One afternoon I returned to town after a particularly trying and exhausting field trip, and, barely touching the pathetic dinner the Indian woman set out for me, I went to my room and fell into a deep sleep. A few hours later—it was still early evening—I was awakened by the sound of the Greek’s loudspeaker. Booming through the plaza, blurred and distorted by echoes and feedback and the crudity of the equipment, was a man’s voice, speaking excitedly and rapidly, delivering what sounded like a news broadcast or, more likely, the commentary on some big sporting event.
Puzzled, I peered out my window. A grand commotion was going on in the plaza. Half the population of Pelpel seemed to be out there, not just those who made the spooky, silent nightly promenades around the plaza’s edge. Hundreds of people were gathered, in groups of ten or a dozen or so, listening intently to the broadcast, occasionally cheering, shaking their heads, pointing at the loudspeaker as if arguing with it. I saw money changing hands, too—men taking crumpled wads of hundred-peso notes from their shirts and giving them to others. Every few minutes some loud outcry from the radio voice brought new cheers and groans from the crowd, and more bills went fluttering back and forth.
I went outside, hoping to find out what was going on. Usually when I appeared all activity halted and the townsfolk gave me looks of dark glowering anger as though I were death at the feast. I was a little hesitant to leave the hotel now, not wanting to sour their festivity. But to my surprise they seemed, for the first time, glad to see me. Some of them waved, some of them grinned, some of them tossed their hats in the air. “Norteamericano!” they cried. “Hola, Norteamericano! Viva! Viva!” What was all that about? They surrounded me, coming up close, peering right into my face and winking, slapping me on the back like old friends. The change of attitude was absolute and dramatic. And also a little frightening. I’ve studied some anthropology. I began to wonder whether I had been chosen for the starring role in some grim municipal ritual that was to be the peak of this mystifying event. I glanced around for the Greek, looking for explanations, but he was nowhere in sight, and the crowd was too thick for me to get across the plaza to his cantina.
Amid all the chaos I stood still and listened, desperately trying to make sense out of the broadcast. And gradually I began to understand a little of it. The announcer was naming local towns—Santa Catalina, Casabindo, San Antonio, Placilla—which I recognized as dusty little way-stations along the inland roads. And he was calling off names—Godoy, de la Gasca, Lezaeta, Alejandro. I gathered that some sort of automobile race was going on out there. In the harsh and forbidding wastelands of the Atacama Desert, under a black moonless sky, men were roaring across the pitted and parched terrain in motorcars, and here in Pelpel frantic wagering was going on over the ultimate outcome and, so it seemed, over the separate stages of the race.
As I listened with growing comprehension I realized that one of the drivers was an American. El Nortecamericano, the announcer kept saying, was doing very well. El Norteamericano was showing great skill. El Norteamericano was demonstrating true virtuosity on the dangerous track. And every time the announcer mentioned this unknown countryman of mine, the townspeople around me grinned and cheered and waved at me, and made V-for-victory signs, as if they were rooting for him as a way of making amends for their coldness toward me. They pointed and shouted something at me again and again that at first I was unable to understand, until I picked up the verb vencer drifting to me like a word out of a vivid dream, and realized that they were telling me, “You will win!” Me?
So frenzied and feverish was the scene that only slowly did I start to consider the baffling, inexplicable, downright impossible aspects of what I was hearing.
The road they were racing on was the same one that I had driven so many times in the past ten or twelve days—a miserable, hopeless washboard track that ran along the coast from Pelpel to Sabroso, then curved inland, practically disappearing into the dust and rocky subsoil, and hooked up briefly with the Pan-American Highway. That road was a killer even for jeeps. What kind of supernatural shocks and springs did the racing cars have? How could the drivers possibly be moving at the speeds the announcer was talking about? Just to get from Placilla to San Antonio was a harrowing half-day project, with pebbles clanging against your oil pan every foot of the way. It was absurd to think of that narrow scratchy dirt-on-dirt track as a racecourse.
Another little mystery was how the announcer was getting his information. In rapid-fire narrative he was giving continuous reports on at least a dozen drivers spread out between Sabroso and Pelpel. I suppose that could have been done by posting him in a helicopter above the scene, but this was thirty years ago, remember, when helicopters were still rare, especially in out-of-the-way corners of Chile. Perhaps observers stationed along the course were phoning in a steady flow of news that the announcer was deftly weaving together to create his running account, but there weren’t even any telephones in the town, let alone out there in the open wastelands. Radio communication? Perhaps. Smoke signals, for all I knew, or a semaphore relay? One guess was as good as another. The whole thing didn’t make sense.
It was just as hard to figure out where the broadcast was coming from. Radio stations simply didn’t exist in these parts. The music that Panagiotis played through his loudspeaker every night came from ancient phonograph records. There were radio stations in the south down by Valparaiso and Santiago, hundreds of miles away, but their signals didn’t get up here. The nearest northern station was probably even further, in Lima, but the curve of the continent put the wall of the Andes between us and it. Short wave, then? Well, maybe. Or maybe some fluky transmission out of the Valparaiso station, although it was hard to see why they would want to devote hours of valuable air-time to an obscure automobile race in a sleepy pocket of the desert.
When I looked toward the northern side of the plaza where the road from Placilla came in, I saw the biggest puzzle of all. A length of sturdy twine, gaudily bedecked with red and green and yellow streamers, had been strung across the road to mark what was obviously the finish line. Boys were stationed on either side of the street with Chilean flags atop long poles, no doubt to wave in the victor’s face as he came thundering down the home stretch. How, though, could they expect to conclude the long race right in the middle of Pelpel? A mere fifty or sixty feet behind the finish line was the high brick wall of the church. Did anyone seriously think that a car speeding through the line was going to be able to brake in time to avoid hitting that wall? I thought I must be mistaken, that this was no finish line but merely some kind of ceremonial halting point to which the winner would coast after passing the true finish line somewhere outside of town. But no, this certainly was decked out the way the terminus of a motor race ought to be decked out, and the townspeople were carefully keeping the road in front of it clear, as if they expected cars to go zooming into the plaza at any instant. And some of them were staring expectantly into the blackness of the night beyond the floodlit plaza, trying to make out the headlights of the finishers as they approached the end of the race.