As I headed downhill through the Old Hospital neighborhood, I saw a man I knew by sight—a big black man with a beaked nose who sometimes played guitar in the port bars or De Gaulle Park—standing in a phone booth, listening without saying a word, and sweating rivers.
All the beach stands were shut. The sand, which later in the day would be yellow, now looked as if it was covered by a white sheet or a shroud of ash, depending on the spot. I ran into a drunk, someone to whom my mother would give plates of fried fish. He had just woken up.
“Hey kid, what are you doing out so early in the morning?” he asked.
“I haven’t been to bed yet, Achille,” I said.
I sat down next to him on the seawall and listened to his stories for a while. He told me that the night before, as I was talking on the phone to Paris, a cat had gone crazy and had to be shot and killed. He said that the eclipse thing wasn’t such a big deal and that people were always getting excited about nothing. In his opinion, true and incredible things happened in the sky every day, but all a man needed was a good woman by his side. You could do without everything else, except that. As we talked, I saw three figures appear at the other end of the street, weaving along. I thought they must be drunks, maybe friends of Achille, in search of a bed or a hospital. As they got closer, I realized that it was the well-dressed guy who had danced at the House of the Sun during the eclipse, with the two women. He didn’t look as well-dressed as he had before. His suit was ripped in places and he had lost his tie. The older woman’s clothes were in more or less the same state. Only the girl looked as if she’d had a quiet night. When they reached us, the girl asked if we knew the address of a cheap boardinghouse where they could stay. Achille eyed them curiously and then asked the girl what had happened to the other two.
“They’ve gone blind,” she said.
“How did that happen?” asked Achille.
“They spent too long staring at the black sun,” she said.
“The black sun?”
“The eclipse,” I said.
“Oh, well, that makes sense, then,” said Achille, and he gave the girl an address on avenue Kennedy, where boardinghouses and cheap hostels followed one after the other. “Make sure you tell the owner that Achille sent you,” he said in farewell.
FATHERLAND
Fatherland
My father was a boxing champion: the bravest, the fiercest, the smartest, the best . . .
When he gave up boxing, Police Commissioner Carner of Concepción offered him a job in Investigations. My father laughed and said no, where the hell did he get an idea like that. The chief replied that he could smell an officer of the law from a distance. His nose never failed him. My father said he didn’t give a shit for the law and also, no offense, he didn’t see himself as a freeloader. I like to work, he said, don’t take it the wrong way. The chief realized that my father might be drunk but he was serious. No offense taken, he said, it’s just strange, because I can smell a cop ten miles off. The good kind, of course. Don’t give me that shit, Carner, what you want is a heavyweight to beat up purse snatchers, said my father. Never, said the commissioner, I’m a modern lawman. Modern or not, Carner read the Rosicrucians and he was a follower (in a casual way) of John William Burr, the now-forgotten promoter of metempsychosis. At home, we still have pamphlets by Burr, published by El Círculo in Valparaiso and the Gustavo Peña Association in Lima, which my father, predictably, never read.
As far as I can remember, my father only read the sports news. He had an album of clippings and pictures that he meticulously maintained, tracking his pugilistic journey from the ranks of amateur boxing to the bronze belt in the South American heavyweight championships. (He also liked football and horse races and tejo—the Columbian version of lawn bowls, played with explosives—and cocaine and swimming and cowboy movies . . .)
My father never joined the police force, of course. When he retired, he opened a soda fountain and married my mother, who was three months pregnant. Soon after, I was born, the poet of the family.
The Family Idiot
It all began years ago, on September 11, 1973, at seven a.m., in the library of the country house of Antonio Narváez, a well-known gynecologist and a patron of the fine arts in his spare time. Before my sleep-reddened eyes, twenty people lay sprawled on the sofas and rugs! All had drunk and argued without cease that night! All had laughed and made plans and danced without cease that interminable night! Except for me. Then, at seven or eight a.m., at the request of our host and his wife, I climbed onto a chair and began to recite a poem to lift everyone’s spirits and pass the time while the coffee was brewing, the exceptionally fine coffee that Antonio Narváez procured on the black market and served with restorative shots of pisco or whiskey before opening the curtains and letting in the first rays of sun as dawn broke over the Andes.
Well, I got up on the chair and the master and mistress of the house called for a moment of silence! This was my specialty. The reason I was invited to parties. Before an audience of familiar faces from the University of Concepción, faces glimpsed at film screenings or plays or encountered at previous country affairs, at the literary ambushes that Dr. Narváez liked to organize, I recited one of Nicanor Parra’s greatest poems from memory. My voice shook. As I gesticulated, my hands shook. But I still think it was a good poem, though it was received with pleasure by some and manifest disapproval by others. I remember that when I climbed up on the chair I realized that I, too, had drunk like a Cossack the night before. The chair was made of araucaria wood and, from up above, the rug’s arabesques seemed infinitely distant.
I must have been on the fifteenth stanza when two guys and a girl came in from the kitchen and broke the news. The radio was reporting that a military coup was underway in Santiago. Blitzkrieg or Anschluss, call it what you want, the Chilean Army was on the move.
The minute the announcement was made, the stampede was on, first into the kitchen and then toward the front door, as if everyone had suddenly gone mad.
I remember that in the middle of the scramble someone yelled at me to shut up, by which I gather that I was still reciting. I remember insults, threats, exclamations of disbelief, expressions mutating from the most sublime heroism to terror and back again, everything topsy-turvy and unfinished, while I stuttered over a line and scanned every corner, the last to realize what was looming over the republic. In the avalanche of people fleeing, my chair tottered and I fell flat on my face. The impact was sharp and painless. Half-stunned, I wondered why it was taking me so long to pass out. Then everything went black.
When I came to, the house was empty except for a girl whose lap my head was resting on. I didn’t recognize her right away. But it wasn’t the first time I’d seen her. We’d spoken the night before, and we’d met a few times before that at some workshop, Fernández’s or Cherniakovski’s, I wasn’t sure which.
A wet cloth was draped over my forehead and it was giving me the shivers. Someone had opened the curtains. An upstairs shutter was swinging in the wind, making a sound like a metronome. In the library, there was something supernatural about the way the silence and light enveloped us: the air seemed different, bright, new, an amalgam of superimposed walls behind which lay adventure or death. I looked at the clock. Only ten minutes had gone by. Then she said, Get up, we have to go as soon as we can. Like a ghost, I got up. Light as a ghost, I mean. Light as a feather. I was twenty years old! I got up and followed her. In the street was a Volkswagen with green bumpers and leopard-skin upholstery. We got in the car and set off. I was twenty and I was falling in love for the first time! I knew it instantly . . . And I couldn’t help it, tears came to my eyes . . .
The Right Side
Her name was Patricia Arancibia and she was twenty-one. She lived outside of Nacimiento, town of potters, in a two-story house of stone and wood, at the top of a bald hill with sweeping views of the whole valley. Along the way, I opened my mouth twice: first to as
k where we were going, and second to tell her that her eyes were blue like the rivers of the province of Bío-Bío. The province has seven rivers, she said, glancing at me as we drove along dirt roads, speeding away from Los Ángeles. The Mulchén, the Vergara, the Laja, the Renaico, the Bureo, the Duqueco, and the Bío-Bío, father of them all. And each is different in color and flow. Sometimes, though hardly ever, all seven are blue, with big green tongues in the pools, though most of the time they run the color of stone, dark stone with emerald and violet streaks. Especially when the winter is long, she said sadly.
At first sight, her house looked like the house from Psycho. Only the stairs and the views were different. From Patricia Arancibia’s house, the views were sweeping, rich, desolate. From Norman’s house, of course, all you could see was the old highway and the swamp.
She parked the car under a shelter of weathered planks. The front door wasn’t locked. I followed her into the living room, which was enormous and full of art and books. My father is a painter, said Patricia. These are his paintings. As she made me tea, I looked at them. The central figure in nearly all of them was a woman with features vaguely resembling my rescuer’s. She’s my mother, Patricia explained, handing me a cup of tea. At a word from her, I sat in a chair while she examined my head. You’re all right, she said, but it’s strange that you were unconscious for so long. Where did everyone else go? I asked. Home, to their party headquarters, to their jobs, I don’t know . . . Why did you call the Bío-Bío the father of all rivers, not the mother? Patricia laughed. You should see a doctor, she said. For your head. I feel fine, I said. Once there was a pretty good artist who fell or was hit by a car; anyway, something like what happened to you. They took him to the hospital. After a while, he recuperated, or seemed to. He looked healthy and the nurses let him have paper and pencil. The first thing he wanted to draw was a portrait of an especially nice nurse. The nurse posed for him, flattered. When he was finished, everyone realized that he had only drawn her right half. As a test, they asked him to draw a table. He drew the right half of the table. When the doctors pointed this out to him, he insisted that the drawing was finished and complete. They tried a few more times and the same thing happened. The artist only drew what he saw, and he had lost sight of the left side of things . . .
I see everything whole, I said softly. I see your left side and your right side. The Bío-Bío is the father of all rivers, said Patricia Arancibia, and the Antuco is the mother of all volcanoes. It should be the other way around, I said. Father volcanoes and mother rivers. Patricia Arancibia laughed. I live with a woman who works for my family, she said. Do you know what her name is? It’s Crescencia Copahue. She’s seventy years old. She was my father’s nanny, though actually she’s like part of the family. Do you know what Copahue is? No idea, I said. It’s a volcano. Copahue is one of the seven volcanoes of Bío-Bío. Haven’t you ever seen my father’s paintings? No, I said. I’ve never even heard of him. There were some hot springs on Copahue that we visited when I was little. My father painted volcanoes, years ago. All the canvases have been sold now or burned.
I live alone, she said. My mother and father live in Santiago. They love each other desperately, she said with a smile. I live with Crescencia. She’s here now, somewhere in the house, listening to the radio. She must be in bed listening to the military speeches. But she’ll get up soon and make us something to eat. Do you know the names of the seven volcanoes of Bío-Bío? Copahue, Tolhuaca, Collapén, Pemehue, Sierra Velluda, Maya-Maya, and Antuco, the most beautiful of all. Why are you closing your eyes? I was imagining the volcanoes, I said. I saw them as walls closing us in. Because of the coup? Don’t see them that way, said the sweet voice.
They felt like bars to my father too, bars to his talent, which is maybe why he went to live in Santiago. The artist who could only see the right side of things, is he still alive? No, he died a long time ago, in New York, in the 1930s, before World War II. His name was Richard Luciano and his drawings still turn up in neuropathology papers sometimes. How sad to end up in a medical journal! I said with my eyes full of tears. Not really, said the sweet voice. Better there than in a museum. Life takes many turns, Mr. Belano, the adventure never ends . . .
Which Way Was Patricia Arancibia Driving That Morning? Toward Heaven or Hell?
The spotless Volkswagen glided along the roads of Bío-Bío as if along a conveyor belt. It braked and accelerated at nudges from the sun, the warm rays on the leopard skin. And Patricia Arancibia, with no sunglasses to shade her eyes, surveyed the roads and chose the best. Down tree-lined streets or oxen tracks, along the edge of fields, past Coigüe or Santa Fe, at the hour of the lazy man’s call to morning prayer, her slender legs moving confidently in the belly of the leopard, setting the desired speed. She was wearing black leather boots with silver buckles, magenta cotton socks sprinkled with tiny stars, a high-waisted black knee-length skirt—tight as if for horse-riding—a brown silk blouse with round pearly buttons, and, carelessly tossed in the back seat, a 1950s starlet’s kid-leather jacket. Every so often she stopped the car in a cloud of dust and consulted a map that she pulled from the glove compartment. The scene was like an advertisement for a savage perfume: her long fingers tracing the roads printed in red, her lips pressed firmly together. Then the car slowly emerged from the cloud of dust as if from an egg. An egg of stone, of light and air, ephemeral as a fly. Volcano egg. And the spotless Volkswagen gradually picked up speed again. Left behind was the shell, crumbling among the tree branches. The map was returned to the glove compartment. Her hands clutched the wheel and the car set off again.
“Where are we going?” I asked in a frightened voice.
(When I was a boy, my siblings and I played a game of turning happy moments into statues . . . If only someone, an angel watching from up above, had turned the Volkswagen and the bumps in the road into a statue . . . The leopard-skin throne into a statue . . . Our speed and our flight into a statue . . .)
She accelerated unhesitatingly. Don’t worry, Mr. Belano, she said mockingly, we won’t get lost . . . We won’t lose anything . . . Her lips, as Virgil’s Argentine or Bolivian translator would have it, were full of ambrosia.
From Eliseo Arancibia to Rigoberto Belano
I’ve received four letters from you and I’d say that’s enough. Don’t grub around in my family’s suffering. Don’t sully my daughter’s memory with conjectures and speculations that lead nowhere. Please, desist. The facts are clear and I don’t see why I should believe you and your suspicions over the police report. It was God’s will that my daughter be taken from us in the flower of her youth, and that, unfortunately, is that.
As for sending you Patricia’s papers, my answer is no. I don’t know what papers you’re referring to. And if I knew, I’m afraid you wouldn’t be the likely recipient. When time has done its healing work, I’ll be able to calmly and patiently collect my daughter’s scattered writings and publish them in worthy fashion. I have plenty of editor friends. I beg you, therefore, not to appoint yourself literary executor when no one has asked you to do so.
Finally: don’t exploit my daughter’s disappearance. Not politically, and not literarily. On this point, I find myself obliged to insist. You have no right. Patricia despised the commonness that I sense in your intentions. I don’t need to tell you that if it comes down to it, I won’t hesitate to take legal steps.
If my words are harsh, I’m sorry. Please understand, I’m a heartbroken father. You, on the other hand, are a young man and you ought to think of your future.
I enclose our magazine Chilean Painters Here and Abroad, with a profile of Onésimo Echaurren that you may enjoy.
Funeral Oration Read by the Interim Secretary of the Chilean Society of Fine Arts, the Honorable Mr. Onésimo Echaurren Gordon. Published in the Quarterly Journal Chilean Painters Here and Abroad, 1974, and Excerpted in the Obituaries Section of El Mercurio, 1973. Unabridged.
We are gathered here, friends and colleague
s, in tribute to a fragile rose, to the still-fresh petals of the loveliest of flowers, the lushest and most enigmatic of flowers, torn too soon from the breast of Nature: mother of us all, the blind and the sighted, the creators and the creatures of the night, the artist who sees and transcends, and that hideous Afro-Haitian spawn, the zombie.
Just when it seemed that the terrible drought was lifting, when the clamor of vulturine flocks seeking to clip the wings of our beloved condor was vanishing like a bad dream from the Nation’s frozen breast, when Andean deer were frolicking once again in reclaimed valleys, and when the tolling of bells announced to young and old that the Republic was forging ahead with new vigor and verve, the news reached our homes like the night’s final blow, tragic news plunging us without warning into a private tempest.
I can say that I was there at her birth; friendship, that sacred, mysterious bond, afforded me the happy privilege of watching her grow up. How can I help but call to mind her little face as it looked in the light of my four copper lamps (they were more like torches), begging me to tell her yet another story, one more in a long list. Unforgettable evenings, wreathed in the magnificent light of the province of Temuco, at La Refalosa, my country estate, the name of which does not harbor a grammatical error, as some of my enemies have insinuated, but rather the pure folk wisdom of my elders, which I’m honored to preserve.
As if time, forgetful friend, hadn’t wagged its comet tail, I seem to see onstage before me the spacious veranda at La Refalosa, with easels at the ready, palettes prepared, paints set out; beyond is the garden, and at the edge of the garden, the children, playing cowboys (children who today are students of Law or Economics!); the countryfolk, humbly attired but generally clean and of cheerful mien, are on their way to the tilled fields; and here she comes, our precocious eight-year-old Amazon, Venus of Botticelli, Max Ernst’s magical woman-child, Alberto Ortega Basauri’s sulky divine thing, riding my mare Dusty through the roses.
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