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Octubre Awake over the Pacific not far south of Lima Puddle bays in an ocean-gaping coastline verging into night smog haze out the portside window Colorless blue-gray soft stardust brilliant The bulk mass wall of the moonlit Andes behind All to the horizon on megascale, as if gazing out from low planetary orbit Moonlight on the water projects colossal reflective plates laid out beside the cusped bays' margins and their headlands Predawn course south-by-southeast into the Southern Cone Short-day chilly October to long-day far-south early October spring Already there, well below the equator Still hours out from Santiago de Chile Great Andean city lying exactly south of Martha's Vineyard At the antipodean latitude of Augusta, Georgia Las Américas The reaches of our stupendous world The detail of the headland to headland scape, rock above the surf to rock to hidden inlet Up and down both ocean coasts of the two long American continents Urban drift smoke fingers in the moonlight reaching out to sea now from Lima, immense gray dust rainless coastal winter foggy Peruvian megalopolis Lima at more than seven million, close upon the coast, suspiring predawn cooking fire smoke as from African bush towns do but on a metropolitan scale Sheet-plastic, zinc corrugated, city-gray dust sprawl reaching across the nearly rainless littoral toward the city's port, Callao In the sprawling poverty of the crowded urban world squeezed to the profoundly squalid by the oblivious insouciance of its elites There were five gigantic cities of over ten million in 1975, fourteen in 1995 There will be twenty-six in 2015 Buenos Aires, Mexico, Los Angeles, Lima, Rio, São Paulo-Santos, Bogotá, New York are the big ones in the Americas Newly arrived among them, Santiago, six million plus It grew by two million in the nineties, has serious inversion layer smog It lies at about 34°S, like Cape Town Without Cape Town's persistent wind, that so eerily enhances the brilliance of Cape Town's ultimacy Cape Town's visual weather flow is like fog moving quietly into San Francisco, but more vivid, a much clearer demarcation between cloud and sun In brilliant sun clouds pour off Table Mountain like liquid air The city spread below The Foreshore lifts into the hill streets of old District Six Cape Town tattooed on the memorial sensorium, cheek on plexiglass staring out in the predawn here and now Skin dry, cabin dry, mouth dry after all night in the lower stratosphere Slipping away from the coast to cross South America's western bight, the moonlight and smoke haze blurs the littoral's lines and limits Over the easternmost reaches of the daunting Pacific Course line from Panama laid to avoid flight over the high Andes of Peru and Ecuador, veer off the coast to slant inland later south of the Atacama Over roughly La Serena and Coquimbo La Serena is close to Vicuña, Gabriela Mistral's papaya-avocado mountain town Gabriela Mistral on her way upcountry from Serena toward her sierra querencia in a Model A's rumble seat And sometimes she'd take the train up her valley to Vicuña from the coast Don't know how she traveled south to Santiago Possibly by ship, La Serena to Valparaìso She died in New York Is buried exactly where she was born in tiny Monte Grande at two thousand meters in a side valley above Vicuña Above Vicuña is perpetual snow and the Paso del Agua Negra to San Juan in Argentina Staring out toward those mountains and drowsing off To sleep some more Before the brightness of mid-Chile's Andean snowfield blue dawn Two unambiguous cordilleras beneath perpetual ice in the long Cordillera de Ollita on the international border between Coquimbo and San Juan And two more sixty-five hundred meter peaks drift into the window view One is the big one, Aconcagua, 6,960 meters, the ultimate Andean cerro, and the highest in both Americas Denali in Alaska is eight hundred less, looks much the same, humped bulk mass In the extreme tranquility of high mountains under ice Perpetual repose Slipping below the crest line of the cordillera on the slow slant Santiago landing path Detail begins to sort out now into front-country canyonlands and cultivated bajadas The perspective of snow-mountains recede crowded by an inventory of ranchland desert and irrigated swaths below steep Andean watered canyons The Andes are so much onto themselves, their lesser grandeur even more determined than the Himalaya Last time in South America, flying from Guayaquil, La Costa, to Quito, La Sierra, up through cumulus and sun seems like a continuous green-brown slope through fluffy white-gray climb path upslope from the coastal vega Etched volcanic slopes, tufted cliffs and river canyon steeps Green-gray Ecuador went well behind already earlier this morning, passed before coming awake over Peru Foolish to have slept across Panama and Columbia, foolish to sleep at all while traveling Overflying Panama, if awake, could have probably seen the lights of Panama City or Colon, the emphatic coastal edges. Maybe one or two of the huge Columbian cities in their mountain bowls Now the glide path down toward daylight Santiago and this stupendous flight is over A few days ago she spoke for the first time of his death How in mid-September, early Friday morning, after spending all night lying together talking, he asked her to call his doctor, that he needed to go to the hospital again He died there before noon He would have liked to hear about Chile When we talked next time, he would have kicked back in his chair Gleefully with each of his rhonchal snorts would have tossed off polished comments about Allende, wine, raising fruit in a Southern Hemisphere California, copper, ozone holes, fisheries, Patagonia, Pinochet He scorned British perfidy and all hypocrisy, his world was Switzerland, his sons, molecular biology, Rhone Valley three-star restaurants, California and Tennessee Charlie, poor Charlie is no more And the plane is down. Southern lapwings off in the grass while taxiing. Lapwings have the onomatopoeic Chilean name of queltehue Sun-gleam glasswall terminal, terrazzo airy and rich with spring The light breeze is warm and clean People here seem to move fast, assertively Up by the voluble driver southeast on a freeway toward the city in a minivan, flashing light and shade traffic eucalyptus chaparral, a bay-winged hawk's loud harsh call as it leaves a wire, wide black buteo tail Grind slickly on into the city through urban traffic toward the Moneda Few things in life are more exciting than breasting a vast city for the first time on a brilliantly sunny day Downtown on the Alameda, the Avenida del Libertador General Bernardo O'Higgins "A great black cloud rises from the burning palace. President Allende dies at his post as the generals kill Chileans by the thousands "General Tomás Opazo Santander offers assurances that the victims do not exceed .01 percent of the population, which is not, after all, a high social cost "CIA director William Colby explainsÉ that, thanks to the executions, Chile is avoiding a civil war. Señora Pinochet declares that the tears of mothers will redeem the country" Slipping into the diminishing past and nearly full redemption coming with 1999 election With neither candidate venturing a word about Pinochet or Allende, or Pinochet's coup, or the London arrest Not a whisper to polarize Chile's new hotdog economy and its national unity themes Lagos, the first socialist candidate since Allende, talked about business concerns. Levin, the rightist, a technocrat from Pinochet's regime, talked social ones Lagos prevailed Big stretched out linear city with hills, big parks, smog Cerro Santa Lucía to Santiago as Bryant Park to Manhattan Darwin went up Cerro Santa Lucía in the 1830s from the Beagle and there is a plaque Plaques commemorating Darwin's presence as common in the Southern Cone as Spanish missions in California or pocket Shinto temples in cities in Japan Another Darwin plaque on the cityside summit of the much higher Cerro San Cristóbal above Bellavista on the other side of the Río Mapocho Off the funicular lifting from the end of Pío Nono, walk to the left thirty meters As from Griffith Park the LA-like city behind you, stare out and down to the northwest at the free-standing white wall, barely over a kilometer away as a paloma flies It's there in the northeast corner of the Cementerio General, beside whose vaults piled like shipping containers at a port, el Memorial stands Erected only in 1994 Over 3,000 names Los desaparecidos, as many as are known Down off Cerro San Cristóbal to go there, brought to the site from Bellavista by a taxi driver who didn't want his fare in thanks for a foreign visit and regard A lean man in his seventies was clambering down from the big river boulders above which el Memorial is set He had put a red bouquet against the wall below one of the columns of names His wife was waiting on the ground Both were crying as they walked away, her arm around his waist, his around hers He called back their son's name over his shoulder Nunca mas +++++++++++++++ Sampling credit to Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire.

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