When we got to Mauricio’s house, which was close to Mater Purissima, his older brother invited me to have lunch with them. There was no one else in the house. We ate charquicán and listened to Pablo Milanés, who I knew for his song “Años,” which I thought was funny, and also for “El breve espacio en que no estás,” which I liked. Using a double tape deck, they had recorded each song three times in a row on a ninety-minute tape, or maybe it was a hundred-and-twenty-minute tape (“They’re so good you want to listen to them again right away,” Mauricio explained to me).
The brothers sang along in horrible voices while they ate; they yelled the lyrics unabashedly, even with their mouths full, and I liked that. When someone sang out of tune in my grandmother’s presence, she would say quietly, as though she were telling a secret (but loud enough so that everyone could hear her), things like: “It’s clear that we aren’t at the opera” or “We don’t always wake up well tuned” or “Does this soprano have a mustache?” But my grandmother wasn’t there to keep those brothers from singing with utter abandon, with ease: you could tell they had sung those songs an infinite number of times, that the music meant something important to them.
While we spooned our ice cream, I started paying attention to the lyrics of “Acto de Fe”: “Creo en ti… I believe in you / and my belief grows / with the pain and suffering / as I look around.” The end of the song struck me as disconcerting: I thought it was a love song, but it ended with the word revolution. The brothers sang it with all their hearts: “I believe in you / revolution.”
Although I was a boy who liked words, that was the first time, at eight years old—or maybe by then I’d turned nine—that I heard the word revolution. I asked Mauricio if it was a name, because I thought it might be the name of the beloved woman: Revolution González, for example, or Revolution Arratia. They laughed, looked at me indulgently. “It’s not a name,” Mauricio’s brother clarified. “Revolution? You really don’t know that word?” I told him no. “Well, then you’re a turd.”
I knew it was a joke; he only said it for the rhyme. Then Mauricio’s brother gave me a class on Chilean and Latin American history that I wish I could recall to the letter, but all I remember is the feeling of becoming bewilderingly and uncomfortably aware of my own ignorance. I knew nothing about the world, nothing. The brother left and Mauricio and I went to watch TV in his bedroom; we fell asleep or half asleep. We started to grope each other, to touch each other all over, without kissing. Throughout all our years of friendship, we never did that again, nor did we mention it.
9
I arrived home just after dark. I wasn’t in the habit of praying, but that night I did, for a long time—I needed God’s help. In just one day I had accumulated two tremendous sins, although I was more worried about my false Communion than my dalliance with Mauricio.
My grandmother saw me there, kneeling in front of a portrait of Christ that we had hanging in the living room, and she couldn’t hold back her laughter. I asked her what she was laughing at, and she told me not to exaggerate, that one “Our Father” was quite enough. My grandmother never went to Mass: she said the priests ogled too much, but she did believe in God. “I don’t need to say prayers,” she explained to me that night. “It’s enough to have a conversation with Jesus, freely, before I go to sleep.” I thought that was strange, or at least intimidating.
Although I went to a Catholic school, I didn’t associate any religious sentiment with what went on there. I didn’t like it when they made us go to Mass at school, or to those tedious sessions in the church that was contiguous to the main building, where they prepared us for our First Communion—those stupid lists of questions, as if we were memorizing traffic rules. But at recess the next morning, I felt so guilty that I decided that even though I hadn’t had my First Communion yet, I needed to confess, or at least talk to a priest about those sins of mine. I headed for Father Limonta’s office, where I found him absorbed in an account book, maybe balancing some figures. When he raised his head he gave me a severe look, and I froze stiff. “I already know what you’re here about,” he told me, and I started trembling, imagining the priest kept up some kind of express communication with God. I went blank, felt dizzy. “It’s not going to happen,” said Limonta finally. “All the boys come in here and ask the same thing, but you’re still too young for the band.” I ran out, relieved, and went back to class.
I think it was that same day that the head teacher and a priest whose name I don’t remember brought us to a home for mentally challenged children. The goal of the visit was to show us just how fortunate we were, and there was even a script to increase the drama: one by one the home’s children would approach the teacher in order to receive her encouragement and affection, though she didn’t touch or hug them. “You mean so much to us, Jonathan,” she would say, while a boy with a twisted mouth, skewed eyes, and snot hanging from his nose mumbled something incomprehensible in response. Each case was more heartrending than the last, and the final person to be paraded out was Lucy, a forty-year-old woman with a little girl’s body, who seemed paralyzed but would turn her head when the priest rang a bell. I remember I thought about Dante then, who was normal compared to these kids, even though in our neighborhood they called him the Mongoloid.
Up until then, my idea of suffering had been associated with Dante and the handicapped children on the telethon, which was an inexhaustible fount of fears and nightmares. Every year my sister and I, like nearly all children in Chile, would watch the entire program until we were falling-down tired, and then we would spend weeks imagining what it would be like to lose our arms or legs.
10
“This is nothing,” my grandmother said after the 1985 earthquake, hugging me. We went back to school some months later, and they switched us to an improvised classroom they’d constructed behind the gym, where we stayed for the rest of the year.
We had a new teacher, too. The first thing he told us was his name, Juan Luis Morales Rojas, and he repeated it in a quiet voice, in a neutral tone, two, three, twenty times. “Now you all repeat it,” he told us. “Juan Luis Morales Rojas.” We started to repeat the name, with growing confidence, increasing our volume, trying to understand if there was a limit to how loud we could be, and after a while we were shouting and jumping while he moved his hands like an orchestra director, or like a musician who was enjoying listening to the audience sing along to the chorus of one of his songs. “Now I know you’re never going to forget my name” was all he said when we got tired of shouting and laughing. In all my years at that school, I don’t remember a happier moment than that one.
Weeks later, or maybe that same day, Juan Luis Morales Rojas told us what elections were, what the president’s duties were, and what the vice president, the secretary, and the treasurer all did. In one of the first Class Council sessions, the two-hour meetings we would have on Mondays, Rojas asked us to make a list of all the problems we had, and at first we couldn’t think of anything, but then someone mentioned how fourth graders weren’t allowed in the band. The idea arose to make a list of all the names of kids who wanted to be in the band, and then to go and talk with Father Limonta. I was going to raise my hand, but I hesitated for a second. Then I realized, quite clearly, that no, I didn’t want to be in the band.
11
After a while, my mom ran into a woman who was sure she had seen me serving at Mass. “That’s impossible,” my mother replied. But then someone else told her the same thing, and she asked me about it again. I told her the person was wrong, but that I had also seen someone who looked surprisingly like me acting as altar boy. “I just have a very common face,” I told her.
When I finally did go to confession with Father Limonta, it didn’t even occur to me to tell him that I had already taken Communion, or about my erotic experience with Mauricio. Later I received my First Communion at school—which by then was my thirtieth or fortieth—and I could finally take Communion legitimately at Mass. My parents were there and they gave me
presents, and I think that was when I first felt the true weight of my double life. I went on serving at Mater Purissima without my parents’ knowledge until maybe the winter of 1985, when, after a tense and sloppy Mass, the priest criticized us harshly: he told us we distracted him, that we were too shrill, that we had no rhythm. His comments hit me hard, maybe because I was precariously coming to understand that the priest was acting, that it wasn’t all enlightenment or whatever you call that sacred calling, that spiritual dimension. I decided to quit and, at that very moment, I stopped being Catholic. I suppose that’s also when my religious feeling began to be quashed. I never had, in any case, those rational meditations on the existence of God, maybe because that was when I started to believe, naively, intensely, absolutely, in literature.
12
After the attempt on Pinochet’s life, in September of ’86, Dante started asking everyone in the neighborhood if they belonged to the right or the left. Some of the neighbors reacted uncomfortably, others laughed and started walking even faster, and still others asked him what he understood of the left and the right. But he never asked us kids, only the adults.
I stayed friends with Mauricio and we still listened to Milanés at his house, but more often to Silvio Rodríguez, Violeta Parra, Inti-Illimani, and Quilapayún, and I got lessons from him and his brother about revolution and community work. It was from them that I first heard about the victims of the dictatorship, about the people who’d been arrested and disappeared, the murders, the torture. I listened to them, perplexed. Sometimes I got mad at them, and other times I fell into a certain skepticism, but I was always filled with the same feeling of impropriety, of ignorance, smallness, estrangement.
I tried to take positions, though they were, at first, erratic and fleeting, a bit like Leonard Zelig: what I wanted was to fit in, to belong, and if Mauricio and his brother were on the left, I wanted to be too, in the same way I wanted to be on the right at home, even though my parents weren’t really right-wing; it was more that politics were never mentioned in my house, except when my mother complained about how hard it had been to get milk for my sister during Salvador Allende’s government.
I figured out that keeping quiet was a very effective way to fit in. I figured out, or began to figure out, that the news obscured reality, and that I was part of a conformist crowd neutralized by television. My idea of suffering became the image of a boy who lived in fear of his parents being murdered, or who grew up without knowing them except through a few black-and-white photographs. Even though I did everything I could to distance myself from my parents, the idea of losing them was, for me, the most devastating thing imaginable.
13
“It’s not about remembering / the First Communion / but rather the last,” says a poem by Claudio Giaconi. I’m wrapping up now.
14
At the start of 1987 the pope came to Chile, and I felt that old religious fervor coming back, but it didn’t last very long. At the end of that same year, just days after I had turned twelve, I found out that my parents were going to send me to a different school. I hadn’t exactly become a virtuosic guitar player, but I had my moment of musical glory when I won my Catholic school’s talent show by singing “El baile de los que sobran” by Los Prisioneros. The boy who got second place sang, in a perfect and melodious voice, “Detenedla ya” by Emmanuel. I have no idea how I beat him. My voice was starting to change, I had trouble hitting the right notes. And I didn’t know what I was singing. I didn’t know what I was singing.
In March of 1988 I entered the National Institute. And that’s when, at the same time, democracy and adolescence arrived. The adolescence was real. The democracy wasn’t.
In 1994 I began studying literature at the University of Chile. There was a shiny black computer in my house. Every once in a while I used it to write my papers, or I typed poems and printed them out. I always erased the files afterward; I didn’t want to leave any records.
***
At the end of 1997 I was living in a boardinghouse across from the National Stadium, and I had completely fallen out with my father. I wouldn’t take his money, but I did accept a used laptop that he insisted on giving me. And even if he hadn’t insisted, I still would have accepted it. It was fitting that my favorite album then was called OK Computer. I wrote while listening to “No Surprises” a thousand times; I wrote about anything, but not about my family, because back then I pretended I didn’t have a family. No family, no house, no past. Sometimes I also listened to “I Am a Rock” by Simon and Garfunkel, and that was also fitting, because that’s what I lived, that’s what I thought, seriously, solemnly: “I have my books / and my poetry to protect me.”
In 1999 the laptop my father had given me—a black IBM, with a little red ball in the middle of the keyboard that served as a mouse (which the techies called the clitoris)—broke down definitively. I bought, with many monthly payments, an immense Olidata. By then I was living at Vicuña Mackenna 58, in the basement apartment of a big old building. I was working as a night phone operator, and, in the afternoons, I wrote and looked out the window at the legs and shoes of people walking by on Eulogia Sánchez. That winter, because I didn’t have a heater or a hot-water bottle, I spent several nights sleeping with my arms around the computer.
***
In 2005 they outlawed the use of treated kite strings, due to the number of accidents they caused, and to the grisly case of a motorcyclist who was killed by one some years before. But by then my father had already moved on to fly fishing.
In August of 2008, my grandmother died. A few days ago, my mother and I went through her stories, now transferred to the computer. They were set in Comic Sans MS font, 12 point, double-spaced. I knew the beginning of “Ninette” by heart: “This is a story about a family whose noble lineage made them more high-and-mighty every day, except for the daughter, an only child, who stood out for being good and kind.”
Today is July 5, 2013. My mother no longer has posters hanging in the conjugal bedroom, but she still follows Paul Simon. This morning, over the phone, we talked about him, about what his life must be like now, and whether he has found happiness with Edie Brickell. I assured her he has, because I’m pretty sure I’d be happy with Edie Brickell too.
It’s nighttime, it’s always nighttime when the text comes to an end. I re-read, rephrase sentences, specify names. I try to remember better: more, and better. I cut and paste, change and enlarge the font, play with line spacing. I think about closing this file and leaving it forever in the My Documents folder. But I’m going to publish it, I want to, even though it’s not finished, even though it’s impossible to finish it.
My father was a computer, my mother a typewriter.
I was a blank page, and now I am a book.
CAMILO
“I’m Camilo!” he shouted to me from the gate, opening his arms wide, as if we knew each other. “Your daddy’s godson.” It seemed terribly suspicious to me, like a caricature of danger, and I was nine then, already too big to fall for a trap like that. Those dark glasses, like a blind man’s, and on such a cloudy day. And that jean jacket, covered in sewn-on patches with the names of rock bands. “My dad’s not here,” I told him, closing the door, and I didn’t even give my father the message. I forgot.
But it turned out to be true: my father had been a close friend of Camilo’s father, Big Camilo—they’d played soccer together on the Renca team. We had photographs of the baptism, the baby crying and the adults looking solemnly into the camera. All was well for several years—my father was an engaged godfather, and he took an interest in the child—but he and Big Camilo had a fight, and later, some months after the coup, Big Camilo was imprisoned, and after he was released he went into exile. The plan was for his wife, July, to bring Little Camilo and meet up with him in Paris, but she didn’t want to, and the marriage ended. So Little Camilo grew up missing his father, waiting for him, saving up money to go visit him. And one day, just after he turned eighteen, he decided that if he couldn
’t see his father, he should at least find his godfather.
I learned all this over tea the first time Camilo came to have onces with us, or maybe I found it out gradually. I want to be clear here, and I’m getting mixed up. But I remember how moved my father was that afternoon when he saw how much his godson looked like his old friend. “You have the same face,” he told him, which was not necessarily a compliment, because it was an unremarkable face, difficult to remember, and though Camilo used many products to style his stiff hair fashionably, it had a tendency to play dirty tricks on him.
Despite my initial distrust, Camilo soon became a benevolent and protective presence for me, luminous, a real older brother. When he set off for France to fulfill his lifelong dream, that’s how it felt: like my brother was leaving. This was in January of 1991. I know that for certain.
I wasn’t the only one who was fascinated by Camilo. My older sister was completely infatuated, and my younger sister, who usually couldn’t keep her attention on anything for more than two seconds, would watch him intently when he came to visit, celebrating every one of his wisecracks. Not to mention my mom, whom he joked around with but also spoke to seriously, because during that time Camilo was—in his own words—“full of religious tension,” and although my mother was no saint, she was so astounded by the idea that a person could deny the existence of God that she’d sit and listen to him in awe.
As for my father, I think that, for him, Camilo became more of a companion or friend than a godson; he even let Camilo address him with the informal tú. They would sit up late in the living room, talking about all kinds of things—except about the existence of God, because my father didn’t allow such things to be questioned, or about soccer, because Camilo was the first man I met who didn’t like soccer. It seemed so funny to me, so exotic: he didn’t even understand the rules. The only match he’d ever played took place in the San Miguel gym, when he was five years old: his knowledge of the game back then came from the replays he’d seen on TV, so he spent the whole afternoon running every which way, cheering for goals that hadn’t happened and waving happily to the crowd, utterly uninterested in the ball.
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