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they foreshadowed what was to come, in their own sad and skeptical way, which led them one by one to the abyss.
when I wanted a little action, something new, I turned to the stories.
The little world of letters is terrible as well as ridiculous,
eyes, shining at the end of a dim corridor in which the shadowy masses of Latin America’s terror were shifting imperceptibly.
imperceptibly, things would begin to change. As if the world really was shifting. I asked her how old she was. Twenty-two, she said. I must be over thirty then, I said, and even my voice sounded different.
Sometimes Leprince suspects that his face, his education, his attitude, or the books he has read are to blame for this rejection. Between newspaper articles and clandestine missions, he throws himself into the composition of a long poem: more than 600 lines exploring the mystery and the martyrdom of minor poets. When the poem is finished, after three months of strenuous and painful effort, he realizes, to his astonishment, that he is not a minor poet. Any other writer would have pursued his investigations, but Leprince is devoid of curiosity about himself. He burns the poem.
A poet can endure anything. Which amounts to saying that a human being can endure anything. But that’s not true: there are obviously limits to what a human being can endure. Really endure. A poet, on the other hand, can endure anything. We grew up with this conviction. The opening assertion is true, but that way lie ruin, madness, and death.
we are all aliens, “we” meaning every living creature on planet Earth; exiles, all of us, wrote Enrique, or outcasts.
In his newspaper articles and with increasing frequency in his books, A has taken to pontificating on all things great and small, human or divine, with a leaden pedantry, like a man who, having used literature as a ladder to social status and respectability, and now ensconced in his nouveau riche ivory tower, snipes at anything that might tarnish the mirror in which he contemplates himself and the world.
For a long time he wonders how it is possible for the feelings and desires of a human being to swing from one extreme to the other like that. Then he gets drunk or tries to lose himself in a book. The days go by.
His speech was soft and monotonous, although occasionally he would raise his voice, and then he sounded like a madman imitating a madman. I never knew whether those outbursts were intentional, part of some private game, or beyond his control, cries from hell.
He said a killer never hunted a killer, how could he, it would be like a snake biting its own tail. He said that snakes had been known to bite their own tails. He said that snakes had even been known to swallow themselves whole and if you see a snake in the process of swallowing itself you better run because sooner or later something bad is going to happen, some dislocation of reality.
Once I asked him what kind of women he liked. It was a stupid question, asked by an adolescent looking for something to say. But the Grub took it seriously and considered his reply for a long time. Finally he said, Calm women. And then he added, But only the dead are really calm. And after a while, Not even the dead, come to think of it.
then he added, But only the dead are really calm. And after a while, Not even the dead, come to think of it.
Some nights they talked about Paul and Marc. Paul was living on his own and had started painting again, though much less than before, and with no prospect of getting a gallery. According to Linda the problem with Paul’s paintings was that they were very bad.
everyone was lost, so how could one lost person presume to show another the way. Especially since the way, as well as being hidden from everyone, probably didn’t even exist.
Solitude is one thing, death is quite another.
we’d laugh and laugh, although now, to be honest, I can’t remember what was so funny, perhaps just the fact that we were alive.
One day she finally turned up at my house. I was on the patio, pulling up weeds when suddenly I heard steps, turned around and there was Anne. That afternoon we made love to hide the sheer joy of seeing each other again.
there’s no point adding to the pain, or adding our own little mysteries to it. As if the pain itself were not enough of a mystery, as if the pain were not the (mysterious) answer to all mysteries.
violence, real violence, is unavoidable, at least for those of us who were born in Latin America during the fifties and were about twenty years old at the time of Salvador Allende’s death.
At the time, The Eye was reputed to be a homosexual. By which I mean that a rumor to that effect was circulating in the various groups of Chileans in exile, who made it their business partly for the sheer pleasure of denigration and partly to add a little spice to their rather boring lives. In spite of their left-wing convictions, when it came to sexuality, they reacted just like their enemies on the right, who had become the new masters of Chile.
He said that for years he had felt guilty and hidden his sexuality, mainly because he considered himself a socialist and there was a certain degree of prejudice among his friends on the Left. We talked about the antiquated word “invert,” which conjured up desolate landscapes, and the term “ponce,” which I would have written with a c, while The Eye thought it was spelt with an s
You felt you could say good-bye to him at any time of the night and he would simply say good-bye, without reproach or any bad feeling. He was the ideal Chilean, stoic and amiable, a type that has never been very numerous in Chile but cannot be found anywhere else.
Days before, at the motel, I had asked myself, What color is the desert at night? A stupid rhetorical question, yet somehow I felt it held the key to my future, or perhaps not so much my future as my capacity for suffering.
It wasn’t yet completely dark, but it was no longer day. The land all around us and the hills into which the highway went winding were a deep, intense shade of yellow that I have never seen anywhere else. As if the light (though it seemed to me not so much light as pure color) were charged with something, I didn’t know what, but it could well have been eternity.
He reads the surrealist poets and is completely bewildered. A peaceful, solitary man, on the brink of death. Images, wounds. That is all he can see. And the images are dissolving little by little, like the setting sun, leaving only the wounds.
It is not a good time to start an argument, to say the least: in Barcelona the light of dawn can drive people mad if they’ve been up all night, or turn them cold and hard like executioners.
Once again reality has proven that no particular group has a monopoly over demagogy, dogmatism, and ignorance.
This is where the story should end, but life is not as kind as literature.
Henri Lefebvre. The name means nothing to B. And suddenly, in the secondhand bookshop, that name, the only one that means nothing to B, lights up like a match struck in a dark room. Or that is how it feels to B. He would have preferred it to light up like a lamp. And in a cave rather than a dark room, but the fact is that Lefebvre, the name Lefebvre, flares briefly like a match.
So B buys the magazine and loses himself in the streets of Paris, where he has gone precisely to lose himself, to watch the days slip away, and although he’d been imagining the lost days as sunny, as he walks along with the issue of Luna Park in a plastic bag dangling lazily from his hand, that sunny image is cast into shade, as if the old magazine (which is beautifully produced, by the way, and in almost perfect condition in spite of the years and the dust that builds up in secondhand bookshops) had triggered or provoked an eclipse. The eclipse, as B knows, is Henri Lefebvre. It is Henri
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A gust of wind is blowing in his memory, blurring the houses he has seen. After
perhaps they are not machines but bewildering figures, the human race suffering and laughing as it marches toward the void.
that’s where art comes from, he said: life stories. Art history comes along only much later. That’s what art is, he said, the story of a life in all its particularity. It’s the only thing that really is particular and personal. It’s the expression of and, at the same time, the fabric of the particular.
We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain.
