Renato and Zunilda

by Alejandra Olguin (Chile)

Making a local connection Chile

Half and hour and a bunch of steps after the path had started, the mission looked harder than what we had been told. El Mirador, the lookout point, was still 30 minutes away and the sun was right up our shoulders. In the middle of the hill, a giant shares its shadow, its little oasis: a native tree from Chile, the arrayán, with its red tree bark all tangled up, ending in white flowers. “Are you enjoying your rest?”, asks a voice from behind. “Indeed”, we reply. And then we see an old man, getting of a white and brown horse. “His name is Lucero”, he tells us. Lucero, as a bright star. He must be Renato, we guess, the owner of this whole chunk of land. A while before, when we were in the center of Puyuhuapi, a town in the middle of the Aysén region in the south of Chile, everyone told us to go visit his land and lookout point in exchange for a little tip. “Do you want to go swim in the natural pool?”, he offers with a big smile and half of his teeth missing. And so we follow him downhill. As the distant noise of a waterfall grows bigger, so do the nalcas, huge plants with green leafs and thorns. Plants that make you feel as if a dinosaur was about to show up. The natural pool is a secret. Nobody gets there without Renato’s guidance. The water is freezing cold, surrounded by big rocks and ending in a river. The waterfall makes it hard to hear what Renato is saying with his southern accent. He is eager to chat, to know where we are from, what are we doing this far away from Santiago, Chile’s capital, and how is it to live in between concrete and cars. He could not imagine it. We look around: it couldn’t be more different. -So what do you do after you have fed your animals? -we ask. -Nothing -he says proudly. Now I go to rest the entire afternoon. I live very quietly and nobody disturbs me. But we won’t let him rest until he shows us his home. We saw it when we were climbing up: a beautiful wooden house, recently painted in blue and yellow, and in the back, a greenhouse. His 75 year-old wife greets us and tell us her name. We can’t understand her, but we will later find out it’s Zunilda. We do understand that the greenhouse is hers, and with slow, insecure steps, she leads us. As soon as she opens the plastic curtain, a wave of warm air heats us. There’s lettuce, some chard and a bunch of herbs. That’s what she spends her time on now. But when she was young, after leaving Chiloé, the island where she grew up, she worked in the carpet factory, the first one to open. It was the germans who started it, the one who escaped from World War II and came all the way down here to establish some houses and business. Zunilda was one of the first women to work in this town. “I also used to milk the cows. We would milk up to 40 cows a day”, she says while all of the wrinkles in her face move. Her boss would make cheese and dairy with that white gold. She also has her chickens -just a few now, after some foxes eat them- and a bunch of wild flowers all over the backyard. “We see people from all over the world here and we chat with all of them”, Zunilda tells us. Puyuhuapi has become a popular destination, right next to the Carretera Austral, a highway that goes all the way to the southern part of Chile. And with his arms wide open and wrinkled hands, Renato adds: “We have never left this house, but nevertheless, we have travelled everywhere”