Hear me here,
Hugging your knees,
Hephaistos Lord.
My battle mate,
My good luck be;
That famous grace
Be my grace too.
And this, in which Archilochus gives us a portrait of himself and then vanishes into immortality, an immortality in which he didn’t happen to believe: “My ash spear is my barley bread, / My ash spear is my Ismarian wine. / I lean on my spear and drink.”
‡All translations from Archilochus are by Guy Davenport, from Archilochus, Sappho, Alkman: Three Lyric Poets of the Late Greek Bronze Age, U. Cal Press, 1980. — tr.
Fragments of a Return to the Native Land
THE INVITATION
Twenty days in Chile that shook the (mental) world that I inhabit. Twenty days that were like twenty sessions of humanity falling with a thud. Twenty days that would make anyone weep or roll on the floor laughing. But let’s start from the beginning. I left Chile in January 1974. The last time I flew anywhere was in 1977. I thought I’d never go back to Chile again. I thought I’d never get on a plane again. One day a girl called me from Paula Magazine and asked if I wanted to be on the jury for a story contest that the magazine organizes. Right away I said yes. I don’t know what I was thinking. Maybe I was thinking about the glorious sunsets of Los Angeles, though not the Los Ángeles of Bío-Bío, in Chile, but the Los Angeles of California, the sunsets of the city that sprang up from nothing and from whose rooftops you can see see the radiance that oozes from every inch of the planet. I might have been thinking about that. I might have been making love. Yes, now I remember, that was it. Then the phone rang and I got out of bed and answered and a female voice asked if I’d like to come to Chile and then the city of Los Angeles full of skyscrapers and palm trees became the city of Los Ángeles full of one-story buildings and dirt roads. Los Ángeles, the capital of the province of Bío-Bío, the city where Fernando Fernández played foosball in yards that were like something dreamed up by deranged adolescents, the city where Lebert and Cárcamo were constant companions and where tolerant Cárdenas was class president at a boys’ school designed by some petty demon and where El Pescado suddenly went underground. City of evening raids. Savage city whose sunsets were like the aphasic commentary of privilege. So I said yes in the same tone that I might have said no. The room was dark; I was expecting a phone call, but not this one; the voice that spoke to me from the other side of the world was sweet. At that moment I could have said no. But I said yes because like a mountain cat, the capital of the province of Bío-Bío suddenly leaped onto the map of the city of happiness and was clawing at it, and in those (invisible) claw marks it was written that I had to return to Chile and I had to get back on a plane.
THE TRIP
So I went back to Chile. I got on a plane. I don’t know how planes manage to stay up in the air. Turbulence over the Atlantic, turbulence over the Amazon. Turbulence over Argentina and just before crossing the Andes. On top of it all, Lautaro, my eight-year-old son, couldn’t play his Game Boy during the flight. But it’s okay. We’re flying. My son is sleeping peacefully. My wife, Carolina López, is sleeping peacefully. The two of them are Spanish and it’s their first trip to America. I’m not asleep. I was born in America. I’m Chilean. I’m awake and I’m holding up the wings of the plane mentally. I listen to the other passengers talk. Most of them are asleep but they’re talking in their sleep. They have nightmares or recurring dreams. They’re Chilean. The Spanish stewardesses glance at them as they walk back and forth down the aisles, sometimes parallel to each other and sometimes in opposite directions. When it’s the latter and their paths intersect, the stewardesses raise their eyebrows in the dark and continue on unperturbed. Wonderful, the women of Spain. Would you like a glass of water, orange juice? they ask when they pass me. No, thanks very much, I say. No, many thanks, I say, as the jet engines drill through the night, the night itself a plane flying inside another plane. The ancients depicted this as a fish eating a fish eating another fish. Meanwhile, the real night, outside the plane, is huge and the moon is very small, like Pezoa Véliz’s moon. I’m on my way to Chile. Every once in a while I drop off to sleep, too, and I have strange and vivid dreams. Brief dreams in black and white that take me back to lives I’ll never live. If people slept during the day they’d dream in color, my son said to me once. Fuck, I’m approaching Chile at more than five hundred miles an hour. And finally dawn begins to break and the plane crosses the Andes and now we’re back and here’s the first change: the last time I left Chile, on a Santiago-Buenos Aires flight, the Andes seemed much bigger and whiter; now they don’t seem so big and the snow is striking for its absence. But they’re still pretty. They seem wilder, more lost, less sleepy. Then the plane is over a dusty stretch of ground, and with no time even to think “Pure, Chile, are your blue skies,” it lands.
A HOOKER RETURNS
I’m back home. No problem. The passengers get up out of their seats: I don’t see any especially happy faces. Instead everyone seems worried, except for the woman sitting directly behind me. During the night I heard her talking. From what she says I deduce that she’s a hooker. A Chilean hooker who works in Europe and is returning to Chile after a more or less extended absence to buy real estate, although it’s not clear to me where: sometimes she seems to say the south and other times she talks about abandoned buildings in Santiago. In any case, she’s a woman with a nice face and dyed blonde hair, her body still lovely, and — surprise — she talks in her sleep too. Unintelligible words in Spanish and Italian and German. For a few minutes, I heard her snoring almost as loudly as the engines of the plane that had miraculously brought us to Chile. When I heard her, I thought those exaggerated snores might be a bad omen. I thought about saying something. But in the end I decided not to do anything and the snoring stopped all of a sudden, as if it were simply the physical manifestation of a nightmare she’d had, this hooker with a heart of gold, and then moved beyond, just as one leaves behind bad days and illnesses.
A while ago I met a Chilean who was always having a hard time. No matter where he was or what he was doing, he was having a hard time. This Chilean, a drifter, sometimes reminisced about his native country and he always ended his ramblings in the same way: I’m going to kiss the ground, he’d say. When I get back to Chile the first thing I’ll do is kiss the ground. He had forgotten the terror, the injustice, the folly. Baffled and amused, we made fun of him, but he didn’t care. Go ahead and laugh, he’d say, but the first thing I’ll do when I get back is kiss Chilean soil. I think he died in some South or Central American country, and if he had returned, I imagine his face would look just like the faces of the other Chilean passengers (except the hooker), deadly serious, worried, as if seen from several angles at once, mutating in seconds from Cézanne to Picasso to Basquiat, the usual face of the natives of this long and narrow country, this island-corridor. Of course, I didn’t kiss my native soil. I tried not to trip on the way out of the plane and I tried to light one of my last Spanish cigarettes with a steady hand. Then I breathed the air of Santiago and we headed toward Customs.
THE FACES
And all of a sudden, there were the Chilean faces, the faces of my childhood and adolescence, everywhere, streaming, I was surrounded by Chileans, Chileans who looked like Chileans, Chileans who looked like Martians, Chileans walking around with nothing to do in an airport that I guess wasn’t the old Pudahuel Airport though at moments it seemed like it, and also Chileans waiting for passengers and waving white handkerchiefs, and even Chileans crying (a common sight, as I remembered, Chileans cry a lot, sometimes for no reason, sometimes even when they don’t feel like crying), and also Chileans laughing as if the world were about to end and they were the only ones who knew it. But most of all what I saw in those first few moments were Chileans standing still and silent, Chileans staring at the floor as if they were floating over an uncertain abyss, as if the airport were a specter and all of us were suspended over a kind of nothing that miraculously (or inevitably) kept us aloft and that demanded in return a mysterious and unspeakable tribute, a tribute that no one was prepared to pay, but that no one was prepared to say they wouldn’t pay, either.