So Bibiano went to the cemetery in Valdivia and, with the help of one of the attendants to whom he promised a handsome tip, spent a whole day looking for the grave of that tall, fair-haired Juan Stein who never left Chile, but despite his efforts he couldn’t find it.
5
At the end of 1973 or the beginning of 1974, Diego Soto, Juan Steins best friend and rival, also disappeared.
They were always together (except at their respective workshops) and always talking about poetry. If the sky over Chile had begun to crumble and fall, they would have gone on talking about poetry: the tall, fair-haired Stein and the short, dark Soto; one strong and well built, the other’s fine-boned body hinting at future plumpness. Stein was mainly interested in Latin American poetry, while Soto was translating French poets who were at the time (and many of whom, I fear, still are) unknown in Chile and this, of course, infuriated a lot of people. How could that ugly little Indian presume to translate and correspond with Alain Jouffroy, Denis Roche and Marcelin Pleynet? Michel Bulteau, Mathieu Messagier, Claude Pelieu, Franck Venaille, Pierre Tilman, Daniel Biga … who were these people, for God’s sake? And what was so special about this Georges Perec character, published by Denoël, whose books Soto was always toting around, pretentious bastard. When he was no longer to be seen walking the streets of Concepción with books under his arm, always neatly dressed (as opposed to Stein, who looked like a tramp), heading off to the Faculty of Medicine or standing in a line outside some cinema or theater, when he disappeared into thin air, nobody missed him. Many would have been glad to hear of his death, for reasons that were not so much political (Soto was a socialist sympathizer, but that was all, he wasn’t even a faithful socialist voter; I would have described him as a left-wing pessimist) as aesthetic in nature: the pleasure of knowing you’re finally rid of someone who is more intelligent than you are and more knowledgeable and who lacks the social grace to hide it. Writing this now it seems hard to believe. But that’s how it was. Soto’s enemies would have been able to forgive his biting wit, but they could never forgive his indifference. His indifference and his intelligence.
Soto, however, like Stein (whom he no doubt never saw again), reappeared in exile. First he went to East Germany, but left as soon as he could after several unpleasant experiences. According to the melancholy folklore of exile – made up of stories that, as often as not, are fabrications or pale copies of what really happened – one night another Chilean gave him such a terrible beating that he ended up in a Berlin hospital with head injuries and two broken ribs. He moved to France where he scraped together a living teaching Spanish and English, and translating for small presses, mainly books by eccentric, early twentieth-century Latin American writers with a bent for fantasy or pornography, or both, as in the case of Pedro Pereda, an obscure novelist from Valparaiso, the author of a startling story in which a woman finds vaginas and anuses growing, or rather opening, all over her anatomy, to the understandable horror of her friends and family (the story is set in the ’20s, but I don’t suppose it would have been any less shocking in the ’70s or the ’90s), and who ends up confined to a brothel for miners in northern Chile, where she remains, shut up in a room without windows, until in the end she becomes a great amorphous, uncontrollable in-and-out, finishes off the old pimp who runs the brothel along with the rest of the whores and the terrified clients, goes out onto the patio, and sets off into the desert (walking or flying, Pereda doesn’t say), finally disappearing into thin air.
Soto also tried (unsuccessfully) to translate Sophie Podolski, the Belgian poet who committed suicide at the age of twenty-one, and Pierre Guyotat, the author of Eden, Eden, Eden and Prostitution (again he gave up), and La Disparition by Georges Perec, a detective story written without using the letter “e,” which he managed (with a limited degree of success) to render into Spanish, following in the footsteps of Jardiel Poncela, who, half a century earlier, had written a story in which the aforementioned vowel was conspicuous by its absence. But it is one thing to write without using “e” and quite another to translate without it.
For a while, Soto and I were both living in Paris, but I never saw him. At the time I had no desire to look up old friends. Also, from what I’d been told, Soto’s financial situation had improved; he had married a French woman. Later I heard that they had a child (for what it’s worth, by then I was living in Spain). He regularly attended the meetings of Chilean writers held in Amsterdam, and contributed to poetry magazines in Mexico, Argentina and Chile. I think he even had a book published in Buenos Aires or Madrid. Then I heard from a friend that Soto was lecturing at a university, which meant financial stability and time for writing and research, and by that stage he had two children, a boy and a girl. He had no plans to return to Chile. He must have been happy, reasonably happy. I could imagine his comfortable flat in Paris, or a house perhaps, in a village not far from the city. I could see him reading in the silence of his soundproof study, while the children watched television and his wife cooked or ironed, because, well, someone has to do the cooking, but of course it could have been a maid, yes, a Portuguese or an African maid, so Soto could read in his soundproof study, or write perhaps, although he was never very prolific, without feeling guilty, while his wife was busy in her own study, near the children’s room, or sitting at a nineteenth-century desk in a corner of the living room, correcting exam papers or planning a summer holiday or idly casting an eye over the cinema listings to decide which film they would go and see that night.
According to Bibiano (who exchanged letters with him quite regularly), it wasn’t so much that Soto had become middle-class: he had never been anything else. If books and reading are what count, you have to lead a sedentary, middle-class life to some degree, said Bibiano. Take me, for example: working in the shoe shop – which gets more depressing every year, or more amusing, I can’t really tell – living in the same old boarding house … in a way, on a different scale, I’m doing the same thing as Soto (or letting the same thing happen to me).
In a word, Soto was happy. He thought he had escaped the curse (or we thought he had, anyway; Soto, I suspect, never believed in curses).
Then he received an invitation to participate in a conference on literature and criticism in Latin America, to be held in Alicante.
It was winter. Soto hated flying; he had done it only once in his life, at the end of 1973, when he flew from Santiago to Berlin. So after a whole night in the train he stepped off in Alicante. It was a weekend conference, but instead of going back to Paris on Sunday night, Soto stayed on. It is not known why. On Monday morning he bought a ticket for Perpignan. The trip was uneventful. When he arrived at the station in Perpignan he inquired about departures for Paris that night and bought a ticket for the 1:00 a.m. train. He spent the rest of the afternoon walking around the city, stopping in bars. He visited a second-hand bookshop where he bought a book by Guerau de Carrera, an avant-garde Franco-Catalan poet who died during the Second World War, but to pass the time he read a detective novel he had picked up that morning in Alicante (Vásquez Montalbán? Juan Madrid?) but didn’t have time to finish (the folded corner of page 155 seemed to indicate that he read no further) despite having devoured the first part with the voracity of an adolescent during the train journey.
In Perpignan he ate in a pizzeria. It is odd that he didn’t go to a good restaurant to sample the renowned cuisine of Rousillon, but for whatever reason he went to a pizzeria. The coroner’s report is explicit and leaves not a shadow of doubt. Soto had a green salad, a large plate of canneloni, an enormous (and I mean truly enormous) helping of chocolate, strawberry, vanilla and banana ice cream, and two cups of black coffee. He also consumed a bottle of Italian red wine (perhaps not the best choice to go with the canneloni, but I know nothing about wine). During the meal he read both the detective novel and Le Monde, jumping back and forth. He left the pizzeria at about 10:00 p.m.
According to various witnesses, he arrived at the station around midnight. He had an hour
to kill before the departure of his train. He went to the station bar and ordered a coffee. He was carrying his bag, and, in the other hand, the book by Carrera, the detective novel and the copy of Le Monde. According to the waiter who served him, he was sober.
He didn’t spend more than ten minutes in the bar. A railway employee saw him walking up and down the platforms, slowly but steadily. Certainly not drunk. Presumably he disappeared among the station’s labyrinthine paths, dear to Salvador Dalí. No doubt that is precisely what he wanted to do. To lose himself for an hour in the sovereign magnificence of Perpignan railway station. To retrace the mathematical, astronomical or mythical itinerary that, in Dalí’s dream, was hidden for all to see within the confines of that edifice. To be a tourist, in other words. The tourist Soto had always been since he left Concepción. A Latin American tourist, perplexed and desperate in equal parts (Gómez Carrillo is our Virgil), but a tourist nevertheless.
What happened next is uncertain. Soto lost himself in the cathedral or cosmic transmitter that is the Perpignan railway station. Because of the time and the weather (it was winter), the station was almost empty despite the fact that the 1:00 a.m. train for Paris was about to leave. Most people were in the bar or the main waiting room. Soto, for some reason, perhaps he heard voices, went to look in another room, some way off. There he found three young neo-Nazis and a bundle on the ground. The youths were diligently kicking the bundle. Soto froze on the threshold until he realized that the bundle was moving, when he saw first a hand and then an incredibly dirty arm emerging from the rags. The tramp shouted, Stop hitting me. It was a woman’s voice. But no one was listening, no one except the Chilean writer. Perhaps his eyes filled with tears, tears of self-pity, because something told him he had met his destiny. Now he wouldn’t have to choose between Tel Quel and the OuLiPo. For him, life had chosen the crime reports. In any case, he dropped his bag and the books at the door and approached the youths. Before the fight began he insulted them in Spanish. The harsh Spanish of southern Chile. The youths stabbed Soto and ran away.
There was a brief article in the Catalonian newspapers, but Bibiano told me all about it, in a very detailed letter, almost like a detective’s report. It was the last letter I received from him.
At first I was annoyed that he had stopped writing to me, but then, considering the fact that I hardly ever replied, I realized it was understandable and didn’t hold it against him. Years later I heard a story that I would have liked to tell Bibiano, but by then I wasn’t sure of his address. It was the story of Petra, and, in a way, Petra is to Soto what Juan Stein’s double is to the Juan Stein we knew. Petra’s story should be told like a fairy tale: Once upon a time in Chile there was a poor little boy … I think the boy was called Lorenzo, I’m not sure, and I’ve forgotten his surname, but some readers may remember it, and he liked to play, and climb trees and high-tension pylons. One day he climbed up a pylon and got such a shock that he lost both his arms. They had to amputate them just below the shoulders. So Lorenzo grew up in Chile without arms, an unfortunate situation for any child, but he also grew up in Pinochet’s Chile, which turned unfortunate situations into desperate ones, on top of which he soon discovered that he was homosexual, which made his already desperate situation inconceivable and indescribable.
Given these circumstances, it is not surprising that Lorenzo became an artist. (What else could he do?) But it’s hard to be an artist in the third world if you are poor, have no arms and are gay to boot. So, for a time, Lorenzo had to do other things. He studied and improved himself. He sang in the streets. Being a hopeless romantic, he fell in love. His disappointments (not to mention humiliations, put-downs and insults) were terrible, and one day – to be marked retrospectively with a white stone – he decided to kill himself. One particularly sad summer evening, as the sun sank into the Pacific Ocean, Lorenzo jumped into the sea from a rock used exclusively by suicides (every self-respecting stretch of Chilean coastline has one). He sank like a stone with his eyes open and saw the water grow darker and the bubbles streaming from his lips and then an involuntary movement of his legs sent him back up to the surface. Because of the waves he couldn’t see the beach, only the rocks and the masts of pleasure craft or fishing boats. Then he went under again. This time too he kept his eyes open: he turned his head calmly (as if under anaesthetic), looking for something, anything, as long as it was beautiful, to be his last memory. But darkness enveloped whatever else might have been sinking with him into the depths and he could see nothing. Then, as the saying goes, his whole life flashed before him like a film. Some parts were in black and white, others in color. His poor mother’s love, her pride, her weariness, how she hugged him at night when, in Chile’s poor neighborhoods everything seemed to be hanging by a thread (black and white); the trembling, the nights when he wet his bed, the hospitals, the staring, the zoo-like staring (color); friends sharing what little they had, the consolations of music, marijuana, beauty revealed in unlikely places (black and white); love perfect and brief like a sonnet by Góngora; knowing with a fatal certainty (but raging against the knowledge) that you only live once. Suddenly drawing courage from nowhere, he decided he was not going to die. Now or never, he thought, and began to swim back up. It seemed to take forever to reach the surface and then he could hardly manage to keep himself afloat, but he did. That afternoon he learnt to swim without arms, like an eel or a snake. In the current socio-political climate, he said to himself, committing suicide is absurd and redundant. Better to become an undercover poet.
From that day on he began to paint (with his mouth and his feet), he took up dancing, he started writing poems and love letters, he learnt to play musical instruments and compose songs (a photo shows him playing the piano with his toes, smiling at the camera), and he began to save money so that he could get out of Chile.
It was hard, but he managed to leave in the end. In Europe, of course, life wasn’t much easier. For some time, years perhaps (though Lorenzo, who was younger than Bibiano and me, and much younger than Soto and Stein, left Chile when the flood of emigrants had abated), he made a living as a street musician and dancer in Holland (a country he adored) and various cities in Germany and Italy. He stayed in boarding houses, in the districts where the Arab, Turkish and African immigrants lived, occasionally moving in with a lover, enjoying the idyll while it lasted, before walking out or being shown the door, and after each day’s work in the street and drinks at a gay bar or a visit to an art-house cinema with continuous screenings, Lorenzo (or Lorenza as he also liked to be called) would shut himself in his room to write and paint. For much of his life he lived alone. He was known to some as the acrobatic hermit. His friends used to ask him how he wiped his ass after shitting, how he paid at the fruit shop, how he dealt with money, how he cooked. How, for God’s sake, could he live on his own? Lorenzo answered all these questions and for almost every difficulty he had an ingenious solution. With a little ingenuity, my dear, you can find a way to do just about anything. If Blaise Cendrars, for instance, could out-box the best of them with one arm, Lorenza could clean her ass after shitting, and very nicely too.
In Germany, an intriguing but often eerie land, he bought himself a pair of prosthetic arms. They looked real and what he liked best was the way they made him feel like a robot or a cyborg in a science fiction film when he put them on and walked around. Seen from a distance, as he stepped out, for example, to meet a friend against a backdrop of violet sky, the visual effect was quite convincing. But he took them off when he worked in the street and the first thing he told his lovers, if they didn’t know already, was that he had no arms. Some of them even liked him better that way.
Shortly before the historic Barcelona Olympics, an actor or actress or a whole theater company from Catalonia toured in Germany and saw him perform in the street, or maybe in a small theater, and mentioned him to the person who had been given the task of finding someone to represent Petra, Mariscal’s cartoon character, the mascot or, to be more precise, the embl
em of the Paralympics, which were to be held immediately after the Olympic Games. They say that when Mariscal saw Lorenzo leaping about in his skin-tight Petra costume like a schizophrenic principal from the Bolshoi Ballet, he said: the Petra of my dreams (which was typical: he doesn’t waste words). When they talked afterwards, Mariscal was charmed and offered Lorenzo his studio so he could come to Barcelona to paint or write or whatever (which was typical of his generosity). But as it turned out, Lorenzo or Lorenza didn’t need Mariscal’s studio to put him on top of the world for the duration of the Paralympic Games. From the very first day he was a media favorite, doing a string of interviews, and it even looked as if he might eclipse Cobi, the Olympic mascot. At the time I was flat on my back with a clapped-out liver in the Vall d’Hebron Hospital in Barcelona, reading two or three newspapers a day, which is how I kept up with his exploits, jokes and anecdotes. Sometimes I had laughing fits reading the interviews. Sometimes they made me cry. I saw him on television too. He played his role very well.