By Night in Chile

Then I rang Farewell. How are you feeling? I asked him. I’m dancing a jig, he said. The following days were strange. It was as if until then we had all been dreaming and had suddenly woken to real life, although occasionally it seemed to be the other way round, as if we had all been plunged into a dream. And we went on living day by day in accordance with the abnormal conventions of the dream world: anything can happen and whatever happens the dreamer
accepts
it. Movement works differently. We move like gazelles or the way gazelles move in a tiger’s dream. We move like a painting by Vasarely. We move as if we had no shadows and were unperturbed by that appalling fact. We speak. We eat. But underneath we are trying not to realize that we are speaking and eating. One night I found out that Neruda had died. I rang Farewell. Pablo’s dead, I said. He died of cancer, said Farewell, cancer. Yes, cancer, I said. Should we go to the funeral? I’m going, said Farewell. I’ll go with you, I said. After I hung up, I felt as if I had dreamed the whole conversation. The next day we went to the cemetery. Farewell was very elegantly dressed. He looked like a phantom ship, but very elegant. They’re going to give me back my estate, he whispered into my ear. It was a large funeral cortege and people kept joining it as we proceeded. Look at those gorgeous boys! said Farewell. Control yourself, I said. I looked him in the face: Farewell was winking at some strangers. They were young and seemed to be in a bad mood, but at the time I felt they had sprung from a dream in which good and bad moods were no more than metaphysical accidents. I could hear someone behind us who had recognized Farewell saying, That’s Farewell, the critic. Words emerging from one dream and entering another. Then someone started shouting.
    Hysterically. Other hysterics joined in the chant. What’s this vulgar
    carrying-on? asked Farewell. Just some riffraff, I replied, don’t worry, it’s not far to the cemetery now. And what has become of Pablo? asked Farewell. He’s up front, in the coffin, I said. Don’t be an idiot, said Farewell, I haven’t gone completely gaga yet. I’m sorry, I said. It’s all right, he replied. What a pity they don’t do funerals like they used to, said Farewell. Indeed, I said. A proper send-off, with eulogies and so forth, said Farewell. In the French manner, I said. I would have written a lovely speech for Pablo, said Farewell, and he started to cry. We must be dreaming, I thought. As we were leaving the cemetery, arm in arm, I saw a man propped against a tomb, asleep. A shiver ran down my spine. The following days were fairly calm, and I was tired from reading all those Greeks. So I returned to the literature of Chile. I tried to write a few poems. For a start everything came out in iambic meter. Then I don’t know what came over me. My poetry veered from the angelic to the demonic. Often in the evening I was tempted to show my confessor the verses I had written, but I never did. I wrote about women, hatefully, cruelly, I wrote about homosexuals and children lost in derelict railway stations. If I had to describe my poetry, I would say that, until then, it had always been Apollonian, yet I had begun to write in what might tentatively be described as a Dionysiac mode. But in fact it wasn’t Dionysiac poetry. Or demonic poetry. It was just raving mad. Those poor women who appeared in my poems, what had they ever done to me? Deceived me perhaps? What had those poor homosexuals done to me? Nothing. Nothing. Not the women, not the queers. And the children, for God’s sake, what could they
    possibly have done? So what were those hapless creatures doing there, stranded in those landscapes of decay? Maybe I was one of those children? Maybe they were the children I would never have? Maybe they were the lost children of lost parents I would never know? So why was I raving on and on? My daily life, by contrast, was perfectly calm. I spoke in measured tones, never got angry, was organized and punctual. I prayed each night and fell asleep without difficulty.
    Occasionally I had nightmares, but in those days just about everybody had nightmares from time to time, though some more often than others. In the
    mornings, nevertheless, I woke up refreshed, ready to face the day’s tasks. One particular morning, I was informed that some visitors were waiting for me in the living room. I finished washing and went down. I saw Mr. Raef