Roberto Bolaño - By Night in Chile

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 to 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.

When we were standing on the porch (night was slowly beginning to fall), she took my hand, as if the thought of being left alone in that condemned house had suddenly scared her. I squeezed her hand and advised her to pray. I was very tired and didn’t manage to put much conviction into my advice. I’m already praying as much as I can, she replied. Try, María, try, do it for your sons. She breathed in the air of outer Santiago, air that is the quintessence of dusk.

Then she looked around, calm, serene, courageous in her own way, she looked at her house, her porch, the place where the cars used to park, the red bicycle, the trees, the garden path, the fence, the windows all shut except for the one I had opened, the stars twinkling far away, and she said, That’s how literature is made in Chile. I nodded and left. While I was driving back into Santiago, I thought about what she had said. That is how literature is made in Chile, but not just in Chile, in Argentina and Mexico too, in Guatemala and Uruguay, in Spain and France and Germany, in green England and carefree Italy. That is how literature is made. Or at least what we call literature, to keep ourselves from falling into the rubbish dump. Then I started singing to myself again: The Judas Tree, the Judas Tree, and my car went back into the tunnel of time, back into time’s giant meat grinder. And I remembered the day Farewell died. His funeral was discreet and orderly, as he would have wished. When I was left alone in his house, looking around the library, which was, in some mysterious way, the incarnation both of his absence and his presence, I asked his spirit (it was, of course, a rhetorical question) why things had turned out as they had for us.

There was no reply. I went over to one of the huge bookcases and touched the spines of the books with my fingertips. There was a movement in a corner of the room. I jumped. But when I looked more closely, I saw that it was one of Farewell’s faithful old crones who had fallen asleep. We left the house together, arm in arm. During the funeral procession, as we made our way through the refrigerated streets of Santiago, I asked what had become of Farewell. He’s in the coffin, said some youths who were walking ahead of me. Idiots, I said, but the youths were gone, they had disappeared. Now I am the invalid. My bed is spinning, afloat on a swift-flowing river. If the waters were turbulent I would know that death was near. But the waters are just flowing quickly, so all hope is not yet lost. The wizened youth has been quiet for a long time now. He has given up railing against me and writers generally. Is there a solution? That is how literature is made, that is how the great works of Western literature are made. You better get used to it, I tell him. The wizened youth, or what is left of him, moves his lips, mouthing an inaudible no . The power of my thought has stopped him. Or maybe it was history. An individual is no match for history. The wizened youth has always been alone, and I have always been on history’s side. I prop myself up on one elbow and look for him. All I can see are my books, the walls of my bedroom, a window in the midst of shadow and light. I could rise from this bed now and start living again, giving classes, writing reviews. I would like to review a book by one of the new French writers.