penitent, that combination of sights conspired to make me lower my guard
momentarily as they say (I suppose) in pugilistic circles, and momentarily enter a state akin to the joyful mysteries, those mysteries in which we all
participate, of which we all partake, but which are unnameable, incommunicable, imperceptible from without, a state that brought on a feeling of dizziness, and nausea rising from my stomach, and closely resembled a combination of weeping, perspiration and tachycardia, and after leaving the welcoming home of our hostess it seemed to me this state had been provoked by the vision of the boy, my little namesake, who looked around with unseeing eyes as his hideous nanny carried him downstairs, his lips sealed, his eyes sealed, his innocent little body all sealed up, as if he didn’t want to see or hear or speak, there in the midst of his mother’s weekly party, in the presence of that joyous, carefree band of literati brought together by his mother each week. I don’t know what happened next. I didn’t pass out. I’m sure of that. Perhaps I resolved firmly not to attend any more of María Canales’s soirées. I spoke with Farewell. He had already drifted so far away. Sometimes he talked about Pablo and it was as if Neruda were still alive. Sometimes he talked about Augusto, Augusto this, Augusto that, and hours if not days would pass before it became clear that he was referring to Augusto d’Halmar. 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. Then I went back to María Canales’s house. Everything was the same as before. The artists laughed, drank and danced, while outside, on the wide, empty avenues of Santiago, the curfew was in force. I didn’t drink or dance. I just smiled beatifically. And thought. I thought how odd it was that, with all the racket and the lights, the house was never visited by a military or police patrol. I thought about María Canales, who by then had won a prize with her rather mediocre story. I thought about Jimmy Thompson, her husband, who was sometimes away for weeks or even months at a time. I thought about the boys, especially my little namesake, who was growing as if against his own will. One night I dreamt of Fr. Antonio, the curate of that church in Burgos, who had died cursing the art of falconry. I was in my house in Santiago, and Fr. Antonio appeared, looking very much alive, wearing a shiny cassock covered with clumsy darning, and without saying a word, he beckoned me to follow him. So I did. We went out into a paved courtyard bathed in moonlight. In the center was a
leafless tree of indeterminate species. Fr. Antonio pointed it out to me, urgently, from the portico at the edge of the courtyard. Poor fellow, I thought, he’s so old, but I looked carefully at the tree, and perched on one of its branches I saw a falcon. It’s Rodrigo, it must be! I cried. Old Rodrigo, he looked so well, gallant and proud, elegantly perched on a branch, illuminated by Selene’s rays, majestic and solitary. And then, as I was admiring the falcon, Fr. Antonio tugged at my sleeve and when I turned to look at him, I saw that his eyes were wide open and he was dripping with sweat and his cheeks and chin were trembling. And when he looked at me I realized that big tears were welling from his eyes, tears like cloudy pearls reflecting Selene’s rays, and then Fr.
Antonio’s gnarled finger pointed to the portico and the arches on the other side of the courtyard, then to the moon or the moonlight, then the starless night sky, then the tree standing in the middle of that vast courtyard, and then he pointed to his falcon Rodrigo, and although he was trembling all the while, there was a certain method to this pointing. And I stroked his back, upon which a small hump had grown, but otherwise it was still a handsome back, like the back of an adolescent farm laborer or a novice athlete, and I tried to calm him, but no sound would come out of my mouth, and then Fr. Antonio began to cry inconsolably, so inconsolably that I felt a draught of cold air chilling my body and an inexplicable fear creeping into my soul, what was left of Fr. Antonio wept not only with his eyes but also with his forehead and his hands and his feet, hanging his head, a sodden rag under which the skin seemed to be perfectly smooth, and then, lifting his head, looking into my eyes, summoning all his strength, he asked me: Don’t you realize? Realize what? I wondered, as Fr.
Antonio melted away. It’s the Judas Tree, he said between hiccups. His
affirmation left no room for doubt or equivocation. The Judas Tree! I thought I was going to die right there and then. Everything stopped. Rodrigo was still perched on the branch. The paved courtyard was still illuminated by Selene’s rays. Everything stopped. Then I began to walk towards the Judas Tree. At first I tried to pray, but I had forgotten all the prayers I ever knew. I walked.
Under that immense night sky my steps made hardly a sound. When I had gone far enough I turned around and tried to say something to Fr. Antonio but he was nowhere to be seen. Fr. Antonio is dead, I said to myself, by now he’ll be in heaven or in hell. Or the Burgos cemetery, more likely. I walked. The falcon moved his head. One of his eyes was watching me. I walked. I’m dreaming, I thought. I’m asleep in my bed, in my house in Santiago. This courtyard or square looks Italian, but I’m not in Italy, I’m in Chile, I thought. The falcon moved his head. Now his other eye was watching me. I walked. Finally I reached the tree. Rodrigo seemed to recognize me. I raised my hand. The leafless branches of the tree seemed to be made of stone or papier-mâché. I raised my hand and touched a branch. Just then the falcon took flight, leaving me there alone. I’m lost, I cried out. I’m dead. When I got up the next morning a little tune was stuck in my head. From time to time I caught myself singing: The Judas Tree, the Judas Tree, during my classes, or as I walked in the garden, or when I took a break from my daily reading to make a cup of tea. 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. Then I went back to María Canales’s house, and I think we must have had some kind of misunderstanding, I don’t know, instead of enquiring about the novel she was writing, clearly a momentous enterprise, I asked after her sons and her husband, I said that life was much more important than literature, and she looked me in the eyes with that bovine face of hers and said she knew, she had always known that. My authority collapsed like a house of cards, while hers, or rather her supremacy, towered irresistibly. Feeling dizzy, I retired to my usual armchair to collect myself and weather the storm as best I could. That was the last time I attended one of her soirées. Months later a friend told me that during a party at María
Canales’s house one of the guests had gotten lost. He or she, my friend didn’t know which, but I’ll assume it was a he, was very drunk and went looking for the bathroom or the water closet, as some of my unfortunate countrymen still say.
Perhaps he wanted to throw up, or just use the toilet, or splash some water on his face, but being so drunk, he got lost. Instead of taking the passage on the right, he took the one on the left, then he went along another passage, down some stairs, and before he knew it, he was in the basement, it was a huge house with a floor plan like a crossword puzzle. Anyhow, he went along various
passages and opened various doors into rooms that were empty or had just a few packing cases in them, and spider webs the Mapuche maid never bothered to clear away. Finally he came to a passage that was narrower than the others and he opened one last door. He saw a kind of metal bed. He put on the light. On the bed was a naked man, his wrists and ankles tied. The man seemed to be asleep, but it was
difficult to verify that impression, since he was blindfolded. 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 quite 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. Then I found out, from another friend, that the guest who had gotten lost was a
playwright or maybe an actor, and that he had been down every one of the
labyrinthine passages in María Canales and Jimmy Thompson’s house, over and over until he arrived at that door at the end of a dimly lit corridor, and opened it and came across that body tied to a metal bed, abandoned in that basement, but alive, and the playwright or the actor shut the door stealthily, trying not to wake the poor man who was recuperating from his ordeal, and retraced his steps and returned to the party or the literary gathering, María Canales’s soirée, without saying a word. And I also found out, years later, while watching clouds crumble, break apart and scatter in the Chilean sky, as Baudelaire’s clouds would never do, that the guest who had gone astray in the deceptive corridors of that house on the outskirts of Santiago was a theorist of avant-garde theater, a theorist with a great sense of humor, who didn’t panic when he lost his way, since as well as having a great sense of humor he was naturally curious, and when he realized he was lost in María Canales’s basement, he wasn’t afraid, in fact it appealed to the busybody in him, and he opened doors and even started whistling, and finally he came to the very last room at the end of the
basement’s narrowest corridor, lit by a single, feeble light bulb, and he opened the door and saw the man tied to the metal bed, blindfolded, and he knew the man was alive because he could hear him breathing, although he wasn’t in good shape, for in spite of the dim light he saw the wounds, the raw patches, like eczema, but it wasn’t eczema, the battered parts of his anatomy, the swollen parts, as if more than one bone had been broken, but he was breathing, he certainly didn’t look like he was about to die, and then the theorist of avant-garde theater shut the door delicately, without making a noise, and started to make his way back to the sitting room, carefully switching off as he went each of the lights he had previously switched on. And months later, or maybe years later, another regular guest at those gatherings told me the same story. And then I heard it from another and another and another. And then democracy returned, the moment came for national reconciliation, and it was revealed that Jimmy Thompson had been one of the key agents of the DINA, and that he had used his house as a center for the interrogation of prisoners. The subversives were taken to the basement, where Jimmy interrogated them, extracting all the information he could, and then he sent them on to other detention centers. As a general rule, prisoners were not killed in Jimmy’s house. It was meant to be just for interrogation, although there was the occasional death. It was also revealed that Jimmy had traveled to Washington and killed one of Allende’s ex-ministers and a North American woman who happened to get in the way. And that he had organized the assassinations of exiled Chileans in Argentina, and even in Europe, that civilized continent, to which Jimmy had paid a brief visit with the diffidence befitting those born in the New World. All this came out. María Canales had known about it for a long time, of course. But she wanted to be a writer, and writers require the physical proximity of other writers. Jimmy loved his wife. María Canales loved her darling gringo. They had a pair of beautiful sons. Little Sebastián did not love his parents. But they were his parents! In her own dark way, the Mapuche maid loved María Canales and probably Jimmy as well. The men who worked for Jimmy didn’t love him, but they probably had wives and children whom they loved in their own dark way. I asked myself the following question: If María 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 soirée, 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 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? Later on Jimmy was arrested in the United States. He confessed. His confession implicated several Chilean generals. They took him out of jail and put him in a special witness protection program. As if the Chilean generals were mafia bosses! As if the Chilean generals had tentacles that could reach all the way to small towns in the American midwest to silence embarrassing witnesses! María Canales was all on her own. All her former friends, all the people who used to look forward to her parties cut her dead. One afternoon I went to see her. The curfew was a thing of the past, and it felt odd to be driving along those avenues on the outskirts, which were gradually changing. The house was no longer the same: all its former splendor, that untouchable, nocturnal splendor, had vanished. Now it was just an oversize house, with a neglected garden, completely overrun by towering weeds that had scaled the railings of the fence, as if to prevent the casual passerby from catching a glimpse of what was inside that building marked out for
opprobrium. I parked beside the gate and stood outside for a while looking in.
The windows were dirty and the curtains were drawn. A child’s red bicycle was lying on the ground beside the steps up to the porch. I rang the bell. After a little while, the door opened. María Canales half opened the door and asked what I wanted. I said I wanted to talk with her. She hadn’t recognized me. Are you a journalist? she asked. I’m Father Ibacache, I said. Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix.
For a few moments she seemed to be traveling back through time, then she smiled and stepped out, walked across the front garden to the gate and opened it.
You’re the last person I expected to see, she said. Her smile was not so
different from the smile I remembered. It’s so long ago, she said, as if reading my mind, but it feels like yesterday. We went into the house. There was not as much furniture as before, and the rooms, which I remembered as luminous, were now in a state of decrepitude comparable to that of the garden and seemed to be filled with a reddish dust, caught in a time warp where sad, remote,
incomprehensible scenes were played over and over. My chair, the chair in which I used to sit, was still there. María Canales noticed me looking at it. Sit down, Father, she said, make yourself at home. I sat down without a word. Then I asked about her children. She told me they were spending a few days with some relatives. And they’re well? I asked. Very well. Sebastián has shot up, if you saw him now you wouldn’t recognize him. I asked about her husband. In the United States, she said. He lives in the United States now, she said. And how is he? I asked. Fine, I guess. With a movement that suggested weariness and disgust blended in equal parts, she drew up a chair, sat down and looked out through the dirty windows at the garden. She was rather fatter than before. And not as well dressed. I asked how she was, what she was doing. Don’t you read the papers? she said, and then let out a vulgar snorting laugh, in which I detected a note of defiance that made me shudder. Her friends were gone, her money was gone, her husband had forgotten her and the children, nobody wanted to know her any more, but she was still there and she wasn’t scared to laugh out loud. I asked about the Mapuche maid. She went back to the south, she said, absently. And your novel, María, did you finish it? I whispered. I still haven’t, Father, she said, lowering her voice like me. I rested my chin on my hand and thought for a while.
I tried to think clearly, but couldn’t. Meanwhile she was talking about the journalists who occasionally came to visit her, foreigners mostly. I want t
o talk about literature, she said, but they always get on to politics, Jimmy’s work, my feelings at the time, the basement. I shut my eyes. Forgive her, I implored in silence, forgive her. Occasionally there are some Chilean or
Argentine journalists, but not often. I make them pay for the interviews now. If they don’t pay, I don’t talk. But for all the gold in the world, I wouldn’t tell them who used to come to my soirées. I promise you. Did you know about
everything Jimmy was doing? Yes, Father. And do you repent? Like everyone else, Father. I felt I could hardly breathe. I got up and opened a window. The cuffs of my jacket got all dusty. Then she started telling me about the house.
Apparently she didn’t own the land, and the owners, Jews who had been in exile for over twenty years, were taking her to court. Since she had no money to hire a good lawyer, she was sure she would lose the case. The Jews were planning to demolish the house and build another from scratch. It’s my house, said María Canales, and there’ll be nothing left to remember it by. I looked at her sadly and said perhaps that was for the best, she was still young, she wasn’t involved in any criminal proceedings, she could start over, with her children, somewhere else. And what about my literary career? she said with a defiant look. Use a nom de plume, a pseudonym, a nickname, for God’s sake. She looked at me as if I had insulted her. Then she 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 Sánchez 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 stood up, took a few steps in that sitting room where our writers and painters, the artisans of our national culture, once used to gather, and shook my head. I must be off, María, I really have to go, I said to her. She burst out laughing uncontrollably. Or maybe I just imagined that.
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