By Night in Chile Read online

  landscape had been painted, tiny grains and microscopic landscapes, and I knew that everyone was putting that necklace on and wearing it, but no one had the patience or the strength or the courage to take it off and look at it closely and decipher each landscape grain by grain, partly because to do so required the vision of a lynx or an eagle, and partly because the landscapes usually turned out to contain unpleasant surprises like coffins, makeshift cemeteries, ghost towns, the void and the horror, the smallness of being and its ridiculous will, people watching television, people going to football matches, boredom

  circumnavigating the Chilean imagination like an enormous aircraft carrier. And that’s the truth. We were bored. We read and we got bored. We intellectuals.

  Because you can’t read all day and all night. You can’t write all day and all night. Splendid isolation has never been our style, and back then, as now, Chilean artists and writers needed to gather and talk, ideally in a pleasant setting where they could find intelligent company. Apart from the inescapable fact that many of the old crowd had left the country for reasons that were often more personal than political, the main difficulty was the curfew. Where could the artists and intellectuals meet if everywhere was shut after ten at night, for, as everyone knows, night is the most propitious time for getting together and enjoying a little unbuttoned conversation with one’s peers. Artists and writers. Strange times. I can picture the wizened youth’s face. I cannot

  actually see him, but he is there in my mind’s eye. He is wrinkling his nose, scanning the horizon, shaking from head to foot. I cannot actually see him, but there he is in my mind’s eye, crouching or down on all fours, on a hillock, black clouds racing past over his head, and the hillock becomes a hill and the next minute it is the atrium of a church, an atrium as black as the clouds, charged with electricity like the clouds, and glistening with moisture or blood, and the wizened youth trembles more and more violently, wrinkles his nose and then pounces on the story. But only I know the story, the real story. And it is simple and cruel and true and it should make us laugh, it should make us die laughing. But we only know how to cry, the only thing we do wholeheartedly is cry. The curfew was in force. Restaurants and bars shut early. People went home at a prudent hour. There were not many places where writers and artists could gather to drink and talk as long as they liked. That’s the truth. So this is how it happened. There was a woman. Her name was María Canales. She was a writer, she was pretty, she was young. In my opinion she was not without talent. I thought so then, and still do. Her talent was, how can I put it? inward,

  sheathed, withdrawn. Others have recanted, they have put it all behind them and forgotten. Naked, the wizened youth lunges at his prey. But I know the story of María Canales, the whole story, everything that happened. She was a writer.

  Maybe she still is. Writers (and critics) didn’t have many places to go. María Canales had a house on the outskirts of the city. A big house, surrounded by a garden full of trees, a house with a comfortable sitting room, with a fireplace and good whiskey, good cognac, a house that was open to friends once or twice a week, even occasionally three times a week. I don’t know how we got to know her.

  I suppose one day she showed up at the editorial office of a newspaper or a literary magazine or at the Chilean Society of Authors. She probably attended a writing workshop. In any case before long we all knew her and she knew all of us. She was pleasant company. As I said before, she was pretty. She had brown hair and large eyes and she read everything she was told to read or so she led us to believe. She went to exhibitions. Maybe we met her at an exhibition. Maybe at the end of a vernissage she invited people to continue the party at her house. She was pretty, as I said. She was interested in art, she liked to talk with painters and performance artists and video artists, maybe because they were not as well educated as the writers. Or so she thought. Then she began to mix with writers and realized that they were not particularly well educated either.

  What a relief that must have been. A very Chilean sort of relief. So few of us are truly cultured in this godforsaken country. The rest are completely

  ignorant. Pleasant, likeable people all the same. María Canales was pleasant and likeable: she was a generous host, nothing was too much trouble when it came to making her guests feel at home, for that, it seemed, was what mattered most to her. And people really did feel comfortable at the select gatherings or

  receptions or soirées or parties hosted by the novice writer. She had two sons.

  I haven’t mentioned them yet. If I remember rightly, she had two young sons, the elder was two or three years old and the younger about eight months, and she was married to a North American called James Thompson, whom she referred to as Jimmy, who worked as a salesman or an executive for a firm that had recently set up a branch in Chile and another in Argentina. Naturally, everyone got to meet Jimmy. I met him too. He was a typical North American, tall, with brown hair slightly lighter in color than his wife’s, not very talkative but polite.

  Sometimes he was present at María’s get-togethers and on those occasions he was generally to be seen listening to one of the duller guests with infinite

  patience. By the time the visitors arrived, and emerged from the cheerful caravan of miscellaneous automobiles, the boys would be asleep in their room on the second floor, it was a three-story house, and sometimes the maid or the nanny would carry them downstairs in their pajamas, to say hello to the newly arrived guests and be subjected to their baby talk and remarks about how cute or well behaved they were, or how much they looked like their mother or their father, although to tell the truth, the elder boy, who was called Sebastián, like me, didn’t look like either of his parents, as opposed to the younger boy, named Jimmy, who was the spitting image of Jimmy senior, with a few South American features inherited from María Canales. Then the children would

  disappear along with the maid, who shut herself away in the room next to theirs, while downstairs, in María Canales’s spacious sitting room, the party would begin in earnest, with the hostess serving whiskies all round, Debussy on the record player, or Webern performed by the Berlin Philharmonic, and after a while someone would be moved to recite a poem, and someone else would weigh up the virtues of this or that novel, the conversation would turn to painting or contemporary dance, little groups would form, the latest work by so-and-so would take a hiding, but wasn’t what’s-his-name’s recent performance a delight, the yawning would begin, sometimes a young poet opposed to the regime would come up to me and start talking about Pound and end up talking about his own work (I was always interested in the work of the younger generation, whatever their political affiliations), the hostess would suddenly appear carrying a tray piled high with empanadas, someone would start crying, others would burst into song, at six in the morning, or seven, when the curfew was over, we would make our unsteady way back to the cars in Indian file, some in pairs, others half asleep, most of us happy, and then the motors of six or seven cars would startle the quiet morning, and for a few seconds drown out the sound of birdsong in the garden, and the hostess would wave goodbye from the porch, as the cars began to drive away, one of us having opened the iron gate, and María Canales would stand there on the porch until the last car had left her property, her hospitable domain, and the cars went off down the empty avenues of outer Santiago, those endless avenues, lined with solitary houses, abandoned or neglected villas and vacant lots, their profiles repeated over and over on either side, while the sun came up over the Cordillera and we heard the dissonant rumor of a new day coming from the hub of the city. And a week later we would be back there again. By we I mean the group. I didn’t go every week. I put in an appearance chez María Canales once a month. Or even less often. But there were writers who went every week. Or more! They all deny it now. They even claim I was the true habitué, present every week without fail. Or twice, three times a week! But even the wizened youth knows that is
patently false. So we can rule that out

  straightaway. My visits were rare. Infrequent, at worst. But when I did go, I kept my wits about me, and the whiskey didn’t cloud my judgement. For example I noticed that young Sebastián, my little namesake, looked rather drawn. One day the maid brought him downstairs, and I took him from her arms and asked what was wrong with him. The maid, who was a full-blood Mapuche, stared at me and tried to take the child back. I ducked away. What’s wrong, Sebastián? I said, with a tenderness I had never felt before. The child looked at me with his big blue eyes. I touched his face. What a cold little face it was. Suddenly I felt my eyes brimming with tears. Then the maid snatched him away from me in a most ungracious manner. I wanted to tell her that I was a priest. But something stopped me, perhaps that sense we Chileans possess to an uncommon degree, the sharpest of all our senses, the sense of the ridiculous. When the maid carried the little boy upstairs again, he looked at me over her shoulder and it seemed to me that those wide eyes were seeing something they did not want to see. María Canales was very proud of him: she told me how intelligent he was. The younger son, she said, was wonderfully inquisitive and bold. I didn’t pay much

  attention: all mothers prattle on like that. Mainly I talked with the

  up-and-coming artists, who, armed with nothing but what they had gleaned from a few books read in secret, were preparing to create the New Chilean Scene, a rather awkward anglicism invented to name the gap left by the emigrants, which my fellow guests were planning to occupy and populate with their as yet

  embryonic works. I talked with them and with old friends from years back who turned up from time to time (like me) in the house on the outskirts of Santiago to discuss English metaphysical poetry or the films they had seen recently in New York. I can’t have had more than about two conversations with María Canales, just short chats really, and once I read a story she had written, a story that went on to win first prize in a competition organized by a left-leaning literary magazine. I remember that competition. I wasn’t on the judging panel. They didn’t even ask me. If they had asked me, I would have done it. Literature is literature. But anyhow I wasn’t one of the judges. Perhaps if I had been, María Canales wouldn’t have won first prize. Not that it was a positively bad story, but it certainly wasn’t good. Like its author, it was laborious and mediocre.

  When I showed it to Farewell, who was still alive at the time, although he never attended a literary gathering at María Canales’s house, mostly because by then he rarely went out or talked with anyone except his faithful crones, when I showed it to him, he read a couple of lines and said it was frightful, unworthy of a prize even in Bolivia, and then he launched into a bitter lament about the state of Chilean literature, was there one contemporary writer you could

  seriously compare to Rafael Maluenda, Juan de Armaza or Guillermo Labarca Hubertson? Farewell was sitting in his armchair, and I was sitting opposite him, in the armchair reserved for close friends. I remember shutting my eyes and hanging my head. Who remembers Juan de Armaza now? I thought as night fell with a snakelike hissing. Only Farewell and some old crone with an elephantine memory. A professor of literature in some remote southern town. A crazy

  grandson, living in a perfect, inexistent past. We have nothing, I murmured.

  What did you say? said Farewell. Nothing, I said. Are you feeling all right?

  asked Farewell. Fine, I said. And then I said or thought: Two conversations. And I said or thought it at Farewell’s house, which was falling apart like its owner, or back in my monkish cell. Because I only had two conversations with María Canales. At her soirées I would usually sit in a corner, near the stairs, beside a large window, next to a table on which there was always an earthenware vase with fresh flowers in it, and I stayed put in that corner, and there I talked with the desperate poet, the feminist novelist and the avant-garde painter, always keeping an eye on the staircase, waiting for the ritual descent of the Mapuche maid and little Sebastián. And sometimes María Canales joined my group. Always so pleasant! Whatever I wanted, nothing was too much trouble. But I suspect she could hardly understand a thing I said. She pretended to

  understand, but how could she have? And she could hardly understand the poet’s ideas either, although she had a slightly better grasp of the novelist’s

  concerns, and was positively enthusiastic about the painter’s schemes. For the most part, however, she just listened. That is, at least, when she was in my corner, in my exclusive little clique. In the other groups scattered around that spacious sitting room, she was, as a rule, the one who called the shots. And when she talked politics she was absolutely sure of herself, and her voice rang out clearly, making her opinions known in no uncertain terms. In spite of which she never ceased to be a model hostess: she knew how to ease any tension with a joke or some playful Chilean teasing. On one occasion she came over to me (I was alone, a glass of whiskey in my hand, thinking about little Sebastián and his wan little face) and without any preliminaries began singing the praises of the feminist novelist. The way she writes, it’s quite unique, she said. I replied frankly: many passages in her books were poor translations (I preferred not to speak of plagiarism, which is always a harsh if not an unjust term) of certain French women writers of the fifties. I watched her expression. There was, undeniably, a certain native cunning in that face of hers. She looked at me blankly and then, little by little, almost imperceptibly, a smile, or the irrepressible prelude to a smile, slightly rearranged her features. Nobody else would have picked it for a smile, but I’m a Catholic priest and I knew

  straightaway. It was harder to tell what kind of smile it was. Perhaps it was a smile of satisfaction, but what was she satisfied about? Perhaps it was a smile of recognition, as if those words had revealed my true face and now she

  knew (or oh so cunningly thought she did, at least) who I really was, or perhaps it was just an empty smile, the sort of smile that forms

  mysteriously out of nothing and dissolves away into nothing again. In other words you don’t like her books, she said. The smile disappeared and her face went blank and dull again. Of course I like them, I replied, I’m just critically noting their weaknesses. What an absurd thing to say. That’s what I think now, lying here, confined to this bed, my poor old skeleton propped up on one elbow.

  How trivial, how grammatically awkward, how plain stupid. We all have

  weaknesses, I said. How dreadful. Only works of genius will prove to be

  unblemished. How ghastly. My elbow is shaking. My bed is shaking. The sheets and the blankets are shaking. Where is the wizened youth? He’s probably finding it all very funny, the story of my bungling. He’s probably laughing his head off at my blunders, my venial and mortal mistakes. Or maybe he got bored and went off leaving me here on a brass bed turning, turning like Sordel, Sordello, which Sordello? Well he can do what he likes. I said: We all have weaknesses, but we have to focus on our strengths. I said: We’re all writers, and in the end we all have to walk a long and rocky road. And from behind her long-suffering

  half-wit’s face, María Canales looked at me as if she were weighing me up, and then she said: What a lovely thing to say, Father. And I looked back at her in surprise, partly because until then she had always called me Sebastián, like the rest of my literary friends, and partly because just at that moment the Mapuche maid appeared on the staircase holding the little boys. And that double

  apparition, the maid and little Sebastián along with María Canales’s face and her calling me Father, as if she had suddenly given up the pleasant but trivial role she had been playing and taken on a new, far riskier role, that of