Distant Star (5 page)

That night Bibiano and I went to see Fat Marta. On the surface she seemed the same as ever; or better, more lively. In fact she was hyperactive and couldn’t sit still, which made her company irritating after a while. She hadn’t been expelled from the university. Life goes on, she said. The main thing was to keep active (any kind of activity would do, like moving a flower pot five times in half an hour, to stop herself going mad) and to look on the bright side, tackling problems one by one, instead of all at the same time, the way she used to do before. It was a matter of growing up. But we soon discovered what the matter really was: Fat Marta was afraid. She had never been so afraid in her life. I saw Alberto, she said to me. Bibiano nodded. He had already heard the story and I had the impression that certain parts of it struck him as improbable. He rang me, said Marta. He wanted me to go and see him at his flat. I told him he was never home. He asked me how I knew, and laughed. Even then I noticed something odd in his voice, but Alberto has always been kind of secretive so I didn’t think anything of it. I went to see him. We made a time and I was there on the dot. The house was empty. Wasn’t Ruiz-Tagle there? Yes, said Marta, but the flat was empty; there wasn’t a single piece of furniture left. Are you moving, Alberto? I asked. Yes, Martita, he said, how did you know? I was very nervous, but I controlled myself and said, Everyone’s moving these days. He asked me who I meant by “everyone.” I told him Diego Soto had left
Concepción. And Carmen Villagrán. And I mentioned you (she meant me), because at the time I didn’t know where you’d got to, and the Garmendia sisters. You didn’t mention me, asked Bibiano, you didn’t say anything about me? No, I didn’t say anything about you. And what did Alberto say? Fat Marta looked at me and I realized for the first time that she wasn’t just intelligent, but strong as well, and that she was suffering terribly (but not because of the political situation; Marta was suffering because she weighed more than eighty kilos, and she was watching the show, with all it’s sex and violence, and its love, from a seat in the stalls, cut off from the stage, behind bullet-proof glass). He said, The rats always leave a sinking ship. I couldn’t believe my ears. What did you say? I asked. Then Alberto turned and looked at me with a big smile on his face. The game’s up, Martita, he said. He was scaring me, so I told him to stop talking in riddles and lighten up. Stop being an asshole, will you?
Say
something for fuck’s sake! I’ve never been so crude in my life, said Marta. He looked like a snake. No, like a pharaoh. He was just sitting there smiling and watching me, but it was as if he was moving round the empty flat. How could he be moving and sitting still at the same time? The Garmendia sisters are dead, he said. Carmen Villagrán too. I don’t believe you, I said. Why would they be dead? You’re trying to scare me, aren’t you, shithead? All the girls who wrote poetry are dead, he said. That’s the truth, Martita, you better believe me. We were sitting on the ground. I in one corner and he in the middle of the living room. I was sure he was going to hit me. Any moment, I thought, he’s going to jump on me
and start beating me up. I came that close to wetting my pants. And all this time he’s staring at me, staring. I wanted to ask him, What’s going to happen to me? But I couldn’t. Stop making things up, I whispered. Alberto wasn’t listening. It was as if he was waiting for somebody else. For a long time neither of us said anything. At some point, my eyes closed. When I opened them again, he was standing up, leaning against the kitchen door, watching me. You were asleep, Marta, he said to me. Did I snore? I asked him. Yes, he said, you snored. That was when I realized he had a cold. He was holding an enormous yellow handkerchief, which he used to blow his nose twice. You’ve got the flu, I said, and smiled at him. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Marta? he said. I’ve just got a bit of a cold. It was a good opportunity to leave, so I stood up and said I’d stop bothering him. You never bother me, he said. You’re one of the few women who understand me, Marta, and I appreciate that. But you’ve caught me on a bad day; I haven’t got any wine or whisky or anything. As you can see, I’m in the middle of moving. Of course, I said. I waved good-bye, which is something I don’t normally do indoors, and left.

And what happened to the Garmendia sisters? I asked. I don’t know, said Fat Marta, emerging from her reverie, how should I know? Why didn’t he do anything to you? asked Bibiano. Because we really were friends, I guess, she said.

We went on talking for a long time.
Wieder
, Bibiano informed us, meant “once more,” “again,” “a second time,” and in some contexts “over and over”; or “the next time,” in sentences referring to future events. And according to his friend
Anselmo Sanjuán, who had studied German philology at the University of Concepción, it was only in the seventeenth century that the adverb
wieder
and the accusative preposition
wider
came to be spelt differently in order to differentiate their meanings.
Wider (widar
or
widari
in Old High German) means “against,” “contrary to,” and sometimes “in opposition to.” And he showered us with examples:
Widerchrist
, “the Antichrist”;
Widerhaken
, “barb, hook”;
widerraten
, “to dissuade”;
Widerlegung
, “refutation, rebuttal”;
Widerlager
, “buttress”;
Widerklage
, “counter-accusation, counter-plea”;
Widernatürlichkeit
, “monstrosity, aberration.” For Bibiano each one of these terms was charged with significance. In full flight now, he went on to explain that
Weide
meant “weeping willow,” and that
weiden
meant “to graze, to put out to pasture” or “to look after grazing animals,” which reminded him of Silva Acevedo’s poem “Wolves and Sheep,” to which certain readers had attributed a prophetic character. There was more:
weiden
also meant to take morbid pleasure in the contemplation of an object that excites sexual desire and/or sadistic tendencies. At which point Bibiano stared at us, eyes wide open, and we looked back at him, the three of us sitting there quietly, hands clasped, as if in prayer or meditation. And then he returned to Wieder, exhausted and terrified, as if time were not a river but an earthquake happening nearby, and he pointed out that the pilot’s grandfather may have been called Weider; perhaps an official at the immigration office, back at the beginning of the century, had made a spelling error and converted his name to Wieder. Unless of course his real name had been
Bieder
, “upright, honest,” which was conceivable given
the phonetic proximity of the labiodental W and the bilabial B. And finally he remembered that the noun
Widder
meant “ram” or “Aries,” from which any number of conclusions could be drawn.

Two days later Fat Marta rang Bibiano and told him that Alberto Ruiz-Tagle was indeed Carlos Wieder. She had recognized him from the photo published in
El Mercurio
. Which was hard to believe, as Bibiano pointed out to me some weeks or months later, since the image was so blurry it could have been almost anyone. What did she have to go on? Her sixth sense, if you ask me, said Bibiano. She says she can recognize Ruiz-Tagle by his posture. In any case, by that time, Ruiz-Tagle had disappeared for good, and Wieder was all we had to give our wretched, empty days some meaning.

Around that time, Bibiano started work as a salesman in a shoe shop. It was a nondescript sort of place, not far from the center of the city, surrounded by narrow, dimly-lit clothing stores, second-hand bookshops slowly going broke and sad restaurants whose waiters doubled as touts, working the street, making amazing but ambiguously worded offers. Of course we never set foot in a writing workshop again. Occasionally Bibiano would inform me of his projects: he wanted to write stories in English about life in the Irish countryside; he wanted to learn French, at least enough to read Stendhal in the original; he dreamed of barricading himself inside Stendhal and letting the years go by (although he contradicted himself immediately by adding that such a stratagem might work with Chateaubriand, the Octavio Paz of the nineteenth century, but not with
Stendhal, no, definitely not); most of all, he wanted to write a book, an anthology of Nazi literature of the Americas. A comprehensive overview, as he used to say when I met him outside the shoe shop at closing time, covering every type of Nazi literature spawned by the Americas, from Canada (the French Canadian writers would be a rich source) to Chile, where he would certainly find variety enough to satisfy all tastes. Meanwhile he had not forgotten Carlos Wieder and was gathering everything he could find about the aviator-poet and his work with the obsessive dedication of a stamp-collector.

One fine day, in 1974 I’m fairly sure it was, the papers informed us that, under the sponsorship of various companies, Carlos Wieder was flying to the South Pole. It was a long and difficult voyage, but at each of his numerous refuelling stops he wrote poems in the sky. These poems, declared his admirers, heralded a new age of iron for the Chilean race. Bibiano followed the journey step by step. Personally, to tell the truth, I no longer cared much what Lieutenant Wieder did or didn’t do. At one stage Bibiano showed me a photo, much clearer than the one in which Fat Marta had thought she recognized Ruiz-Tagle. True, there was a resemblance between Ruiz-Tagle and Carlos Wieder, but by that time all I could think about was getting out of the country. In any case, neither the photo nor Wieder’s declarations showed even a trace of the old Ruiz-Tagle, so tactful, so considerate and so charmingly shy (after all, he was an autodidact). Wieder was confidence and audacity personified. He spoke of poetry (not Chilean or Latin American poetry, but poetry full stop) with an authority that disarmed all his interviewers
(although I should add that, at the time, he was interviewed exclusively by journalists who supported the new regime and would not have dreamt of arguing with an officer of the nation’s air force), and although his transcribed replies were full of neologisms and awkward turns of phrase, which are hard to avoid in our intractable language, you could sense a force in the way he talked, the purity and sheen of the absolute, the reflection of a monolithic will.

Before he set off for the Arturo Prat Antarctic base on the last leg of his polar voyage, a gala dinner was held in his honour at a restaurant in Punta Arenas. According to the reports, Wieder drank to excess and slapped a naval officer for having failed to treat a lady with due respect. Concerning this lady the reports vary, but they all coincide on one point: she had not been invited by the organizers and none of the other guests knew her; the only plausible explanations for her presence were that she was a gatecrasher or that she had come with Wieder. He referred to her as “my lady” or “my young lady.” She was about twenty-five-years old, tall, with dark hair and a shapely figure. At one point in the evening, perhaps during dessert, she shouted at Wieder, You’re going to kill yourself tomorrow, Carlos! An appalling lapse of taste, as everyone agreed. That was when the incident with the sailor occurred. Afterwards there were speeches, and the next day, after three or four hours’ sleep, Wieder flew to the South Pole. It was, to say the least, an eventful flight, and on more than one occasion the unidentified woman’s prediction almost came true (none of the guests ever saw her again, incidentally). When he returned to Punta Arenas,
Wieder declared that the most dangerous thing had been the silence. To the genuine or simulated astonishment of the journalists, he explained that by “silence” he meant the waves of Cape Horn trying to lick the belly of his plane, waves like vast Melvillean whales or severed hands groping at the fuselage throughout the journey, but silently, dumbly, as if in those latitudes sound could only be made by humans. Silence is like leprosy, declared Wieder; silence is like communism; silence is like a blank screen that must be filled. If you fill it, nothing bad can happen to you. If you are pure, nothing bad can happen to you. If you are not afraid, nothing bad can happen to you. According to Bibiano, he was describing an angel. A proudly human angel? I hazarded, quoting Blas de Otero. No, dick-head, replied Bibiano, the angel of our misfortune.

In the crystal clear sky over the Arturo Prat base, Wieder wrote ANTARCTICA IS CHILE, and his exploit was recorded on film and in photographs. He wrote other verses too, about the color white and the color black, about ice, the occult and the smile of the Fatherland, a fine, frank, clear-cut smile, a smile
like an eye
that is in fact watching us. Afterwards he returned to Concepción and then went to Santiago, where he appeared on television (I couldn’t avoid seeing the program; there was no TV set in Bibiano’s boarding house, so he came round to my place), and yes, Carlos Wieder
was
Ruiz-Tagle (What a nerve, said Bibiano, stealing a good name like that) and yet, in a way, he wasn’t, or so it seemed to me. My parents had an old black-and-white TV (they were glad Bibiano was there, watching the program and having dinner with us, as if they
knew I was going to leave and would never have a friend like him again), and Carlos Wieder’s photogenic pallor recalled not only the shadowy figure of Ruiz-Tagle, but many other figures, other faces, other phantom pilots who had flown from Chile to Antarctica and back in planes which Mad Norberto, peering from the depths of the night, identified as Messerschmitt fighters, squadrons of Messerchmitts that had escaped from the Second World War. But Wieder, we knew, did not fly in a squadron. He flew a light plane and he flew alone.

Like the story of Chile itself in those years, the story of Juan Stein, who ran our poetry workshop, is larger than life.

Born in 1945, he published two books before the coup, one in Concepción (with a print run of five hundred) and another in Santiago (five hundred copies again). Together, they came to less than fifty pages. His poems were short. Like most of the poets of his generation, he was influenced by Nicanor Parra and Ernesto Cardenal, but also by Jorge Teillier’s home-grown imagism, although Stein recommended we read Lihn rather than Teillier. His tastes were quite often different from and even opposed to our own: he didn’t care for Jorge Cáceres (the Chilean surrealist who had become our cult hero) or Rosamel del Valle or Anguita. He liked Pezoa Véliz (and knew some of his poems by heart), Magallanes Moure (a foible for which we compensated by dipping into the verse of the dreadful Braulio Arenas), the geographical and gastronomical poems of Pablo de Rokha (which we, and when I say we, I realize now I am referring only to Bibiano O’Ryan and myself; as to the others, I can’t remember a thing about
them, not even their literary loves and hates; in any case we kept well clear of de Rokha, as if he were a bottomless pit, and anyway you’re better off reading Rabelais), Neruda’s love poetry and
Residence on Earth
(which we, having suffered from Neruditis since early childhood, could not so much as look at without breaking out in hives). We shared Stein’s esteem for the aforementioned Parra, Lihn and Teillier, although we differed over the relative merits of certain works (the publication of
Artefactos
, which we adored, prompted Stein to write a letter to old Nicanor, in a tone somewhere between indignation and perplexity, reproaching him for some of the jokes he had seen fit to crack at that crucial moment in Latin America’s revolutionary struggle. Parra replied on the back of an
Artefactos
postcard, telling him not to worry, because no one, on the right or the left, was reading anyway, and I’m sure Stein treasured that card). We also liked Armando Uribe Arce, Gonzalo Rojas and some of the poets from Stein’s generation, born in the ’40s, whom we used to frequent, mainly because they happened to live in the area; we had no particular aesthetic affinities with them, but in the end they probably influenced us more than anyone else. Juan Luis Martínez (who, for us, was a compass lost in the wilds of Chile), Oscar Hahn (who was born at the end of the ’30s, but that didn’t matter), Gonzalo Millán (who came to the workshop twice and read his poems, which were all short, but there were
lots
of them), Claudio Bertoni (who was almost young enough to qualify as one of our generation: the poets born in the ’50s), Jaime Quezada (who got drunk with us one day, knelt down and started bellowing a novena),
Waldo Rojas (who was one of the first to distance himself from the so-called “accessible poetry” that was all the rage at the time – cut-rate versions of Parra and Cardenal) and, of course, Diego Soto, who according to Stein was the best poet of his generation, and according to us was one of the
two
best, the other being Stein himself.