Three years later, I found out he had died of AIDS. The person who told me wasn’t sure if he had died in Germany or South America (he didn’t know he was Chilean).
Sometimes, when I think of Stein and Soto, I can’t help thinking of Lorenzo too.
Sometimes I think he was the best poet of the three. But usually I see them all together.
Although the only thing they had in common was having been born in Chile. And possibly a book: Stein may have read it; Soto certainly did (he mentioned it in a long article on exile and rootlessness published in Mexico), and Lorenzo devoured it enthusiastically, like almost every book he read. (How did he turn the pages? With his tongue: an example to us all!) The book was called Ma Gestalt-thérapie, and its author, Dr. Frederick S. Perls, was a psychiatrist, a fugitive from Nazi Germany and a wanderer on three continents. As far as I know, it hasn’t been published in Spain.
6
But let us return to the beginning, to Carlos Wieder and the year of grace 1974.
At that time Wieder was at the height of his fame. After his triumphant journey to Antarctica and aerial displays over numerous Chilean cities, he was called upon to undertake something grand in the capital, something spectacular to show the world that the new regime and avant-garde art were not at odds, quite the contrary.
Wieder was only too pleased to oblige. In Santiago he stayed in Providencia, at the flat of a friend from the air force academy, and spent his days training at the Captain Lindstrom airstrip, socializing at the military clubs and visiting friends at their parents’ houses, where he met or was more or less forcibly introduced to their sisters, cousins and various young lady friends, who were struck by his dashing appearance, his courteous and apparently shy manner, but also by his coldness, by something remote in his gaze. As Pía Valle put it, there seemed to be another pair of eyes behind his eyes. At night, free at last, he devoted his time to the solitary preparation of a photographic exhibition to be held in the flat, using the walls of the spare bedroom, which was to open on the same day as his display of aerial poetry.
Years later, the owner of the flat declared that he had not seen the photographs Wieder was planning to exhibit until the night of the opening. His first reaction to Wieder’s project was naturally to offer him the living room, or the whole flat, to display the photos, but Wieder declined. He maintained that the photos required a restricted and well-defined space, such as the room that he, the photographer, was occupying. He said that after writing in the sky it would be appropriate – as well as charmingly paradoxical – to circumscribe the epilogue to his aerial poem within the bounds of the poet’s den. As to the nature of the photos, according to the owner of the flat, Wieder wanted to surprise the guests, and would only say that it was visual poetry – experimental, quintessential, art for art’s sake – and that everyone would find it amusing. He also made his host promise that neither he nor anyone else would go into the room until the night of the opening. The owner of the flat offered to dig out the key to the room so that Wieder could rest easy. But Wieder said that wouldn’t be necessary; a promise was enough for him. So, solemnly, the owner of the flat gave his word of honor.
Naturally the invitations to the party in Providencia were limited to a select group: various pilots and young army officers (the oldest of them had not reached the rank of commander) who could reasonably be supposed to have a certain degree of aesthetic sensibility, a trio of journalists, two artists, an old right-wing, ex-avant-garde poet who seemed to have recovered his youthful vigor since the coup, a young society belle called Tatiana von Beck Iraola (apparently the only woman to attend the exhibition) and Carlos Wieder’s father, who lived in Viña del Mar and was in delicate health.
Things got off to a bad start. On the morning of the air show, bulging black cumulus clouds came down the valley, heading south. Some of Wieder’s superior officers advised him not to fly. He ignored the bad omens and apparently conferred with an unidentified individual in the dark corner of a hangar. Then he took off, and the spectators watched with more apprehension than admiration as he executed a few preliminary stunts. He did some hedge-hopping, then looped the loop right way up and upside down. But without releasing any smoke. The army men and their wives were enjoying the show, although some senior air force officers wondered what was really going on. Then the plane climbed and disappeared into the belly of an immense grey cloud that was moving slowly over the city as if it were guiding the black clouds of the storm.
Wieder travelled inside the cloud like Jonah inside the whale. For a while, the spectators awaited his thundering reappearance. A few began to get the uneasy feeling they had been tricked, left sitting there on makeshift stands at the Captain Lindstrom airstrip, staring at a sky that would yield only rain, not poetry. But most of them took advantage of the pause to get up from their seats, stretch their legs, mingle, greet friends or acquaintances, join the groups that kept forming and breaking up just as someone was about to chip in with a comment on the latest rumors, who’d been promoted to which position or the grave problems the nation was facing. The younger and livelier members of the crowd were gossiping about recent parties and who was going out with whom. Soon even Wieder’s die-hard fans, rather than waiting in silence for the plane to reappear or reading all manner of omens in the blank sky, launched into down-to-earth discussions of everyday matters whose relevance to Chilean art or poetry was tenuous, to say the least.
Wieder’s plane emerged far from the airstrip, over an outlying suburb of Santiago. There he wrote the first line: Death is friendship. Then he flew over some railway sheds and what appeared to be disused factories, although down in the streets he could make out people dragging cardboard boxes, children climbing on fences, dogs. To the left, at nine o’clock, he recognized two enormous shanty towns, separated by the railway tracks. He wrote the second line: Death is Chile. Then he swung round to three o’clock and headed for the city center. Soon the river-like avenues appeared, the lattice of dull-hued snakes and ladders, the river itself, the zoo, the few high-rise buildings that were the city’s pride. Seen from the air, as Wieder himself noted somewhere, a city is like a photo ripped into pieces, which, counter-intuitively, seem to scatter: a fragmentary, shifting mask. Over the presidential palace of La Moneda, he wrote the third line: Death is responsibility. Some pedestrians saw him: a beetle-like silhouette against the dark and threatening sky. Very few could decipher his words: the wind effaced them almost straight away. At one point someone tried to communicate with him by radio. Wieder didn’t answer. On the horizon, at eleven o’clock, he saw the shapes of two helicopters approaching. He circled until they drew near, then shook them off in a second. On the way back to the airstrip he wrote the fourth and fifth lines: Death is love and Death is growth. When the strip came into sight, he wrote: Death is communion. But none of the generals or the generals’ wives and children or the senior officers or the military, civil, ecclesiastical and cultural authorities present could read his words. An electric storm was building in the sky. From the control tower a colonel told him to hurry up and land. Wieder replied “Received,” and immediately began to climb. For a moment those watching from below thought he was going to disappear into a cloud again. A captain, who was not in the official box, remarked that in Chile all poetic acts spelt disaster, usually just for individuals or families, but occasionally for the nation as a whole. Then came the lightning – the first bolt fell on the far side of Santiago, but was clearly visible from the stands at the Captain Lindstrom airstrip – and Carlos Wieder wrote: Death is cleansing, but so unsteadily, given the adverse weather conditions, that very few of the spectators, who by now had started to get up from their seats and open their umbrellas, could understand what had been written. All that was left in the sky were dark shreds, cuneiform characters, hieroglyphics, a child’s scribble. The few who did manage to understand thought Carlos Wieder had gone mad. It started to rain and the crowd hurriedly dispersed. The cocktail party had to be shifted to a hangar, and by
that stage, what with the delay and the downpour, everyone was in need of refreshment. In less than fifteen minutes all the canapés had been devoured. The waiters, recruits from the Quartermaster Corps, were amazingly quick on their feet and their diligence provoked the envy of some of the ladies present. Some of the officers discussed the aviator-poet’s eccentric performance, but most of the conversations had moved on to questions of national (and even international) significance.
Meanwhile Carlos Wieder was still up in the sky, struggling with the elements. Beside the airstrip glistening with rain (the scene was worthy of a Second World War film) only a handful of friends remained, and two journalists who in their spare time wrote surrealist poems (or super-realist poems, as they preferred to say, aping a rather precious Spanish usage), their eyes fixed on the light plane veering around under the storm-clouds. Wieder himself was perhaps unaware that his public had so drastically diminished.
He wrote, or thought he wrote: Death is my heart. Then: Take my heart. And then his name: Carlos Wieder, undaunted by rain or lightning. Undaunted, above all, by incoherence.
And then he had no smoke left to write with (for some time it had looked as if the plane were on fire, or drawing out wisps of cloud, rather than sky-writing) but still he wrote: Death is resurrection, and the faithful who had stayed by the airstrip were bewildered, but they knew that Wieder was writing something. They understood or thought they understood the pilot’s will, and they knew that although they couldn’t make head or tail of it, they were witnessing a unique event, of great significance for the art of the future.
Then Carlos Wieder landed without the slightest difficulty (witnesses said he was sweating as if he had just emerged from a sauna) and was reprimanded by the officer from the control tower and certain other high ranking officers who were still wandering among the remnants of the cocktail party, and after drinking a beer without sitting down or talking to anyone (giving monosyllabic replies to every question), he went back to the flat in Providencia to prepare the second act of his Santiago gala.
The foregoing account of the air show may be reliable. Or not. Perhaps the generals of the Chilean Air Force were not accompanied by their wives. Perhaps the Captain Lindstrom airstrip was never set up for a display of aerial poetry. It might be that Wieder wrote his poem in the sky over Santiago without asking permission or warning anyone, although it seems unlikely. Perhaps it didn’t even rain that day in Santiago, although there are witnesses who, at the time, were sitting idle on park benches looking up at the sky or staring out of the windows of lonely rooms, and who still remember the words in the sky and the purifying rain that followed. But perhaps it all happened differently. In 1974, hallucinations were not uncommon.
The following account of the photographic exhibition in the flat is, however, accurate.
The first guests arrived at 9:00 in the evening. Most of them were old school friends who hadn’t seen each other for some time. At 11:00, twenty people were present, all of them moderately drunk. No one had yet entered the spare bedroom, occupied by Wieder, on the walls of which were displayed the photos he was planning to submit to the judgment of his friends. Lieutenant Julio César Muñoz Cano, who years later was to publish a self-denunciatory memoir entitled Neck in a Noose relating his activities during the early years of the military regime, informs us that Carlos Wieder behaved normally (or perhaps abnormally: he was much quieter than usual, to the point of meekness, and throughout the night his face had a freshly washed look). He attended to the guests as if he were in his own home (everyone was getting along splendidly, too well, in fact, writes Muñoz Cano). Wieder was very pleased to see his friends from the air force academy, it had been such a long time; he had the good grace to comment on the morning’s incidents without according them, or himself, any particular importance; he cheerfully tolerated the jokes (unsubtle at best and often in frankly poor taste) that are invariably told at such gatherings. Now and then he disappeared, shutting himself in the spare bedroom (and this time he did lock the door behind him), but he was never gone for long.
Finally, on the stroke of midnight, he climbed onto a chair in the living room, called for silence and said (these are his actual words according to Muñoz Cano) that it was time to plunge into the art of the future. He had changed back to the Wieder they knew: imperious, self-assured, his eyes somehow separate from his body, as if they were watching from another planet. Then he made his way to the door of the spare room and began to let them in one by one. One at a time gentlemen; the art of Chile is not for herds. According to Muñoz Cano, he said this in a jocular tone of voice, looking at his father and winking first with his left eye, then with his right. As if he were a boy of twelve again, giving a secret sign. Calmly, Wieder senior smiled back at his son.
The first person to enter the room, logically enough since she was the only lady present and had a headstrong, impulsive temperament, was Tatiana von Beck Iraola. Tatiana, writes Muñoz Cano, came from an illustrious military family, and was, in her own slightly mad way, an independent woman, who always did as she pleased, went out with whom she fancied and held outrageous opinions, which were, in many cases, highly original if often contradictory. Years later she married a pediatrician, went to live in La Serena and had six children. In a passage whose melancholy tone is subtly tinged with horror, Muñoz Cano describes Tatiana as she was that night: a beautiful and confident young woman who went into the room expecting to see heroic portraits or boring photographs of the Chilean skies.
The room was lit in the usual way. There were no extra lamps or spotlights to heighten the visual effect of the photos. It was not meant to be like an art gallery, but simply a room, a spare bedroom temporarily occupied by a young visitor. There is, of course, no truth to the story that there were colored lights or drum beats coming from a cassette player hidden under the bed. The ambience was meant to be everyday, normal, low-key.
Outside, the party continued. The young men drank as young men do, like the victors they were, and they held their drink like Chileans. The laughter, recalls Muñoz Cano, was contagious, without the slightest hint of menace or anything sinister. Somewhere a trio began to sing, arms around each other, one playing a guitar. Propped against the wall in groups of two or three, other guests talked about love or the future. They were all pleased to be there, at the aviator-poet’s party; they were pleased with themselves and pleased to be friends of Carlos Wieder, although they weren’t sure they quite understood him and were aware of the difference between him and themselves. The line in the corridor kept breaking up; some guests had finished their drinks and went back for more, others got caught up in reaffirmations of eternal friendship and loyalty, a providential surge of fellow-feeling sweeping them back into the living room, from which they returned with flushed cheeks to take their places in the line again. The smoke was thick, especially in the corridor. Wieder stood firm at the doorway. Two lieutenants were arguing and shoving each other (but gently) in the bathroom at the end of the passage. Wieder’s father was one of the few who patiently kept his place in the line. Muñoz Cano, as he admitted in his confession, kept pacing nervously back and forth, filled with foreboding. The two surrealist (or super-realist) reporters were talking with the owner of the flat. As he came and went, Muñoz Cano caught snatches of their conversation: travel, the Mediterranean, Miami, tropical beaches, fishing boats, voluptuous women.
Less than a minute after going in, Tatiana von Beck emerged from the room. She was pale and shaken – everyone noticed. She stared at Wieder as if she were going to say something to him but couldn’t find the words. Then she tried to get to the bathroom, unsuccessfully. After vomiting in the passage, Miss von Beck staggered to the front door with the help of an officer who gallantly offered to take her home, although she kept saying she would prefer to go alone.
The second person to enter the room was a captain who had been one of Wieder’s teachers at the academy. He remained inside. Wieder shut the door behind him (the captain had left it ajar)
and stood there smiling, with an air of growing satisfaction. In the living room, some of the guests asked what on earth had got into Tatiana. She’s just drunk, said a voice that Muñoz Cano didn’t recognize. Someone put on a Pink Floyd record. How can you dance when there are no women? It’s like a fags’ convention here, someone said. You’re not supposed to dance to Pink Floyd, it’s for listening, came the reply. The surrealist reporters whispered to each other. A lieutenant proposed they all go and find some whores straight away. Muñoz Cano says that at this point he felt as if they were outside, under the night sky, deep in the countryside, or at least that is how the voices sounded. In the hallway the atmosphere was even more tense. There was hardly any talking; it was like a dentist’s waiting room. But who, wonders Muñoz Cano, has ever seen a dentist’s waiting room where the rotten teeth (sic) are standing in line?
Wieder’s father broke the spell. He made his way forward politely, addressing each officer by name as he excused himself, then went into the room. The owner of the flat followed him in. Almost immediately he came out again, went up to Wieder, seized him by the lapels, and for a moment it looked as if he would hit him, but then he turned away and stormed off to the living room in search of a drink. Now everyone, including Muñoz Cano, pressed into the bedroom or tried to. There they found the captain, sitting on the bed. He was smoking and reading some typed notes that he had torn off the wall. He seemed calm, although ash from his cigarette had dropped onto one of his trouser legs. Wieder’s father was contemplating some of the hundreds of photos with which the walls and part of the ceiling had been decorated. A cadet who happened to be present, though what he was doing there no one could explain (perhaps he was the younger brother of one of the officers) started crying and swearing and had to be dragged out of the room. The surrealist reporters looked disapproving but maintained their composure. Muñoz Cano claims to have recognized the Garmendia sisters and other missing persons in some of the photos. Most of them were women. The background hardly varied from one photo to another, so it seemed they had all been taken in the same place. The women looked like mannequins, broken, dismembered mannequins in some pictures, although Muñoz Cano could not rule out the possibility that up to thirty per cent of the subjects had been alive when the snapshots were taken. In general (according to Muñoz Cano) the photos were of poor quality, although they made an extremely vivid impression on all who saw them. The order in which they were exhibited was not haphazard: there was a progression, an argument, a story (literal and allegorical), a plan. The images stuck to the ceiling (says Muñoz Cano) depicted a kind of hell, but empty. Those pinned up in the four corners seemed to be an epiphany. An epiphany of madness. In other groups of photos the dominant mood was elegiac (but how, asks Muñoz Cano, could there be anything “nostalgic” or “melancholy” about them?) The symbols were few but telling. A photo showing the cover of a book by Joseph de Maistre: St. Petersburg Dialogues. A photo of a young blonde woman who seemed to be dissolving into the air. A photo of a severed finger, thrown onto a floor of porous, grey cement.