By Night in Chile (8 page)

digestion, observed Mr. Raef. I followed him. There was nobody at the reception desk. The secretary has gone to lunch, said Mr. Raef. I stood there puffing and panting, saying nothing, while my Maecenas tapped on the frosted glass window of his associate’s office with the second joint of his middle finger. A shrill voice cried, Come in. After you, said Mr. Raef. Mr. Etah was sitting behind a metal desk, and when he heard my name, he got up, came around and greeted me effusively. He was slim, with fair hair and pale skin, and his cheeks were ruddy, as if he rubbed lavender water into them at regular intervals. He did not smell of lavender, however. He offered us each a seat and after looking me up and down went back to his place behind the table. My name is Etah, he said, with an
h
at the end. Understood, I said. And you are Father Urrutia

Lacroix. The very same, I said. Beside me, Mr. Raef was smiling and nodding without a word. Urrutia is a Basque name, isn’t it? It is indeed, I said.

Lacroix, of course, is French. Mr. Raef and I nodded in time. Do you know where the name Etah comes from? I have no idea, I said. Take a guess, he said.

Albania? You’re cold, he said. I have no idea, I said. Finland, he said. It’s half Finnish, half Lithuanian. Quite, quite, said Mr. Raef. In times long gone there was a good deal of commerce between the Finns and the Lithuanians, for them the Baltic Sea was like a bridge, or a river, a stream crossed by

innumerable black bridges, imagine that. I am, I said. And Mr. Etah smiled.

You’re imagining it, are you? Yes, I’m imagining it. Black bridges, oh yes, murmured Mr. Raef beside me. And streams of little Finns and Lithuanians going back and forth across them endlessly, said Mr. Etah. Day and night. By the light of the moon or the feeble light of torches. Plunged in darkness, guided by memory. Not feeling the cold that cuts to the bone up there near the Arctic Circle, feeling nothing, just alive and moving. Not even feeling alive: just moving, inured to the routine of crossing the Baltic in one direction or the other. A normal part of life. A normal part of life? I nodded once again. Mr.

Raef took out a box of cigarettes. Mr. Etah explained that he had given up smoking for good about ten years before. I refused the cigarette that Mr. Raef offered me. I asked about the job they were proposing and what it would entail.

It’s not so much a job as a fellowship, said Mr. Etah. We’re mainly an

import-export firm, but we’re branching out into other areas, said Mr. Raef. To be precise, at the moment we’re working for the Archiepiscopal College. They have a problem, and we’re looking for the ideal person to solve their problem, said Mr. Etah. They need someone to undertake a study, and it’s our job to find the person who fits the bill. We meet a need, we look for solutions. And do I fit the bill, I asked? No one is better suited to the task than you, Father, said Mr. Etah. Perhaps you might explain just what this task consists of, I said. Mr. Raef looked at me in surprise. Before he could protest, I told him I would like to hear the proposal again, but this time from Mr. Etah. Mr. Etah needed no further prompting. The Archiepiscopal College wanted someone to write a report on the preservation of churches. Naturally no one in Chile knew

anything about the subject. In Europe, on the other hand, a good deal of

research had been undertaken, and in some quarters there was talk of definitive solutions putting a stop to the deterioration of God’s houses on earth. My task would be to go and see, to visit the churches at the forefront of the battle against dilapidation, to evaluate the various methods, to write a report and come home. How long would it take? I could spend up to a year traveling around various European countries. If my work was not completed within a year, an extension of six months could be granted. I would receive my full salary each month, plus an allowance to cover travel and living expenses in Europe. I could stay in hotels or in the parish hospices scattered the length and breadth of the old continent. Need I say it was as if the job had been designed especially for me. I accepted. During the following days I had frequent meetings with Mr. Etah and Mr. Raef, who were taking care of all the paperwork for my trip to Europe. I wouldn’t say I warmed to them, however. They were efficient, that was clear from the start, but they were also sadly lacking in tact. And they knew nothing about literature, except for a couple of Neruda’s early poems, which they could recite from memory and often did. Still, they knew how to solve what to me seemed insuperable administrative problems and did whatever was required to smooth the way to my new destiny. As the day of my departure approached, I became more and more nervous. I spent a good while saying goodbye to my friends, who couldn’t believe my luck. I made an arrangement with the newspaper whereby I would go on sending reviews and installments of my column back from Europe. One morning I said goodbye to my elderly mother and took the train to Valparaíso, where I embarked on the
Donizetti
, a ship that plied between Valparaíso and Genoa under the Italian flag. The voyage was slow and refreshing and enlivened by friendships that have lasted right up to the present, if only in the most colorless and polite form, namely the punctual exchange of Christmas greetings by post. The first port of call was Arica, where, from the deck, I took a photograph of our heroic headland, then El Callao, then Guayaquil (when we crossed the equator I had the pleasure of saying mass for all the passengers), then Buenaventura, where, as the ship lay at anchor among the stars, I recited José Asunción Silva’s
Nocturno
by way of an homage to Colombian

letters, and was warmly applauded, even by the Italian officers, who, in spite of their imperfect grasp of Spanish, were able to appreciate the profoundly musical strains of the bard who died by his own hand, then Panama, the wasplike waist of the Americas, then Cristóbal and Colón, the divided city, where some rascals tried unsuccessfully to rob me, then industrious Maracaibo, redolent of oil, and then we crossed the Atlantic Ocean, where, by popular demand, I

celebrated another mass for all the passengers, many of whom wanted to confess their sins during three days of storms and heavy weather, and then we stopped in Lisbon, where I got off the boat and prayed in the first church in the port, and then the
Donizetti
put ashore in Malaga and Barcelona, and finally, one winter morning, we arrived in Genoa, where I said goodbye to my new friends, and said mass for a few of them in the ship’s reading room, a room with oak

floorboards and teak-paneled walls and a large crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling and soft armchairs in which I had spent so many happy hours,

absorbed in the works of the classic Greek authors and the classic Latin authors and my Chilean contemporaries, having at last regained my passion for reading, my literary instincts, completely cured, while the ship went on parting the waves, faring on through ocean twilight and bottomless Atlantic night, and, comfortably seated in that room with its fine wood, its smell of the sea and strong liquor, its smell of books and solitude, I went on happily reading well into the night, when no one ventured on to the decks of the
Donizetti
, except for sinful shadows who were careful not to interrupt me, careful not to disturb my reading, happiness, happiness, passion regained, genuine devotion, my prayers rising up and up through the clouds to the realm of pure music, to what for want of a better name we call the choir of the angels, a non-human space but undoubtedly the only imaginable space we humans can truly inhabit, an

uninhabitable space but the only one worth inhabiting, a space in which we shall cease to be but the only space in which we can be what we truly are, and then I stepped on to dry land, on to Italian soil, and I said goodbye to the

Donizetti
and set off on the roads of Europe, determined to do a good job, lighthearted, full of confidence, resolution and faith. The first church I visited was the church of St. Mary of Perpetual Suffering in Pistoia. I was expecting to find an old parish priest, so I was more than a little

surprised to be welcomed by a clergyman not even thirty years old. Fr. Pietro, as he was called, explained to me that Mr. Raef had written to inform him of my visit, and went on to say that in Pistoia the principal threat to the major examples of Romanesque and Gothic architecture was pollution caused not by humans but by animals, specifically pigeon shit, the numbers of pigeons in Pistoia, as in many other European cities and villages, having increased

exponentially. A radical solution to this problem had been found, a weapon that was still undergoing tests, as he was to show me the following day. That night, I remember, I slept in a room that opened off the sacristy, and I kept waking up suddenly, not knowing if I was on the boat or still in Chile, and supposing I was in Chile, was it our family home or the dormitory at school or a friend’s house, and although I sometimes realized I was in a room adjoining the sacristy of a European church, I didn’t quite know which European country that room was in and what I was doing there. In the morning I was woken by a woman who worked for the parish. Her name was Antonia and she said: Father, Fr. Pietro is waiting for you, get up quickly or you’ll incur his wrath. Her very words. So I

performed my ablutions and put on my cassock and went out to the patio of the presbytery, and there was young Fr. Pietro, wearing a smarter cassock than mine, his left hand clad in a stout gauntlet of leather and metal, and in the air, in the square space of sky bounded by gold-colored walls, I noticed the shadow of a bird, and when Fr. Pietro saw me he said: Let’s go up the bell tower, and without a word I followed in his footsteps and we climbed up to the bell tower’s steeple, tackling that silent, strenuous ascent in tandem, and when we reached the steeple, Fr. Pietro whistled and waved his arms and the shadow came down from the sky to the bell tower and landed on the gauntlet protecting the

Italian’s left hand, and then there was no need to explain, for it was clear to me that the dark bird circling over the church of St. Mary of Perpetual

Suffering was a falcon and Fr. Pietro had mastered the art of falconry, and that was the method they were using to rid the old church of pigeons, and then, looking down from the heights, I scanned the steps leading to the portico and the brick-paved square beside the magenta-colored church, and in all that space, as hard as I looked, I could not see a single pigeon. In the afternoon, Fr.

Pietro, one of God’s keen falconers, took me to another place in Pistoia where there were no ecclesiastical buildings or civil monuments or anything that needed to be defended against the ravages of time. We went in the parish van.

The falcon traveled in a box. When we reached our destination, Fr. Pietro took the falcon out and flung it up into the sky. I saw it fly and swoop down on a pigeon and I saw the pigeon shudder as it flew. The window of a council flat opened and an old woman shouted something and shook her fist at us. Fr. Pietro laughed. Our cassocks flapped in the wind. When we got back he told me the falcon was called Turk. Then I took a train to Turin, where I visited Fr.

Angelo, curate of St. Paul of Succor, who was also versed in the falconer’s art.

His falcon, called Othello, had struck terror into the heart of every pigeon in Turin, although, as Fr. Angelo confided in me, Othello was not the only falcon in the city, he had good reason to believe that in some unidentified suburb of Turin, probably in the south, there lived another falcon, which Othello had occasionally encountered during his aerial forays. Both birds of prey hunted pigeons, and, in principle, there was no reason for them to fear one another, but Fr. Angelo felt the day was not far off when the two falcons would clash. I stayed longer in Turin than in Pistoia. Then I took the night train to

Strasbourg. There Fr. Joseph had a falcon called Xenophon, with plumage of deepest midnight blue, and sometimes when Fr. Joseph was saying mass the falcon would be perched on a gilded pipe at the top of the organ, and kneeling there in the church listening to the word of God, I could sometimes feel the falcon’s gaze on the nape of my neck, his staring eyes, and it distracted me, and I thought of Bernanos and Mauriac, whom Fr. Joseph read and reread tirelessly, and I thought of Graham Greene, whom I was reading, though he was not, since the French only read the French, in spite of which we stayed up late one night talking about Graham Greene, without being able to resolve our disagreement. We also talked about Burson, priest and martyr in North Africa, whose life and ministry were the subject of a book by Vuillamin, which Fr. Joseph lent to me, and about l’Abbé Pierre, a funny little mendicant priest of whom Fr. Joseph seemed to approve on Sundays but not during the week. And then I left Strasbourg and went to Avignon, to the church of Our Mother of Noon, in the parish of Fr.

Fabrice, whose falcon, called Ta Gueule, was known throughout the surrounding area for his voracity and ferocity, and my afternoons with Fr. Fabrice were unforgettable, Ta Gueule in full flight, scattering not just flocks of pigeons but also flocks of starlings, which in those long gone, happy days, were common in the countryside of Provence, where Sordel, Sordello, which Sordello? wandered once, and Ta Gueule flew off and disappeared among the low clouds, the clouds descending from the desecrated yet somehow still pure hills of Avignon, and while Fr. Fabrice and I conversed, Ta Gueule appeared again like a lightning bolt, or the abstract idea of a lightning bolt, and swooped on the huge flocks of starlings coming out of the west like swarms of flies, darkening the sky with their erratic fluttering, and after a few minutes the fluttering of the

starlings was bloodied, scattered and bloodied, and afternoon on the outskirts of Avignon took on a deep red hue, like the color of sunsets seen from an airplane, or the color of dawns, when the passenger is woken gently by the engines whistling in his ears and lifts up the little blind and sees the horizon marked with a red line, like the planet’s femoral artery, or the planet’s aorta, gradually swelling, and I saw that swelling blood vessel in the sky over