractured pots and plates. But his gaze was fixed on the woman’s neatly braided black hair. He used to wonder how she had died, what grief her death had provoked. Did she leave a child? Did she leave a lover? Who had washed and braided her hair for her final rest? But he had stopped wondering about such things after Ana Luisa left. Now he just came to look, and to remember.

Tomás went to La Estancia for dinner that night. Passing through the crooked door frame at the end of one of San Pedro’s sunbleached blocks, he found Margaret and Kenny and their new Spanish friends cautiously picking at the llama meat and pinto beans on their plates. Right outside the cramped thatch-roof dining room where they ate, a cow lowed because she hadn’t been milked. Tomás was happy to see the six tables were filled. Rodriguez, the local police chief, strutted into the room to size up the weekend’s crop. It looked like plenty of business. He smiled in Tomás’ direction, his gold tooth flashing in the candlelight.

Pinochet’s coup had intruded upon their college days like a puma descending on a flock in the field. As the new regime’s reach spread up the Chilean coast, the digging stopped around the ruins and most of the students, including Tomás and Ana Luisa, returned to Antofoghasta to be with their families. In the little city, they found none of the anger that they had expected. The hungry Antofoghastans were tired of waiting in lines at the grocer’s and they welcomed the general’s henchmen as warmly as they did the bread that reappeared on the store shelves. Ana Luisa was enraged when she saw how meekly her fellow townsfolk accepted the military’s power grab. “Don’t make so much noise,” her mother implored her. “The cat silences the mouse.” News that scores of people had disappeared after the authorities carted them off to a soccer stadium in Santiago had reached Antofoghasta, and Ana Luisa felt the fear taking root among her fellow students. But she couldn’t let pass what she was seeing, not after she saw friends and neighbors rounded up week after week for questioning about their political leanings. Some returned to say they had been treated roughly, and others were too frightened to say anything at all. She met with other young people in the cafés and bars in the evening, and she complained openly, bitterly, about what was happening to her country.

Within a month of Pinochet’s coup, the Social Democrat who was the national police’s representative in San Pedro was sacked. In his place the new regime installed Rodgriguez, then simply a cooperative young man from Antofoghasta. Soon the gap in his teeth was filled with gold and he was driving one of the village’s three cars. On the weekends, he liked to return to the coast and hang around the bars where the college kids socialized and listen to them talk. Ana Luisa’s angry denunciations of his patrons soon caught his ear, and he made a note to keep a close eye on her. He wouldn’t want her spreading those sentiments back in San Pedro.

Big-boned and blonde, Margaret really wasn’t Tomás’ type. But when he saw her eating with her friends at La Estancia, he knew instantly that she would be the one this weekend. Kenny saw it, too – saw it in the canine glint in Tomás’ eye. Tomás pulled a chair up to the group’s table and began to work his magic. Margaret was sold at the mention of the flamingos. The Spanish woman, a small lady with fiery eyes named Luicia, haggled with Tomás a little over his fee. But before the arroz con leche was served, they had a plan to depart early the next day.  

In the morning, Tomás led the group on a short visit to the Spanish colonial churches of a couple nearby towns. In the “cathedral” of Tatio, the original cactus wood roof had remained intact since the day the tiny structure was blessed in the early 1500s. Not far away, in Chuchu, stood a statue of the of the virgin which the Spaniards had rigged so tears would flow from her eyes. Whenever the natives needed to be brought to heel, Mary would weep to show her disappointment in them. Tomás showed his retainers natural walls of pumice standing by a burbling creek, and they sat in the shade together eating the cactus fruit he peeled for them with his pocketknife.

A pair of German tourists joined the group that evening, filling the last two seats in his Wagoneer, and he drove the group out to what the locals called Campo de la Luna. He soon regretted taking on the newcomers. The woman just sat mum, quietly embarrassed, as the oversized young man blabbed on about his camera, comparing his idiot-proof instamatic to the $3,000 Pentax that Luicia’s partner wore around his neck.

In the Cordillera del Sal, formed under the whimsical influence of the Humboldt Current by geysers now long dormant, the group sat chatting idly atop a sand dune as the descending desert sun turned the mountains violet and the clouds a flaming orange. Tomás glanced from quiet Lincancabur to smoldering Lascar and, with the last glint of day, said “silencio por favor!” Everyone hushed. There wasn’t a bird, bug or serpent in the desert for those few moments. There was no wind. Tomás let a fistful of sand slide through his fingers, thankful for the peace of the desert.

But a fool abhors the emptiness that silence reveals. The German preferred to debate the finer points of the magical surroundings that dwarfed him. “How could these salt formations have been formed before the glaciers?” he asked, picking up on something Tomás had said an hour earlier. “If it was pre-glacial, it would have been carried away in the Ice Age.” Tomás ignored him. Kenny tried to explain, but the German’s English turned out to be even worse than his Spanish, and his annoying pronouncements were made worse in either language by his boorish nature.

Before long, the German and his date began smashing rocks they collected from the desert floor to break loose salt chips for keepsakes. A look of disgust spread across Tomás’ face as the couple headed toward his truck balancing armloads of twisted, uninteresting stones. Without a word, he bent down and picked up a transparent chip of mica laying by his boot and handed it to Margaret. She felt its smoothness between her fingers and smiled.

The German returned to the crest of the dune where the rest of the group was sitting and he began telling Tomás all about Chile, how the workers in the North earned more than the workers in the South, how long one person had to work in order to earn the equivalent of one empanada, about all the suffering that political strife had caused in the country. “Are you people content with your work?” he asked obtusely. “Oh sí, señor. Muy contentos todos.”

The German sensed that he was mocking him, but he decided to take it in jest and playfully flicked a pinch of sand toward Tomás’s face. Tomás was in no joking mood. He lashed out with his left foot, tripping the oaf over the crest of the dune. By the time the German stopped rolling, Tomás had turned the key in the Wagoneer and the rest of the group was loading up.

Tomás returned to the ruins outside the village that night to show Margaret the star-bright sky by the side of the creek that ran red at dusk. As she was looking at the stones in the creek, he poked his head over a curved stone wall, behind which he and Ana Luisa had spent so much time scraping and digging. This was the place where, on another spectacularly clear desert night after all the other students had returned to the village for dinner, they had succumbed to temptation slowly, running their fingers gently over each groove and bend of the other’s flesh.

Six months after Pinochet’s coup, Ana Luisa joined a group of students who gathered from across the northern provinces and traveled by bus to Santiago for a show of solidarity against the excesses of the new regime. Tomás, complaining of a sore throat and insisting that someone should remain behind to watch over the dig, demurred. “There are seventeen others going,” he told her. “You will have plenty of company.” A look of disillusionment spread across her face. His curse was to remember her always with that look on her face, a look that made him feel so small. Her head bent forward ever so slightly, her straight black bangs spilling over her forehead, covering her eyes as she frowned.

She was frowning at him again now when the ground began to shake and a pair of fighter jets on a training run came screaming low across the sky, jarring him from the cold grip of memory. He looked over wall to see Margaret pointing at the machines as they shot straight up into the heavens.

In the morning, as he was bringing Margaret back to La Estancia, Tomás stopped for coffee at a corner shop on the village square and bought one of the newspapers that arrived a day late from Antofoghasta. He tossed the paper on the front seat of his truck next to Margaret without reading it, but there was something on the front page that he didn’t like at all. He didn’t focus on it at first. He just drove toward the desert, forgetting at first to drop off Margaret and having to turn back briefly to leave her at the hostel.

He drove a couple hundred kilometers until he reached a great salt lake, where he stepped out onto the dry earth to watch the pink flamingos, thousands of them, wading in the water as smoke spilled down the shoulders of smoldering Lascar in the background. A mass grave had been discovered in the desert between San Pedro and Antofoghasta, the headline said. The skeletal remains of eighteen bodies. Far to the west, he noticed two jet fighters flying back and forth, criss-crossing low and slow over the desert floor. A southerly breeze carried away the sound of their distant engines.

Tomás kicked off his shoes and stepped into the ankle-deep lake. The blue-green water swirled slowly through the wide grooves it had carved in the desert floor and around the protective little circles of salty mud that the birds kicked up around their eggs. He tossed a stone to scare the flamingos into flight, and their necks throbbed and wobbled as they took wing. By the time they returned to the water, the jets had disappeared. And Tomás was alone in the vast desert.