There was just one blemish on my time in Valparaiso, one a bit more personal than stepping in one of the many mounds of dog excrement that litter the city. I left a futbol café with a place in mind for live music. It was closed. Remembering the guidebook’s description of the bars east of Plaza Sotomayor as popular with the sailors come to port, I went looking for a seafarer’s haunt. I found nothing but eerie buildings and buses on their way home. I came to a dimly lit square. As I passed through, someone from a group of teens said god knows what to me in Spanish. For discretion’s sake, I consulted my map behind a statue. I had just laid my bag at the foot of the statue when a hoodlum from that group swooped it up and sprinted off the square. Still holding my photocopied sheets of Neruda poems, I sprang my step and hauled ass after him. My adrenaline was whipping me into a frenzy as I lengthened my stride. We were making our way up the mazy streets of Valpo and it was high time for me to retain my camera and dignity. Now only a few yards behind him, I began clawing the air to try to collar him at full speed. He heard my crazed breathing and must have known he had it coming; just then he flipped the bag over his head to me and ran off into the Chilean night. I had scarcely noticed an accomplice running alongside him, ready to play a game of catch with my satchel. I fumed and shouted after them and took several seconds to remember I was in a back alley in Chile. A couple of abuelitas gawked at me as they shuffled home.
My newfound insecurity rattled me all the way up the hill, where I sought refuge in the night-time panorama of the city. I didn’t want a fluke incident to blight my conception of Concepcion, one of the wondrous thoroughfares that led me up to my hostel. I put my feet up on a banister overlooking the harbor and, after a smoke and a coffee, the city’s luster seeped back into me as my sweat began to dry. I gaped for awhile at the port that had once been the western hemisphere’s busiest. Sometimes it’s necessary to jostle with the mayhem down below to appreciate such a vista.
I scoffed aloud at the amateurism of the thief – as petty as they come, ill-prepared for a tourist willing to tussle. Neruda’s moonlight cut through billowing clouds casting out to sea. I reached into my bag for the poems I had saved for my last night in Chile, but then realized that the thief really had succeeded in robbing me. In switching to survival mode to chase him down, my hand had involuntarily let slip the Neruda poems. So goes the loss of innocence in a city cloaked in serenity. I closed my eyes to inhale the crisp air and forgive all that was below me. The moon was watchful, the ships docked for the night, and somewhere up the hill in La Sebastiana, Neruda’s ghost promised me a second reading.
