Excerpt:
Santiago does not let itself be loved at first glance. It’s not like Barcelona, which seduces you with the predictable layout of the Eixample or sells you the dream with the sea breeze. Santiago hits you. The drive from the airport in Tiare’s blue BMW was my first intensive lesson in Andean reality. I had arrived with the European “chip,” expecting orderly highways and impeccable signage, only to find myself submerged in a concrete artery—the Costanera Norte, she told me—running parallel to a coffee-with-milk colored river.
“Is that the river?” I asked, pointing to the murky Mapocho channel. Tiare let out a burst of laughter as she overtook a truck with a maneuver that made me dig my nails into the upholstery. “It’s meltwater, po, it comes down dragging sediment from the mountains. It’s not dirty, it’s earth. Welcome to Chile!”
I realized that, although we shared a language, I spoke in Spanish (castellano) and she spoke in Chilean, a dizzying tongue, full of idioms that swallowed final ‘s’ sounds and turned every sentence into a riddle.
As we headed east, the city shifted. We left the central area behind, and the architecture became vertical, mirrored, almost aggressive in its modernity. We entered Vitacura. To my architect’s eye, it was a shock. There was none of the compact density of my city; here, everything was wide avenues, highway knots, and residential towers attempting to compete in height with the mountains. Her building was a twenty-story behemoth right opposite Parque Arauco. A privileged location, she explained, though to me, accustomed to walking downstairs to buy bread, it felt like an island surrounded by asphalt and shopping centers. We entered the underground parking, passed a concierge security checkpoint that resembled the Pentagon, and ascended to the 11th floor.
The apartment was a reflection of Tiare’s own contradiction. The structure was what I would call standard luxury: floating floors, an immaculate open-plan kitchen, and a floor-to-ceiling window dominating the entire living room. But she had colonized it. Where there should have been cold minimalism, there was vital chaos. Disassembled analog cameras lay on the glass table, a mud-splattered mountain bike leaned against an immaculate wall, and plants. So many plants. So many that for a moment I wondered if I had entered a high-rise apartment or a clandestine nursery. But what truly took my breath away was the view. “Come out onto the terrace,” she shouted, tossing the keys into a bowl. “Careful of the vertigo.”
I stepped onto the balcony. Below, Parque Arauco was a green, commercial stain, and Avenida Kennedy a river of red and white lights. But in the distance, immense, blocking out half the sky, stood the Andes Mountains. They looked so close that it felt as if you could reach out and touch the snow. In Barcelona, the limit is the sea, the flat horizon; here, the limit was a five-thousand-meter rock wall. I felt ridiculously small.
“Make yourself at home,” she yelled from the kitchen. “The bathroom is on the left. Oh, and be careful with the calefont; you have to get the hang of it.” The calefont… good lord, the hot water heater I’d used all my life in Barcelona.
The first few days were a blur of adjustment. Tiare worked part-time at an engineering consultancy nearby, in one of those Sanhattan office towers, and I was left alone in the mornings trying to understand Vitacura’s urban planning. I became a frustrated flâneur. I tried to walk, but that neighborhood wasn’t built for pedestrians; it was built for cars. The distances were deceptive; what looked close meant crossing overpasses above highways or circumnavigating gigantic blocks.
I felt somewhat trapped in that ivory tower, observing the city from the heights like one looking at a miniature model. One afternoon, we were in the living room. I was trying to respond to a few work emails—Vicent had sent me a couple of queries about a license—and she was editing photos on her laptop with her legs up on the table. The dull roar of Kennedy traffic was a constant hum, like background sea noise.
“You’re very tense, gallego,” she suddenly said. In Chile, all Spaniards are called gallegos, and by that point, I had given up trying to explain my family tree. “I’m not tense. It’s just that Vicent tells me the Barcelona City Council rejected our renovation project in Gracia over a silly bylaw technicality.”
She slammed her laptop shut. “You are in Santiago. You are with me, facing the most beautiful mountain range in the world. The Barcelona City Council can wait. Come on.”
She dragged me out to the terrace. The sun was setting and, suddenly, the glass buildings of Alonso de Córdova and the mountains were dyed a furious, almost unreal violet. “Do you know what your problem is?” she said, leaning on the glass railing. “You think in straight lines. You want everything to fit, just like in your blueprints. And here, the earth moves, cachai? Literally.”
She was referring to the tremors, of course. That very morning I had felt a slight one, a subtle dizziness that made the glasses on the shelf tinkle and left me pale, while she hadn’t flinched. “This building,” she continued, rapping her knuckles against the concrete pillar, “is designed to dance. If it were rigid like you want to be, it would break in two during the first earthquake. You have to learn to oscillate a little, architect…
…"
–Continue reading in its original Castilian language at https://fictograma.com/ , an open source Spanish community of writers–