Roberto Bolaño - By Night in Chile

Because you can’t read all day and all night. You can’t write all day and all night. Splendid isolation has never been our style, and back then, as now, Chilean artists and writers needed to gather and talk, ideally in a pleasant setting where they could find intelligent company. Apart from the inescapable fact that many of the old crowd had left the country for reasons that were often more personal than political, the main difficulty was the curfew. Where could the artists and intellectuals meet if everywhere was shut after ten at night, for, as everyone knows, night is the most propitious time for getting together and enjoying a little unbuttoned conversation with one’s peers. Artists and writers. Strange times. I can picture the wizened youth’s face. I cannot actually see him, but he is there in my mind’s eye. He is wrinkling his nose, scanning the horizon, shaking from head to foot. I cannot actually see him, but there he is in my mind’s eye, crouching or down on all fours, on a hillock, black clouds racing past over his head, and the hillock becomes a hill and the next minute it is the atrium of a church, an atrium as black as the clouds, charged with electricity like the clouds, and glistening with moisture or blood, and the wizened youth trembles more and more violently, wrinkles his nose and then pounces on the story. But only I know the story, the real story. And it is simple and cruel and true and it should make us laugh, it should make us die laughing. But we only know how to cry, the only thing we do wholeheartedly is cry. The curfew was in force. Restaurants and bars shut early. People went home at a prudent hour. There were not many places where writers and artists could gather to drink and talk as long as they liked. That’s the truth. So this is how it happened. There was a woman. Her name was María Canales. She was a writer, she was pretty, she was young. In my opinion she was not without talent. I thought so then, and still do. Her talent was, how can I put it? inward, sheathed, withdrawn. Others have recanted, they have put it all behind them and forgotten. Naked, the wizened youth lunges at his prey. But I know the story of María Canales, the whole story, everything that happened. She was a writer.

Maybe she still is. Writers (and critics) didn’t have many places to go. María Canales had a house on the outskirts of the city. A big house, surrounded by a garden full of trees, a house with a comfortable sitting room, with a fireplace and good whiskey, good cognac, a house that was open to friends once or twice a week, even occasionally three times a week. I don’t know how we got to know her.

I suppose one day she showed up at the editorial office of a newspaper or a literary magazine or at the Chilean Society of Authors. She probably attended a writing workshop. In any case before long we all knew her and she knew all of us. She was pleasant company. As I said before, she was pretty. She had brown hair and large eyes and she read everything she was told to read or so she led us to believe. She went to exhibitions. Maybe we met her at an exhibition. Maybe at the end of a vernissage she invited people to continue the party at her house. She was pretty, as I said. She was interested in art, she liked to talk with painters and performance artists and video artists, maybe because they were not as well educated as the writers. Or so she thought. Then she began to mix with writers and realized that they were not particularly well educated either.

What a relief that must have been. A very Chilean sort of relief. So few of us are truly cultured in this godforsaken country. The rest are completely ignorant. Pleasant, likeable people all the same. María Canales was pleasant and likeable: she was a generous host, nothing was too much trouble when it came to making her guests feel at home, for that, it seemed, was what mattered most to her. And people really did feel comfortable at the select gatherings or receptions or soirées or parties hosted by the novice writer. She had two sons.

I haven’t mentioned them yet. If I remember rightly, she had two young sons, the elder was two or three years old and the younger about eight months, and she was married to a North American called James Thompson, whom she referred to as Jimmy, who worked as a salesman or an executive for a firm that had recently set up a branch in Chile and another in Argentina. Naturally, everyone got to meet Jimmy. I met him too. He was a typical North American, tall, with brown hair slightly lighter in color than his wife’s, not very talkative but polite.

Sometimes he was present at María’s get-togethers and on those occasions he was generally to be seen listening to one of the duller guests with infinite patience. By the time the visitors arrived, and emerged from the cheerful caravan of miscellaneous automobiles, the boys would be asleep in their room on the second floor, it was a three-story house, and sometimes the maid or the nanny would carry them downstairs in their pajamas, to say hello to the newly arrived guests and be subjected to their baby talk and remarks about how cute or well behaved they were, or how much they looked like their mother or their father, although to tell the truth, the elder boy, who was called Sebastián, like me, didn’t look like either of his parents, as opposed to the younger boy, named Jimmy, who was the spitting image of Jimmy senior, with a few South American features inherited from María Canales. Then the children would disappear along with the maid, who shut herself away in the room next to theirs, while downstairs, in María Canales’s spacious sitting room, the party would begin in earnest, with the hostess serving whiskies all round, Debussy on the record player, or Webern performed by the Berlin Philharmonic, and after a while someone would be moved to recite a poem, and someone else would weigh up the virtues of this or that novel, the conversation would turn to painting or contemporary dance, little groups would form, the latest work by so-and-so would take a hiding, but wasn’t what’s-his-name’s recent performance a delight, the yawning would begin, sometimes a young poet opposed to the regime would come up to me and start talking about Pound and end up talking about his own work (I was always interested in the work of the younger generation, whatever their political affiliations), the hostess would suddenly appear carrying a tray piled high with empanadas, someone would start crying, others would burst into song, at six in the morning, or seven, when the curfew was over, we would make our unsteady way back to the cars in Indian file, some in pairs, others half asleep, most of us happy, and then the motors of six or seven cars would startle the quiet morning, and for a few seconds drown out the sound of birdsong in the garden, and the hostess would wave goodbye from the porch, as the cars began to drive away, one of us having opened the iron gate, and María Canales would stand there on the porch until the last car had left her property, her hospitable domain, and the cars went off down the empty avenues of outer Santiago, those endless avenues, lined with solitary houses, abandoned or neglected villas and vacant lots, their profiles repeated over and over on either side, while the sun came up over the Cordillera and we heard the dissonant rumor of a new day coming from the hub of the city. And a week later we would be back there again. By we I mean the group. I didn’t go every week. I put in an appearance chez María Canales once a month. Or even less often. But there were writers who went every week. Or more! They all deny it now. They even claim I was the true habitué, present every week without fail. Or twice, three times a week! But even the wizened youth knows that is patently false. So we can rule that out straightaway. My visits were rare. Infrequent, at worst. But when I did go, I kept my wits about me, and the whiskey didn’t cloud my judgement. For example I noticed that young Sebastián, my little namesake, looked rather drawn. One day the maid brought him downstairs, and I took him from her arms and asked what was wrong with him. The maid, who was a full-blood Mapuche, stared at me and tried to take the child back. I ducked away. What’s wrong, Sebastián? I said, with a tenderness I had never felt before. The child looked at me with his big blue eyes. I touched his face. What a cold little face it was. Suddenly I felt my eyes brimming with tears. Then the maid snatched him away from me in a most ungracious manner. I wanted to tell her that I was a priest. But something stopped me, perhaps that sense we Chileans possess to an uncommon degree, the sharpest of all our senses, the sense of the ridiculous. When the maid carried the little boy upstairs again, he looked at me over her shoulder and it seemed to me that those wide eyes were seeing something they did not want to see. María Canales was very proud of him: she told me how intelligent he was. The younger son, she said, was wonderfully inquisitive and bold. I didn’t pay much attention: all mothers prattle on like that. Mainly I talked with the up-and-coming artists, who, armed with nothing but what they had gleaned from a few books read in secret, were preparing to create the New Chilean Scene, a rather awkward anglicism invented to name the gap left by the emigrants, which my fellow guests were planning to occupy and populate with their as yet embryonic works. I talked with them and with old friends from years back who turned up from time to time (like me) in the house on the outskirts of Santiago to discuss English metaphysical poetry or the films they had seen recently in New York. I can’t have had more than about two conversations with María Canales, just short chats really, and once I read a story she had written, a story that went on to win first prize in a competition organized by a left-leaning literary magazine. I remember that competition. I wasn’t on the judging panel. They didn’t even ask me. If they had asked me, I would have done it. Literature is literature. But anyhow I wasn’t one of the judges. Perhaps if I had been, María Canales wouldn’t have won first prize. Not that it was a positively bad story, but it certainly wasn’t good. Like its author, it was laborious and mediocre.