Looking for Lucia Berlin in Santiago and Southern Chile

Bright memories and aromo blossoms on the third stop of my Lucia Berlin research trip

Hello, friends —

For everyone who’s subscribed since my newsletters from Alaska, Texas and Mexico: thanks a million, and welcome! Check out my previous posts for more information about my journey ‘in search’ of Lucia Berlin, and my biography Looking for Lucia, which will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the next couple of years.

The third stop on my literary road trip was Santiago, Chile, where Lucia lived as a teenager: ‘opulence and ease enveloped our world then,’ she writes in her wonderful memoir. I stayed in the city with dear friends, Tracy and Ben, whose daughter Belle asked me to send you this message.

First Impression

The Andes are unbelievable. As I drove in from the airport, an unpublished line of Lucia’s kept running through my head: Santiago is ‘protected by high white walls, the Andes’ (there will be lots more on Lucia’s unpublished writing in my book). It’s early spring in Chile now, and their impossibly high peaks are still white, covered in snow.

And Lucia was right about the Andes feeling protective: Santiago is held by the mountains like a snow globe cupped in the palm of a hand.

The first thing I did in Santiago was go to Santa Lucía Hill, which Lucia mentions in her fabulous story ‘Itinerary’, because it felt lucky. Here I am, writing by the fountain.

Best Discovery

I had the biggest research win of my entire life in rural Chile, where I drove to find the estate where Lucia set her novella ‘Andado’. It was a huge risk. There was almost nothing to go on — one blurry photo, plus Google Maps’ satellite view — and I didn’t even know whether this was a real place, as opposed to a fictional one… Lucia is a short story writer, after all. But it is real, and I found it.

(!!!!!)

I have to save the full story for my book, since it’s just too good not to — but here are the yellow aromo flowers Lucia describes in ‘Andado’, which still grow outside the big house.

Other Best Discovery

Another major highlight of my life was getting to meet Lucia’s best friend from school, Consuelo (on whom Lucia based her fictional character Conchi, who appears in several stories).

Consuelo is incredibly gracious, charming and fun, and she took me on the same walk to and from school that she and Lucia used to go on together every morning. Here she is, telling me about their adolescent escapades. I had the time of my life in Chile, basically.

Worst Discovery

Santiago has changed a lot since Lucia lived there seventy years ago, and many of the places she describes in her memoir are no longer glamorous haunts for ‘frivolous and pampered’ teenagers in ‘beautiful clothes’, as she puts it in Welcome Home. The Hotel Crillon is a department store, and the Hotel Carrera is closed for business, a government building now. I wish I could have seen their rooftop pool, where you used to be able to swim overlooking the Andes. Here it is in the 1950s.

Last Impression

Chile was wonderful — the country, the research, the time with friends — but I flew out of Santiago feeling almost drunk with exhaustion. The twenty-seven-hour journey from Texas, plus the twenty hours of driving back and forth down the spine of the country to find the estate from ‘Andado’, plus another twenty-plus-hour journey to my next destination, all within a single week (since I’m doing this on a budget)… And I somehow forgot to build in days off when I planned the trip.

Thank you all again for cheering me on — it really gives me energy!

Final Thought

I somehow managed to get through an entire PhD without using microfilm, but that’s how the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile archive their newspapers — so I am now a convert. I love the clicking and whirring sounds the rolls make as you scroll through them.

And here’s a ridiculous article I came across in the Mercurio, from January 1950: ‘The typewriter and the piano are good exercises to cultivate elegant and flexible hands,’ writes Madame Veronique, ‘but they can make your fingertips swell up.’ God forbid.

I’m off to look for Lucia in yet another country now! In the meantime, keep well, and keep typing as much as you damn well please.

Nina

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