By+Night+in+Chile

(Chris Andrews translation)

Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix: "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." (3)

Lacroix: "With the naivete of a fledgeling, I said that I wanted to be a literary critic, that I wanted to follow in his footsteps, that for me nothing on earth could be more fulfilling than to read, and to present the results of my reading in good prose, when I said that, Farewell smiled and put his hand on my shoulder (a hand that felt as heavy as if it were encased in an iron gauntlet or heavier still) and he met my gaze and said it was not an easy path. In this barbaric country, the critic's path, he said, is not strewn with roses. In this country of estate owners, he said, literature is an oddity and nobody values knowing how to read." (4) Ironic statement... bolano wasn't a peasant poet, but he was more aligned with them than the stuffy, spine-stroking conservatives.

Lacroix: "There was Neruda and there a few meters behind him was I, and, between us, the night, the moon, the equestrian statue, Chilean plants, Chilean wood, the obscure dignity of our land. I bet the wizened youth has no stories like this to tell. He didn't meet Neruda. He hasn't met any of our Republic's major writers in a setting as elemental as the one I have just described." (13)

Lacroix: "Neruda recites a poem. He and Farewell recall a particularly knotty line from Gongora. Naturally the young poet turns out to be a Nerudian. Neruda recites another poem. The meal is exquisite. Chilean tomato salad, game birds with bearnaise sauce, baked conger eel brought in specially from the coast on Farewell's orders. Wine from the estate. Compliments." (14) Neruda the tepid communist. Compare to social conditions in Chile at the time.

Lacroix: "...Farewell laughing and looking at me, a look of brazen complicity, as if to say to me, Be a poet by all means if that's what you want to do, but you must write criticism, and for goodness' sake read widely and deeply, widely and deeply..." (17)

Lacroix: "The pure song of water on stones. As I walked back through the wood 'Sordel, Sordello, which Sordello?' was still ringing in my ears, but something within the wood itself darkened the mood of that sprightly refrain. I came out on the wrong side. Before me lay not the lodge but rather some godforsaken-looking orchards. I was not surprised to hear dogs barking, although I could not see them, and as I walked through the orchards where, under the protective shade of avocado trees, there grew an assortment of fruits and vegetables worthy of Archimboldo, I was a boy and a girl who, naked like Adam and Eve, were tilling the same furrow. The boy looked at me: a string of snot hung from his nose down to his chest. I quickly averted my gaze but could not stem and overwhelming nausea. I felt myself falling into the void, an intestinal void, made of stomach and entrails. When at last I managed to control the retching, the boy and the girl had disappeared. Then I came to some sort of chicken coop." (18) A portal to the underworld.

Lacroix: "So I adoped the name of H. Ibacache. And little by little the reputation of H. Ibacache oustripped that of Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix, to my surprise, and to my satisfaction, since Urrutia Lacroix was preparing a body of poetic work of posterity, an oeuvre of canonical ambition, which would take shape gradually as the years went by, in a meter that nobody was using in Chile any more, what am I saying, a meter that nobody has ever used in Chile, while Ibacache read other people's books and explained them to the public, just as Farewell had done before him, endeavoring to elucidate our literature, a reasonable endeavor, a civilized endeavor, an endeavor pursued in a measured, conciliatory tone, like a humble lighthouse on the fatal shore." (25)

Lacroix: "...and while Don Salvador [Reyes] let time slip away sitting in the chair at the back of the room, watching the shifting landscape of his own soul, the gaunt, melancholic Guatemalan let time slip away watching the repetitive and unpredictable landscape of Paris. And when our writer's eyes discovered the transparent line, the vanishing point upon which the Guatemalan's gaze was focused, or from which on the contrary it emanated, well, at that point a chill shiver ran through his soul, a sudden desire to shut his eyes, to stop looking at that being who was looking at the tremulous dusk over Paris, a desire to be gone or to embrace him, a desire (arising from a reasonable curiosity) to ask him what he could see and to seize it then and there, and at the same time a fear of hearing what cannot be heard, the essential words to which we are deaf and which in all probability cannot be pronounced. And it was there, in that attic room, by pure chance, that some time later, Salvador Reyes happened to meet Ernst Junger, who had come to visit the Guatemalan, guided by his aesthetic flair and above all by his tireless curiosity. And as soon as Don Salvador crossed the threshold of the Central American's abode, he saw Junger in his snug-fitting German officer's uniform intently examining a two-by-two meter canvas, an oil painting that Don Salvador had seen innumberable times at which bore the curious title //Landscape: Mexico City an hour before dawn//, a painting undeniably influenced by surrealism... and in which an eccentric interpretation of certain Italian landscape painters could be detected, as well as a spontaneous attraction, not uncommon among extravagant and oversensitive Central Americans, to the French Symbolists, Redon and Moreau. The painting showed Mexico City seen from a hill or perhaps from the balcony of a tall building. Greens and grays predominated. Some suburbs looked like the waves in the sea. Others looked like photographic negatives. There were no human figures, but, here and there, one could make out the blurred skeletons that could have belonged to people or animals..." (29-30)

Lacroix: "And then, when the Guatemalan had gone back to the window with his due ration of cognac, Junger, returning to the canvas that had intrigued him, asked the painter of he had spent long in the Aztec capital and what impression his time there had left, to which the Guatemalan replied that the week or slightly less he had spent in Mexico City had left no more than a vague blur in his memory, and, in any case, he had painted that picture, now the object of the German's attention of curiosity, many years later, in Paris, without really thinking about Mexico at all, although under the influence of what, for want of a better expression, he called a Mexican Mood. And that set Junger musing on the sealed wells of memory, perhaps imagining that during his brief stay in Mexico City the Guatemalan had unwittingly stored a way a vision that would not surface again until many years later, although Don Salvador, who was agreeing with everything the Teuton hero said, thought to himself perhaps it was not a question of sealed wells suddenly reopened, or in nay case not the sealed wells Junger had in mind, and as soon as this thought occurred to him his head began to buzz, as if hundred of sand flies or horseflies were escaping from it, flies visible only through the prism of a hot, dizzy feeling, in spite of the fact that.... understanding only snatches of Junger's oblivious disquisition.... glimpsed or thought he glimpsed a part of the truth... the Guatemalan in Paris, the war already underway or about to begin, the Guatemalan already accustomed to spending long, dead (or dying) horus in front of his only window, contemplating the landscape of Paris, and //Landscape: Mexico City and Hour before dawn// emerging from that contemplation... an altar for human sacrifice... an expression of supreme boredome... an acknowledgement of defeat... not the defeat of Paris or the defeat of European culture bravely determined to burn itself down, not the political defeat of certain ideals that the painter tepidly espoused, but his personal defeat... with a clear-sightedness reaching far beyond the realm of the particular and the anecdotal... And then, in a single draught Don Salvador drained what was left of his cognac and started listening to Junger again, who all this time had been holding forth imperturbably, while he, that is to say our writer, had become entangled in a spiderweb of futile thoughts and the Guatemalan, predictably, remained slumped beside the window, his life seeping away in the obsessive and sterile contemplation of Paris... Junger said that he did not think the Guatemalan would live until the following winter, an odd remark for him to make, since by then it was obvious to everyone that many thousands of people were not going to live until the following winter..." (34)

Don Salvador: "It's good to love. It's bad to be impressionable." (36)

Lacroix: "...the work we sometimes think we know but which in fact we hardly know at all, the mystery we carry in our hearts and which in a moment of rapture we set in the center of a metal tray inscribed with Mycenaean characters, characters that stammer out our history and our hopes, but what they stammer out in fact is nothing more than our defeat, the joust in which we have already fallen although we do not know it..." (43) //Mystery.//

Farewell: "At first, news of his idea spread like nimble wildfire lit by a mocking got to amuse the public, but then it went the way of all things, subsiding into oblivion... Writers went on invoking their muses. The Emperor died. A war broke out and the Empire collapsed... And then the Russian colonel got down from his tank and said, What the hell is that?.. And they saw neither statues nor tombs but only desolation and neglect, until at the very top of the hill they discovered a crypt... Inside the crypt, sitting on a grand stone seat, they found the shoemaker's body, his eye sockets empty as if he were never to contemplate anything but the valley spread out below Heroes' Hill, and his jaw hanging open, as if he were still laughing after having glimpsed immortality... Do you understand? Do you understand?" (44)

Lacroix: "Farewell and I stayed put and kept still, only our hands moving, lifting the coffee cups to our lips, while our eyes looked on, as if what they were seeing had nothing to do with us... in that typically Chilean way... making me feel dizzy and causing an ache in my eyes... and ache I soothed with prayers and asprin... there was something in Farewell's expression, something in his stillness... which... seemed with growing force to imply an infinite terror, or rather a terror shooting towards the infinite, as terror does by its very nature, rising and rising endlessly, thence our affliction, thence our grief, thence certain interpretations of Dante, stemming from that terror, slender and defenseless as a worm, and yet able to climb and climb and expand like one of Einstein's equations... " (46)

Farewell: "Everything falls apart, time devours everything, beginning with Chileans." (50)

Lacroix: "...a fresh breeze caressed my face, trying to wake me up properly, but I still cannot have been properly awake, for deep in my friend I could hear the voices of the popes, like the distant screeching of a flock of birds, a clear sign that part of my mind was still dreaming or obstinately refusing to emerge from the labyrinth of dreams..." (51)

Lacroix: "I could only hear the odd word, that Chilean intonation, words that meant nothing yet conveyed the infinite vulgarity and hopelessness of my compatriots." (59)

Lacroix: "In Europe... a good deal of research had been undertaken, and in some quarters there was talk of definitive solutions putting a stop to the deterioration of God's houses on earth." (61)

Lacroix: "...while Fr. Fabrice and I conversed, Ta Gueule appeared again and again light a lightning bolt, or the abstract idea of a lightning bolt, and stooped on the huge flocks of starlings coming out of the west like swarms of flies, darkening the sky with their erratic fluttering, and after a few minutes the fluttering of the starlings was bloodied, stattered and bloodied, and afternoon on the outskirts of Avignon took on a deep red hue... like the planet's femoral artery, or the planet's aorta, gradually swelling, and I saw that swelling blood vessel in the sky over Avignon, the blood-stained flight of the starlings, Ta Gueule splashing color like an abstract expressionist painter, ah, the peace, the harmony of nature..." (67)

Lacroix: "After an initial period of enthusiasm, [Fr. Antonio] had begun to have doubts about using such an expeditious method to be rid of the birds which, in spite of their shitting, were God's creatures too. By the time I arrived in Burgos, Rodrigo the falcon was eating only mincemeat or sausage meat and the offal that Fr. Antonio or his housekeeper bought at the market, liver, heart, scraps, and idleness had reduced him to a sorry state, similar tothe state in which Fr. Antonio was languishing, his cheeks hollowed by doubt and untimely repentance, which is the worst kind..." (68)

Lacroix: "One day I decided it was time to go back to Chile. I went by plane. My country was not in a healthy state. This is no time to dream, I said to myself, I must act on my principles. This is no time to go chasing rainbows, I said, I must be a patriot." (73)

Lacroix: "The night of Allende's victory I went out and walked all the way to Farewell's house... we started drinking... I suggested he ring up some Catholic poets we both knew, if that was going to make him feel better. They're the worst, said Farewell, they're probably all out in the street, celebrating Allende's victory. After a few hours Farewell fell asleep in his chair. I tried to put him to bed, but he was too heavy, so I left him there. When I got back to my house, I went straight to my Greek classics. Let God's will be done, I said. I'm going to reed the Greeks... I also reread Demosthenes and Menander and Aristotle and Plato (whom one cannot read too often), and there were strikes and the colonel of a tank regiment tried to mount a coup, and a cameraman recorded his own death on film, and then Allende's naval aide-de-camp was assassinated and there were riots, swearing, Chileans blaspheming, painting on walls, and then nearly half a million people marched in support of Allende, and then came the coup d'etat, the putsch, the military uprising, the bombing of La Moneda and when the bombing was finished the president committed suicide and that put an end to it all. I sat there in silence, a finger between the pages to mark my place, and I thought: Peace at last. I got up and looked out the window: Peace and quiet. The sky was blue, a deep, clean blue, with a few scattered clouds. I saw a helicopter in the distance. Leaving the window open, I knelt and prayed, for Chile, for all Chileans, the living and the dead. Then I rang Farewell. How are you feeling? I asked him. I'm dancing a jig, he said." (74-6)

Lacroix, after Allende falls: "If I had to describe my poetry, I would have said that, until then, it had been Apollonian, yet I had begun to write in that night what might tentatively be described as a Dionysiac mode. But in fact it wasn't Dionysiac poetry. Or demonic poetry. It was just raving mad." (77-8)

A sense of the ridiculous... Admiral Merino wants to know if Marta Harnecker is attractive. "General Pinochet seemed to be very tired. THis was the first class to which he had come in uniform. He spent it slumped in an armchair, jotting down the odd note, not once removing his dark glasses. I think he fell asleep for a few minutes, still firmly gripping his propelled pencil." (84)

Lacroix: "When I got [home], at two in the morning, after driving through the empty streets of Santiago, reduced to geometry by the curfew, I couldn't get to sleep and didn't know what to do.... Was it all right? Did they learn anything? Did I teach them anything? Did I do what I had to do? Did I do what I ought to have done? Is Marxism a kind of humanism? Or a diabolical theory? If I told my literary friends what I had done, would they approve? Would some condemn my actions out of hand? Would some understand and forgive me? Is it //always// possible for a man to know what is good and what is bad? In the midst of these deliberations, I broke down and began to cry helplessly, stretched out on the bed, blaming Mr. Raef and Mr. Etah for my misfortunes (in an intellectual since) since they were the ones who got me into that business in the first place... That week I dined with Farewell... In spite of Colonel Perez Latouche's stern warnings about absolute discretion, I told him about my strange adventure, teaching that secret group of illustrious pupils... Farewell, I whispered, Did I do the right thing or not? And since there was no reply, I repeated the question: Did I do my duty, or did I go beyond it? And Farewell replied with another question: Was it a necessary or unnecessary course of action? Necessary, necessary, necessary, I said. That seemed to satisfy him, and me too, at the time. And then we went on eating and talking." (87-92)

Pg 89-91 Pinochet says Allende used to read "Magazines. All he read was magazines. Summaries of books. Articles his followers used to cut out for him. I have it from a reliable source, believe me." Frei read "Nothing. He didn't read at all. Not a word, not even the Bible." Alessandri read romances. "They didn't read, they didn't write. They pretended to be cultured, but not one of them was a reader of a writer. Maybe they knew something about the press, but they knew nothing about books." Pinochet himself claims to have written three books.

Word of the teaching sessions spreads. Lacroix expects trouble, but none comes. "At first, I thought this silence was the result of a concerted decision to ostracize me. Then, to my astonishment, I realized nobody gave a damn. 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." (93)

Lacroix: "I went on writing reviews for the newspaper, and critical articles crying out for a different approach to culture, as even the most inattentive reader could hardly fail to notice if he scratched the surface a little, critical articles crying out, indeed begging, for a return to the Greek and Latin greats, to the Troubadors, to the //dolce stil nuovo// and the classics of Spain, France and England, more culture! more culture! read Whitman and Pound and Eliot, read Neruda and Borges and Vallejo, read Victor Hugo, for God's sake, and Tolstoy, and proudly I cried myself hoarse in the desert, but my vociferations and on occasions my howling could only be heard by those who were able to scratch the surface of my writings with the nails of their index fingers, and there were not many, but enough for me, and life went on and on..." (95)

Lacroix: "So I went out into the street and breathed the air of Santiago with the vague conviction that I was living, if not in the best of worlds, at least in a //possible// world, a //real// world..." (95-6)

Lacroix, of Maria Canales: "She was interested in art, she liked to talk with painters and performance artists and video artists, maybe because they were not as well educated as the writers. Or so she thought. Then she began to mix with writers and realized that they were not particularly well educated either. What a relief that must have been. A very Chilean sort of relief. So few of us are truly cultured in this godforsaken country. The rest are completely ignorant. Pleasant, likable people all the same." (98)

Lacroix: "Then the maid snatched [the baby] away from me in a most ungracious manner. I wanted to tell her that I was a priest. But something stopped me, perhaps that sense we Chileans possess to an uncommon degree, the sharpest of all our senses, the sense of the ridiculous. When the maid carried the little boy upstairs again, he looked at me over her shoulder and it seemed to me that those wide eyes were seeing something they did not want to see." (101)

Lacroix: "Who remembers Juan de Armaza now? I thought as night fell with a snakelike hissing. Only Farewell and some old crone with an elaphantine memory. A professor of literature in some remote southern town. A crazy grandson, living in a perfect, inexistent past. We have nothing, I murmured. What did you say? said Farewell." (102)

Lacroix: "To be frank, one could no longer have a conversation with Farewell. Sometimes I sat there looking at him and I thought: You old windbag, you old gossip, you old drunk, how are the mighty fallen. But then I would get up and fetch the things he asked for, trinkets, little silver or iron sculptures, old editions of Blest-Gana or Luis Orrego Luco that he was content simply to fondle. What has become of literature? I asked myself. Could the wizened youth be right? Could he be right after all? I wrote or tried to write a poem. In one line there was a boy with blue eyes looking through a window. Awful, ridiculous." (106)

In a dream, Fr. Antonio points out to Lacroix the Judas Tree. (106-7) "Fr. Antonio is dead, I said to myself, by now he'll be in heaven or in hell. Or the Burgos cemetery, more likely." (107-8) "The Judas Tree, the Judas Tree. One afternoon, as I was singing away to myself, I had a glimpse of what it meant: Chile itself, the whole country, had become the Judas Tree, a leafless, dead-looking tree, but still deeply rooted in the black earth, our rich black earth with its famous 40-centimeter earthworms." (108)

Lacroix: "I said that life was much more important than literature, and [Maria Canales] looked at me in the eyes with that bovine face of hers and she said she know, she had always known that. My authority collapsed like a house of cards, while hers, or rather her supremacy, towered irresistibly." (108)

Lacroix: Jimmy Thompsons was revealed to be an agent of DINA, he killed one of Allende's ex-ministers and "a North American woman who happened to get in the way." (111) Of the dying man in the basement: "The stray guest shut the door, feeling suddenly stone cold sober, and stealthily retraced his steps. When he got back to the sitting room he asked for a whiskey and then another and didn't say a word. Later, how much later I don't know, he told a friend, who then told my friend, who, much later on, told me. It was weighing heavily on my friend's conscience. Go in peace, I told him." (109)

Lacroix: "I asked myself the following question? If Maria Canales knew what her husband was doing in the basement, why did she invite guests to her house? The answer was simple: Because, normally, when she had a soiree, the basement was unoccupied. I asked myself the following question: Why then, on that particular night, did a guest who lost his way find that poor man? The answer was simple: Because, with time, vigilance tends to relax, because all horrors are dulled by routine. I asked myself the following question: Why didn't anyone say anything at the time? The answer was simple: Because they were afraid. I was not afraid. I would not have been able to speak out, but I didn't see anything, I didn't know until it was too late. Why go stirring up things that have gradually settled down over the years?" (112)

Lacroix: "Then [Maria Canales] smiled: 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." (115-6)

Lacroix: "An individual is no match for history." 117

Lacroix: "Is there any solution?" (repeated) 117

I see people running in the streets. I see people going into the Metro or into movie theaters. I see people buying newspapers. And sometimes it all shakes and everything stops for a moment. And then I ask myself: Where is the wizened youth? Why has he gone away? And little by little the truth begins to rise like a dead body. A dead body rising from the bottom of the sea or from the bottom of a gully. I can see its shadow rising. Its flickering shadow. Its shadow rising as if it were climbing a hill on a fossil planet. And then, in the half-light of my sickness, I see his fierce, his gentle face, and I ask myself: Am I that wizened youth? Is that the true, the supreme terror, to discover that I am the wizened youth whose cries no one can hear? And that the poor wizened youth is me? And then faces flash before my eyes at vertiginous speed, the faces I admired, those I loved, hated, envied and despised. The faces I protected, those I attacked, the faces I hardened myself agains and those I sought in vain. / And then the storm of shit begins." 118