By Night in Chile (4 page)

obligations, in any case they made a tentative date to meet for supper, a good Chilean supper, said Don Salvador, so Jünger could see for himself how well we live in Chile, in case he thought that over here we were still walking around wearing feathers, and then Don Salvador took his leave of Jünger and returned with the countess or the duchess or the princess through the series of salons opening one on to another like the mystical rose that opens its petals to reveal a mystical rose that opens its petals to reveal another mystical rose and so on until the end of time, speaking in Dante’s Italian, speaking of Dante’s women, but as far as the substance of the conversation was concerned they might just as well have been speaking of D’Annunzio and his whores. And some days later Don Salvador met Jünger in an attic room inhabited by a Guatemalan painter who had not been able to leave Paris since the beginning of the Occupation and whom Don Salvador visited from time to time, bringing on each occasion food of various kinds, bread and pate, a half bottle of Bordeaux, a kilo of spaghetti wrapped in brown paper, tea and sugar, rice and oil and cigarettes, whatever he could find in the kitchen at the embassy or on the black market, and this Guatemalan painter, subjected to our writer’s charity, never thanked him, so even if Don Salvador appeared with a tin of caviar, plum marmalade and champagne, he never said, Thank you, Salvador, or Thank you, Don Salvador, and on one occasion, when visiting the painter, our eminent diplomat even brought with him one of his novels, a novel he had intended to give to someone else, whose name it were better discreetly not to mention here, since the person in question was married, and seeing the Guatemalan painter so down in the dumps, he decided to give him or lend him the novel, and when he came to visit the painter again, a month later, the novel, his novel, was still sitting on the same table or chair where he had left it, and when he asked the painter if he had disliked it or if on the contrary it had afforded him moments of pleasant diversion, the painter,

withdrawn and ill at ease as he always seemed to be, replied that he had not read it, at which point Don Salvador, feeling downcast, as any author (at least any Chilean or Argentine author) would in such a situation, said: What you’re telling me is you didn’t like it; to which the Guatemalan replied that he neither liked nor disliked the book, he simply hadn’t read it, and then Don Salvador picked up his book and on its cover he could see for himself the layer of dust that accumulates on books (indeed on all things) when they are not in use, and he knew then that the Guatemalan had told the truth, so he did not take offence, although at least two months passed before his next visit to the attic room. And when he returned the painter was thinner than ever, as if he had not eaten a thing during those two months, as if he were determined to let himself waste away while contemplating the street plan of Paris from his window,

stricken with what in those days certain physicians described as melancholia, although we know it now as anorexia, a condition most common in young girls, like the Lolitas blown this way and that by the shimmering wind through the imaginary streets of Santiago, but which, in those years and in that city subjected to Germanic will, afflicted Guatemalan painters living in dim attic rooms at the top of precipitous stairs, and was not referred to as anorexia but melancholia,
morbus melancholicus
, the malady that beleaguers the pusillanimous, and then Don Salvador Reyes or perhaps Farewell, but if it was Farewell it must have been much later on, recalled Robert Burton’s book,
The Anatomy of Melancholy
, which contains many perspicacious observations on that malady, and it may be that all those present at the time fell silent and held their peace for a minute in memory of those who had succumbed to the influence of black bile, the black bile that is eating away at me now, sapping my strength, bringing me to the brink of tears when I hear the wizened youth’s words, and that night when we fell silent it was as if, in close collaboration with chance, we had composed a scene that might have figured in a silent film, a white screen, test tubes and retorts, and the film burning, burning, burning, and then Don Salvador spoke of Schelling (whom he had never read, according to Farewell), Schelling’s notion of melancholy as yearning for the infinite —
Sehnsucht
— and cited neurosurgical operations in which the nerve fibers joining the thalamus to the cerebral cortex of the frontal lobe had been severed, and then he went back to the Guatemalan painter, skinny, wasted, rickety, pinched, scrawny, gaunt, haggard, debilitated, emaciated, feeble, drawn, in a word: extremely thin, so thin it frightened Don Salvador, who thought, This has gone on long enough, So-and-so (whatever the Central American was called), and like a good Chilean his first impulse was to invite the man out for dinner or supper, but the Guatemalan refused, on the pretext that for some reason or other he was incapable of going out into the street at that time of day or night, at which point our diplomat hit the roof or at least the table and asked him how long it had been since he had last eaten, and the Guatemalan said he had eaten a little while ago, just how long ago he didn’t remember. Don Salvador however did remember a detail and that detail was this: when he stopped talking and put the few bits and pieces of food he had brought with him on the sideboard beside the gas burner, in other words, when silence reigned once more in the Guatemalan’s attic room and Don Salvador’s presence became less

obtrusive, busy as he was setting out the food or looking for the hundredth time at the Guatemalan’s canvases hanging on the walls, or sitting and thinking and smoking to pass the time with a will (and an impassibility) possessed only by those who have spent long years in the diplomatic corps or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Guatemalan sat down on the other chair, deliberately placed beside the only window, and while Don Salvador let time slip away sitting in the chair at the back of the room, watching the shifting landscape of his own soul, the gaunt, melancholic Guatemalan let time slip away watching the repetitive and unpredictable landscape of Paris. And when our writer’s eyes discovered the transparent line, the vanishing point upon which the Guatemalan’s gaze was focused, or from which on the contrary it emanated, well, at that point a chill shiver ran through his soul, a sudden desire to shut his eyes, to stop looking at that being who was looking at the tremulous dusk over Paris, a desire to be gone or to embrace him, a desire (arising from a reasonable curiosity) to ask him what he could see and to seize it then and there, and at the same time a fear of hearing what cannot be heard, the essential words to which we are deaf and which in all probability cannot be pronounced. And it was there, in that attic room, by pure chance, that some time later, Salvador Reyes happened to meet Ernst Jünger, who had come to visit the Guatemalan, guided by his aesthetic flair and above all by his tireless curiosity. And as soon as Don Salvador crossed the threshold of the Central American’s abode, he saw Jünger in his snug-fitting German officer’s uniform intently examining a two-by-two-meter canvas, an oil painting that Don Salvador had seen innumerable times and which bore the curious title
Landscape: Mexico City an hour before dawn
, a painting undeniably influenced by surrealism (to which movement the Guatemalan had attached himself in a determined if not entirely successful manner, never enjoying the official blessing of Breton’s acolytes), and in which an eccentric interpretation of certain Italian landscape painters could be detected, as well as a spontaneous attraction, not uncommon among extravagant and oversensitive Central Americans, to the French Symbolists, Redon and Moreau. The painting showed Mexico City seen from a hill or perhaps from the balcony of a tall building. Greens and grays predominated. Some suburbs looked like waves in the sea. Others looked like photographic negatives. There were no human figures, but, here and there, one could make out blurred skeletons that could have belonged to people or to animals. When Jünger saw Don Salvador, his face

betrayed just a hint of surprise and then an equally subtle hint of pleasure. Of course they greeted each other effusively and exchanged the customary questions.

Then Jünger started talking about painting. Don Salvador asked about German art, with which he was unacquainted. It seemed that Jünger was only really interested in Dürer, so for a good while they talked about Dürer exclusively. Both men became more and more enthusiastic. Suddenly Don Salvador realized that since arriving he had not exchanged a single word with his host. He looked around, while inside him a little alarm rang louder and louder. When we asked what had set off the alarm, he said he was worried that the Guatemalan had been arrested by the French police or, worse still, the Gestapo. But the Guatemalan was there, sitting by the window, absorbed (although “absorbed” is not the word, in fact it could hardly be less appropriate) in the unwavering contemplation of Paris.

Relieved, our diplomat cleverly changed the subject and asked Jünger what he thought of the silent Central American’s work. Jünger said that the painter seemed to be suffering from acute anaemia and that, clearly, the best thing for him to do would be to eat something. At that point Don Salvador realized that he was still holding the packets of food he had brought for the Guatemalan, a little tea, a little sugar, a round loaf of bread and half a kilo of goat’s cheese that none of his Chilean colleagues would eat, purloined from the embassy kitchen. Jünger looked at the food. Don Salvador blushed and proceeded to put it on the shelves while explaining to the Guatemalan that he had “brought him a few little things.” The Guatemalan, as usual, neither thanked him nor turned around to see the little things in question. Don Salvador recalled that for a few seconds the situation seemed perfectly ridiculous. Jünger and himself standing there, not knowing what to say, and the Central American painter refusing to budge from the window, obstinately keeping his back turned. But Jünger knew how to respond to any situation, and compensating for his host’s torpor, made Don Salvador feel at home, drawing up two chairs and offering him Turkish

cigarettes, which it seemed he kept exclusively for friends or unforeseen situations, since he himself smoked none that evening. Far from the idle but agitated and often indiscreet chatter of the Parisian salons, the Chilean writer and the German writer enjoyed a free-ranging conversation, touching on the human and the divine, war and peace, Italian painting and Nordic painting, the source of evil and the effects of evil that sometimes seem to be triggered by chance, the flora and fauna of Chile, which Jünger seemed to have read about in the works of his fellow countryman Philippi, who was at once a true Chilean and a true German, all the while drinking cups of tea prepared by Don Salvador himself (which the Guatemalan, when invited to join them, refused almost inaudibly), the tea being followed by two glasses of cognac from the supply that Jünger carried in his silver hip flask, and this time the Guatemalan did not say no, which made both writers smile discreetly at first, then laugh long and loud, proffering the appropriate witticisms. And then, when the Guatemalan had gone back to the window with his due ration of cognac, Jünger, returning to the canvas that had intrigued him, asked the painter if he had spent long in the Aztec capital and what impression his time there had left, to which the Guatemalan replied that the week or slightly less he had spent in Mexico City had left no more than a vague blur in his memory, and, in any case, he had painted that picture, now the object of the German’s attention or curiosity, many years later, in Paris, without really thinking about Mexico at all, although under the influence of what, for want of a better expression, he called a Mexican mood. And that set Jünger musing on the sealed wells of memory, perhaps imagining that during his brief stay in Mexico City the Guatemalan had unwittingly stored away a vision that would not surface again until many years later, although Don Salvador, who was agreeing with everything the Teuton hero said, thought to himself perhaps it was not a question of sealed wells suddenly reopened, or in any case not the sealed wells Jünger had in mind, and as soon as this thought occurred to him his head began to buzz, as if hundreds of sand flies or horseflies were escaping from it, flies visible only through the prism of a hot, dizzy feeling, in spite of the fact that the Guatemalan’s attic room could hardly have been described as a warm place, and the sand flies flew back and forth in front of his eyelids, transparently, like winged droplets of sweat, making the buzzing noise that horseflies make, or the noise that sand flies make, which is more or less the same, although of course there are no sand flies in Paris, and then Don

Salvador, as he nodded in agreement once again, by this stage understanding only snatches of Jünger’s oblivious disquisition in French, glimpsed or thought he glimpsed a part of the truth, and in that tiny part of the truth he could see the Guatemalan in Paris, the war already underway or about to begin, the

Guatemalan already accustomed to spending long, dead (or dying) hours in front of his only window, contemplating the landscape of Paris, and
Landscape: Mexico City an hour before dawn
emerging from that contemplation, from a Guatemalan’s sleepless contemplation of Paris, and in its own way the painting was an altar for human sacrifice, and in its own way the painting was an

expression of supreme boredom, and in its own way the painting was an

acknowledgement of defeat, not the defeat of Paris or the defeat of European culture bravely determined to burn itself down, not the political defeat of certain ideals that the painter tepidly espoused, but his personal defeat, the defeat of an obscure, poor Guatemalan, who had come to the City of Light

determined to make his name in its artistic circles, and the way in which the Guatemalan accepted his defeat, with a clear-sightedness reaching far beyond the realm of the particular and the anecdotal, made the hair on our diplomat’s arms stand up, or, in vulgar parlance, gave him goose bumps. And then, in a single draught, Don Salvador drained what was left of his cognac and started listening to Jünger again, who all this time had been holding forth imperturbably, while he, that is to say our writer, had become entangled in a spiderweb of futile thoughts, and the Guatemalan, predictably, remained slumped beside the window, his life seeping away in the obsessive and sterile contemplation of Paris. And having grasped the drift of the monologue without too much difficulty (or so he thought), Don Salvador was able to insert a word edgeways into that parade of ideas, which would have intimidated the great Pablo himself, if not for the modest tone, the unpretentious manner in which the German set out his creed in matters relating to the fine arts. And then the officer of the Wehrmacht and the Chilean diplomat left the attic room together, and as they went down the