Chileans loved to be called the English of South America. It was silliness, obviously, except for the general addiction to an exotic oriental infusion, discovered by Tibetan monks to excite the desire for achieving Nirvana. It was introduced into this illustrious corner of the spinning blue planet by the English of Europe. It’s called, tea.

Tea had a very complex itinerary. According to tea experts, the dark, seductive weed arrived in Valparaíso with British pirates in the 18th Century. How it became a centerpiece of Chilean culture was odd. Even Neruda found it curious. While having yet another cup.

Served to him by Matilde Urrutia, his love. While the mailman rang the doorbell outside with ardent patience, because no one condescended to open the door for him at the poetic palace at Isla Negra, which was not an island at all, just a beach. With sands that were not black, but white. It did have a nice view of the rocky Pacific coast that the bona fide simple man never got to see, unless he took the cheap bus to Cartagena, and spent the night on the beach with a blanket, a couple of friends and a five-liter jug of wine, known as la chuica, waiting for the beautiful beach babes who never arrived because the only females that dared to go to that beach were either professionals, or vendors of beach treats with white hats and uniforms.

Beach treats were different variations of fried dough with sugar, none of them very poetic, which is why Neruda had to have his own personal beachfront property, for the good of literary humanity, comrade.  But, in the morning, on the beach at Cartagena, the simple man and his three friends would make their morning tea in an empty tin can over a tiny fire. That was known as la choca, constant companion of farm laborers and construction workers, infused with the same exotic Tibetan herbs that Neruda’s third wife and eternal love, Matilde Urrutia was preparing for him a few miles north of there, at Isla Negra. Which is not black and not an island, but very exclusive, so much so that there is no cheap bus, and if you drive your own car, you will be ticketed for parking it on the street. Such an eyesore, among seasoned aristocrats. They were unaccustomed to that sort of thing, you know, the idea that other people might be coming to their beach.

As a Senator of the Republic in 1945, the poet went slumming with the masses in the desert north. The northern third of Chile is the biggest, longest, driest, highest, most superlative desert in the world, in many ways. And the most prone to earthquakes, but very well-endowed, minerally speaking. The Party was strong among the working proletariat of the mining industry. This is what he had to say.

On those long trips, I customarily stayed in the poorest homes, in the shacks and cabins belonging to the men of the desert. Almost always, there was a group waiting for me, waving their tiny flags at the entry gate. Then, they would show me to a place where I could rest. All day long, in my room, I would receive visits from men and women bringing their labor disputes. Some of the conflicts they would bring were rather intimate. Sometimes, their complaints took on a character that perhaps one would judge to be humorous, whimsical or even grotesque. For example, a shortage of tea was, for them, a motive for a strike that would have far-reaching consequences. Is that sort of Londonesque urgency conceivable in such a desolate place? But it’s true that Chilean people can’t live without drinking tea several times a day. Some of the miners were barefoot, but they would ask, filled with anxiety, how they were expected to survive the shortage of such an exotic and necessary beverage. They would argue, almost apologetically, If we don’t have our tea, we get terrible headaches.                    

Pure poetry, comrade. Even Victor Jara, the champion of the Chilean proletariat, same guy who was working on the beginning of a story without knowing how it would end, always got home in time for tea. Tea for two, and two for tea. When the shift is over, and the afternoon stretches theshadows across the scaffold, that construction laborer needs to nourish his exhausted body in exactly the same manner as Her Royal Majesty, Elizabeth Windsor, Queen of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. If not, he gets sick. Then he gets mad, and there is a huge strike. It’s no joke. Take Neruda’s word for it. But his real name was Neftalí Reyes.

When the common man got mad, in Chile, they would say, se emplotó. Literally, he got naked. No eroticism intended. It meant that he reverted to his Native American roots, and traditional dress, which was, pretty much, nothing. In fact, most Native Americans are not angry people, at all. It’s not part of their culture. But the Mapuche, in the south, was an exception. He was famous for a smoldering rage that could last for decades. The Mapuche were, moreover, the only tribe never conquered by the Spanish. And they never drank tea. They drank yerba mate.

Now, why don’t Chilean poets use their real names? A quandary.  Gabriela Mistral (Lucila Godoy) drank tea as she scribbled her verses. I am sure that José María Memet (Pedro Ortiz), poet and Mirista, drank tea because he drank it in my house in Peñalolén at eleven o’clock at night. I think he was waiting for the last bus to leave, the one that would take him back into his clandestine cave. But he was stalling. Looking for an excuse to stay over, because he wanted to have sex with the gringas who lived with me in the house by the canal, where we hung up our guitars and wept because we couldn’t sing hopeful songs anymore.

According to Víctor Jara (whose real name was Víctor Jara), sex with las gringas was the best. It was his one ideological inconsistency, comrade. He even married one. Joan Turner from England. From the place where we
first got the tea.

She was his dance instructor at the Universidad de Chile. And, yes, a little-known fact, before he became the most famous singer in the country and martyr for the cause of the Canto Nuevo, he was a dancer. He had all the right moves, comrade. He was a member of the national ballet. Tights and lights, the only straight guy there, supposedly.

The tea arrived in England from China via Portugal during the Restoration. The Brits had a stint under military rule with General Oliver Cromwell, Puritan usurper who had himself proclaimed Lord Protector, after the execution of Charles I in 1648. The dead king’s son, Charles II recovered the throne when the dictatorship was over by 1660. He married Catalina Enriqueta de Braganza, Infanta de Portugal. She was quite the princess, comrade. She became Queen Consort of England, Scotland and Ireland in 1662. Her dowry was most of India.

She never learned a word of English, and she never produced an heir for Charles, but she brought tea from Portugal. Charles liked the tea, and it became forever fixed in the idiosyncrasy of the English. It probably also saved the royal marriage. English monarchs didn’t take kindly to infertile noblewomen from the Iberian nether parts of Europe. There had been incidents. But now, there was tea.

When the tea from England made its way to Chile, it was just an aromatic plant that swashbucklers brought in modest quantities for the expensive tastes of the Edwards, Leighton and Mackay families who had colonized Valparaiso. The huddled masses were still drinking yerba mate, comrade, as their mostly indigenous ancestors had done for centuries. In Chile, tea became a thing in 1767 when the Spanish Governor, in the name of His Royal Majesty, Carlos III, imposed a sovereign tax on yerba mate to force poor people to pay for the construction of a bridge over the Mapocho River. That was Puente Cal y Canto.

A bridge was necessary for about three weeks out of the year, when winter rain or an early thaw turned the gentle mountain brook into a raging torrent, crashing down onto the capital from Lo Barnechea, and threatening to wash it into the sea at Isla Negra. The rest of the year, it was just a trickle, just enough to keep the turds from the barrio alto moving right along. But the Governor wanted a bridge. Paris had bridges. Madrid had bridges. Santiago needed a bridge.

But the workers of the world united. It was perhaps the first and last time that would ever happen. Chilean people conspired to quit drinking yerba mate. They started drinking tea. The pirates in Valparaiso recognized their once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. They started bringing in industrial quantities. It rounded out their commerce, besides. Silver from Potosí went to China, via Acapulco. The Chinese paid in tea and china. The china was for drinking the tea. It was called china because it came from China. Ceramics made anywhere else cracked from the hot water. Thus, tea, for Chileans, became a collective addiction.

Except in the countryside, far away, Chileans stopped drinking yerba mate. The Governor had to pay for his own goddam bridge. Sell some cows, auction off some wine, maybe. They were the His Majesty’s cows, anyway. 

Six years later, the English of England slapped a tax on the tea for the residents of their colonies in North America. The silly gringos could have adopted yerba mate, but no. They dressed up as Indians and tossed the tea into Boston harbor. That tea belonged to the East India Company, comrade, the first capitalist transnational. England declared war and the United States was born. If it weren’t for the tea, comrade, the Colossus of the North would have just become Canada, all the way down to Miami. Things would have been different.

And, if it weren’t for the tea, there would be no modern science, either. Though tobacco seemed to confer the authority to state scientific fact without ever performing a single experiment, it was the tea that kept Lavoisier and Faraday and Newton and Dalton and Boyle off the sauce long enough to figure anything out. Before tea, comrade, adults drank beer all day, or wine. In the New World, Europeans put rum in their water to keep from shitting themselves into oblivion from the tropical parasites. So, everyone was drunk all day, until there was tea.

Puente Cal y Canto was a marvel of colonial architecture, even though it was, perhaps, too much for the humble Mapocho. It was demolished in 1888, in an overzealous rush to modernize the landscape. But the tea is still with us, comrade. The majestic elixir had staying power.

There was a proper ritual that had to be observed. Not nearly as formal as the Japanese ceremony, but the tea bag, that nasty little North American creation, was out of the question. Can you imagine Matilde Urrutia serving The Poet his daily dose with a tea bag, comrade? They were only invented in 1908, and quite by accident. A burlap sack of tea fell into a farm pond. A cowboy who happened to be taking his monthly wash in that very farm pond just then cried, Eureka! After that, it was history. Even so, according to those in the know, only the most uncivilized, ill-mannered savage in a loin cloth (or less) would ever consider using such a filthy contrivance for tea drinking. In the days of Charles and Catalina, the tea was the thing that distinguished the nobility from their social, economic and genetic inferiors. Ordinary people drank beer. Legal drinking age was about two. 

Tea remained the domain of the aristocracy for centuries because rustics and fishermen had no access to the exotic granulated necessity used to sweeten a fashionable lady’s cup. That had to be imported specially from Barbados for Her Majesty’s royal enjoyment. Silver from the Andes to pay for the tea from China; slaves from Africa to work the cane in Barbados; and pirate ships from Europe to take the sugar to London. An entire planet had to be mobilized to ensure five o’clock tea at Windsor Castle and Balmoral.  

This is how the fanatic addiction of an Iberian princess transformed the faces of three continents and made Chileans the English of Latin America, comrade. Now you know.