By Night in Chile

today, I said. And I turned my back on them and walked away at a decidedly brisk pace, swinging my arms and wearing a smile that relaxed into unbridled laughter as soon as I passed through the barrier of washing, my walk at that point becoming a trot with a vaguely
    military rhythm to it. In the garden at Là-bas, beside a pergola built of fine timber, Farewell’s guests were listening to Neruda recite. I approached quietly and stood beside his young disciple, who was smoking with a rather unpleasant frown of concentration on his face, while the words of the great man burrowed down through the various layers of the earth’s crust and rose up to the
    pergola’s carved crossbeams and beyond, to the Baudelairean clouds on their solitary voyages through the clear skies of Chile. At six that evening my first visit to Là-bas came to an end. A car belonging to one of Farewell’s guests dropped me at Chillán, just in time to catch the train, which took me back to Santiago. My literary baptism had reached its conclusion. During the nights that followed, so many varied and often contradictory images crowded in on me, inhabiting my thoughts and my sleeplessness! Again and again I would see
    Farewell’s black, rotund silhouette in an enormous doorway. His hands were in his pockets and he seemed to be intently watching time go by. I also saw
    Farewell sitting in a chair at his club, with his legs crossed, speaking of literary immortality. Ah, literary immortality. At times I could make out a group of figures joined at the waist, as if they were dancing the conga, up and down, back and forth in a salon whose walls were crammed with paintings.
    Somebody I could not see was saying, Dance, Father. I can’t, I replied, it is contrary to my vows. With one hand I was holding a little notebook in which, with the other, I was drafting a book review. The book was called
As Time Goes By
. As time goes by, as time goes by, the whipcrack of the years, the precipice of illusions, the ravine that swallows up all human endeavor except the struggle to survive. The syncopated serpent of the conga line kept moving steadily towards my corner, lifting first its left legs all at once, then the right ones, and then I spotted Farewell among the dancers, Farewell with his hands on the hips of a woman who moved in the most exclusive circles of Chilean society at the time, a woman with a Basque surname, which unfortunately I have forgotten, while Farewell’s hips in turn were gripped by an old man whose body was perilously frail, more dead than alive, but who beamed a smile at all and sundry and seemed to be having as much fun as anyone in the conga line.
    Sometimes, images from my childhood and adolescence would come back to me: my father’s shadow slipping away down the corridors of the house as if it were a weasel, a ferret, or to employ a more appropriate simile, an eel in an
    inadequate container. All conversation, all dialogue, is forbidden, said a voice. Sometimes I wondered about the nature of that voice. Was it the voice of an angel? Was it the voice of my guardian angel? Was it the voice of a demon? It did not take me long to discover that it was my own voice, the voice of my superego guiding my dream like a pilot with nerves of steel, it was the super-I driving a refrigerated truck down the middle of a road engulfed in flames, while the id groaned and rambled on in a vaguely Mycenaean jargon. My ego, of course, was sleeping. Sleeping and toiling. It was around this time that I started working at the Catholic University. It was around this time that I published my first poems, my first reviews and my notes on literary life in Santiago. I prop myself up on one elbow, stretch my neck and I remember. Enrique Lihn, the most brilliant poet of his generation, Giacone, Uribe Arce, Jorge Teillier, Efraín Barquero, Delia Domínguez, Carlos de Rokha, all the gilded youth. All of them or almost all under the influence of Neruda, except for a few who succumbed to the influence or rather the teaching of Nicanor Parra. And I remember Rosamel del Valle. I knew him, of course. I reviewed them all: Rosamel, Díaz Casanueva, Braulio Arenas and his associates at La Mandrágora, Teillier and the young poets from the rainy south, the novelists of the fifties, Donoso, Edwards, Lafourcade.
    All of them good people, all of them splendid writers. Gonzalo Rojas, Anguita. I reviewed Manuel Rojas and wrote about Juan Emar, María Luisa Bombal and Marta Brunet. I