By Night in Chile

outskirts of Avignon took on a deep red hue, like the color of sunsets seen from an airplane, or the color of dawns, when the passenger is woken gently by the engines whistling in his ears and lifts up the little blind and sees the horizon marked with a red line, like the planet’s femoral artery, or the planet’s aorta, gradually swelling, and I saw that swelling blood vessel in the sky over
    Avignon, the bloodstained flight of the starlings, Ta Gueule splashing color like an abstract expressionist painter, ah, the peace, the harmony of nature, nowhere as evident or as unequivocal as in Avignon, and then Fr. Fabrice
    whistled and we waited for an indefinable time, measured only by the beating of our hearts, until our quivering warrior came to rest upon his arm. And then I took the train and with a heavy heart left Avignon behind and traveled to Spain, and of course the first thing I did was to go to Pamplona, where the churches were maintained by other methods, which did not interest me, or were simply not maintained at all, but I owed my Opus Dei colleagues a visit, and they
    introduced me to the Opus publishers and the principals of the Opus schools and the Rector of the University, which is also run by Opus Dei, and all of them showed an interest in my work as literary critic, poet and teacher, and they invited me to publish a book with them, the Spanish are so generous, and
    punctilious too, for the very next day I signed a contract, and then they gave me a letter addressed to me and written by Mr. Raef, in which he asked How’s Europe going, what’s the weather like and the food and the sites of historical interest, a ridiculous letter but somehow it seemed to conceal another,
    invisible letter, more serious in content, and this hidden letter, although I couldn’t tell what it said or even be sure it really existed, worried me deeply.
    And then, after much hugging and writing down addresses and friendly, protracted farewells, I left Pamplona and went to Burgos, where I was to meet Fr. Antonio, a little old priest with a falcon called Rodrigo, who didn’t hunt pigeons, partly because Fr. Antonio was now too old to accompany the raptor on his forays, and partly because, after an initial period of enthusiasm, the priest had begun to have doubts about using such an expeditious method to be rid of birds which, in spite of their shitting, were God’s creatures too. By the time I arrived in Burgos, Rodrigo the falcon was eating only mincemeat or sausage meat and the offal that Fr. Antonio or his housekeeper bought at the market, liver, heart, scraps, and idleness had reduced him to a sorry state, similar to the state in which Fr. Antonio was languishing, his cheeks hollowed by doubt and untimely repentance, which is the worst kind, and when I arrived in Burgos, Fr.
    Antonio was lying on his bed, a poor priest’s Spartan pallet, under a coarse woollen blanket, in a big room with stone walls, and the falcon was in a corner, shivering with cold, wearing his hood, without the slightest trace of the elegance I had observed in his Italian and French counterparts, a wretched falcon and a wretched priest, wasting away the pair of them, and Fr. Antonio saw me, and tried to lift himself up on one elbow, just as I was to do years later, aeons later, two or three minutes later, when the wizened youth appeared like a bolt from the blue, and I saw Fr. Antonio’s elbow and his arm as skinny as a chicken’s leg, and Fr. Antonio told me he had been thinking, I have been
    thinking, he said, maybe this business with the falcons is not such a good idea, it’s true they protect churches from the corrosive and, in the long term, destructive effects of pigeon shit, but one mustn’t forget that pigeons or doves are the earthly symbol of the Holy Spirit, are they not? And the Catholic church can do without the Father and the Son, but not the Holy Spirit, who is far more important than most lay people suspect, more important than the Son who died on the cross, more important than the Father who made the stars and the earth and all the universe, and then with the tips of my fingers I touched the forehead and temples of the Castilian priest and realized immediately that he was running a temperature of at least 104 degrees Fahrenheit, and I called his housekeeper and sent her to fetch a doctor, and while I was waiting for the doctor to arrive, for something to do I examined the falcon, who seemed to be freezing to death, perched on a