By Night in Chile

the center of Santiago. One afternoon two thugs attacked me. I swear I have no money, lads, I said to them. Don’t you now, Father Ass`hole, replied the muggers. I ended up handing over my wallet and praying for them, but not much. My boredom had taken on a fierce intensity. And my exhaustion had grown in proportion. From that day on, however, I changed the route of my daily walk. I chose less dangerous parts of town, I chose parts of town from which I could contemplate the magnificence of the Cordillera, this was when it was still possible to see the Cordillera at any time of year, before it was hidden by a blanket of smog. I wandered and wandered and sometimes I caught a bus and went on wandering with my head against the window and sometimes I took a taxi and went on wandering through the abominable yellow and the abominable luminous blue of my boredom, from the city center to the rectory, from the rectory to Las Condes, from Las Condes to Providencia, from Providencia to Plaza Italia and the Parque Forestal and from there back to the center and back to the rectory, my cassock flapping in the wind, my cassock like a shadow, my black flag, my prim and proper music, clean, dark cloth, a well in which the sins of Chile sank without a trace. But all that flitting around was to no avail. The boredom did not abate, indeed sometimes in the middle of the day it became unbearable and filled my head with ludicrous ideas. Sometimes, trembling with cold, I would go to a soda fountain and order a Bilz. I would sit on a bar stool and gaze all misty-eyed at the droplets running down the surface of the bottle, while somewhere inside me, a bitter voice was preparing me for the unlikely spectacle of a droplet climbing
up
the glass, against the laws of nature, all the way up to the mouth of the bottle. Then I shut my eyes and prayed or tried to pray while my body was seized with shuddering, and children and adolescents ran back and forth across the Plaza de Armas, spurred on by the summer sun, and the sounds of stifled laughter coming from all directions composed an all too pertinent commentary on my defeat. Then I took a few sips of iced Bilz and resumed my wandering. It was around that time that I met Mr. Raef and, a little later, Mr. Etah. Both were employed by a certain foreign
    gentleman, whom I never had the pleasure of meeting, to run an import-export business. I think they had a clam-tinning plant and shipped the tinned clams to Germany and France. I first encountered Mr. Raef (or Mr. Raef first encountered me) in a yellow street. I was walking along half frozen to death when I heard someone calling my name. I turned around and saw him: a middle-aged man, of average height, neither skinny nor slim, with a nondescript face, just slightly more indigenous than European in its features, wearing a light-colored suit and a most elegant hat, waving to me in the middle of the yellow street, not too far away, while behind him the earth was reflected in sheet upon sheet of glass or plastic. I had never seen him before, but it was as if he had known me all his life. He said he had heard about me from Fr. García Errázuriz and Fr. Muñoz Laguía, whom I held in high esteem and whose favor I enjoyed, and those wise men, he said, had recommended me warmly and without reservations for a delicate mission in Europe, no doubt thinking that an extended trip to the old continent would be just the thing to restore some of the cheerfulness and energy I had lost and was visibly still losing, as from the sort of wound that, refusing to heal, eventually causes the spiritual if not the physical death of the afflicted person. At first I was puzzled and reluctant, since Mr. Raef’s line of business could not have been further removed from my own, but in the end I got into his car and let him drive me to a restaurant in the Calle Banderas, a place that had seen better days, called My Office, where Mr. Raef, without giving anything away concerning his real reasons for tracking me down, spoke instead of people I knew, Farewell among others, and various poets of the younger generation whom I was seeing frequently at the time, just to let me know that he was keeping tabs on the circles I moved in, not only my ecclesiastical colleagues but also the writers with whom I felt an affinity and even my professional contacts, since he also mentioned the chief editor of the newspaper in which I published my column.
    Nevertheless it was obvious that he didn’t