In any case, on the wall of Juan Steins house, there hung a rather ornately framed portrait of Chernyakhovsky, and that, I dare say, was incommensurably more important than the busts and the cities named after him and the countless Chernyakhovsky Streets, full of potholes, scattered through the Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania and Russia. I don’t know why I’ve kept the photo, Stein said to us. Maybe because he was the only really important Jewish general in the Second World War and he came to a tragic end. Though the real reason is probably that my mother gave it to me when I left home, like a sort of riddle. She didn’t say a word, just handed me the picture. Was she trying to tell me something? Was it meant to be the start of a dialogue? Et cetera, et cetera. The Garmendia sisters thought the photo of Chernyakhovsky was awful. They would have liked to replace it with a portrait of Blok (there was a good-looking Russian) or Mayakovsky, their dream lover. Sometimes, especially when he was drunk, Stein would wonder what Ivan Chernyakhovsky’s third cousin was doing in the literature department of a university in southern Chile. And sometimes he said he was going to use the frame for a photo he had of William Carlos Williams doing his day job as a small-town doctor. In the photo he was carrying a black leather bag and there was a stethoscope, like a two-headed snake, emerging, in fact almost falling, from the pocket of his old jacket, which was showing its years, but comfortable and still warm in the cold weather, and the footpath he was walking down was long and tranquil, edged with picket fences painted white or green or red, behind which you could glimpse little patios or strips of lawn (and a mower left out by someone who had been called away, perhaps). Dr. Williams was wearing a dark, narrow-brimmed hat, and perfectly clean, almost sparkling glasses, yet there was nothing extreme or excessive about their brightness; he didn’t look intensely happy or sad, but content (perhaps because he was warmly wrapped up in his jacket, perhaps because he knew that the patient he was going to see was not fatally ill), walking along calmly, at, say, five o’clock on a winter’s evening.
But Stein never replaced the portrait of Chernyakhovsky with his photo of William Carlos Williams. Some of us in the workshop, and Stein himself on occasion, had doubts about the authenticity of the photo. According to the Garmendia sisters, it looked more like President Truman disguised as something, not necessarily a doctor, walking down the street in his home town, incognito. In Bibiano’s view, it was a clever montage: Williams’s face with someone else’s body, some other small-town doctor probably, while the background was a mosaic: the wooden fences taken from one picture, the lawn and the lawn-mower from another; then there were the birds perched on the fences and even on the mower-handle, the light-grey evening sky; in all eight or nine different photos had been used. Stein was baffled, but he wasn’t ruling out any possibilities. Whatever its origins, he used to call it “the photo of Dr. Williams” and he didn’t throw it out (sometimes he called it “the photo of Dr. Norman Rockwell” or “the photo of Dr. William Rockwell”). It was clearly one of his most treasured possessions, not that, poor as he was, he had many to treasure. On one occasion (I think we were discussing beauty and truth) Veronica Garmendia asked him why he was so attached to the photo when it almost certainly wasn’t Williams. I just like it, said Stein. I like to think it is William Carlos Williams. But most of all, he added after a while, by which stage we had already got onto Gramsci, I like its tranquillity, the idea that Williams is going about his business, walking unhurriedly down a calm street to make a house call. And later still, when we were talking about poetry and the Paris Commune, he said very softly, I don’t know; but I don’t think anyone heard.
After the coup, Stein disappeared, and for a long time Bibiano and I assumed he was dead.
In fact everyone assumed he was dead; everyone thought they were bound to have killed that Jewish Bolshevik son of a bitch. One afternoon Bibiano and I went to his house. We were afraid to knock at the door. In our paranoia we imagined that the house might be under surveillance; we even thought a policeman might open the door, invite us in and never let us out again. So we walked past the house three or four times. There were no lights on, and we went away feeling deeply ashamed but also secretly relieved. A week later, by tacit accord, we returned to Stein’s house. no one answered our knock. A woman watched us from the window of the adjoining house, then disappeared, and as well as reviving a host of vague cinematic memories, this intensified the loneliness and dereliction we could feel emanating not just from Stein’s house but from the whole street. The third time we went there, a young woman opened the door, followed by two children, both under three, one walking, the other on all fours. She told us she was living there now with her husband and hadn’t met the previous tenant. She said that if we wanted to find out more we’d have to go and talk to the landlady. She was a kind woman. She invited us in and offered us a cup of tea, which Bibiano and I declined. We don’t want to bother you, we said. The maps and the photo of General Chernyakhovsky were gone from the walls. This man was a good friend of yours and he left suddenly, without telling you? asked the woman, smiling. Yes, we said, something like that.
Shortly afterwards I left Chile for good.
Some time later – I can’t remember if I was living in Mexico or in France – I received a very short letter from Bibiano, so telegraphic in style it was almost a riddle or a piece of nonsense (but one thing was clear, at least: he was happy), accompanied by a press cutting, probably from a Santiago newspaper. The article mentioned various “Chilean terrorists” who had crossed into Nicaragua from Costa Rica with the Sandinista troops. One of them was Juan Stein.
From then on there was no shortage of news about Stein. He appeared and disappeared like a ghost wherever there was fighting, wherever desperate, generous, mad, courageous, despicable Latin Americans were destroying, rebuilding and redestroying reality, in a final bid that was doomed to failure. I saw him in a documentary about the capture of Rivas, a town in southern Nicaragua, with a ragged haircut, thinner than before, dressed like a cross between a soldier and a professor at a summer school, smoking a pipe, his broken glasses held together with wire. Bibiano sent me a cutting in which it was reported that Stein, along with five other ex-members of the MIR, was fighting the South Africans in Angola. Later I received two photocopied pages from a Mexican magazine (so by then I must have been in Paris) which referred to conflicts between the Cubans in Angola and certain international groups, one of which consisted of two Chilean adventurers, the sole survivors (or so they said, and I presume the journalist interviewed them in a bar in Luanda, from which I deduce that they were drunk), supposedly the sole survivors of a group known as the Flying Chileans, which reminded me of the Human Eagles, a circus that used to do marathon tours of southern Chile every year. Stein, of course, was one of these survivors. From Angola, it seems, he went to Nicaragua. In Nicaragua we kept losing track of him. He was lieutenant to a priest and guerrilla leader who died in the capture of Rivas. Then he commanded a battalion or a brigade or was second in charge of something or withdrew from the front line to train new recruits. He didn’t take part in the triumphal entry into Managua. Then he disappeared again for some time. He was rumored to be among the members of the commando unit that assassinated Somoza in Paraguay. He was rumored to have joined a Colombian guerrilla group. Some even said he had returned to Africa, and was in Angola or Mozambique or with the Namibian guerrilla fighters. He lived dangerously, but as they say in the westerns, the bullet with his name on it was still waiting to be cast. Then he went back to America and for a while he lived in Managua. Bibiano told me that an Argentine poet called Di Angeli, one of his correspondents, had been involved in organizing a reading of poetry from Argentina, Uruguay and Chile at the Managua Cultural Center, during which a member of the audience, “a tall, fair-haired guy with glasses,” made various remarks about Chilean poetry and the criteria used to select the poems for the reading (the organizers, including Di Angeli, had prohibited the inclusion of poems by Nicanor Parra and Enrique Lihn for political reasons)
; in a word, he said it was a load of shit, at least the Chilean section, but the way he said it was very calm, not at all aggressive, according to Di Angeli, very ironic and a bit sad or tired, maybe, hard to tell. (Of the countless correspondents scattered throughout the world with whom Bibiano maintained regular epistolary contact from his shoe shop in Concepción, this Di Angeli was, by the way, one of the most shameless, cynical and amusing. Although a typical leftist social climber, he was constantly apologizing for oversights and errors of all kinds; his gaffes, according to Bibiano, were legendary. Under Stalin, his pathetic existence could have inspired a great picaresque novel, but in Latin America in the ’70s, it was just a pathetic existence, full of little acts of meanness, some of which were not even intentional. He would have been better off on the right, said Bibiano, but, curiously, among the hosts of the left, Di Angeli’s kind are legion. At least he hasn’t started writing literary criticism, remarked Bibiano, adding that it wouldn’t be long. And sure enough, one day in the abominable ’80s, looking through some Mexican and Argentine magazines, I came across various critical articles by Di Angeli. I think he had made a name for himself. I haven’t encountered his by-line again in the ‘90s, but I don’t read as many magazines these days.) Stein, in any case, was back in America. And it was definitely the Juan Stein we knew from Concepción, according to Bibiano, the third cousin of Ivan Chernyakhovksy. For some time, the time of an overly drawn-out sigh, he was to be seen at gatherings such as the aforementioned reading of South American poetry or at exhibitions or in the company of Ernesto Cardenal (twice) or at the theater. Then he disappeared and was never seen again in Nicaragua. He hadn’t gone very far. Some said he was with the Guatemalan guerrilla fighters; others swore that he had joined the Frente Farabundo Martí (FMLN). Bibiano and I agreed that a guerrilla group with a name like that deserved to have Stein on its side. Although, given the chance, we felt he would have personally executed those responsible for the death of Roque Dalton (viewed from a distance, Stein cut a fierce and implacable figure; he had taken on the epic proportions of a Hollywood hero). How could one dream, or one nightmare, possibly accommodate the third cousin of Chernyakhovsky, the Jewish Bolshevik from the forests of southern Chile, and the sons of bitches who killed Roque Dalton while he was asleep, just to shut him up, for their revolutionary convenience? It was inconceivable. Yet Stein was there in El Salvador. And he participated in various campaigns and surprise attacks and one fine day he disappeared and this time it was for good. I was living in Spain at that stage, doing various menial jobs; I didn’t have a television and rarely bought a newspaper. According to Bibiano, Juan Stein was killed in the FMLN’s widely reported final offensive, during which they succeeded in taking control of certain sectors of San Salvador. I remember seeing snatches of that distant war while eating or drinking in bars in Barcelona, but although people were watching the television, the noise of the conversations and the plates and cutlery being carried back and forth made it impossible to hear anything. Even the images my memory has retained (from the war correspondents’ video tapes) are blurred and fragmentary. There are only two things I remember with absolute clarity: the pitiful barricades in the streets of San Salvador, more like fairground shooting stands, and the small, dark, wiry figure of an FMLN commander. He was known as Commander Achilles or Commander Ulysses and I know that shortly after speaking to the journalist he was killed. According to Bibiano, all the commanders involved in that desperate offensive had assumed the names of Greek heroes and demigods. What could Stein’s name have been? Commander Patroclus? Commander Hector? Commander Paris? I don’t know. But certainly not Aeneas. Or Ulysses. When the battle was over and the bodies were being removed, among them was the corpse of a tall, fair-haired man. A brief description in the police records indicated that there were scars from old wounds on the arms and legs, and a lion rampant tattooed on the right arm. It was a high quality tattoo. A real professional job, honest to God, you couldn’t get that done in El Salvador. In the file at Central Police Records the mysterious fair-haired man was identified as Jacobo Sabotinski, an Argentine citizen and ex-member of the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (ERP).
Many years later, Bibiano went to Puerto Montt to look for Juan Stein’s family home. He couldn’t find anyone called Stein. There was a Stone, two Steiners and three Steens. The Stone he eliminated straight away. The Steens were all related and they couldn’t tell him much; they weren’t Jewish and they didn’t know anything about the Stein family or Chernyakhovsky. They asked Bibiano if he was Jewish himself and if there was money in it. By this stage, I think, Puerto Montt had started to boom. The Steiners were Jewish, but came from Poland, not the Ukraine. The first one he went to see was a tall, overweight agronomist, who wasn’t much help. Then he talked with the agronomist’s aunt, a high school piano teacher. She remembered a widow called Stein who had gone to live in Llanquihue in 1974. But she wasn’t Jewish, that lady, declared the piano teacher. Slightly confused, Bibiano went to Llanquihue. What she must have meant, he thought, was that the widow wasn’t a practising Jew. In any case, knowing Juan Stein and his family history (his third cousin having been a Red Army general), he would have expected them to be atheists.
It didn’t take him long to find old Mrs Stein’s house in Llanquihue. It was a little wooden house painted green, on the outskirts of the village. When he went in through the gate, a friendly dog, white with black splotches like a miniature cow, came out to greet him. He rang the doorbell, which sounded like – and may well have been – a real bell with a clapper, and after a while a woman opened the door. She must have been about thirty-five and was one of the most beautiful women Bibiano had ever seen.
He asked if Mrs Stein lived there. She used to, but a long time ago, replied the woman cheerfully. What a pity, said Bibiano. I’ve been trying to find her for ten days now and I’ll have to go back to Concepción soon. The woman invited him in, told him she was about to have morning tea and asked if he would like to join her. Bibiano, of course, said yes, and then the woman confessed that old Mrs Stein had been dead for three years. A sudden wave of sadness seemed to sweep over her and Bibiano felt he was to blame. She had known Mrs Stein and, although she wouldn’t have said they were friends, she respected her: a slightly domineering woman, one of those stern Germans, but she had a good heart. I didn’t know her, said Bibiano. In fact, I was trying to find her to pass on the news of her son’s death, but perhaps it’s better this way; it’s always terrible having to tell someone that one of their children has died. There must be some mistake, said the woman. She only had one son, who was still living when she died, and he was a friend of mine. Bibiano thought he was going to choke on his avocado sandwich. Only one son? Yes, a bachelor, very nice looking, I don’t know why he never got married. I guess because he was so shy. Then I must have got mixed up again, said Bibiano. We must be talking about different families. So Mrs Stein’s son doesn’t live in Llanquihue any more? He died last year in a hospital in Valdivia, so I heard. We were friends, but I never went to see him in hospital, we weren’t that close. What did he die of? I think it was cancer, said the woman, looking at Bibiano’s hands. And he was left-wing wasn’t he? asked Bibiano, with a faltering voice. Could have been, said the woman, suddenly cheerful again – her eyes shone like no other eyes I’ve ever seen, said Bibiano – yes, he was left-wing, but he wasn’t militant; he was one of the silent left, like so many Chileans since 1973. He wasn’t Jewish, was he? No, said the woman, although who knows, I’ve never really been interested in religion, but no, I don’t think they were Jewish, they were German. What was his name? Juan Stein. Juanito Stein. And what did he do? He was a teacher, although what he really liked was repairing motors: tractors, harvesters, pumps, any kind of motor, he had a real gift for it. And he made a nice bit of pocket money that way. Sometimes he made the parts himself. Juanito Stein. Is he buried in Valdivia? I think so, said the woman, looking sad again.