Acrylic

A girl had already lost her phone, so we were told to keep our bags pressed to our legs, our wallets wedged into pocket caverns, runaway receipts and peso congregations like stalagmites. The directors had told us to be wary of the pickpockets. We stood in front of an ice cream shop, the signs out front dripping peeled paint husks to elaborate on the store’s age. The kids around me chatted in English, excitedly. They were clean-scrubbed and had snake-shedded their American scales into the hotel’s bathroom basin to emerge new-faced into the Chilean night.  I stayed silent. They were ready for their first taste of a new culture, in a new city, with new people. I was less enthusiastic. I didn’t order ice cream; instead, I watched them eat theirs. They were smiling when I realized the cause of my inclination to inaction: I’d rather watch than do.

Exactly one day before, we had crammed into a bus to take us away from the airport in Santiago. We thirty had sacrificed our summer months to cross into another hemisphere and learn a new language. Outside it was drizzling, the drops marching in slant formation down the windows. I sat alone. We played a game while we waited for everyone to exit their planes. Name. Grade. State. Fun fact. “Boaz. Junior. I’m from Connecticut. I was once stung by a jellyfish.” My stomach almost flipped upside-down when I said it, a crippling kind of self-doubt: I felt like I had said something wrong. My hands were shaking I was so nervous. I didn’t talk to anybody for the rest of the bus ride to Valparaíso, the city we were going to live in. About halfway there, the program manager spoke into the bus microphone, her voiced pocketed with static. She talked about wearing warm clothes. It was winter in Chile and harshly cold. Earlier, on the way to the bus, an ocean of asphalt had stretched in front of me, pocked with puddles. In Chile the rain was chronic. On this first day we American kids marinated in the drizzle, and then walked into a rain-bleached landscape, cold, and foreign.

On the second day, my host mother came to pick up my roommate and me from the hotel our group had been staying in. She was old-- older than my parents. Her back keeled her over slightly and laugh lines ran down her face. She smiled, spoke only Spanish. She had lived in Chile her whole life. She later spoke of Pinochet and the Missing People. She came with her two daughters to pick us up and we drove back to her house in a 1990s model Subaru. There were five of us in the car, and my host mother squeezed in between my roommate and me. We tooled down the highway bordering the ocean. The car lurched at every pothole, and we jolted about in the car. The sun set, dropping from its mantel in the sky. Tendrils of pink inched forward until the horizon blushed with euphoria. My host mother kept moving her hands in a flight path, made airplane noises. The car kept retching forward, a careening cadence. My mind took in all of this, and it felt cluttered, chaotic. I had a headache. I reached into my backpack and took out my bottle of Tylenol. “La turbulencia?” she repeated to me, although I didn’t know if she was talking about the airplane’s turbulence or the car’s. “La turbulencia?”

The city was tattooed. Ink-kissed. Walking up the scoliotic streets, we examined the graffiti planted, like living tendon tissue, onto the sides of the avenues. The graffiti seemed to breathe its own life. Colors crammed, elbowing for place on the fractured walls, roofs, stairs. The tour guide wound us through the ribs of the city, bent like crescent moons. “Graffiti is an extension of personality,” he told us. “It is the character of the city, the mind. It informs, it shocks, it saddens.” He showed us one artist’s recurring image. The graffiti showed a salmon belly-up. He told us it illustrated the struggles fish farmers had had with recent disease.  On one fin, the salmon bled. The fluid leaked out like magma, hitting the bottom of the cement in a lake. Other fish, small, different, swam in the sanguine-red reservoir.

On a Thursday we visited the old house of Pablo Neruda. Striped blue-red, it stood facing the bay. The inside was small, almost cramped, but there was an emphasis on windows.

From the windows we had a view of the ocean: steel shipping crates like building blocks, teeth to the bay’s open mouth. Cranes clawed at the sky.  We could see above the seaside fog, could see the multicolored houses arrayed in hillside columns like vertebrae.

Neruda had a toy horse in his living room. The audio guide whispered in my ear, told me that Neruda once said, “A child who does not play is not a child, but the man who doesn’t play has lost forever the child who lived in him and who he will miss terribly.” The toy horse however, was dying. Shellacked, its smile scalloped carousel-carnivore fashion by decaying dentures, like an old man’s. I wondered if a kid had ever used it.

The group took the long way down from Neruda’s house, choosing to walk rather than bus. I trailed behind the group. I was still uncomfortable, jigsawed out of place. When I was younger, I thought that certain hills, if steep enough, were the curves of the world. We journeyed over hills that stretched 70 degrees vertically, and I figured that this must be where the globe arches. It was funny to me that I could have once thought that. From the hill, we saw a sunset sink into the bay, the sun gulped down by the sea like an egg yolk.

The city was like the Milky Way at night, a seam of stars ripping through the light- polluted sky. I took the elevator—a rickety wooden box clamped to a railing—up a rock face and saw thousands, millions, of baubles of light. I ate dinner looking up at the hills, the rolling chest of the city.

While walking down the hill I saw a graffiti artist at work. He was painting the front of a flower shop. He drew a naked man. It was one of the indigenous people of Chile. I had read about them in my language classes. The artist touched up the painting with large swathes of red, his signature. Then he left. I thought about who the first graffiti artist might have been, and how the practice had grown in this city. The graffiti slithered everywhere: across highways, bandaging bridges, staining storefronts. Each tag was painted one at a time, each adding, slowly, to the collective character, the flaming face of the city, haloed by the lights.

My host family, my roommate, and I climbed a sand dune. Rain-packed, the sand was solid under our feet. From the top we could see the warring sea and the violent tides attacking the sand, threatening to swallow the beach. We could see the city, its skyline smog-strangled, skyscrapers indexing upward. But we could also see metropolitan beauty: trains running like clockwork and buses burying themselves in traffic. Overlooking the city, I was offered an aphorism about beauty from my host-mother. In English broken and bent, she told me, “Perfect no is beautiful. Beauty is try.”

While walking on the beach, the sunset, a red-stricken mosaic that tiled like stained-glass cathedral windows, reminded me of the pomegranate fields I had seen from the top of the mountain I climbed two days earlier. Then, the guide had pointed toward the fields of pomegranates. In columns like church pews. The stalks passed a collection plate that gathered red seeds, planted into fertile soil. The guide told us the pomegranates were strictly commercial: not for eating, only for the dying of red cloth. He pivoted, foot and conversation, to point at the mountains sandwiching us. “Over there is Argentina,” he said. He turned to the left, “The sea.” He told us about how a country, a city, is like a human body. How “we’re just skinny,” and how highways tunnel like capillaries and arteries, how the cities concave-convex like organ-drum beats. His cousin was an organ donor, and when he crashed, his blood went somewhere else, like the pomegranate seed collection plate.

When walking to language classes every morning, I noticed the city was spliced in half by age. There was an old city and a new one. It seemed the city got older the further I walked up the city’s hill because the buildings turned from glass giants to crumbling houses. In the contrast, I thought of the city as two halves: an old man and a young boy. I imagined the man pulling the boy up to the same height as him, helping him to stand, planting him in the fertile soil of the city’s bay, and watching him grow.

The Saturday before we left, we cleaned the city. Community service.  We put on surgical masks to play doctor on graffitied walls, gave sandpaper massages, made sure to scrape, rake, rasp until cement was raw and shaved like skin under pumice stone. Until it was new. We picked up trash by the highway, remodeled the overpasses. I slathered gray over the graffiti, painted over the character of the city. I painted the wall closest to the street, but by the next day trash already sat at its foot and new coat of gray paint was tagged with a name and a white stork. Beak covered in bandage, it carried a body. Maybe it was an old man, maybe it was a baby.