And the Copiapó River
Where we stopped
To eat cold
Empanadas.
And Pancho Ferri
Returned to the intercontinental
Adventures
Of Caraculo and Jetachancho,
Two musicians from Valparaíso
Lost
In Barcelona’s Chinatown.
And poor Caraculo,
The lead singer said,
Was married and needed
To get money
For his wife and children
Of the Caraculo lineage
So badly he started dealing
Heroin
And a little cocaine
And on Fridays a little ecstasy
For the subjects of Venus.
And bit by bit, stubbornly,
He was moving up,
And while Jetachancho
Hung out with Aldo Di Pietro,
Remember him?
In Café Puerto Rico,
Caraculo saw his checking account
And his self-esteem grow.
And what lesson can we
Neochileans learn
From the criminal lives
Of those two South American
Pilgrims?
None, except that limits
Are tenuous, limits
Are relative: reeded edges
Of a reality forged
In the void.
Pascal’s horror
Precisely.
That geometric horror
So dark
And cold,
Said Pancho Ferri
At the wheel of our race car,
Always heading
North, till we reached
Toco
Where we unloaded
The amp
And two hours later
Were ready to go on:
Pancho Relámpago
And the Neochileans.
A tiny
Pea-sized failure,
Though some teens
Did help us
Load the instruments back
In the van: kids
From Toco
Transparent like
The geometric figures
Of Blaise Pascal.
And after Toco, Quillagua,
Hilaticos, Soledad, Ramaditas,
Pintados and Humberstone,
Playing in empty banquet halls
And brothels converted
Into Lilliputian hospitals,
A really rare sight, rare they even had
Electricity, really
Rare that the walls
Were semi-solid, in short,
Places that kind of
Scared us a little
And where the clients
Took a liking to
Fist-fucking and
Feet-fucking,
And the screams that came
Through the windows and
Echoed through the cement courtyard
Through outhouses
Between stores full
Of rusted tools
And sheds that seemed
To collect all the moon’s light,
Made our hair
Stand on end.
How can so much evil exist
In a country so new,
So minuscule?
Might this be
The Prostitutes’ Hell?
Pancho Ferri
Pondered aloud.
And we Neochileans didn’t know
What to answer.
I just sat wondering
How those New York variants of sex
Could go on
In these godforsaken
Provinces.
And with our pockets emptied
We continued north:
Mapocho, Negreiros, Santa
Catalina, Tana,
Cuya and
Arica,
Where we found
Some rest — and indignities.
And three nights of work
In the Camafeo, owned by
Don Luis Sánchez Morales, retired
Official.
A place filled with little round tables
And pot-bellied lamps
Hand-painted
By don Luis’s mom,
I suppose.
And the only really
Amusing thing
We saw in Arica
Was the sun of Arica:
A sun like a trail
Of dust.
A sun like sand
Or like lime
Tossed artfully
Into the motionless air.
The rest: routine.
Assassins and converts
Chit-chatting
With the deaf and mute,
With imbeciles turned loose
From Purgatory.
And Vivanco the lawyer,
A friend of don Luis Sánchez,
Asked what the fuck we were trying to say
With all that Neochilean shit.
New patriots, said Pancho,
As he got up
From the table
And locked himself in the bathroom.
And Vivanco the lawyer
Tucked his pistol back
In its holster
Of Italian leather,
A fine repoussé of the boys
Of Ordine Nuovo,
Detailed with delicacy and skill.
White as the moon
That night we had to tuck
Pancho Ferri in bed
Between all of us.
With a 40 degree fever
He was growing delirious:
He didn’t want our band
To be called Pancho Relámpago
And the Neochileans anymore,
But instead Pancho Misterio
And the Neochileans:
Pascal’s terror.
The terror of lead singers,
The terror of travelers,
But never the terror
Of children.
And one morning at dawn,
Like a band of thieves,
We left Arica
And crossed the border
Of the Republic.
By our expressions
You’d have thought we were crossing
The border of Reason.
And the Peru of legend
Opened up in front of our van
Covered in dust
And filth,
Like a piece of fruit without a peel,
Like a chimeric fruit
Exposed to inclemency
And insults.
A fruit without a rind
Like a cocky teenager.
And Pancho Ferri, from
Then on called Pancho
Misterio, didn’t break
His fever,
Murmuring like a priest
In the back part
Of the van
The ups and downs,
The avatars — Indian word —
Of Caraculo and Jetachancho.
A life thin and hard
As the soup and noose of a hanged man,
That of Jetachancho and his
Lucky Siamese twin:
A life or a study
Of the wind’s caprices.
And the Neochileans
Played in Tacna,
In Mollendo and Arequipa,
Sponsored by the Society
For the Promotion of Art
And Youth.
Without a lead singer, humming
The songs to ourselves
Or going mmm, mmm, mmmmh,
While Pancho was melting away
In the back of the van,
Devoured by chimeras
And cocky teenagers.
Nadir and zenith of a longing
That Caraculo learned to sense
In the moons
Of the drug dealers
Of Barcelona: a deceptive
Glow,
That means nothing,
That’s worth nothing, and that
Nevertheless exposes itself to you
Free of charge.
And if we weren’t
In Peru? we
Neochileans
Asked ourselves one night.
And if this immense
Space
That instructs
And limits us
Were an intergalactic ship,
An unidentified
Flying object?
And if Pancho Misterio’s
Fever
Were our fuel
Or our navigational device?
And after working
We went out walking
Through the streets of Peru:
With military patrols,
Peddlers and the unemployed,
Scanning
The hills
For Shining Path’s bonfires,
But we saw nothing.
The darkness surrounding the
Urban centers
Was total.
This is like a vapor trail
Straight out of
World War II
Said Pancho lying down
In the back of the van.
He said: filaments
Of Nazi generals like
Reichenau or Model
Escaping in spirit
Involuntarily
To the Virgin Lands
Of Latin America:
A hinterland of specters
And ghosts.
Our home
Positioned within the geometry
Of impossible crimes.
And at night we would
Go out to the clubs:
The sweet-sixteen-year-old whores
Descendents of those brave men
Of the Pacific War
Loved hearing us talk
Like machine guns.
But above all
They loved seeing Pancho,
Wrapped in piles of colored blankets
With his wool cap
From the altiplano
Pulled down to his eyebrows,
Appear and disappear
Like the gentleman
He always was,
A lucky guy,
The great ailing lover from southern Chile,
The father of the Neochileans.
And the mother of Caraculo and Jetachancho,
Two poor musicians from Valparaíso,
As everyone knows.
And dawn would find us
At a table in the back
Discussing the kilo and a half of gray matter
In the adult
Brain.
Chemical messages, said
Pancho Misterio burning with fever,
Neurons activating themselves
And neurons inhibiting themselves
In the vast expanses of longing.
And the little whores said
A kilo and a half of gray
Matter
Was enough, was sufficient, why
Ask for more.
And Pancho started to
Weep when he heard them.
And then came the flood
And the rain brought silence
Over the streets of Mollendo,
And over the hills,
And over the streets in the barrio
Of the whores,
And the rain was the only
One talking.
A strange phenomenon: we Neochileans
Shut our mouths
And went our separate ways
Visiting the dumps of
Philosophy, the safes, the
American colors, the unmistakable manner
Of being Born and Reborn.
And one night our van
Made for Lima, with Pancho
Ferri at the wheel, like in
The old days,
Except now a whore
Was with him.
A thin young whore,
Whose name was Margarita,
An unrivaled teen,
Resident of the permanent
Storm.
Thin and agile shadow
The dark ramada
Where Pancho
Might heal his wounds.
And in Lima we read
Peruvian poets:
Vallejo, Martín Adán and Jorge Pimentel.
And Pancho Misterio went out
On stage and was convincing
And versatile.
And later, still trembling
And sweaty,
He told us of a novel
Called Kundalini
By an old Chilean writer.
One swallowed by oblivion.
A nec spes nec metus
We Neochileans said.
And Margarita.
And the ghost,
The mournful hole
Where all endeavors
End,
Wrote — it seems —
A novel called Kundalini,
And Pancho could hardly remember it.
He really tried, his words
Poking around in a dreadful infancy
Full of amnesia, gymnastic
Trials and lies,
And he was telling it to us like that,
Fragmented,
The Kundalini scream,
The name of a race-loving mare
And the shared death on the racetrack.
A racetrack that no longer exists.
A hole anchored
In a nonexistent Chile
That’s happy.
And the story had
The virtue to illuminate
Like an English landscape painter
Our fear and our dreams
Which were marching East to West
And West to East,
While we, the real
Neochileans
Traveled from South
To North.
And so slowly
It seemed we weren’t moving.
And Lima was an instant
Of happiness.
Brief but effective.
And what is the relationship, asked Pancho,
Between Morpheus, god
Of Sleep
And morfar, slang
To eat?
Yes, that’s what he said,
Hugged around the waist
By the lovely Margarita,
Skinny and almost naked
In a bar in Lince, one night
Glimpsed and fractured and
Possessed
By the lightning bolts
Of the chimera.
Our necessity.
Our open mouth
Where bread
Goes in
And dreams
Come out: vapor trails
Fossils
Colored with the palette
Of the apocalypse.
Survivors, said Pancho
Ferri.
Lucky Latin Americans.
That’s it.
And one night before leaving
We saw Pancho
And Margarita
Standing in the middle of an infinite
Quagmire
And then we realized
The Neochileans
Would be forever
Governed
By chance.
The coin
Leapt like a metallic
Insect
From between his fingers:
Heads, to the south,
Tails, to the north,
And we all piled into
The van
And the city
Of legends
And fear
Stayed behind.
One happy day in January
We crossed
Like children of the Cold,
Of the Unstable Cold
Or of the Ecce Homo,
The border of Ecuador.
> At the time Pancho was
28 or 29 years old
And soon he would die.
And Margarita was 17.
And none of the Neochileans
Was over 22.
MEJOR APRENDER A LEER QUE
APRENDER A MORIR
Mucho mejor
Y más importante
La alfabetización
Que el arduo aprendizaje
De la Muerte
Aquélla te acompañará toda la vida
E incluso te proporcionará
Alegrías
Y una o dos desgracias ciertas
Aprender a morir
En cambio
Aprender a mirar cara a cara
A la Pelona
Sólo te servirá durante un rato
El breve instante
De verdad y asco
Y después nunca más
Epílogo y Moraleja: Morir es más importante que leer, pero dura mucho menos. Podríase objetar que vivir es morir cada día. O que leer es aprender a morir, oblicuamente. Para finalizar, y como en tantas cosas, el ejemplo sigue siendo Stevenson. Leer es aprender a morir, pero también es aprender a ser feliz, a ser valiente.
IT’S BETTER TO LEARN HOW TO READ THAN TO LEARN HOW TO DIE
Literacy is
Much better
And more important
Than the arduous study
Of Death
It will be with you all your life
And will even dole out
Happiness
And a certain misfortune or two
Learning to die
On the other hand
Learning to look
The Grim Reaper in the face
Will only serve you a short while
The brief moment
Of truth and disgust
And then never again
Epilogue and Moral: Dying is more important than reading, but it doesn’t last as long. You could argue that living is dying every day. Or that reading is learning to die, obliquely. In conclusion, and as with so many things, the example continues to be Stevenson. Reading is learning to die, but also learning to be happy, to be brave.
RESURRECCIÓN
La poesía entra en el sueño
como un buzo en un lago.
La poesía, más valiente que nadie,
entra y cae
a plomo
en un lago infinito como Loch Ness
o turbio e infausto como el lago Balatón.
Contempladla desde el fondo:
un buzo
inocente
envuelto en las plumas
de la voluntad.
La poesía entra en el sueño
como un buzo muerto
en el ojo de Dios.
RESURRECTION
Poetry slips into dreams
like a diver in a lake.
Poetry, braver than anyone,
slips in and sinks
like lead
through a lake infinite as Loch Ness
or tragic and turbid as Lake Balatón.
Consider it from below:
a diver
innocent
covered in feathers
of will.
Poetry slips into dreams
like a diver who’s dead
in the eyes of God.
UN FINAL FELIZ
Finalmente el poeta como niño y el niño del poeta
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