Artwork by Kaya Joan
Most people we knew wanted to get away from Capital City as soon as they could. The problem was they had nowhere to go. There were places that might stay habitable for a while, maybe for decades, but they weren’t a certainty. Even the most everyday of activities was now unstable on the grid. It had all been built to stifle us, to make us forget rest and produce without looking back. Each one chose the bodies, the music, the lights to immerse themselves in rhythm and brilliance— to have a place to land when night falls, or the mantle of isolation threatened to swallow you. You could spend years of your life in it, bodies, music, lights. In a loop, almost without thinking about it. Fleeing the void, stuffing yourself with lovers, tongues, dances, songs, eyes that gleam as if through prisms. Drugs, alcohol, food. We never imagined that this lifestyle, as deeply ingrained as it was in our skin, would also come apart.
As the expropriation and demolition movement progressed, speculation and bidding on the stable buildings in the east also surged. It became impossible to afford rent in that area, far from the sinkholes; every day, we saw more families living in tents set up on the perimeter of the collapse zone. The more fortunate ones occupied the old offices downtown, but the conditions were still overcrowded. Luckily, our building was one of the oldest in the city. Its antiquity was our salvation. The way it was built, with all its intricate connections, had enabled it to withstand; the construction was rock- solid. Though there were still some minor failures, like a few collapsed sections, some broken glass, and cracks that crisscrossed the roof, these were small things compared to the ruins that surrounded us. The ground hadn’t given way either; there weren’t any sinkholes close by. The important things remained intact, despite the earthquakes.
With the repairs we improvised among the neighbors, the structure held on. The building was condemned as unstable by the government. This meant that Bigger Real Estate’s insurance was responsible for covering our expenses and, incidentally, the state would grant them a generous compensation for their “losses.”
We managed to prop up the parts that were collapsing with lightweight materials: cholgúan hardboard, corrugated sheets of calamina, Pizarreño panels, and Internit fiber cement. Everything was useful: old pallets, fruit crates, egg cartons, Styrofoam, even garbage bags. Our neighbors, for the most part, had grown up in tightly packed neighborhoods, blocks of tiny, matchbox-size apartments, shanties on stilts, and illegal add-ons. Picking up construction tools was subsistence memory, part of the peripheral learning that comes from building houses from scraps. Those born with nothing make wonders out of scarcity. Rig after rig, a Frankenstein of trash. Bodies that have withstood burned homes, floods, deluges, and earthquakes. A country built on encampments and obstinacy. Even though it took us hours of collective work, when we still had energy left, we’d joke around. Despite the pain, we found a way to laugh. Some days we turned the hammers into improvised microphones and sang cloying old love songs; we learned salsa with the Caribbean neighbors and imitated the journalists who reported from the rubble of the city: “Señora, it seems as though you’ve lost your house.
Your husband’s been swallowed up by a sinkhole. And you yourself are living in a tent. Do you know where you’ll be spending Christmas?” Nothing made much sense. We weren’t making any great structural changes or spending what little we had. Because nothing was ours, and sooner or later, everything was going to collapse anyway. We often said that if we hadn’t been on the brink of death, we could have launched a venture into experimental Andean architecture: a touch of Matta-Clark head-to-head with Freddy Mamani’s beautiful “cholets.” No dystopian future or anything; it was good times or death.
Our structures were to keep living, to avoid thinking about the abyss we carried within. So we hammered away like we were raising a barn. We cooked in shared pots, turned some great Amazonian cumbia all the way up, and enjoyed the occasional homemade liquor. That’s right, amid the scarcity, we also became fermentation experts as we shared the little stories that made up our lives. This wasn’t a gringo action movie; no superhero was coming to save us.
Like I said, life can’t be put on hold.
You’re tired, but you have to keep dancing, eating, loving.
Because if not, you might as well die right there.
Excerpted from CHILCO: A Novel by Daniela Catrileo. Copyright © 2023 by Daniela Catrileo. Copyright © 2023 by Editorial Planeta Chilena S.A.—Book&Film. Rights Latin America—Grupo Planeta. Translation copyright © 2025 by Jacob Edelstein. All rights reserved.