Desert Memories by Ariel Dorfman

Author:Ariel Dorfman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: National Geographic Society
Published: 2004-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

THIRD PART: BODIES

Preservation Blues

Thursday, May 23, 2002. Santa Laura and Humberstone.

Outside Iquique.

I am standing where Julio Valdivia once danced as a young man over fifty years ago, here in the inner patio of the only residence left intact in the ghost town of Santa Laura, I am standing next to seventy-four-year-old Julio Valdivia, who is telling me about this place where he used to live and work and dance.

He had been given a room here for three months, Valdivia says to me and Senén Durán, the other member of this expedition, given a room in what was then the Casa de Administración, where employees were lodged while waiting for more permanent residence. “Here’s where I slept, here’s where my bed was and there was a dresser over there and look, here’s where I could hang my clothes at night,” he says, gesturing inside an airless chamber where only a dirt floor and a boarded window greet him now, all so different from when he had arrived in 1951 to start his job as an assistant in the pulpería, the company store.

We walk through the building—“Look, over there was the bathroom, look, over here is where we ate our dinner”—which now serves as a sort of impromptu display gallery, full of trinkets and mementos and old photos, set up by the mayor of nearby Pozo Almonte, who decided a few years ago to hire a guard to protect the site from thieves, explains Senén Durán, who heads a program at the university in Iquique that trains tourist guides and knows more about life in the pampa than anyone else I have met so far.

“Lucky for us the mayor acted like that, even if he did not have the legal right to do so,” says Julio Valdivia, “or not even this might be left standing.” In effect, every other house in Santa Laura has been torn down, its wood and tin dismantled over the years and sold for scrap by the Andía family, which acquired this salitrera and the other similar towns that made up the Cantón Nebraska in 1961, the year after they were all closed for good. What its erstwhile owners did not ever manage to find a buyer for was the planta industrial, which awaits our visit looming immensely a few hundred yards away, the only extant and almost flawlessly preserved example of how nitrate was refined with the Shanks system. This makes Santa Laura, with its machines and vats and enormous chimney thrusting up into the sky, an absolutely unique place in the whole pampa salitrera. And a perfect complement to the neighboring nitrate town of Humberstone, once the largest such community in the Norte Grande and that has kept all its streets and residences, its theater and church and stores, almost exactly as they were the day it ceased to function over forty years ago, lacking only the factory building and industrial installations that can be found at Santa Laura. So between the two of them, these

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