By Night in Chile

watching from a yellow street corner and yelling at me. I can hear some of his words. He is saying I belong to Opus Dei.
    I have never hidden that, I say. But of course he’s not even listening to me. I can see his jaws and his lips moving and I know he’s shouting, but I cannot hear his words. He can see me whispering, propped up on one elbow, while my bed negotiates the meanders of my fever, but he cannot hear my words either. I would like to tell him this is getting us nowhere. I would like to tell him that even the poets of the Chilean Communist Party were dying for a kind word from me, a word of praise for their poetry. And I did praise their poetry. Let’s be
    civilized, I whisper. But he cannot hear me. From time to time I catch a few of his words. Insults, of course. Queer, is he saying? Opus Dei? Opus Dei queer, did he say? Then my bed swings around and I can hear him no longer. How pleasant to hear nothing. How pleasant not to have to prop myself up on an elbow, on these poor old weary bones, to stretch out in the bed and rest and look at the gray sky and let the bed drift in the care of the saints, half closing my eyes, to remember nothing and only to hear my blood pulsing. But then my lips begin to work again and I go on speaking. I never pretended I wasn’t a member of Opus Dei, young man, I say to the wizened youth, although I can no longer see him, although I no longer know if he is behind me or off to the side or lost in the mangrove swamps that line the river. I never made a secret of it. Everyone knew.
    Everyone in Chile knew. You must be the only person who didn’t, or you’re pretending to be more of a dimwit than you are. Silence. The wizened youth does not reply. In the distance I can hear what sounds like a gang of primates chattering away, all at once, in a state of high excitement, and then I take one hand out from under the blankets and put it in the water and laboriously steer the bed around, using my hand as an oar, moving my four fingers together like a punkah, and when the bed has turned around, all I can see is the jungle and the river and its tributaries and the sky, no longer gray but luminous blue, and two very small, very distant clouds scudding like children swept along by the wind.
    The chattering of the monkeys has died away. What a relief. What silence. What peace. A peace that summons the memory of other blue skies, other diminutive clouds scudding eastwards before the wind, and how they filled my spirit with boredom. Yellow streets and blue skies. As one approached the center of the city, the streets gradually lost that awful yellow color and turned into neat, gray, steely streets, although I knew that the slightest scratch would reveal yellow under the gray. And that filled my soul not only with lassitude but also with boredom, or maybe the lassitude began to turn into boredom, heaven knows, in any case there came a time of yellow streets and luminous blue skies and deep boredom, during which my poetic activity ceased, or rather my poetic activity underwent a dangerous mutation, since I did not actually st op putting pen to paper, but the poems were full of insults and blasphemy and worse, and I had the good sense to destroy them as soon as the sun came up the next day, without showing them to anyone, although at the time many would have considered it an honor to see them, poems whose deep meaning, or at least the meaning I thought I glimpsed in their depths, left me in a state of perplexity and anguish that lasted all day long. And this state of perplexity and anguish was accompanied by a state of boredom and exhaustion. Monumental boredom and exhaustion. The perplexity and the anguish were small by comparison, and lived encrusted in some cranny of the general state of boredom and exhaustion. Like a wound within a wound. And then I stopped giving classes. I stopped saying mass. I stopped reading the newspaper each morning and discussing the news with my brothers in Christ. My book reviews became muddled (although I did not stop writing them).
    Several poets came to see me and asked what was wrong. Several priests came to see me and asked what was troubling my spirit. I went to confession and prayed.
    But the rings under my eyes gave me away. And indeed at the time I was getting very little sleep, sometimes three hours, sometimes two. In the mornings I would walk from the rectory to the vacant lots, from the vacant lots to the
    shantytowns, from the shantytowns back to