Roberto Bolaño - By Night in Chile

he asked. And only then did I realize that when we had gone to the college I had changed out of the suit I was wearing at the office and put on a cassock. I shook my head. Pérez Latouche said he knew a few priests who were pretty good drinkers. I said I doubted there were any good drinkers in Chile, priests or lay folk. We tend to be bad drinkers in this country. As I expected, Pérez Latouche disagreed. I let him go on and stopped listening, wondering what had prompted me to change my clothes. Was it that I wanted to be in uniform too, so to speak, when facing my illustrious pupils for the first time? Was I afraid of something?

Did I feel the cassock would ward off some indefinable, undeniable danger? I tried to open the curtains covering the windows of the car, but could not. There was a metal bar holding them in place. It’s a security measure, said Pérez Latouche, who was still listing Chilean wines and incorrigible Chilean drunks, as if he were unwittingly, and ironically, reciting one of Pablo de Rokha’s crazy poems. Then the car drove into a garden and stopped in front of a house with only one light on, above the main door. I followed Pérez Latouche. He realized I was looking for the soldiers on guard duty and explained that the best guards were the ones you couldn’t see. So there are guards? I asked. Oh yes, and each one has his finger on the trigger. That’s good to know, I said. We entered a room where the furniture and the walls were blindingly white. Take a seat, said Pérez Latouche, What would you like to drink? A cup of tea? I suggested. Tea, excellent, said Pérez Latouche, and left the room. I was left standing there on my own. I was sure they were filming me. There were two mirrors with gilded wooden frames that they could easily have been using. I could hear distant voices, people discussing something or sharing a joke. Then silence again. I heard footsteps and a door opening: a waiter dressed in white brought me a cup of tea on a silver tray. I thanked him. He murmured something I didn’t catch and vanished. When I was putting sugar in my tea I saw my face reflected in the surface of the liquid. Who would have thought you’d come to this, Sebastián? I said to myself. I felt like flinging the cup at one of those immaculate walls, I felt like sitting down with the cup between my knees and crying, I felt like shrinking until I could dive into the warm infusion and swim to the bottom, where the sugar crystals lay like big chunks of diamond. But I remained hieratic and expressionless. I put on a bored look. I stirred my tea and tasted it. It was good. Good tea. Good for the nerves. Then I heard steps in the corridor, not the corridor by which I had arrived, but another one, leading to a door right in front of me. The door opened and in came the aides-de-camp or adjutants, all of them in uniform, then a group of batmen or young officers, and then the Junta in full made its entrance. I got to my feet. From the corner of my eye I could see myself reflected in a mirror. The uniforms shimmered a moment like shiny cardboard cutouts, then like a restless forest. My black, loose-fitting cassock seemed to absorb the whole spectrum of colors in an instant. That first night we talked about Marx and Engels. How they came to work together. Then we looked at the Manifesto of the Communist Party and the Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League . For background reading I gave them the Manifesto and Basic Elements of Historical Materialism , by our compatriot Marta Harnecker. In the second class, a week later, we discussed The Class Struggles in France: 1848–1850 and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte , and Admiral Merino asked if I was personally acquainted with Marta Harnecker, and if so, what I thought of her. I said I didn’t know her personally, I explained that she was a disciple of Althusser (he didn’t know who Althusser was, so I told him), and had studied in France, like many Chileans. Is she good-looking? I believe she is, I said. In the third class we returned to the Manifesto . According to General Leigh it was an unadulterated urtext.

He didn’t elaborate. At first I thought he was making fun of me, but it soon became clear that he was serious. I’ll have to think about that later, I said to myself. General Pinochet seemed to be very tired. This was the first class to which he had come in uniform. He spent it slumped in an armchair, jotting down the odd note, not once removing his dark glasses. I think he fell asleep for a few minutes, still firmly gripping his propelling pencil. Of the Junta, only General Pinochet and General Mendoza were present at the fourth class. Seeing me hesitate, General Pinochet gave the order to proceed as if the others were there as well, and, in a symbolic way, they were, since among those present I recognized a Navy captain and an Air Force general. I talked about Capital (I had prepared a three-page summary) and The Civil War in France . General Mendoza didn’t ask a single question in the whole class, he just took notes. There were several copies of Basic Elements of Historical Materialism on the desk, and when the class was over General Pinochet told the others to take a copy away with them. He winked at me and shook my hand warmly before leaving. I never saw him in such a genial mood. In the fifth class I talked about Wages, Price and Profit and discussed the Manifesto again. After an hour General Mendoza was sleeping soundly. Don’t worry, said General Pinochet, come with me. I followed him to a large window, which looked out over the gardens behind the house. A full moon illuminated the smooth surface of a swimming pool. He opened the window. Behind us I could hear the muffled voices of the generals talking about Marta Harnecker. A delicious perfume given off by clumps of flowers was wafting all through the gardens. A bird called out and straightaway, from somewhere within the walls or from an adjoining property, a bird of the same species replied, then I heard a flapping of wings that seemed to rip through the night and then the deep silence returned, unscathed. Let’s take a walk, said the general. As if he were a magician, as soon as we stepped through the window frame and entered the enchanted gardens, lights came on, exquisitely scattered here and there among the plants. Then I talked about The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State , which Engels wrote on his own, and the General nodded at each stage of my explanation, now and then asking a pertinent question, and from time to time both of us fell silent and looked at the moon sailing on alone through infinite space. Perhaps it was that vision that gave me the nerve to ask him if he knew Leopardi. He said he didn’t. He asked who Leopardi was. We stopped for a moment. Standing at the window, the other generals were looking out into the night. A nineteenth-century Italian poet, I said. If I may be so bold, sir, I said, this moon reminds me of two of his poems: “The Infinite” and “Night Song of a Wandering Shepherd of Asia.” General Pinochet did not express the slightest interest. Walking beside him I recited what I knew by heart of “The Infinite.” Nice poetry, he said. In the sixth class everyone was present again: General Leigh struck me as something of a star pupil, Admiral Merino was a fine and, above all, a friendly conversationalist, while General Mendoza, true to form, remained silent and took notes. We talked about Marta Harnecker. General Leigh said that the young woman in question was intimately acquainted with a pair of Cubans. The admiral confirmed this report.

Is that possible? said General Pinochet. Can that be possible? Are we talking about a woman or a bitch? Is this information correct? It is, said Leigh.

Suddenly I had an idea for a poem about a degenerate woman, and I made a mental note of the first lines and the general drift that night while talking about Basic Elements of Historical Materialism and going back over some points from the Manifesto that they still hadn’t properly grasped. In the seventh class I talked about Lenin and Stalin and Trotsky and the various rival schools of Marxism around the world. I talked about Mao and Tito and Fidel Castro. All of them (except General Mendoza who wasn’t there for the seventh class) had read Basic Elements of Historical Materialism , and when the discussion started to flag we went back to talking about Marta Harnecker. I remember we also discussed Chairman Mao’s military accomplishments. General Pinochet said that the really gifted strategist in that part of the world was not Mao but another Chinaman, whose unpronounceable names he mentioned, but of course I forgot them straightaway. General Leigh said that Marta Harnecker was probably working for the Cuban secret service. Is this information correct? It is. In the eighth class I talked about Lenin again and we examined What Is to Be Done? and then we went over Mao’s Little Red Book (which General Pinochet found very simple and straightforward), and then we came back to Basic Elements of Historical Materialism , by Marta Harnecker. In the ninth class I asked them questions about Harnecker’s Basic Elements .