By Night in Chile

came the
    elections and Allende won. And I stood before the mirror in my room and tried to formulate the crucial question, which I had saved for just that moment, and the question refused to emerge from my bloodless lips. It was absolutely unbearable.
    The night of Allende’s victory I went out and walked all the way to Farewell’s house. He opened the door himself. How old he looked. He must have been about eighty by then, or older, and he had stopped touching my belt or my hips each time we met. Come in, Sebastián, he said. I followed him into the living room.
    Farewell was making phone calls. The first person he called was Neruda. He couldn’t get through. Then he called Nicanor Parra. Engaged too. I collapsed into a chair and covered my face with my hands. I could hear Farewell ringing the numbers of four or five other poets, without any luck. We started drinking.
    I suggested he ring up some Catholic poets we both knew, if that was going to make him feel better. They’re the worst, said Farewell, they’re probably all out in the street, celebrating Allende’s victory. After a few hours Farewell fell asleep in his chair. I tried to put him to bed, but he was too heavy, so I left him there. When I got back to my house, I went straight to my Greek classics.
    Let God’s will be done, I said. I’m going to reread the Greeks. Respecting the tradition, I started with Homer, then moved on to Thales of Miletus, Xenophanes of Colophon, Alcmaeon of Croton, Zeno of Elea (wonderful), and then a
    pro-Allende general was killed, and Chile restored diplomatic relations with Cuba and the national census recorded a total of 8,884,746 Chileans and the first episodes of the soap opera
The Right to be Born
were broadcast on television, and I read Tyrtaios of Sparta and Archilochos of Paros and Solon of Athens and Hipponax of Ephesos and Stesichoros of Himnera and Sappho of Mytilene and Anakreon of Teos and Pindar of Thebes (one of my favorites), and the
    government nationalized the copper mines and then the nitrate and steel
    industries and Pablo Neruda won the Nobel Prize and Díaz Casanueva won the National Literature Prize and Fidel Castro came on a visit and many people thought he would stay and live in Chile for ever and Pérez Zujovic the Christian Democrat ex-minister was killed and Lafourcade published
White Dove
and I gave it a good review, you might say I hailed it in glowing terms, although deep down I knew it wasn’t much of a book, and the first anti-Allende march was organized, with people banging pots and pans, and I read Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides, all the tragedies, and Alkaios of Mytilene and Aesop and Hesiod and Herodotus (a titan among authors), and in Chile there were shortages and inflation and black marketeering and long lines for food and Farewell’s estate was expropriated in the Land Reform along with many others and the Bureau of Women’s Affairs was set up and Allende went to Mexico and visited the seat of the United Nations in New York and there were terrorist attacks and I read Thucydides, the long wars of Thucydides, the rivers and plains, the winds and the plateaus that traverse the time-darkened pages of Thucydides, and the men he describes, the warriors with their arms, and the civilians, harvesting grapes, or looking from a mountainside at the distant horizon, the horizon where I was just one among millions of beings still to be born, the far-off horizon
    Thucydides glimpsed and me there trembling indistinguishably, and I also reread Demosthenes and Menander and Aristotle and Plato (whom one cannot read too often), and there were strikes and the colonel of a tank regiment tried to mount a coup, and a cameraman recorded his own death on film, and then Allende’s naval aide-de-camp was assassinated and there were riots, swearing, Chileans
    blaspheming, painting on walls, and then nearly half a million people marched in support of Allende, and then came the coup d’état, the putsch, the military uprising, the bombing of La Moneda and when the bombing was finished, the president committed suicide and that put an end to it all. I sat there in silence, a finger between the pages to mark my place, and I thought: Peace at last. I got up and looked out the window: Peace and quiet. The sky was blue, a deep, clean blue, with a few scattered clouds. I saw a helicopter in the
    distance. Leaving the window open, I knelt and prayed, for Chile, for all Chileans, the living and the dead.