Last Evenings On Earth

MAURICIO ("THE EYE") SILVA

Mauricio Silva, also known as "The Eye," always tried to avoid violence, even at the risk of being considered a coward, but violence, real violence, is unavoidable, at least for those of us who were born in Latin America during the fifties and were about twenty years old at the time of Salvador Allende's death. That's just the way it goes.

The case of The Eye is paradigmatic and exemplary, and it may well be worth recalling, especially now that so many years have passed.

In January 1974, four months after the military coup, The Eye left Chile. First he went to Buenos Aires, but then the ill winds blowing in the neighboring republic sent him to Mexico, where he lived for a couple of years. That's where I met him.

He wasn't like most of the Chileans living in Mexico City at the time: he didn't brag about his role in the largely phantasmal resistance; he didn't frequent the various groups of Chileans in exile.

We became friends and used to meet at least once a week at the Cafй La Habana in the Avenida Bucareli or at my house in the Calle Versalles, where I lived with my mother and sister. For the first few months, The Eye scraped by doing odd jobs, before finding work as a photographer for a newspaper. I can't remember which one it was, maybe El Sol, if such a newspaper ever existed in Mexico, or El Universal; I would like to think it was El Nacional, whose cultural supplement was edited by the old Spanish poet Juan Rejano, but it can't have been, because I worked there and I never saw him at the office. Anyway, he worked for one of the Mexico City papers, I'm quite sure of that, and his financial situation improved, imperceptibly at first, because The Eye had grown accustomed to a spartan way of life, but if you looked carefully, you could spot unequivocal signs of an economic upturn.

For example, during the first months I remember him wearing sweatshirts. Toward the end of his time in Mexico City he had bought himself a pair of shirts with collars and once I even saw him in a tie, an item of apparel quite foreign to me and my poet friends. In fact the only person wearing a tie who ever sat down at our table in the Cafй La Habana was Mauricio ("The Eye") Silva.

At the time, The Eye was reputed to be a homosexual. By which I mean that a rumor to that effect was circulating in the various groups of Chileans in exile, who made it their business partly for the sheer pleasure of denigration and partly to add a little spice to their rather boring lives. In spite of their left-wing convictions, when it came to sexuality, they reacted just like their enemies on the right, who had become the new masters of Chile.

The Eye came to dinner at my house once. My mother liked him and The Eye returned her affection by taking family photos from time to time: my mother and one of her friends, my sister and me. Everyone likes to be photographed, he once told me. At the time I thought, I don't care one way or the other, but on reflection I decided he was right. The only people who don't like it are certain Indians, he said. My mother thought he was talking about the Mapuche, but in fact he meant Indians from India, a country that was to play a major part in his life.

One night I ran into him in the Cafй La Habana. There was hardly anyone else there and The Eye was sitting by the windows that look out onto the Avenida Bucareli, with a white coffee in one of those big, thick glasses they used to have at La Habana (I've never come across them in any other cafй or restaurant). I sat down next to him and we talked for a while. He seemed translucent. That was the impression I had. The Eye seemed to be made of some vitreous material. His face and the glass of white coffee in front of him seemed to be exchanging signals: two incomprehensible phenomena whose paths had just crossed at that point in the vast universe, making valiant but probably vain attempts to find a common language.

That night he confessed to me that he was a homosexual, just as the exiled Chileans had been whispering, and that he was leaving Mexico. For a moment I thought he was leaving because he was homosexual. But no, a friend had found him a job with a photographic agency in Paris, the sort of work he had always dreamed of. He was in the mood for talking and I listened. He said that for years he had felt guilty and hidden his sexuality, mainly because he considered himself a socialist and there was a certain degree of prejudice among his friends on the Left. We talked about the antiquated word "invert," which conjured up desolate landscapes, and the term "ponce," which I would have written with a c, while The Eye thought it was spelt with an s.

I remember we ended up railing against the Chilean Left, and at one point I proposed a toast to the wandering fighters of Chile, a substantial subset of the wandering fighters of Latin America, a legion of orphans, who, as the name suggests, wander the face of the earth offering their services to the highest bidder, who is almost always the lowest as well. But when we finished laughing, The Eye said violence wasn't for him. I'm not like you, he said, with a sadness I didn't understand at the time, I hate violence. I assured him that I did too. Then we started talking about other things: books and movies, and after that we didn't see each other again.

One day I heard that The Eye had left Mexico. One of his former colleagues from the newspaper told me. I wasn't surprised that he hadn't said good-bye. The Eye never said good-bye to anyone. I never said good-bye to anyone either. None of my Mexican friends ever did. For my mother, however, it was a clear case of bad manners.

Two or three years later I left Mexico too. I went to Paris, where I tried (not very hard, admittedly) to find The Eye, without success. As time went by I began to forget what he looked like, although I still had a vague sense of his bearing and his manner. There was a certain way of expressing opinions, as if from a distance, sadly but gently, that I went on associating with The Eye, and even when his face had disappeared or receded into the shadows, that essence lingered in my memory: a way of moving, an almost abstract entity in which there was no place for calm.

Years went by. Many years. Some friends died. I got married, had a child, published some books.

At one point I had to go to Berlin. On my last night there, after dinner with Heinrich von Berenberg and his family, I took a taxi to my hotel (as a rule Heinrich drove me back at night) and told the driver to stop before we got there, because I felt like a walk. The driver (an elderly Asian man who was listening to Beethoven) dropped me about five blocks from the hotel. It wasn't very late, but there was hardly anyone about. I walked across a square. The Eye was sitting on a bench. I didn't recognize him until he spoke to me. He called my name and asked me how I was. I turned around and looked at him for a few moments without realizing who it was. He remained seated on the bench, looking at me, then glanced down at the ground or to the side, at the huge trees crowding that little square in Berlin and at the shadows surrounding him more densely than me (or so I thought). I took two steps toward him and asked who he was. It's me, Mauricio Silva, he said. The Eye, I asked, from Chile? He nodded and only then did I see him smile.

That night we talked almost until dawn. The Eye had been living in Berlin for some years and knew where to find the bars that stayed open all night. I asked him about his life. He gave me a general idea of the freelance photographer's lot. He had lived in Paris, Milan, and now Berlin, in modest apartments, where his books kept one another company during his long absences. It was only when we went into the first bar that I could tell how much he had changed. He was a lot thinner, his hair was going grey and wrinkles creased his face. I also noticed that he drank much more than he used to in Mexico. He wanted to know about me. Our meeting had not been a coincidence, of course. My name had been in the newspapers and The Eye had seen it or someone had told him that one of his compatriots was giving a reading or a talk, which he couldn't attend, but he called the organizers and found out where I was staying. He told me he'd been sitting there in the square thinking while he waited for me to turn up.

I laughed. I was very glad to have met him again. The Eye was the same as ever: an odd person but good-natured and unassuming. You felt you could say good-bye to him at any time of the night and he would simply say good-bye, without reproach or any bad feeling. He was the ideal Chilean, stoic and amiable, a type that has never been very numerous in Chile but cannot be found anywhere else.

Reading over the previous sentence I realize that it is not strictly true. The Eye would never have made such a sweeping generalization. In any case, the conversation we had, sitting in various bars, he with his whisky and I with my nonalcoholic beer, was made up essentially of recollections; it was, in other words, a confessional and melancholic dialogue. But the most interesting part for me, which was more like a monologue, came as he was walking me back to my hotel, around two in the morning, and coincidentally it began just as we were crossing the square in which we had met a few hours before. I remember it was cold and suddenly The Eye started talking, saying he wanted to tell me something he had never told anyone else. I looked at him. His gaze was fixed on the paved path winding across the square. I asked him what he wanted to tell me. About a trip, he replied immediately. And what happened on this trip? I asked. Then The Eye stopped and for a few moments nothing seemed to exist for him except the tops of the tall German trees and, above them, the fragments of sky and silently boiling clouds.

Something terrible, said The Eye. Do you remember a conversation we had in the Cafй La Habana before I left Mexico? Yes, I said. Did I tell you I was gay? asked The Eye. You said you were a homosexual, I said. Let's sit down, said The Eye.

He sat down on the very same bench as before, I swear, as if I still hadn't arrived, as if I hadn't yet started to cross the square and he was still waiting for me and thinking about his life and the story that he was compelled, by history or destiny or chance, to tell me. He turned up the collar of his coat and began to talk. I remained standing and lit a cigarette. The Eye's story was set in India. He had gone there for work, not as a tourist, and he had two assignments. The first was typical third-world photojournalism, a mixture of Marguerite Duras and Hermann Hesse (we smiled); there are people who like to imagine India as a cross between India Song and Siddhartha, he said, and we have to give the editors what they want. So the first assignment consisted of photos of colonial houses, derelict gardens, all sorts of restaurants, especially the seedier kind (or rather restaurants that looked seedy but were in fact normal Indian family restaurants); photos of the edges of cities, the really poor areas, then the country and the transportation system: roads, railway junctions, buses, and trains arriving and departing; and nature of course, in a dormant state quite unlike Western hibernation, trees that were clearly non-European, rivers and streams, bare fields and fields sown with crops, the Land of Holy Men, said The Eye.

The second assignment took him to the prostitutes' district in an Indian city whose name I will never know.

And that was where The Eye's story really began. He was still living in Paris at the time and had been commissioned to take photos to illustrate a text written by a well-known French writer who had become a specialist in the underworld of prostitution. In fact, the assignment was only the first of a series, which would cover red-light districts around the world, each one shot by a different photographer, but all described by the same writer.

I don't know which city The Eye flew into, Bombay maybe, or Calcutta, perhaps Benares or Madras; I remember I asked him but he ignored my question. Anyway, he arrived in India on his own, because the Frenchman had already written his text and he simply had to illustrate it, so he went to the districts mentioned in the text and started taking photographs. According to his plans — and the plans of his publisher — the work, and consequently his stay in India, shouldn't have lasted more than a week. He stayed in a hotel in a quiet part of town. His room was air-conditioned and the window looked onto a garden that didn't belong to the hotel, where he could see two trees on either side of a fountain and part of a terrace on which two women would sometimes appear, followed or preceded by several little boys. The women were dressed in what The Eye took to be traditional Indian style, but not the boys; once he even saw them wearing ties. In the afternoons he went to the red-light district, took photos and talked with the prostitutes, some of whom were very young and beautiful, while others were older or more faded, with the air of skeptical, laconic matrons. He came to like the smell, which had bothered him at first. The pimps (whom he rarely saw) were friendly and carried themselves like Western pimps or perhaps (but this thought only occurred to him later, in his air-conditioned hotel room) it was the other way around: Western pimps had adopted the body language of their Indian counterparts.

One afternoon he was invited to have sexual intercourse with one of the prostitutes. He refused politely. The pimp understood immediately that The Eye was a homosexual and the next night took him to a brothel where there were young male prostitutes. That night The Eye fell sick. It was only then, he said, examining the shadows in that Berlin square, that I really knew I was in India. What did you do? I asked. Nothing. I looked and smiled. And did nothing. Then it occurred to one of the boys that perhaps their guest would like to visit another kind of establishment. Or that is what The Eye supposed, because they didn't speak English among themselves. So they left the brothel and walked through narrow, filthy streets until they came to a building with a small facade, behind which lay a labyrinth of dim passages and tiny rooms, with altars and shrines gleaming in the shadows here and there.

It is customary in some parts of India, said The Eye, looking at the ground, to offer a young boy to a deity whose name I can't remember. I regret to say that here I interrupted to point out that as well as having forgotten the name of the deity, he couldn't remember the name of the city or of any of the people in his story. The Eye looked at me and smiled. I've tried to forget, he said.

At that point I started to fear the worst. I sat down beside him and for a while we remained there in silence with our coat collars turned up. After looking around the square as if he were afraid a stranger might be lurking in the shadows, he resumed his story. They make an offering of this boy and he becomes the incarnation of the god, for a time, I couldn't say how long. Maybe only as long as the procession lasts, maybe a week, a month, a year, I don't know. It's a barbaric ceremony, forbidden by Indian law, but that doesn't stop it from happening. During the festival the boy is showered with gifts, which his parents, who are generally poor, are only too glad to accept. When the festival is over the boy is sent back to his house, or the filthy hovel he lives in, and in a year's time it all begins again.

Outwardly the ceremony is like a Latin American pilgrimage, but perhaps more joyful, more turbulent, and for the participants, those who know what they're participating in, the experience is probably more intense. But there is one major difference. A few days before the festivities begin, they castrate the boy. The god whose incarnation he is to be during the festival requires a male body-although the boys are usually no more than seven years old — purified of male sexual organs. So the parents hand him over to the festival doctors, or barbers, or priests, and they emasculate him, and when the boy has recovered from the operation, the festival begins. Weeks or months later, when it is all over, the boy goes home, but now he is a eunuch and his parents reject him. So he ends up in a brothel. These brothels vary; there are all sorts, said The Eye with a sigh. That night, they took me to the worst one of all.

For a while we said nothing. I lit a cigarette. Then The Eye described the brothel for me and it was as if he were describing a church. Covered interior courtyards. Open galleries. Cells from which hidden eyes watch your every move. They brought him a eunuch who couldn't have been more than ten years old. He looked like a terrified little girl, said The Eye. Terrified and taunting at the same time. Do you understand what I'm saying? Sort of, I said. We fell silent again. When I was finally able to speak I said, No, I have no idea. Neither do I, said The Eye. No one can have any idea. Not the victim. Not the people who did it to him. Not the people who watched. Only a photo.

You took a photo of him? I asked. A shiver seemed to run down The Eye's spine. I got out my camera, he said, and I took a photo of him. I knew I was damning myself for all eternity, but I did it.

I don't know how long we sat there in silence after that. I know it was cold and at one point I began to shiver. Once or twice I heard The Eye sob beside me, but I didn't want to look at him. I saw the headlights of a car driving down one side of the square. Through the foliage I saw a light come on in a window.

Then The Eye went on with his story. He said the boy smiled, then quietly slipped away down one of the passages of that baffling edifice. At some point a pimp suggested that if none of the boys took his fancy, they should go. But the Eye said no. He couldn't leave. That's what he said to him: I can't leave yet. And it was true, though he didn't know what was stopping him from walking straight out of that lair. The pimp, however, seemed to understand and ordered tea or some such beverage. The Eye remembers that they sat down on the floor, on mats or worn-out rugs. The room was lit by a pair of candles. A poster of the god hung on a wall.

For a while The Eye looked at the god and at first he felt fear, but then he felt something like rage, or perhaps hate.

I have never hated anyone, he said, lighting a cigarette and blowing the first breath of smoke out into the Berlin night.

At one point, while The Eye was staring at the image of the god, the others disappeared, leaving him alone with a male prostitute about twenty years old, who spoke English. Then, summoned by a couple of claps, the eunuch reappeared. I was crying, or thought I was, said The Eye, or maybe that's what the prostitute thought, poor kid, but none of it was true. I tried to keep a smile on my face (although it wasn't my face anymore, I could feel it drifting away from me like a leaf on the wind), and all this time, underneath, I was scheming. Not that I had a plan, or any idea of redress, just a blind determination.

The Eye, the prostitute, and the eunuch stood up and walked down a dimly lit corridor, then another more dimly lit still (the eunuch at The Eye's side, watching him and smiling, the prostitute smiling at him too, as The Eye nodded and emptied the money from his pockets into their hands) until they reached a room in which the doctor was dozing beside a boy who was younger than the eunuch, maybe six or seven years old, and had darker skin, and The Eye listened to the doctor's long-winded explanations, invoking tradition, ritual, privilege, communion, elation, and saintliness, and he could see the surgical instruments with which the child would be castrated the following morning or the morning after; in any case the child had come to the temple or the brothel that day, he gathered — a preventive or hygienic measure — and had eaten well, as if he were already the god's incarnation, although what The Eye saw was a drowsy, tearful child; the eunuch was still at his side, with a half-amused half-terrified look on his face. Then The. Eye was transformed into something else, although the expression he used was not "something else" but "mother."

Mother, he said and sighed. At last. Mother.

What happened next is all too familiar: the violence that will not let us be. The lot of Latin Americans born in the fifties. Naturally, The Eye tried to negotiate, bribe, and threaten, without much hope of success. All I know for certain is that there was violence and soon he was out of there, leaving the streets of that district behind, as if in a dream, drenched with sweat. He vividly remembers the feeling of exaltation welling up inside him, stronger and stronger, a joy that felt dangerously like lucidity, but wasn't (couldn't have been). Also, the shadows they cast onto the peeling walls, he and the two boys he was leading by the hand. Anywhere else he would have attracted attention. There, at that time of night, no one took any notice of him.

The rest is more an itinerary than a story or a plot. The Eye went back to the hotel, packed his suitcase and left with the boys. First they took a taxi to a town or to its outskirts. Then a bus to another town, where they caught a second bus that took them to yet another town. At some point in their flight they boarded a train and traveled all night and part of the following day. The Eye remembered the faces of the boys looking out at a landscape frayed by the morning light, as if all that had ever really existed were the stately and humble scenes framed by the window of that mysterious train.

Then they took another bus, a taxi, a bus again, another train; they even hitchhiked, said The Eye, gazing at the silhouettes of the German trees but seeing, beyond them, the silhouettes of other trees, countless and incomprehensible. Finally they came to rest in a village somewhere in India, where they rented a house.

After two months The Eye's money ran out and he walked to a neighboring village, where he sent a letter to the friend he had left behind in Paris. A fortnight later he received a bank draft. To cash it he had to go to a town bigger than the village where he had gone to send the letter and much bigger than the one where he lived. The boys were well. They played with other children but did not go to school, and sometimes they came back to the house with food: vegetables the neighbors had given them. Instead of calling him father, he had the boys call him The Eye, as we used to; he thought it safer, less likely to attract the attention of the curious. He did, however, tell the villagers that they were his sons. His story was that the boy's mother, an Indian woman, had recently died, and he didn't want to go back to Europe. It was believable. Yet The Eye had nightmares about the Indian police coming to arrest him, making shameful accusations. He would wake up trembling. He would go over to the mats where they boys were sleeping and the sight of them gave him the strength to carry on, to sleep, get up, and face another day.

He became a farmer. He tended a small orchard and occasionally worked for the richer farmers in the village. They too were poor, of course, but not as poor as the others. He spent the rest of his time teaching the boys English and a little math, and watching them play. He could not understand a word of the language they spoke to each other. Sometimes, when he was watching them play, they would stop and head off across the fields like sleepwalkers. He would call out to them. Sometimes the boys pretended not to hear and kept walking until they disappeared. Other times they turned back and smiled at him.

How long were you in India? I asked, getting worried.

About a year and a half, said The Eye, I'm not exactly sure.

Once his friend from Paris came to the village. He still loved me, said The Eye, although in my absence he had set up house with an Algerian mechanic who worked for Renault. Telling me this, he laughed. So did I. It was all so sad, said The Eye. His friend arriving in the village in a taxi covered with red dust, the boys chasing after an insect in the dry scrub, the wind, it seemed, bearing good news and bad.

In spite of his friend's entreaties, he did not return to Paris. Months later a letter arrived from France informing him that he was not wanted by the Indian police. Apparently no one had reported the incident at the brothel. This news did not put an end to The Eye's nightmares. The characters who came to arrest and brutalize him simply changed their clothes: instead of policemen, now they were thugs from the sect of the castrated god. Which turned out to be even more horrifying, The Eye confessed, although by then he was used to the nightmares and at some level always knew that he was dreaming, that it wasn't real.

Then the disease came to the village and the boys died. I wanted to die too, said The Eye, but I wasn't that lucky.

After convalescing in a hut that was steadily washing away in the rain, The Eye left the village and returned to the city where he had met his children. He was somewhat surprised to discover that it was not nearly as far away as he had thought; his flight had followed a spiral path, and the return journey was relatively short. On the afternoon of his return, he went to see the brothel where boys used to be castrated. Its rooms had been converted into lodgings for entire families. The corridors he remembered as lonely and funereal were now swarming with life, from toddling children to old men and women who could barely drag themselves along. To him it was an image of paradise.

That night when he went back to his hotel, he wept for his dead children and all the other castrated boys, for his own lost youth, for those who were young no longer and those who died young, for those who fought for Salvador Allende and those who were too scared to fight. Unable to stop crying, he called his French friend, who was now living with a former weightlifter from Bulgaria, and asked him to send him an airplane ticket and some money for the hotel.

And his friend said Yes, of course he would, right away, and then: What's that sound? Are you crying? And The Eye said Yes, he couldn't stop crying, he didn't know what was happening to him, he had been crying for hours. His French friend told him to calm down. At this The Eye, still crying, laughed, said he would do that and hung up. But he went on crying, on and on.