Distant Star

ROBERTO BOLAÑO

Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews

For Victoria Ávalos and Lautaro Bolaño

“What star falls unseen?”

WILLIAM FAULKNER

In the final chapter of my novel
Nazi
Literature in the Americas
I recounted, in less than twenty pages and perhaps too
schematically, the story of Lieutenant Ramírez Hoffman of the Chilean Air
Force, which I heard from a fellow Chilean, Arturo B., a veteran of Latin
America’s doomed revolutions, who tried to get himself killed in Africa. He
was not satisfied with my version. It was meant to counterbalance the preceding
excursions into the literary grotesque, or perhaps to come as an anticlimax, and
Arturo would have preferred a longer story that, rather than mirror or explode
others, would be, in itself, a mirror and an explosion. So we took that final
chapter and shut ourselves up for a month and a half in my house in Blanes, where,
guided by his dreams and nightmares, we composed the present novel. My role was
limited to preparing refreshments, consulting a few books, and discussing the reuse
of numerous paragraphs with Arturo and the increasingly animated ghost of Pierre
Ménard
.

I saw Carlos Wieder for the first time in 1971, or perhaps in 1972, when
Salvador Allende was President of Chile.

At that stage Wieder was calling himself Alberto Ruiz-Tagle and
occasionally attended Juan Stein’s poetry workshop in Concepción, the
so-called capital of the South. I can’t say I knew him well. I saw him once or
twice a week at the workshop. He wasn’t particularly talkative. I was. Most of us
there talked a lot, not just about poetry, but politics, travel (little did we know what
our travels would be like), painting, architecture, photography, revolution and the
armed struggle that would usher in a new life and a new era, so we thought, but which,
for most of us, was like a dream, or rather the key that would open the door into a
world of dreams, the only dreams worth living for. And even though we were vaguely aware
that dreams often turn into nightmares, we didn’t let that bother us. Our ages
ranged from seventeen to twenty-three (I was eighteen) and most of us were students in
the Faculty of Literature, except the Garmendia sisters, who were studying sociology and
psychology, and Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, who, as he said at some point,
was an autodidact. What this meant in Chile in the years before 1973 is in itself
an interesting subject. But to tell the truth, he didn’t strike me as an
autodidact. What I mean is: he didn’t
look
like one. In Chile, at the
beginning of the seventies, autodidacts didn’t dress like Ruiz-Tagle. They were
poor. True, he talked like an autodidact. I guess he talked the way we all do now, those
of us who are still alive (he talked as if he were living inside a cloud), but I
couldn’t believe, from the way he dressed, that he had never set foot in a
university. I don’t mean he was a dandy – although, in his own way, he was
– or that he dressed in a particular style. His tastes were eclectic: sometimes he
would turn up in a suit and tie; other days he’d be wearing sports gear, and he
wasn’t averse to jeans and T-shirts. But whatever he was wearing, it was always an
expensive brand. In other words, Ruiz-Tagle was well dressed, and in those days, in
Chile, autodidacts were too busy steering a course between lunacy and destitution to
dress like that, or so I thought. He once said that his father or his grandfather used
to have an estate near Puerto Montt. At the age of fifteen he had decided, so he told
us, or perhaps we heard it from Veronica Garmendia, to quit school and devote himself to
working on the property and reading the books in his father’s library. At Juan
Stein’s poetry workshop we all assumed he was a skilled horseman. I don’t
know why, because we never saw him ride. In fact, all our suppositions concerning
Ruiz-Tagle were predetermined by our jealousy or perhaps our envy. He was tall and slim,
but well built and handsome. According to Bibiano O’Ryan, his face was too
inexpressive to be handsome, but of course he said
this with the
benefit of hindsight, so it hardly counts. Why were we jealous of Ruiz-Tagle? The plural
is misleading.
I
was jealous of him. Bibiano too perhaps. Why? Because of the
Garmendia sisters, naturally: identical twins and the undisputed stars of the poetry
workshop. In fact we sometimes felt, Bibiano and I, that Stein was running the workshop
for their benefit alone. I have to admit they outshone us all. Veronica and Angelica
Garmendia: so alike some days it was impossible to tell them apart, yet other days (and
especially other
nights
) so different that they seemed to be strangers to each
other, if not enemies. Stein adored them. Along with Ruiz-Tagle, he was the only one who
always knew which twin was which. It’s not easy for me to talk about them.
Sometimes they appear in my nightmares: the same age as I was, or perhaps a year older,
tall, slim, with dark skin and black hair, very long black hair – it was the
fashion back then, I think.

The Garmendia sisters made friends with Ruiz-Tagle almost straight away.
He enrolled in Stein’s workshop in ’71 or ’72. No one had seen him
before, at the university or anywhere else. Stein didn’t inquire where he was
from. He asked him to read out three poems and said they weren’t bad. (The only
poems he ever praised without reserve were those of the Garmendia sisters.) And that was
how Ruiz-Tagle joined our group. At first the rest of us didn’t pay him much
attention. But when we saw that the Garmendia sisters were making friends with him, we
did too. Up until then he had been affable but distant. Only with the Garmendia girls
(and in this he resembled Stein) was he positively friendly, unfailingly kind and
attentive. With the
rest of us he was, as I said, affable but
distant, by which I mean that he would greet us with a smile; when we read out our
poems, he was discreet and measured in his critical judgments; he never defended his
work against our generally devastating attacks, and when we talked, he listened in a
manner that I certainly wouldn’t describe as attentive now, although that is how
it seemed to us then.

The differences between Ruiz-Tagle and the rest of us were obvious. We
spoke a sort of slang or jargon derived in equal parts from Marx and Mandrake the
Magician (we were mostly members or sympathisers of the MIR or Trotskyite parties,
although a few of us belonged to the Young Socialists or the Communist Party or one of
the leftist Catholic parties), while Ruiz-Tagle spoke Spanish, the Spanish of certain
parts of Chile (mental rather than physical regions) where time seems to have come to a
standstill. We lived with our parents (those of us who were from Concepción) or in
spartan student boarding-houses; Ruiz-Tagle lived on his own, in a flat near the center
of town, with four rooms and the curtains permanently drawn. I never visited this flat,
but many years later Bibiano O’Ryan told me about it, no doubt under the influence
of the sinister legend that had grown up around Wieder, so I don’t know how much
to believe and how much to put down to my fellow student’s imagination. We hardly
ever had two dimes to rub together (it seems so odd to be writing the word
dime
: I can see it shining like an eye in the night); Ruiz-Tagle was never
short of money.

What did Bibiano say about Ruiz-Tagle’s flat? He talked about how
bare it was, mostly; he had the feeling it had been
prepared
. He only went there once on his own. He was passing by and,
typically, decided to drop in and invite Ruiz-Tagle to go and see a film. He hardly knew
the guy, but that didn’t stop him. There was a Bergman film showing, I can’t
remember which one. Bibiano had already been to the flat a couple of times with one or
other of the Garmendia sisters, and on both occasions the visit had been expected, so to
speak. Both times, the flat seemed to have been
prepared
, its contents arranged
for the eye of the imminent visitor; it was too empty, and there were spaces from which
things had obviously been removed. In the letter explaining all this to me (which was
written many years later), Bibiano said he felt like Mia Farrow in
Rosemary’s
Baby
, when she goes into the neighbour’s house for the first time with
John Cassavetes. What was missing from Ruiz-Tagle’s flat was something unnameable
(or something that Bibiano, years later, and knowing the full story, or a good part of
it at any rate, considered unnameable, but palpably present), as if the host had
amputated parts of the interior. Or as if the interior were a kind of Meccano that could
be reconstructed to fit the expectations and particularities of each visitor. The
impression was even stronger when he visited the flat on his own. This time, of course,
Ruiz-Tagle, had not been expecting him. He took a long time to open the door. And then
he seemed not to recognize his visitor, although Bibiano assured me that he came to the
door with a smile and went on smiling throughout what followed. There was not much
light, as Bibiano himself admitted in his letter, so I don’t know quite how
accurate my friend’s account is. In any case, Ruiz-Tagle opened the door, and
after
a rather incongruous exchange (at first he didn’t
understand that Bibiano was proposing they go and see a film), he asked him to wait a
moment, shut the door, opened it again after a few seconds, and invited him in. The flat
was dimly lit. The air was thick with a peculiar odour, as if Ruiz-Tagle had cooked
something very pungent the night before, something oily and spicy. For a moment, Bibiano
thought he heard a noise in one of the rooms and assumed there was a woman in the flat.
He was about to excuse himself and leave when Ruiz-Tagle asked which film he was
thinking of going to see. Bibiano said a Bergman film, at the Teatro Lautaro. Ruiz-Tagle
kept wearing that smile of his, which, according to Bibiano was enigmatic, but which
always struck me as self-satisfied if not downright arrogant. He excused himself, saying
he already had a date with Veronica Garmendia; and anyway, he explained, he didn’t
like Bergman’s films. By that stage, Bibiano was sure there was someone else in
the flat, hiding behind a door and listening to the conversation. He thought it must
have been Veronica; otherwise why would Ruiz-Tagle, who was normally so discreet, have
mentioned her name? But try as he might, he couldn’t imagine our star poet in that
situation. Neither Veronica nor Angelica Garmendia would stoop to eavesdropping. So who
was it? Bibiano never found out. Right then, probably the only thing he knew was that he
wanted to get out of there, away from Ruiz-Tagle, and never return to that naked,
bleeding flat. Those are his words. Although, to judge from his description, the flat
could not have looked more antiseptic. Clean walls, books lined up on the metal shelves,
armchairs covered with Mapuche ponchos,
Ruiz-Tagle’s Leica
sitting on a wooden bench (he brought it to the poetry workshop one afternoon to take
photos of us all). The kitchen door was ajar and Bibiano could see in: it looked normal,
except that there were no piles of dirty plates, none of the mess you’d expect in
the flat of a student who lives on his own (but then Ruiz-Tagle wasn’t a student).
In short, nothing out of the ordinary, except for the noise, which could easily have
come from the flat next door. While Ruiz-Tagle was talking, Bibiano had the distinct
impression that his host didn’t want him to leave and was prolonging the
conversation precisely to keep him there. Although there was no objective basis for this
impression, it contributed to my friend’s nervous agitation, which soon reached a
degree he described as intolerable. The strange thing is that Ruiz-Tagle seemed to be
enjoying himself: he could see Bibiano growing paler and sweating more profusely, yet he
went on talking (about Bergman, presumably), smiling all the while. Rather than breaking
the close silence of the flat, his words accentuated it.