Valparaiso, mi amor

The coastal port city Valparaiso is Chile’s second largest city and, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful places in the world. The closest comparison I have for Valparaiso would be San Francisco, but the San Francisco of 50 years ago or more. Like San Francisco, the city hugs the hills at the edge of the sea, with weather-beaten buildings slung at absurd angles on the slopes. But the city is more than just beautiful. It has a depth, a magic, and a mystery of the kind that San Francisco used to have but is gradually losing to glass condominiums and boutique coffee shops. In Valparaiso, chips of green, red, and blue paint flake off of the aging walls, stray dogs roam the thoroughfares, and everywhere there are cobblestone side streets and shadowy alleys. The city seems to breathe sweet and briny from both its proud civic buildings and its ancient brothels built for generation after generation of Chilean lonely sailors on shore leave.

Our main stop was a curious house named “La Sebastiana” in the scattered hillside neighborhood of Cerro Bellavista: one of the three surviving houses of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Neruda was an outspoken socialist, an ambassador to France, a presidential candidate, a Nobel Prize winner, and one of the most important poets of the twentieth century. He also has a reputation as a hopeless romantic, so I have a little extra sympathy for him. On my birthday my Chilean family gave me “Versos del Capitan”, a collection of love poems that Neruda wrote to his mistress while living in Italy. I read part of one of them to my host mother. She squealed and exclaimed, “Oh, that’s BEAUTIFUL! I have to go tell Katya.” She then grabbed the book out of my hands and ran to the next room to call her best friend.

“I wish a man would say that to ME!” Katya told her.

“I know, me too!” replied Marcela. “I had to hear it from DAVID!”

Neruda’s house is decorated with the memorabilia of a lifetime of travels around the world, and reflects the poet’s own unique, and sometimes bizarre, sensibility. He built the floors intentionally squeaky to remind him of the sea. He mixed and matched tiles and paint colors in every room. His favorite chair, which he called La Nube (The Cloud) has been carefully preserved. Looming over his bedroom is a life-sized, black and white photo of Walt Whitman, his favorite English-language poet. “What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman…” I whispered to myself. A favorite line from an Allen Ginsberg poem.

After seeing the house we walked down the hill to eat lunch, taking a winding path through an informal outdoor museum of murals painted on walls and the sides of buildings, el Museo al Aire. The museum route was only recently restored. Many of the streets of Valparaiso are so steep that there is no trash pick-up service, and it has only been in the last couple of years that the city has finally made an effort to clean up the route along the murals. “Valparaiso is a city where one walks with their eyes both in the heavens and in the earth,” a local told me. It was a romantic way of telling me to watch out for dog poop. Small packs of stray dogs roamed lazily about the city, sniffing for the tourists who may be willing to share some bread or an extra scrap of carne.

We ate in a rotating restaurant at the top of one of the city’s high-rise hotels. As with our trip to Concepcion, the Bings paid our tab—fortunate because this place looked pricey. From the top we could see for miles around—the sea, the hills, the rubble-strewn parking lot next door that had been a market until the last big earthquake, and the rusting hulks of shipwrecks along the breakwater dissolving into the salt and spray.

“Y el tiempo se escurrio y sus ojos se le llenaron de amaneceres. Y del mar se enamoro y su cuerpo se enrraizo en el muelle.”
- Fher Gonzales