Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998-2003
Page 7
RODRIGO PINTO
A writer sometimes has absolutely solid hunches. One of my few hunches is Rodrigo Pinto. There can’t be many critics like him in Chile. He’s a priceless character: every pore of Rodrigo Pinto speaks to us of his love for literature, his humor, his wisdom.
Rodrigo Pinto is that mythical Chilean, the one who has read everything or is prepared to read everything. And on top of it all, he’s a good person. Rodrigo Pinto can go from Wittgenstein to Juan Emar, from Stendhal to Claude Simon without blinking. I thought readers like that had disappeared, or were holed up in Viña, or Villa Alemana, or Valdivia. But Rodrigo Pinto lives in Santiago and is still young, which means it’s possible to suppose that he’ll keep up the fight for a long time in this valley of tears. The last time I saw him, in Santiago, he had a stunning woman on each arm, one dark-haired and the other a redhead, and he was on his way to a Japanese restaurant for sushi.
WOMEN WRITERS
I’m not sure whether it’s under the reproving eye of Gabriela Mistral, Violeta Parra, María Luisa Bombal or Diamela Eltit, but there’s a generation of women writers out there who promise to be insatiable. Two among them clearly stand out. They are Lina Meruane and Alejandra Costamagna, followed by Nona Fernández and five or six other young women armed with all the tools of good literature. Lina and Alejandra, both born in 1970, have already published books, which I’ve read. They write very differently from each another. Or rather: the forms to which their writing adheres are very different. And yet they resemble each other in the force of their writing. When they write, the reader has no choice but to follow them through the ruins of this waning century or through the apparently no-exit blaze of the coming millennium. Their prose issues from the hammer blows of conscience, but also from the intangible, and from pain. Stylistically, Lina Meruane can be associated with a certain French school (I’m thinking of Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute), more subjective and introspective, whereas Alejandra Costamagna works in the North American tradition, objective, faster-paced, less ornate. One writes in shades of gray and the other in black and white. Las Infantas [The Princesses], by Lina Meruane, and En voz baja [In a Low Voice] and Ciudadano en retiro [Citizen in Retirement], by Alejandra Costamagna, are achievements in themselves, but above all they are the firm promise of a literature that refuses to relinquish anything. The young female writers of Chile write like women possessed.
SANTIAGO
Santiago is still the same. Twenty-five years doesn’t change a city. People still eat empanadas in Chile. The empanadas of Chile are called empanadas chilenas and they can be sampled at the Nacional or the Rápido (recommended by Germán Marín). People still eat the sandwiches called barros-luco or barros-jarpa or chacareros, ergo the city hasn’t changed. The new buildings, the new streets, mean nothing. The streets of Santiago are still the same as they were ninety-eight years ago. Santiago is the same as it was when Teófilo Cid and Carlos de Rokha walked its streets. We still live in the age of the French Revolution. Our cycles are much longer and more crowded and twenty-five years is nothing.
EVERYBODY WRITES
In Chile everybody writes. I realized this one night when I was waiting to do a live television interview. A girl who had been Miss Chile, or something like that, was on before me. Maybe she’d only been Miss Santiago or Miss Burst Into Flames. Anyway, she was a tall, pretty girl, who talked with the empty poise of all Misses. She was introduced to me. When she found out that I had been a juror for the Paula contest she said that she had almost sent in a story but in the end she hadn’t been able to, and that she would submit something next year. Her confidence was impressive. I hope she’ll have time to type up her story for the 1999 contest. I wish her the best of luck. Sometimes the fact that everyone in the world writes can be wonderful, because you find fellow-writers everywhere, and sometimes it can be a drag because illiterate jerks strut around sporting all the defects and none of the virtues of a real writer. As Nicanor Parra said: it might be a good idea to do a little more reading.
NICANOR PARRA AND GOODBYE TO CHILE
My friend Marcial Cortés-Monroy takes me to visit Nicanor Parra. As far as I’m concerned, Parra has long been the best living poet in the Spanish language. So the visit makes me nervous. It makes no sense when you think about it, but the truth is that I’m nervous: at last I’m going to meet the great man, the poet who sleeps sitting in a chair, though his chair is sometimes a flying chair, jet-propelled, and sometimes a chair that drills down into the earth, but anyway, I’m going to meet the author of Poems and Antipoems, the most clear-sighted resident of this island-corridor that is strolled from end to end by the ghosts of Huidobro, Gabriela Mistral, Neruda, de Rokha, and Violeta Parra, looking in vain for a way out.
We’re met at the door by Corita. A bit wary, Corita, though you can see she isn’t a bad person. Then we’re left alone and soon we hear footsteps approaching the living room. Nicanor comes in. His first words, after he greets us, are in English. It’s the welcome Hamlet receives from some peasants of Denmark. Then Nicanor talks about old age, about Shakespeare’s fate, about cats, about his first house in Las Cruces, which burned down, about Ernesto Cardenal, about Paz, whom he values more as an essayist than a poet, about his father, who was a musician, and about his mother, who was a seamstress and made shirts out of scraps for him and his siblings, about Huidobro, whose tomb on the other side of the bay, above a forest, is visible from the balcony, a white spot like bird shit, about his sister Violeta and her daughter Colombina, about loneliness, about a few afternoons in New York, about car accidents, about India, about dead friends, about his childhood in the south, about Corita’s mussels, which really are very good, about Corita’s fish with mashed potatoes, which is also very good, about Mexico, about Dutch Chile and the Mapuches who fought on the side of the Spanish crown, about the university in Chile, about Pinochet (Nicanor is prophetic regarding the judgment of the House of Lords), about new Chilean fiction (he speaks highly of Pablo Azócar and I’m in complete agreement), about his old friend Tomás Lago, about Gonzalo de Berceo, about Shakespeare’s ghosts and Shakespeare’s madness (always visible, always circumstantial), and I listen to him talk — live — and then I watch a video of him talking about Luis Oyarzún and I feel like I’m falling into an asymmetrical well, the well of the great poets, where all that can be heard is his voice gradually mingling with other voices, and I don’t know who those other voices belong to, and I also hear footsteps echoing through that wooden house as Corita listens to the radio in the kitchen and hoots with laughter, and Nicanor goes up to the second floor and then comes down with a book for me (the first edition of which I’ve owned for years; Nicanor gives me the sixth) that he inscribes, and then I thank him for everything, for the book that I don’t tell him I already have, for the food, for the very pleasant few hours that I’ve spent with him and Marcial, and we say hasta luego though we know it isn’t hasta luego, and then the best thing is to get the fuck out of there, the best thing is to find a way out of the asymetrical well and hurry silently away as Nicanor’s steps echo up and down the corridor.
The Corridor With No Apparent Way Out
It’s strange to come back to Chile, the corridor country, but when you think twice (or even three times) about it, it’s strange to come back anywhere. Assuming, of course, that you’re really back, and not dreaming that you’re back. It was twenty-five years before I came back. The streets actually seemed the same as always. The faces, too. Which can spell deadly boredom or
madness. So this time, for a change, I decided to keep calm and wait and see what would happen, sitting in a chair, which is the best place to keep a corridor from surprising you.
One day I was invited to dinner at the house of a government minister. The chance of a lifetime to write an in-depth article on power. Actually, I was invited to dinner at the house of the writer Diamela Eltit, whose lover or partner, or anyway the man she lived with, was the Socialist minister Jorge Arrate, spokesman of the Frei government. That was enough to make anybody nervous. Our friend Lina Meruane came to pick us up at eight at the hotel where we were staying and off we went.
First surprise: the neighborhood where Eltit and Arrate live is a middle-middle class neighborhood, not upper class or upper-middle class. The kind of neighborhood that produced the illustrious (and not so illustrious) gladiators of the seventies. Second surprise: the house is relatively small and not ostentatious at all, not the kind of house where one expects a Chilean minister to live. Third surprise: when we get out of the car I scan the street for the unmarked car driven by the minister’s bodyguard and I don’t see it.
Many hours later, when I ask Jorge about his bodyguards, he says he doesn’t have any. What do you mean you don’t have any? I ask. I just don’t, he says, Diamela doesn’t like bodyguards and anyway they’re a nuisance. But is it safe? I ask. Jorge Arrate is well-acquainted with persecution and exile and he knows that no one is ever safe. Diamela glances at him. We’re at the table, eating the dinner that Jorge personally prepared. There’s no meat. Someone in the house is a vegetarian and presumably he or she has imposed the diet on everyone else. In any case, it’s Jorge who cooks and he does a fine job. I enjoy vegetarian food the way I enjoy a kick in the stomach, but I eat what they put in front of me. Diamela looks at Jorge and then she looks at my wife, Carolina, and then at Lina and at the novelist Pablo Azócar, the fifth guest, and she doesn’t look at me. I get the sense she doesn’t like me. Or maybe she’s very shy. Anyway. The truth is, all I can think about right now is a band of Nazis bursting into the house to kill the minister and along the way killing my wife and my son, Lautaro (who hasn’t come to the table and is asleep in a room with the TV on). And what if those bastards from Patria y Libertad turn up? I ask. I hope they don’t, says Jorge, so calmly it makes my hair stand on end.
This is no country for me, I think.
That morning, Jorge Arrate went out all by himself to shop for provisions for dinner. It’s clear at a glance that he hasn’t gotten rich as a minister under Frei. I think he was a minister in the Aylwin government too. I’m not sure. What I do know is that he hasn’t gotten rich. Still, as he waited patiently in line to pay for his lettuce and tomatoes, some kids who probably weren’t even born when he was already a political exile started chanting “yellow, yellow, yellow.” Other times, of course, what they yell (different kids, horribly vulgar women) is “red, red.” So what did you do when they called you yellow? I asked. Nothing, what could I do? said Jorge. Take the two slurs together, I tell him, and you’d have the Spanish flag. Jorge doesn’t hear me. He’s telling my wife the story of an independent candidate in the first democratic elections who, in the name of equal opportunity, was allotted fifteen seconds of free advertising space on television. The candidate had decided to say only her name. But then she wasn’t even given enough time for that. She said her name, but so fast that you could hardly understand her, the whole thing reduced to a short and desperate squawk.
The surprising thing is that the candidate won, which gave the big party strategists and advertising people much food for thought. Anyway, says Jorge, as if to play down this — and any other story — the point is that soon afterward the independent candidate joined a party on the far right.
And so any fantasy about a heroic or at least eccentric woman taking a solitary stance was shattered, as everything is shattered in Chile, and herein perhaps lies the country’s charm, its strength: in its insistence on sinking when it could soar and soaring when it’s hopelessly sunk. In its taste for bloody paradoxes. In its schizophrenic reactions.
Maybe that’s why there are so many writers in Chile, I say to myself. Because here, as I confirm on a daily basis, everybody writes. A writer publishes just one collection of stories at a bottom-tier publishing house and he’s got an ad in one of the newspapers or magazines, and out of nothing comes another writing workshop, full of young people and people no longer so young, all eager to face up to the mystery of the blank page. This is how writers make a living, of course. Most don’t make much, but there are some who rake it in. People flock to these workshops (it scares me to think how many there must be up and down the Republic) in the same frame of mind in which some New Yorkers go to see a therapist. Not desperate, but close. Not calm, but close. They aren’t tightrope walkers, but when it comes to teetering on the brink of the abyss — an abyss that seems more Latin American every day — they manage to keep their balance, a precarious balance that is in some sense deeply pathetic, but also heroic.
Of course, not everybody limits themselves to attending workshops. Some are also in therapy. One very dear friend, during dinner at a restaurant, told me about her psychoanalyst, who turned out to be none other than Norman Mailer’s daughter. Another friend (a writer, and not a bad one, either) was listening and said that he was in therapy with Norman Mailer’s daughter too. Almost instantly, another girl jumps in and says the same thing. For a moment I thought they were kidding me. Everyone had drunk lots of pisco and I hadn’t touched anything because I can’t drink anymore, but the sense I got was that I was the only drunk person in the room. Norman Mailer’s daughter is a psychoanalyst and she lives in Chile? Hard to believe. But it’s true. What could possibly bring Norman Mailer’s daughter to Chile? If we were in Mexico, it would make more sense: there’s a tradition of outrageousness there that encompasses a sub-genre of bizarre visitors. But not in Chile. And yet Norman Mailer’s daughter lives here and has been seeing these people for a while now. So is she any good? I ask. My friend says she’s very good, although I don’t think she sounds very convinced. The writer says sometimes she’s good and sometimes she has no clue. But why did she come to live in Chile? I ask, on the verge of tears. No one knows.
Jorge Arrate, as far as I know, isn’t in therapy. But he hasn’t been able to avoid writing workshops. Somebody told me the story of how he met Diamela Eltit. She ran a workshop and he decided to enroll. At first he came at the scheduled time, like everyone else in the group, except that Arrate had a chauffeur and an official car since he was already a minister. Then one day he came half an hour early. And another day he came an hour early. And finally he came three hours early. And while they were waiting for the workshop to begin — while Diamela, I suppose, wrote or cooked or ironed her son’s clothes — Arrate would sit himself down in a chair in her house, which is where writers hold their workshops, and talk to her about literature. I like to imagine them like that, Jorge sitting and Diamela ironing and every so often giving him one of those Diamelian looks, at once brooding and innocent, and talking about her writing, which is as complex as anything you’ll come across in Spanish today, and probably also about other people’s work, books by women, avant-garde texts, works that Arrate, a socialist and an exile forged in fights where such things had no place, wasn’t familiar with and that from then on he set to reading with passion and humor — the same passion and humor that he brings to everything he does — and also with the boldness of love. After a while he was dating Diamela, contemporary Chilean literature�
��s most maudit writer, and then, basically, as sometimes happens, they moved in together.
Then the bodyguards disappeared. But what if one night you’re attacked by some group from Patria y Libertad? I asked for the hundredth time, ready to eat my dessert and go. I can only hope they don’t have my address, says Arrate. Never had a house seemed more vulnerable to me. The room where Diamela writes overlooks the yard and is big and full of books. Arrate’s office, meanwhile, is small, with photographs on the walls: most are of two kids, Jorge’s children, who live in Holland, others are of legendary leftist figures, a brief frozen history of lost dreams. At some point during the night we talk about Carson McCullers and her unhappy husband who wanted to write and couldn’t. Diamela knows McCullers’s work very well. Arrate, joking, says that he, a former writing workshop participant, has something in common with McCullers’s husband. I suppose he’s referring to his literary efforts. I don’t know. I’ve never read anything by Arrate and I probably never will. But he’s right about one thing: Carson McCullers’s husband fought in World War II and he was brave, and Arrate fought in the disastrous little wars of Latin America and he’s brave. Brave like Allende’s former comrades. In other words, stoically brave. But I don’t tell him that.
Chilean writers, real or aspiring, are hopeless. That’s what I’m thinking as, late that night, I leave the house where Diamela and the minister live, and outside we say goodbye to Pablo Azócar, who wants to leave Chile as soon as possible and never quite manages to go and finally is lost; that’s what I’m thinking as Lina, Carolina, and I wave goodbye on a dark street in the neighborhood that produced so many illustrious gladiators.