Distant+Star

Bolaño, Roberto. "Distant Star." New Directions. Trans. Chris Andrews.

Fat Marta: "It's as if they weren't his poems. His real poems, if you see what I mean." 14

"IN PRINCIPIO . . . CREAVIT DEUS . . . CAELUM ET TERRAM, I read as if in a dream. I supposed - or hoped - it was part of an advertising campaign." 25

"TERRA AUTEM ERAT INANIS . . . ED VACUA . . . ET TENEBRAE . . . SUPER FACIEM ABYSSI . . . ET SPIRITUS DEI . . . FEREBATUR SUPER AQUAS . . . ... One of the prisoners, a man called Norberto, who was going mad (or such, at least, was the diagnosis pronounced by a fellow prisoner, a socialist psychiatrist who was later executed, I heard, in full possession of his intellectual and emotional faculties), tried to climb the fence that separated the men's yard from the women's, and started shouting, It's a Messerschmitt 109, a Messerschmitt fighter from the Luftwaffe, the best fighter plane of 1940! ... Mad Norberto laughed and said, The Second World War is returning to Earth. All that talk about the Third World War war was wrong; it's the Second returning, returning, returning. And it has fallen to us, the people of Chile, to greet and welcome it... I managed to read the words DIXITQUE DEUS . .. FIAT LUX. . . ET FACTA EST LUX, though perhaps I was guessing or imagining or dreaming." 26-27

"ET VIDIT DEUS . . . LUCEM QUOD . . . ESSET BONA . . . ET DIVISIT . . . LUCEM AC TENEBRAS" 27-8

I caught a glimpse of the pilot. The time he didn't wave. He looked like a stone statue enclosed in the cockpit. The sky was darkening; so soon the night would engulf everything. THe clouds were no longer pink, but black with streaks of red. Over Concepión the symmetrical outline of the plane looked like a Rorschach blot. / This time it wrote only one word, in large letters, over what must have been the center of the city: LEARN." 29

"Two teachers said something about the church running a publicity campaign." 30

"...he went on to explain that //Weide// mend "weeping willo," and that //weiden// meant "to graze, to put out to pasture" or "to look after grazing animals," which reminded him of Silvia Acevedo's poem "Wolves and Sheep," to which certain readers attributed a prophetic character." 41

"Two days later Fat Marta rang Bibiano and told him that Alberto Ruiz-Tagle was indeed Carlo Wieder. She had recognized him from the photo published in //El Mercurio//... so blurry it could have been anyone... She says she can recognize Ruiz-Tagle by his posture. In any case, by that time, Ruiz-Tagle had disappeared for good, and Wieder was all we had to give our wretched, empty days some meaning." 42 Feels like allegory.

Wieder flies over the South Pole, a woman prophecizes his death, he returns and says the most dangerous thing was the silence. "Silence is like leprosy, declared Wieder; silence is like communism; silence is like a blank screen that must be filled. If you fill it, nothing bad can happen to you. If you are not afraid, nothing bad can happen to you. According to Bibiano, he was describing an angel. A proudly human angel? I hazarded, quoting Blas de Otero. No, dickhead, replied Bibiano, the angel of our misfortune." 44-5

"ANTARCTICA IS CHILE" 45 Not CHILE IS ANTARCTICA

Belano's poetry teacher turned soldier of fortune "appeared and disappeared like a ghost wherever there was fighting, wherever desperate, generous, mad, courageous, despicable Latin Americans were destroying, rebuilding and redestroying reality, in a final bid that was doomed to failure." 57

"Di Angeli . . . shameless, cynical and amusing... a typical leftist social climber . . . At least he hasn't started writing literary criticism, remarked Bibiano, adding that it wouldn't be long. And sure enough, one day in the abominable '80s . . . I came across various critical articles by Di Angeli. I think he had made a name for himself." 59

Another poetry teacher, "Soto also tried (unsuccessfully) to translate Sophie Podolski, the Belgian poet who committed suicide at the age of twenty-one...

"In the current socio-political climate . . . committing suicide is absurd and redundant. Better to become an undercover poet." 73

"Wieder was at the height of his fame . . . called upon to undertake something grand in the capital, something spectacular to show the world that the new regime and avant-garde art were not at odds, quite the contrary . . . his coldness . . . something remote in his gaze . . . there seemed to be another pair of eyes behind his eyes . . . the photos required a restricted and well-defined space . . . after writing in the sky it would be appropriate - as well as charmingly paradoxical - to circumscribe the epilogue to his aerial poem within the bounds of the poet's den . . . it was visual poetry - experimental, quintessential, art for art's sake . . . everyone would find it amusing . . . " 77-8

". . . a bad start . . . bulging black cumulus . . . //Death is friendship . . . Death is Chile . . . Death is responsibility . . .// Very few could decipher his words: the wind effaced them almost straight away. At one point someone tried to communicate with him by radio. Wieder didn't answer . . . //Death is love// and //Death is growth . . . Death is communion.// But none of the generals or the generals' wives and children or the senior officers or the military, civil, ecclesiastical and cultural authorities present could read his words . . . A captain . . . remarked that in Chile all poetic acts spelt disaster, usually just for individuals or families, but occasionally for the nation as a whole. Then came the lightning . . . //Death is cleansing//, but so unsteadily, given the adverse weather conditions that very few of the spectators, who by now had started to get up from their seats and open their umbrellas, could understand what had been written. All that was left in the sky were dark shreds, cuneiform characters, hieroglyphics, a child's scribble. The few who did manage to understand though Carlos Wieder had gone mad. . struggling with the elements. . . two journalists who in their spare time wrote surrealist poems (or super-realist poems, as they prefered to say, aping a rather precious Spanish usage). . . He wrote, or thought he wrote: //Death is my heart.// Then: //Take my heart.// And then his name: //Carlos Wieder,// undaunted by rain or lightning. Undaunted, above above all, by incoherence. . . he had no smoke left to write with (for some time it looked as if the plane was on fire, or drawing out whisps of clouds rather than sky writing) but still he wrote //Death is resurrection//, and the faithful who had stayed by the airstrip were bewildered, but they knew that Wieder was writing //something. . .// account may be reliable. Or not. . . In 1974, hallucinations were not uncommon. . . The following account of the photographic exhibition in the flat is, however, accurate. . . on the stroke of midnight, he. . . called for silence and said. . . it was time to plunge into the art of the future. . . One at a time gentlemen; the art of Chile is not for herds. . . they were all. . . pleased with themselves. . . although they weren't sure they quite understood him and were aware of the difference between him and themselves. . . a lieutenant propoed they all go and find some whores straight away. . . Wieder's father was contemplating some of the hundreds of photos with which the walls and part of the ceiling had been decorated. A cadet. . . started crying and swearing and had to be dragged out of the room. The surrealist reporters looked disapproving but maintained their composure. Muñoz Cano claims to have recognized the Garmendia sisters and other missing persons in some of the photos. Most of them were women. The background hardly varied from one photo to another, so it seemed that they had all been taken to the same place. The women looked like mannequins, broken, dismembered mannequins in some pictures, although Muñoz Cano could not rule out the possibility that up to thirty per cent of the subjects had been alive when the snapshots were taken. . . At [the captain's] suggestion one of the lieutenants made a list of all the guests who had been present. Someone referred to an oath. . . I'm sure our civilian friends know what's best for them. . .I advise you to get some sleep and forget everything that happened here tonight. . . Carlos Wieder at the window, showing no sign of fatigue, with a glass of whiskey in his perfectly steady hand, contemplating the dark cityscape." 79-93

"a world inhavited exclusively by Siamese twins, where sadism and masochism are children's games . . . the inversion can only take place when "the depths have been plumbed. . pain is our only connection with life; only pain can reveal what life is. . . Wieder was either deceiving his father with other people's creations, or his father was deceiving himself. . ." 94-8

"Bibiano's correspondent was called Graham Greenwood and like a true North American he had a firm and militant belief in the existence of evil, absolute evil. In his personal theology, hell was a framework or chain of coincidences. He explained serial killings as "explosions of chance." He explained the deaths of the innocent (and everything our minds refuse to accept) as the expression of chance set free . . appeared on local television . . up and down the west coast . . . The way to fight evil, he said, was to learn how to read, and by this he meant not only words but numbers, colors, signs, arrangements of tiny objects, late-night and early-morning television shows, obscure films." 102

Of the younger writers [read], the youngest was Carlos Wieder, and this was an indication of the hopes [critic] Ibacache had pinned on him." 105

". . . appeared prominently in a judicial report on torture and the disappearance of prisoners . . . linked to an 'independent operational group' responsible for the deaths of various students . . . " 108

barbaric writing

"Nothing like this has ever happened to me, I confessed. That's not true said Romero [the detective who probably killed Wieder] very gently. Worse things have happened to us, think about it. You could be right, I admitted, but this really has been a dreadful business. Dreadful, repeated Romero, as if he were savoring the word. Then he laughed quietly, grinning like a rabbit, and said, Well, what else could it have been? I wasn't in a laughing mood, but I laughed all the same. Romero looked at the sky, the lighted windows, the car headlights, the neon signs, and he seemed small and tired. Soon, I guessed, he would be sixty. And I had already passed forty. A taxi pulled up beside us. Look after yourself, my friend, he said, and off he went.