By Night in Chile

leafing through various early editions. On one wall the shelv es were stacked with the finest and most distinguished works of Chilean poetry and narrative, each book inscribed to Farewell by the author with an ingenious, courteous, affectionate or conspiratorial phrase. It occurred to me that my host was, without doubt, the estuary in which all of our land’s literary craft, from dinghies to freighters, from odoriferous fishing boats to extravagant
    battleships, had, for brief or extensive periods, taken shelter. It was no accident that his house had appeared to me shortly before in the guise of an ocean liner! But in fact, I reflected, Farewell’s house was a port. Then I heard a faint sound, as if someone were crawling over the terrace. My curiosity piqued, I opened the French doors and went out. The air was even colder than before, and there was no one on the terrace, but in the garden I could make out an oblong-shaped shadow like a coffin, heading towards a sort of pergola, a Greek folly built to Farewell’s orders, next to a strange equestrian statue, about forty centimeters high, made of bronze, and perched on a porphyry pedestal in such a way that it seemed to be eternally emerging from the pergola. The moon stood out clearly against a cloudless sky. My cassock fluttered in the wind.
    Boldly I advanced towards the place where the shadowy figure had hidden. There he was, next to Farewell’s equestrian fantasy. His back was turned. He was wearing a velvet jacket and a scarf and a narrow-brimmed hat tipped back on his head, and he was softly intoning words that can only have been meant for the moon. I froze in a posture like that of the statue, with my left foot off the ground. It was Neruda. I don’t know what happened next. There was Neruda and there a few meters behind him was I, and, between us, the night, the moon, the equestrian statue, Chilean plants, Chilean wood, the obscure dignity of our land. I bet the wizened youth has no stories like this to tell. He didn’t meet Neruda. He hasn’t met any of our Republic’s major writers in a setting as elemental as the one I have just described. What does it matter what happened before and after? There was Neruda reciting verses to the moon, addressing the minerals of the earth, and the stars, whose nature we can only know by
    intuition. There I was, shivering with cold in my cassock, which suddenly felt several sizes too big, like a cathedral in which I was living naked and
    open-eyed. There was Neruda murmuring words I could not quite understand, but whose essential nature spoke to me deeply from the very first moment. And there was I, tears in my eyes, a poor clergyman lost in the immensity of our land, thirstily drinking in the words of our most sublime poet. And I ask myself now, propped up on my elbow: Has the wizened youth ever had an experience like that?
    I ask myself seriously: Has he ever in all his days experienced anything like that? I have read his books. In secret and wearing gloves, but I’ve read them.
    And there is nothing in them to match that scene. There’s aimless wandering, street fights, horrible deaths down back alleys, the obligatory doses of sex, obscenity and indecency, dusk in Japan, not in Chile of course, hell and chaos, hell and chaos, hell and chaos. Oh my poor memory. My poor reputation. Now for the dinner. I cannot remember it. Neruda and his wife. Farewell and the young poet. Myself. Questions. Why was I wearing a cassock? A smile from me.
    Fresh-faced. I didn’t have time to change. Neruda recites a poem. He and
    Farewell recall a particularly knotty line from Góngora. Naturally the young poet turns out to be a Nerudian. Neruda recites another poem. The meal is exquisite. Chilean tomato salad, game birds with béarnaise sauce, baked conger eel brought in specially from the coast on Farewell’s orders. Wine from the estate. Compliments. After dinner the talk going on into the small hours, Farewell and Neruda’s wife playing records on a green gramophone that caught the poet’s fancy. Tangos. An awful voice reeling off awful stories. Suddenly, perhaps as a result of having consumed liberal quantities of liquor, I felt sick. I remember I went out on to the terrace and looked for the moon, in which our poet had confided earlier that evening. I steadied myself against an
    enormous pot of geraniums and fought back the nausea. I heard paces behind me. I turned around. There was Farewell’s Homeric silhouette, facing