Life at Zinka's House

Zinka kissed me.

It happened in her office. A big smile crossed her face when I walked in and, in her rapid, staccato Spanish, she said something more or less unintelligible to me. All I caught were the repeated words, "grande personaje" and something about me having been on TV. She got up from behind her desk and rushed over--waddled would be more accurate for Zinka is not a small woman and does not move very quickly--to plant a big kiss on each cheek. I stood there stammering, embarrassed, blushing certainly and not at all sure what to say or do.

Apparently, I had been in the papers and on TV in the days before and Zinka was overjoyed to have such a client at her humble "hostal." The next morning at breakfast, I heard her proudly telling one of the other guests about me; I did my best to sink behind a pot of tea in embarrassment. I was not expecting this. I had been away for a week in the southern part of Tierra del Fuego and had only just returned that evening to Punta Arenas. The newspaper had written an article about my research shortly after my arrival in Punta Arenas and this, for some reason set off the other stories. Fortunately, I had missed all the hubub, but Zinka had not.

Zinka´s had been my base in Punta Arenas ever since I realized my travels were going to take longer than expected and less expensive lodgings would be necessary. I downsized, trading my $30/night hostal downtown for Zinka´s House, half a mile and half a world away from the town’s leafy central square with its elegant Beaux Artes buildings (see lower left). Zinka´s was 50% less expensive and it showed. But, despite the fluorescent lighting and the sickly lime green walls of my room, despite the sway-backed mattress and the indignity of having a truck stop-sized wheel of toilet paper in the bathroom, and despite the neighborhood rooster that would wake me every morning at 5am, I actually liked my life at Zinka´s.

It had less to do with the house and more to do with the people, but the house is not without charm. Zinka´s House--that’s the name of the hostal, "Zinka´s House", in English, though no one there speaks a word of that language--is a rambling, one story affair with several outbuildings, all wedged behind a painted white metal fence. Located in the midst of the town’s drab Croatian quarter, Zinka´s House stands out. Its fire-engine red walls and tidy white trim present a bright contrast to the dingy buildings all around. In her front yard, hard against the fence, is a pretty little garden overflowing with gladiolas, irises, and other flowers the names of which I don’t know. Bunches of rhubarb--harvested for Zinka´s excellent rhubarb jam--fringe the garden and the sides of the buildings. The flowers and the rhubarb are real, but the centerpiece of the garden is a peculiar still life of plastic tulips around a two-foot high plastic snowman perched in a small, wooden wheelbarrow. This should be in jarring contrast to the lush living flowers and the rhubarb but at Zinka´s kitsch combines with the authentic and somehow it all just works.

Little Croatia is a run-down section of Punta Arenas. The houses there are mostly little more than single story frame boxes with corrugated siding and roofs. Here and there you stumble upon the occasional "Magallenic" style house of the early 1900s with gingerbread trim and steep mansard roofs or perhaps one of the sleek functionalist houses from the 1930s and 40s with its porthole windows and curving, poured concrete walls (at left, top and bottom). Both styles are plentiful in the city’s tonier neighborhoods but in Little Croatia they seem out of place, forlorn reminders of the days when the neighborhood was a leafy, well-to-do suburb and not the dusty barrio it has become. The houses of Little Croatia today are generally painted a dull white or yellow, or a splotchy light brown. Graffiti covers virtually every building (lower right). Some of the houses are left unpainted entirely, rusting into a reddish-brown that blends with the unpaved sidewalks. Trucks and tractors are parked randomly about on Zinka's street, spilling out of garages onto the crumbling, broken-edged strips of dirt and concrete that masquerade as sidewalk.

Dogs are everywhere in Little Croatia. The strays are good natured, dirty things that lope along, greeting you with a slight wag of the tail as they go happily about their business. The ones behind the fences, in contrast, are mean, bitter beasts. They growl and bark at everything that passes, straining at their chains, eyes bulging, spray leaping from angry jaws. In the land of the free, a chained dog is an unhappy dog.

To call the neighborhood Little Croatia is no exaggeration. Not only is there a Croacia street, nearby is the Croatian Consulate itself. A Croatian school is down the street. All the shops seem to have Croatian names: Buljan, Serka, Yankulic, etc. There is even a sign on one building that simply reads, "Clinica Croacia." What does this mean? Are the doctors all Croatian? Or does it refer to the patients they treat? As if to say, "Croats only. Others need not apply."

Immigration is THE major theme in the history of Tierra del Fuego and southern Patagonia. The first immigrants to the region were the Swiss in the 1850s, followed quickly by the French. The British arrived when the huge sheep estancias (ranches) were set up, bringing stock and know-how from the nearby Falkland Islands. Asturians from northern Spain followed, as did Germans. The first big wave of Croatian immigrants came shortly before the turn of the 20th Century, providing strong-backed, cheap labor, not just for the estancias but also for the sawmills that were springing up all over the vast forests of the Fuegian fjords to the south. The Croats of Tierra del Fuego remain a tight-knit community today, their identity fueled no doubt by pride in Croatia’s independence in 1991.

Before then the community in Punta Arenas lived in Little Yugoslavia. The consulate was the Yugoslavian Consulate and the street was Yugoslavia Street. You get the picture. But, before there was a Yugoslavia the Croats in Chile were called "Autrichos." To me, this seems a cruel thing to call the poor devils who were, for the most part, trying to flee the oppression and poverty they faced at the hands of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire to which Croatia then belonged. (See Croatian coat of arms, right.)

European immigration not only gave Punta Arenas its fine architecture, it also led to literacy and primary schooling statistics that were off the charts compared with the rest of Chile and South America. But the authorities in Santiago worried the large European presence in the strategic Straits of Magellan might prove too tempting to one of the imperial powers in Europe. This fear was not entirely irrational. During WWI, for example, German residents of Punta Arenas openly supplied the Kaiser's warships with food and coal while they hid in the fjords. The town's doughty Britishers dutifully reported the squadron's whereabouts to the Admiralty in London. A fleet was sent south to intercept and the result was the Battle of the Falklands, one of the largest naval encounters of the war. (See left, the cruiser Dresden, in hiding in Chile, 1914.)

So, in the first two decades of the 20th Century Santiago set out to dilute the European population in the far south by encouraging a second migration, targeting the mixed-race farmers and fishermen of the dismally poor island of Chiloe to the north. These low-paid laborers were a boon to the burgeoning economy of Punta Arenas but they forever changed the complexion of the city. Today, the Chiloten presence dominates and, of the many European groups that once ran things in town, only the Croats remain a distinct, vibrant community.

Zinka is the uncrowned queen of this Croatian community and like any royal she has her court. It is comprised of two permanent residents, Maria and Georgio, and a host of rotating visitors who come to sit at her desk and take a serving of tea and gossip. It is a never-ending stream of visitors she hosts; over many days at Zinka´s, I can think of only one instance in which I saw her alone in her office.

Maria acts as the palace chamberlain. Nothing gets done without her. She serves breakfast, does the linens, looks after the guests, and generally keeps the place humming. She is constantly on the go, moving at a brisk trot. She’s an attractive, slim woman of a hard-to-determine age. She may be 35. She may be 50. Somehow, despite all she accomplishes, she seems never to be far from Zinka. This is important because Zinka can’t function without her. Even the simplest question never fails to fluster Zinka. A question like, for example, ¨Zinka, do you have any rooms available for tomorrow?¨ causes her to sputter, then pause. This is quickly followed by a shout for Maria who instantly appears, calming Zinka, providing the desired answer, moving on.

Georgio is the outside man and I think of him in the role of court jester. Before I knew his name, I did not realize he was a man at all. I’ve never met a more androgynous figure. Georgio stands about four and a half feet tall, has a bowl-cut hairdo, a high, squeaky voice, and wears his jeans pulled up high above his waist, the same multi-colored acrylic sweater tucked in tight, day after day. I never quite learned what he does around the place. I believe he tends the garden. Honestly, anything else would seem too strenuous. One day, when I returned late to Punta Arenas and found Zinka´s House full and my regular room unavailable, Georgio was dispatched to take me around to another hostal in the neighborhood. I saw him make a move to take one of my bags, edging for my backpack which stood almost as tall he. Terrified he would topple under the weight of it, I jumped in and, thanking him, handed him my bookbag instead.

Finally, there is Zinka herself. She is an exuberant woman, short and plump, in her late fifties or early sixties, with a luxurious head of blonde hair she wears in an ornate bun on top of her head. Her presence fills the small office that doubles as the hostal´s reception. Her voice penetrates the surrounding walls and she speaks in a rapid-fire Spanish almost impossible to understand; even fluent Spanish-speakers claim to sometimes have a hard time following her.

Every visit to Zinka's office never failed to intimidate me. I felt like a poor supplicant at a royal audience. Generally, I would pause a few seconds behind the always-closed door, steeling myself for the enormity of the encounter. From behind the door I'd hear Zinka´s rapid, booming voice in conversation with one of the neighborhood courtiers or with Maria or Georgio, either of whom--often both--were likely to be squeezed into the little office, too. Just over the left shoulder of the guest’s chair, a television blares, adding to the din. I knock timidly on the door and Zinka´s voice booms out, ¨Adelante! Adelante.¨ I go in. A torrent of unintelligible sentences tumble from her lips. Is she talking to me, I wonder? I stare blinking, bewildered. Then, a smile or wink from Zinka makes me realize, yes, indeed, she is talking to me. But what is she saying? I panic. She repeats herself. Maybe I catch a word or two, maybe not. I ask her to speak more slowly, please. Generally, this goes on until I either figure out what she’s saying or until Maria swoops in to sort things out. Half the time I leave the office so flustered I find I’ve forgotten to ask the question that propelled me there in the first place.

Zinka´s office is decorated as a kind of shrine to all things Croatian and to Zinka herself. On the walls are several large travel posters of scenic Croatian towns. Croatian knick-knacks, colorful ethnic plates, and other handicrafts are there, too. And then there are the pictures. Some show Zinka with the Croatian president on his visit to Punta Arenas. Others are of Zinka dancing with various handsome men, Slavic dignitaries, I imagine. There are pictures of Zinka in full ethnic costume--red skirt, white apron, heavy silver jewelry, her long hair in braids--marching at the front of Punta Arenas´s Croatian day parade, and on and on, filling what seems to be every square foot of wall space in the office.

The place of honor, however, on the wall just behind her chair, is reserved for a larger than life photo of Zinka herself. It is a portrait of Zinka in full ethnic dress, a smile on her face and a mischievous glint in her eye, her right hand jauntily grasping the shoulder strap of her dress, as if to say, ¨Come along, young man, Let me show you the charms of Croatia.¨ It is a spectacular image and when you stand in her office, across the desk from Zinka herself sitting beneath that photograph, it is all you can do to keep your eyes fixed on the original. You strain every bit of your concentration to keep focused on her but it is impossible, your eyes can not help but dart back to that photograph. You feel intimidated and elated at the same time, as if in the presence of royalty or perhaps some Latin American dictator whose cult of personality is enormous and meticulously tended and yet so fragile its iconography must extend even to the seat of power itself.

Bizarre, and yet compelling. Kitsch combining with the authentic. But somehow it all works. Such is life at Zinka´s House.