THE+PART+ABOUT+THE+BASEMENT

As Carlos Wieder’s photographic exhibition wears on into the early hours of the morning, an air force captain says, “I advise you to get some sleep and forget everything that happened here tonight.” The fact that anyone could sleep after viewing Wieder’s photographs is as horrible as their content because they are all caught up in the same storm – the content could not exist if silence did not enable it. It is more comforting at first to imagine the guests trying to forget what they’ve seen, but then the idea of humanity //forgetting// Weider's actions is just as bad as the rest of it. If Wieder is representative of a ‘dark heart’ of fascist thought (and human thought by extension), then the complicity of the captain, himself an officer of Chile’s fascist military, is not surprising. He himself is not the executor of the horror, but he protects Wieder by urging the other guests to make peace with the photographs and try to forget them. This process, a sort of repression, is necessary in a world of not-Wieders. They can’t stop him, so they are urged to accept him or join him. (Note that Belano/Bolaño later does stop Wieder by advising a detective named Romero, who finds and kills him. Or gives him a suitcase full of money. It isn't clear.) The silent not-Wieder is exemplified by Father Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix, narrator of __By Night in Chile__. He begins that novel by stating that, One has a moral obligation to take responsibility for one's action, and that includes one's words and silences, yes, one's silences, because silences rise to heaven too, and God hears them, and only God understands and judges them, so one must be very careful with one's silences. I am responsible in every way. My silences are immaculate. Let me make that clear. Clear to God above all. The rest I can forgo. But not God.

We soon come to suspect that this is not the case. Why would he be writing the book if he intended to forgo the rest of us? Father Urrutia is upset because of an encounter with a “wizened youth,” who I suspect is Arturo Belano but could also be a manifestation of the priest’s internal guilt, a result of the sickness from which he's dying. The book seems intended to justify its implied author’s actions. Urrutia also justifies the actions of others. Later in life, he is a frequent guest at the parties of Maria Canales, a bovine woman who loves writing but prefers the company of “painters and performance artists and video artists” because she finds them less intellectually intimidating. “Then she began to mix with writers and realized that they were not particularly well educated either.” Urrutia says this produces, “A very Chilean sort of relief.” A very middle-class sort of relief, it you ask me. In any case, Maria Canales hosts fashionable parties for her artist friends and Urrutia, because he is by then a successful critic known by the pseudonym Ibacache, is often invited. Maria Canales’ is married to Jimmy Thompson, an //estadounidensie//. By the end of the book, Urrutia discovers that he is an agent of the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional, Pinochet’s secret police. This revelation occurs gradually. A drunken guest wanders down to Maria Canales' basement and finds, in one room among many, a naked man, blindfolded and tied to a metal bed. He returns, suddenly sober, to the party, where he asks for a whiskey and drinks it in //silence//. Urrutia hears about this, years later, from a friend of a friend of the man. By then, Jimmy is gone. Urrutia, because he did not know, considers himself absolved of all blame. What about his friend, the source of the story? Urrutia tells him to “go in peace.” It’s unclear whether this other friend knew in time to intervene. It's certain that Father Urrutia spent the years under Pinochet (during which Jimmy was doing his work) invested in various scholarly projects and in teaching the General and his staff about communism. The 'go in peace' is not the only instance in which Urrutia’s function is to justify questionable behavior. After he gains renown as a critic, Urrutia is approached by two men, Mr. Etah and Mr. Raef (i.e. “hate” and “fear”) and is offered a great deal of money to go to Europe and study methods of maintaining churches. Urrutia accepts. In Europe, he finds that the primary threat to churches is the corrosive shit of starling doves and the primary means of defending against the doves is falconry. He visits a number of churches, each protected by a falconer-priest. One of the falcons is named Ta Gueule, which Urban Dictionary defines as a “French slang/argot expression to demand silence in a violent or immediate way.” The falcon does indeed silence the doves (though Urrutia, at least in Chris Andrews’ translation, always refers to them as “starlings,” possibly to avoid the associations “doves” carries), striking like the “abstract idea of a lightning bolt” and Urrutia compares “the blood-stained flight of the starlings” with “the planet’s femoral artery” “swelling” “in the sky over Avignon.” Urrutia meets another priest, Fr. Antonio, who now feeds his falcon sausage and mincemeat and whose cheeks are “hollowed by doubt and untimely repentance, which is the worst kind,” because he has come to object to the killing of “earthly symbols of the Holy Spirit” by such an “expeditious” method. (I disagree – the worst kind of repentance is that which never comes.) Urrutia feels that Antonio and his falcon have both been weakened by their refusal to participate in the systemic destruction of life, a sentiment that echoes the fascist association of violence with strength (or death with regeneration/resurrection). In his recommendations regarding the maintenance of churches, Urrutia places “special emphasis on the use of falcons.” Jimmy Thompson, I suppose, is a falcon as well, though Urrutia’s justification extends only to the people who didn’t stop him, not to the man himself. (Urrutia is probably glad of Thompson’s work... Allende’s reign is a sort of bad dream for him.) However, the language he uses to describe the falcon Ta Geuele is adoring and, as we shall see, his stance towards Wieder is similar. In __Distant Star__, the men searching for Wieder discover an anthology written by Ibacache, where, “Of the younger writers, the youngest was Carlos Wieder, and this was an indication of the hopes Ibacache had pinned on him.” (Further proof that even the most misguided individuals contribute to the great investigation.) No word on whether Ibacache knew about the photography exhibition. This fragment “broke off abruptly, as if Ibacache had suddenly realized he was stepping into a void.” In a separate article, ostensibly about cemeteries on the Pacific coast, Ibacache describes a night conversation with a young man with black trench coat a hidden face who occasionally lapsed into “vulgar or violent language.” It is unclear whether this figure was Wieder or “a figment of the critic’s imagination.” All this causes Wieder to become a mythic figured and gives his ideas, or what some believe his ideas to be, a certain following. What this suggests is that Urrutia is attracted at least to the surface of Wieder’s work. The horror with which he reacts to the truth about Maria Canales’ house (which we’ll get to in a moment) suggests that he probably didn’t know about the photography exhibition. If he had, why would he have pinned his hopes on Carlos Wieder? Anyway, this attraction to the surface causes him to unknowingly mythologize (or contribute to the mythologization of) a horrifically destructive force. His investigation fails – whether out of a lack of will or improper upbringing we don't know (nature or nurture, that is, by which I mean luck) – and that failure constitutes one more gust of wind in the direction of the Chilean hurricane's continuance. I’ve already mentioned that Father Urrutia tutored Pinochet and several of his generals on the subject of Communism, so there’s only a little more to add in regard to the last major part of his life. He is scared for a while that the public and his partners in criticism will censure him when they hear about the lessons. For a while, he hears nothing about it and thinks he is being shunned. Then he realizes nobody cares. He feels: "The country was populated by hieratic figures, heading implacably towards an unfamiliar, gray horizon, where one could barely glimpse a few rays of light, flashes of lightning and clouds of smoke. What lay there? We did not know." Urrutia, who complains about the illiteracy of the public, is right to be worried. The apathy toward his words and the apathy toward literature as a whole stem from the same gray complacency, the same silence, which leads the figures toward some apocalyptic future. What he does not realize (or declines to realize) is the degree to which he is apathetic as well. Now we can move on to the real subject of this chapter: the basement. When Urrutia visits Maria Canales some time after the parties are a thing of the past, she offers to take him down to the basement: Do you want to see the basement? she said. I could have slapped her face, instead of which I sat there and shook my head several times. I shut my eyes. In a few months' time it will be too late, she said to me. By the tone of her voice and the warmth of her breath, I could tell she had brought her face very close to mine. I shook my head again. They're going to knock the house down. They'll rip out the basement. It's where one of Jimmy's men killed the Spanish UNESCO official. It's where Jimmy killed that Cecilia Sanchez Poblete woman. Sometimes I'd be watching television with the children, and the lights would go out for a while. We never heard anyone yell, the electricity just cut out and then came back. Do you want to go and see the basement? ... I must be off, Maria, I really have to go, I said to her... I squeezed her hand and advised her to pray... the stars twinkling far away, and she said, That's how literature is made in Chile. While I was driving back into Santiago, I thought about what she had said. That is how literature is made in Chile, but not just in Chile, in Argentina and Mexico too, in Guatemala and Uruguay, in Spain and France and Germany, in green England and carefree Italy. That is how literature is made. Or at least what we call literature, to keep ourselves from falling into the rubbish dump. Then I started singing to myself again: The Judas Tree, the Judas Tree, and my car went back into the tunnel of time, back into time's giant meat grinder.

That sums it up, doesn't it? If Urrutia doesn't want to speak, he shouldn't look either. That makes it easier for him to do his job. Easier for him to say, "go with God" to men with terrible secrets. Better able to offer comfort to the operators of the meat grinder and the people grant them impunity. Offered a complete image of the evil he's aided, Urrutia chooses ignorance. He lies dying examining a Chilé that seems unfamiliar and repeating the phrase, “Is there a solution?” He says, “An individual is no match for history. The wizened youth has always been alone, and I have always been on history’s side.” That’s the problem right there, and thus the solution, but he doesn't notice. Urrutia is a defeatist. He's looking for a solution, but he can't really care because he isn't willing to risk opposing "history." By "history," I take him to mean, "the weather," the storm that not even the evil metamachine can control. The one who’s alone, the one who resists history or doesn’t believe in it, doesn't need "solutions". The wizened youth, Arturo Belano, is working to build a solution. Urrutia goes with the flow and now he’s been brought to the point where he can’t get outside of it – swept out into the ocean. His conviction that one can’t resist the current causes him to submit to it until he is brought to a place where the probability of his escape is minimal. He then does his job in silence, as the meat grinder keeps spinning. This is precisely how literature is made. Without people like Father Urrutia and Pinochet, what would Bolaño have to write about? (Probably love.) Luckily, Bolaño does provide us with an escape from this rather dark picture. At the end of the chilling "Part About the Crimes," Sergio González Rodríguez, Bolaño’s real-life source for much of the information included in that section, meets with a congresswoman who, determined to avenge the death of a friend, tells him, “I want you to write about this, keep writing about this... I want you to strike hard, strike human flesh, unassailable flesh... stir up the hive.”<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> This is what Urrutia does not realize: the solution is not to 'find a solution' but to keep writing. Writing is the solution. (Of course, if Bolaño were a photographer, photography would be the solution. The medium of action is irrelevant, so long as that action is properly directed.) Urrutia write not to //investigate// but to //justify//. "Justify" to me signals a particular psychological tactic: the burying of an idea for the purpose of comfort. Something is veiled because it creates discomfort. This is another reason we don't see too many stories about starvation on TV. This is a mass veiling, a mass justification. It sells because it creates happiness. Commoditized justification sells well. This is a problem of both supply and demand: people keep buying bullshit and people keep selling it. I have a theory about the reason Urrutia's novel (and possibly his life) ends, "And then the storm of shit begins."<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Maybe it's because the meat grinder only keeps turning because the people at the cranks are eating each other's' bullshit. This seems like the sort of cycle that's hard to stop, but then I realize: they're eating shit. The ocean does not care about shit. Bolaño give us tools that help us deal with this type of system and art as a whole has proved excellent at deconstructing just about everything. Surely humanity has something in its arsenal that can help it deal with evil machines. __Amulet__ constitutes an examination of this sense of cosmic war. The titular amulet is the beautiful song of the beautiful Latin American children as they march down the valley and into the abyss.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Auxilio Lacouture, the book's narrator, writes: And Remedios Varo, who is standing with her back to a picture, a picture covered with an old skirt (but that old skirt, it occurs to me, must have belonged to a giant), says that she has given up smoking, that her lungs are delicate now, and although she doesn't look like she has bad lungs, or has even seen anything bad in her life, I know that she has seen many bad things, the ascension of the devil, the unstoppable procession of termites climbing the Tree of Life, the conflict between the Enlightenment and the Shadow * * or the Empire or the Kingdom of Order, which are all proper names for the irrational stain that is bent on turning us into beasts or robots, and which has been fighting against the Enlightenment since the beginning of time (a conjecture of mine, which the official representatives of the Enlightenment would no doubt reject), I know that she has seen things that very few women know they have seen, and now she is seeing her own death, which is set to occur in less than twelve months' time, and I know that there is someone else in her house who smokes and does not want to be discovered by me, which makes me think that whoever it is, it must be someone I know.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">

The sense of a binary cosmic war, good versus evil, Order versus Enlightenment, kingdom versus kingdom seems like a joke. Cosmic wars and black/white thinking are qualities of apocalyptic cults. Of course it's silly to believe in absolute evil. Of course it's silly to believe in malevolent machines. But there are termites aplenty (senseless as they may be) and I for one would prefer that the Tree of Life continue to stand. What can we do? Keep Enlightening, I guess. Auxilia writes: [Avenida] Guerrero, at that time of night, is more like a cemetery than an avenue, not a cemetery in 1974 or in 1968, or 1975, but a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">

I like to imagine that this is Urrutia's eye. At the end of his life, he can do little but contemplate the horror he's enabled, whether or not he realizes it. If you believe in reincarnation, the dead Urrutia might be both the corpse and an unborn child. (Metempsychosis, or transmigration of the soul, is mentioned repeatedly in Amulet.) Is he dispassionate? I don't know; I haven't read his criticism. But he's certainly dispassionate about the matters that are really important (or else his passion is outweighed by his fear). Maybe he considers Chilé to be more important than the man in the basement. More likely, he considers himself to be more important than the man in the basement. (I'd like to call the combined philosophical position "fascist objectivism.") In any sense, he's typical enough: foisting off his humanity on abstractions and animal desires.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> He's a senseless figure as much as anyone else. The year __2666__, the cemetery long beyond the end of human foresight, the apex or epicenter or eye of the storm beneath Santa Teresa, is the space from which or through which or to which the devil ascends. We've finally come to the end. What's the point of all this investigation? 1) I'll state it clearly: NAFTA is rape and murder, the drug war is rape and murder, and too much of what we buy or sell (or watch bought or sold) is caught up in a system that creates unacceptable amounts of suffering. (We might be more inclined to notice the 'vortexes' of intense or concentrated suffering, but there are big, dark clouds of it all over.) Our weakness causes us to tolerate some evils we might otherwise resist or oppose. 2) Silence and sadism enable each other. Passivity creates impunity. "Awareness leads to control," said my old Psych teacher. Making people less senseless probably reduces suffering. 3) Why not oppose human suffering with everything we've got? We're not just warring factions of howler monkeys in the jungle, we're warring factions of howler monkeys all over the planet, armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons. Something must be done. I'm going to buy into less, sell out less, investigate, and enlighten. This is the Enlightenment fighting the Order. (Of course, each subsumes the other. This is an age without borders.) The only way to deal with the suffering of the world is to engage with it, no matter how horrible. That is to say, individuals must examine the horrific real in as many ways as possible, from many different angles. The work of the real and fictional Sergio Gonzálezes give us hope. On the other hand: complicit detective Ernesto San Epifano has a dream where he’s driving the police chief’s car and finds a body in the trunk but is too scared to remove the black cloth bag covering its head. He gets back in and keeps driving. He, like Father Urrutia Lacroix, cannot stand to see his handiwork. Lalu Cura, meanwhile, sleeps well.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> The factories pay no taxes. The police are underpaid. The army is at war with the gangs. The gangs bribe the police, traffic marijuana into the States, and rape and murder girls sometimes. The police leave the gangs alone and everything continues.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Op. Cit. __Distant Star__. Pg. 92. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Op. Cit. __By Night in Chile__. Pg. 3. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Op. Cit. __By Night In Chile__. Pg. 3. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Op. Cit. __By Night in Chile__. Pg. 109. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> //The phrase seems to translate more literally to, “Shut your animal mouth.”// "Ta Guele." Urban Dictionary. 2013, April 7. <http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=ta%20gueule> <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Op. Cit. __By Night in Chile__. Pg. 66-7. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Op. Cit. __By Night in Chile__. Pg. 68. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Op. Cit. __By Night in Chile__. Pg. 72. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Op. Cit. __Distant Star__. Pg. 105. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Op. Cit. __Distant Star__. Pg. 106. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Op. Cit. __Distant Star__. Pg. 107. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> By Night in Chile. 93. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> By Night in Chile. 115-6. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> By Night in Chile. 117. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> By Night in Chile. 117. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Metamachine – n. A machine made of machines. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> 2666. 13901-13930. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Op. Cit. __By Night in Chile__. Pg. 118. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Op. Cit. __Amulet__. Loc. 1438, 100%. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Op. Cit. __Amulet__. Loc. 835, 57%. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Op. Cit. __Amulet__. Loc. 678, 46%. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> I'm referencing Pynchon, who wrote in __V.__, "A decadence is a falling away from what is human, and as we fall we foist off our humanity on inanimate objects and abstract theories." You'll have to take my word on that, because I don't have a copy handy and the validity of the quote isn't essential to my argument. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Op. Cit. __2666__. Loc. 9898-9903, 48%.