Cowboy Graves: Three Novellas

Fatherland

My father was a boxing champion: the bravest, the fiercest, the smartest, the best…

When he gave up boxing, Police Commissioner Carner of Concepción offered him a job in Investigations. My father laughed and said no, where the hell did he get an idea like that. The chief replied that he could smell an officer of the law from a distance. His nose never failed him. My father said he didn’t give a shit for the law and also, no offense, he didn’t see himself as a freeloader. I like to work, he said, don’t take it the wrong way. The chief realized that my father might be drunk but he was serious. No offense taken, he said, it’s just strange, because I can smell a cop ten miles off. The good kind, of course. Don’t give me that shit, Carner, what you want is a heavyweight to beat up purse snatchers, said my father. Never, said the commissioner, I’m a modern lawman. Modern or not, Carner read the Rosicrucians and he was a follower (in a casual way) of John William Burr, the now-forgotten promoter of metempsychosis. At home, we still have pamphlets by Burr, published by El Círculo in Valparaiso and the Gustavo Peña Association in Lima, which my father, predictably, never read.

As far as I can remember, my father only read the sports news. He had an album of clippings and pictures that he meticulously maintained, tracking his pugilistic journey from the ranks of amateur boxing to the bronze belt in the South American heavyweight championships. (He also liked football and horse races and tejo—the Columbian version of lawn bowls, played with explosives—and cocaine and swimming and cowboy movies…)

My father never joined the police force, of course. When he retired, he opened a soda fountain and married my mother, who was three months pregnant. Soon after, I was born, the poet of the family.

The Family Idiot

It all began years ago, on September 11, 1973, at seven a.m., in the library of the country house of Antonio Narváez, a well-known gynecologist and a patron of the fine arts in his spare time. Before my sleep-reddened eyes, twenty people lay sprawled on the sofas and rugs! All had drunk and argued without cease that night! All had laughed and made plans and danced without cease that interminable night! Except for me. Then, at seven or eight a.m., at the request of our host and his wife, I climbed onto a chair and began to recite a poem to lift everyone’s spirits and pass the time while the coffee was brewing, the exceptionally fine coffee that Antonio Narváez procured on the black market and served with restorative shots of pisco or whiskey before opening the curtains and letting in the first rays of sun as dawn broke over the Andes.

Well, I got up on the chair and the master and mistress of the house called for a moment of silence! This was my specialty. The reason I was invited to parties. Before an audience of familiar faces from the University of Concepción, faces glimpsed at film screenings or plays or encountered at previous country affairs, at the literary ambushes that Dr. Narváez liked to organize, I recited one of Nicanor Parra’s greatest poems from memory. My voice shook. As I gesticulated, my hands shook. But I still think it was a good poem, though it was received with pleasure by some and manifest disapproval by others. I remember that when I climbed up on the chair I realized that I, too, had drunk like a Cossack the night before. The chair was made of araucaria wood and, from up above, the rug’s arabesques seemed infinitely distant.

I must have been on the fifteenth stanza when two guys and a girl came in from the kitchen and broke the news. The radio was reporting that a military coup was underway in Santiago. Blitzkrieg or Anschluss, call it what you want, the Chilean Army was on the move.

The minute the announcement was made, the stampede was on, first into the kitchen and then toward the front door, as if everyone had suddenly gone mad.

I remember that in the middle of the scramble someone yelled at me to shut up, by which I gather that I was still reciting. I remember insults, threats, exclamations of disbelief, expressions mutating from the most sublime heroism to terror and back again, everything topsy-turvy and unfinished, while I stuttered over a line and scanned every corner, the last to realize what was looming over the republic. In the avalanche of people fleeing, my chair tottered and I fell flat on my face. The impact was sharp and painless. Half-stunned, I wondered why it was taking me so long to pass out. Then everything went black.

When I came to, the house was empty except for a girl whose lap my head was resting on. I didn’t recognize her right away. But it wasn’t the first time I’d seen her. We’d spoken the night before, and we’d met a few times before that at some workshop, Fernández’s or Cherniakovski’s, I wasn’t sure which.

A wet cloth was draped over my forehead and it was giving me the shivers. Someone had opened the curtains. An upstairs shutter was swinging in the wind, making a sound like a metronome. In the library, there was something supernatural about the way the silence and light enveloped us: the air seemed different, bright, new, an amalgam of superimposed walls behind which lay adventure or death. I looked at the clock. Only ten minutes had gone by. Then she said, Get up, we have to go as soon as we can. Like a ghost, I got up. Light as a ghost, I mean. Light as a feather. I was twenty years old! I got up and followed her. In the street was a Volkswagen with green bumpers and leopard-skin upholstery. We got in the car and set off. I was twenty and I was falling in love for the first time! I knew it instantly… And I couldn’t help it, tears came to my eyes…

The Right Side

Her name was Patricia Arancibia and she was twenty-one. She lived outside of Nacimiento, town of potters, in a two-story house of stone and wood, at the top of a bald hill with sweeping views of the whole valley. Along the way, I opened my mouth twice: first to ask where we were going, and second to tell her that her eyes were blue like the rivers of the province of Bío-Bío. The province has seven rivers, she said, glancing at me as we drove along dirt roads, speeding away from Los Ángeles. The Mulchén, the Vergara, the Laja, the Renaico, the Bureo, the Duqueco, and the Bío-Bío, father of them all. And each is different in color and flow. Sometimes, though hardly ever, all seven are blue, with big green tongues in the pools, though most of the time they run the color of stone, dark stone with emerald and violet streaks. Especially when the winter is long, she said sadly.

At first sight, her house looked like the house from Psycho. Only the stairs and the views were different. From Patricia Arancibia’s house, the views were sweeping, rich, desolate. From Norman’s house, of course, all you could see was the old highway and the swamp.

She parked the car under a shelter of weathered planks. The front door wasn’t locked. I followed her into the living room, which was enormous and full of art and books. My father is a painter, said Patricia. These are his paintings. As she made me tea, I looked at them. The central figure in nearly all of them was a woman with features vaguely resembling my rescuer’s. She’s my mother, Patricia explained, handing me a cup of tea. At a word from her, I sat in a chair while she examined my head. You’re all right, she said, but it’s strange that you were unconscious for so long. Where did everyone else go? I asked. Home, to their party headquarters, to their jobs, I don’t know… Why did you call the Bío-Bío the father of all rivers, not the mother? Patricia laughed. You should see a doctor, she said. For your head. I feel fine, I said. Once there was a pretty good artist who fell or was hit by a car; anyway, something like what happened to you. They took him to the hospital. After a while, he recuperated, or seemed to. He looked healthy and the nurses let him have paper and pencil. The first thing he wanted to draw was a portrait of an especially nice nurse. The nurse posed for him, flattered. When he was finished, everyone realized that he had only drawn her right half. As a test, they asked him to draw a table. He drew the right half of the table. When the doctors pointed this out to him, he insisted that the drawing was finished and complete. They tried a few more times and the same thing happened. The artist only drew what he saw, and he had lost sight of the left side of things…

I see everything whole, I said softly. I see your left side and your right side. The Bío-Bío is the father of all rivers, said Patricia Arancibia, and the Antuco is the mother of all volcanoes. It should be the other way around, I said. Father volcanoes and mother rivers. Patricia Arancibia laughed. I live with a woman who works for my family, she said. Do you know what her name is? It’s Crescencia Copahue. She’s seventy years old. She was my father’s nanny, though actually she’s like part of the family. Do you know what Copahue is? No idea, I said. It’s a volcano. Copahue is one of the seven volcanoes of Bío-Bío. Haven’t you ever seen my father’s paintings? No, I said. I’ve never even heard of him. There were some hot springs on Copahue that we visited when I was little. My father painted volcanoes, years ago. All the canvases have been sold now or burned.

I live alone, she said. My mother and father live in Santiago. They love each other desperately, she said with a smile. I live with Crescencia. She’s here now, somewhere in the house, listening to the radio. She must be in bed listening to the military speeches. But she’ll get up soon and make us something to eat. Do you know the names of the seven volcanoes of Bío-Bío? Copahue, Tolhuaca, Collapén, Pemehue, Sierra Velluda, Maya-Maya, and Antuco, the most beautiful of all. Why are you closing your eyes? I was imagining the volcanoes, I said. I saw them as walls closing us in. Because of the coup? Don’t see them that way, said the sweet voice.

They felt like bars to my father too, bars to his talent, which is maybe why he went to live in Santiago. The artist who could only see the right side of things, is he still alive? No, he died a long time ago, in New York, in the 1930s, before World War II. His name was Richard Luciano and his drawings still turn up in neuropathology papers sometimes. How sad to end up in a medical journal! I said with my eyes full of tears. Not really, said the sweet voice. Better there than in a museum. Life takes many turns, Mr. Belano, the adventure never ends…

Which Way Was Patricia Arancibia Driving That Morning? Toward Heaven or Hell?

The spotless Volkswagen glided along the roads of Bío-Bío as if along a conveyor belt. It braked and accelerated at nudges from the sun, the warm rays on the leopard skin. And Patricia Arancibia, with no sunglasses to shade her eyes, surveyed the roads and chose the best. Down tree-lined streets or oxen tracks, along the edge of fields, past Coigüe or Santa Fe, at the hour of the lazy man’s call to morning prayer, her slender legs moving confidently in the belly of the leopard, setting the desired speed. She was wearing black leather boots with silver buckles, magenta cotton socks sprinkled with tiny stars, a high-waisted black knee-length skirt—tight as if for horse-riding—a brown silk blouse with round pearly buttons, and, carelessly tossed in the back seat, a 1950s starlet’s kid-leather jacket. Every so often she stopped the car in a cloud of dust and consulted a map that she pulled from the glove compartment. The scene was like an advertisement for a savage perfume: her long fingers tracing the roads printed in red, her lips pressed firmly together. Then the car slowly emerged from the cloud of dust as if from an egg. An egg of stone, of light and air, ephemeral as a fly. Volcano egg. And the spotless Volkswagen gradually picked up speed again. Left behind was the shell, crumbling among the tree branches. The map was returned to the glove compartment. Her hands clutched the wheel and the car set off again.

“Where are we going?” I asked in a frightened voice.

(When I was a boy, my siblings and I played a game of turning happy moments into statues… If only someone, an angel watching from up above, had turned the Volkswagen and the bumps in the road into a statue… The leopard-skin throne into a statue… Our speed and our flight into a statue…)

She accelerated unhesitatingly. Don’t worry, Mr. Belano, she said mockingly, we won’t get lost… We won’t lose anything… Her lips, as Virgil’s Argentine or Bolivian translator would have it, were full of ambrosia.

From Eliseo Arancibia to Rigoberto Belano

I’ve received four letters from you and I’d say that’s enough. Don’t grub around in my family’s suffering. Don’t sully my daughter’s memory with conjectures and speculations that lead nowhere. Please, desist. The facts are clear and I don’t see why I should believe you and your suspicions over the police report. It was God’s will that my daughter be taken from us in the flower of her youth, and that, unfortunately, is that.

As for sending you Patricia’s papers, my answer is no. I don’t know what papers you’re referring to. And if I knew, I’m afraid you wouldn’t be the likely recipient. When time has done its healing work, I’ll be able to calmly and patiently collect my daughter’s scattered writings and publish them in worthy fashion. I have plenty of editor friends. I beg you, therefore, not to appoint yourself literary executor when no one has asked you to do so.

Finally: don’t exploit my daughter’s disappearance. Not politically, and not literarily. On this point, I find myself obliged to insist. You have no right. Patricia despised the commonness that I sense in your intentions. I don’t need to tell you that if it comes down to it, I won’t hesitate to take legal steps.

If my words are harsh, I’m sorry. Please understand, I’m a heartbroken father. You, on the other hand, are a young man and you ought to think of your future.

I enclose our magazine Chilean Painters Here and Abroad, with a profile of Onésimo Echaurren that you may enjoy.

Funeral Oration Read by the Interim Secretary of the Chilean Society of Fine Arts, the Honorable Mr. Onésimo Echaurren Gordon. Published in the Quarterly Journal Chilean Painters Here and Abroad, 1974, and Excerpted in the Obituaries Section of El Mercurio, 1973. Unabridged.

We are gathered here, friends and colleagues, in tribute to a fragile rose, to the still-fresh petals of the loveliest of flowers, the lushest and most enigmatic of flowers, torn too soon from the breast of Nature: mother of us all, the blind and the sighted, the creators and the creatures of the night, the artist who sees and transcends, and that hideous Afro-Haitian spawn, the zombie.

Just when it seemed that the terrible drought was lifting, when the clamor of vulturine flocks seeking to clip the wings of our beloved condor was vanishing like a bad dream from the Nation’s frozen breast, when Andean deer were frolicking once again in reclaimed valleys, and when the tolling of bells announced to young and old that the Republic was forging ahead with new vigor and verve, the news reached our homes like the night’s final blow, tragic news plunging us without warning into a private tempest.

I can say that I was there at her birth; friendship, that sacred, mysterious bond, afforded me the happy privilege of watching her grow up. How can I help but call to mind her little face as it looked in the light of my four copper lamps (they were more like torches), begging me to tell her yet another story, one more in a long list. Unforgettable evenings, wreathed in the magnificent light of the province of Temuco, at La Refalosa, my country estate, the name of which does not harbor a grammatical error, as some of my enemies have insinuated, but rather the pure folk wisdom of my elders, which I’m honored to preserve.

As if time, forgetful friend, hadn’t wagged its comet tail, I seem to see onstage before me the spacious veranda at La Refalosa, with easels at the ready, palettes prepared, paints set out; beyond is the garden, and at the edge of the garden, the children, playing cowboys (children who today are students of Law or Economics!); the countryfolk, humbly attired but generally clean and of cheerful mien, are on their way to the tilled fields; and here she comes, our precocious eight-year-old Amazon, Venus of Botticelli, Max Ernst’s magical woman-child, Alberto Ortega Basauri’s sulky divine thing, riding my mare Dusty through the roses.

Blessed vision! Her winged presence produced something akin to astonishment, of the sort usually elicited only by poems, whether on canvas or on the page. Abstracted traveler of imaginary lands, from the very start she dazzled her dear parents and the select circle to which they belonged with her intellect and beauty. I can say without hesitation that it was from Eliseo Arancibia that she inherited her open, unwavering intelligence, and from Elena Múgica Echevarría the beauty and grace that were hers until the final dusk.

As evidence of her cleverness, let me say that by the age of ten she could already hold forth on the vagaries of criollo and French surrealism. She valued the work of our dear Juan Miguel Marot, of blessed memory, and she dispelled any confusion about the overvalued paintbrush of Roberto Antonio Matta. Spellbound, the grown-ups—our fun-loving Here and Abroad gang, who back then were just skimming the edge of their forties (oh, happy age!)—heard her say in her deep, confident little voice, her body leaning like a Harlequin on her beloved father’s knee, that Leonora Carrington’s main defect was her dreadful thinness.

As I’ve said, she was blessed with her father’s talent and the beauty of the woman who bore her, but there was something else, something visible only to the artist’s discerning eye, if I may say so: a quality of character (and character, as everyone knows, is the seat of talent, its palace and its lair), a quality of character, as I was saying, that was singular, unique, incommutable. Chiseled in fire. It was a Chilean quality, but English too, something to astound the shrewdest psychologist.

She had it all (or all that anyone can have by the age of twenty-one), but she wasn’t spoiled. A good daughter, a good student, a good friend, steadfast in everything that she undertook, free as a bird; sometimes my tired eyes seemed to see a human being with a lifetime of experiences and vicissitudes, not a person—an exquisite person—born in 1952. Such was her kindness and her sweetness, her understanding and her grace.

I saw her for the last time eight or nine months before her death, at her father’s opening at the Círculo Francés of Santiago. It goes without saying that she was a grown woman by then. As always, she exuded life and talent from every pore. We exchanged a few words. I learned that she was studying literature at the University of Concepción, that she wrote poems (I begged her to recite one on the spot, but she modestly declined, judging it unseemly), that she was planning to travel to Europe at the end of the year, that she lived alone or rather with her old Mapuche nurse at her enchanted and enchanting house in Nacimiento, that it had been a while since she gave up drawing. I thought this was a shame, and she graced me with one of her frank, crystalline laughs, ripe with health.

After the opening, we threw a party for Eliseo at the home of the Ortega Basauris. Some among us will still remember the event with fondness and nostalgia. Present were new and old members of the group of Here and Abroad painters, joined in fruitful camaraderie. The times were tumultuous, but we were undaunted. Patricia turned up too, though just for a moment, with her parents and a friend with whom she planned to leave for Viña del Mar. Surrounded as I was by reporters and strangers asking my opinion on a wide range of topics, it was impossible for us to approach each other. After a while, she and her friend were gone and Eliseo himself conveyed her goodbyes.

Did I suspect, perhaps, that it would be the last time?

Who knows!

All I know is that I cried like a child when, months later, Eliseo called to give me the news. And in my cathartic weeping, I was accompanied by my wife and my son, Juan Carlos.

She’s gone. She has flown far from our woes and tribulations. She is no longer with us. God has deprived us of her laughter and her gaze. We’ve all lost. The whole of Chile has lost. Her death might seem the best argument for discouragement.

And yet it’s necessary to carry on. Carry on, we must! Now more than ever.

I’ll conclude by saying that Patricia loved the night. She loved it for the gift and consolation of the stars, she confessed to me and her father one distant (pure and distant) day, on the sprawling veranda of La Refalosa, sipping a cold tea after a tiring excursion. In the vast night, the same night in which all of us will be lost, the stars twinkle. That’s our Southern Cross. Beyond it, the firmament extends its mantle of orbs and lights. That’s where Patricia lives. She’s waiting for us there.

The Biggest. The Border-Maker. The Prettiest River at the Ass End of the Earth.

These aren’t the roads of the counterrevolution, said Patricia Arancibia, as I quaked. These are the roads of Los Ángeles, Nacimiento, the province of Bío-Bío. We’re on our way to my house.

The Messerschmitt

In December, a few lucky people saw the old plane flying over Concepción. It was the time of day when the sun sinks into the Pacific, rolling toward the islands, the happy places, toward Japan and the Philippines. The plane appeared from the north, as if approaching from Tomé. It came in over Talcahuano and spent a long time circling over Concepción. I was in the police station gymnasium, now a holding pen for political prisoners, recovering from my last beating, and I don’t know where I got the strength to come to the window; where I got the idea that it was important to see that plane.

It was Gaspar Yáñez who said that a Messerschmitt was flying over the city. A what? A Messerschmitt, comrades, a Third Reich fighter plane, let me get a good look at it, a 109, the crown jewel of the Luftwaffe, two 15-mm machine guns and a 30-mm cannon. What’s it doing? the prisoners asked. For a few seconds, Gaspar Yáñez studied the red rectangle in silence… Aerobatics! Spins! Loops! Rolls! The pilot must be ecstatic!

I remember that the light inside the gymnasium was a dusky yellow and every face was turned toward Gaspar Yáñez, who was peering out the window like a pirate. Christ almighty, what a pilot, what a plane, what a sight! Sitting on the floor, the men and women listened in silence: Gaspar’s thin, bony face, his broad nose and full lips, seemed to smolder in the red of the sunset. They were the fighter planes in the Battle of England, he said as if in prayer. Wait until a Hawker Hunter turns up and see what happens to your fighter, spat someone from a dark corner. Never was so much owed by so many to so few, added the dean of the Law School, who was dozing on a filthy mattress between two miners from Lota.

But this one seems to be retrofitted, said Gaspar. Look, there’s smoke coming from it! The beauty of it, gentlemen! The elegance, the grace! Don’t bad-mouth German technology to me! Does the smoke mean it’s going down, Gasparcito? asked a woman of about fifty, also from Lota. Going down? No! It’s writing something in the sky. Holy mother, what can it be, what can it be, cried Gaspar in agony. It must be an advertisement, said one of the prisoners. Then I leaped over the blankets, the mattresses, and the bodies and I looked out the window.

Through the bars, I saw the plane, the silent propellers, the square-tipped wings, just like in Spitfire magazine, the steel-blue enemy fighter plane, strangely lovely. And then I saw the words: the bold script swiftly whittled away by the wind, the dark text written in the sky as if by someone with the secret wish to be read only in a mirror. And the lines of poetry, words that I had heard before, stolen—like so much else—from Patricia Arancibia’s house.

It’s advertising a volcanic drink! cried Gaspar Yáñez, who was raving by now. It’s announcing the birth of Fascist literature, comrades!

Shut up, you crazy bastard, called a chorus of protesters, irritable miners.

Across the city, two helicopters appeared, painted camouflage green. They were flying low, just over the rooftops, and they were approaching the edge of the area where the plane was performing its maneuvers. I felt the air vibrate. Dogfight! shouted Gaspar. No one paid any attention to him. Behind us the silence was startling. I turned around: the prisoners were talking, eating, sleeping, playing checkers with scraps of paper, thinking. The Chilean Air Force versus the Luftwaffe! Helicopters of Quiriquina Island! Onward, boys! shouted Gaspar. He began to foam at the mouth, his body shaking with spasms that grew more and more violent. It took four men to get him away from the window. I didn’t move. The helicopters were just below the Messerschmitt. This kid needs a doctor, said someone, or at least a painkiller. The voice was cool as could be. A woman from the Lota group pulled a little box of pills from her bra and handed one to the person tending to Gaspar. Now Gaspar’s moans sounded like the thunder before a storm. But not a Chilean storm: an African storm. With deep sadness, I watched the flurry of blankets, the hands grasping Gaspar’s jaw, the contradictory opinions flying back and forth, the shadows of the gymnasium: we truly seemed more like lunatics than prisoners.

When I looked out the window again, the helicopters were heading back to their bases. In Concepción’s inflamed sky, the plane made a last pirouette and then it rose proudly and was lost in the clouds… Gaspar began to pull out clumps of hair. The gray words were left behind in the red sky, dissolving in the air.

The Crown Jewel of the Luftwaffe

It was the best plane in the world, in the darkness of the world, said Gaspar Yáñez, on all fours like a mythological beast at death’s door; his voice, the succession of syllables in my ear, woke me with a start. Everyone is asleep, said Gaspar Yáñez. The vowels fell petrified from his lips by the dark and by fear. A perpendicular movement made him rock from knees to wrists. It’s strange, don’t you think? Muted voices and laughter reached us; the sound of water flowing from a hose. What’s strange? I whispered even more softly than the madman, so softly that I was afraid he wouldn’t hear me, but he heard. The plane, he said. The fighter circling over our heads. I repeated what others had explained already, that the FACh kept a German plane as a museum piece, that it had been in Chile since approximately 1939, but as I was talking I realized that I didn’t believe the explanation either. Gaspar smiled (on the second day of his detention, they had broken most of his teeth) as if he could guess what I was thinking. I heard the laughter and the gush of water again, I imagined the snaking of the hose in the prison yard. They’re having fun, said Gaspar, as if he wanted to lay the subject to rest and move on to what was really important. Who? The cops. They never sleep, it must be their consciences, or a sixth sense warning them of Solitude. Those thugs have no conscience, I said. Gaspar sighed. His lungs made a very strange sound. I think the world is full of holes, he said, and that’s how the fighter planes get in. Have you heard me talk about Solitude? (Strange question.) Another hole, that’s all. I don’t believe in that kind of thing, I whispered. You don’t have to believe, said Gaspar, I’ve seen the planes flying at dawn and it’s not a matter of believing or not. When you see the silhouettes in the cabins, the face of Hans Marseille like a crumb of white bread, you realize that it’s the only consolation. Consolation for what? I stammered. My vocal cords were turning to stone too. It’s hard to admit, but consolation for everything, said Gaspar. Nothing but the crown jewel of the Luftwaffe up in the sky. The 109, and then all the prototypes, planes even better than the 109, I must confess, though it’s the number that makes all the difference. What? What? I whispered. The number of crewmen. Each of the others flies two, my friend, and that’s no good. The 109 has room for just one and you really do need balls for that. Take off from France, climb above the clouds, and reach England in time to fight for five minutes in a wind made of dreams. What are you talking about, man? I whispered. Weren’t you a radio host? Weren’t you on that show Bring in the Kids? Are you so crazy that you’ve turned into a Nazi? Gaspar gave me a horrible smile, shaking his head. Then he raised one hand and patted me on the shoulder. Without getting up, he vanished on all fours into the darkness toward his mat. For a long time I lay awake. The next day, they brought me out into the courtyard, gave me a beating, and tossed me into the street.

Family Plot

Effects of the coup on the family unit. My mother lost her job as a math teacher at Liceo number 3 in Concepción. My father and my mother were on speaking terms again. My brother David was arrested and beaten: for fifteen days my parents searched for him at police stations and hospitals. He came home a month later and for the next thirty days he refused to say a word. My mother wept and cried out, asking what they’d done to her son. My father watched him, touched him, stared into his face, and declared that whatever it was, it wouldn’t kill him. My sister Elisenda was angry all of the time. Meals were scanty, but now at least the whole family sat down to eat together. My father came over from across the street and we all ate together at my mother’s house. Or my mother and the three of us crossed the street and we all ate together at my father’s house. My sister Elisenda stopped watching so much TV. My brother David started to train every morning in the yard. He was taking a martial arts correspondence course: karate, kung fu, judo. When my father was at my mother’s house, he spied on my brother through the kitchen window and smiled. In front of my mother, my sister, and me, my brother David said that he could drop my father with a single karate kick. Frankly, everyone in the family was on edge. More and more, my mother wondered why we still lived in this country. My father, who used to criticize the Allende government for its sports policies, stopped talking about sports for a while. My brother David became a Trotskyite. My sister Elisenda burned her childhood books and then cried bitterly. My father tried to make love to my mother five or six times, and the results, to judge by their faces, were not satisfactory. My mother got out her songbook and played the guitar. My father closed the soda fountain and sold it soon after to a retired navy sergeant. When my brother David was arrested for the second time and my sister saw her chances of enrolling in the university vanishing, my mother said that enough was enough. She sold the house and the furniture and bought tickets to Lima. She would have liked to get tickets to Madrid, but she didn’t have enough money. She cried when I refused to go with them. My brother David called me a faggot and a eunuch. I replied that I might be a faggot, you never know, but I definitely wasn’t a eunuch. Maliciously I added that, according to my father, it was people who practiced martial arts imported from the East who were eunuchs. My brother David tried to hit me. Don’t hit him in the head, my mother cried. The days before the departure were like the rosary of the dawn. My brother David made up with me. David, Elisenda, and I hugged. I promised my mother that I would save some money and come join them. I promised that I’d stay out of trouble. My father and I accompanied my mother and siblings to Santiago. As the plane took off, my father muttered to himself and bit his knuckles. I understood how he felt. I imagined my mother and my brother and sister in their seats, with their seat belts on, sad but full of energy, defying the future and what it held in store for them, no matter what. My father, however, seemed to be on the verge of death, his face shrunken, as if he had inner wrinkles now in addition to his outer ones. Never had he looked more like a famous boxer than he did then. We took the train back to Concepción. For the trip, my father bought a roast chicken and a bottle of wine. We ate and drank in fits and starts, I don’t know why. My father didn’t sleep a wink. Sometimes I was woken by the sound of him sucking on a wing. A very strange noise. He picked up the wing in his hand and sucked on it slowly, his gaze lost in the darkness of the car. I’ll never see them again, my father said. Two weeks later, the first postcards arrived. My mother’s postcard was fairly optimistic. My brother’s was more like a riddle or a puzzle. I could never figure out the clues, if there were any. My sister’s was the most idiotic, but at the same time I liked it best, maybe because it was so innocent. Basically, it described the trip from Santiago to Lima. The part she liked best was the movie she saw on the plane: Hitchcock’s Family Plot.

The Dream

It was years after Patricia Arancibia’s death that I began to dream about the dark city… A kid, seventeen, walked the empty streets, flanked by tall buildings… His strides were long, almost feline… I can’t say why, but I’m sure he was seventeen… I’m also sure of his bravery… He was wearing a white shirt and loose black pants that flapped in the wind like a flag… He was wearing sneakers that had once been white but in the dream were an indeterminate color… He had long hair and though his face remained in shadow I glimpsed dark wolf or coyote eyes… The streets were vast, some paved, some cobbled, but vast and empty… The kid loped along, happy to be alive, happy that the warm wind was rippling his clothes… Then four or five people appeared… They all knew one another and they walked together for a while… Next the kid and his companions stopped at an overlook… Beneath them was a ravine, and, in the distance, the silhouettes of other buildings… Among the buildings rose the movie theater, imposing as four cathedrals and four soccer fields… The Diorama… The kid and his companions admired the dark landscape and produced bottles of beer and drugs from somewhere… Little by little their gestures became more disturbing… They gesticulated, argued… One of the guys, fat and wearing tight pants, grabbed the kid by the neck and hurled him into the middle of the street… The others laughed… Then a knife appeared in the kid’s hand and he stepped toward the fat guy… No one saw anything, but the laughter froze… The fat guy took the blow in the stomach… He could feel the tension in the kid’s arm… The kid’s determination, edged with disgust… Disgust conquered by the driving force of his arm… Then the storm began…

A Drink on the Road

Cherniakovski? Juan Cherniakovski? Iván Cherniakovski? Cherniakovski, the poet. I remember him, said the algebra teacher, nobody who saw him even once could forget Cherniakovski. He was as handsome as they come. Back then, in ’71 or ’72, the ladies were always chasing him, you know? I’m no faggot, one look at me and it’s obvious I don’t give a shit about fashion, but I had eyes or at least I could see things more clearly back then, vision’s going, you know? Though ideologically everything is as dark as ever, if that makes sense, I guess confusion is just our natural state, the natural state of history, I don’t know, Slim, sometimes I think it would make the most sense for all of us to kill ourselves, but luckily I’ve got my old lady and the goats and I’m still down in the trenches. What was I saying? Cherniakovski, Juanito Cherniakovski, a great poet, though I’m no judge, it’s been years since I read a poem and to think there was a time when I wrote them. I haven’t even read Zurita, which says it all. Not Zurita, not Millán, not Maquieira, though none of them are dead yet. What can I tell you about the ones who went into exile? It’s like they never existed. But where was I? Juanito Cherniakovski. Nice guy. Son of the Dead Sea, that was what the Fascists in Econ called him, it’s hard to explain how scared people were of him, how much they respected him. Even the nickname, which was supposed to be insulting, is a giveaway. See, they didn’t call him a Jew bastard, there’s the difference. Honestly, I don’t know what it was about Cherniakovski, but people respected him. Don’t think for a minute that he was some leftist thug, the kind who were all over the place, unfortunately, or that he ever raised his voice, threatened anybody. I think Cherniakovski won people over with his looks. Go on, laugh. Have you seen any paintings by Dürer, Slim? And do you remember the one called Oswolt Krel? You never saw it in your life? It’s oil on wood, with two side panels that close over the portrait of Oswolt Krel, and on each of the side panels, along with the family coats of arms, there’s a scary-looking wild man with blond hair. But the important thing is the portrait of Oswolt. The spitting image of Cherniakovski! Pure energy! Pure tragic energy, if you know what I mean, Slim. That was Cherniakovski, he had the most tragic, soulful eyes I’ve ever seen, though I could be exaggerating. I’ve seen lots of eyes since then, or at least it seems like a lot to me. I’ve even seen eyes in my soup, Slim! You too? Let’s drink to that! Oswolt Krel, God damn it. Juanito Cherniakovski in the flesh… Respected, admired, beloved, but a touch of the odd bird, like Oswolt, frankly. A touch of something strange in the eyes. A touch? No, man, I take that back, a shitload. You should see the painting, Slim! Oswolt Krel gets a glimpse of something terrible, yes? And it’s obvious that he has, but he restrains himself, he pulls himself together, it’s just his eyes, which are the mirror of the soul, that reveal the horror that the spectator can’t see. Is he afraid? Maybe, but he holds it in, and that’s the incredible thing about him… That’s what Cherniakovski was like… He held it in. Overall, he was a good guy, a down to earth guy… He was in exile for a while, I think… It was too bad he had to give up his poetry workshop, we had fun, but what else could he do? How long was I in the workshop? My whole youth, pal! And I got to know the Pons sisters, absolutely. Two pretty girls, good poetesses. Especially Edna Pons. I’m forgetting the other one’s name. Lisa, that’s right. Lisa and Edna Pons. Cherniakovski’s pride and joy. Of the rest of the workshop, well, I remember two journalism kids, two or three other literature kids, the actor Javier Oyarzún, he struck it lucky, the bastard, and you, of course… What did you say your name was? Belano? The talker! Rules Boy Belano. Of course I remember. It might not seem like it, but I do. The speechmaker, right? Don’t be embarrassed, Slim! Those were good times! Did I notice some stranger at the workshop before the coup? Exactly how long are we talking? Two or three months before? Man, strangers plural, in those days it was like a three-ring circus, there were all kinds of strangers, people who came in just to read a manifesto or to spend the afternoon: we were all fired up and partying twenty-four seven, don’t you remember? And the workshop was always open… Not like Fernández’s, which was stricter and more elitist. A poet? Slim, man, in those days we were all poets. Let me tell you something: Cherniakovski was the only one who seemed to know everyone, he’s the one who could shed some light for you, but who knows where Cherniakovski is at this point in the game. That’s all I can tell you, sorry. Rules Boy Belano! It’s been a pleasure talking to you, man, but I have to go. Duty calls and I can still ring a few bells. It’s hard to sell appliances door to door, but it’s a steady job and with sales on the installment plan, all the better. Keep in mind that we’re virtually the only business in the trade. I can’t handle competition, Slim… No, let me get this… I have cash and One Eye here gives me a discount…

The Dream (2)

The kid in the white shirt walked the streets of the dark city… In the distance, silhouetted against the horizon, he saw the movie theater… But no, to say that it was silhouetted might erroneously suggest that it was on level ground, which was not the case… The streets rose and fell, stone staircases everywhere, gleaming in the night… The city, or at least this part of the city, seemed to be built on hills and crags… Uneven ground, paved with stone and cement, flanked by ravines filling up with black garbage bags as shiny as stones… And there were columns… Roman or Greek columns, holding urns… Urns plain and simple: the flowerpots of hell, muttered the boy… The kid glanced sidelong at the urns (flowerless) and the pillars… The kid was in a hurry, I know; it’s not that he was scared… If I could climb a pillar, he thought, and reach into one of those pots… On the kid’s face, hidden in shadows, a white smile with yellow streaks like strands of gold appeared… Imperceptibly, the silhouette of the movie theater loomed larger… There was no one in the stone and cardboard ticket booth… In any case, the kid had no plans to buy a ticket… He strode along the inner corridors of the movie theater… The corridors seemed like sections of an underground parking garage, they were too wide and the curtains that covered the cement wall barely concealed a swarm of pipes… Finally he pushed through double doors and stepped into a side gallery… From here he could see only part of the screen… The faces projected, a close-up of two platinum blondes, moved with exasperating slowness… Still standing, the kid watched the scene… The gallery was long and narrow… At the back were stacks of cane chairs and a row of seats rotted by the rain… The kid took a pack of Cabañas and a gold lighter out of his pocket… Along with the knife, they were his only possessions… He lit a cigarette and the smoke veiled his eyes like a tiny screen between him and the Diorama screen…

The Oarsman of Fate

Walt Whitman’s daughters have hairy balls

Walt Whitman’s daughters are gilded dolls

Walt Whitman’s daughters sail as night falls

Eating breasts

Of turkey

Signed (in the air):

Carlos Ramírez

FACh Lieutenant

“What do you think of the poem?” asks Bibiano Macaduck.

“I don’t know…”

“It’s crap. The fucking goose-stepper thinks he’s Céline.”

“Are you including him in your Signals, too?”

“His complete works, compadre. The acme of the arrogance brigades, confound them, pack of morons…”

“But this poem isn’t in the Watchful Eye…”

“Ah, but we have our sources. The poem in question turned up at the Concepción Library on the shelf of lost works, between a monograph on the Seventh Regiment (an insane book that has our valiant troops scaling the slopes of Machu Picchu) and a Crawford and Sons volume on certain forays of Chile’s premier botanist, full of sketches of the nation’s flora and some of its fauna. What was the botanist’s name, for Christ’s sake? There must be something wrong with me, Rules Boy! I remember the publishing house, gone more than sixty years now, and I can’t remember the botanist.”

“Philippi.”

“That’s right. Rudolf Amand. God, what’s wrong with me!”

“Relax, Macaduck. You found it between the Seventh Regiment and Philippi. But what did you find, exactly?”

“The journal with the poem in it, you dolt. Poems by Ramírez, some guy, Ismael Copero, and somebody else I can’t remember. All of it crammed into an oversize eight-page booklet. The title of this monstrosity was Semana Santa, I shit you not. Semana Santa, get it? Initials: SS.”

“Take it easy.”

“Fine…”

“So where can I see this journal?”

“I told you, dumb ass, in the library. I’ll make you a map so you can find the famous shelf without getting scrambled. Some strange books are buried in that dump. On Ramírez’s shelf, you’ve got the Italian Fascists cuddling up to the Nazis and the National Unionists. Or their artistic manifestations. I mean: thugs on the plane of the sublime. The truth is, there’s not much to choose between them, but you can trace the resolve. A straight line from the turn of the century, followed relentlessly, sometimes successfully and sometimes not: usually not. Occasionally I try to imagine what the rat who drops books off there must be like. The rat or the monk.”

“I’ll go and see it with my own eyes,” I said.

“Better wait and read my Signals. Poking around in the dust will only confuse you more, Rules Boy.”

“I’m going anyway,” I said.

“What do you think he meant by saying that the daughters have hairy balls?”

“That they’re men, obviously, Bibiano. Walt Whitman’s daughters are men. Which is why they have hairy testicles… He must be referring to Neruda, Sandburg, de Rokha, Vachel Lindsay…”

“What about when he says that they’re gilded dolls?”

“Man, ‘dolls’ is there to rhyme with ‘balls,’ that’s the only reason I can think of. Unless the point is that they have money. Golden girls. But I doubt it.”

“What about Walt Whitman’s daughters sailing as night falls?”

“Same thing: it’s for the rhyme. Makes no difference whether they sail as night falls or whether they sink their ships, like Hernán Cortés.”

“Look, this is how I see it. Walt Whitman is America. ‘Walt Whitman’s daughters have hairy balls’ is a reference to the Amazons or the angels, the original inhabitants of the continent. The second line, about gilded dolls, means that the Amazons have forgotten their true nature and gotten mixed up with the new throngs of European immigrants, and on top of that they have gold: money or wisdom. The third line, when the daughters of Walt Whitman sail as night falls, is a reference to the Amazons’ voyage to America. When you brought up Hernán Cortés, you unintentionally came close to hitting the nail on the head. The fourth and fifth lines, in which they eat turkey breasts, suggests—no, flat out states—that the Amazons came down to Earth devouring their parents, the gods of heaven. Devouring them with smiles on their faces, I’d say.”

“You’re messing with me, Macaduck.”

“Actually, the events described in the poem aren’t in chronological order. If we read it this way around, our birdie will sing a different tune: ‘Walt Whitman’s daughters sail as night falls / Eating breasts / Of turkey / The daughters of Walt Whitman have hairy balls / The daughters of Walt Whitman are gilded dolls,’ and even better: insert the adverb ‘today.’ Today Walt Whitman’s daughters (now, at this moment of struggle and destruction) are gilded dolls (they mingle complacently with decent working women, decent wives and mothers). And, as I’m sure you know, in some cultures the turkey is synonymous with sovereignty, wealth, and power… In America, and Europe too, the turkey stands for the father…”

“I always thought that kids who acted dumb were called turkeys. In school that’s what they called me for a while.”

“That’s true, too, that’s the flip side of it… We want to believe that the gods are stupid. But we don’t lift a finger in the face of their wrath. Only the Amazons have ever been capable of eating them…”

“So, according to you, the hidden message of the poem is…”

“I’m not surprised you got a zero in mythology, Rules Boy. These chicks devour their parents and come down to earth thinking they’re the shit, prancing around, even eating! Can you imagine the movie? Like the dinner party from Venus Attack, when an H-bomb is dropped on San Francisco and the guests come out on the terrace carrying chicken wings and glasses of wine, and they keep chewing and sipping as the mushroom cloud grows in the distance, have you seen it?”

“I saw it.”

“Well, it’s the same thing. The Amazons step out of their ships, victorious, feeling the peace that settles in the pores once the sweat has dried and everything is over. They come, they see, and they conquer. Still, the mere fact that a poet (especially when that poet is Carlos Ramírez) has testified to their arrival hides the seed or promise of destruction.”

“Whose destruction?”

“Come on, man, the Amazons’.”

“But why? Why would he destroy them?”

“I’ll tell you, but don’t yell. I could quote some sixty psychology books. But I’ll make it brief: the guy has a problem with women…”

“Oh, that’s all…”

“No, that’s not all. He’s got muscle—that’s how I’d put it. The son of a bitch, if I can take poetic license, is an oarsman of fate…”

Cherniakovski Presents Two Images of India at the University of Concepción Poetry Workshop, 1972

The photographs come from two photographers, two books, and two ways of seeing India. Some are by Englishman Frederic Chester, from the book The Wellspring of the Aryan Race. The others, illustrations to The Chaste Secrets, by Dr. (Mrs.) Amalfitano, were taken by the Argentine photographer Eduardo “Lorito” Lozano. I think they complement each other, even if the complementing takes place in a savage realm, full of mirrors and heat. The faces, however, are noble and indifferent, as if they know something that we don’t. As if they’ve come to accept something—perhaps after a millennial struggle—that we likely would not. Cherniakovski’s face was contorted… I remember that it was winter and it was pouring rain. The Pons sisters, Javier Oyarzún, Fuenzalida, and I were all there, talking Rilke. Cherniakovski arrived ten minutes late. He was carrying a slide projector. The projector was wet and so was he. Not bothering to dry himself off, he plugged in the projector and began to show the slides. There was no need to close the curtains: low black clouds covered the sky. Rain streaked the windows. That’s a Brahmin, said Cherniakovski. Shot of a man with white hair and a white beard, dark skin, dark eyes, lips parted as if in conversation with the man on the other side of the lens. Cherniakovski sucked in air through his nose. Then came photographs of villages and cities, though it was hard to tell which was which. Boys in shorts, Talcahuano, said Javier Oyarzún. I searched for Cherniakovski’s face in the semidarkness. His expression was stern and his eyes were glued to the screen. The Brahmin, whispered Cherniakovski. Again we saw the old man with the white beard, now sitting on a stone. Then a bright-red bus with white stripes, packed to the brim, and the statue of a god in a shrine by the side of the road. The god’s eyes were green. The projector made a sound like an eggbeater and between slides the screen went blank: a weirdly illuminated stretch of wall. Some of us lit cigarettes. Cherniakovski said: that’s a Brahmin, do you know what he’s doing? His tone of voice made us shudder for some inexplicable reason. The rain seemed to fall inside the workshop. When we tried to look closer, the slide was gone. Encore, said Javier Oyarzún, but now other snapshots of the city’s streets and inhabitants appeared. Indians eating in markets, old women with goods for sale on the ground, beggars in black Ray-Bans. Outside the rain literally lashed the walls. On the screen: a road, the old Brahmin, and the photographer’s shadow. Then another photograph, closer up, the Brahmin casting a sideway glance at the lens with an apologetic smile. In the next one, the Brahmin’s back was to the photographer and he was walking toward a city that could be glimpsed on the horizon. The city was barely visible and the air was dirty, stung with smoke and fog. There were five or six more slides until the old man disappeared around a bend. Cherniakovski coughed. What is the Brahmin doing? he asked. After some discussion, all we could say was that the Brahmin was walking toward a city. Calcutta? asked Javier Oyarzún. Bombay, said Cherniakovski. And the old man wasn’t just walking, he was staring at the ground. Why? So he doesn’t kill anything. Not even a single ant. Which is why the trip takes so long when he travels by foot—and these saints only travel by foot, I think, though I can’t swear to it. A fifteen-mile walk can take four days, but they don’t care. These people would rather die than hurt a butterfly. Now look at this. We sighed and turned our eyes to the screen again. We were definitely better off with Rilke. A room in India. Candles burning and faces emerging from the darkness as if from a black pool, smiling at the camera. Women? No, men wearing saris, their eyes made up. Transvestites, said Javier Oyarzún. Eunuchs, came Cherniakovski’s voice from the rear of the workshop. I looked at him. His eyes stared, dazzled by the halo of light. The eunuchs were having a party. In a corner of the room, a boy. He’s naked. A man with long white hair ties the boy’s little testicles with a yellow ribbon. Cherniakovski let the white light linger on the wall. Now they go ahead and castrate him, he said. The operation is performed by the eunuchs’ guru. We saw the skinny face of the boy. Ten, maybe eleven. Skinny and smiling. And Gabriela Mistral is dead, we heard Cherniakovski say in a soft, very dangerous voice. On this detail I must insist: his voice was as lethal as a razor-sharp boomerang, and so real that I ducked my head. Where the hell did you get these photographs? asked Javier Oyarzún, shrinking back in his seat, horrified. Cherniakovski didn’t reply. He lit a cigarette and sat down in one of the many empty chairs. The projector kept running on its own. Its rattle gradually meshed with the sound of the rain. The rain seemed to say: get outside and enjoy your youth. Indians walking, working, eating, sleeping, but especially Indians walking. As if the slides were stuck… With my head on fire I took a last look at the screen. I seemed to see Juan Cherniakovski there, very dirty, his hair longer, smoking a cigarette and walking in the crowd. But probably it was just another Indian.

Bibiano Macaduck’s Lecture at the Cortapalos Club of Concepción

When the war was over, Cherniakovski left the country. I guess he was looking for adventure or a break or he was trying to wipe the visions of delirium from his head. The fact is that he went to one of those Latin American cities that do their best to simulate hell. It had it all: gunmen, beggars, whores, child exploitation, everything you could ask for. Cherniakovski moved in with a reporter. In those days, of course, his name wasn’t Cherniakovski. Let’s say he went by Víctor Díaz. At first he lived a relatively quiet life. Maybe that was because he never went out. Víctor Díaz was a homebody. He got up late, past noon, brewed himself some coffee, and took his time drinking it. According to the reporter, Víctor Díaz wrote poems, short ones and not many of them, but all very polished, as was the norm among his old friends from Concepción. If you were born in the forties, you wrote short poems. If you were born in the fifties, you wrote epics. If you were born in the sixties, you wrote flatlined electroencephalograms. Ha ha, that’s a joke. Anyway: Víctor Díaz went back to writing little poems and he left the reporter’s house only to buy food and the like. Until one night he agreed to go out partying with some friends (the reporter’s friends) and he was introduced to the red-light district. Bad news. His eyes, which had seemed to soften in the peace and quiet, grew sharp again. His whole body was on fire after that first night. The next week, he ventured out again, but this time alone. And every night after that. According to the reporter, Víctor Díaz was asking to be stabbed or shot, but you and I know how tough Cherniakovski was. The lucky bastard! End result: he took a prostitute as a lover. She was fifteen or sixteen, and she had a twelve-year-old brother. The pimps of the red-light district wanted to sell the kid. Whether as a rent boy or as fresh meat for organ transplants, it’s not clear. Both were lucrative prospects. Víctor Díaz inhaled all the information he got from his lover like an addict going through withdrawal. There are men, I swear, who have some mysterious—even supernatural—ability to get their hands on any kind of weapon in any situation. Víctor Díaz was one of them. One night, he turned up with a Spanish Luger and he shot two pimps and three bodyguards. The sight of blood went to his head. Though according to other versions, he only killed one person. And I have a strong hunch of my own: the dead man was the prostitute’s father (though not the little brother’s). Either way, a crime was committed. There was blood. And it would all have turned into your typical tropical catastrophe were it not for the woman in this story. We can thank our lucky stars that the teenage prostitute had more sense and smarts than anyone could have imagined, because otherwise Víctor Díaz would be dead. Though we have our doubts about that. Anyway: the girl hid him, and we can guess that sooner or later they left the country. The prostitute, her little brother, and Víctor Díaz. The latter had contacts, and it seems that his companions came along for the ride. The three of them set off for some European country. Did Víctor Díaz marry his teen lover? Did the little brother go to school, did he make a place for himself in that strange and extraordinary culture? Did he learn to speak French, English, German? What was Víctor Díaz’s victory, exactly? Was it finding them a home in a suburb of Development? We’ll never be able to answer these questions with full confidence. Víctor Díaz got them settled, and after a while he left again. International terrorism was summoning our compatriot to other tasks…

Bibiano Macaduck’s Lecture at the Cortapalos Club of Concepción (2)

I’ve spoken about a child and a sacrifice. Sacrifice in the commercial sense of the word. Now I think I should add a thing or two. Traffic in children’s organs spread across Latin America at more or less the same time as Juan Cherniakovski (or Víctor Díaz) was wandering the Bolivarian stage with bloodshot eyes. And you’re right, the image isn’t mine—I stole it from some tabloid. The story, I think, unfolds like a performance at one of those so-called art house theaters: in the artificial dark of night, Víctor Díaz, one of legions of shuddering, sleepy Latin American macho men, arrives by chance at the heart of the slaughterhouse. The scenery is red and children roam a refrigerated corral awaiting their fate, which is to fly legally or clandestinely to private clinics in the United States or Canada—in some cases, clinics in Mexico, Guatemala, Puerto Rico—where they will undergo an operation. Everybody knows (since now and then El Mercurio makes it their business to inform us) that the waiting lists for those who need a kidney, a pancreas, or a heart can be long. So if you can pay for it (and in Real Democracies there is money), it’s more comfortable—and above all, safer—to go under the knife at one of these private clinics. The network is run by professionals and it’s efficient. There’s always material. This is important if you’re an engineer from San Francisco and you need a liver right away or the party’s over. It’s important if you’re a good parent and you know that unless your six-year-old gets a heart transplant in two weeks, he’ll die in your arms. Love—as everybody knows—moves mountains and spares no cost. Self-love or brotherly love. Need drives the market. And the market grows and fine-tunes itself. In the performance we were talking about, children wander bleak streets under palm trees. Other equally bloody stories unspool in the same place, but fate, which is like the devil and unites alpha and omega, led Víctor Díaz—who once upon a time wasn’t Víctor Díaz and relished the poetry of Gabriela Mistral—to immerse himself in this particular horror. The scenery is red, and gang bosses and bands of lowlifes stroll under the palm trees. Hideous crones, like the witch from “Hansel and Gretel,” play the part of health inspectors. Beggar children, homeless children, are the most common source of raw material. They’re relatively easy to catch and their absence goes mostly unnoticed, but they have one drawback, energetically decried by the medical teams of various clinics: they aren’t always healthy, their organs weak or ruined. The gang leaders deliberate in the land of Bolívar and San Martín, and after these parleys, commands fly across the theater at a speed achievable only by serious operators. Under the palm trees, when a sun of glossy paper—perfect imitation of a Siqueiros sun—sets over the saddest roofs on Earth, janissaries set out to steal children who’ve been better cared for. Speaking cinematographically, we move from Buñuel’s Los olvidados to some random Joselito movie. These aren’t middle-class children, obviously, but the children of workers. In fact, let’s call them the children of working mothers, so that Víctor Díaz’s eyes explode like neutron bombs. Seamstresses, shoe factory workers, waitresses, teachers, the occasional prostitute with a heart of gold. The business advances by leaps and bounds. In the land of palm trees and beyond, everyone has heard of it and it is occasionally discussed in hushed voices. Publicly, nobody will touch it or go near it. The criollo authorities respond in time-honored fashion by covering their ears. Like the three little monkeys, like Harman and Ising’s cartoon version of the three little monkeys. Worse, if possible. The bosses are efficient and keep a low profile. The press lavishes well-informed citizens with details of the drug trade and the arms trade, which carry on like something in the foreground of a Flemish painting, while in the background a long line of children are carted off to the slaughterhouse. (For further information, I recommend Auden, the poem that begins: “About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position; how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along…” etcetera, etcetera, though I suppose you’ve never heard of Auden, like good Chileans.) The silence, as I was saying, is almost total. Every so often there’s a bit of news, not in the papers or on television, but in magazines, like stories about flying saucers. We know it exists, but the reality is so awful that we’d rather pretend we don’t. That’s human progress. Assaults on a deserted street are awful at first, and break-ins are even worse, but we end up coming to terms with both. We’ve progressed from the perfect execution to the concentration camp and the atomic bomb. We seem to have stomachs of steel, but we’re not ready to digest child-killing cannibalism, despite the counsel of Swift and Dupleix. We’ll accept it eventually, but not yet. Meanwhile business prospers under the palm trees, and the Siqueiros sun rises and falls like a mad mandrill. The witches touch up their warts with French makeup. The child hunters play cards and fondle their privates like degenerate Narcissuses, fathers and brothers of us all. Víctor Díaz (a man who really preferred the love of men) falls in love with an adolescent prostitute and embraces the Terror. His formula is expressed as the curtain falls: if Paradise, in order to be Paradise, is fertile soil for a vast Hell, the duty of the Poet is to turn Paradise into Hell. Víctor Díaz and Jesus Christ set fire to the palm trees.

Regarding Events at Perpignan Station in the Early Morning Hours of December 13, 1988

Monsieur Benoît Hernández, forty-three, married and a native of Avignon, who on the dates of this deposition was in Perpignan for the purpose of performing his professional duties, has provided documents confirming that he is a wine sales representative for the house of Peyrade, in Marseille, with no criminal record.

On the night of December 12, M. Hernández dined with M. Patrick Monardes, with whom he planned to finalize the sale of one hundred and forty cases of Grand Reserve XXX from the Viticulture Cooperative of Port-Vendres. Attached is a statement from M. Monardes corroborating this fact. It is noted that the house of Peyrade has had business dealings with the Cooperative of Port-Vendres for the past five years. M. Hernández and M. Monardes dined at Restaurant Coelho, where M. Monardes is a regular, known to the owner and employees. Attached are statements from M. Coelho; from the waiter who served M. Monardes and M. Hernández; and from the cook, who was twice visited by Monardes and Hernández (they stepped into the kitchen, in other words). The two men were delighted by the quality and originality of the food and also somewhat inebriated by the wine they had consumed.

When dinner was over, they proceeded to the Leather Clock, a fashionable dance club located in the center of our town. Here M. Monardes and M. Hernández remained until approximately five in the morning, though neither of the two is able to say exactly what time it was. Attached is a statement from Jean-Marc Rivette, waiter at the Leather Clock, who confirms that he served alcoholic beverages to M. Monardes, known to him before the date of this deposition, and to a male companion of M. Monardes’s, in all likelihood M. Hernández. In his statement, Jean-Marc Rivette mentions that he saw Monardes and Hernández dancing on the main floor of the Leather Clock in the company of two women. Interrogated on this point, Monardes and Hernández deny having danced at all, which leads to the assumption that Rivette was mistaken or that Monardes and Hernández were dancing in such a state of intoxication that they are incapable of remembering it.

From the Leather Clock, M. Hernández and M. Monardes took a taxi to the latter’s residence, having made the prudent choice not to drive M. Monardes’s car, parked two blocks from the dance club. Ahmed Filali, the taxi driver, confirms that he picked up a fare at the Leather Clock, but he was reluctant to give a precise time, estimating that it was between four and five in the morning. Attached is his statement, and let it be noted that the aforementioned driver neglected to record the time and location of the fare request, as required…

Regarding Events at Perpignan Station in the Early Morning Hours of December 13, 1988 (2)

After they were dropped off at M. Monardes’s residence, M. Hernández paid the taxi driver and dismissed him. M. Monardes’s wife and daughter didn’t hear M. Monardes arrive. M. Monardes confirms that M. Hernández accompanied him to the elevator (M. Monardes lives in a third-floor apartment) and refused to come up, despite repeated entreaties. At seven a.m., M. Monardes’s wife found her husband asleep in the guest room when she got up to make breakfast. M. Monardes, a man of rather intemperate nocturnal habits, often slept in the guest room when he came home under the influence.

After leaving M. Monardes safe and sound, M. Hernández decided to take a walk through town rather than catching a taxi back to his hotel. Here we should note that M. Hernández’s hotel was less than one hundred yards from the station. It’s no surprise, then, that Mr. Hernández’s walk concluded in the general vicinity of the station.

At this point, M. Hernández’s statement becomes less precise, full of gaps and question marks. As someone accustomed to drinking, M. Hernández knew that a night walk would help to clear his head, especially when little sleep was likely to be forthcoming. According to M. Hernández’s schedule, he was supposed to leave Perpignan at eleven a.m., en route to Bordeaux, where he hoped to close another deal with local winemakers. As usual, he planned to make the trip in the same vehicle in which he had arrived in Perpignan, in other words, his own car. So far, so good.

What caused him to set foot in the station itself? M. Hernández hypothesizes that he wasn’t tired yet and that the morning chill made a cup of hot coffee sound appealing. Thinking that the only place open so early would be the station restaurant, he turned in that direction.

The main entrances to the station were closed. But not the side entrances, one of which leads to the post office and other agencies, and one to the platforms. M. Hernández doesn’t remember which he took, though it’s possible to deduce that it was the one leading to the post office. M. Hernández remembers seeing two sacks of mail in the hallway, but no employees. The post office manager, André Lebel, confirms this. At that hour, the employees—Lebel himself and Pascal Lebrun—were busy sorting the mail in the back room and it’s possible that an empty sack or two had been left in the hall. Sacks aside, all that can be said for certain is that no one saw or was seen by M. Hernández as he entered the station.

M. Hernández’s walk along the platforms was brief. He went in search of the restaurant and discovered that it was closed. It was at this point, M. Hernández confessed, that he began to feel a growing sense of unease. Was it something in the restaurant or on the platforms that sparked his unease? Did M. Hernández fear being the only person in the station, perhaps, and therefore the likely victim of some assault or other aggression? When questioned about this, M. Hernández responded that it never occurred to him that he might be assaulted, much less that he might be the only person in the station. According to M. Hernández, everybody knows that stations are never completely empty. The greater likelihood, given the early hour and the cold, was that the employees were all hidden away in their respective cubicles. So what did trigger M. Hernández’s stated unease? The only possible explanation is his discovery that the restaurant was closed.

Except that the restaurant wasn’t closed. When he didn’t see lights on inside, this was the conclusion that M. Hernández reached, but if he had pushed the door open he would have realized his error. (M. Hernández can’t remember whether the door was open or closed or whether he tried to open it, and he admits that it’s possible he assumed that the restaurant was closed just because the lights were off and there wasn’t a soul sitting at the counter, behind the counter, or at the tables.)

At the moment in question, the restaurant manager, M. Jean-Marcel Vilar, was in the kitchen with the cleaning girl and one of the station’s watchmen. None of them remembers hearing or seeing anything. The kitchen door was closed due to the morning cold, according to M. Vilar. The kitchen is a long, windowless room with two vents, isolated from the rest of the restaurant. And yet, if the light was on in the kitchen, which seems beyond dispute, M. Hernández would have seen it through the glass. (In his statement, M. Hernández says that he didn’t see any lights on inside the restaurant.) The cleaning girl, Aline Darcy, eighteen, arrested twice for drug dealing and an addict herself, currently in recovery, has her own explanation for why M. Hernández didn’t see light coming from the kitchen. According to her, they were working by candlelight, at the express request of M. Vilar, who was trying to save on electricity. Questioned about this, M. Vilar and the watchman emphatically denied the truth of this statement. In a side note to the main investigation, we note that two days after the date of the deposition, Aline Darcy exhibited contusions and bruises to her arms and back. The bruises weren’t the result of clumsy needle punctures but rather seemed to be caused by pinches or blows…

From Lola Fontfreda to Rigoberto Belano

I’m Catalan. I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in ghosts. But yesterday Fernando came to me in a dream. He stood beside my bed and asked me to take care of the child. He asked me to forgive him for leaving me nothing. He asked me to forgive him for not loving me. No. He asked me to forgive him for loving me less than he loved books. But the child made up for all that, he said, because he loved him more than anything. Both of them: Didac and Eric. Actually, the children is what he said, which could have been a reference to all the children in the world, not just his own children. Then he got up and went into another room. I followed him. It was a hospital room. Fernando undressed and got into one of the beds. The other beds were empty, though the sheets were rumpled and in some cases shockingly dirty. I went to Fernando’s bed and took his hand. We smiled at each other. I’m burning up, he said, feel my forehead, how high is my fever? One hundred and seven, I answered. I don’t know why, since there was no way to take his temperature. You’re so precise it’s scary, he said, but now you should go. I thought he had mistaken me for the Swedish woman. When I went out, I started to cry. I think Fernando was crying too. From here a person can go back anywhere, he said, please don’t come in. I went out and sat on a chair in the hall. There were no nurses or doctors or family members anywhere. Soon I heard Fernando screaming. His screams were terrible, followed by whistles, and I couldn’t stand it but I didn’t move. Fernando was screaming from the depths of his soul, sometimes piercingly and sometimes hoarsely, as if his throat was scorched. He seemed to be asking for water. He seemed to be calling cattle. He seemed to be whistling a song… Then I woke up. I was shaking and soaked in sweat. It took me a while to realize that I was crying too. Since I couldn’t sleep anymore, I decided to write this. Now I think I should send it to you.