Roberto Bolaño - By Night in Chile

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.