THE DANCE BEGINS
Getting through Customs was simple. It’s been years since they let me into a country so easily. My wife had to fill out a form and I think she had to pay something. When I asked what forms I had to fill out, a round, friendly little customs agent told me I didn’t have to fill out anything. That was the first welcome. The second came from a second customs agent, who decided not to search any of our suitcases. You’re all right, she said, go ahead. The third came from my grandmother and Alexandra Edwards and Totó Romero and Carlos Orellana and La Malala Ansieta, who greeted us as if we were lifelong friends. By now we were outside the airport and we were waiting for a taxi to take us to the hotel and everything was going fine, but somehow I wasn’t back in Chile yet. Or to put it another way, I was there, surrounded by Chileans, which was something I hadn’t experienced since January 1974, but I still wasn’t back, in the real sense of the word. I was still on the plane, I was still sprinting down the corridors of the airport in Madrid, I was still in bed in my house on Calle del Loro, in Blanes, I was still dreaming that I was about to go somewhere.
YOU CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN
It was Samuel Valenzuela, of Las Últimas Noticias, who really let me know that I was back. We talked for a while. I didn’t have much to say. So what I did was ask questions and Samuel Valenzuela answered them all. Samuel Valenzuela looks like someone out of a Manuel Rojas novel. I think he paints in his spare time. It was the first day, I was still jet-lagged, and we were at a ranch that they’d brought me to, an agrarian nightmare as painted by Miquel Barceló. Vicente Huidobro used to spend his vacations here, someone said behind me. This ranch — where one hundred and twenty patriots or maybe two hundred and twenty, or maybe just twenty or maybe even only two took refuge during the War of Independence, and which is now a vineyard, museum, and restaurant — is the dadaist setting of my first event on native soil. I look around and the ghosts of those patriots appear and disappear, fading into the whitewashed walls and the huge, sad trees of the great park that surrounds the ranch, in one corner of which there’s a Roman bath built by a previous owner that gave me the shivers when it was pointed out to me. The tweeness of Chileans has no equal on the planet. Neither does Chilean hospitality, and in my case it’s unceasing. Until Samuel Valenzuela takes me aside for an interview. We talk about Chilean wine. Wine that I can no longer drink. We also talk about empanadas. What does it feel like to be back? he asks. I tell him I don’t know. Nothing, I say, it doesn’t feel like anything. The next day our interview is in the paper. The headline reads: “Bolaño Can’t Go Home Again.” When I read it, I think: it’s true! With that headline, Samuel Valenzuela told me everything that he could humanly, metaphysically, ontologically, or tellurically tell me. That was when I knew I was back in Chile.
PHONE CONVERSATIONS WITH PEDRO LEMEBEL
The first thing Lemebel asked me was how old I was when I left Chile. Twenty, I said. So how could you lose your Chilean accent? he asked. I don’t know, but I lost it. You can’t have lost it, he said, by the time you’re twenty you can’t lose anything. You can lose lots of things, I said. But not your accent, he said. Well, I lost it, I said. Impossible, he said. That might have been the end of everything: the conversation didn’t seem to be going anywhere. But Lemebel is the greatest poet of my generation and from Spain I had already admired the glorious and provocative wake left by his performance art duo Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis (The Mares of the Apocalypse). So I took the plunge and we went to eat at a Peruvian restaurant and I talked to all the other people we were with — Soledad Bianchi, Lina Meruane, Alejandra Costamagna, the poet Sergio Parra — and meanwhile Lemebel lapsed into a state of general melancholy and was silent for the rest of the evening, which was too bad. No one speaks a more Chilean Spanish than Lemebel. Lemebel doesn’t need to write poetry to be the best poet of my generation. No one goes deeper than Lemebel. And also, as if that weren’t enough, Lemebel is brave. That is, he understands how to open his eyes in the darkness, in those lands where no one dares to tread. How do I know all this? Easy. By reading his books. And after reading them, in exhilaration, in hilarity, in dread, I called him on the phone and we talked for a long time, a long conversation of golden howls, during which I recognized in Lemebel the indomitable spirit of the Mexican poet Mario Santiago, dead, and the blazing images of La Araucana, dead, forgotten, which Lemebel brought back to life and then I knew that this queer writer, my hero, might be on the side of the losers but that victory, the sad victory offered by Literature (capitalized, as it is here), was surely his. When everyone who has treated him like dirt is lost in the cesspit or in nothingness, Pedro Lemebel will still be a star.
THE FAT REPORTER
One day a fat reporter came to interview me. He wasn’t as young as the others. He might have been my age, maybe a bit younger, and he was from La Serena. He gave me a copy of his paper, a La Serena paper, and then he sat down in a chair, panting, and he spotted my cigarettes and asked for one. He didn’t buy them anymore because he had stopped smoking, but that morning he was in the mood for one.
There was no photographer with him, so he took my picture. Do you know how these cameras work? he asked. I looked at the camera and said I had no idea. For a while we stood there studying the camera. A photographer colleague at La Serena had loaned it to him. His indecisiveness, I soon realized, was greater than mine. Let’s take the pictures on the balcony, he said, there’s more light. I don’t know why, but I didn’t like the idea. I have a sore throat, I said, I don’t want to go outside. The problem is you smoke too much, he said, leaving his cigarette in the ashtray. Finally I sat in a chair and I said take the pictures now or never. He sighed and took three or four pictures. Being a local reporter is boring, he said. But there must be interesting parts too, I said. The guys on the police beat have more fun, he said. Yes, there are interesting parts. Like in any life.
CHILEAN LITERATURE
This is what Chilean literature taught me. Ask for nothing, because you’ll be given nothing. Don’t get sick because no one will help you. Don’t ask to be included in any anthology because your name will always be omitted. Don’t fight because you’ll always be defeated. Don’t turn your back on power because power is everything. Don’t be stinting in your praise for idiots, the dogmatic, the mediocre, if you don’t want to live a season in hell. Life here goes on more or less unchanged.
RODRIGO PINTO
A writer sometimes has absolutely solid hunches. One of my few hunches is Rodrigo Pinto. There can’t be many critics like him in Chile. He’s a priceless character: every pore of Rodrigo Pinto speaks to us of his love for literature, his humor, his wisdom.
Rodrigo Pinto is that mythical Chilean, the one who has read everything or is prepared to read everything. And on top of it all, he’s a good person. Rodrigo Pinto can go from Wittgenstein to Juan Emar, from Stendhal to Claude Simon without blinking. I thought readers like that had disappeared, or were holed up in Viña, or Villa Alemana, or Valdivia. But Rodrigo Pinto lives in Santiago and is still young, which means it’s possible to suppose that he’ll keep up the fight for a long time in this valley of tears. The last time I saw him, in Santiago, he had a stunning woman on each arm, one dark-haired and the other a redhead, and he was on his way to a Japanese restaurant for sushi.