Valparaiso

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.

The Wine Cradle of the Andes

Mendoza was sepia for the winter but the mountains were still there, as was the wine. There’s something disarming about the flatlands below a mountain range, as if nothing can fall on you....We arrived on a Thursday morning, as did El Gripe in the newspapers: 300,000 exposed, 40% of schools shuttered. Added to this premonition of malaise was the detectable filth on the city’s streets – storefronts looked blanketed by a dust storm and cadaverous dogs hobbled up after you as you passed. While the winter may sully the city, the outlying vineyards retain their unspoiled beauty and the Andes are eternal. We hired a guide and toured three vineyards in addition to the five-course tasting menu we enjoyed at another estate. This cost $150 a head.

Our area of focus was Lujan de Cuyo, a lush valley minutes south of Mendoza. Our tour guide painted a not-so-rosy picture of how El Gripe was squeezing his ski business. This jeremiad influenced our tip at the end of the day.

Since we hadn’t had a fluid conversation with a stranger in several days, we got on well with the guide. In my own head, I couldn’t conjure the circumstances that had plucked this laid back outdoorsman from the pines of Washington state and placed him in Argentina. He mentioned a girlfriend and a job as a ski photographer, but I was unable to connect the dots because it all seemed a whimsical, if enviable, undertaking.

To our virgin nostrils, the wine was ambrosial. Naturally, we concentrated on the Malbec grape, a cast-off from France that was born again on the Argentine hillsides. Its vibrant violet color took on a fantastic glitter as I held it up to the sun. I think being onsite boosted the taste, as a satisfactory sampling is the only acceptable follow-up to all of the swirling and sniffing and smacking of the lips.

Our first bodega was Alta Vista, a rustic compound built by Spanish immigrants at the turn of the century. The charming hostess led us through cavernous basements where the wine mingles with flavored oak in enormous barrels until its ready for drinking. We glimpsed estate workers busy calibrating the wine to its proper temperature for fermentation. For red wine, Alta Vista uses century-old concrete vats that require a delicate finessing of the temperature. A fire is lit under the concrete and the heat disperses throughout. White wine isn’t as sensitive to temperature variations and can be fermented in larger steel vats.

The first provocative wine we sampled at Alta Vista was Torrontes, a signature white wine of Argentina. To avoid the taint of charlatanism, I won’t broach the oenologist’s phrasebook. Words like “oaky” and “earthy” mean nothing to me. One of my few criteria for wine is that it startle rather than bore me. White wines rarely do the former to my stubborn palate. Torrontes, with its robust, lingering flavor, was a welcome exception.

We next visited Club Tapiz to take in a larger scale bodega. The American label Kendall-Jackson had owned the estate a few years back but an Argentine family proudly returned it to local hands and whitewashed the Jackson name from all of its branding. Why? “We didn’t want the stigma.” So much of the appeal of these vineyards is in them being a generational labor of love.

On arriving at Tapiz, we were ushered into a horse-drawn carriage for a drive through the vineyards themselves. Dust flew up and settled to reveal the supernatural silhouette of the Andes. The driver pulled up next to some idling llamas that looked a bit like men in llama costumes. We were bemused to see each other. I wondered aloud if the clumsy creatures trampled the vines, but no one seemed too concerned.

The wine flowed from this picturesque welcome and against such a backdrop, how could any aroma cause offense? Tapiz showcased its impressive arsenal of vintages beneath a stately chandelier in a barn house. A 2006 Malbec classic struck me with vim so I bought a bottle. We also had the luxury of tasting the wine directly from the vat and attempting to discern these inchoate flavors from their fully matured and bottled cousins.


We needed some nourishment to sponge up the wine and it came in the form of a five-course tasting menu at the lovely Bodega Ruca Malen. The seating chart was such: my four companions to my left and right, and myself opposite the Andes. The young servers blushed before announcing each course in lilting accents that heightened my expectations for an epic repast. The meal was such:

1) Yauquen Sauvignon Blanc 2008 – “refreshing, light and citric”
Goat Cheese Bruschetta

Objective of pairing: “To highlight the citric flavors and fresh fruit of the Sauvignon Blanc”

2) Ruca Malen Malbec 2006 – “Deep, elegant nose”
Slices of Filet Mignon cured with olive oil from Lunlunta

Objective of pairing: “To highlight the fresh red fruit and sweetness of the Malbec”

3) Ruca Malen Merlot 2006 – “Brilliant and intense red…Hints of both
vanilla and chocolate”
Wheat Croquets with Wild Mushroom Ragout
and caramelized onions

Objective of the pairing: “To highlight the black pepper as the aromatic descriptor”

4) Ruca Malen Carbernet Sauvignon 2006 – “An intense ruby red with
hints of toasted oak”

Kinien Malbec 2007 – “On the nose red fruits and some floral violet
notes"

Roasted Beef Tenderloin with squash, sweet corn and mashed potatoes

Objective of pairing: “To show the structure of these two varietals, highlighting the spicy side of Cabernet Sauvignon and flower notes and sweet tannins of Malbec”

5) Granite made of Chardonnay, yerba mate, and honey

White chocolate and season fruit


The menu had every reason to boast. The flavors were all there, even the indescribable ones that the menu so enticingly described. We stayed two hours and were content to stay two more. It was a meal that you impulsively label your best ever because it is so vivid and anything but fleeting.

We wrapped the day at the homey Bodega Sottano, which produces just a few thousands bottles a year. By this stage the wine was evoking some heady conversation. Our affable hostess may have another job as a grade school teacher as she often interjected with a palate quiz: “Where on your tongue do you taste this wine?” “What varietals are striking you?” “What colors do you see in this Cabernet Sauvignon?” As in grade school, I tried to guess the answer by the tone of the teacher’s voice. By the fourth red wine I was running out of colors and labeled one fuchsia. She saw that I was using words that she might not recognize in order to improve my quiz score. I apologized for my inept Spanish and fell silent.

Next she bestowed famous look-alikes on our group of four. One was told he resembled Roger Federer (not the first time), another the singular Waldo, as in “Donde esta Waldo?”, and my third friend an elusive Latin pop star (probably the first time). The hostess decided my beard reminded her of Joseph Fiennes and for the rest of our tour I was known as Shakespeare. We thought it only polite to offer her a celebrity of her own. Despite our assurances that her twin is “an attractive American comedienne”, she was dissatisfied with what Google Images returned for Sarah Silverman. We had evidently exhausted all conversation on wine. It was time to hand in our connoisseur badges and step out of the surreal.

The sun ducked behind the Andes as we parted ways with the vineyards and returned to Mendoza city. We muttered impressions to each other through teeth stained purple from a day’s work. “A good place for a honeymoon.” “How good an investment is a vineyard?” Our guide was grinning at our ravings about the day, his Van Gogh beard holding a couple of droplets of Malbec. This was the bliss I had come for and all the trifles of travel – delays, flu, foreign tongues, and general disarray – wilted in the dying embers of the day.

Calling it like It Is

In the foreword to Life is What It is, Patrick French refers to his biography of V.S. Naipaul as perhaps the last of its genre compiled entirely from paper documents (biographies will henceforth be gleaned from Facebook, emails, and other electronic paper trails). He goes on to write an unsparing account of an ingenious writer shadowed by a callous man. French's patchwork is painstaking. Perhaps in realizing that, in his own words, "there can be no doctored truth", Naipaul allowed his biographer unhindered access to his archives and the diaries of his deceased wife. It was a remarkable opening up for a man who, at an obscenely young age, declared friendship superfluous and treated relationships as grist for his ego.

French is right to subtitle his book “the authorized biography of VSN”; Naipaul has garnered a lifetime of snubbed protégés, many of whom have spilt vindictive ink in Sir Vidia’s direction. It pained me to read of Naipaul's dismissal of Paul Theroux, an author whom I greatly admire, as a fatuous travel writer. When Theroux finally realized the extent to which Naipaul had accessorized him, the former wrote an impassioned memoir, Sir Vidia’s Shadow. While Mr. French draws on Theroux’s outtakes from a friendship gone sour, it is the biographer's dispassionate narrative that allows the reader to hand a more damning verdict to Naipaul than Theroux could have hoped for.

The irony of Naipaul's outbursts provides bits of levity in the story. Naipaul had long disavowed the role of his alma mater, Oxford, in his literary achievements; when an editor has the audacity to critique his punctuation, Sir Vidia pistol-whips him with his degree. Another scene that allows the reader to chortle at an otherwise frightening man: upon returning to Buenos Aires, Naipaul runs madly through the airport and hops a fence out of fear of a confrontation with his mistress's husband. The man's idiosyncracies take a slight edge off the most abrasive of personalities.

After pages of ghastly revelations on the private life of the Nobel laureate, I was surprised to read A.N. Wilson’s judgment that Tolstoy was more of a “monster” than Naipaul. Wilson is more qualified than anyone to judge a character contest between the two curmudgeons, but I beg to differ. I can only recall a few of the lurid equivalents to Naipaul’s “monstrosities” in Wilson’s biography of Tolstoy. Yes, both men were unraveled by sexual guilt and both were gallingly ungrateful for their wives’ help in the literary process. Both men drove their spouses to insanity and left them to rot in the mad house. But Naipaul’s narcissism inflicted more damage. He is, by his own admission, guilty of negligent homicide in carrying on a twenty-five year affair and frequenting prostitutes while his wife toiled for his dreams. Pat Naipaul seemed to stomach her husband’s affair until she found out via the newspapers that Vidia was "a great prostitute man". The revelation may have triggered a psychosomatic break and a precipitous descent for her health. Naipaul’s ex post facto remorse is too laden with self-pity to gain any moral capita with the reader. It is a great relief that we can keep the man in one corner and the writer in another, for despite making himself a caricature of insensitivity and prejudice, Naipaul wrote profound and evocative accounts of post-colonial struggle. His societal insight is, according to French, unrivaled.

Perhaps A.N. Wilson’s impartiality should be questioned. When Naipaul was caught driving drunk in 1993, Wilson groveled that the famous writer should be tucked into bed rather than brought to court. And in Wilson’s review of Life is What it Is, he avoids moral accountability for Naipaul. Titling your review “Master and Monster" obliges you to be as brutally honest as French was in writing the biography. And what if Tolstoy were alive? Might Wilson’s verdict read differently?

If there was a point to this post I've strayed from it. Naipaul forged his literary persona by freeing himself from the inconveniences of reciprocal relationships and camping out as a displaced observer among the displaced peoples of the 20th century. The collateral damage from the molding of an artist was a necessary sacrifice in Naipaul's eyes, one dutifully accepted by his first wife. It is fascinating to learn of the creative destruction that infuses a writer's work, even if the reader is among the urchins swallowed by the tide of the writer's gaze.

"Words Without Thoughts Never to Heaven Go"

With a certain Dane's words as guidance, I sat down to remember a fallen relative. Elegies have thankfully been few and far between for me and I was keen on ensuring that mine did not dissolve into a generic tribute applicable to any kind-hearted man. This man was a giant in the family and no scribblings could recreate the way a room would sway when he entered. My only lyrical consolation was to address him directly, as he had done every time he spoke to me:

"Uncle Harm, your hospitality springs eternal. Whenever I arrived States-side after months overseas, you were the first to welcome me back to America's heartland. Yes, I do fancy a game of ping pong and lunch with your sprightly bride. How humbling it was to observe a man in the element of his own making, the spoils of years of hard work and unabated love.

Your focus was always your companion, never yourself; your curiosity for what others have seen insatiable; your capacity for merriment undiminished through the years. Has the world known a more genuine or reassuring handshake?

I can only end by giving you a title I hope you'll wear proudly in Heaven: the grandfather I never had.

Amen, my buddy, Amen"

I'm Not There

There was plenty of appropriate symbolism in the musical guests both on Inauguration Day and at Sunday's concert at the Lincoln Memorial. Crooners from Aretha Franklin to Stevie Wonder embodied the significance of the moment. But one musician might have rounded out the line-up more than any other: a certain Robert Zimmerman. Dylan is, of course, a devoted recluse and it might have taken some luring to get him down to Washington. And he might not have warmed to such a staged appearance. There are a slew of reasons why it wouldn't work, but they would all be trumped by the realization that the times really are a-changin'. Some 45 years earlier, Dylan cut a scrawny figure as he sang "Only a Pawn in Their Game" through his nose in a civil rights demonstration on the Mall. His lyrical potence has made casual observers of injustice uncomfortably familiar with their consciences. So for all of the poetry that rang out this week, we could have used one more refrain. It would have been a perfect replacement for the unrelenting narcisissm of Bono.

The new president is a fan, referring to "Maggie's Farm" as a song that "speaks to me as I listen to the political rhetoric". Dylan and "post-partisanship" might go well together.