The Nitrate Town Talent Show

The nitrate train left Iquique at six in the morning, and for the first hour it climbed.

It climbed the brown wall of hills behind the port until the sea was a flat grey sheet far below. Then the train went over the top, and the sea was gone, and Mara saw the pampa for the first time.

There was nothing.

That was the first thought. A plain the colour of old biscuits ran away on every side as far as an eye could follow, flat, and stony, and bare, without one tree or one bush or one blade of grass, all the way to a line of mountains so far off that they looked like they had been painted on the sky in pale violet and might wash away in the next rain.

It was July of 1931. In Iquique the docks were silent, and Mara's mother had stood in the kitchen with a letter in one hand and said, very brightly, the way she did when things were bad, that Mara would go and stay with Uncle Benito and Aunt Tomasa on the pampa, just for a little while, until things picked up. At the oficina. In the desert. Where Uncle Benito had work.

For three hours the train ran across the plain, and every so often a town came up out of the emptiness: a black chimney, the long sheds of the works, grey mountains of waste rock, rows of little iron houses all alike. Some of the chimneys did not smoke. Those towns were dead, the windows empty, sand blowing through the open doors.

Oficina Santa Rufina was the fifth stop. Mara got down with a cloth bag in one hand and the other hand deep in a pocket, and stood on the platform in a wind that was warm and dry and full of grit, and looked for Uncle Benito.

He was not there.

Instead there was a crowd at the far end of the platform, gathered around a board on the station wall, very quiet, the way people are quiet in church. They were all reading the same piece of paper, pinned to the board, with a big black company stamp on the bottom of it, and then turning away, one by one, and not looking at each other.

Mara went to look.

NOTICE, it said, in big letters. By order of the Directors of the Santa Rufina Nitrate Company, Limited, the works at Oficina Santa Rufina will cease production on the 31st day of August, 1931. All employees and their families are to vacate company housing by that date. Transport south will be provided by the Company. Signed, H. W. Pennock, Administrator.

And then a voice rang out across the platform, a deep trained voice that could fill a theatre, and every head turned.

"Well!" said the voice. "That is the end of that, then. And what are we going to do about it?"

A woman was standing on a bench at the end of the platform. She was perhaps sixty, short and stout and upright, in a black dress twenty years out of fashion and a hat with a long green feather in it, which the wind was trying to steal. Her eyes were very black and very bright.

"We have six weeks," said Señora Inés to the whole platform. "Six weeks! Enough to put on a show. On the twenty-ninth of August, in the theatre, before they put us on the train, Santa Rufina will hold a talent show. The best one this pampa has ever seen. And then, when we go, we will go with our heads up." She looked around the crowd. Nobody said anything. Her eyes moved over the faces one by one, and stopped, for no reason at all that Mara could see, on Mara. "You," she said. "New. Off the train. Yes?"

"Yes, Señora," said Mara, and stepped forward, because it seemed rude not to, and because everybody else had stepped back.

Señora Inés climbed down off the bench, slowly, holding on to the feather. She looked Mara up and down, the cloth bag, the shoes white with the road, the hand deep in the pocket.

"Good," she said. "You can carry things, and you are not crying. That is two more qualifications than most people here." She held out a small hard hand. "Inés Barra. Formerly of the Teatro Victoria, Valparaíso. Currently of nowhere in particular. And you are?"

"Mara," said Mara. "I'm here to stay with my uncle. Benito."

"Benito the filter-man!" said Señora Inés. "Of course. He sings bass. Badly. Come and find me tomorrow at the theatre, Mara. I shall need a stage manager."

At six o'clock the works whistle went, and the men came out of the works in a slow white river of dust, and one of them was Uncle Benito, who picked Mara up off the ground, bag and all, though Mara was twelve and far too big for it, and said that Mara had grown and looked exactly like her mother, and that Aunt Tomasa had made soup.

He did not say anything about the notice. Not at supper, in the little iron house in the fourth row, while Aunt Tomasa laughed too loudly at everything.

But afterwards, lying awake on a mattress in the corner of the kitchen, Mara heard them talking in low voices behind the curtain. Where will we go? South. Where south? Who knows. Santiago. There's nothing in Santiago. There's nothing anywhere. Then Uncle Benito, very quietly, so that Mara almost did not hear it: She's mad, Inés. A talent show. As if that will help.

And Aunt Tomasa, just as quietly: It won't help. But it's something.