The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography

FOUR. The Poetic Act

Definitions are only approximations. Whatever the subject may be, its predicate is always the entirety of the universe. In this impermanent reality what we imagine as absolute truth becomes inconceivable to us. Our arrows will never hit the white center of the target, because it is infinite. The concepts used by reason are true for me, here, at this precise time. For someone else, in the same place later on, they may be false. For this reason, despite having been raised with the most tenacious atheism, between two beliefs I decided to choose the one that would be more useful or the one that would help me to live. Before coming into the world I was a form of will that chose who its father and mother should be in order that my spirit might develop through suffering and rebellion in contact with the mental boundaries of these two immigrants. Why was I born in Chile? I have not the least doubt: my encounter with poetry justifies my emergence in that country.

Chile was poetically alive like nowhere else in the world during the 1940s and early 1950s. Poetry permeated everything: education, politics, cultural life, love. At the continuous parties that took place every day, where people drank wine without limitation, there was always some drunk reciting the verses of Neruda, Gabriela Mistral, Vicente Huidobro, and other great poets. Why such lyrical joy? In those years, while humanity was suffering from the effects of World War II, far off Chile — separated from the rest of the planet by the Pacific Ocean and the Andes mountain range — observed the struggle between the Nazis and the Allies as if it were a soccer match. There was a map covered with little flag pins on the wall of every home; the ups and downs of the opposing armies were followed amidst innumerable toasts and bets. Despite its internal problems, for the Chileans their long and narrow country was like an island paradise, protected by distance from the world’s ills. While death prevailed in Europe, poetry reigned in Chile. With abundant food (four thousand kilometers of coastline provided delicious mollusks and fish) and an exceptional climate for producing cheap wine (a liter of red cost less than one of milk), the most important thing for all social classes, poor and rich alike, was partying. Most of the bureaucrats would behave themselves properly until six o’clock in the evening, but once they were out of the office they would get drunk and undergo a change, shedding their gray personalities and assuming a magical identity. (A respectable notary made people call him Terrible Black Tits when drinking in the bars after six o’clock, and the way he had dealt with one customer was the subject of much mirth: “Señora, I have also been a woman. Let us speak cow to cow.”) The whole country was seized by a collective madness at sunset. The lack of solidity in the world was celebrated. In Chile, the earth trembled every six days! The very soil was, as it were, convulsive. For this reason, all people were subject to existential tremors. We did not live in a solid world governed by a rational being, but in a trembling, ambiguous reality. We lived precariously, both on the material plane and in our relationships with one another. You never knew how a night out on the town would end: a couple married at noon might wake up the next morning in other people’s beds, the guests you invited over might throw your furniture out the window, and so on. Poets, night owls by necessity, lived to euphoric excess. Neruda, an obsessive collector, built a house-museum in the form of a castle, gathering a whole village around him. Huidobro was not content with writing “Why do you sing the rose, O poets! Make it blossom in the poem!” but also covered the floors of his house with fertile soil and planted a hundred rose bushes there. Teófilo Cid, the son of some extremely rich Lebanese, gave up his fortune, although he did keep his subscription to the French newspaper Le Monde, and, drunk day and night, began living on a bench in Forestal Park. He was found dead there one morning covered by sheets of that same newspaper. There was another poet who only appeared in public on the occasion of his friends’ funerals, in order to jump on the coffin. The exquisite Raúl de Veer did not bathe for two years in order to use his stench to identify those who were truly interested in hearing his verses. They had all begun to emerge from literature to participate in the events of daily life with an aesthetic and rebellious stance. For me, as for many other young people, they were idols showing us a beautiful and insane way to live.

In celebration of Jashe and Moishe’s golden wedding anniversary the family decided to throw a party, at the same time inaugurating the new house that Isidoro, the architect, had designed for his mother: a large casket from which another smaller casket rose up, balanced on a pair of columns. The event was attended by close relatives and by some distant ones who came from Argentina. Most of them were chubby retirees, and their dark skin contrasted with their white hair, which they wore proudly, full of viscous satisfaction at being part of this humdrum Sephardic family. Sara, between nervous laughter and sugary tears, went from one relative to another uttering exaggerated elegies motivated by her desire to be liked. Unfortunately, being the beautiful swan among so many ugly ducklings, she drew contempt from all. Particularly envious was Fanny, who let slip some cruel jokes about Sara’s weight and the whiteness of her skin, comparing her to a sack of flour. Jaime was also despised for having a store in a working class neighborhood. With great condescension he was invited to play cards, and conspiring among themselves they relieved him of a large sum of money.

No one paid any attention to me. They appeared not to see me. I sat for several hours, without eating, in a corner of the dark courtyard. What use had I for them? Was this a dignified life, being obliged to make a thousand bows like my mother in order to be halfway accepted into this mediocre purgatory or being gouged like my father in order to show that he was not a pauper? Seeing them in a large crowd like this filled me with rage. An ax rested next to a big lime tree, the only one that graced the little garden. Driven by an irresistible urge, I took it and began to ferociously hack away at the trunk. Only many years later did I understand the crime I had committed. At the time, when I did not yet feel connected to the world and did not see families as family trees, this plant was not a sacred being but a dark symbol that catalyzed my despair and hatred. I increased the force of my blows with the ax, losing my awareness of everything around me. I woke up half an hour later; I was dealing blows to a wound that already covered half the trunk. Shoske, my great aunt, was shrieking in horror. “You rascal! Stop him, he’s cutting down the lime tree!” Jashe, equipped with a lantern and followed by all her relatives, burst into the small courtyard. They had to hold her up lest she faint. Isidoro rushed toward me. I dropped the ax and punched him in the gut. He fell, crushing a bed of daisies with his large rump. Everyone froze. The guests, frozen like wax statues, stared at me with a look of severe judgment. Among them was Sara, red with embarrassment. Jaime, standing behind the group, was doing his best to look detached. The thick, straight trunk of the lime tree gave forth a crack, threatening to break. Moishe emptied a bottle of mineral water onto the ground, took up handfuls of mud, and on his knees, sobbing, began to fill the huge hole in the trunk while my half-aunt, her black hair bristling, showed me the way out with an avenging index finger. “Go away, you savage, and never come back!” I was seized by intense emotion. I was afraid that I would start crying, like the pseudo-Gandhi. With an increasing satisfaction growing in me, I burst out laughing. I walked out and started running, panting with joy. I knew that this atrocious act had marked the beginning of a new life for me. Or rather, at last, it marked the beginning of my life.

I stopped after a while and heard footsteps coming behind me. The thin air and darkness prevented me from distinguishing who it was. “If it’s Fanny,” I said to myself, “I’ll punch her too.” But it was a distant cousin, Bernardo, an architecture student a few years older than I who was tall, bony, and myopic, with big ears and a monkeylike face but a velvety and romantic voice.

“Alejandro, I’m amazed. That was a rebellious act worthy of a poet. I can only compare it to when Rimbaud painted the walls of a hotel room with his shit. How did you get the idea of doing something like that? You said everything without saying anything. Ah, if only I could be like you! The only things that interest me are painting, literature, and theater, but my family, the family you’ve just left, prevents me. I have to be an architect like Isidoro to satisfy my mother. Anyway, cousin, do you dare to sleep at your house tonight? I’ve heard that Jaime is a fierce man. ”

My encounter with Bernardo was providential, and I am indebted to him for my entry into the world of poetry, but later he disappointed me to the core. The admiration he appeared to have for my talent turned out to be banal: he had simply fallen in love with me. After much hesitation — knowing that he would receive a resounding rejection — he decided to confess his love to me in the restroom of the Literary Academy, with reddened eyes showing me his erect penis as if it were a divine curse.

That night, on the pretext of wanting only a pure friendship, he brought me to stay with the Cereceda sisters.

Were they orphans? Millionaires? They had a three-story house all to themselves. I never saw them work, nor did I see their parents. The front door had no locks, so their artist friends could come in at any time, day or night. There were books everywhere, with reproductions of the greatest paintings; there were also records, a piano, photographs, beautiful objects, sculptures. Carmen Cereceda, a painter, was a muscular woman with thick hair, absorbed in a pre-Columbian silence. Her room was decorated with a mural on the walls, floor, and ceiling that was somewhere between the styles of Picasso and Diego Rivera, full of thick-legged women and political symbols. Veronica Cereceda, fragile, hypersensitive, eloquent, her head covered with fine down, was a poet and future actress. Both sisters loved art above all things in life. When I arrived with Bernardo, they received me smiling.

“What do you do, Alejandro?” Veronica asked me.

“I write poems.”

“Do you know any from memory?”

“The Self is something that consumes / flames pouring from the dream,” I recited, blushing to my fingertips. Veronica gave me a kiss on each cheek.

“Come, brother. ” And taking my hand, she led me to a room decorated with Mapuche motifs where there was a bed, a table with a typewriter, a ream of paper, and a lamp. “This is where I shut myself away when I want to create my poems. You can borrow this space for as long as you need. If you’re hungry, there’s the kitchen downstairs: you’ll find fruit and chocolate bars there; that’s all we eat. Good night.”

I stayed there, shut in, for several days without anyone bothering me. Sometimes a shadow would pass in front of the door and someone would leave a couple of apples there for me. When I overcame my shyness I went out to make the acquaintance of the group, which was no more than twenty people. They were composers, poets, painters, a philosophy student. Beside myself — I was the youngest — the others who resided in the Cereceda house included a lesbian girl, Pancha, who made large rag dolls; Gustavo, a pianist and close friend of Carmen; and Drago, a cartoonist with a stutter. Seeing that money was scarce in that house and the fruit and chocolate were provided by the members of the group, I realized that their acceptance of me was a true sacrifice. Veronica, being idealistic, shared her vast cultural knowledge with me, as well as the few things she possessed, simply because she loved poetry. She is recorded in my memory as an angel. In this world so full of violence, whenever someone disappoints me I remember those sisters and console myself with the thought that sublime beings do exist. In youth, encounters with others are fundamental: they can change the course of one’s life. Some are like meteorites, opaque shards that can hit Earth at some moment and cause massive damage; others are like comets, luminous objects bringing vital elements with them. I had the providential good fortune at this time in my life to find beings that enriched me: beneficial comets. During the same period, I knew others who, although they were just as worthy of a creative destiny as I was, fell prey to bad company that led them into failure and death: meteorites. Well, maybe it was more than just luck, through the distrust I had learned during my wounded childhood I had also developed the ability to dodge. In boxing one wins not only by hitting harder, but also by avoiding more blows. I always shunned negative contacts and sought out friends who could be my teachers.

One day Veronica woke me up at six o’clock in the morning. “Enough working with only your mind. Your hands have a lot to say, just like your words. I’ll teach you to make puppets.” In the kitchen she showed me how to cut newspaper into thin strips to be boiled, crushed, and shredded, then mixed with flour to make a paste that is very easy to sculpt. I could now sculpt puppet heads on a ball made from an old stocking and a few handfuls of sawdust, which hardened when they dried in the sun. Carmen then showed me how to paint them. Pancha sewed the costumes into which I put my hands as if they were gloves in order to make the characters move and talk. Drago built me a little theater, a kind of folding screen, behind which I could work my puppets. I fell in love with them. It was enchanting for me to see an object I had created breaking free from me. From the moment I reached inside a puppet, the character began to live in an almost autonomous way. I was assisting in the development of an unknown personality, as if the puppet was using my voice and hands to take on an identity that was already its own. I seemed to be filling the role of servant rather than creator. Ultimately, I had the impression of being directed, manipulated by the puppet! Moreover, in a certain way the puppets led me to discover an important aspect of magic: the transfer of a person to an object. Because I had had almost no contact with Jaime, Sara, and the rest of my family, I had become an incomprehensible mutant to all of them, invisible most of the time, despised when visible. However, family contact is necessary for the soul to develop. Determined to establish a profound relationship I sculpted puppets that represented them, in caricature but very accurate. Thus I was able to talk to Don Jaime, Doña Sara, and all the others. My friends, seeing these grotesque representations, laughed themselves silly. But when my hands entered the characters, they began to exist with their own life. As soon as I lent them my voice, they said things I had never thought. Mainly they justified themselves, considered my criticisms unjust, insisted that they loved me, and finally demanded that having disappointed them I should apologize. I realized that my complaints were selfish. I regretted the fact that I did not want to forgive them; that is to say, I did not want to mature, to reach adulthood. And the path to forgiveness required my recognizing that, in their own way, my entire family — my parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents — were my victims. I had not lived up to their aspirations, aspirations that, for all that I found them negative and absurd, were legitimate aspirations for them on their level of consciousness. I sincerely asked for their forgiveness. “Forgive me, Jaime, for not having given you the opportunity to conquer all your social complexes and for not pursuing a university career. My earning a diploma in medicine, law, or architecture was the only chance you had to be respected by the community. Forgive me, Sara, for not being the reincarnation of your father. Forgive me, Raquel, for having been born with the penis that you should have had. Forgive me, grandmother, for cutting down the lime tree, for having renounced the Jewish religion. Forgive me, Aunt Fanny, for finding you so ugly. And especially you, fat Isidoro, forgive me for not understanding your cruelty; you never grew up; you were always a giant baby. When I came to stay with your mother, you treated me as a dangerous rival, not as a child.” In turn, all the puppets forgave me. Shedding tears, one by one I too forgave them.

Strangely, perhaps due to the magic of the puppetry, my parents’ attitude toward me was more understanding and loving once I decided to resume relations with them. Also, my grandmother, without ever mentioning the tree incident, invited me to have tea with her and, for the first time ever, gave me a gift: a watch that had an elephant in place of hands, marking the minutes with its trunk and the hours with its tail. A miracle! I explained to myself that the image we have of another person is not that person but a representation. The world that is imposed on us by our senses depends on our way of seeing it. In many ways, the other is what we believe it to be. For example, when I made the Jaime puppet I modeled it in the way I saw him, giving him a limited existence. When I brought him to life in the miniature theater other aspects that I had not captured came to light, rising up from my obscure memory and transforming the image. The character, enriched by my creativity, evolved to reach a higher level of consciousness, changing from fierce and stubborn into friendly and full of love. Perhaps my individual subconscious was closely linked to the family subconscious. If my reality was different, then my relatives’ reality was also different. In a certain way, when a being is portrayed a nexus is established between the being and the object that symbolizes it. Thus, if changes come about in the object, the being that gave rise to what it represents also changes. Years later, when studying medieval witchcraft and magic, I saw that this technique had been used to harm enemies. A necklace made that contained hairs, fingernails, or shreds of clothing from the intended victim was put on the neck of a dog that was then slaughtered. After engraving a patient’s name in the bark of a tree, incantations were recited in order to transfer the disease to the tree. This principle has been preserved in popular witchcraft in the form of pictures or wax figurines that are impaled with pins. My attention was also drawn to the belief in the transfer of personality through physical contact. Touching someone or something means, in a certain way, becoming it. Medieval doctors, in order to heal knights wounded in tournaments, used to spread their healing ointments on the sword that had inflicted the wound. I was not aware of this topic at that time in my life, and yet I applied it intuitively and in a positive way.

I told myself, if the puppets I make come to life and transmit their essence to me, instead of creating characters I despise or hate why not choose characters who can transmit a knowledge that I do not yet possess? During those years Pablo Neruda was regarded as the greatest poet, but like many young people a spirit of contradiction caused me to refuse to be his ardent follower. Suddenly, there came a new poet, Nicanor Parra, who rebelled against the genius Neruda who was so visceral and politically compromised, writing verses that were intelligent, humorous, and different from all other known poetry; these he dubbed “anti-poems.” My enthusiasm for this was delirious. Finally an author had descended from the romantic Olympus to discuss his everyday anxieties, his neuroses, his sentimental failures. One poem above all made an impression on me: “The Viper.” Unlike Neruda’s sonnets, this poem was not about an ideal woman, but about a real bitch.

For many years I was condemned to worship a despicable woman,

To sacrifice myself for her, to suffer countless humiliations and ridicule,

Working day and night to feed and clothe her,

Perpetrating some crimes, committing some offenses,

Small thefts by the light of the moon

Falsifications of incriminating documents

Under the threat of falling into disgrace in her fascinating eyes.

How great was my envy, having never even made love to any woman, of Nicanor Parra having known such an extraordinary female!

For long years I lived as a prisoner of this woman’s charm

She used to show up in my office completely naked

Performing the most difficult contortions imaginable.

I immediately made some paste and started to model a puppet representing the poet. The newspaper had not published any photos of him, but in contrast to Neruda, who was rather bald, stocky, with a Buddha-like air, I sculpted Parra with hollow cheeks, intelligent eyes, an aquiline nose, and leonine hair. Enclosed in my little theater I manipulated the Nicanor puppet for hours, making him improvise anti-poems and, above all, relate his experiences with women. Stifled by my chastity, having had a mother whose torso was always encased in a corset and who blushed at the slightest sexual reference, women appeared to me the greatest mystery of all. but once I was imbued with the spirit of the poet, I felt myself capable of finding a muse, preferably on par with the Viper.

In the city center, Café Iris opened its doors at midnight. There, illuminated by cruel neon tubes, the night owls drank beer on tap or else an extremely cheap wine that made them shudder with every sip. The waiters, all dressed in black uniforms, were older people who walked unhurriedly from table to table, taking small steps.

In this calm place, time seemed to stand still in an eternal instant where there was no room for sorrow or anguish. Nor was there room for any great happiness. They drank in silence, as if in purgatory. Nothing new could happen there. And yet, on the very night that I decided to go to Café Iris to find the woman who would become my ferocious muse, Stella Díaz Varin was there. How to describe her? It was 1949, and we were in the most remote country, where no one wanted to be different from everyone else, where it was almost mandatory to wear shades of gray, where the men had to have closely cropped hair and the women had to have chitinous coiffures sculpted at beauty salons, forty years before the first punks emerged. I had just settled down over a cup of coffee when Stella (who had just been fired from the newspaper La Hora for her article about the deforestation brought about by the logging industry, which would later devastate the southern part of the country) appeared before me shaking her amazing head of red hair, a sanguine mass that reached below her waist; it was not hair but a mane. I am not exaggerating, never in my life have I met a woman with such thick hair. Rather than powdering her face, as was customary in Chile at that time, she had painted it pale violet using watercolors. Her lips were blue, her eyelids were covered with green eye shadow, and her ears were shining, painted gold. It was summer, but over her short skirt and a sleeveless shirt that highlighted her arrogant nipples she wore an old fur coat, probably made of dog hair, which came down to her heels. She drank a liter of beer, smoked a pipe, and without paying attention to anyone, locked in her own personal Olympus, she wrote something down on a paper napkin. A drunken man approached her and whispered something in her ear. She opened her coat, lifted her shirt, showed him her opulent breasts, and then quick as lightning dealt him a blow to the chin that sent him sprawling three meters away on the ground, unconscious. One of the old waiters, not greatly perturbed, poured a glass of water on his face. The man got up, offered humble apologies to the poet, and went to sit in a corner of the café. It was as if nothing had happened. She continued writing. I fell in love.

My encounter with Stella was fundamental. Thanks to her I was able to move from the conceptual act of creation, through words and images, to the poetic act with poems resulting from a sum of bodily movements. Stella, defying social prejudices, behaved as if the world were a ductile material that she could model at will. I asked the old bartender if he knew her.

“Of course, young man, who doesn’t? She comes here often to write and drink beer. She used to work for the secret police, where she learned karate chops. Then she was a journalist, but they fired her for being too controversial. Now she’s a poet. The critic in El Mercurio says she’s better than Gabriela Mistral. He must have slept with her. Watch out, young man, that beast can break your nose.”

Trembling, I watched her finish a second liter of beer, feverishly fill several pages in her notebook, and then walk haughtily out into the street. I followed her as inconspicuously as possible. I noticed that she was walking barefoot, and her feet were painted in watercolors, forming a rainbow from the red nails to the violet ankles. She got on a bus that ran all the way along the Alameda de las Delicias toward the central station. I got on as well and sat in front of her. I felt her eyes on the nape of my neck, piercing me like a stiletto. The night became a dream. To be in the same vehicle with this woman meant moving toward our common soul. Suddenly, as the bus was starting to move again after a stop, she ran to the door and jumped out. Surprised, I begged the driver to stop, which he did two hundred meters farther on. I walked toward the point where Stella had jumped off. I saw with surprise that she was looking at me, motioning to me to stop. With my heart pounding in terror, I stood still. I closed my eyes and waited for the fierce punch. Her hands began to touch my body, without sensuality. Then she opened my fly and examined my penis like a doctor. She sighed.

“Open your eyes, squirt! I can see you’re still a virgin! I’m too much for you. An ostrich can’t hatch a pigeon’s egg. What do you want?”

“I hear you write. So do I. Could I have the honor of reading your poems?”

She smiled. I saw that one of her incisors was broken, giving her a cannibalistic air.

“You’re only interested in my poetry? What about my ass and my tits? Hypocrite! Do you have some money?”

I dug in my pockets. I found a five-peso bill and showed it to her. She snatched it.

“There’s a café open all night next to the Alameda Theater. Let’s go there. I’m hungry. We’ll eat a sandwich and drink a beer.”

So we did. She opened her notebook and, munching bread with salami, her lips whitened by beer foam, began to read. She recited for an hour, which seemed like ten to me. I had never heard poetry like this. I felt each sentence like a knife. In the instant that I heard them these verses transformed themselves into deep but pleasurable wounds. To listen to this real poet, liberated from rhyme, meter, and morality, was one of the most moving moments of my youth. The café was dirty, ugly, lit by glaring lights, and full of sordid, bestial patrons. And yet, as I heard those sublime words, it became a palace inhabited by angels. There was the proof that poetry was a miracle that could change one’s vision of the world. And to change the vision was to change the perceived object as well. The poetic revolution seemed more important than political revolution to me. One part of that reading remains in my memory like treasure from a shipwreck: “The woman who loved doves in a virgin’s ecstasy, and fed irises at night with her sleeping nipple, dreamed with her back to the wall, and everything seemed beautiful without being so.” She abruptly closed the book and, not wanting to hear my words of admiration, got up, took me by the arm, went out into the street, and led me to the nearest corner by the Pedagogical Institute. A narrow door was the entrance to the boarding house where she rented a small room. With a push, she sat me down on the stone step in front of the door, knelt beside me, and caught my right ear in her sharp teeth. She stayed like this, the way a panther holds its prey in its mouth before crushing it. A thousands thoughts ran through my mind. “Maybe she’s crazy, she might be cannibalistic, she’s testing me; she wants to see if I’ll sacrifice a piece of ear to get her.” Well, I decided to sacrifice it, knowing this woman was worth such mutilation. I calmed down, stopped tensing my muscles, and gave myself over to the pleasure of feeling the touch of her moist lips. Time seemed to solidify. She made no move to let go. Instead, she squeezed her teeth a little more. I tried to remember where the nearest open pharmacy was, so that I could run there after losing part of my ear to buy alcohol, disinfect the wound, and stop the bleeding. Miraculously, I was saved by an exhibitionist; he passed by us, face covered with an open newspaper, his fly open to show his bulky phallus. Stella let go of me to drive him away, kicking him. The man, running as fast as his legs could carry him, disappeared into the night. The poet, laughing, sat down beside me, wiped the sweat off one of my palms with her hand, and examined my lines by the light of a match.

“You got talent, kid. We’ll get along well. Come and pee.”

She led me to a nearby church. Next to the gate was a sculpture of St. Ignatius of Loyola.

“Do it on the saint,” she said, rolling up her skirt. “Praying and pissing are both sacred acts.”

She wore no panties, and her pubic hair was abundant. Kneeling beside me, she let a thick yellow stream fall onto the monk’s stone chest. I, with a stream that was thinner but went farther, bathed the statue’s forehead.

“I warmed his heart and you crowned him, boy. Now go to bed. I’ll see you tomorrow at midnight at Café Iris.”

She gave me a quick but intense kiss on the mouth, walked with me to the central station, and the moment I turned my back on her, kicked me in the rear. Without offering any resistance I let myself be pushed, took four precipitous steps, then regained my normal gait and, with great dignity, walked away from her without looking back.

The next day the hours slipped by without my noticing anything. Immobilized, I moved through flat, gray time as through an empty tunnel, at the end of which the anticipated midnight hour shone like a splendid jewel. I arrived at Café Iris at twelve o’clock sharp, with my Nicanor Parra puppet hidden, clutched to my chest. It was a gift for Stella. but my beloved had not yet arrived. I ordered a beer. At 12:30 I asked for another; at 1:00, yet another, and at 1:30 another; another at 2:00, and another at 2:30. Drunk and sad I finally saw her enter, looking smug, accompanied by a man shorter than her with a face like a boxer and wearing that sardonic expression common to those broken offspring of Spanish soldiers and raped Indian women. Glancing at me defiantly, she sat in front of me with, I assumed, her lover. They both smiled, looking satisfied. I was furious. I slipped my hand under my vest, took out the puppet, and threw it on the table. “Let this Nicanor Parra be your teacher! You deserve to be with a poet of this dimension, not to debase yourself with down-and-outs like the one you’re with right now. If you read his brilliant poem “The Viper” you will find your portrait. Goodbye forever.” And, stumbling, getting caught in the legs of the chairs, I headed for the exit. Stella chased me down and brought me back to the table. I thought the insulted boxer would punch me, but no. With a smile he held out his hand and said, “I appreciate what you said. I am Nicanor Parra and the woman who inspired me to write ‘The Viper’ is Stella.” While it is true that my creation bore no resemblance to the features of the great poet, I felt certain that I had my puppet to thank for my having met him. This miracle came from one of the threads from which the world is woven together. Parra graciously gave me his telephone number, informed me with a single glance he was not Stella’s lover and that I had a good chance of being that, and said goodbye to us.

Faced with this extravagant and beautiful woman, I was speechless. My drunkenness had dissipated as if by magic. She looked at me with the intensity of a tiger, inhaled the smoke from her pipe, and blew it in my face. I started coughing. She gave a hoarse cackle that drew the attention of everyone in the café, then turned serious and said in an accusing tone, “Don’t deny it; you have a knife. Give it to me!” Embarrassed, not wishing to deny it, I dug in a pocket and pulled out my modest knife. She took it, opened it, looked at the half-rusted blade, and asked what my name was. She spread out her open left hand on the table, and with the knife in her right hand made three cuts on the back of it, forming a bloody A. She licked the blood off the blade and returned it to me, wet with saliva. With dizzying speed, I thought, “The A is formed by three straight lines, which makes the cuts easier. If I cut an S I’ll have to make a long curvy wound; I might cut a vein, I don’t have oily skin like her. What should I do? I’m being tested. I’m going to look like a stupid coward. I have to find an elegant solution.” I took her hand and licked the wound, five, ten, endless minutes, until not a drop of blood was left. I offered her my red-stained mouth. She kissed me passionately.

“Come,” she said. “We will never separate again. We will sleep by day and live at night, like vampires. I’m still a virgin. We will do everything but penetration. My hymen is reserved for a god who will come down from the mountains.”

Nicanor Parra.

When we went outside, she asked me again for the knife. I handed it to her, trembling; surely my gallant act had not been enough to balance out the cuts on her hand. In a peremptory tone, she told me to put my hand into my left pants pocket and pull out the lining. So I did. She deftly cut the seams at the bottom of the pocket. Then she stuffed the lining back into my pants. She put her right hand inside and, with gentle firmness, gripped my testicles and penis.

“From now on, every time we walk together, I will hold your private parts.”

Thus we walked along the Alameda de las Delicias, heading to her room, without saying a word. Dawn began to break. The final cold of the night in its death throes became more intense. But the heat her hand imparted to me, the same hand that had written such wonderful verses, not only invaded my skin but also entered into my very depths, lighting up my soul. The birds began to sing as we reached the door of her boarding house.

“Take off your shoes. Retirees sleep late. When a noise awakens them, they moan like turtles in agony.”

The stairway creaked, the steps creaked, the ancient floorboards in the hallways creaked. The door of the room, upon being opened, gave forth a long funereal groan like a chorus of turtles. Then there was silence.

“We’re not going to turn on the light,” she said. “Orpheus must not see his beloved naked, lying in hell.”

I stripped off my clothes in three seconds. She did so slowly. I heard a sticky plop as her dog fur coat fell to the ground, then the whisper of her short skirt sliding down her legs. After that, the oily rubbing of her shirt and then, a marvelous memory, I saw her as if she were lit by a hundred-watt lamp. The whiteness of her skin was so intense that it overcame the dark. She was a marble statue with her red mane and, above all, the russet burst of her pubic hair. We embraced, we fell on the bed, and without caring that the mattress made noises like a sick accordion, we caressed each other for hours. As day arrived, the room filled first with red light, then orange. The noises of the street, footsteps, voices, trains, cars, plus the buzzing of flies, tried to dispel our enchantment. But our desire was stronger. Her vagina, anus, and mouth were off-limits. Only the god of the mountains could enter the Sibyl’s interior. We stuck with caresses, which grew longer and longer, without our remembering where we had started and without wanting to reach the end. Stella grew tense, and suddenly, instead of giving a cry of pleasure, she clenched her teeth so that they began to creak. This noise increased to the point that I thought every bone in her body would explode. Thus, as if emerging from a tempest of passion, coming forth from the bottom of an ocean of flesh, her bone structure emerged like an ancient shipwreck. Satisfied, she murmured in my ear, “A skeleton sits in my pupils, chewing my soul between its teeth.” Then, before falling asleep with her head on my chest, she whispered, “We have given an orgasm to my death.”

Thus our relationship began, and thus it continued. We went to bed at six in the morning, caressed each other for at least three hours, then we slept soundly; I because of the stress that being with such a strong woman caused me, she from the effects of large quantities of beer. We rose at ten in the evening. Since money was an evil symbol that the poet was eliminating from her life, my job was to feed her. So I went out, took the train that went through Matucana, used my key to enter my parents’ house, and, reassured by the continuous rhythm of their tremendous snoring, stole food from their pantry, a little money from my mother’s purse, and a little more from my father’s pockets. Then I returned to her lodgings, where we devoured everything down to the crumbs. What little remained attracted an invasion of ants and cockroaches. Sometimes Stella would purposely leave dirty dishes on the floor, and they were soon visited by dozens of the black bugs. She impaled them with pins and stuck them to the wall. She made a compact field of cockroaches on the wall in the shape of the Virgin Mary. A winged phallus, also made of cockroaches, coming from the mountains, flew toward the saint. “It’s the annunciation of Mary,” she told me, proud of her work, adding eyes to the face in the form of two green beetles; I never knew where she had found them.

We would arrive at Café Iris around midnight, walking side by side, her hand constantly in my pocket. Our entrance would interrupt the chattering of the drunks there. Stella wore a different form of makeup every day, and it was always spectacular. There was always some impertinent man who would come over, not deigning to acknowledge that I existed, and try to seduce her by means of audacious groping. His mission would be curtailed by a punch to the chin. The waiters would pick up the unconscious fool and return him to his table. When he awoke, cured of his drunkenness, the man would order us a bottle of wine, making discrete apologetic gestures. Once they had learned the lesson of the beast, the men would stop feeling her up with their eyes and dive back into discussions that had nothing to do with reason. There was always someone standing up and reciting a poem, half-singing. Stella stuck cotton wool in my ears, required me to stay still like a model posing for a painter, and with her eyes fixed on mine wrote with dizzying speed, filling page after page without looking down at her notebook.

One night, tired of this immobility, I proposed a game: we would observe strangers and, without saying anything, each write on a sheet of paper what the person did, their characteristics, their social status, their economic status, their degree of intelligence, their sexual capacity, their emotional problems, their family structure, their possible diseases, and the corresponding death that would result. We played this game a great many times. We achieved such a spiritual amalgam that our answers started to be the same. This does not mean we were able to draw a correct portrait of the unknown person, which we would not have been able to verify, but at the very least we knew that there was telepathic communication between the two of us. Eventually, every time we were in someone else’s presence, a mere fleeting glance between us was enough for us to know how we should act.

Anything that is different attracts the attention of ordinary citizens and also attracts their aggression. A couple like us was unsettling, a magnet for destructive people who were envious of the happiness of others. The ambiance of Café Iris was becoming insupportable. The clientele were directing more and more jeers, aggressive praise, sarcastic comments, and stares imbued with crude sexuality toward us.

“Enough of Iris,” Stella said to me. “Let’s find a new place.”

“But where will we go? It’s the only all night café.”

“I’ve heard there’s a bar on San Diego Street, the Dumb Parrot, that stays open until dawn.”

“You’re crazy Stella, that’s an awful place, the worst people go there! They say there’s at least one knife fight there every night.”

I could not dissuade her. “If Orpheus seduced the beasts, we can make that Dumb Parrot sing a mass!”

After midnight, the wine had plunged the sinister patrons of that grisly, dark place into a bovine stupor. My arrival, with the poet on my arm, wearing her most extravagant makeup ever, caused no reaction. Stella was so different from the worn-out whores who beached themselves there, a being from another planet, that they were simply unable to see her. They kept on drinking as if nothing had happened. Offended in her exhibitionism, she decided to drink standing at the bar. I, in normal attire, gradually began to attract some notice. After half an hour, when Stella, having finished her first liter of beer was ordering a second, four men approached me. I did my best to hide the fear that came over me, forcing my face to become an expressionless mask. I tossed a crumpled bill on the counter and said, in a tone that was natural but loud enough for the four men to hear me, “I’ll settle the tab now. This is all I have left.” I left the change, a few small coins, on a saucer. The four curious men, all looking cynical, took the coins and dropped them in their pockets.

“And you, young man, where are you from?”

“I’m Chilean, like you. What happened is that my grandparents were immigrants, they came from Russia.”

“Russian? Comrade?” Sly muttering. “And where do you work?”

“Well, I don’t work. I’m an artist, a poet. ”

“Ah, a poet, like that pot-bellied Neruda! Come on, have a drink with us and read us a poem!”

Stella still seemed to be invisible to them. Their lewd glances were directed at me. They exuded the sexuality of prison inmates. My youthful white skin turned them on. I drank from a glass of sour wine. I started to improvise a poem. The clientele turned their attention toward me.

Where there are ears but there is no song

in this world that dissipates

and in which existence is given to those who do not deserve it

I am much more my footprints than my steps.

In the midst of reciting I saw that all eyes were now on Stella, and no one was listening to me. Determined to steal my audience, my friend was impaling her arm with a large hairpin that she had taken from her sequin-covered purse. Without any sign of pain, she slowly pushed the pin through until it emerged on the other side of her arm. I was fascinated as well. I had not known that the poet had the skills of a fakir. Once she was sure she had captured the patrons’ attention, she began to recite a poem in an insulting tone while lifting up her shirt, millimeter by millimeter.

I am the guardian, you are the punished men

the farmhands with oblique gestures

from whom, as you engender false furrows,

the seed flees in terror!

She now showed her perfect breasts, accusing the offended drunks with her erect nipples, which she moved in a provocative semicircular motion. If I have ever in my life thought that I was going to defecate out of fear, it was on that occasion. Like a volcano beginning a devastating eruption, these dark men were beginning to stand up, reaching into their pockets for the knives they carried at all times. Their hatred was mixed with bestial desire. We were about to be raped and eviscerated. Stella, who had a deep, masculine voice, took in a deep breath and let out a deafening yell that froze them all for an instant: “Stop, macaques, respect the avenging vagina!” I took advantage of their bewilderment to grab her by the arm and make her jump with me through the open window. We ran toward the well-lit streets of the city center like hares being pursued by a pack of raging predators.

We reached the Alameda de las Delicias. At that hour of the night there was not a soul around. We leaned our backs against the trunk of one of the great trees that lined the avenue, catching our breath. Stella, reeling with laughter, pulled the pin out of her arm. Her laughter was contagious, and I started laughing as well, until I shook. Suddenly, our joy vanished. We realized that a strange shadow was covering us. We looked up. Above our heads, a woman was hanging from a branch. The light of a neon sign tinged the suicide’s hair with red. In this I saw a sign. There was nothing we could do for the dead woman, and we left quickly so as not to have to deal with the police. At the door of the boarding house, I said goodbye to Stella.

“I need to be alone for a while. I feel like I’m drowning without a lifejacket in your immense ocean. I do not know who I am. I’ve become a mirror that only reflects your image. I can’t keep living in the chaos you create. The woman hanging from the tree, you invented that. Every night you kill yourself because you know that you will be reborn the same as you were. But maybe someday you will wake up as someone else, in a body that you don’t deserve. I beg you, let me recover; give me a few days of solitude.”

“Well,” she said in an unexpectedly childlike voice, “let’s meet at midnight on the dot, in twenty-eight days, one lunar cycle, at Café Iris. But before you go, come with me to urinate on St. Ignatius of Loyola.”

For those twenty-eight days, under the pretext of nervous exhaustion I ate only fruits and chocolate and did not leave the room the Cereceda sisters were loaning me. I felt empty. I could not write, think, or feel. If someone had asked me who I was, my answer would have been, “I am a mirror broken into a thousand pieces.” Sleeping very little, I spent hours piecing together the fragments. At the end of this lunar cycle I felt reconstructed. However, I realized I had not rediscovered myself; once again, I was the mirror of that terrible woman.

Like a drug addict needing his fix, I went to Café Iris. I got there right at midnight, even though I knew she might be hours late. But it was not so. She was waiting, standing by a window wearing a sober military coat and no makeup. Without her mascara she was still beautiful, but now the expression on her unadorned face was that of a saint. In a voice so soft that she reminded me of my mother when she sang to me in my crib, she said, “I am a carrier pigeon in your hands. Let me go. The god who was waiting has come down from the mountains. I’m not a virgin. I’m sure that I am carrying in my belly the perfect child that destiny has promised me.” She showed me a needle threaded with one of her long hairs. I could not keep from shedding tears while she sewed up my pocket. I closed my eyes. When I opened them, Stella had disappeared. I saw her again fifty years later, a prisoner in another body, a sweet little grandmother with short gray hair.

The world fell away from me. I went back to the house in Matucana. My parents did not ask me any questions. Jaime handed me a few bills. “From now on I’ll give you a weekly salary. All you have to do is help in the shop on Saturdays; there are more thieves every day.” My mother got a hot bath ready for me then served me a hearty breakfast. I saw in her eyes the anguish of not understanding me. If I, being a part of them, was incomprehensible, then that meant the world they had built so strongly had a fault, an area populated by madness that did not match up with their scheme of “reality.” It was absolutely necessary for them to consider my behavior as delusional. To maintain their own equilibrium, they had to force the madman into the straitjacket of “normal life.” When they realized they could not break me down, they tried to persuade me by filling me with shame. And they succeeded. After several weeks I felt guilty; I lost my confidence in poetry and promised myself not to frustrate their hopes, to continue my studies at the university until I got a diploma. But one night, in a dream, I saw a high wall on which one sentence was written: “Let go your prey, lion, and take flight!” I packed a few books, my writings, the few clothes I owned, and returned to the Cereceda sisters.

I absorbed myself in making my puppets. Like a hermit, I spent the day locked in my room engaging in dialog with them. Only late at night, when my hosts and their friends were asleep, did I go to the kitchen to eat a piece of chocolate. One morning someone gave a few short, discrete, delicate knocks on my door. I decided to open it. I saw before me a woman of short stature with amber-colored hair and an ingenuous expression that touched me deeply. However, I asked her with false brusqueness what her name was.

“Luz.”

“What do you want?”

“They say you make some very nice puppets. Can I see them?” I showed them to her with great pleasure. There were fifty of them. She put them on her hands, made them speak, laughed, “I have a friend who is a painter who will love to see what you do. Please come with me to show him your characters.”

What I felt for Luz had nothing to do with love or desire. I knew that for me she was an angel, the polar opposite of the Luciferian Stella; rather than breaking the poisonous world into a thousand pieces, she saw a chaos of sacred fragments that it was her duty to put together in order to reconstruct a pyramid. Luz came to draw me out of my dark retreat, to lead me into the luminous world, and once there, to vanish. And so it was. Luz and Stella were two opposing views of the world. Although they both felt themselves to be foreign to the world, outsiders in it, one saw it as having heavenly ties while the other saw it as having roots in hell. One wanted to show the good things in the world by making herself its mirror, the other, in the same way, wanted to reflect its failures. The two were of a piece, consistent with each other: cobras charming men, one wanting to inoculate them with the venom of the infinite, the other with the elixir of eternity.

Luz’s boyfriend, obviously madly in love with her, was an older painter by the name of André Racz, who had a prophet-like appearance, wearing long hair and a beard halfway down his chest. He lived in an old studio, much longer than it was wide, at least three hundred square meters. It was reached via a long, dark passageway with a cement floor with rusty rails in it, giving the place the appearance of an abandoned mine. Racz’s paintings and engravings were based on the Gospels. Christ, who bore the artist’s face, was shown preaching, performing miracles, and being crucified in the contemporary era amidst cars and trains. The soldiers who tortured him wore German-style uniforms. One of them shot him in his side with a pistol. The Virgin Mary was always a portrait of Luz.

I was pulling my puppets out of my suitcase, one by one. Racz, his attention consumed by the beauty of his girlfriend, was barely looking at them. Luz, without seeming to notice this embarrassing situation, smiled as if waiting for a miracle. And a miracle occurred! One puppet to which I had given the supporting role of a drunken bum, wearing a patched coat, long hair, and abundant beard, revealed his true personality upon emerging in this environment full of religious paintings: he was Christ. And the most surprising thing of all was that his features were very similar to those of André Racz. The painter moved the puppet with the enthusiasm of a child, engaging in dialogue with it. Luz took the puppet’s hands and began to waltz with it. Racz followed her like a shadow all around the studio. I saw in his dog-like glances that he wanted my puppet to be his own so that he could give it to her. I immediately told him, “It’s a gift. Take it.” He answered me with great emotion. “Young man, you are a divine messenger. You did not arrive here by chance. Without knowing me, you made my portrait. I have just bought a plane ticket to go to Europe. I need to put an abysmal distance between Luz and myself. I’m old enough to be her grandfather. I’m chaining her to an old man. I know she will sleep with the puppet as she is remembering me. It will make the breakup easier. This is my studio; we have spent unforgettable moments together in it. I will give it to you. I do not want to abandon it to vulgar hands. Now go, I want to say goodbye alone to my Virgin.”

I left the room as if emerging from a dream. It seemed impossible that someone would so suddenly give me a studio in which I could live as I pleased. But it was true. The next day Luz came to get me, accompanied me to the studio, and said rather sadly, “André gave me all his paintings but didn’t want to give me his new address.” She handed me the keys to the studio and left. I never saw her again.

Thus, overnight I found myself the proprietor of a huge space at 340 Villavicencio Street, perhaps the site of an old factory, which, being at the end of a hundred-meter-long tunnel, was isolated from the neighbors. There I could freely make all the noise I wanted. I believed that the ultimate achievement of an artist was to become a creator of parties. If everyday life seemed like hell, if everything boiled down to two words, permanent impermanence, if the future that was promised us was the victory of the persecutors, if God had become a dollar bill, then I had to abide by the words of Ecclesiastes: “There is nothing better for man than to eat, drink, and make his soul merry.” My weekly “studio parties” became very well known. People from all walks of life attended. A phrase from Hesse’s Steppenwolf was written on the door: “Magic Theater. Price of Admission: Your Mind.” By the door a former mendicant, Patas de Humo (“Smokey Paws”), who normally slept in the tunnel and whom I had taken on as my assistant, gave out a quarter-liter glass full of vodka to each guest. For those who did not gulp it down, there was no getting in. Those who accepted this hefty drink, which would get them drunk immediately, were admitted by Smokey Paws with an affectionate kick in the rear, whether man or woman, young or old, laborer or legislator. Once inside there was no more drinking, just conversation and dancing, but no popular music, only classical. The biggest hit was Swan Lake. In that space, as full as a rush-hour bus, groups of people improvised, imitating the mechanical gestures of the Russian ballet with tremendous grace. The mingling of artists with university professors, boxers, salesmen, produced an explosive mixture. As the drink was limited to that initial quarter liter, there was no violence and the party became a paradisiacal game. Naturally now and then, almost without intending to, someone would climb up on a chair and become the center. These interventions were short, but their intensity made them unforgettable. A young law student once loudly declared that his father, a famous lawyer who lived secluded in his immense library, had never permitted his son to read a single one of his precious volumes, always keeping his library locked.

“Well, before coming to this party, I saw my father asleep at his desk, face down on some papers. I entered into this sacred enclosure for the first time ever, with intense emotion I picked up one of his books, and then. look at this!” And the young man produced the spine of a book out of the backpack he wore. “All volumes were false: a collection of spines, nothing more, hiding cabinets filled with bottles of whiskey!” Then he started screaming, “Who are we? Where are we?” and let himself fall, arms outstretched, amidst his audience.

Another time, an older man got a seductive young lady to get up on the chair with him. He said, with tears in his eyes, “I waited all my life. Finally I found her. I would cover her with caresses, but. ” With his left hand he removed his right hand, which was artificial, and shook it: “I lost it as a child. I got so used to my false hand that I grew up without thinking about how it was missing. Until the day that Margarita offered her body to me. And I, only half-caressing her, wished that I had two, three, four, eight, infinite hands to slide over her skin for eternity.”

Twenty men raised their hands and, standing in a compact group behind the man with the missing hand, became one with him. The woman let the two hundred and five fingers run over her body.

Another man, of a neat appearance, with a deep voice and measured gestures, giving an unexpected shout, climbed onto the shoulders of a young man and asked for everyone’s attention. When he had it, he tore off his tie and cried out, “I’ve been married twenty years; I have a wife and my two children! I’m tired of lying! I’m gay! And the young man carrying me on his back is my lover!”

Without knowing it, by considering the creation of parties as the supreme expression of art, in 1948 I was discovering the principles of the “ephemeral panic,” which artists would later call “happenings.”

On one occasion a young man of my age, nineteen years, with an intelligent face, a tall and thin body, an African baritone voice, and the hands of an aristocrat, climbed onto the confessional chair and swaying like a metronome put an oval mirror in front of his face like a mask and began to recite a long poem. This was Enrique Lihn. Even at that young age the genius of poetry dwelt within him. His talent awakened great admiration in me. I obtained his address through some mutual friends and went to look for him at the house in the Providencia neighborhood where he lived with his parents, which in those days was considered a very long distance from the city center. The streets were lined with lush trees, and the houses were small, single story, with porches where fruit trees grew. Nervous, I moved the copper ring that served as a door knocker. The poet opened the door. Frowning, he growled, “Ah, the party planner! What do you want?”

“I want to be your friend.”

“Are you a homosexual?”

“No.”

“Then why do you want to be my friend?”

“Because I admire your poetry.”

“I understand, it’s not me, my verses are what interests you. Come in.”

His room was small, his bed narrow, his closet tiny. But it had been converted into a palace: Lihn had covered the walls and ceiling with poems written in small, angular letters; he had also covered the shutters and windowpanes, furniture, door, floorboards, and parchment lamp. In addition to this there were mountains of handwritten pages, verses covering the white spaces in the books, train tickets, movie tickets, paper napkins, all barely containing his poems. I felt immersed in a compact sea of letters. Wherever I rested my gaze, I saw the words of a tortured but beautiful song.

With Enrique Lihn in our puppet theater, 1949. Photo: Ferrer.

“What a shame, Enrique, all this wonderful work will be lost!”

“It doesn’t matter: dreams are also lost, and we ourselves dissolve, little by little. Poetry is the shadow of an eagle flying toward the sun; it cannot leave traces on the ground. The prayer most pleasing to the gods is sacrifice. A poem reaches its perfection when it burns, like a phoenix. ”

On the verge of vertigo, I began to see the letters walking through the walls like an army of ants. I suggested to Lihn that we take a walk.

The poet took two of his father’s Maurice Chevalier — style hats and a couple of sticks, just in case robbers assaulted us, and thus armed and hatted, marching briskly, we descended on the Avenida Providencia. I cannot help thinking that the names chance offers contain a profound message. We came across a robust tree that grew in the middle of the sidewalk. Without discussing the idea, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, we climbed up the trunk and sat side by side on a thick branch. There we sat, chatting and discussing things until dawn. We began by finding out that we both agreed that the language we had been taught carried crazy ideas. Instead of thinking correctly, we thought distortedly. Concepts had to be given their true meaning. We spend a lot of time doing this. I remember a few examples:

Instead of “never”: very few times. Instead of “always”: often. “Infinite”: of unknown extent. “Eternity”: with an unthinkable end. “To fail”: to change activities. “I was deceived”: I imagined wrongly. “I know”: I believe. “Beautiful, ugly”: I like, I do not like. “You are like this”: I perceive you to be like this. “Mine”: What I currently possess. “Dying”: changing form.

Next, we reviewed definitions and concluded that it was absurd to define things with a positive assertion. Instead, the correct thing was to define by negating. “Happiness”: to be less distressed each day. “Generosity”: to be less selfish. “Courage”: to be less cowardly. “Strength”: to be less weak. And so on. We concluded that, because of this twisted language, all of society lived in a world plagued by grotesque situations. The word grotesque, beside its definition in the dictionary as meaning ludicrous, prodigious, or outlandish, was also taken to mean unconscious noncommunication. For example, the Pope believed himself to be in direct communication with a god who was actually blind, deaf, and dumb. A citizen, while being beaten by the police, believed that the state was protecting him. Two people remained married for twenty years without realizing that they were speaking to each other in different languages. The worst grotesque situations: believing one knows oneself, believing one knows everything about some topic, believing one has judged with absolute impartiality, believing one will love and be loved forever. In conversation, people think one thing and, in trying to communicate it, say something else. The interlocutor hears one thing, but understands something different. When answering, one does not respond to what the other person initially thought, nor to what the other person said, but to what one has understood. The final result: a conversation between deaf people who do not even know how to listen to themselves.

I proposed the poetic act as a solution to this grotesque communication. A heated discussion followed, which ended with the dawning of the sun’s first rays. There were two forms of poetry: written poetry, which ought to be secret, a kind of intimate diary created solely for the benefit of the poet, which should only have a minimal number of readers; and the poetry of action, which should be performed as a social exorcism in front of numerous spectators. Discussing these subjects while sitting on the branch of a tree gave them paramount importance. From that day on Enrique and I frequently saw each other, and over the course of three or four years performed a large number of poetic acts that, unknown to me at the time, would form the basis of psychomagical therapy.

In that city where many streets are at whimsical twisted angles, the first thing we proposed was to choose a destination point and get there by walking in a straight line, without deviating for any reason. This is not to say that we always succeeded. We sometimes found insurmountable or dangerous obstacles; one example is the time when we used the exit to a parking lot as our route. We paid no heed to the sign reading “Private area, entry prohibited.” We were advancing in a poetic ecstasy through the damp gloom when a pack of wild dogs came lunging toward us, barking ferociously. Throwing aside all dignity, we fled, certain that we would leave with our pants ripped off. I do not know what divine inspiration led Lihn to bark more ferociously than the dogs, while also galloping on all fours. Terror lent a prodigious volume to his voice. I quickly began to imitate him. In an instant, we switched from being pursued to being part of the pursuing group. The dogs, confused, made no attempt to bite us. We left the dark underground area shaking with nervous laughter, but with a sense of triumph. This adventure made us realize that by identifying with the difficulties we faced, we could make them into our allies. Rather than resisting or fleeing a problem, by entering it, making oneself part of it, one can use it as an element of liberation.

Sometimes we were attacked because if there were a car in our path we would climb onto it and walk over its roof. One furious owner chased us, throwing stones. However, there were many times that we had the joy of achieving a straight line. At houses we would ring the bell, ask for permission, enter through the door, and leave by whichever way we wanted, even through a narrow window. The important thing was to follow the straight line with the precision of an arrow. Luckily for us, Chile was a poetic country in that era. Saying, “We’re young poets in action,” would bring a smile to the severest of faces. Many kind ladies would accompany us on the journey through their homes and show us out the back door. We were often offered a glass of wine. This crossing of the city in a straight line was a fundamental experience for us because it taught us to overcome obstacles by getting them to participate in the work of art. It was as if all of reality danced with us once we had decided on the act.

Little by little, we were carrying out acts that involved more participants. One day we put a large quantity of coins in a perforated cookie tin and walked around the city center, letting them fall. It was extraordinary to see well-dressed people forgetting their dignity, bending down feverishly behind us — a whole street of people with their backs bent! We also decided to create our own imaginary city parallel to the real city. To accomplish this we conducted inaugurations by gathering at the foot of some statue or famous monument, covering it partly or entirely with sheets, and conducting an inaugural ceremony according to the dictates of our imagination. We would applaud when we pulled off the fabric and then give the statue a meaning that was different from its real history. For example, we applauded the naval hero Arturo Prat because, in his agony after jumping to board a ship and receiving a machete blow on the head dealt to him by an enemy cook, he had been struck by inspiration and invented the recipe for baked empanadas. On another national hero we bestowed the story that he had conquered the enemy army using love as a weapon by sending in an invading horde of expert prostitutes, which thanks to patriotic idealism included his sisters, mother, and two grandmothers. Thus, with these humorous nighttime inaugurations, fueled by abundant wine, we gave new significance to banks, churches, and government buildings. We changed the names of a large number of streets. Lihn decided to live on “Lovesick Street” at the corner of the “Avenue of the God Who Does Not Believe In Me.” When other friends joined in our poetic acts we presented a great exhibition of dogs, replacing any given object with them. For example, a poet walked in dragging a suitcase while claiming, in order to validate his “animal,” that it had no legs and so could not get thorns in its paws, which meant fewer vet bills. The parade included the dog-lamp (you can read all night by it without it urinating on you), the dog-long underwear (better than a greyhound), the dog-wastebasket (collects waste instead of producing it), the dog-rifle (a very good guard dog), the dog-banknote (very nice and makes you lots of friends), and so forth. Another time we decided that money could be transformed. Instead of coins, we would use boiled shrimp. When we put these red creatures into the hands of the conductor selling bus tickets, he did not know how to react and let us board without a problem. We paid the cover charge to get into a dance hall with a seashell. Many times we went to the Museum of Fine Arts, stood before the pictures, and imitated the voices of the subjects portrayed, attributing all manner of absurd speeches to them. We attained such perfection in this activity that we were finally able to perform it with abstract paintings as well. Sometimes Lihn and I set ourselves goals that were strange due to their simplicity: when we were fed up with university life, we took the train to Valparaiso and determined not to return until an old lady invited us for a cup of tea. In search of our hostess, whom we likened to the magicians in fairy tales, we walked around the jumbled streets of the port district. Feigning extreme fatigue, we recited poems while walking and bumping into each other. Soon a lady offered us a glass of water. We convinced her that it would be better to give us some tea. Having achieved our goal, we triumphantly returned to the capital.

On another occasion I went to a French restaurant accompanied by four very well-dressed poets. We all ordered steaks with pepper. When the steaks arrived, we rubbed them all over our clothes, soaking ourselves in sauce. Once this was accomplished, we ordered the same thing again, and repeated the act. And so on, six times over, until everyone in the restaurant was trembling, seized by a kind of panic. Then each of us, pulling a rope from his pocket, made a six-steak necklace. We paid and left quietly, as if what we had done was the most natural thing in the world. One year later, when we returned to the same establishment, the headwaiter told us, “If you’re planning to do what you did the other day, we can’t let you in.” The event had made such an impression on him that, despite its having been quite long ago, it seemed to him as if he had seen us last week. Another time we decided to announce the arrival of a Sufi sage, whom we named Assis Namur. We distributed leaflets that read, “Tomorrow at 5:00 p.m., at the feet of the Virgin of San Cristobal Hill, the holy Assis Namur-the-poor, after a supreme effort, will achieve indifference.” We took the cable car up the hill and sat at the feet of the enormous statue of the Virgin. Lihn, wrapped in a sheet and in a meditative pose, used an eyebrow pencil to write a bold “No!” on his forehead. We waited for hours. No one showed up. However, the next day there was a brief article in the evening paper, the Diario de la Tarde, reporting that the famous sheik Assis Namur had visited Santiago de Chile.

Our intention was to demonstrate the unpredictable quality of reality with these poetic acts. Lihn and I pulled ground meat out of our pockets at a meeting of the Literary Academy, flinging it at the worthy attendees while giving cries of horror. This caused a collective panic. For us, poetry was a convulsion, an earthquake. Appearances were to be denounced, falsehoods unmasked, and conventions challenged. Dressed as beggars, we took up a violin and a guitar in front of the patio of a café, as if we were about to play. Then we broke the musical instruments by smashing them against the sidewalk. We gave a coin to each patron and left. At a lecture by a professor of literature in the central hall of the University of Chile, while dressed as explorers we approached the speaker’s table crawling on all fours and with melodramatic moans of thirst fought with each other to drink the water from the official carafe. We lined up to enter a movie theater disguised as blind people and crying loudly. In an act paying homage to mothers, on the tenth of May we dressed in tuxedos and sang a lullaby while pouring several bottles of milk over our heads.

However, our youthful enthusiasm also led us to commit some grave errors. We went to the medical school and, with the complicity of friends who were students there, stole the arms of a corpse. Lihn took one arm and I the other, and we each dressed in an overcoat. Then we went around shaking hands with people, giving them the dead hands. No one dared to comment that our hands were stiff and cold because they did not want to face the reality of those dead limbs. Once finished with this macabre game we threw the arms into the Mapocho River without thinking of the consequences and without paying any respects to the human being who had possessed them.

Our feeling of freedom led us to do evil. On the banks of the Mapocho, a wild area in those days, a colony of ants had built a statuesque city. Enrique and I invited a group of artists to this location, promising an “exemplary comedy.” We set folding chairs around the ant mound. We dressed as soldiers. We advanced, goose-stepping in our boots, saluting like Nazis, and trampled the ant nest, carrying out a massacre of thousands of insects. Driven mad, they spread out in a black swarm beneath the feet of the spectators, who, disgusted, began to stomp on them. Although everyone certainly understood the meaning of our message, this did not make us any less cruel murderers of ants. We felt affected by this experience, and it led us to question ourselves seriously.

What is the definition of a poetic act? It should be beautiful, imbued with a dreamlike quality, should be above any justification, and should create another reality within the very heart of ordinary reality. It should allow for transcendence to another plane. It should open the door to a new dimension, achieving a purifying courage. Therefore, if we were proposing to perform an act deviating from ordinary and codified behaviors, it was necessary for us to evaluate the consequences beforehand. The act should be a vital fissure in the petrified order perpetuated by society, not a compulsive manifestation of blind rebellion. It was essential to distrust the negative energies that could lead to a senseless act. We understood why André Breton had apologized after yielding to excitement and declaring that the ultimate surrealist act was to go out into the street brandishing a revolver and killing random strangers. The poetic act should be a gratuitous act that allows creative energies that are normally repressed or latent in us to manifest with goodness and beauty. The irrational act is an open door to vandalism and violence. When a crowd is enraged, when manifestations degenerate and people set fire to cars and break windows, this is also a release of pent-up energies. But it does not deserve to be called a poetic act.

A Japanese haiku gives us a clue. The student shows the teacher his poem:

“Here’s a butterfly:

Now I will tear off its wings.

I get a pepper!”

The teacher’s response is immediate.

“No, that’s not it. Listen:

“I have a pepper:

Now I add some wings to it.

Here’s a butterfly!”

The lesson was clear: the poetic act must always be positive, aiming for construction and not destruction.

We reviewed the acts that we had carried out. Many of them had been nothing more than hateful reactions against a society that we considered vulgar, more or less clumsy attempts at an act worthy of being called poetic. We clearly saw that on the day we had gone into my father’s shop accompanied by Assis Namur, claiming that Jaime was a holy man because he was selling a beautiful void then opening a box to show that it was empty, we should have arrived in a procession with a bag of socks and filled the box with them in order to realize his dream of becoming a merchant. Instead of putting earthworms between the legs of my parents, I should have filled their bed with chocolate coins. Instead of staring in the dark like a beast at the crotch of my sleeping sister, I should have used immense delicacy to place a pearl between those labia. Instead of cutting off the dead man’s arms, we should have painted him gold, dressed him in a purple robe, put long hair and a beard on him, and added a crown of electric lights, making him into Christ. We should have put a plaster Virgin smeared with honey next to the ant mound, so that the ants would cover her, giving her a living skin.

After this gaining of awareness, we had no more regrets. Errors are excusable if they are committed only once, in a sincere quest for knowledge. These atrocities had opened up our path to the true poetic act. We decided to create an act for the consecrated Pablo Neruda. It was known that he would return from Europe the following spring on a very precise date. We knew a gentleman whose passion was to cultivate butterflies. He had a thorough knowledge of the habits of these insects, and he knew how to breed their larvae. We made him an accomplice in our act and went to Isla Negra with him to a beach where the poet had built a retreat by joining together several houses with a tower rising from their midst. Lihn, with the air of a magician, inserted an antique key — apparently a memento from his grandmother — into the old lock, and without applying the least force, unlocked it. The door to the sacred lair swung open! Although we knew that no one was living there, we walked on tiptoe, afraid of awakening some unknown and terrible muse. The rooms were full of beautiful and strange objects: collections of bottles of all types, figureheads with faces flushed by delusions, bizarrely shaped rocks, huge seashells, old books, crystal balls, primitive drums, coffee mills, all sorts of spurs, folk dolls, automata, and so forth. It was an enchanting museum formed by the child that inhabited the soul of the poet. Out of religious respect, we touched nothing. We moved as little as possible, gliding rather than walking to dodge the artifacts. The butterfly breeder, carrying his packets, stood stiff as a statue, hardly daring to breathe. All at once, Enrique was seized by an angelic energy that made him suddenly lighter on his feet. He began to jump effortlessly, intoning a song composed of unintelligible words, sounding like something between Arabic and Sanskrit. We saw him dance as if his body had lost its bones; his balance was amazing, his movements more and more daring, closer and closer to the precious objects. When he reached a final paroxysm, he shook so fast that he appeared to have hundreds of limbs. He did not break anything. All items remained in place. After the dance, we knelt meditating while the butterfly breeder placed his caterpillars in strategic corners. After the task was completed, we started back toward Santiago. The cultivator assured us that when Neruda returned to his house, clouds of butterflies would emerge from every corner.

In 1953 I threw my address book into the sea and boarded a boat from Valparaiso, bound for Paris with a fourth-class dormitory cabin ticket and barely a hundred dollars in my pocket. I had decided never to return again, not because I did not love Chile or my friends (it hurt me deeply to cut all my ties), but because I wanted to fundamentally live the idea that the poet must be a tree that converts its branches into celestial roots. Before leaving, I carried out two poetic acts, one in Lihn’s company and the other alone, that affected my character profoundly.

In a bookstore that, not merely by chance, was called Daedalus, Enrique and I put on a puppet show of a play by Federico García Lorca with our little theater, which we called the Bululú. Taming my poet friend enough to rehearse, and tearing him out of the arms of Bacchus, was a herculean task but luckily we were encouraged by our girlfriends and their sisters, who patiently sewed all the costumes. On the day of the performance the audience, mostly civil war refugees from Spain, filled the place and did not hold back their applause. Although the price of admission was modest, we took in a good amount of money. Elated by success, after several toasts we decided to rent a victoria, one of those open horse-drawn carriages popular among romantic couples and tourists. We asked the driver what route he would take us on in return for the amount that we had earned. He suggested a five-kilometer route past the most beautiful sights in the city center and its surroundings. We accepted, but instead of traveling comfortably seated, we ran behind the victoria. (That is to say, we were pursuing fame.) For the last three hundred meters we got on, sat down, and finished the ride with our arms raised as if we were champions. We had intuitively discovered that the subconscious accepts metaphorical facts as real. This act, seemingly absurd and eccentric, was a contract we made with ourselves: we would invest our energy in our work; we would devote ourselves to pursuing victory; we would not be losers but winners. Enrique Lihn devoted his entire life to art and worked unceasingly to perfect what he did until his death at the age of fifty-nine. He is considered one of the great Chilean poets. While in his sick bed, the last verse he wrote was: “. he unravels the skein of death with his hands, which they say are those of an angel.”

As I was preparing to leave the second poetic act took place at a farewell party that my friends threw for me at Café Tango on the Alameda de las Delicias. We heard a rumbling that grew and grew, as if a gigantic wave were approaching. We young artists, living isolated in our idealistic sphere and paying no attention to vulgar politics, had not noticed when the country voted to elect a new president. In an absurd historical phenomenon, the popular candidate in this democratic election was the former military dictator Carlos Ibáñez del Campo. Now, by their own will, the people had put him in command for the second time. The deafening rumble proclaiming triumph originated from a crowd of some hundred thousand people who joined the throng, from homes in the slums around the Central Station to posh neighborhoods. It was as if a dark river of euphoric, drunken ants had invaded the broad avenue. Moved by I do not know what force I jumped up and ran to the avenue, full of uncontainable joy, stood in the middle of it, and waited for the crowd to reach me. When the first line of marchers was a few meters from me I began yelling loudly, without thinking for one second of the dangerous consequences, “Death to Ibáñez!” It was not David versus Goliath; it was a flea against King Kong. How could I have had the idea of confronting a hundred thousand people? In a state of ecstasy, alien to my body and therefore alien to fear, I shouted and shouted until I was hoarse, insulting the new president. The river of people did not react. My act was so foolish that it was unthinkable to them. They simply integrated me into their triumph. I was one of them, one more citizen cheering their new leader. Instead of “death to Ibáñez” they heard “long live Ibáñez.” As the human torrent passed all around me and I stood there like a salmon swimming against the current, I realized that I was not doing this because I wanted to die, but on the contrary, because I wanted above all to live, meaning to survive without being swallowed by this prosaic world — a world that is so prosaic, however irrational it may seem, that it has glimmerings of the surreal. The people who were marching along were not shouting “long live Ibáñez” but “long live the Horse.” The winning candidate had begun his career as a cavalry officer, and because he spoke little and had abnormally large teeth the people called him the Horse. Perhaps that is why he governed the country by stomping on it.

My friends, who had initially thought I had run to the bathroom to vomit, became concerned about my disappearance and went to look for me in the street. They spotted me standing there, shouting against everything in the middle of the parade. Pale, they made their way to me and got me out of there at top speed. I collapsed on a table in the café, short of breath. My whole body ached as if I had been beaten. Then I was seized by nervous laughter and severe trembling, at which point they calmed me down by throwing water from a jug in my face. The Alejandro they calmed thus would never be the same again. A force had awakened within me that would enable me to overcome a great many adverse currents. Years later, I applied this experience to therapy: you cannot heal someone; you can only teach him how to heal himself.