By Night in Chile (3 page)

Sordello, which Sordello?” was still ringing in my ears, but something within the wood itself darkened the mood of that sprightly refrain. I came out on the wrong side. Before me lay not the lodge but some rather godforsaken-looking orchards. I was not surprised to hear dogs barking, although I could not see them, and as I walked through the orchards, where, under the protective shade of avocado trees, there grew an assortment of fruits and vegetables worthy of Archimboldo, I saw a boy and a girl, who, naked like Adam and Eve, were tilling the same furrow. The boy looked at me: a string of snot hung from his nose down to his chest. I quickly averted my gaze but could not stem an overwhelming nausea. I felt myself falling into the void, an intestinal void, made of

stomachs and entrails. When at last I managed to control the retching, the boy and the girl had disappeared. Then I came to a sort of chicken coop. Although the sun was still high in the sky, I saw all the chickens sleeping on their dirty roosts. I heard the dogs barking again and what sounded like a body of considerable size crashing through the branches. It must have been the wind, I thought. Further on, I came to a stable and a pigsty. I went around them. On the far side stood a great araucaria tree. What was such a majestic, beautiful tree doing in that place? It has been set here by the grace of God, I said to myself.

I leaned against the araucaria and took a deep breath. And there I stayed a while, until I heard some voices far in the distance. I set off again, sure that the voices were those of Farewell, Neruda and their friends come to look for me.

I crossed a ditch where a sluggish stream of muddy water flowed. I saw thistles and all sorts of weeds, and I saw stones disposed in an apparently haphazard fashion, which was nevertheless the result of a human design. Who placed those stones in such a way? I asked myself. I imagined a child wearing a striped woollen sweater, several sizes too big, thoughtfully making his way through the immense solitude that precedes nightfall in the country. I imagined a rat. I imagined a wild boar. I imagined a vulture lying dead in a gully where no human being had ever set foot. Nothing came to sully that sure sense of absolute solitude. Beyond the canal I saw freshly washed clothes hanging from lengths of twine strung from tree to tree, billowing in the wind and giving off an odor of cheap soap. I pushed my way through the sheets and shirts, and there before me, thirty meters away, I saw two women and three men standing bolt upright in an imperfect semicircle, with their hands covering their faces. Just standing there like that. It was hard to believe, but there they were. Covering their faces!

And although they did not remain for long in that position, three of them soon started walking towards me, the vision (and everything it conjured up), in spite of its brevity, completely upset my mental and physical equilibrium, that blessed equilibrium granted to me minutes before by the contemplation of nature.

I remember I stepped back. I got tangled up in a sheet. I flailed around with my hands and would have fallen backwards had it not been for one of the farmers, who grasped my wrist. I ventured a puzzled, grateful grimace. That is what my memory has retained. My timid half-smile, my timid teeth, my voice breaking the silence of the countryside, saying thank you. The two women asked if I was all right. How do you feel, son, I mean Father? they asked. I was astonished that they had recognized me, because these were not the two peasant women I had seen on the first day, and I had seen no others since. Nor was I wearing my cassock.

But news travels quickly, and these women, who did not work at Là-bas but on a neighboring estate, knew of my presence, and it is even possible that they had come to Farewell’s property in the hope of hearing mass, something that Farewell could have organized without great difficulty, since the estate had a chapel, but of course the idea had not crossed Farewell’s mind, largely because the guest of honor happened to be Neruda, who prided himself on being an atheist (although I suspect he was not), and because the pretext for the weekend

gathering was literary rather than religious, and on that point I was in

complete agreement. Nevertheless the women had come on foot through paddocks, along rough paths, around ploughed fields, just to see me. And there I was. And they looked at me and I looked at them. And what did I see? Rings under their eyes. Parted lips. Shiny skin stretched over cheekbones. A patience that I feared was not Christian resignation. A patience native to some faraway place, or so it seemed. Not a Chilean patience, although those women were Chileans. A patience that had not evolved in our land or anywhere in America, and was not even European, Asian or African (although I know practically nothing about the cultures of the latter continents). A patience that seemed to have come from outer space. And that patience almost wore my own patience out. And their words and their murmuring spread out through the surrounding countryside, among the trees swaying in the wind, among the weeds swaying in the wind, among the fruits of the earth swaying in the wind. And with each passing moment I felt more impatient, since I was expected back at the lodge, and perhaps someone, Farewell or someone else, was wondering why I had been away so long. And the women just smiled, looked severe or feigned surprise, mystery giving way to illumination on their initially blank faces, their expressions tense with mute questions or opening in wordless exclamations, while the two men who had remained behind started to move away, not walking in a straight line, not setting off towards the mountains, but zigzagging, talking to one another, now and then pointing out imperceptible features of the landscape, as if they too were prompted by nature to observe particularities worthy of commentary. And the man who had come forward to meet me with the women, the one whose claw had fastened on to my wrist and held me up, stood still about four meters away from the women and myself, but turned his head and followed the other two men with his eyes as they walked away, as if what they were doing or seeing was suddenly a source of fascination for him, sharpening his gaze so as not to miss the slightest detail.

I remember scrutinizing his face. I remember drinking his face down to the last drop trying to elucidate the character, the psychology of such an individual.

And yet the only thing about him that has remained in my memory is his ugliness.

He was ugly and his neck was extremely short. In fact they were all ugly. The women were ugly and their words were incoherent. The silent man was ugly and his stillness was incoherent. The men who were walking away were ugly and their zigzag paths were incoherent. God have mercy on me and on them. Lost souls in the desert. I turned my back on them and walked away. I smiled at them, said something, asked them the way to the lodge at Là-bas and walked away. One of the women wanted to come with me. I refused. The woman insisted, I will escort you there, Father, she said, and the verb “to escort” sounded so incongruous in her mouth, it sent a wave of hilarity all through my body. You will escort me, will you? I asked. That I will, Father, she said. Or something like that, something a wind from the end of the fifties is still blowing around the innumerable nooks and crannies of a memory that is not mine. In any case I shuddered and shook with suppressed laughter. That won’t be necessary, I said. You have been too kind already, I said. That will be all for today, I said. And I turned my back on them and walked away at a decidedly brisk pace, swinging my arms and wearing a smile that relaxed into unbridled laughter as soon as I passed through the barrier of washing, my walk at that point becoming a trot with a vaguely

military rhythm to it. In the garden at Là-bas, beside a pergola built of fine timber, Farewell’s guests were listening to Neruda recite. I approached quietly and stood beside his young disciple, who was smoking with a rather unpleasant frown of concentration on his face, while the words of the great man burrowed down through the various layers of the earth’s crust and rose up to the

pergola’s carved crossbeams and beyond, to the Baudelairean clouds on their solitary voyages through the clear skies of Chile. At six that evening my first visit to Là-bas came to an end. A car belonging to one of Farewell’s guests dropped me at Chillán, just in time to catch the train, which took me back to Santiago. My literary baptism had reached its conclusion. During the nights that followed, so many varied and often contradictory images crowded in on me, inhabiting my thoughts and my sleeplessness! Again and again I would see

Farewell’s black, rotund silhouette in an enormous doorway. His hands were in his pockets and he seemed to be intently watching time go by. I also saw

Farewell sitting in a chair at his club, with his legs crossed, speaking of literary immortality. Ah, literary immortality. At times I could make out a group of figures joined at the waist, as if they were dancing the conga, up and down, back and forth in a salon whose walls were crammed with paintings.

Somebody I could not see was saying, Dance, Father. I can’t, I replied, it is contrary to my vows. With one hand I was holding a little notebook in which, with the other, I was drafting a book review. The book was called
As Time Goes By
. As time goes by, as time goes by, the whipcrack of the years, the precipice of illusions, the ravine that swallows up all human endeavor except the struggle to survive. The syncopated serpent of the conga line kept moving steadily towards my corner, lifting first its left legs all at once, then the right ones, and then I spotted Farewell among the dancers, Farewell with his hands on the hips of a woman who moved in the most exclusive circles of Chilean society at the time, a woman with a Basque surname, which unfortunately I have forgotten, while Farewell’s hips in turn were gripped by an old man whose body was perilously frail, more dead than alive, but who beamed a smile at all and sundry and seemed to be having as much fun as anyone in the conga line.

Sometimes, images from my childhood and adolescence would come back to me: my father’s shadow slipping away down the corridors of the house as if it were a weasel, a ferret, or to employ a more appropriate simile, an eel in an

inadequate container. All conversation, all dialogue, is forbidden, said a voice. Sometimes I wondered about the nature of that voice. Was it the voice of an angel? Was it the voice of my guardian angel? Was it the voice of a demon? It did not take me long to discover that it was my own voice, the voice of my superego guiding my dream like a pilot with nerves of steel, it was the super-I driving a refrigerated truck down the middle of a road engulfed in flames, while the id groaned and rambled on in a vaguely Mycenaean jargon. My ego, of course, was sleeping. Sleeping and toiling. It was around this time that I started working at the Catholic University. It was around this time that I published my first poems, my first reviews and my notes on literary life in Santiago. I prop myself up on one elbow, stretch my neck and I remember. Enrique Lihn, the most brilliant poet of his generation, Giacone, Uribe Arce, Jorge Teillier, Efraín Barquero, Delia Domínguez, Carlos de Rokha, all the gilded youth. All of them or almost all under the influence of Neruda, except for a few who succumbed to the influence or rather the teaching of Nicanor Parra. And I remember Rosamel del Valle. I knew him, of course. I reviewed them all: Rosamel, Díaz Casanueva, Braulio Arenas and his associates at La Mandrágora, Teillier and the young poets from the rainy south, the novelists of the fifties, Donoso, Edwards, Lafourcade.

All of them good people, all of them splendid writers. Gonzalo Rojas, Anguita. I reviewed Manuel Rojas and wrote about Juan Emar, María Luisa Bombal and Marta Brunet. I published studies and explications of the work of Blest Gana, Augusto D’Halmar and Salvador Reyes. And I decided, or perhaps I had already decided, probably I had, it is all so vague and mixed up now, in any case I felt I needed a pseudonym for the critical articles, so that I could retain my real name for my poetical efforts. So I adopted the name of H. Ibacache. And little by little the reputation of H. Ibacache outstripped that of Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix, to my surprise, and to my satisfaction, since Urrutia Lacroix was preparing a body of poetic work for posterity, an oeuvre of canonical ambition, which would take shape gradually as the years went by, in a meter that nobody was using in Chile any more, what am I saying, a meter that nobody had ever used in Chile, while Ibacache read other people’s books and explained them to the public, just as Farewell had done before him, endeavoring to elucidate our literature, a

reasonable endeavor, a civilized endeavor, an endeavor pursued in a measured, conciliatory tone, like a humble lighthouse on the fatal shore. And Ibacache’s purity — clothed as it was in the simple garments of critical prose, yet none the less admirable, since it was perfectly clear, whether reading between the lines or viewing the full sweep of the enterprise, that Ibacache was engaged in an ongoing exercise in dispassionate analysis and rationality, that is to say in civic virtue — Ibacache’s purity would be able to illuminate far more powerfully than any other strategy the body of work taking shape verse by verse in the diamond-pure mind of his double: Urrutia Lacroix. And speaking of purity or while I’m on the subject of purity, one evening, when I was at the house of Don Salvador Reyes, with five or six other guests, Farewell among them, Don Salvador said that one of the purest men he had met in Europe was the German writer Ernst Jünger. And Farewell, who no doubt knew the story already, but wanted me to hear it from Don Salvador himself, asked him how and in what circumstances he had come to meet Jünger, and Don Salvador settled into an armchair with gilded trim and said that it had happened many years before, during the Second World War, in Paris, when he was on a diplomatic posting at the Chilean embassy. And then he told us about a party, I don’t remember if it was at the Chilean embassy, or the German or Italian one, and he spoke of a very beautiful woman who asked if he would like to be introduced to the well-known German writer. And Don Salvador, who at that time must have been less than fifty years old according to my estimate, that is to say considerably younger and more vigorous than I am now, said, Yes, I would be delighted, please do, Giovanna, and the Italian woman, the Italian duchess or countess who was so fond of our eminent writer and diplomat, led him through various salons, each opening on to the next like mystical roses, and in the last salon there was a group of officers of the Wehrmacht and several civilians and the center of attention for all present was Captain Jünger, the First World War hero, author of
Storm of Steel, African Games, On the Marble Cliffs
and
Heliopolis
, and after listening to several of the great German writer’s aphorisms, the Italian princess proceeded to introduce him to the Chilean diplomat, whereupon they exchanged views, in French naturally, and then Jünger, moved by a generous impulse, asked our writer if any of his works were available in French translation, to which the Chilean replied in a trice and the affirmative, yes indeed, a book of his had been translated into French, if Jünger would like to read it he would be delighted to present him with a copy, to which Jünger replied with a satisfied smile and they exchanged their cards and made a date to have dinner or lunch or breakfast together since Jünger’s diary was crammed with inescapable engagements, not to mention the things that came up each day, inevitably upsetting the schedule of prior