Why don’t you think I should include him? asked Bibiano, slumped forward, with his head resting on his outstretched arm as if it were a pillow and the table were his bed. I thought you were friends, I said. We are, said Fat Marta, but I still wouldn’t put him in. Why not? insisted Bibiano. Fat Marta shrugged. Then she said, It’s as if they weren’t his poems. His real poems, if you see what I mean. What do you mean? asked Bibiano. Marta looked me in the eye (I was sitting opposite, and Bibiano, beside her, seemed to have fallen asleep) and said, Alberto is a good poet, but he still hasn’t made his breakthrough. You mean he’s a virgin? asked Bibiano, but Fat Marta and I ignored him. Have you read other poems of his? I inquired. What does he write? What’s it like? Fat Marta smiled inwardly, as if she herself couldn’t believe what she was about to tell us. Alberto, she said, is going to revolutionize Chilean poetry. Have you actually read his stuff, or is this just a feeling you have? Fat Marta gave a little snort by way of reply. Then, abruptly, she said, The other day I went to his flat. We didn’t tell her to go on, but I noticed that Bibiano, slumped on the table, was smiling at her affectionately. He wasn’t expecting me, of course, she added. I know what you’re trying to tell us, said Bibiano. Alberto opened up to me, said Fat Marta. I can’t imagine Ruiz-Tagle opening up to anybody, said Bibiano. Everyone thinks he’s in love with Veronica Garmendia, said Marta, but it’s not true. Is that what he told you? asked Bibiano. Fat Marta smiled to herself, as if she were in possession of a great secret. At that point I remember thinking, I don’t like this woman. She might be talented, she might be intelligent, she’s on the right side, but I don’t like her. No, he didn’t tell me that, said Marta, although he tells me things he doesn’t tell anyone else. You mean, he doesn’t tell other girls, said Bibiano. Right, she said, things he doesn’t tell the other girls. Things like what? Fat Marta thought for a while before answering. Well, he tells me about his new poetry, what else? You mean the poetry he’s planning to write? asked Bibiano skeptically. That he’s going to perform, said Marta. And you know why I’m so sure? Because of his will. She waited a moment for a question from us, then added, He has a will of iron. You don’t know him. It was late. Bibiano looked at Fat Marta and got up to pay. If you’ve got so much faith in him, how come you don’t want Bibiano to put him in the anthology? I asked. We wrapped our scarves around our necks (never since have I worn a scarf as long as the ones we had then) and went out into the cold street. Because they’re not his poems, said Marta. And how do you know? I asked with mounting irritation. Because I can read people, she said sadly, looking at the empty street. How conceited can you get, I thought. Bibiano was the last out of the door. Martita, he said, there are not many things I’m sure about, but one of them is that Ruiz-Tagle is not going to revolutionize Chilean poetry. I don’t think he’s even a socialist, I added. Surprisingly, Marta agreed with me. No, he’s not, she said, her voice sounding even sadder. For a moment I thought she was going to burst into tears and I tried to change the subject. Bibiano laughed. With friends like you, she said, who needs enemies? Bibiano hadn’t meant to be cruel, of course, but she was hurt and tried to storm off. We accompanied her home. In the bus we talked about the film and the political situation. Before saying good-night, she looked at us fixedly and said she had to ask us to promise her something. What? asked Bibiano. What we were talking about, don’t mention it to Alberto. O.K., said Bibiano, I promise, we won’t say you didn’t want him in my anthology. It’s not as if anyone’s going to publish it, said Fat Marta. Probably not, he admitted. Thanks, Bibi, she said (nobody else ever called him that) and gave him a peck on the cheek. We won’t tell him anything, I swear, I said. Thanks, thanks, thanks, said Marta. I thought she was joking. Don’t say anything to Veronica either, she said. She could tell Alberto and then, you know … No, we won’t tell her. Promise it won’t go beyond us three, said Marta. We promised. Finally Fat Marta turned away, opened the door of her building and we saw her get into the lift. Before disappearing, she waved to us one last time. What a peculiar woman, said Bibiano. I laughed. We walked back to our respective places of residence: he to his boarding house and I to the family home. Chilean poetry, said Bibiano that night, isn’t going to change until we learn how to read Enrique Lihn properly. In other words, not for a long time.
A few days later the army seized power and the government collapsed.
One night I rang the Garmendia sisters, for no particular reason, just to see how they were. We’re leaving, said Veronica. With a lump in my throat I asked when. Tomorrow. In spite of the curfew, I insisted on going over. The flat where the two of them lived was not too far from my house and, besides, it wasn’t the first time I had broken the curfew. It was 10:00 by the time I arrived. To my surprise, they were drinking tea and reading (I guess I had expected to find them hatching escape plans amid a chaos of half-packed cases). They weren’t leaving the country, they told me, but moving to their parents’ house in Nacimiento, a town a few kilometres from Concepción. What a relief, I said, I thought you were going to Sweden or somewhere like that. If only, said Angelica. Then we talked about the friends we hadn’t seen for a few days and launched into the inevitable speculations: who was under arrest for sure, who might have gone into hiding, who was being hunted. The sisters were not afraid (they had no reason to be; they were only students, and apart from being friends with a few activists, mainly from the Faculty of Sociology, they had no links with the so-called “extremists”), but they were going to Nacimiento because Concepción had become unbearable and, as they admitted, they always went back to the family home when “real life” revealed its deeply unpleasant bent for the ugly and the brutal. Well, you better go right away, I said, because it looks like we’re hosting the world championship in ugliness and brutality. They laughed and told me to go home. I insisted on staying a little longer. I remember that night as one of the happiest of my life. At 1:00 in the morning Veronica said I might as well stay. None of us had eaten, so we crammed into the kitchen and improvised a little feast of scrambled eggs, fried onions, fresh-baked bread and tea. Suddenly I felt happy, immensely happy, capable of anything, although I was aware that meanwhile all that I believed in was collapsing forever, and that many people, several friends of mine among them, were being hunted down or tortured. But I felt like singing and dancing, and the bad news (or the depressing commentaries on the bad news) only added fuel to the fire of my joy, to use an expression which is, I admit, impossibly trite (“corny” we would have said back then) but does convey how I (and I dare say the Garmendia sisters) felt, along with many other Chileans who, in September 1973, had not yet reached the age of twenty-one.
At 5:00 in the morning I fell asleep on the sofa. Angelica woke me four hours later. We had breakfast in the kitchen, in silence. At midday, they put a pair of suitcases in their car, a lime-green ’68 model Citroneta and left for Nacimiento. I never saw them again.
Their parents, both painters, had died before the twins’ fifteenth birthday, in a car accident, I think. I once saw a photograph of them: he was dark and lean with very prominent cheekbones and a certain look of sadness and perplexity peculiar to those born south of the river Bío-Bío; she was or seemed to be taller than him, slightly chubby, with a sweet, easy-going smile.
When they died, their daughters inherited the house in Nacimiento – a three-story place (the top story was one big attic room, which the parents had used as a studio) built of stone and wood, on the outskirts of town – as well as some land near Mulchén, which provided the girls with a comfortable living. They often talked about their parents (according to them, Julián Garmendia was one of the best painters of his generation, although I have never heard or seen him mentioned anywhere) and their poems often described painters lost in the wilds of southern Chile, embarking on hopelessly ambitious works and hopelessly in love. Is that how Julián Garmendia loved María Oyarzún? I find it hard to believe when I think of that photo. But I don’t find it hard to believe that in the 1960s, in Chile, there were
people who were hopelessly in love. It seems strange to me now. Like a film misplaced on a forgotten shelf in some enormous archive. But I don’t doubt it for a moment.
From here on, my story is mainly conjecture. The Garmendia sisters went to Nacimiento, to their big house on the outskirts of town where their mother’s older sister, a certain Ema Oyarzún, lived together with an elderly maid, Amalia Maluenda.
They went to Nacimiento and shut themselves up in the house, and one fine day, say two weeks or a month later (although I doubt a month had gone by), Alberto Ruiz-Tagle turned up on their doorstep.
It must have happened something like this. One afternoon, one of those bracing yet melancholic southern afternoons, a car appears on the dirt road, but the twins don’t hear, because they’re playing the piano or busy in the orchard or stacking firewood at the back of the house with their aunt and the maid. Someone knocks at the front door. Knocks and knocks and finally the maid opens the door and there is Ruiz-Tagle. He says he has come to see the twins. The maid doesn’t let him in and says she will go and call the girls. Ruiz-Tagle waits patiently, seated in a cane armchair on the broad porch. When the twins see him, they greet him effusively and scold the maid for not having shown him in. For the first half-hour, Ruiz-Tagle is bombarded with questions. No doubt he strikes the aunt as a pleasant young man: nice-looking, polite. The twins are happy. Ruiz-Tagle is invited to dinner, of course, and in his honor they prepare a feast. I don’t want to think about what they might have eaten. Corn-cakes perhaps or empanadas, but no, it must have been something else. Naturally, they invite him to spend the night. Ruiz-Tagle accepts without a fuss. After dinner they stay up late talking, and the twins read some poems: the aunt in raptures, Ruiz-Tagle knowing and silent. He, of course, doesn’t read anything; he says that after poems like theirs, his don’t rate. The aunt insists, Please, Alberto, read us something of yours, but he will not be moved. He says he has nearly finished something new, but until it is finished and corrected, he would prefer not to talk about it. He smiles, shrugs, says, No, sorry, no, no, no, and the twins take his side, Leave him alone, Aunty. In their innocence they think they understand, but they don’t understand at all (the “New Chilean Poetry” is about to be born), and yet they think they understand and they read their poems, their wonderful poems, while Ruiz-Tagle looks on, smiling (and no doubt closing his eyes the better to listen), and the aunt is occasionally offended or perplexed: Angelica, how can you be so crude? Or, Veronica, dear, I didn’t understand a thing. Alberto, can you explain that metaphor to me? And Ruiz-Tagle politely obliging, talking about signifier and signified, about Joyce Mansour, Sylvia Plath and Alejandra Pizarnik (although the twins say, No, no, we don’t like Pizarnik, by which they really mean that they don’t write like Pizarnik), and the aunt nodding attentively as Ruiz-Tagle goes on to mention Violeta and Nicanor Parra (I met Violeta, in her tent, I did, says poor Ema Oyarzún), and then Enrique Lihn and “civil poetry,” and here if the twins were more attentive they would have seen an ironic glint in his eye (civil poetry, I’ll give you civil poetry), and finally, in full flight now, he starts talking about Jorge Cáceres, the Chilean surrealist who died in 1949 at the age of twenty-six.
And then the twins get up, or perhaps it’s only Veronica who goes to look in her father’s sizeable library and returns with a book by Cáceres, Bound for the Great Polar Pyramid, published when the poet was only twenty. From time to time the Garmendia sisters, or maybe it was only Angelica, used to talk about republishing the complete works of Cáceres, a legendary figure for our generation, so it’s not surprising that Ruiz-Tagle brings him up (although he has nothing to do with the sisters’ poetry; Violeta Parra does, Nicanor too, but not Cáceres). He also mentions Anne Sexton and Elizabeth Bishop and Denise Levertov (poets whose work the twins adore and have on occasion translated and read at the workshop, to the evident satisfaction of Juan Stein) and then they all make fun of the aunt, who doesn’t understand anything, and they eat homemade biscuits and play the guitar and someone notices the maid, who has been standing in the corridor, watching them from the shadows, not daring to come in, and the aunt says, Come on, Amalia, don’t stand there like a waif, and the maid, drawn by the music and the revelry, takes two steps forward, but no more, and then night falls and the party is over.
A few hours later Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, although from here on I should call him Carlos Wieder, gets up.
Everyone is asleep. He has probably slept with Veronica Garmendia. It’s not important. (What I mean is: not any more; at the time, of course, it was, unfortunately for us.) At any rate, Carlos Wieder gets up like a sleepwalker, without hesitation, and quietly searches the house. He is looking for the aunt’s bedroom. His shadow moves over the paintings by Julián Garmendia and María Oyarzún that line the corridors, along with plates and dishes from the area around Nacimiento (which is famous, I believe, for its china or pottery). Wieder stealthily opens door after door. Finally he finds the aunt’s room, on the ground floor, next to the kitchen. The room opposite is sure to be the maid’s. And as he slips into the aunt’s room he hears the sound of a car approaching the house. He smiles; no time to lose. In a bound he is beside the bed. In his right hand, he holds a curved knife. Ema Oyarzún is sleeping placidly. Wieder takes the pillow and covers her face with it. Straight away, with a single stroke of the knife, he cuts her throat. The car pulls up in front of the house. Wieder has already left the aunts room and is going into the maid’s. But the bed is empty. For a moment Wieder doesn’t know what to do; he is seized by a desire to kick the bed, smash up the rickety old chest of drawers in which Amalia Maluenda’s clothes are piled. But it lasts only a moment. Soon he is at the front door, breathing normally, letting in the four men who came in the car. They greet him with a discreet but respectful nod and peer obscenely at the dark interior, the carpets, the curtains, as if from the very start they were searching out and weighing up places to hide. But they are not the ones who will be hiding.
With these men the night comes into the Garmendias’ house. Fifteen minutes later, or ten perhaps, when they leave, the night leaves with them. The night comes in, and out it goes again, swift and efficient. And the bodies will never be found; but no, one body, just one, will appear years later in a mass grave, the body of Angelica Garmendia, my adorable, my incomparable Angelica, but only hers, as if to prove that Carlos Wieder is a man and not a god.
2
Around that time, as the last life rafts of the Popular Unity Front were sinking, I was taken prisoner. The circumstances of my arrest were banal, if not grotesque, but being imprisoned, rather than hanging around in the street or in a café or, more likely, holed up in my room refusing to get out of bed, meant that I witnessed Carlos Wieder’s first poetic act, although at that stage I didn’t know who Carlos Wieder was or what had befallen the Garmendia sisters.
It happened late one afternoon – Wieder was fond of twilight – while the prisoners, about seventy of us, were killing time at La Peña, a transit center on the outskirts of Concepción, practically in Talcahuano, playing chess in the yard or just talking.
A few strands of cloud appeared in the sky, which half an hour earlier had been absolutely clear. Drifting east, shaped like cigarettes or pencils, the clouds were black and white at first, when they were still over the coast, but as they veered towards the city they turned pink, then bright vermilion as they headed up the valley.
For some reason I had the impression I was the only prisoner looking at the sky. It might have had something to do with being nineteen years old.
Then, among the clouds, the airplane appeared. At first it was a spot no bigger than a mosquito. I thought it must have come from an airstrip somewhere nearby and be returning to base after a flight along the coast. It approached the city slowly but steadily, as if it were gliding, hard to make out among the strips of high cirrus and the pencil-shaped clouds trailed by the wind just above the rooftops.
It seemed to be moving as slowly as the clouds, but that, I
soon realized, was an optical illusion. When it flew over the transit center, it made a noise like a damaged washing-machine. The pilot’s face was visible, and for a moment I thought I saw him raise his hand and wave us good-bye. Then the plane turned its nose up and climbed, and soon it was flying over the center of Concepción.
There, high above the city, it began to write a poem in the sky. At first I thought the pilot had gone mad and I wasn’t surprised. Madness was not exceptional at the time. I thought he was looping around in a fit of desperation and would crash into a building or a square in the city. But then, suddenly, the letters appeared, as if the sky itself had secreted them. Perfectly formed letters of grey-black smoke on the sky’s enormous screen of rose-tinged blue, chilling the eyes of those who saw them. IN PRINCIPIO … CREAVIT DEUS … CAELUM ET TERRAM, I read as if in a dream. I supposed – or hoped – it was part of an advertizing campaign. I chuckled to myself. Then the plane swung around and flew west, heading towards us, before turning again to make another pass. This time the line of words was much longer and it stretched out over the southern suburbs. TERRA AUTEM ERAT INANIS … ET VACUA … ET TENEBRAE … SUPER FACIEM ABYSSI… ET SPIRITUS DEI … FEREBATUR SUPER AQUAS …
For a moment it seemed the plane would disappear over the horizon, heading for the coastal range or the Andes, one or the other, I really couldn’t tell, heading south anyway, towards the great forests. But it came back.
By then almost everyone in the city center was watching the sky. One of the prisoners, a man called Norberto, who was going mad (or such, at least, was the diagnosis pronounced by a fellow prisoner, a socialist psychiatrist who was later executed, so I heard, in full possession of his intellectual and emotional faculties), tried to climb the fence that separated the men’s yard from the women’s, and started shouting, It’s a Messerschmitt 109, a Messerschmitt fighter from the Luftwaffe, the best fighter plane of 1940! I stared at him and then at the rest of the prisoners, and everything seemed to be immersed in a transparent grey wash, as if the La Peña Center were dissolving in time. The pair of guards at the entrance to the gymnasium, where we slept on the floor, had stopped talking and were looking at the sky. So were all the prisoners, who had risen to their feet, abandoning their games of chess, their confessions, their speculations on the days ahead and what they held in store. Clinging to the fence like a monkey, Mad Norberto laughed and said, The Second World War is returning to the Earth. All that talk about the Third World War was wrong; it’s the Second returning, returning, returning. And it has fallen to us, the people of Chile, to greet and welcome it – Oh lucky day! he cried, as the white froth of his saliva, contrasting with the dominant tone of grey, ran down his chin, dripped onto the collar of his shirt and spread out in a large wet patch on his chest.