By Night in Chile (2 page)

Every now and then, Farewell burst into excessively sonorous laughter. At each of these guffaws, I looked at him out of the corner of my eye. He looked like the god Pan, or Bacchus in his den, or some demented Spanish conquistador ensconced in a southern fort. The young bard’s laugh, by contrast, was slender as wire, nervous wire, and always followed Farewell’s guffaw, like a dragonfly following a snake. At some point Farewell announced that he was expecting other guests for dinner that night. I turned my head and pricked up my ears, but our host was giving nothing away. Later I went out for a stroll in the gardens of the estate. I must have lost my way. I felt cold. Beyond the gardens lay the country, wilderness, the shadows of the trees that seemed to be calling me. It was unbearably damp. I came across a cabin or maybe it was a shed with a light shining in one of its windows. I went up to it. I heard a man laughing and a woman protesting. The door of the cabin was ajar. I heard a dog barking. I knocked and went in without waiting for a reply. There were three men sitting around a table, three of Farewell’s farmhands, and, beside a wood stove, two women, one old, the other young, who, as soon as they saw me, came and took my hands in theirs. Their hands were rough. How good of you to come, Father, said the older woman, kneeling before me and pressing my hand to her lips. I was afraid and disgusted, but I let her do it. The men had risen from their seats.

Sit yourself down, son, I mean Father, said one of them. Only then did I realize with a shudder that I was still wearing the cassock I had traveled in. I could have sworn I had changed when I went up to the room Farewell had set aside for me. Yet although I had intended to change, I had not in fact done so, going back down to join Farewell in the hunting lodge dressed as before. And there in the farmers’ shed I realized there would be no time to change before dinner. And I thought Farewell would form a false impression of me. And I thought the young poet he had in tow would also get the wrong idea. And finally I thought of the surprise guests, who were no doubt important people, and I saw myself wearing a cassock covered with dust from the road and soot from the train and pollen from the paths that lead to Là-bas, sitting cowed in a corner, away from the table, eating my dinner and not daring to look up. And then I heard one of the

farmhands inviting me to take a seat. And like a sleepwalker I sat down. And I heard one of the women saying Father, won’t you try some of this or that. And someone was talking to me about a sick child, but with such poor diction I couldn’t tell if the child was sick or dead already. What did they need me for?

If the child was dying, they should have called a doctor. If the child had already been dead for some time, they should have been saying novenas. They should have been tending his grave. Getting rid of some of that couch grass that was growing everywhere. They should have been remembering him in their prayers.

I couldn’t be everywhere at once, for God’s sake. I simply couldn’t. Is he baptized? I heard myself ask. Yes, Father. Good, all’s in order then. Would you like a piece of bread, Father? I’ll try it, I said. They put a chunk of bread in front of me. Hard bread, peasants’ bread, baked in a clay oven. I lifted a slice to my lips. And then I thought I saw the wizened youth standing in the doorway.

But it was just nerves. This was at the end of the fifties and he would only have been five years old, or six maybe, a stranger still to terror, abuse and persecution. Do you like the bread, Father? said one of the farmers. I moistened it with saliva. It’s good, I said, very tasty, very flavorsome, a treat for the palate, veritable ambrosia, pride of our agriculture, hearty staple of our hardworking farm-folk, mmm, nice. And to tell the truth, the bread was not bad at all, and I needed to eat, I needed to put something into my stomach, so I thanked the farmers for their generosity, stood up, made the sign of the cross in the air, said God bless this house, and cleared out. Outside I heard the dog barking again and a rustle of branches, as if an animal hidden in the

undergrowth were watching me make my uncertain way back towards Farewell’s house, which I saw soon enough, lit up like an ocean liner in the southern night. When I arrived, the meal had not yet begun. Taking my courage in both hands, I resolved not to change out of my cassock. I killed some time in the hunting lodge leafing through various early editions. On one wall the shelves were stacked with the finest and most distinguished works of Chilean poetry and narrative, each book inscribed to Farewell by the author with an ingenious, courteous, affectionate or conspiratorial phrase. It occurred to me that my host was, without doubt, the estuary in which all of our land’s literary craft, from dinghies to freighters, from odoriferous fishing boats to extravagant

battleships, had, for brief or extensive periods, taken shelter. It was no accident that his house had appeared to me shortly before in the guise of an ocean liner! But in fact, I reflected, Farewell’s house was a port. Then I heard a faint sound, as if someone were crawling over the terrace. My curiosity piqued, I opened the French doors and went out. The air was even colder than before, and there was no one on the terrace, but in the garden I could make out an oblong-shaped shadow like a coffin, heading towards a sort of pergola, a Greek folly built to Farewell’s orders, next to a strange equestrian statue, about forty centimeters high, made of bronze, and perched on a porphyry pedestal in such a way that it seemed to be eternally emerging from the pergola. The moon stood out clearly against a cloudless sky. My cassock fluttered in the wind.

Boldly I advanced towards the place where the shadowy figure had hidden. There he was, next to Farewell’s equestrian fantasy. His back was turned. He was wearing a velvet jacket and a scarf and a narrow-brimmed hat tipped back on his head, and he was softly intoning words that can only have been meant for the moon. I froze in a posture like that of the statue, with my left foot off the ground. It was Neruda. I don’t know what happened next. There was Neruda and there a few meters behind him was I, and, between us, the night, the moon, the equestrian statue, Chilean plants, Chilean wood, the obscure dignity of our land. I bet the wizened youth has no stories like this to tell. He didn’t meet Neruda. He hasn’t met any of our Republic’s major writers in a setting as elemental as the one I have just described. What does it matter what happened before and after? There was Neruda reciting verses to the moon, addressing the minerals of the earth, and the stars, whose nature we can only know by

intuition. There I was, shivering with cold in my cassock, which suddenly felt several sizes too big, like a cathedral in which I was living naked and

open-eyed. There was Neruda murmuring words I could not quite understand, but whose essential nature spoke to me deeply from the very first moment. And there was I, tears in my eyes, a poor clergyman lost in the immensity of our land, thirstily drinking in the words of our most sublime poet. And I ask myself now, propped up on my elbow: Has the wizened youth ever had an experience like that?

I ask myself seriously: Has he ever in all his days experienced anything like that? I have read his books. In secret and wearing gloves, but I’ve read them.

And there is nothing in them to match that scene. There’s aimless wandering, street fights, horrible deaths down back alleys, the obligatory doses of sex, obscenity and indecency, dusk in Japan, not in Chile of course, hell and chaos, hell and chaos, hell and chaos. Oh my poor memory. My poor reputation. Now for the dinner. I cannot remember it. Neruda and his wife. Farewell and the young poet. Myself. Questions. Why was I wearing a cassock? A smile from me.

Fresh-faced. I didn’t have time to change. Neruda recites a poem. He and

Farewell recall a particularly knotty line from Góngora. Naturally the young poet turns out to be a Nerudian. Neruda recites another poem. The meal is exquisite. Chilean tomato salad, game birds with béarnaise sauce, baked conger eel brought in specially from the coast on Farewell’s orders. Wine from the estate. Compliments. After dinner the talk going on into the small hours, Farewell and Neruda’s wife playing records on a green gramophone that caught the poet’s fancy. Tangos. An awful voice reeling off awful stories. Suddenly, perhaps as a result of having consumed liberal quantities of liquor, I felt sick. I remember I went out on to the terrace and looked for the moon, in which our poet had confided earlier that evening. I steadied myself against an

enormous pot of geraniums and fought back the nausea. I heard paces behind me. I turned around. There was Farewell’s Homeric silhouette, facing me, hands on hips. He asked if I felt ill. I said no, it was just a little dizzy spell, the fresh country air would soon set me right. Although he was standing in the shadows, I knew that Farewell had smiled. Faintly, the sound of tango chords and the melodic complaints of a honey-smooth voice. Farewell asked what impression Neruda had made on me. What can I say, I replied, he’s the greatest. For a few moments we stood there in silence. Then Farewell took two steps forward and his face appeared before me, the face of an aging Greek god kept awake by the moon.

I blushed intensely. Farewell’s hand came to rest for a moment on my belt. He spoke to me of night in the work of the Italian poets, night in Jacopone da Todi. Night in the work of the Penitents. Have you read them? I stammered. I said that at the seminary I had read a little of Giacomino da Verona and Pietro da Bescapé, Bonvesin de la Riva as well. Then Farewell’s hand squirmed like an earthworm cut in two by a mattock and detached itself from my belt, but the smile remained upon his face. What about Sordello? he said. Which Sordello? The troubadour, said Farewell, Sordel also known as Sordello. No, I said. Look at the moon, said Farewell. I took a quick look at it. Not like that, said

Farewell. Turn around and look properly. I turned around. I could hear Farewell murmuring behind me: Sordello, which Sordello? The one who drank with Ricardo de San Bonifacio in Verona and with Ezzelino da Romano in Treviso, which Sordello?

(and at this point Farewell’s hand gripped my belt once again!), the one who rode with Raymond Berenger and Charles I of Anjou, Sordello, who was not afraid, who was not afraid, who was not afraid. And I remember thinking then that I was afraid, and yet I chose to go on looking at the moon. The cause of my

trepidation was not Farewell’s hand resting on my hip. It was not his hand, it was not the moonlit night or the moon, swifter than the wind sweeping down off the mountains, it was not the sound of the gramophone serving up one awful tango after another, it was not the voice of Neruda or his wife or his devoted

disciple, but something else, so what in the name of Our Lady of Carmen was it, I asked myself as I stood there. Sordello, which Sordello? repeated Farewell’s voice sarcastically behind me, Dante’s Sordello, Pound’s Sordello, the Sordello of the
Ensenhamens d’onor,
the Sordello of the
planh
on the death of Blacatz, and then Farewell’s hand moved down from my hip towards my buttocks and a flurry of Provençal rogues blustered on to the terrace, making my black cassock flutter, and I thought: The second woe is past, and, behold, the third woe cometh quickly. And I thought: I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea. And I thought: And there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me. And I thought: For her sins hath reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities. And only then did I hear the voice of Neruda, who was behind Farewell just as Farewell was behind me. And our poet asked Farewell who this Sordello was we were talking about, and who was this Blacatz, and Farewell turned to face Neruda, and I turned around too but all I could see was Farewell’s back burdened with the weight of two, or perhaps three, libraries, and then I heard his voice saying Sordello, which Sordello? and Neruda’s voice saying, That’s precisely what I want to find out, and Farewell’s voice saying, Don’t you know, Pablo? and Neruda’s voice saying, Why do you think I’m asking, dickhead? and Farewell laughing and looking at me, a look of brazen complicity, as if to say to me, Be a poet by all means if that’s what you want to do, but you must write criticism, and for goodness’ sake read widely and deeply, widely and deeply, and Neruda’s voice saying, Well are you going to tell me or not? and Farewell’s voice quoting a few lines from
The Divine Comedy
, and Neruda’s voice reciting other lines from
The Divine Comedy
that had nothing to do with Sordello, and what of Blacatz, an invitation to cannibalism, Blacatz’s heart of which we all should eat, and then Neruda and Farewell hugged one another and recited some lines by Rubén Darío, while the young Nerudian and I declared that Neruda was our finest poet and Farewell our finest literary critic and pair after pair of toasts were proposed. Sordello, which Sordello? Sordel, Sordello, which

Sordello? Light and refreshing, swift and inquisitive, this little refrain followed me wherever I went, throughout the weekend. The first night at Là-bas I slept like a cherub. The second night I stayed up late reading a
History of Italian Literature in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth

Centuries
. On Sunday morning a car arrived with more guests. Neruda, Farewell and even the young Nerudian knew them all, but they were strangers to me, so while the others were busy greeting them effusively, I slipped away with a book into a wood that flanked the lodge on the left-hand side. Near the far side of the wood, but within it still, was a sort of hillock from which one could survey Farewell’s vineyards and his fallow land and his fields of wheat and barley. On a path winding through the fields I could make out two farmers wearing straw hats, who disappeared into some willows. Beyond the willows stood very tall trees that seemed to be drilling into the majestic, cloudless sky. And further off still rose the great mountains. I said the Lord’s Prayer. I shut my eyes. What more could I have wanted? Well, perhaps the murmur of a stream. The pure song of water on stones. As I walked back through the wood “Sordel,