The next day we left the ship. Johnny Paredes was met by his aunt from Viña del Mar. Dora and her secretary were met by two big men with mustaches and dark suits. Our goodbyes were formal. Then I shouldered my backpack and set off on foot for the train station.
4.
The Coup
I was dreaming about a woman with bright eyes when shouts woke me. It was Juan de la Cruz, a painter and sculptor of virgins, whose house I was staying in. My first thought was that I was being kicked out or that I had a phone call from Mexico, something serious to do with my mother’s health, maybe. Then I realized that Juan de la Cruz was moaning, not shouting, and that he was tearing at his hair with one hand as he shook me by the shoulder with the other, though his voice barely rose above a whisper, as if he was afraid he would be overheard. I jumped out of bed naked and asked whether there was a call for me. The painter sat down on the bed that I had just abandoned and said not to worry, my mother was fine, or he guessed she was, and then he said that he wished he could be with my mother right now, or even my father, or begging for change around Chapultepec (which is something that makes an impression on tourists—Juan de la Cruz had been in Mexico not long ago). The military has risen up, he said, it’s all over. My first feeling was relief. My mother was fine, my family was fine. I got dressed and went into the bathroom to wash my face and brush my teeth, followed by the painter, who summed up for me over and over again what had happened so far, and then we had a cup of tea together. I asked what he planned to do. What can I do? he said, I’m an artist, it’s all over.
I didn’t see it that way, and before I left I took my Caborca knife from my backpack and put it in my pocket. This was a working-class neighborhood of single-story houses with back and front yards, stretching endlessly along the highway south from Santiago. On the other side of the highway rose a new shantytown with narrow unpaved streets, linked to the neighborhood and its shops via a few very high pedestrian walkways. Along both sides of the highway were many vacant lots.
There was no one outside, but I knew that the painter’s neighbors were Socialists because people came into their yards at night to talk and we’d spoken once. So I crossed the street and knocked on their door. I wasn’t a Communist or a Socialist but it didn’t seem like the kind of day to be choosy about your comrades. The Socialists were orphans. One was seventeen and the other was fifteen and they were having breakfast when I got there. They lived with an older brother, who was twenty and who had left for the factory a while ago. They offered me a cup of tea and at first I got the impression that their brother had gone to work. Then I realized that he hadn’t, that nobody was going to work that day.
One of the Socialists said that the local Communist cell was handing out weapons and coordinating the actions of all the leftist groups, and after we finished our tea we went there. The cell’s headquarters were at the house of an ordinary workingman, a fat little guy who was clearly rattled by the presence of so many strangers in his dining room. At times he seemed about to cry, though at the critical moment he always pulled himself together. The Socialist brothers had been there before, and they introduced me succinctly: a comrade, they said, and the fat man and his wife said good morning, comrade, shrugging their shoulders.
Every new arrival brought fresh and contradictory reports. They talked all at once and the fat man sometimes took refuge in a corner under the portrait of a man and a woman, also fat and smiling literally from ear to ear, who must have been his parents, and then he would pull a handful of coins out of his pocket, count them, and put them back again. Following this, he would sink his head in his hands and try to think.
There were more than fifteen of us congregated in the dining room and we represented nearly the full spectrum of the Chilean left, official and clandestine. The fat man’s wife came out of the kitchen with a tray full of glasses and a teapot. Suddenly the noise level dropped and we all sat down wherever we could, mostly on the floor, and drank tea. I remember that we called each other comrade, even though we’d hardly met before today. Among the young people, especially, the camaraderie was intense. As soon as things were quiet, the fat man said that we should contact the organization to get concrete orders and trustworthy information. This mission, which had to be carried out in broad daylight, under curfew, and on a bicycle, was assigned to me. Then I realized that they all thought I was a foreigner (and therefore a seasoned activist) and I hurried to correct the misunderstanding. I told them that I was Chilean, that I had a different accent because I had just arrived from Mexico where I had been living for years, that I had no experience in situations like this, and I hardly knew Santiago. The news plunged all of them—but especially the fat man—into deep gloom. For a second I thought he was about to tell us to go home. But he clung to his plan and asked for a volunteer. Everyone turned him down for one reason or another. The fat man’s wife gazed at us sadly from the kitchen. All right, said the fat man, settling the matter, I’ll go myself.
Some of us went outside to see him off or to advise him on the best route. Avoiding the busiest streets, it would take him twenty minutes at least. Before he left, the fat man said goodbye to his children and then he got on his bicycle and rode off. He was the only person out on those empty streets and he struggled to keep his balance. As far as I know, he never came home again.
Then the fat man’s wife made more tea and we poured another round. Some people started to talk about soccer. The crowd broke up into pairs and threesomes. One group was telling jokes. The walls and the floor were wooden and they smelled nice. Suddenly I felt tired and I could easily have gone to sleep. The fat man seemed to have taken the dream of History with him, and deep down, those of us left at the house knew—some of us more definitely, other less so—that it was all over.
After a while another Communist turned up, a guy in a sweater that looked like it was knit out of hair, and he said it was an outrage to see so many people sitting around with nothing better to do than drink tea. It’s about time you got here, Pancho, said the fat man’s wife. We gathered that this Pancho was the cell boss and the fat man had filled in for him in his absence. The Socialist brothers and some of the younger guys, all in their teens, said that they were looking for action, but since there were no guns we were making do with tea. You’ll get action, said Pancho, and he sat at the head of the table and made us line up. He wrote down our names on a piece of paper, and then the streets that we should guard, and finally our code names. What name do you want? he asked me when it was my turn. I wanted Ernesto but somebody had already claimed it, so I said the first name that came into my head: Enrique. Then Pancho gave us the password: Looks like it’s going to rain, we had to say when anybody approached us (probably Pancho himself, but it might also be another comrade) and he would reply, It’s a cold morning. Then we had to say, Could be worse, which meant that there had been no movement of right-wing radicals on the street, or, It’s going to rain cats and dogs, which meant the exact opposite. I was assigned to guard a street near where I lived. When I asked what right-wing radicals I should be watching out for, nobody knew what to tell me. Then we left one by one on our respective missions.
Those were the worst two hours of my life, hours spent sitting in the street where there wasn’t a soul to be seen, staring at shuttered houses. I knew that I was being watched too, and I could understand why people would be curious. Frankly, they were right to keep an eye on me: only a crazy person would sit in the middle of an empty street, in deep contemplation of nothingness, risking arrest if an army jeep drove by. Once, I saw some kids watching me from a window. Another time, a woman came into the yard with her dog (the dog wanted to go out, but the woman held him back and we talked for a while). Otherwise, there was no movement at the house or houses of the supposed right-wingers, and why should there be? The work was being done by others—and done impeccably, to judge by the planes that from time to time I saw, as if in a dream, pass above from one cloud to another.
&n
bsp; When at last I saw Pancho approaching, all I cared about was getting out of there. He wasn’t alone. A tall young guy with wet hair, as if freshly washed, was with him. It’s a cold morning, Pancho said. Suddenly I realized that I didn’t remember the password, and I said so. I can’t remember the password, comrade, but everything’s quiet here (in fact, our presence on the street was the only deviation from the new normal). What are we doing standing here? I wondered. Pancho looked at me as if he didn’t know me and he feared an ambush or worse. His companion—I could tell by the expression on his face when he heard my excuse—was ready to beat me up on the spot. The cell boss tried again: It’s a cold morning. This time I decided to ignore him and give him a brief report of everything that had happened in the past two hours: there’s been no movement of right-wing elements, I said, my sense is that people are scared, I haven’t seen any military patrols, a woman who came out with her dog told me that they’re bombing La Moneda. It’s a cold morning, Pancho repeated. I don’t know why, but at that moment I felt a kind of affection for him, for the thug with him, and for myself, not having brought a single book to while away the long wait.
One of the two of us had to admit defeat, but neither Pancho nor I was willing. Asking, answering; utterly lost to each other.
FRENCH COMEDY OF HORRORS
For Lautaro and Alexandra Bolaño
That day, if I’m not mistaken, was the day of the eclipse. We, the friends of Roger Bolamba, had settled down at the House of the Sun, a soda fountain that is, or was, at the curve of the seaside promenade along the stretch officially known as avenue Colonel Goffin. As we waited for the spectacle of the eclipse, we talked about poetry and politics, which was what we always talked about anyway. We had chosen a table next to the window overlooking the cliff, which wasn’t the best seat in the house, but it wasn’t bad either. Though it was true that the waiters hardly paid any attention to us and served us last, Bolamba presided over the table with his usual dignity and we—who were young and inexperienced back then—felt like princes.
Next to our table was a guy in a white cotton blazer, black shirt, and bloodred tie. He was big, six feet tall at least, and he was drinking rum with Guyanita-Cola. With him were two women. One was older, and she was looking all around, as if the festive atmosphere at the House of the Sun scared her. The other was much younger, and every so often she cuddled up to the well-dressed guy, whispering words that I couldn’t quite make out.
I remember the guy because when the eclipse started he got up from his table and started to dance, staring straight at the sun (the rest of us were all looking at it through film negatives or special sunglasses, and some of us even had bits of dark glass, probably pieces of beer bottles), and after a few seconds the older woman joined him in a kind of chacona or resbalosa, a galleada maybe or a sombrilla, a dance that was somehow anachronistic but at the same time terrifying, and that, according to Bolamba, was known only deep in the northern rain forests, in other words the poorest and most remote parts of the country, the malarial forests, the half-abandoned villages near the border where dengue and superstition ruled.
But that wasn’t all. On the one hand, the sun was gradually dimming until it went completely black. On the other hand, the well-dressed guy and the older woman were dancing a sombrilla, which sometimes seemed more like a resbalosa, or a chacona (because of the precision of the steps), or a galleada (because of the obscene moves), singing softly and watching the solar show without blinking. They looked like two people possessed, not in a violent way, but in a resigned, bureaucratic way. The girl, oblivious to the eclipse, had eyes only for them, as if their highly predictable spins were the most interesting thing happening. I should also say that of all the people pressing their noses to the glass at the House of the Sun, it’s possible (though I may be presuming too much) that, other than the girl, I was the only one watching what was happening inside as well as out. When the eclipse was over, we all—those of us in Roger Bolamba’s circle, that is—held our breath and clapped. The other patrons followed our lead and the applause was universal and thunderous. Even the well-dressed guy stopped dancing and bowed with a flourish, submissive and sardonic. Just then the older woman cried out.
“I’ve gone blind!” she shouted.
The waiters at the House of the Sun, who were watching the sky from behind tinted glasses, looked at her and laughed. The well-dressed guy patted the air, searching for the body of the older woman, who had sat down on the floor. The girl got up from the table and took him by the hand.
“The eclipse is over,” she said. “Now we can go, love.”
With a jab of my elbow, I alerted my friend David Alan to what was happening behind his back, but after glancing at the three people attracting my attention, he turned back to the otherworldly darkness blowing over the streets and hills of Port Hope. Then the girl helped the older woman up from the floor, calling her mamá, mother, life-giver, madam, señora, sainted lady, as tears spilled down her cheeks. What an absurd performance, I remember thinking. The well-dressed guy, sitting at the table again, wound a shiny wristwatch, which certainly didn’t look cheap. I turned away. The sea below had suddenly grown calm and the tide, according to Roger Bolamba, didn’t know whether to come in or go out. We heard a dog bark. Past the cliff, where the promenade runs along the beach, we saw a man walk into the water and then swim out to the buoy. The buildings on the waterfront seemed to have shifted, tilting slightly toward the south, like psychopathic Towers of Pisa. The few clouds plying the sky of Port Hope had disappeared. A sound like charcoal against dry wood, like stone against gem, imperceptibly scored the air of the capital. Roger Bolamba, who had been the one to invite us to the soda fountain, said that we would watch the next solar eclipse in bathing trunks on the beach, and then we would follow the example of the swimmer who was making his way toward the buoy.
“When is the next eclipse?” asked someone I didn’t recognize.
“Thirty years from now,” said David Alan.
When I turned to look at the well-dressed guy and the women with him, they were gone. Then the sun shone again through the windows and most of us pocketed the devices we had used to protect our eyes from the dangerous rays of the blazing orb (or tossed them on the floor), except for the waiters, who were still wearing their glasses at work five years later, starting a trend that was gradually picked up by hotel waiters, beach restaurant waiters, and finally dance club waiters.
The rest of the afternoon proceeded as usual: somebody wrote a sonnet to the eclipse; somebody compared the eclipse to the state of the arts in our country; somebody said that children conceived during an eclipse were born with birth defects or just flat-out evil, which meant that it wasn’t a good idea to make love during an eclipse, total or partial. Then it was time to pay and we all dug into our pockets. As usual, somebody was out of cash, or didn’t have enough, or hadn’t brought cash with him, and among all of us, democratically, we had to cover what he’d ordered, a beer, a coffee, a dish of pineapple preserves. Nothing very expensive, as you can see, though when you’re poor anything that isn’t free is expensive.
Later, the owner of the soda fountain—who respected Bolamba’s past as an athlete and grudgingly accepted his new literary calling—ordered us to leave, which we did willingly, since there was no air conditioning at the House of the Sun and by then the heat had become unbearable. Our conversation continued at De Gaulle Park, the biggest park in the city, where we sprawled on the green grass that no one had cut for more than a month, as Alcides La Mouette pointed out, because of the strike of city contractors, which included gardeners and caretakers, but not garbagemen, whose work regulations were different. So the grass was taller than usual (much taller) and we lay down in it, Roger Bolamba and the five or six of us who followed him everywhere, as the pot and amphetamine dealers settled on the cement or stone benches that had replaced the original cast-iron benches, which someone had stolen and sold to the rich and cultiva
ted families of our city.
As always, we read aloud the news published in the literary section of the Port Hope Monitor, dreary news, the names of academics who had gone on to better places, the names of others who were still swarming the basements of the Ministry of External Affairs or the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, occupied with complex heuristic challenges. Alongside them, shining bright, were the young people (though some of these young people were past fifty) who would replace them, though for the moment they spent their time writing about the flora and fauna of our republic. It was they whom Roger Bolamba most hated or envied, because they were of his generation and they were, to a certain extent, those directly responsible for his marginal position in national literary circles. As always, we laughed at their poems, we laughed at their translations (there was one of a German writer that made him sound like a stuttering Creole), we laughed at their reviews, dithyrambic in most cases, affected paeans to the masters with nods to colleagues or friends. Then the sun began to set and a breeze blew from the south and we all went with Bolamba to his house, which was by the port, a little fisherman’s house, where books jostled for space with the cups and medals that our mentor had won over the course of his long athletic career.
Cowboy Graves Page 6