And that’s what I’m thinking when I talk late one night to Pedro Lemebel, one of Chile’s most brilliant writers. It’s his birthday. Lemebel — born in the mid-fifties, according to him, although I think he was born in the early fifties — has published four books (Incontables [Countless], 1986; La esquina es mi corazón [The Corner Is My Heart], 1995; Loco afán [Wild Desire], 1996; and De perlas y cicatrices [Of Pearls and Scars], 1998), and for some time, a pretty shitty time, as it happens, he was one of two members of the group Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis or The Mares of the Apocalypse, whose name is an accomplishment in itself and whose survival was something like a miracle.
Who were the Yeguas? First and foremost, the Yeguas were two penniless homosexuals, which in a homophobic and hierarchical country (where being poor is an embarrassment, and being poor and an artist is a crime) was almost an invitation to abuse, in every sense of the word. Much of the honor of the real Republic and the Republic of Letters was saved by the Yeguas. Then came the rift and Lemebel began his solo career. There is no battlefield on which Lemebel — cross-dresser, militant, third-world champion, anarchist, Mapuche Indian by adoption, a man reviled by an establishment that rejects the truth he speaks, possessor of a painfully long memory — hasn’t fought and lost.
In my opinion, Lemebel is one of Chile’s best writers and the best poet of my generation, though he doesn’t write poetry. Lemebel is one of those few who doesn’t seek respectability (the respectability for which Chilean writers would sell their own asses) but freedom. His contemporaries, the hordes of right-leaning and left-leaning mediocrities, glance at him over their shoulders and try to smile. He isn’t the first homosexual, god knows, of the Chilean Parnassus, with all its closeted queers, but he’s the first cross-dresser to appear on stage alone in the glare of the footlights, addressing a literally stupefied crowd.
They can’t forgive me for having a voice, Robert, says Lemebel at the other end of the line. Santiago glitters in the night. It looks like the last great city of the southern hemisphere. Cars pass under my balcony and Pinochet is in prison in London. How many years has it been since the last curfew? How many years will it be until the next? They can’t forgive me for remembering all the things they did, says Lemebel. But you want to know what they really can’t forgive, Robert? They can’t forgive me for not forgiving them.
I have the sense that Lemebel and Jorge Arrate wouldn’t get along. Anywhere in Europe, this would be a pity, but in Chile it’s a tragedy too.
And last of all, a true story. I repeat: this isn’t fiction, it’s real, it happened in Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship and more or less everybody (the small and remote “everybody” that is Chile) knows it. A right-wing young woman sets up house with a right-wing American, or marries him. The two of them aren’t just young, they’re good-looking and proud. He’s a DINA (National Intelligence Directorate) agent, possibly also a CIA agent. She loves literature and loves her man. They rent or buy a big house in the suburbs of Santiago. In the cellars of this house the American interrogates and tortures political prisoners who are later moved on to other detention centers or added to the list of the disappeared. She writes, and she attends writing workshops. In those days, I suppose, there weren’t as many workshops as there are today, but there were some. In Santiago people have grown accustomed to the curfew. At night there aren’t many places to go for fun, and the winters are long. So every weekend or every few nights she has a group of writers over to her house. It isn’t a set group. The guests vary. Some come only once, others several times. At the house there’s always whiskey, good wine, and sometimes the gatherings turn into dinners. One night a guest goes looking for the bathroom and gets lost. It’s his first time there and he doesn’t know the house. Probably he’s a bit tipsy or maybe he’s already lost in the alcoholic haze of the weekend. In any case, instead of turning right he turns left and then he goes down a flight of stairs that he shouldn’t have gone down and he opens a door at the end of a long hallway, long like Chile. The room is dark but even so he can make out a bound figure, in pain or possibly drugged. He knows what he’s seeing. He closes the door and returns to the party. He isn’t drunk anymore. He’s terrified, but he doesn’t say anything. “Surely the people who attended those post-coup, culturally stilted soireés will remember the annoyance of the flickering current that made lamps blink and music stop, interrupting the dancing. Just as surely, they knew nothing about another parallel dance, in which the jab of the prod tensed the tortured back of the knee in a voltaic arc. They might not have heard the cries over the blare of disco, which was all the rage back then,” says Pedro Lemebel. Whatever the case, the writers leave. But they come back for the next party. She, the hostess, even wins a short story or poetry prize from the only literary journal still in existence back then, a left-wing journal.
And this is how the literature of every country is built.
Words From Outer Space
So what is Secret Interference? It’s a clandestinely recorded tape. It’s voices talking and transmitting orders and counter-orders on September 11, 1973. Voices we’ve vaguely heard at some point in our lives, but to which we aren’t able to attach a body, as if they issued from forms without substance. Voices that are echoes of a nebulous fear located in some part of our bodies. Imaginary ghosts. A real fear, and also a vulgar fear.
Some orders are unequivocal: there’s talk about killing on sight, arrests, bombings. Sometimes the men who’re talking make jokes: this doesn’t bring them any closer to us, in fact, it sinks them deeper into an abyss, they’re men who emerge from invisible and imperceptible pits and who, in vaguely military terms, promise to establish order. Despite it all, the humor they flaunt is familiar. A humor that one recognizes and would rather not recognize.
The man who’s talking could be my father or grandfather. The man who’s giving orders could be an old school friend, the bully or the teacher’s pet, the kid no one remembers or the kid we played with just once. In those familiar voices we can contemplate ourselves, at a remove, as if watching ourselves in a mirror. It isn’t Stendhal’s mirror, the mirror that strolls along a path, but it could be, and for many who hear the tape it surely will be precisely that.
At first the voices are indistinguishable. Gradually, however, each begins to acquire a personality, a unique character, though they all bear the common stamp of Chileanness, that is, the common stamp of a childhood wreathed in mist and in something that for lack of a better word we can call happiness. The voices that reach us from outer space aren’t just redesigning the childhood island called Chile: they’re teaching us our reality with the teacher’s rod, they’re asking us to open our eyes and also our ears. They’re the voices of real men. Some — to judge by the way they talk, by their moments of hesitation — are scared, nervous. Others control their emotions and maintain their composure with impressive coldbloodedness. The tape rolls and little by little the voices become familiar, as if they’d always been there, talking to us, threatening us. The image is redundant. In fact, they were always there. They’re the men who ordered a father to sodomize his own son if he didn’t want them both to be killed, the bosses who put live rats into the vagina of a twenty-two-year-old Mirista they called a whore.
And yet it all seems like a game. The voices creep in from our childhood like prankster guardian spirits: anything is possible if God doesn’t exist, anything can be done if it’s in the name of Chile. Some voices raise doubts. Most comply, hesitant. Sometimes their ignorance is staggering. A t
op commander, in direct communication with another commander, says that from now on, given the importance of the information he has to transmit, he’ll speak in English. As if English were a dead language, or as if no one on the other side spoke English.
There’s no getting around it: these are the voices of our childhood. Chilean voices, as if smuggled into a movie too big for them, voices that relay a message that the speakers themselves don’t quite understand. A conversation on the far side of reality, where conversation is impossible. And yet no matter how many extraordinary deeds are accumulated, the picture we’re left with is tinged with a familiar vulgarity, taken to a sickening degree. At some point in our lives we knew the people who’re talking. The voices are performing for us, as if in a radio serial, but mostly they’re performing for themselves. Pornography, snuff movies. At last they’ve found the roles of their lives. Finally, the soldiers have their war, their great war: before them we stand, unarmed but watching and listening.
A Modest Proposal
Everything would suggest that we’re entering the new millennium under the glowering word abject, which comes from the Latin abjectus, which means lowly or humble, according to Joan Corominas, the sage who spent his last years on the Mediterranean coast, in a town just a few miles from mine.
September 11, 1973, glides over us like the penultimate Chilean condor or even like a winged huemul, a beast from the Book of Imaginary Beings, written by Borges in collaboration with María Guerrero in 1967, in which there is a chapter, “An Animal Dreamed by Kafka,” that literally transcribes the words of the Prague writer. It goes like this: “It is the animal with the big tail, a tail many yards long and like a fox’s brush. How I should like to get my hands on this tail some time, but it is impossible, the animal is constantly moving about, the tail is constantly being flung this way and that. The animal resembles a kangaroo, but not as to the face, which is flat almost like a human face, and small and oval; only its teeth have any power of expression, whether they are concealed or bared. Sometimes I have the feeling that the animal is trying to tame me. What other purpose could it have in withdrawing its tail when I snatch at it, and then again, waiting calmly until I am tempted again, and then leaping away once more?”
Sometimes I get the feeling that September 11 wants to break us. Sometimes I get the feeling that September 11 has already irrevocably broken us.
What would have happened if September 11 had never existed? It’s a silly question, but sometimes it’s necessary to ask silly questions, or it’s inevitable, or it suits our natural laziness. What would have happened? Many things, of course. The history of Latin America would be different. But on a basic level, I think everything would be the same, in Chile and in Latin America. It can be argued: there would be no disappeared. True. And there would be no caravan of death. Or firing squads. In Mexico, I met a Mirista who was tortured by having rats put into her vagina. She was a young girl, just a little older than me, which means she must have been twenty-two or twenty-three, and later I was told that she died of sadness, like in a nineteenth-century novel. Without September 11, that wouldn’t have happened. What would we have seen? A different kind of repression, maybe. Instead of meeting that Mirista in Mexico, maybe I would’ve met her at a concentration camp in the south of Chile, where she was sent for her leftist views, that “childhood malady” (for childhood, read childish), and I was sent for being a writer with no class consciousness or sense of history. Would that have been better? I think so. Such a bath of horror, you might say, would be less sticky than the real historic bath of horror into which we were plunged.
A little while ago I was in Chile, where I happened to watch two or three televised conversations among politicians of different views. The conversations, if they can be called that (they were more like mini-debates, though more because of the atmosphere of conflict and strife than because of any controversy aired), consisted of a public exhibition of patience by the politicians of the center and the left, and a display of rudeness — when not of jingoistic hysteria — by the politicians on the right. I was left with the impression (possibly illusory) that some (precisely those supported by the majority of the electorate) took the position of recently liberated offenders still subject to the will (more imaginary than real) of their ex-jailers, and the others (those supported by a much smaller portion of the electorate) took a proud stance, the stance of gentlemen wounded to the quick, but also of badly behaved children, of bullies who don’t intend to concede a single point to their adversaries, completely forgetting that politics is above all the art of dialogue and tolerance.
And it’s here that the word abject turns up again. A difficult and cumbersome abjection that at times seems unshakable. It’s true that the left committed an infinity of crimes, by commission or omission. To require of the Chilean politicians on the left (who I suspect have committed very few crimes of commission) that they intone a permanent mea culpa for the Stalinist concentration camps is from any point of view an excessive demand. It’s toward this, however, that political discourse seems to tend. Toward an incessant penitence that takes the place of the exchange or expression of ideas. But this penitence isn’t even penitence. Its real purpose is to cover up one of the nation’s essential qualities: its ridiculousness and tweeness, the horrific seriousness of Chileans dressed up in the trappings of the twee, of that precious, pretentious vulgarity.
Sometimes, when I’m in the mood to think pointless thoughts, I ask myself whether we were always like this. I don’t know. The left committed verbal crimes in Chile (a specialty of the Latin American left), it committed moral crimes, and it probably killed people. But it didn’t put live rats in any girl’s vagina. It didn’t have the time to create its own evil, it didn’t have the time to create its own forced labor camps. Is it possible that it would have, if given the time? Of course it’s possible. Nothing in our country’s history allows us to imagine a more optimistic alternate history. But the truth is that in Chile the concentration camps weren’t the work of the left, and neither were the firing squads, torture, the disappeared, repression. All of this was accomplished by the right. All of this was the work of the government that took power after the coup. Nevertheless, as we enter the third millennium the politicians of the left are still asking to be forgiven, which after all isn’t so bad, and, upon reflection, is even advisable, on the condition that all politicians — those on the left and those on the right and those in the center — ask for forgiveness for all the real crimes that their fathers and grandfathers committed here and in other countries (especially in other countries!), and that they also ask forgiveness for the string of lies that their fathers and grandfathers told and that they themselves are prepared to keep telling, and for the secrets and the back-stabbing, and then wouldn’t that be a pretty picture, as Hart Crane says, all the country’s politicians asking to be forgiven, and even competing to see who can ask most convincingly or most loudly.
Of course, I would rather that we entered the twenty-first century (which incidentally means nothing) in a more civilized fashion, perhaps engaged in conversation, which also means listening and reflecting, but if, as everything seems to indicate, that won’t be possible, then it wouldn’t be a bad thing, or at least not the worst thing, to enter the third millennium asking for forgiveness right and left, and in the meantime, while we’re at it, we should raise a statue of Nicanor Parra in Plaza Italia, a statue of Nicanor and another of Neruda, but with their backs turned to each other.
At this point, I foresee that more than one alleged reader will say to himself (and then run to tell his friends and relatives): Bolaño says Parra is the poet of the right and Neruda is the poet of the left.
Some people don’t know how to read.
Out in the Cold
Long ago, when I was young, a friend showed me an anthology of contemporary poetry in Spanish, one of the many lackluster volumes that appear each year. This one had been published in Chile, and the contribution of one of the editors, a poet of certain standing, was to insist that at least half of the anthology be devoted to Chilean poetry. In other words, if the anthology was three hundred pages long, thirty pages were devoted to Spanish poetry, twenty to Argentine poetry, twenty to Mexican poetry, five to Uruguayan poetry, five to Nicaraguan poetry, maybe ten to Peruvian poetry (and Martín Adan wasn’t included), three to Colombian poetry, one to Ecuadorian poetry, and so on until one hundred and fifty pages were filled. Across the other hundred and fifty pages Chilean poets strolled at their leisure. This anthology, the title and editors of which I prefer not to recall, is a fair reflection of the image that Chilean poetry once had of itself. Poets were poor but they were poets. Poets lived off state patronage but they were poets. Until it all came to an end. Then the Chilean poets descended from the Chilean Olympus — which, incidentally, excepting the five greats (who might only be four, or possibly three), had little significance in other latitudes — in Indian file, reluctantly, bewildered and terrified, and they saw how their former home, the famous House of Handouts, had been taken over by an illustrious group of writers who called themselves novelists, noveltrixes, and even nouveau novelists. The recent arrivals, as one might expect, were quick to explain this change of tenancy with the magic word modernism or postmodernism. Novelists (in the absence of filmmakers) are modern and therefore they are the real mirror in which a modern society should examine itself. The poets, who, with a few exceptions, had until then carefully cultivated an apocalyptic aesthetic mixed with the crudest kind of nationalism, didn’t make a peep. They abandoned the field, surrendering to the evidence of sales figures. Chile is no longer a country of poets. Today there’s little chance that a couple of Chilean poets would think to put together an anthology of contemporary poetry in Spanish in which Chileans occupied more than half the pages. That supreme ignorance, that brutish provincialism, is today the exclusive heritage of the Chilean novel. The poets, those poor Chilean poets between the ages of thirty and fifty-five, today bow their heads and wonder what’s happened, why it’s suddenly started to rain, what are they doing out there in the cold, their minds blank, not sure which way to run. Anywhere else this would be a nightmare, but in Chile it’s a good thing. Literary status acquired by trickery and deceit was blown to pieces. Poetry’s respectability was reduced to a handful of dust. Now Chilean poets live out in the cold again. And they can go back to reading poetry. And they can even read or reread some Chilean poets. And they can see that what those poets wrote wasn’t bad, and that sometimes it was even good. And they can go back to writing poetry.
Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998-2003 Page 8