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Santiago de Chile, site of the sadly famous Palacio de la Moneda.

We don’t know if the show “Cuéntame” is still on. If it’s not and you feel like more of it, come to Santiago. Santiago de Chile. Here you’ll feel like you’re in the Spain of TVE, when there was only one, of course. Everything is in black-and-white. Or better still, sepia. Because there is a constant mist in the air that gives everything that moves that tone. We don’t know if it’s pollution, fog or dust, or a mix of all. But one has the feeling of seeing the country through a filter that ages everything. In the main square, you can still find a shoeshine boy that you’d say was from a different era if it weren’t for the advertisements on the benches. The same as the cabdrivers, some of which still wear a tie under their woolen vests and have kind faces like old pensioners of the past. That’s why we’re surprised to see so much advertising about children’s rights in Chile, though it’s true that everywhere and at all times things like that went on.

Wherever you look, everything has this familiar air, but from the past. Stores, bars, even the design of the suits or the cars with alarm, security bar and locks. Then you close your eyes to see if everything is just a dream and you start hearing the music to Sesame Street and, also, in the background, Madonna’s Like a Virgin. Though not for long, because the sounds are immediately drowned out by a cassette playing in a car without AC driven by a maniac with the windows down and Tina Turner’s Mad Max song mercilessly bursting the Pioneer speakers. Scared, you enter the first café you find to check if it’s just exhaustion playing a dirty trick on you. At the bar you see three executives wearing impeccable white shirts and for a second believe you’re safe. But then you hear them talk and you understand they’re expatriates from the Banco de Santander, the sole master of Chile. Around them, everything has that old look of Madrid in the 1970’s. And even worse, because the barmaids look like bingo hostesses in tight dresses with big breasts defying the laws of gravity.

So you run like hell to the first newspaper stand. You want to check what day it is in the papers and be sure that the plane that brought you from Easter Island was not cursed by one of the Aku Aku spirits and sent into a time tunnel. January 27, 2008. For a second, you breathe with relief. But when you see the front covers, the nightmare comes back. Photographs of semi-naked women on the front of weekly magazines about politics, news fit for the National Enquirer, old-style headlines that consume the whole article, and, in passing, the need to read it: “Mapuche stops hunger strike” or “Hate against pokemons increases”.

You’re left with just two options. The first is to seek asylum in one of the multiple churches in Santiago. Yet when you enter and see them bursting with people, many of them young, something that hasn’t happened for years where you come from, you think that they, too, have been cursed. The second option is to understand what happened in this country for it to be like this. Since we collect books and sometimes even read them, we go to a bookstore and ask for one History (capital letters) book. Before we can even finish our sentence, we’ve been handed Pinochet’s autobiography, all five volumes. After the History lesson, since we’ve travelled into the past, we head to the Mercado Central to eat some machas with Parmesan cheese or a good stew. Just like from the past, of course.