Bicarbonate of soda in a state of unrest

by Catherine Oughtibridge (Chile)

I didn't expect to find Chile

Stood in the foyer, my boss shrugs his shoulders. I don’t know when I’ll see him again. Nobody knows how long the universities are going to stay shut. As parting advice, he suggests, should I march, popping a lemon and some bicarbonate of soda in my handbag. A few days later I’m invited to hang out with a group of friends of a friend. A tale is told: the other night, whilst everyone else was deep asleep, our host’s father woke up with a dry throat. He clambered out of bed and headed to the kitchen. Opening the fridge, he reached for a bottle of water. Only it wasn’t just water. Prepared to defend themselves against tear-gas, his sons had mixed in bicarbonate of soda. Protest supplies have been banned from the family fridge. It’s funny and it’s sad. These English speaking, privately schooled, well-educated Chileans, spent their Friday night debating whether or not a virus is alive, how harvesting sea kelp to make shampoo gooey is destroying the marine ecosystem, and the inevitable sleeplessness that follows watching someone being shot dead. One guy tugged up his trouser leg and showed me the deep bruise of a scattered ‘rubber’ bullet on his calf. His account of getting hit, on that tragic day Romario Veloz Cortez was shot by the military outside the mall, is disjointed. It’s not his English that scrambles his words, but the trauma. A story of confusion and pain. We are a city of confusion and pain. The world news did not concern itself with us in October when Chile was placed in a state of emergency. When the uprising began, thousands of people marched here, not millions. But that’s because we aren’t millions. This is not Santiago. We are a small coastal city in the desert, a six-hour bus ride north from the capital. Tourists come here for the beach and to access the mystical Elqui Valley, famous in the circles of astrophysicists and wine connoisseurs. Argentinians drive over the Andes for a swim in the Pacific. Santiago’s inhabitants escape to us for our cool summer breeze. Until the universities closed, I was teaching English. Then there was chaos, violence and a military curfew. Now it’s me who’s being educated. I’m taught by the man whose voice betrays his fear as he says the words ‘auto coup d’état’. I’m forced to pause by a woman’s gentle reference to a fatherless childhood – he lived in forced exile. I’m shown how inequality hurts everyone. A son from a well-off family declares how he marches to prove that the protest speaks for people across the social strata. Things must change. A man tells me how his mother won’t ever return to Chile; the one time she did visit, she saw the man who tortured her on the bus. There is tangible desperation here for a fairer constitution. A need to move on. The weeks pass and the universities remain shut. Students occupy buildings and bar the gates with classroom chairs. Everyone is cautious. We watch the videos of flames licking at a sister site's walls and pass by the burnt-out train station and the charred concrete carcass of what used to be a supermarket. One evening, I head to the theatre with my housemate. There is no big theatre here, but a local group of actors occasionally puts on productions. We crush in and sit thigh to thigh on the rickety wooden benches. The show is based on true events: real women imprisoned and tortured in a nunnery during the dictatorship. At one point the actors have us singing and as we laugh the benches shake, but, by the end, it’s us who have been shaken. This nunnery lies behind my yoga school. Then, shortly before Christmas, I’m sitting in a taxi when I breathe in tear-gas for the first time. On drenched streets, police officers in battle costume stand across from the few remaining gas-masked protesters. I imagine my friends out there, somewhere, bathing their eyes with bicarbonate of soda. Sighing, our driver loops around to avoid the closed road. This is now an ordinary day in La Serena. It’s nothing like what I had expected to find.