[Versión en Español acá] When I met Erminio Orellana I felt, just like Juan Dahlman when he met the old Gaucho in Borges’ narration, that I was in front of a symbol from the South, the South that belonged to me.
Erminio worked as a peon on the lands of René Muñoz in Chilean Patagonia and one of the first things he told me when I met him, and he said it with pride, is that he was a huacho. The comment impressed me because I had just read (I’ll talk about that book later) that huachos constituted “the historical origin of proletarian consciousness in Chile”, but I think Erminio’s pride was of another kind. Or maybe yes, it was precisely because of that. I better tell you what we talked about and what I saw and felt that morning…
I had accompanied René and his family on a boat trip to his field after a flood had isolated the area for a couple of weeks. Erminio had been left alone taking care of the house, and when we arrived, his silhouette surrounded by dogs was waiting for us on the riverbank.
René allowed me to spend the night in the old house that his father built decades ago on the banks of the Baker River and that they later had to move inland, precisely to avoid the constant overflows. After dinner (Erminio didn’t sit at the table; he ate, alone, next to the stove) they showed me a small room where I could put my sleeping bag on the floor.
At some point during the night, someone opened the door and came in, took a few steps, and then the noises disappeared, gone as if the person had taken flight. In that complete darkness I had not realized that there was a bed there and that this was precisely Erminio’s room. At dawn we greeted each other and I asked him if I could take a picture of him sitting on that basic bed, practically built with ax blows.
Erminio gets up with the first light of day, before everyone else. He goes to look for firewood, lights the fire in the kitchen, heats water for the Mate. If he accompanies someone, he always walks behind, stutters when talks, bears, looking to the ground, the constant jokes they make at his expense, a subtle reminder that he is not the owner of that land, that he is there only because of René’s affection, whom he met when he, René, was just a child. His arms seem too long but that’s because of his body bent after a life working. When I met him he was 71 years old and that morning I was the one who followed him.
My fascination with his story was due, in part, to my recent reading of Ser Niño Huacho en la Historia de Chile, by Gabriel Salazar, a book that I carried in my backpack on that trip. Huacho (from Quechua huak’cho: animal that gets out of the herd) is someone who is not raised by the parents, not necessarily because they died, but because of poverty that does not allow them to raise the child, having to hand the newborn over to another person, family member or friend, in a better situation.
In his case, Erminio was born in 1937 in Coyhaique and was raised by relatives. When we talked that morning he told me that he didn’t remember his parents. Of the people with whom he grew up, he did not keep good memories; he did not want to go into details but it is easy to imagine the discriminatory treatment he must have received, the physical punishment, in a society where the word huacho is a stigma. At the age of 17, illiterate, he left home and rode into Patagonia; He bordered Lake General Carrera, crossed to Argentina, passed mountains and rivers, surviving with sporadic jobs in the fields that he found in his path (that is, working as a Peon), until he met René Muñoz’s father.
René was a child when his mother fell ill. They had to take her out of that remote field, first on horseback and then by navigating the mighty Baker River, in an agonizing journey that must have lasted days, until they reached Cochrane, a city then isolated from the rest of the country by land. After the death of the mother, Erminio helped in the field and also raise René and his brothers. Today, it is René who lives in the old house, and his gratitude and natural generosity have allowed Erminio to continue living there.
Peon, then, is someone who works in someone else’s field. Usually his possessions are a horse and whatever he can carry on it. It is not a temporary worker, since a peon can work for a long time in the same place, not just during a harvest. Also different from the Inquilino, who the owner of the land allows to build a house, have his own garden and animals, in exchange for working in the field.
The person who worked in my maternal grandmother’s farm was an Inquilino. His name was Alfonso, he lived with his wife and children on the property and when Erminio told me his story, I felt as if two pieces of a puzzle were coming together.
In what was a rite full of unforeseen events, every summer we traveled with my family to that field where my mother was born in the south of Chile, two days on the road from Santiago in a vehicle loaded to the roof, which was also a return to the origin, not only of my family, but also of the Chilean society. There was the mythical Hacienda, in this case a farm far from the maps, lost among dirt roads, without electricity or a legion of employees, only Alfonso, who knew how to do everything.
Although I did not see him many times, I keep an indelible memory of Alfonso. I couldn’t have been more than ten years old, I was at the back of the house, probably looking those wonderful native apples from the south of Chile with which they made an artisanal Chicha that attracted all kinds of buyers from the area (peones, inquilinos and farm owners alike), the only source of income, along with milk production, that that farm had, when I saw Alfonso in the animal pen repelling, with just the strength of his arms, the charge of a huge billy goat. The scene of that slim, short and always obliging man facing the animal that attacks him by grabbing it by the horns, bending its neck and throwing it to the ground in a cloud of dust took epic overtones in my eyes of city boy and never left me.
Years later, after the death of my grandmother, the property was sold to a lumber company and today only pine trees grow on that battlefield and history has stopped flowing.
Alfonso spent the last years of his life in the city of Tegualda, not far from where the farm was located, under the care of his family. This photo was taken in 2012 by one of my brothers, a year before Alfonso passed away.
Alfonso and Erminio, two silhouettes walking away at the end of the day, the first going to rest with his family in a transient house, the second entering that small room to finally be alone and take flight.
Postscript: Erminio Orellana passed away in 2013 in a nursing home in Cochrane. The last time I saw him I was able to give him his portrait, accompanied by a text by Gabriel Salazar, published in the special edition “Chilenos” of the Que Pasa magazine dedicated to the bicentennial. According to what I heard, showing his photo printed on full page was a source of pride for him.
