By Night in Chile

mystical rose that opens its petals to reveal another mystical rose and so on until the end of time, speaking in Dante’s Italian, speaking of Dante’s women, but as far as the substance of the conversation was concerned they might just as well have been speaking of D’Annunzio and his whores. And some days later Don Salvador met Jünger in an attic room inhabited by a Guatemalan painter who had not been able to leave Paris since the beginning of the Occupation and whom Don Salvador visited from time to time, bringing on each occasion food of various kinds, bread and pate, a half bottle of Bordeaux, a kilo of spaghetti wrapped in brown paper, tea and sugar, rice and oil and cigarettes, whatever he could find in the kitchen at the embassy or on the black market, and this Guatemalan painter, subjected to our writer’s charity, never thanked him, so even if Don Salvador appeared with a tin of caviar, plum marmalade and champagne, he never said, Thank you, Salvador, or Thank you, Don Salvador, and on one occasion, when visiting the painter, our eminent diplomat even brought with him one of his novels, a novel he had intended to give to someone else, whose name it were better discreetly not to mention here, since the person in question was married, and seeing the Guatemalan painter so down in the dumps, he decided to give him or lend him the novel, and when he came to visit the painter again, a month later, the novel, his novel, was still sitting on the same table or chair where he had left it, and when he asked the painter if he had disliked it or if on the contrary it had afforded him moments of pleasant diversion, the painter,
    withdrawn and ill at ease as he always seemed to be, replied that he had not read it, at which point Don Salvador, feeling downcast, as any author (at least any Chilean or Argentine author) would in such a situation, said: What you’re telling me is you didn’t like it; to which the Guatemalan replied that he neither liked nor disliked the book, he simply hadn’t read it, and then Don Salvador picked up his book and on its cover he could see for himself the layer of dust that accumulates on books (indeed on all things) when they are not in use, and he knew then that the Guatemalan had told the truth, so he did not take offence, although at least two months passed before his next visit to the attic room. And when he returned the painter was thinner than ever, as if he had not eaten a thing during those two months, as if he were determined to let himself waste away while contemplating the street plan of Paris from his window,
    stricken with what in those days certain physicians described as melancholia, although we know it now as anorexia, a condition most common in young girls, like the Lolitas blown this way and that by the shimmering wind through the imaginary streets of Santiago, but which, in those years and in that city subjected to Germanic will, afflicted Guatemalan painters living in dim attic rooms at the top of precipitous stairs, and was not referred to as anorexia but melancholia,
morbus melancholicus
, the malady that beleaguers the pusillanimous, and then Don Salvador Reyes or perhaps Farewell, but if it was Farewell it must have been much later on, recalled Robert Burton’s book,
The Anatomy of Melancholy
, which contains many perspicacious observations on that malady, and it may be that all those present at the time fell silent and held their peace for a minute in memory of those who had succumbed to the influence of black bile, the black bile that is eating away at me now, sapping my strength, bringing me to the brink of tears when I hear the wizened youth’s words, and that night when we fell silent it was as if, in close collaboration with chance, we had composed a scene that might have figured in a silent film, a white screen, test tubes and retorts, and the film burning, burning, burning, and then Don Salvador spoke of Schelling (whom he had never read, according to Farewell), Schelling’s notion of melancholy as yearning for the infinite —
Sehnsucht
— and cited neurosurgical operations in which the nerve fibers joining the thalamus to the cerebral cortex of the frontal lobe had been severed, and then he went back to the Guatemalan painter, skinny, wasted, rickety, pinched, scrawny, gaunt, haggard, debilitated, emaciated, feeble, drawn, in a word: extremely thin, so thin it frightened Don Salvador, who thought, This has gone on long enough, So-and-so (whatever