Tales of the Autumn in Gerona A woman—I should say a stranger—who caresses you, jokes with you, is sweet with you and brings you to the edge of the abyss. There, the character cries ah or pales. As though he were within a kaleidoscope and saw the eye that sees him. Colors that order themselves in an alien geometry beyond all that you are prepared to accept as good. So begins the autumn, between the Oñar River and the hill of Las Pedreras. * The stranger is sprawled on the bed. Between loveless scenes (flat bodies, sadomasochistic objects, pills and unemployed faces) you arrive at the moment that you name the autumn and discover the stranger. In the room, in addition to the reflection that swallows everything, you notice stones, yellow slates, sand, hairs on the pillows, abandoned pajamas. Then everything fades. * She jokes with you, she caresses you. A solitary walk through the plaza of cinemas. In the center an allegory in bronze: “The battle against the French.” The private with pistol lifted, it could be said on the verge of shooting the air, is young; his face is contorted to show fatigue, hair disheveled, and she caresses you without saying anything, although the word kaleidoscope slips like saliva from her lips and then the scenes become transparent in something you could call the moan of the pale character or geometry around your naked eye. * After a dream (I have extrapolated in the dream the film I saw the day before) I say to myself that the autumn cannot be but for money. Money like the umbilical cord that links you to the girls and the landscape. Money that I will never have and that by exclusion makes me an anchoret, the character that suddenly pales in the desert. * “This could be hell for me.” The kaleidoscope moves with the serenity and tedium of days. For her, in the end, there was no hell. She simply avoided living here. Simple solutions guide our acts. The teachings of love have only one motto: don’t suffer. That which moves away can be called desert, rock in the shape of a man, the tectonic thinker. * The screen, crossed by bars, opens and it is your eye which opens around the bar. Every day the study of the desert opens like the word “erasure”. A countryside erased? A face in the foreground? Lips that shape another word? The stranger crossed the geometry of autumn only so that your nerves would open. Now the stranger returns to disappearing. Anew you assume the appearance of solitude.

* She says she’s fine. You say you’re fine and think she really must be fine and that you really are fine. Her gaze is dreamy, as though seeing for the first time the scenes she’s always wanted. Later the stale breath arrives, the eyes hollow although she says (while you stay quiet, like in a silent film) that hell can’t be the world she lives in. Cut this piece of shit text! she screams. The kaleidoscope assumes the appearance of solitude. Crac, sounds your heart. * The adventure is left to the character, and to say “it has begun to snow, boss”. * From this side of the river all that interests you maintains the same mechanics. Terraces open to receive the most sun possible, girls parking their scooters, screens covered by curtains, the retired sitting on benches. Here the text isn’t conscious of anything but its own life. The shadow you provisionally call author hardly bothers to describe how the stranger arranged everything for her Atlantis moment. * No wonder that the room of the author should be full of allusive posters. Naked, she spins through the center contemplating the peeled walls where signs flash, nervous drawings, phrases out of context. Resonating in the kaleidoscope, like an echo, the voices of all those who left him and, for this, burn in his patience. The patience of Gerona before the Third War. A mild autumn. Her scent in the room scarcely remains… The perfume was called Fleeting slaughter A famous doctor had operated on her left eye… * The real situation: I was alone in my house, I was twenty-eight years old, I had just returned from spending the summer outside the province working, and the rooms were full of spiderwebs. I still didn’t have work and the money, rationed, could last for four months. Neither did I have hopes of finding other work. The police had renewed my visa for three months. Not authorized to work in Spain. I didn’t know what to do. It was a mild autumn. * Two in the morning and the white screen. My character sits in an armchair, cigarette in one hand and a glass of cognac in the other. He meticulously recomposes some scenes. Like so, the stranger sleeps with perfect calm. Then she caresses his shoulders. Then she tells him not to accompany her to the station. There you see a sign, the tip of the iceberg. The stranger swears that she wasn’t planning to sleep with him. Friendship—her smile now enters the zone of overstretched—doesn’t presuppose any kind of hell.

It’s strange, from here it seems like my character is frightening flies with his left hand. He could, certainly, transform his anguish to fear if he were to lift his gaze and see between the rotting beams the eyes of a rat fixed on him. Crac, his heart. Patience like a gray ribbon within the kaleidoscope that you turn over and over again. And if the character were to speak of happiness? Does happiness begin in his twenty-eight-year-old body? * What there is behind when there is something behind: “call the boss and tell him that it has begun to snow”. There is not much more to add to the autumn of Gerona. A girl showers, her skin reddening under hot water; over her hair, like a turban, an old discolored towel. Suddenly, while painting her lips in front of the mirror, she looks at me (I am behind) and says not to forget to accompany her to the station. I replay the same scene now, although there is no one before the mirror. * To be near the stranger it’s necessary to stop being the invisible man. She says, with every action, that the only mystery is the future secret. Can the mouth of the invisible man draw near the mirror? Extract me from this text, I will mean to say to her, show me the clear and simple things, the clear and simple cries, fear, death, your Atlantis moment having dinner with family. * The autumn in Gerona: the School of Fine Arts, the plaza of cinemas, the unemployment rate in Catalonia, three months permission to reside in Spain, the fish of the Oñar (carps?), invisibility, the author who contemplates the lights of the city and above them a strip of gray smoke over the metallic blue night, and at the bottom the silhouettes of mountains. Words of a friend referring to his companion who he has been living with for seven years: “she is my patron”. It doesn’t make sense to write poetry, the old ones speak of a new war and sometimes the recurrent dream returns: an author writing in a shadowed room; in the distance, rumors of rival gangs fighting by a supermarket; rows of cars that will never again drive. The stranger, despite it all, smiles at me, moves through the autumns and finds herself at my side. When I wait for screaming or a scene, she only asks me why I do this to myself. Why I do this to myself? The screen returns to white like a plot. * The author suspends his work in the dark room, the boys stop fighting, the lights of the cars illuminate as though touched by fire. On the screen I see only lips that spell her Atlantis moment.

* Death also has systems of clarity. It doesn’t serve me (I feel it close to me, but it doesn’t serve me), the tentacled and solar love of John Varley, for example, if that lucid gaze that embraces a situation can't be another lucid gaze met with another situation, etc. And even if beyond this, the free falling it assumes doesn’t serve me either for what I truly want: the space that mediates between the stranger and me, that which I can misname like autumn in Gerona, the empty ribbon that separates us despite all the risks. The moment of origin that is the passport of R. B. in October of 1981, that establishes him as Chilean with permission to reside in Spain, without working, for another three months. The emptiness where not even nausea fits! * And so, it’s no wonder, the profusion of posters in the author's room. Circles, cubes, cylinders fragmenting rapidly give us an idea of his face when the light presses in; his lack of money transforms into desperation for love; any gesture of his hands transforms into pity. His face, fragmented around him, seems to submit to the eye that reorders it, the ideal kaleidoscope. (That is: desperation for love, pity, etc.) * Sunday morning. La Rambla is empty, there are only some old people sitting on benches reading the newspaper. At the other end the silhouettes of two policemen begin their rounds. Isabel arrives: I look up and watch her. She smiles, she has red hair. Beside her there is a guy with short hair and a four-day beard. He says he is going to open a bar, a cheap bar where his friends can go. “You’re invited to the opening.” In the newspaper there is an interview with a famous Catalan painter. “How does it feel to be in the most important galleries in the world at 33?” A big red smile. Beside the text, two photos of the painter with his paintings. “I work twelve hours a day, it is a schedule I impose upon myself.” Beside me, on the same bench, an old person with another newspaper begins to stir; objective truth, whispers my mind. Isabel and the future proprietor take their leave, intending to go, they tell me, to a party in a neighboring pueblo. At the other end the silhouettes of the policemen have become exaggerated and are already almost over me. I close my eyes. Sunday morning. Today, like last night and the day before, I phoned a friend from Barcelona. No one answers. I imagine for a few seconds the phone ringing in her house where no one is, like last night and the day before, then I open my eyes and check the coin-slot and don’t see any coins. * Desolation and anguish consume my heart. I abhor the arrival of day, which invites me to a life whose truth and meaning is uncertain for me. I pass the nights shaken by constant nightmares.

Fichte.1

1 Fichte is a German philosopher concerned with self-awareness. This is a linguistic pun in Spanish, as the verb “fichar” means “to

identify” and therefore the command to “identify yourself” would be “Fichate”.

In fact, desolation, anguish, etc. The pale character waiting; at the exit of a cinema?, a deportation camp?, the arrival of the immaculate grave. (From this autumnal perspective his nervous system seemed to be entwined in a film of war propaganda.) * I clean my teeth, face, arms, neck, ears. Every day I go down to the post office. Every day I masturbate. I devote a large part of the morning to preparing food for the rest of the day. I pass the dead hours sitting, leafing through newspapers. I try, on many occasions in the café, to become convinced that I am in love, but that it lacks some sweetness—a particular sweetness—betrays the opposite. Sometimes I think I am living somewhere else. After eating I sleep with my head on the table, sitting. I dream the following: Giorgio Fox, a comical character, art critic for seventeen years, dines in a restaurant on the 30th floor in Rome. This is all. Upon waking I think that the luminosity of art adopted and recognized in the fullness of youth is something that in an absolute manner has distanced itself from me. Absolutely, I was within paradise, like an observer or a castaway, there where paradise took the form of the labyrinth, but never as executor. Now, at twenty-eight, paradise has distanced itself from me and the only thing I am able to see is youth foregrounded in all its aspects: fame, money, it is said the ability to speak for himself, to move, to love. And the line that draws Giorgio Fox is of a kindness and hardness that my image will never be able to imitate. I want to say: there is Giorgio Fox, crew-cut, pastel blue eyes, perfectly good within a beautifully nuanced vignette. And here I am, the immaculate grave in the momentary paper of mass consumption of art, mass that manipulates and sees itself framed in a passage of a mining city. (The desolation and anguish of Fichte, etc.) * Again, the stranger hangs from the kaleidoscope. I tell her “I am inconstant. A week ago I loved you, in moments of exaltation I even came to think we were a couple from paradise. But already you know that I’m a failure: those couples exist far from here, in Paris, in Berlin, in Barcelona's zona alta. I am inconstant, at times I desire grandeur, at others only its shadow. They are the true couple, the only one, the famous leftist novelist and the dancer before her Atlantis moment. I, in contrast, am a failure, someone who will never be like Giorgio Fox, and you seem to be a common and ordinary woman, who wants to have fun and be happy. I mean: happy here, in Cataluña, and not on an airplane bound for Milan or the nuclear plant on Lampedusa. My inconstancy is faithful to this originary moment, to the fierce resentment of being what I am, the dream in the eye, the bony nakedness of an old consular passport sent from Mexico in ’73, valid until ’82, with permission to reside in Spain for three months, without the right to work. The inconstancy, now you see it, allows fidelity, a singular fidelity, but to the end.” The image fades to black. A voice offstage lists hypothetical causes for Zurbarán abandoning Seville. Did he do it because people preferred Murillo? Or because the plague that lashed the city in those years left it without some of his beloved beings and full of debt?

* Paradise, in moments, appears in the general idea of kaleidoscope. A vertical structure full of grey stains. If I close my eyes, in my head the reflections of fragments will dance, the tremor of a plain of hills, those which you call jet-coal. Also, if I remove the dramatic effects, I will see myself walking through the plaza of cinemas toward the post office, where I will not find any letters. * It’s no wonder that the author paces naked in the center of his room. The faded posters open like the words he puts together in his head. Then, almost without transition, I will see the author leaning over a flat roof contemplating the landscape; or sitting on the ground, back against a white wall while in the next room they martyr a girl; or standing, in front of a table, left hand over the wood edge, gaze raised towards a point far from the scene. In any case, the author opens, paces naked surrounded by posters that raise, like an operatic cry, his autumn in Gerona. * DAY BREAKS CLOUDY. Sitting in an armchair, with a cup of coffee in my hands, without having bathed yet, I imagine the character in the following way: his eyes closed, face pale, hair dirty. He lays on train tracks. No. Only his head is over one of the rails, the rest of his body lies to the side of the tracks, over the grey-white gravel. It’s curious: the left half of his body gives the impression of limpness belonging to sleep, while the other half seems stiff, numb, as though he were already dead. In the upper part of the picture I observe the skirts of a hill of firs (yes, of firs!) and over the hill a cluster of pink clouds, which would call themselves the dusk of the Golden Age. DAY BREAKS CLOUDY. A man, badly dressed and unshaven, asks me what I do. I answer, nothing. He replies that he’s thinking of opening a bar. A place, he says, where people might go to eat. Pizzas. Not very expensive. Magnificent, I say. Then someone asks if he is in love. What does you mean by that, he says. They explain: if you like some woman seriously. He responds yes. It will be a stupendous bar, I say. He says I am invited to the opening. You can eat whatever you want without paying. * A woman that caresses you, jokes with you, is sweet with you and then never speaks to you again. What are you talking about, the Third War? The stranger loves you and then recognizes the slaughterhouse situation. She kisses you and then tells you that life consists precisely of moving forward, absorbing sustenance and searching for more. It’s funny, in the room, in addition to the reflection that swallows everything (and hence the immaculate grave), there are children’s voices, questions that arrive as though from afar. And behind the questions, she would have guessed it, there are nervous laughs, blocks that, before coming undone, release her message as best they can. “Take care.” “Goodbye, take care.” *

That old moment called “Nel, love.” * Now you slide into action. You arrive at the river. There you light a cigarette. At the end of the street, on the corner, there's a telephone booth and it's the only light at the end of the street. You call Barcelona. The stranger answers the telephone. She tells you she won't come. After a few seconds, in which you say “well”, and she mimics “well”, you ask why. She tells you she's going to Alella on Sunday and you say that you’ll call when you’re next in Barcelona. You hang up and the cold catches the booth, unexpectedly, while you were thinking: “it’s like an autobiography”. Now you slide through twisting streets, how luminous Gerona can be by night, you think, there’s only two streetcleaners talking outside a closed bar and at the end of the street the lights of a car disappearing. I shouldn’t drink, you think, I shouldn’t sleep, I shouldn’t do anything that might unsettle the fixity. Now you are stopped beside the river, on the bridge built by Eiffel, concealed in the trellis of iron. You touch your face. By the other bridge, the bridge called de los labios, you hear footsteps but when you look for her there is no one, only the murmuring of someone descending the stairs. You think: “and so the stranger was like this, like that; and so I'm the crazy one; and so I've been having a magnificent dream". The dream you're referring to just passed before you, in the subtle instant in which you allowed yourself a reprieve—and therefore you went transparent briefly, like the lawyer Vidriera—, and it consisted of the apparition, at the other end of the bridge, of a population of eunuchs, merchants, professors, housewives, stripped and exposing their castrated testicles and vaginas in the palms of their hands. What a most curious dream, you say to yourself. You're definitely trying to cheer yourself up. * Through the large windows of a restaurant I see the bookseller from one of the leading bookstores in Gerona. He is tall, a little thick and has white hair and black eyebrows. He is walking up the sidewalk, from behind me. I am sitting in the back of the restaurant with a book on the table. After a moment the bookseller crosses the street with slow strides, he would call them measured, and his head tilted. I ask myself of whom he could be thinking. Once I heard, while browsing around his establishment, him confess to a woman from Gerona that he also had done foolish things. Later I caught loose words: “trains”, “two assassins”, “the night at the hotel”, “an emissary”, “defective pipes”, “nobody at the other side”, “the hypothetical gaze of”. At this point I had to hide the lower half of my face with a book so they didn’t catch me laughing to myself. The hypothetical gaze of his girlfriend, of his wife? The hypothetical gaze of the proprietress of the hotel? (I can also ask myself: the hypothetical gaze of the woman on the train?, the young woman that went to the small window and saw the vagabond put his head on the tracks?) And finally: why a hypothetical gaze? Now, in the restaurant, while I watch him arrive at the other side of the street and contemplate something above the large windows, behind which I am, I think that perhaps I didn’t understand his words that day, in part because of the closed Catalan of this province, in part because of the distance that separated us. Soon a horrible boy replaces the bookseller in the space that he occupied a few seconds ago. Then the boy moves and the space is occupied by a dog, then another dog, then a woman of forty years, blonde, then the waiter who goes outside to move back the tables because it begins to rain.

* Now the screen fills—special of mini baroque period—with the voice of the stranger speaking to you of her friends. In reality you also know these people, to kill time you wrote two or four rotten cynical poems on the therapeutic relationship between your penis, your passport and them. Perhaps, in the room of ghostly dance, all the immaculate holes that you were able to make recognized themselves, in one corner, and they, the Burgueses de Calais of their own fears, in the other. The voice of the stranger throws shovelfuls of shit on her friends (from this moment you can call them the strangers). It’s tragic. Satin landscapes where people amuse themselves before the war. The voice of the stranger describes, explains, ventures causes of effects never disastrous and always anemic. A landscape that will always need a thermometer, such nice diners, such incredible ways to wake up in the morning. Please, continue talking, I’m listening to you, you say while you slip away running across the black room, the moment of the black dinner, the black shower and the black bath. * THE REALITY. I had returned to Gerona, alone, after three months of work. I had no chance of finding more, nor did I hope to. The house, during my absence, had filled with spiderwebs and things seemed covered by a green film. I felt empty, not wanting to write, and, when I tried to, incapable of sitting more than an hour before a blank page. The first few days I didn’t even bathe and soon I got used to the spiders. My activity was reduced to going down to the post office, where very rarely I found a letter from my sister from Mexico, and to the market to buy scraps of meat for the dog. THE REALITY. In some inexplicable way, the house seemed touched by something it didn’t have at the moment of my departure. Things seemed sharper, for example, my chair seemed sharp, brilliant, and the kitchen, although full of dust stuck to scabs of grease, gave an impression of whiteness, as though one could see through it. (See what? Nothing: more whiteness.) In the same way, things were more distinct. The kitchen was the kitchen and the table was only the table. Some day I will try to explain it, but back then, two days after my return, if I put my hands or elbows on the table, I experienced a piercing sorrow, as if I were eating away at something irreparable. * Call the boss and tell him that it has begun to snow. On the screen: the back of the character. He is sitting on the ground, knees lifted; before him, as if placed there by himself to study them, we see a kaleidoscope, a tarnished mirror, a stranger. * THE KALEIDOSCOPE OBSERVED. Passion is geometry. Rhombuses, cylinders, lateral angles. Passion is geometry that falls into the abyss, observed from the depths of the abyss. THE STRANGER OBSERVED. Breasts reddened from the hot water. It is six in the morning and the voice of a man offstage says he will accompany her to the train. That's not necessary, she says, her body moving, her back to the camera. With precise gestures she puts her pajamas in the suitcase, closes it, picks up a mirror, looks at herself (there the viewer will get a glimpse of his face: eyes wide open, terrified), opens the suitcase, stows the mirror, closes the suitcase, fade…

* I have not searched for this hope. This silent pavilion of the Unknown University.

GERONA, 1981

The Neochilenos for Rodrigo Lira The journey began one happy day in november But in some way the journey had ended When we began it. All times exist together, said Pancho Ferri, The singer. Or come together, We will discover. The preliminaries, however, Were simple: We boarded with resignation The small truck That our manager in a burst Of madness Had bestowed on us And pointed north, The north that magnetizes the dreams And the apparently Meaningless Songs of the Neochilenos, A north, how would you say it?, Foretold in the white handkerchief That sometimes covered My face Like a shroud. A pure white handkerchief Or not On which My nomadic nightmares And my sedentary nightmares Project themselves. And Pancho Ferri Asked If we knew the story Of Caraculo And Jetachancho Seizing with both hands The steering wheel And making the truck vibrate

While we searched for the exit From Santiago, Making it vibrate as though it were The chest Of Caraculo That bore a weight too terrible For any human. And I remembered then that the day Before our departure We had been In Forestal Park To visit the monument To Rubén Darío. Goodbye, Rubén, we said drunk And drugged. Now the banal acts Are blurred With the foreboding cries Of real dreams. But such were the Neochilenos, Pure inspiration And no method. And the following day we traveled As far as Pilpilco and Llay Llay And we passed without stopping Through La Ligua and Los Vilos And we crossed the river Petorca And the river Quilimari And the Choapa until arriving At La Serena And the river Elqui And finally Copiapó And the river Copiapó Where we stopped To eat fried Empanadas. And Pancho Ferri Returned to the Intercontinental

Adventures of Caraculo and Jetachancho Two musicians from Valparaiso Lost In the chinese slum of Barcelona. And the poor man Caraculo, said The singer, Was married and had to Get money For his woman and his children Of Caraculo stock, So that he took to trafficking Heroin And a little cocaine And Fridays a bit of ecstasy For the subjects of Venus. And bit by bit, obstinately, He began to progress. And while Jetachancho Was keeping company with Aldo Di Pietro, Remember him? In the Cafe Puerto Rico, Caraculo saw grow His bank account And his self-esteem. And what lesson could we, The Neochilenos, take From the criminal life Of those two Migratory south americans? None, save that the limits Are thin, the limits Are relative: milled By a reality minted In the void. The horror of Pascal Exactly. This horror, geometric And dark And cold Said Pancho Ferri

At the steering wheel of our car, Always towards the North, until Toco Where we unload The amplifiers And two hours later We were ready to perform: Pancho Lightening And the Neochilenos. A small failure Like a walnut, Although some teenagers Helped us Squeeze the instruments Back into the truck: children Of Toco Transparent like The geometric figures Of Blaise Pascal. And after Toco, Quillagua, Hilaricos, Soledad, Ramaditas, Pintados and Humberstone, Performing in empty nightclubs And brothels converted From hospitals in Liliput, It was rare, very rare that we had Electricity, very Rare that the walls Were semisolid, ultimately, Locales that made us A little afraid And in which customers Were infatuated with Fist-fucking and Feet-fucking, And the cries that came out Of the windows and Traveled through the cement patio And the outdoor latrines

Between warehouses full Of oxidized tools And sheds that seemed To gather all the lunar light, Put our hairs On end. How can so much Evil exist In a country so new, So little? Perhaps this is The Hell of Whores? Pancho Ferri Wondered aloud. And the Neochilenos didn’t know How to respond. I preferred to reflect On how those Deviant New Yorkers of sex Could exist in those obscure Provincials. And with barren pockets We continued ascending: Mapocho, Negreiros, Santa Catalina, Tana Cuya and Arica, Where we had A short rest—and abuse. And three nights of work On the Ranch of Don Luis Sánchez Morales, retired Official. A place full of small round tables And small potbellied lamps Painted by hand By the mother of don Luis I suppose. And the only thing Truly interesting

That we saw in Arica Was the sun of Arica: A sun like a trail of Dust. A sun like sand Or like lime Flung cunningly Into the motionless air. The rest: routine. Murderers and the converted Mixed in the same discussion Of deafs and mutes, Of idiots loosed By Purgatory. And the lawyer Vivanco, A friend of don Luis Sánchez, Asked what bullshit we meant By that fucking stupid name ‘the Neochilenos.’ New patriots, said Pancho, As he got up From the gathering And locked himself in the bathroom. And the lawyer Vivanco Turned to sheathe the gun In a holster Of Italian leather, Embossed with delicacy and dexterity With a fine detail of the boys Of the New Order. During it all Pancho Ferri lay on the bed. With a fever of one hundred and four He began to rave: He no longer wanted our group To be called Pancho Lightening And the Neochilenos, But Pancho Mystery And the Neochilenos: The terror of Pascal. The terror of singers,

The terror of travelers, But never the terror Of children. And dawn broke Like a band of thieves, We left Arica And crossed the border Of the Republic. To us it seemed we could have been crossing The border of Reason. And the legendary Peru Opened before our truck Covered in dust And filth, Like an unpeeled fruit Like a chimerical fruit Exposed to the storms And the insults. A skinless fruit Like a cocky teenager. And Pancho Ferri, from Then on called Pancho Mystery, didn’t emerge From the fever, Muttering like a priest In the bed Of the truck The ups and downs— los avatares, indian word— Of Caraculo and Jetachancho. A thin and hard life Like the rope and soup of a hanged man, That of Jetachancho and his Lucky identical twin: A life or a study Of the whims of the wind. And the Neochilenos Performed in Tacna, In Mollendo and Arequipa, Under the sponsorship of the Society

For the Promotion of Art And Youth. Without a singer, humming To ourselves the songs Or going mmm, mmm, mmmmh, While Pancho melted In the depth of the truck, Devoured by chimeras And by the cocky teenagers. Nadir and zenith of an aspiration That Caraculo knew to intuit Across the moons Of the drug traffickers Of Barcelona: a misleading Brilliance, A tiny and empty space Where nothing has meaning, Where nothing has value, and where Without doubt, it is offered to you for Free. And if we are not In Peru? we, The Neochilenos, Asked ourselves one night. And if this immense Space That instructs us And limits us Were an intergalactic ship, An unidentified Flying object? And if the fever Of Pancho Mystery Were our engine Or our navigation device? And after working We went out to walk through The streets of Peru: Between military patrols, traveling Merchants and the unemployed,

Searching In the hills For the blazes of the Shining Path, But we saw nothing. The darkness that enclosed the Urban nuclei Was complete. This is like a trail Escaped the Second World War Said Pancho Laying in the depth of the truck. He said: filaments Of nazi generals like Reichenau or Model Escaped in spirit And involuntarily Went towards the Virgin Territory Of Latin America: A hinterland of ghosts And phantoms. Our house Installed in the geometry Of impossible crimes. And by night we usually Went to cabarets: The fifteen-year-old whores Descendents of those heroes Of the Pacific War Liked to listen to us talk Like machine guns. But above all They liked to watch Pancho Wrapped in several colored blankets And with a hat made of wool From the high plateau Pulled down to his eyebrows Appear and disappear Like the horseman That always leaves.

A type with luck, The great sick lover of the south of Chile, The father of the Neochilenos And the mother of Caraculo and Jetachancho, Two poor musicians from Valparaiso, As everybody knows. And the dawn usually found us At a table in the back Speaking about the kilo and a half of grey matter Of an adult brain. Chemical messages, said Pancho Mystery burning with fever, Neurons that activate And neurons that inhibit In the vastness of a longing. And the little whores said That a kilo and a half of grey Matter Was enough, was sufficient, why Ask for more. And tears fell For Pancho when they listened. And after arrived the deluge And the rain broke the silence Over the streets of Mollendo, And over the hills, And over the streets of the barrio Of the whores, And the rain was the only Interlocutor. Strange phenomena: the Neochilenos Stopped talking And each on his own We visited the garbage dump of Philosophy, the coffers, the american Colors, the unmistakable style Of birth and rebirth. And one night our truck Pointed towards Lima, with Pancho Ferri at the steeringwheel, like in

The old days, Except that now a whore Accompanied him. A whore, thin and young, Named Margarita, A teenager without equal, Inhabitant of the permanent Storm. Also she had been able To call Agile Shadow, The dark shelter Where Pancho could Cure his wounds. And in Lima we read the Peruvian poets: Vallejo, Martín Adán and Jorge Pimentel. And Pancho Mystery took The stage and was convincing And versatile. And then, still shaking And sweaty He told us the story Of a novel By an old Chilean writer. One swallowed by the forgetting. A nec spes nec metus Said the Neochilenos. And Margarita said: A novelist. And the ghost, The sick hole In which all effort Is changed, He wrote—it seems— A novel called Kundalini, And Pancho with difficulty remembered it, With effort, its words Stirred in a cruel childhood Full of amnesia and acrobatic proofs

And lies, And so he stopped recounting, Fragmented, The cry Kundalini The name of a mare devoted to racing And the collective death of the racetrack. A racetrack that no longer exists. A hollow anchored In a Chile nonexistent And happy. And that story had The virtue of illumination Like an english landscape painter Our fears and our dreams That marched from East to West And from West to East, While we, the real Neochilenos Traveled from South To North. And so slow That it seemed we didn’t move. And Lima was an instant Of happiness, Brief but effective. And what is the relation, said Pancho Between Morpheus, god Of dreams And “morfar,” vulgar For “to eat”? Yes, he said, Taking by the waist The beautiful Margarita, Skinny and almost naked In a bar in Lince, one night Read and divided and Possessed By the lightenings Of the chimera. Our necessity.

Our open mouth Through which enters The Pope And through which leaves The dreams: fossil Trails Colored with the palate Of apocalypse, Survivors, said Pancho Ferri. Latin Americans with luck. That is all. And one night before setting out We saw Pancho And Margarita Walking in the middle of an Infinite muddy place. And then we knew That the Neochilenos Would be forever Governed By chance. The coin Jumped like a metallic Insect From between their fingers: Heads, to the south, Tails, to the north, And then we all boarded The truck And the city Of legends And of fear Stayed behind. One happy day in january We crossed Like the children of the Cold, Of the Unstable Cold Or of the Ecce Homo, The border with Ecuador.

Then Pancho was 28 or 29 years old And soon would die. And Margarita 17. And none of the Neochilenos Were more than 22. BLANES, 1993

A Stroll Through Literature for Rodrigo Pinto and André Neuman

1

I dreamed that Georges Perec was three years old and visited my house. I hugged him, I kissed him, I told him he was

a precious boy.

2

We were left half-done, father, neither cooked nor raw, lost in the vastness of this interminable garbage dump,

missing and mistaking ourselves, killing and begging forgiveness, manic depressives in your dream, father, your

infinite dream that we unraveled a thousand times and a thousand times again, like Latin American detectives lost in

a labyrinth of crystal and mud, traveling through rain, watching films where old men appear and cry tornado!

tornado!, looking at things for the last time, but without seeing them, like phantoms, like frogs in the bottom of a

well, father, lost in the poverty of your utopian dream, lost in the variety of your voices and your abysses, manic

depressives in the immeasurable room in Hell where you cook up your Jokes.

3

Half-done, neither raw nor cooked, bipolars capable of riding the hurricane.

4

In these desolations, father, where your laugh alone remained, the archaeological remains.

5

We, nec spes nec metus.

6

And someone said:

Sister of our violent memory

best not to speak of valor.

He who has conquered fear

will be valiant for ever.

Let us dance, then, while the night passes

like a gigantic shoebox

by the top of the cliff and the balcony,

in a fold of reality, of the possible,

where kindness is not an exception.

Let us dance in the uncertain reflection

of the Latin American detectives,

a puddle of rain that reflects our faces

every ten years.

Then the dream arrived.

7

I dreamed then that I was visiting the mansion of Alonso de Ercilla. I was sixty years old and broken by sickness

(literally falling to pieces). Ercilla was some ninety years old and dying in an enormous canopy bed. The old man

stared at me scornfully then asked for a glass of brandy. I searched and searched again for the brandy but found only

riding gear.

8

I dreamed I was walking on the Boardwalk in New York and I saw in the distance the figure of Manuel Puig. He wore

a celestial blue shirt and some pants of light canvas, clear blue or dark blue, depending.

9

I dreamed Macedonio Fernández appeared in the sky of New York in the form of a cloud: a cloud without nose or

ears, but with eyes and mouth.

10

I dreamed I was on a street in Africa that suddenly became a street in Mexico. Sitting on a rock, Efraín Huerta was

playing dice with the beggar poets of the DF.

11

I dreamed that in a forgotten cemetery in Africa I came across a tomb of a friend whose face I no longer could recall.

12

I dreamed someone pounded on my front door late one night. It was snowing. I didn’t have a stove or money. I

thought they were going to cut the lights. And who was on the other side of the door? Enrique Lihn with a bottle of

wine, a bag of groceries and a check from the Unknown University.

13

I dreamed I was reading Stendhal in the Civitavecchia Nuclear Station: a shadow slid over the ceramics of the

reactors. It is the ghost of Stendhal, said a young man wearing boots, naked from the waist up. And you, who are

you? I asked. I am the junkie of ceramic, the hussar of ceramic and shit.

14

I dreamed I was dreaming, we had lost the revolution before it began and I decided to return home. Crawling into bed

I found De Quincey sleeping. Wake up, Sir Thomas, I said, dawn is coming, you have to go. (As though De Quincey

were a vampire.) But nobody heard me and I returned to the dark streets of Mexico City.

15

I dreamed I saw Aloysius Bertrand born and die in the same day, almost without any time inbetween, as though the

two of us were living in a calendar of stone, lost in space.

16

I dreamed I was an old and sick detective. So sick that I was literally falling to pieces. On the trail of Gui Rosey, I was

walking through the barrios of a port that could have been Marseilles, or not. A kind old Chinese man led me at last

to a cellar. This is what is left of Rosey, he said. A small pile of ashes. As it is, it could be Li Po, I answered.

17

I dreamed I was an old and sick detective searching for people lost long ago. Sometimes I accidentally looked in a

mirror and recognized Roberto Bolaño.

18

I dreamed Archibald McLeish wept—just three tears—on the patio of a restaurant on Cape Cod. It was past midnight

and even though I didn’t know how to get back we ended up drinking and toasting the Wild New World.

19

I dreamed about the Stiffs and the Forgotten Beaches.

20

I dreamed the corpse returned to the Promised Land mounted on a Host of Mechanical Bulls.

21

I dreamed I was fourteen years old and that I was the last human being in the Southern Hemisphere that read the

brothers Goncourt.

22

I dreamed I found Gabriela Mistral in an African village. She had shrunk a little and acquired the habit of sleeping

sitting on the ground, her head on her knees. Even the mosquitoes seemed to know her.

23

I dreamed I returned to Africa in a bus full of dead animals. At a border someone appeared, a faceless veterinarian.

His face was like vapor, but I knew who he was.

24

I dreamed Philip K. Dick strolled through the Civitavecchia Nuclear Station.

25

I dreamed Archilochus was crossing a desert of human bones. He was encouraging himself: “Let’s go, Archilochus,

don’t weaken, onward, onward.”

26

I dreamed I was fifteen years old and I was calling on Nicanor Parra to take my leave. Where are you going, Bolaño?,

he said. Far from the Southern Hemisphere, I answered.

27

I dreamed I was fifteen years old and, in effect, setting out from the Southern Hemisphere. When putting in my

backpack the only book that I owned (Trilce by Vallejo), it burned. It was seven in the afternoon and I flung my

charred backpack out the window.

28

I dreamed I was sixteen and that Martín Adán gave me piano lessons. The old man’s fingers, large like those of the

Fantastic Rubber-Man, drove into the ground and keyed over a chain of subterranean volcanoes.

29

I dreamed I was translating Virgil with a stone. I was naked on a great basalt flagstone and the sun, as the captains of

the hunt would say, drifted dangerously towards 5.

30

I dreamed I was killing myself on an African patio and that a poet called Paulin Joachim addressed me in French (I

only caught fragments like “consolation,” “time,” “the years that are yet to come”) while a hanged monkey balanced

on a branch.

31

I dreamed the Earth had ended. And the only human being that contemplated the end was Franz Kafka. In the

heavens the Titans fought to the death. From a wrought-iron bench in Central Park Kafka watched the world burn.

32

I dreamed I was dreaming and that I returned to my house extremely late. In my bed I found Mario de Sá-Carneiro

sleeping with my first love. When I pulled the covers back I discovered that they were dead, and biting my lips until I

bled, I went back out to the neighborhood streets.

33

I dreamed Anacreon built his castle at the summit of a bare hill , then destroyed it.

34

I dreamed I was a very old Latin American detective. I lived in New York and Mark Twain contracted me to save the

life of someone without a face. It is going to be a damned difficult case, Mr. Twain.

35

I dreamed I was in love with Alice Sheldon. She didn’t love me. So I tried to get myself killed on three continents.

Years passed. Finally, when I was very old, she appeared at the far end of the Coney Island boardwalk, and by means

of signals (like those they make on aircraft carriers so that the pilots can land) she told me that she had always loved

me.

36

I dreamed I was 69ing with Anaïs Nin on top of a huge basalt slab.

37

I dreamed I was fucking Carson McCullers in a half-lit room in the spring of 1981. And we both felt irrationally

happy.

38

I dreamed I returned to my old grammar school and Alphonse Daudet was my French teacher. Something

imperceptible indicated to us that we were dreaming. Daudet looked at the window the whole time and was smoking

Tartarín’s pipe.

39

I dreamed I stayed asleep while my grammar school classmates tried to free Robert Desnos from the Terzin

concentration camp. When I awoke a voice ordered me to get moving. Quickly, Bolaño, quickly, there is no time to

lose. On arriving I found only an old detective digging through the smoldering ruins of the fight.

40

I dreamed a frenzy of ghostly numbers was all that was left of human beings three billion years after the Earth ended.

41

I dreamed I was dreaming and in the tunnels of the dreams I found the dream of Roque Dalton: the dream of the

heroes who died from a chimera of shit.

42

I dreamed I was eighteen years old and saw my best friend from then, who was also eighteen years old, making love

with Walt Whitman. They did it in an armchair gazing at the stormy dusk of Civitavecchia.

43

I dreamed I was imprisoned and that Boethius was my cellmate. Look, Bolaño, he said extending his hand and pen in

the half-light: they don’t tremble!, they don’t tremble! (After a while, he added in a peaceful voice: but they tremble

when they see that bastard Theodoric.)

44

I dreamed I translated the Marquis de Sade to the blows of an axe. I had gone mad and lived in a forest.

45

I dreamed Pascal spoke of fear with crystalline words in a tavern in Civitavecchia: “Miracles do not serve to convert,

but to condemn”, he said.

46

I dreamed I was an old Latin American detective and that a mysterious Foundation commissioned me to find the

death certificates of the Spic Flyers. I visited hospitals, battlefields, bars, abandoned schools all over the world.

47

I dreamed Baudelaire made love with a shadow in a room where a crime had been committed. But it didn’t matter to

Baudelaire. It is always the same, he said.

48

I dreamed a girl of sixteen entered the tunnel of dreams and woke us with two kinds of a face. The girl lived in a

lunatic asylum and little by little she became madder.

49

I dreamed in the stagecoaches that entered and left Civitavecchia I saw the face of Marcel Schwob. The vision was

fleeting. A face almost translucent, with tired eyes, tight with happiness and with sorrow.

50

I dreamed after the storm a Russian writer and his French friends chose happiness. Without questioning or asking for

anything. Like one who collapses senseless on his favorite carpet.

51

I dreamed the dreamers had gone to la guerra florida. No one returned. In the bulletins of forgotten barracks in the

mountains I managed to read some names. From a remote place a voice broadcast again and again the order issued

for the condemned.

52

I dreamed the wind flapped the worn sign of a tavern. Inside James Mathew Barrje played dice with five threatening

gentlemen.

53

I dreamed I returned to the streets, but this time I was no longer fifteen but over forty. I possessed only a book,

which I carried in my small backpack. Suddenly, while I was walking, the book began to burn. Dawn was breaking and

almost no cars passed. While throwing the charred backpack in an irrigation ditch I felt my back sting as though I

had wings.

54

I dreamed the streets of Africa were full of prospectors, slavers, accountants.

55

I dreamed that no one dies in the twilight.

56

I dreamed a man turned his eyes back, over the anamorphic landscape of dreams, and that his gaze was hard like steel

but equally fragmented in multiple gazes each more innocent, each more helpless.

57

I dreamed Georges Perec was three years old and was crying inconsolably. I tried to calm him. I held him, I bought him sweets, coloring books. Then we went to the Boardwalk at Coney Island and while he played on the slide I said to myself: I do not serve anyone, but I will serve to protect you, no one will harm you, no one will try to kill you. Later it turned to rain and we returned peacefully to the house. But where was our house?

BLANES, 1994