Roberto Bolaño - By Night in Chile

I knelt before the Holy Father. I cried. I had disturbing dreams. I saw women tearing their clothes. I saw Fr. Antonio, the priest from Burgos, who, as he lay dying, opened one eye and said: It’s wrong, my friend, it’s wrong. I saw a flock of falcons, thousands of falcons flying high over the Atlantic ocean, headed for America. Sometimes the sun went black in my dreams. Sometimes a very fat German priest appeared and told me a joke. Father Lacroix, he said to me, I’m going to tell you a joke. One day the Pope is having a quiet conversation with a German theologian in one of the rooms of the Vatican. Suddenly two French archaeologists burst in, very agitated and nervous, and they tell the Holy Father they have just got back from Israel with some very good news and some rather bad news. The Pope beseeches them to come out with it, and not to leave him in suspense. Talking over each other, the Frenchmen say the good news is they have discovered the Holy Sepulchre. The Holy Sepulchre? says the Pope. The Holy Sepulchre. Not a shadow of a doubt. The Pope is moved to tears. What’s the bad news? he asks, drying his eyes. Well, inside the Holy Sepulchre we found the body of Christ. The Pope passes out. The Frenchmen rush to his side and fan his face. The only one who’s calm is the German theologian, and he says: Ah, so Jesus really existed? Sordel, Sordello, that Sordello, the master. 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.

In Chile things were not going well. For me, things had been going well, but not for my country. I am not a fanatical nationalist, but I do sincerely love the land of my birth. Chile, my Chile. What on earth has come over you? I would sometimes ask, leaning out of my open window, looking at the glow of Santiago in the distance. What have they done to you? Have my countrymen gone mad? Who is to blame? And sometimes, walking down a hallway in the college or the newspaper offices, I would ask: How long do you think you can go on like this, Chile? Are you going to change beyond recognition? Become a monster? Then came the elections and Allende won. And I stood before the mirror in my room and tried to formulate the crucial question, which I had saved for just that moment, and the question refused to emerge from my bloodless lips. It was absolutely unbearable.

The night of Allende’s victory I went out and walked all the way to Farewell’s house. He opened the door himself. How old he looked. He must have been about eighty by then, or older, and he had stopped touching my belt or my hips each time we met. Come in, Sebastián, he said. I followed him into the living room.

Farewell was making phone calls. The first person he called was Neruda. He couldn’t get through. Then he called Nicanor Parra. Engaged too. I collapsed into a chair and covered my face with my hands. I could hear Farewell ringing the numbers of four or five other poets, without any luck. 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 reread the Greeks. Respecting the tradition, I started with Homer, then moved on to Thales of Miletus, Xenophanes of Colophon, Alcmaeon of Croton, Zeno of Elea (wonderful), and then a pro-Allende general was killed, and Chile restored diplomatic relations with Cuba and the national census recorded a total of 8,884,746 Chileans and the first episodes of the soap opera The Right to be Born were broadcast on television, and I read Tyrtaios of Sparta and Archilochos of Paros and Solon of Athens and Hipponax of Ephesos and Stesichoros of Himnera and Sappho of Mytilene and Anakreon of Teos and Pindar of Thebes (one of my favorites), and the government nationalized the copper mines and then the nitrate and steel industries and Pablo Neruda won the Nobel Prize and Díaz Casanueva won the National Literature Prize and Fidel Castro came on a visit and many people thought he would stay and live in Chile for ever and Pérez Zujovic the Christian Democrat ex-minister was killed and Lafourcade published White Dove and I gave it a good review, you might say I hailed it in glowing terms, although deep down I knew it wasn’t much of a book, and the first anti-Allende march was organized, with people banging pots and pans, and I read Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides, all the tragedies, and Alkaios of Mytilene and Aesop and Hesiod and Herodotus (a titan among authors), and in Chile there were shortages and inflation and black marketeering and long lines for food and Farewell’s estate was expropriated in the Land Reform along with many others and the Bureau of Women’s Affairs was set up and Allende went to Mexico and visited the seat of the United Nations in New York and there were terrorist attacks and I read Thucydides, the long wars of Thucydides, the rivers and plains, the winds and the plateaus that traverse the time-darkened pages of Thucydides, and the men he describes, the warriors with their arms, and the civilians, harvesting grapes, or looking from a mountainside at the distant horizon, the horizon where I was just one among millions of beings still to be born, the far-off horizon

Thucydides glimpsed and me there trembling indistinguishably, and 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’état, 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. The following days were strange. It was as if until then we had all been dreaming and had suddenly woken to real life, although occasionally it seemed to be the other way round, as if we had all been plunged into a dream. And we went on living day by day in accordance with the abnormal conventions of the dream world: anything can happen and whatever happens the dreamer accepts it. Movement works differently. We move like gazelles or the way gazelles move in a tiger’s dream. We move like a painting by Vasarely. We move as if we had no shadows and were unperturbed by that appalling fact. We speak. We eat. But underneath we are trying not to realize that we are speaking and eating. One night I found out that Neruda had died. I rang Farewell. Pablo’s dead, I said. He died of cancer, said Farewell, cancer. Yes, cancer, I said. Should we go to the funeral? I’m going, said Farewell. I’ll go with you, I said. After I hung up, I felt as if I had dreamed the whole conversation. The next day we went to the cemetery. Farewell was very elegantly dressed. He looked like a phantom ship, but very elegant. They’re going to give me back my estate, he whispered into my ear. It was a large funeral cortege and people kept joining it as we proceeded. Look at those gorgeous boys! said Farewell. Control yourself, I said. I looked him in the face: Farewell was winking at some strangers. They were young and seemed to be in a bad mood, but at the time I felt they had sprung from a dream in which good and bad moods were no more than metaphysical accidents. I could hear someone behind us who had recognized Farewell saying, That’s Farewell, the critic. Words emerging from one dream and entering another. Then someone started shouting.