The Smell of a Country

Chile smells. I didn't notice it at first, because when I arrived in Santiago it was April, a month that comes after at least five months of drought in the "metropolitan region," more or less smack in the middle of the length of Chile. At that time of year, the smells are subtle and I couldn't get a feeling for them with my April nose, fresh from the United States, piqued for every flower, every pollen mote, every sign of spring. When I arrived in Santiago, I thought, "this place has no smell." Strange.

The first time I left Chile after moving here, I had a couple of months to travel, and I bussed, flew and boated around some of our neighboring countries. I spent most of the time in Brazil, followed by Argentina. Where Chile is shy and retiring, humble and subtle, these two countries (most notably, Brazil), smack you in the face. They are loud, audacious. People are feisty. They complain and argue, gesticulate in 180 degrees, eat dinner until midnight.

I am a woman of comparisons. This is like that, this is taller, bigger, smaller, prettier, similar to that other thing. It used to drive my ex insane. Why can't you just enjoy what we're seeing-eating-breathing-living-walking for what it is? Because I'm wired this way. That's why.

So when I returned to Chile, I couldn't help but compare it to what I'd seen-smelled-heard. I first noticed Chile's smell on my second day back, on a trip to an outdoor vegetable market. There, a huge smell hit me. It was from the zapallo, a mottled, ugly, tremendous squash, the size with which Peter Peter Pumpkineater would have been duly impressed--perhaps for future storage of children that might come along. This squash, a deformed relative of the pumpkin, shows up in the homemade fried sopaipillas, a type of Chilean frybread, and in cazuela, a soup that everyone's mother knows how to make. Zapallo is sold in cortes, or chunks, because it's simply too big and impractical to schlep home. So it is hacked into little pieces, and the bulk of the squash sits in the market, guts exposed, with a little saw stuck into it. And the most amazing warm, yellowy, pumpkiny smell wafts from it. And when I smelled that smell, after not having smelled it for so long, I knew I was back in Chile.

So I decided to reconsider the idea that Chile had no smell. It's simply not true. Chile has many wonderful (and not-so wonderful) smells. I read recently that dogs, whose sense of smell is many thousands of times more acute than our own, do not find any smell unpleasant. They will sniff and sniff smells that we humans cannot stomach. I challenge them to smell the Mapocho, a stinking sliver of a river that swells to a medium-sized torrent in the spring melt. It reeks. Garbage, sewage, rotting vegetables. It smells like what it looks like. It's grey.

Other disagreeable smells include the meat hanging in the market. Unrefrigerated, meat has a very rusty smell. Chicken is even worse, somewhat like aluminum. There are whole sections of the market I never enter, pushed back by the sheer ugliness of the smell. A strong waft of urine comes from beside the Basilica near my house. I don't need to explain why. The bus exhaust, the smell of rain hitting the asphalt for the first time after the drought, tear gas, the chemical solvent people use to strip their floors before waxing them. An improperly-vented kerosene heater used in the winter. These are the bad smells.

But then there are things that surprise me. The pumpkin I mentioned above, the smell of toasted baguette-like marraqueta in the morning as I'm leaving my house, the harina tostada (toasted flour, prepared into an oatmeal-like consistency, eaten as a breakfast food) from the tostaduria where I buy my coffee, the lunchtime smells of people cooking real food for their midday meal. Onions. Ripe tomatoes, the almost minty mountain air in nearby Cajon de Maipo. Then there's the paper-like smell of the cleanser they use at the hospital where I did physical therapy. The colonia that they put on babies, the unidentified clovey smell of a cologne that not one but two men I've dated have worn

. There's the smell of living things, during the wet season, of my friend's organic garden. Of earth. Providencia, a neighborhood lined with trees has a particular verdant smell. The flower section of the market. Palo santo, a wood people burn as incense. When they put lemon in the electric tea kettle at work to clean it. The after lunch smell of toothpaste on everyone's breath. The promising, yeasty smell of rising and baking at the supermarket. A whiff of (prohibited) woodsmoke here in the city, which reminds nearly everyone of a time before the pollution in Santiago was so bad that woodstoves were banned here.

They say that olfactory memory is very strong, and that smells from childhood are not easily forgotten. I wonder, now that I've identified some of the smells that make up my existence here, how solidly I will remember them years from now. Will I remember them like my childhood smells, or will they be more diffuse, because I learned them later? I'll always have an accent in Spanish. Will my smell memory be similarly stunted?