Mallrat

If you read this entry backwards while watching Married with Children, a great secret will be revealed. Yesterday, I was surprised to overhear my favorite Icelandic band, Sigur Rós, playing on the television. I turned away from our game of domino to see what the occasion was. It was playing as the soundtrack of a montage on a program called “Amor Ciego”. This is a show where a dozen men in their twenties live together in a mansion and compete for the affection of a 24 year-old blonde model. (If you sat down to watch Chilean television without the sound and were forced to guess what country you were in, any country in Scandinavia would be a perfectly reasonable guess.) The men prepare food and presents for Carolina, who then – without knowing which food, gift, etc. belongs to which man – eliminates the worst. The responsible party then reveals himself and has a chance to say sweet parting words to Carolina before he is dismissed from the program. Hence, “Blind Love”. In the dismissal scene, which apparently occurs at the end of every episode, the men wear black tuxedos and gather by moonlight in the garden below Carolina´s balcony where they anxiously await her arrival. She eventually emerges in a white gown accompanied by another woman who does most of the talking. Sometimes, a lucky man gets to spend time one-on-one (“a date”) with Carolina, and to choose the Valentine´s Day date, viewers voted by cell phone text message.

If this sounds a lot like an awful show you accidentally saw once on American television five years ago, that´s about all you need to know about Chilean television. It´s the worst of American TV with a five year lag. Oh, actually, there´s one other thing you should know about Chilean TV. Chile loves “Married with Children” so much that it has its own version, “Casado con Hijos”. It´s the same show only with Chilean actors, who oddly resemble their American counterparts. That “Married with Children” is the show – the only one I´m aware of anyway – that inspired a remake strikes me as some important insight into Chilean culture. At this point, you might be wondering how much television I´ve been watching, and the truth is as little as possible. But I´ve been hearing a lot. Both because it´s common conversation material at the dinner table (translated excerpt: “Oh poor Edmundo, he´s so sweet and sensitive. He actually loves her. Poor thing. He´s so sensitive.”) and because the television is on all the time. I´m staying in an apartment with Guillermo and Isabel – he a retired policeman and she a real estate owner and house wife extraordinaire. They are not yet married because Isabel is separated and divorce only became legal in Chile in 2004 (and though it´s now legal, it´s still not easy). When Guillermo is awake, or at least out of bed – because he sleeps sitting on the sofa sometimes – the television is turned on. From noon until the middle of the night (I haven´t stayed up late enough to know exactly when) the soundtrack of the apartment is whatever´s on. Because the apartment is a kitchen-dining-living space separated from the bedrooms by thin walls, there´s really no escape.

I have found one escape. The mall. It´s an easy, thirty minute walk to relative freedom. I say relative because obviously I´m just trading one irritation for another. The mall is so busy, its assault on the sense so complete and consistent that it becomes like silence. The environment is so replete with distractions that – for me – they cease to be distractions; they cancel each other out. One wave cannot rise above the great sea of commotion, and I sit still in the midst of apparent chaos. While the television in the kitchen-dining-living space dominates the entire house, the televisions in the mall (for some reason playing a VH1 show in English) have to compete with babies screaming, that alarm that goes off whenever someone tries to shoplift (which seems to be often), the 80´s ballads that characterize the music taste of the mall DJ (do malls have DJs?), and on and on. I sit in the middle of it all – the Starbucks’ lounge under the escalators surrounded on all sides by pedestrian traffic – and write with a focus that I haven´t found outside of the cabin I rented in Vermont for a weekend of uninterrupted peace and quiet. I know that travelling around the world to sit in Starbucks is… well, if I want to write a classic travel narrative, I´ll have to take some creative liberties on this chapter. Starbucks in Chile is a funny thing. Chileans don´t really drink coffee, especially overpriced gringo coffee. And then there´s the size issue. As many of you probably know, Starbucks calls its sizes “tall”, “grande”, and “vente” instead of the more traditional “small”, “medium”, and “large”. This is confusing in Chilean because, as many of you also know, “grande” means “large” in Spanish. “¿Usted quiere el grande grande o el grande mediano?” Umm… sí. The barrista indicates the model cups and, using the universal language of the index finger, I tell her which size I would like.