Distant Star (7 page)

Many years later, Bibiano went to Puerto Montt to look for Juan Stein’s family home. He couldn’t find anyone called Stein. There was a Stone, two Steiners and three Steens. The Stone he eliminated straight away. The Steens were all related and they couldn’t tell him much; they weren’t Jewish and they didn’t know anything about the Stein family or Chernyakhovsky. They asked Bibiano if he was Jewish himself and if there was money in it. By this stage, I think, Puerto Montt had started to boom. The Steiners were Jewish, but came from Poland, not the Ukraine. The first one he went to see was a tall, overweight agronomist, who wasn’t much help. Then he talked with the agronomist’s
aunt, a high school piano teacher. She remembered a widow called Stein who had gone to live in Llanquihue in 1974. But she wasn’t Jewish, that lady, declared the piano teacher. Slightly confused, Bibiano went to Llanquihue. What she must have meant, he thought, was that the widow wasn’t a
practising
Jew. In any case, knowing Juan Stein and his family history (his third cousin having been a Red Army general), he would have expected them to be atheists.

It didn’t take him long to find old Mrs Stein’s house in Llanquihue. It was a little wooden house painted green, on the outskirts of the village. When he went in through the gate, a friendly dog, white with black splotches like a miniature cow, came out to greet him. He rang the doorbell, which sounded like – and may well have been – a real bell with a clapper, and after a while a woman opened the door. She must have been about thirty-five and was one of the most beautiful women Bibiano had ever seen.

He asked if Mrs Stein lived there. She used to, but a long time ago, replied the woman cheerfully. What a pity, said Bibiano. I’ve been trying to find her for ten days now and I’ll have to go back to Concepción soon. The woman invited him in, told him she was about to have morning tea and asked if he would like to join her. Bibiano, of course, said yes, and then the woman confessed that old Mrs Stein had been dead for three years. A sudden wave of sadness seemed to sweep over her and Bibiano felt he was to blame. She had known Mrs Stein and, although she wouldn’t have said they were friends, she respected her: a slightly domineering woman, one of those stern
Germans, but she had a good heart. I didn’t know her, said Bibiano. In fact, I was trying to find her to pass on the news of her son’s death, but perhaps it’s better this way; it’s always terrible having to tell someone that one of their children has died. There must be some mistake, said the woman. She only had one son, who was still living when she died, and he
was
a friend of mine. Bibiano thought he was going to choke on his avocado sandwich. Only one son? Yes, a bachelor, very nice looking, I don’t know why he never got married. I guess because he was so shy. Then I must have got mixed up again, said Bibiano. We must be talking about different families. So Mrs Stein’s son doesn’t live in Llanquihue any more? He died last year in a hospital in Valdivia, so I heard. We were friends, but I never went to see him in hospital, we weren’t that close. What did he die of? I think it was cancer, said the woman, looking at Bibiano’s hands. And he was left-wing wasn’t he? asked Bibiano, with a faltering voice. Could have been, said the woman, suddenly cheerful again – her eyes shone like no other eyes I’ve ever seen, said Bibiano – yes, he was left-wing, but he wasn’t militant; he was one of the silent left, like so many Chileans since 1973. He wasn’t Jewish, was he? No, said the woman, although who knows, I’ve never really been interested in religion, but no, I don’t think they were Jewish, they were German. What was his name? Juan Stein. Juanito Stein. And what did he do? He was a teacher, although what he really liked was repairing motors: tractors, harvesters, pumps, any kind of motor, he had a real gift for it. And he made a nice bit of pocket money that way. Sometimes he made the parts himself. Juanito
Stein. Is he buried in Valdivia? I think so, said the woman, looking sad again.

So Bibiano went to the cemetery in Valdivia and, with the help of one of the attendants to whom he promised a handsome tip, spent a whole day looking for the grave of that tall, fair-haired Juan Stein who never left Chile, but despite his efforts he couldn’t find it.

At the end of 1973 or the beginning of 1974, Diego Soto, Juan Steins best friend and rival, also disappeared.

They were always together (except at their respective workshops) and always talking about poetry. If the sky over Chile had begun to crumble and fall, they would have gone on talking about poetry: the tall, fair-haired Stein and the short, dark Soto; one strong and well built, the other’s fine-boned body hinting at future plumpness. Stein was mainly interested in Latin American poetry, while Soto was translating French poets who were at the time (and many of whom, I fear, still are) unknown in Chile and this, of course, infuriated a lot of people. How could that ugly little Indian presume to translate and correspond with Alain Jouffroy, Denis Roche and Marcelin Pleynet? Michel Bulteau, Mathieu Messagier, Claude Pelieu, Franck Venaille, Pierre Tilman, Daniel Biga … who
were
these people, for God’s sake? And what was so special about this Georges Perec character, published by Denoël, whose books Soto was always toting around, pretentious bastard. When he was no longer to be seen walking the streets of Concepción with books under his
arm, always neatly dressed (as opposed to Stein, who looked like a tramp), heading off to the Faculty of Medicine or standing in a line outside some cinema or theater, when he disappeared into thin air, nobody missed him. Many would have been glad to hear of his death, for reasons that were not so much political (Soto was a socialist sympathizer, but that was all, he wasn’t even a faithful socialist voter; I would have described him as a left-wing pessimist) as aesthetic in nature: the pleasure of knowing you’re finally rid of someone who is more intelligent than you are and more knowledgeable and who lacks the social grace to hide it. Writing this now it seems hard to believe. But that’s how it was. Soto’s enemies would have been able to forgive his biting wit, but they could never forgive his indifference. His indifference and his intelligence.

Soto, however, like Stein (whom he no doubt never saw again), reappeared in exile. First he went to East Germany, but left as soon as he could after several unpleasant experiences. According to the melancholy folklore of exile – made up of stories that, as often as not, are fabrications or pale copies of what really happened – one night another Chilean gave him such a terrible beating that he ended up in a Berlin hospital with head injuries and two broken ribs. He moved to France where he scraped together a living teaching Spanish and English, and translating for small presses, mainly books by eccentric, early twentieth-century Latin American writers with a bent for fantasy or pornography, or both, as in the case of Pedro Pereda, an obscure novelist from Valparaiso, the author of a startling story in which a woman finds vaginas and anuses growing, or rather opening,
all over her anatomy, to the understandable horror of her friends and family (the story is set in the ’20s, but I don’t suppose it would have been any less shocking in the ’70s or the ’90s), and who ends up confined to a brothel for miners in northern Chile, where she remains, shut up in a room without windows, until in the end she becomes a great amorphous, uncontrollable
in-and-out
, finishes off the old pimp who runs the brothel along with the rest of the whores and the terrified clients, goes out onto the patio, and sets off into the desert (walking or flying, Pereda doesn’t say), finally disappearing into thin air.

Soto also tried (unsuccessfully) to translate Sophie Podolski, the Belgian poet who committed suicide at the age of twenty-one, and Pierre Guyotat, the author of
Eden, Eden, Eden
and
Prostitution
(again he gave up), and
La Disparition
by Georges Perec, a detective story written without using the letter “e,” which he managed (with a limited degree of success) to render into Spanish, following in the footsteps of Jardiel Poncela, who, half a century earlier, had written a story in which the aforementioned vowel was conspicuous by its absence. But it is one thing to
write
without using “e” and quite another to
translate
without it.

For a while, Soto and I were both living in Paris, but I never saw him. At the time I had no desire to look up old friends. Also, from what I’d been told, Soto’s financial situation had improved; he had married a French woman. Later I heard that they had a child (for what it’s worth, by then I was living in Spain). He regularly attended the meetings of Chilean writers
held in Amsterdam, and contributed to poetry magazines in Mexico, Argentina and Chile. I think he even had a book published in Buenos Aires or Madrid. Then I heard from a friend that Soto was lecturing at a university, which meant financial stability and time for writing and research, and by that stage he had two children, a boy and a girl. He had no plans to return to Chile. He must have been happy, reasonably happy. I could imagine his comfortable flat in Paris, or a house perhaps, in a village not far from the city. I could see him reading in the silence of his soundproof study, while the children watched television and his wife cooked or ironed, because, well, someone has to do the cooking, but of course it could have been a maid, yes, a Portuguese or an African maid, so Soto could read in his soundproof study, or write perhaps, although he was never very prolific, without feeling guilty, while his wife was busy in her own study, near the children’s room, or sitting at a nineteenth-century desk in a corner of the living room, correcting exam papers or planning a summer holiday or idly casting an eye over the cinema listings to decide which film they would go and see that night.

According to Bibiano (who exchanged letters with him quite regularly), it wasn’t so much that Soto had become middle-class: he had never been anything else. If books and reading are what count, you have to lead a sedentary, middle-class life to some degree, said Bibiano. Take me, for example: working in the shoe shop – which gets more depressing every year, or more amusing, I can’t really tell – living in the same old boarding house … in a way, on a different scale, I’m doing the
same thing as Soto (or letting the same thing happen to me).

In a word, Soto was happy. He thought he had escaped the curse (or we thought he had, anyway; Soto, I suspect, never believed in curses).

Then he received an invitation to participate in a conference on literature and criticism in Latin America, to be held in Alicante.

It was winter. Soto hated flying; he had done it only once in his life, at the end of 1973, when he flew from Santiago to Berlin. So after a whole night in the train he stepped off in Alicante. It was a weekend conference, but instead of going back to Paris on Sunday night, Soto stayed on. It is not known why. On Monday morning he bought a ticket for Perpignan. The trip was uneventful. When he arrived at the station in Perpignan he inquired about departures for Paris that night and bought a ticket for the 1:00 a.m. train. He spent the rest of the afternoon walking around the city, stopping in bars. He visited a second-hand bookshop where he bought a book by Guerau de Carrera, an avant-garde Franco-Catalan poet who died during the Second World War, but to pass the time he read a detective novel he had picked up that morning in Alicante (Vásquez Montalbán? Juan Madrid?) but didn’t have time to finish (the folded corner of page 155 seemed to indicate that he read no further) despite having devoured the first part with the voracity of an adolescent during the train journey.

In Perpignan he ate in a pizzeria. It is odd that he didn’t go to a good restaurant to sample the renowned cuisine of Rousillon, but for whatever reason he went to a pizzeria. The
coroner’s report is explicit and leaves not a shadow of doubt. Soto had a green salad, a large plate of canneloni, an enormous (and I mean
truly
enormous) helping of chocolate, strawberry, vanilla and banana ice cream, and two cups of black coffee. He also consumed a bottle of Italian red wine (perhaps not the best choice to go with the canneloni, but I know nothing about wine). During the meal he read both the detective novel and
Le Monde
, jumping back and forth. He left the pizzeria at about 10:00 p.m.

According to various witnesses, he arrived at the station around midnight. He had an hour to kill before the departure of his train. He went to the station bar and ordered a coffee. He was carrying his bag, and, in the other hand, the book by Carrera, the detective novel and the copy of
Le Monde
. According to the waiter who served him, he was sober.

He didn’t spend more than ten minutes in the bar. A railway employee saw him walking up and down the platforms, slowly but steadily. Certainly not drunk. Presumably he disappeared among the station’s labyrinthine paths, dear to Salvador Dalí. No doubt that is precisely what he wanted to do. To lose himself for an hour in the sovereign magnificence of Perpignan railway station. To retrace the mathematical, astronomical or mythical itinerary that, in Dalí’s dream, was hidden for all to see within the confines of that edifice. To be a tourist, in other words. The tourist Soto had always been since he left Concepción. A Latin American tourist, perplexed and desperate in equal parts (Gómez Carrillo is our Virgil), but a tourist nevertheless.

What happened next is uncertain. Soto lost himself in the cathedral or cosmic transmitter that is the Perpignan railway station. Because of the time and the weather (it was winter), the station was almost empty despite the fact that the 1:00 a.m. train for Paris was about to leave. Most people were in the bar or the main waiting room. Soto, for some reason, perhaps he heard voices, went to look in another room, some way off. There he found three young neo-Nazis and a bundle on the ground. The youths were diligently kicking the bundle. Soto froze on the threshold until he realized that the bundle was moving, when he saw first a hand and then an incredibly dirty arm emerging from the rags. The tramp shouted, Stop hitting me. It was a woman’s voice. But no one was listening, no one except the Chilean writer. Perhaps his eyes filled with tears, tears of self-pity, because something told him he had met his destiny. Now he wouldn’t have to choose between
Tel Quel
and the OuLiPo. For him, life had chosen the crime reports. In any case, he dropped his bag and the books at the door and approached the youths. Before the fight began he insulted them in Spanish. The harsh Spanish of southern Chile. The youths stabbed Soto and ran away.