By Night in Chile

writers and artists could gather to drink and talk as long as they liked. That’s the truth. So this is how it happened. There was a woman. Her name was María Canales. She was a writer, she was pretty, she was young. In my opinion she was not without talent. I thought so then, and still do. Her talent was, how can I put it? inward,
    sheathed, withdrawn. Others have recanted, they have put it all behind them and forgotten. Naked, the wizened youth lunges at his prey. But I know the story of María Canales, the whole story, everything that happened. She was a writer.
    Maybe she still is. Writers (and critics) didn’t have many places to go. María Canales had a house on the outskirts of the city. A big house, surrounded by a garden full of trees, a house with a comfortable sitting room, with a fireplace and good whiskey, good cognac, a house that was open to friends once or twice a week, even occasionally three times a week. I don’t know how we got to know her.
    I suppose one day she showed up at the editorial office of a newspaper or a literary magazine or at the Chilean Society of Authors. She probably attended a writing workshop. In any case before long we all knew her and she knew all of us. She was pleasant company. As I said before, she was pretty. She had brown hair and large eyes and she read everything she was told to read or so she led us to believe. She went to exhibitions. Maybe we met her at an exhibition. Maybe at the end of a vernissage she invited people to continue the party at her house. She was pretty, as I said. She was interested in art, she liked to talk with painters and performance artists and video artists, maybe because they were not as well educated as the writers. Or so she thought. Then she began to mix with writers and realized that they were not particularly well educated either.
    What a relief that must have been. A very Chilean sort of relief. So few of us are truly cultured in this godforsaken country. The rest are completely
    ignorant. Pleasant, likeable people all the same. María Canales was pleasant and likeable: she was a generous host, nothing was too much trouble when it came to making her guests feel at home, for that, it seemed, was what mattered most to her. And people really did feel comfortable at the select gatherings or
    receptions or soirées or parties hosted by the novice writer. She had two sons.
    I haven’t mentioned them yet. If I remember rightly, she had two young sons, the elder was two or three years old and the younger about eight months, and she was married to a North American called James Thompson, whom she referred to as Jimmy, who worked as a salesman or an executive for a firm that had recently set up a branch in Chile and another in Argentina. Naturally, everyone got to meet Jimmy. I met him too. He was a typical North American, tall, with brown hair slightly lighter in color than his wife’s, not very talkative but polite.
    Sometimes he was present at María’s get-togethers and on those occasions he was generally to be seen listening to one of the duller guests with infinite
    patience. By the time the visitors arrived, and emerged from the cheerful caravan of miscellaneous automobiles, the boys would be asleep in their room on the second floor, it was a three-story house, and sometimes the maid or the nanny would carry them downstairs in their pajamas, to say hello to the newly arrived guests and be subjected to their baby talk and remarks about how cute or well behaved they were, or how much they looked like their mother or their father, although to tell the truth, the elder boy, who was called Sebastián, like me, didn’t look like either of his parents, as opposed to the younger boy, named Jimmy, who was the spitting image of Jimmy senior, with a few South American features inherited from María Canales. Then the children would
    disappear along with the maid, who shut herself away in the room next to theirs, while downstairs, in María Canales’s spacious sitting room, the party would begin in earnest, with the hostess serving whiskies all round, Debussy on the record player, or Webern performed by the Berlin Philharmonic, and after a while someone would be moved to recite a poem, and someone else would weigh up the virtues of this or that novel, the conversation would turn to painting or contemporary dance, little groups would form, the latest work by so-and-so would take a hiding, but wasn’t what’s-his-name’s recent performance a