By Night in Chile

Paris.
    Relieved, our diplomat cleverly changed the subject and asked Jünger what he thought of the silent Central American’s work. Jünger said that the painter seemed to be suffering from acute anaemia and that, clearly, the best thing for him to do would be to eat something. At that point Don Salvador realized that he was still holding the packets of food he had brought for the Guatemalan, a little tea, a little sugar, a round loaf of bread and half a kilo of goat’s cheese that none of his Chilean colleagues would eat, purloined from the embassy kitchen. Jünger looked at the food. Don Salvador blushed and proceeded to put it on the shelves while explaining to the Guatemalan that he had “brought him a few little things.” The Guatemalan, as usual, neither thanked him nor turned around to see the little things in question. Don Salvador recalled that for a few seconds the situation seemed perfectly ridiculous. Jünger and himself standing there, not knowing what to say, and the Central American painter refusing to budge from the window, obstinately keeping his back turned. But Jünger knew how to respond to any situation, and compensating for his host’s torpor, made Don Salvador feel at home, drawing up two chairs and offering him Turkish
    cigarettes, which it seemed he kept exclusively for friends or unforeseen situations, since he himself smoked none that evening. Far from the idle but agitated and often indiscreet chatter of the Parisian salons, the Chilean writer and the German writer enjoyed a free-ranging conversation, touching on the human and the divine, war and peace, Italian painting and Nordic painting, the source of evil and the effects of evil that sometimes seem to be triggered by chance, the flora and fauna of Chile, which Jünger seemed to have read about in the works of his fellow countryman Philippi, who was at once a true Chilean and a true German, all the while drinking cups of tea prepared by Don Salvador himself (which the Guatemalan, when invited to join them, refused almost inaudibly), the tea being followed by two glasses of cognac from the supply that Jünger carried in his silver hip flask, and this time the Guatemalan did not say no, which made both writers smile discreetly at first, then laugh long and loud, proffering the appropriate witticisms. And then, when the Guatemalan had gone back to the window with his due ration of cognac, Jünger, returning to the canvas that had intrigued him, asked the painter if he had spent long in the Aztec capital and what impression his time there had left, to which the Guatemalan replied that the week or slightly less he had spent in Mexico City had left no more than a vague blur in his memory, and, in any case, he had painted that picture, now the object of the German’s attention or curiosity, many years later, in Paris, without really thinking about Mexico at all, although under the influence of what, for want of a better expression, he called a Mexican mood. And that set Jünger musing on the sealed wells of memory, perhaps imagining that during his brief stay in Mexico City the Guatemalan had unwittingly stored away a vision that would not surface again until many years later, although Don Salvador, who was agreeing with everything the Teuton hero said, thought to himself perhaps it was not a question of sealed wells suddenly reopened, or in any case not the sealed wells Jünger had in mind, and as soon as this thought occurred to him his head began to buzz, as if hundreds of sand flies or horseflies were escaping from it, flies visible only through the prism of a hot, dizzy feeling, in spite of the fact that the Guatemalan’s attic room could hardly have been described as a warm place, and the sand flies flew back and forth in front of his eyelids, transparently, like winged droplets of sweat, making the buzzing noise that horseflies make, or the noise that sand flies make, which is more or less the same, although of course there are no sand flies in Paris, and then Don
    Salvador, as he nodded in agreement once again, by this stage understanding only snatches of Jünger’s oblivious disquisition in French, glimpsed or thought he glimpsed a part of the truth, and in that tiny part of the truth he could see the Guatemalan in Paris, the war already underway or about to begin, the
    Guatemalan already accustomed to spending long, dead (or dying) hours in front of his only window, contemplating the landscape of Paris, and
Landscape: