Roberto Bolaño: By Night in Chile

Then Jünger started talking about painting. Don Salvador asked about German art, with which he was unacquainted. It seemed that Jünger was only really interested in Dürer, so for a good while they talked about Dürer exclusively. Both men became more and more enthusiastic. Suddenly Don Salvador realized that since arriving he had not exchanged a single word with his host. He looked around, while inside him a little alarm rang louder and louder. When we asked what had set off the alarm, he said he was worried that the Guatemalan had been arrested by the French police or, worse still, the Gestapo. But the Guatemalan was there, sitting by the window, absorbed (although “absorbed” is not the word, in fact it could hardly be less appropriate) in the unwavering contemplation of Paris.

Relieved, our diplomat cleverly changed the subject and asked Jünger what he thought of the silent Central American’s work. Jünger said that the painter seemed to be suffering from acute anaemia and that, clearly, the best thing for him to do would be to eat something. At that point Don Salvador realized that he was still holding the packets of food he had brought for the Guatemalan, a little tea, a little sugar, a round loaf of bread and half a kilo of goat’s cheese that none of his Chilean colleagues would eat, purloined from the embassy kitchen. Jünger looked at the food. Don Salvador blushed and proceeded to put it on the shelves while explaining to the Guatemalan that he had “brought him a few little things.” The Guatemalan, as usual, neither thanked him nor turned around to see the little things in question. Don Salvador recalled that for a few seconds the situation seemed perfectly ridiculous. Jünger and himself standing there, not knowing what to say, and the Central American painter refusing to budge from the window, obstinately keeping his back turned. But Jünger knew how to respond to any situation, and compensating for his host’s torpor, made Don Salvador feel at home, drawing up two chairs and offering him Turkish cigarettes, which it seemed he kept exclusively for friends or unforeseen situations, since he himself smoked none that evening. Far from the idle but agitated and often indiscreet chatter of the Parisian salons, the Chilean writer and the German writer enjoyed a free-ranging conversation, touching on the human and the divine, war and peace, Italian painting and Nordic painting, the source of evil and the effects of evil that sometimes seem to be triggered by chance, the flora and fauna of Chile, which Jünger seemed to have read about in the works of his fellow countryman Philippi, who was at once a true Chilean and a true German, all the while drinking cups of tea prepared by Don Salvador himself (which the Guatemalan, when invited to join them, refused almost inaudibly), the tea being followed by two glasses of cognac from the supply that Jünger carried in his silver hip flask, and this time the Guatemalan did not say no, which made both writers smile discreetly at first, then laugh long and loud, proffering the appropriate witticisms. And then, when the Guatemalan had gone back to the window with his due ration of cognac, Jünger, returning to the canvas that had intrigued him, asked the painter if he had spent long in the Aztec capital and what impression his time there had left, to which the Guatemalan replied that the week or slightly less he had spent in Mexico City had left no more than a vague blur in his memory, and, in any case, he had painted that picture, now the object of the German’s attention or curiosity, many years later, in Paris, without really thinking about Mexico at all, although under the influence of what, for want of a better expression, he called a Mexican mood. And that set Jünger musing on the sealed wells of memory, perhaps imagining that during his brief stay in Mexico City the Guatemalan had unwittingly stored away a vision that would not surface again until many years later, although Don Salvador, who was agreeing with everything the Teuton hero said, thought to himself perhaps it was not a question of sealed wells suddenly reopened, or in any case not the sealed wells Jünger had in mind, and as soon as this thought occurred to him his head began to buzz, as if hundreds of sand flies or horseflies were escaping from it, flies visible only through the prism of a hot, dizzy feeling, in spite of the fact that the Guatemalan’s attic room could hardly have been described as a warm place, and the sand flies flew back and forth in front of his eyelids, transparently, like winged droplets of sweat, making the buzzing noise that horseflies make, or the noise that sand flies make, which is more or less the same, although of course there are no sand flies in Paris, and then Don Salvador, as he nodded in agreement once again, by this stage understanding only snatches of Jünger’s oblivious disquisition in French, glimpsed or thought he glimpsed a part of the truth, and in that tiny part of the truth he could see the Guatemalan in Paris, the war already underway or about to begin, the Guatemalan already accustomed to spending long, dead (or dying) hours in front of his only window, contemplating the landscape of Paris, and Landscape: Mexico City an hour before dawn emerging from that contemplation, from a Guatemalan’s sleepless contemplation of Paris, and in its own way the painting was an altar for human sacrifice, and in its own way the painting was an expression of supreme boredom, and in its own way the painting was an acknowledgement of defeat, not the defeat of Paris or the defeat of European culture bravely determined to burn itself down, not the political defeat of certain ideals that the painter tepidly espoused, but his personal defeat, the defeat of an obscure, poor Guatemalan, who had come to the City of Light determined to make his name in its artistic circles, and the way in which the Guatemalan accepted his defeat, with a clear-sightedness reaching far beyond the realm of the particular and the anecdotal, made the hair on our diplomat’s arms stand up, or, in vulgar parlance, gave him goose bumps. And then, in a single draught, Don Salvador drained what was left of his cognac and started listening to Jünger again, who all this time had been holding forth imperturbably, while he, that is to say our writer, had become entangled in a spiderweb of futile thoughts, and the Guatemalan, predictably, remained slumped beside the window, his life seeping away in the obsessive and sterile contemplation of Paris. And having grasped the drift of the monologue without too much difficulty (or so he thought), Don Salvador was able to insert a word edgeways into that parade of ideas, which would have intimidated the great Pablo himself, if not for the modest tone, the unpretentious manner in which the German set out his creed in matters relating to the fine arts. And then the officer of the Wehrmacht and the Chilean diplomat left the attic room together, and as they went down the interminable, precipitous stairs to the street, Jünger said he did not think the Guatemalan would live until the following winter, an odd remark for him to make, since by then it was obvious to everyone that many thousands of people were not going to live until the following winter, most of them much healthier than the Guatemalan, most of them happier, most of them unmistakably endowed with a stronger will to live, but Jünger made the remark all the same, perhaps without thinking, or not wishing to confuse separate issues, and Don Salvador agreed once again, although, having known and visited the painter over a longer period, he was not so sure the Guatemalan would die, nevertheless he agreed: Of course, Quite so, or perhaps he just made that diplomatic hmm hmm noise that can mean absolutely anything. And a little while later Ernst Jünger went to dine at the house of Salvador Reyes, and this time the cognac was served in proper cognac glasses and they discussed literature sitting in comfortable armchairs and the meal was, well, it was balanced, as meals in Paris ought to be, in gastronomic as well as intellectual terms, and when the German was leaving, Don Salvador gave him one of his books translated into French, perhaps the only one, I don’t know, according to the wizened youth no one in Paris has even the vaguest memory of Don Salvador Reyes, he’s probably saying that to annoy me, it might be true that no one remembers Salvador Reyes in Paris, indeed even in Chile few people remember him and fewer still read his books, but that is not the point, the point is that when the German went home that night, in one of his suit pockets there was a book by Salvador Reyes, and there can be no doubt that he subsequently read the book, because he mentions it, in quite positive terms, in his memoirs. And that is all Salvador Reyes told us about his years in Paris during the Second World War. But one thing is certain and it is something to be proud of: in his entire memoirs, Jünger mentions only one Chilean, and that is Salvador Reyes. Not a single Chilean to be found, even darting timidly across the background of the German’s writings, except for Don Salvador Reyes. Not a single Chilean exists, as a human being or as the author of a book, in the dark, rich years of Jünger’s chronicle, except for Don Salvador Reyes. And that night as I returned from the house of our storyteller and diplomat, walking with Farewell’s dissolute shadow down a street lined with lime trees, I had a vision of torrential grace, burnished like the dreams of heroes, and, being young and impulsive, I told Farewell about it straightaway, but he was only interested in finding the quickest way to a restaurant whose cook had been highly recommended to him, I told Farewell that for an instant, as we were walking down that quiet street lined with lime trees, I had seen myself writing a poem in praise of a writer or his golden shadow asleep inside a spaceship, like a young bird in a nest of smoking, twisted iron wreckage, and the writer who had set out for immortality was Jünger, and the spaceship had crashed in the Andes, and the immaculate body of the hero among the wreckage would be preserved by the everlasting snows, while the writings of the heroes together with the scribes who serve those writings would compose a hymn to the glory of God and civilization. And Farewell, who was getting hungrier by the minute and walking as fast as his bulk would allow, looked at me over his shoulder as if he were thinking, What a windbag, and graced me with a mocking smile. And he said that Don Salvador’s words seemed to have made quite an impression on me. Not a good thing. It’s good to love. It’s bad to be impressionable. All the while Farewell kept on walking. And then he said that the literature of heroism was vast. So vast that two people with diametrically opposed tastes and ideas could dip into it at random without any likelihood of hitting on the same thing. And then he fell silent, as if the effort of walking were killing him, and after a while he said: Jeepers I’m hungry, an expression I had never heard him use before and never heard him use again, and then he didn’t say a word until we were seated in a rather squalid restaurant, where, as he proceeded to wolf down a rich and varied Chilean repast, he told me the story of Heroes’ Hill or Heldenberg, a hill situated somewhere in Central Europe, perhaps in Austria or Hungary.