CHAPTER FOUR (3)

After the point at which Carlos dared not remember, his great grandfather – Fransisco Meli Valdivia Antofogasta – was a subsistence farmer on the border of Arica in what as then Bolivia. His name was a tossed salad of harsh colonization and indigenous persistence: Fransisco because his mother, supposedly, wanted to give an easy name that his siblings – which he was brought up to take care of – could pronounce as Pancho because, for whatever reason, Fransiscos at the time always ended up being called Pancho or Panchito when they were young. Meli (meaning “four” in Mapuche) retained his indigenous blood and became a source of conflict later on in his life when he joined the conservative riech of Pinochet. Valdivia represented the foundation of Chile, which, though his family should very well have been compelled to erase from their past, came from Pedro Valdivia himself – he who civilized the area. The story goes that the Mapuches in the seventeenth century had a choice: to take a last name (usually consisting of the Spainard whom they belonged to or were raped by), or die. Obviously, the Mapuche in which Carlos descended chose to wake rather than sleep, and so the curse of his oppression reached far beyond his days. Like in the Old Testament, thought Carlos to himself in the cab, where He smote those who sinned by punishing their future generations.

After serving his time as a lowly private in the war between Chile and Péru and Bolivia, which Carlos had heard by many generations in his family was known to his great grandfather as a “fluke,” a little schism between two countries that, as his great grandfather used to say, was just another war between who actually created pisco, he eventually retained land on which the entire subterranean level of his 2500 acres was a substance close to gold. Until 12, Carlos never understood why his family always referred to the substance that created his relative’s fortune as “close to gold.” But as his eyes poured after a seemingly annoying and insignificant history book, he found the word “salitre.” Ah, salitre: the foundation on which modern Chile was built, destroyed, taxed, exploited, and finally destroyed again. Nitrates went to fuel wars abroad and domestically, while making his great grandfather a literal trillionaire (in terms of Chilean pesos) – one of the first of his kind in a rapidly growing and even more rapidly inflating Chilean economy.

            In 1879, el Compañía de Salitre y Ferrocarril de Antofagasta was created. This is where, like Velcro, Pancho affixed his final origin: Antofagasta. From what Carlos had picked up between long conversations between his family members, and dreary days at school, Antofagasta was a region that came from other indigenous languages not of the Mapuche idiom. Apparently, it meant “hidden copper” because the land of Antofagasta was home to millions of dollars in more than one resource. Why is great grandfather chose salitre instead of copper, Carlos could not discern. But, the business was more than profitable: it brought connections and more resources turn in turn was currently allowing him to call the affluent barrio of Bellavista his home.