By Night in Chile (7 page)

obstinately refusing to emerge from the labyrinth of dreams, that parade ground where the wizened youth is hiding, along with the dead poets who were living then, and who now, against the certainty of imminent oblivion, are erecting a miserable crypt in my cranial vault, building it with their names, their

silhouettes cut from black cardboard and the debris of their works, and although the wizened youth is not among them, since in those days he was just a kid from the south, the rainy borderlands, the banks of our nation’s mightiest river, the fearsome Bío-Bío, all the same I sometimes confuse him with the swarm of Chilean poets whose works implacable time was demolishing even then, as I walked away from Farewell’s house through the Santiago night, and continues to demolish now, as I prop myself up on one elbow, and will go on demolishing when I am gone, that is, when I shall exist no longer or only as a reputation, and my reputation resembling a sunset, as the reputations of others resemble a whale, a bare hill, a boat, a trail of smoke or a labyrinthine city, my reputation like a sunset will contemplate through half-closed eyelids time’s little twitch and the devastation it wreaks, time that sweeps over the parade ground like a

conjectural breeze, drowning writers in its whirlpools like figures in a

painting by Delville, the writers whose books I reviewed, the writers whose work I criticized, the moribund of Chile and America whose voices called out my name, Father Ibacache, Father Ibacache, think of us as you walk away from Farewell’s house with a dancer’s sprightly gait, think of us as your steps lead you into the inexorable Santiago night, Father Ibacache, Father Ibacache, think of our ambitions and our hopes, think of our mute, inglorious lot as men and citizens, compatriots and writers, as you penetrate the phantasmagoric folds of time, time that we perceive in three dimensions only, although in fact it has four or maybe five, like the castellated shadow of Sordello, which Sordello? a shadow not even the sun can obliterate. Nonsense. I know. Twaddle. Piffle. Balderdash. Rot.

Figments of the imagination that throng unbidden as one goes into the night of one’s destiny. My destiny. My Sordello. The start of a brilliant career. But it wasn’t always easy. Even prayer is boring in the long run. I wrote articles. I wrote poems. I discovered poets. I praised them. They would have sunk without a trace if not for me. I was probably the most liberal member of Opus Dei in the whole Republic. The wizened youth is watching from a yellow street corner and yelling at me. I can hear some of his words. He is saying I belong to Opus Dei.

I have never hidden that, I say. But of course he’s not even listening to me. I can see his jaws and his lips moving and I know he’s shouting, but I cannot hear his words. He can see me whispering, propped up on one elbow, while my bed negotiates the meanders of my fever, but he cannot hear my words either. I would like to tell him this is getting us nowhere. I would like to tell him that even the poets of the Chilean Communist Party were dying for a kind word from me, a word of praise for their poetry. And I did praise their poetry. Let’s be

civilized, I whisper. But he cannot hear me. From time to time I catch a few of his words. Insults, of course. Queer, is he saying? Opus Dei? Opus Dei queer, did he say? Then my bed swings around and I can hear him no longer. How pleasant to hear nothing. How pleasant not to have to prop myself up on an elbow, on these poor old weary bones, to stretch out in the bed and rest and look at the gray sky and let the bed drift in the care of the saints, half closing my eyes, to remember nothing and only to hear my blood pulsing. But then my lips begin to work again and I go on speaking. I never pretended I wasn’t a member of Opus Dei, young man, I say to the wizened youth, although I can no longer see him, although I no longer know if he is behind me or off to the side or lost in the mangrove swamps that line the river. I never made a secret of it. Everyone knew.

Everyone in Chile knew. You must be the only person who didn’t, or you’re pretending to be more of a dimwit than you are. Silence. The wizened youth does not reply. In the distance I can hear what sounds like a gang of primates chattering away, all at once, in a state of high excitement, and then I take one hand out from under the blankets and put it in the water and laboriously steer the bed around, using my hand as an oar, moving my four fingers together like a punkah, and when the bed has turned around, all I can see is the jungle and the river and its tributaries and the sky, no longer gray but luminous blue, and two very small, very distant clouds scudding like children swept along by the wind.

The chattering of the monkeys has died away. What a relief. What silence. What peace. A peace that summons the memory of other blue skies, other diminutive clouds scudding eastwards before the wind, and how they filled my spirit with boredom. Yellow streets and blue skies. As one approached the center of the city, the streets gradually lost that awful yellow color and turned into neat, gray, steely streets, although I knew that the slightest scratch would reveal yellow under the gray. And that filled my soul not only with lassitude but also with boredom, or maybe the lassitude began to turn into boredom, heaven knows, in any case there came a time of yellow streets and luminous blue skies and deep boredom, during which my poetic activity ceased, or rather my poetic activity underwent a dangerous mutation, since I did not actually stop putting pen to paper, but the poems were full of insults and blasphemy and worse, and I had the good sense to destroy them as soon as the sun came up the next day, without showing them to anyone, although at the time many would have considered it an honor to see them, poems whose deep meaning, or at least the meaning I thought I glimpsed in their depths, left me in a state of perplexity and anguish that lasted all day long. And this state of perplexity and anguish was accompanied by a state of boredom and exhaustion. Monumental boredom and exhaustion. The perplexity and the anguish were small by comparison, and lived encrusted in some cranny of the general state of boredom and exhaustion. Like a wound within a wound. And then I stopped giving classes. I stopped saying mass. I stopped reading the newspaper each morning and discussing the news with my brothers in Christ. My book reviews became muddled (although I did not stop writing them).

Several poets came to see me and asked what was wrong. Several priests came to see me and asked what was troubling my spirit. I went to confession and prayed.

But the rings under my eyes gave me away. And indeed at the time I was getting very little sleep, sometimes three hours, sometimes two. In the mornings I would walk from the rectory to the vacant lots, from the vacant lots to the

shantytowns, from the shantytowns back to the center of Santiago. One afternoon two thugs attacked me. I swear I have no money, lads, I said to them. Don’t you now, Father Ass`hole, replied the muggers. I ended up handing over my wallet and praying for them, but not much. My boredom had taken on a fierce intensity. And my exhaustion had grown in proportion. From that day on, however, I changed the route of my daily walk. I chose less dangerous parts of town, I chose parts of town from which I could contemplate the magnificence of the Cordillera, this was when it was still possible to see the Cordillera at any time of year, before it was hidden by a blanket of smog. I wandered and wandered and sometimes I caught a bus and went on wandering with my head against the window and sometimes I took a taxi and went on wandering through the abominable yellow and the abominable luminous blue of my boredom, from the city center to the rectory, from the rectory to Las Condes, from Las Condes to Providencia, from Providencia to Plaza Italia and the Parque Forestal and from there back to the center and back to the rectory, my cassock flapping in the wind, my cassock like a shadow, my black flag, my prim and proper music, clean, dark cloth, a well in which the sins of Chile sank without a trace. But all that flitting around was to no avail. The boredom did not abate, indeed sometimes in the middle of the day it became unbearable and filled my head with ludicrous ideas. Sometimes, trembling with cold, I would go to a soda fountain and order a Bilz. I would sit on a bar stool and gaze all misty-eyed at the droplets running down the surface of the bottle, while somewhere inside me, a bitter voice was preparing me for the unlikely spectacle of a droplet climbing
up
the glass, against the laws of nature, all the way up to the mouth of the bottle. Then I shut my eyes and prayed or tried to pray while my body was seized with shuddering, and children and adolescents ran back and forth across the Plaza de Armas, spurred on by the summer sun, and the sounds of stifled laughter coming from all directions composed an all too pertinent commentary on my defeat. Then I took a few sips of iced Bilz and resumed my wandering. It was around that time that I met Mr. Raef and, a little later, Mr. Etah. Both were employed by a certain foreign

gentleman, whom I never had the pleasure of meeting, to run an import-export business. I think they had a clam-tinning plant and shipped the tinned clams to Germany and France. I first encountered Mr. Raef (or Mr. Raef first encountered me) in a yellow street. I was walking along half frozen to death when I heard someone calling my name. I turned around and saw him: a middle-aged man, of average height, neither skinny nor slim, with a nondescript face, just slightly more indigenous than European in its features, wearing a light-colored suit and a most elegant hat, waving to me in the middle of the yellow street, not too far away, while behind him the earth was reflected in sheet upon sheet of glass or plastic. I had never seen him before, but it was as if he had known me all his life. He said he had heard about me from Fr. García Errázuriz and Fr. Muñoz Laguía, whom I held in high esteem and whose favor I enjoyed, and those wise men, he said, had recommended me warmly and without reservations for a delicate mission in Europe, no doubt thinking that an extended trip to the old continent would be just the thing to restore some of the cheerfulness and energy I had lost and was visibly still losing, as from the sort of wound that, refusing to heal, eventually causes the spiritual if not the physical death of the afflicted person. At first I was puzzled and reluctant, since Mr. Raef’s line of business could not have been further removed from my own, but in the end I got into his car and let him drive me to a restaurant in the Calle Banderas, a place that had seen better days, called My Office, where Mr. Raef, without giving anything away concerning his real reasons for tracking me down, spoke instead of people I knew, Farewell among others, and various poets of the younger generation whom I was seeing frequently at the time, just to let me know that he was keeping tabs on the circles I moved in, not only my ecclesiastical colleagues but also the writers with whom I felt an affinity and even my professional contacts, since he also mentioned the chief editor of the newspaper in which I published my column.

Nevertheless it was obvious that he didn’t know any of those people well. Then Mr. Raef exchanged some words with the owner of My Office and shortly afterwards we made a hurried exit for reasons that remain unclear to me, and arm in arm we walked through the neighboring streets until we came to another restaurant, much smaller and less gloomy, where Mr. Raef was welcomed almost as if he were the owner, and there we ate our fill, although it was very hot outside, hardly the ideal weather for the consumption of such a copious and varied repast. For coffee he insisted we go to the Haiti, a repulsive place that collects the scum of the city offices, the middle management, vice-this, assistant-that and deputy-the-other-thing, who consider it good form to drink standing up at the bar or in bunches scattered about the establishment’s barnlike space, fronted, as I remember it, by two large glass windows, from the ceiling almost down to the floor, so that the clients standing inside, with a coffee cup in one hand and a battered ring binder or briefcase in the other, provide a spectacle for the passersby, who simply cannot resist looking in, albeit from the corner of an eye, at the mass of bodies crowded there in legendary discomfort. And I was dragged along to this sordid place, a man like me, with a name, indeed with two names, and a reputation to think of, and a certain number of enemies and a great many friends, and although I tried to protest, to refuse, Mr. Raef could be persuasive when he wished. And while I stood in a corner with my back to the wall, unable to take my eyes off the front windows, waiting for Mr. Raef to come back from the bar with two steaming coffees, the best in Santiago according to the plebs, I began to wonder just what kind of business the said gentleman was going to propose. He made his way back to me and we began to drink our coffee, standing up. I remember he talked. He talked and smiled, but I couldn’t hear a thing he was saying because the voices of the assistant-deputy-whatnots were making such a racket, they were so thick in the air of the Haiti that not a cranny was left for even one more voice. I could have leaned forward, I could have put my ear to the lips of my interlocutor, as the rest of the clients were doing, but I preferred not to do so. I pretended to understand and let my gaze wander about that chairless space. A few men returned my gaze. In some of those countenances I felt I could read signs of an immense pain. Pigs suffer too, I said to myself. And immediately I regretted that thought. Pigs suffer, it is true, and their pain purifies and ennobles them. A lantern came alight inside my head or perhaps inside my piety: pigs too are a hymn to the glory of the Lord, or if not a hymn, for that is perhaps an exaggeration, a carol, a ballad, a round in celebration of all living things. I tried to eavesdrop on other

conversations. It was impossible. I could only hear the odd word, that Chilean intonation, words that meant nothing yet conveyed the infinite vulgarity and hopelessness of my compatriots. Then Mr. Raef took me by the arm and before I knew what was happening I was out in the street again, walking beside him. I’m going to introduce you to my associate, Mr. Etah, he said. There was a buzzing in my ears. I felt as if I were hearing it for the first time. We were walking along a yellow street. There were not many people about, although, from time to time, a man in dark glasses or a woman wearing a headscarf would disappear into a doorway. The import-export office was on the fourth floor. The elevator was out of order. A little exercise won’t do us any harm, it’s good for the