WOMEN WRITERS
I’m not sure whether it’s under the reproving eye of Gabriela Mistral, Violeta Parra, María Luisa Bombal or Diamela Eltit, but there’s a generation of women writers out there who promise to be insatiable. Two among them clearly stand out. They are Lina Meruane and Alejandra Costamagna, followed by Nona Fernández and five or six other young women armed with all the tools of good literature. Lina and Alejandra, both born in 1970, have already published books, which I’ve read. They write very differently from each another. Or rather: the forms to which their writing adheres are very different. And yet they resemble each other in the force of their writing. When they write, the reader has no choice but to follow them through the ruins of this waning century or through the apparently no-exit blaze of the coming millennium. Their prose issues from the hammer blows of conscience, but also from the intangible, and from pain. Stylistically, Lina Meruane can be associated with a certain French school (I’m thinking of Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute), more subjective and introspective, whereas Alejandra Costamagna works in the North American tradition, objective, faster-paced, less ornate. One writes in shades of gray and the other in black and white. Las Infantas [The Princesses], by Lina Meruane, and En voz baja [In a Low Voice] and Ciudadano en retiro [Citizen in Retirement], by Alejandra Costamagna, are achievements in themselves, but above all they are the firm promise of a literature that refuses to relinquish anything. The young female writers of Chile write like women possessed.
SANTIAGO
Santiago is still the same. Twenty-five years doesn’t change a city. People still eat empanadas in Chile. The empanadas of Chile are called empanadas chilenas and they can be sampled at the Nacional or the Rápido (recommended by Germán Marín). People still eat the sandwiches called barros-luco or barros-jarpa or chacareros, ergo the city hasn’t changed. The new buildings, the new streets, mean nothing. The streets of Santiago are still the same as they were ninety-eight years ago. Santiago is the same as it was when Teófilo Cid and Carlos de Rokha walked its streets. We still live in the age of the French Revolution. Our cycles are much longer and more crowded and twenty-five years is nothing.
EVERYBODY WRITES
In Chile everybody writes. I realized this one night when I was waiting to do a live television interview. A girl who had been Miss Chile, or something like that, was on before me. Maybe she’d only been Miss Santiago or Miss Burst Into Flames. Anyway, she was a tall, pretty girl, who talked with the empty poise of all Misses. She was introduced to me. When she found out that I had been a juror for the Paula contest she said that she had almost sent in a story but in the end she hadn’t been able to, and that she would submit something next year. Her confidence was impressive. I hope she’ll have time to type up her story for the 1999 contest. I wish her the best of luck. Sometimes the fact that everyone in the world writes can be wonderful, because you find fellow-writers everywhere, and sometimes it can be a drag because illiterate jerks strut around sporting all the defects and none of the virtues of a real writer. As Nicanor Parra said: it might be a good idea to do a little more reading.
NICANOR PARRA AND GOODBYE TO CHILE
My friend Marcial Cortés-Monroy takes me to visit Nicanor Parra. As far as I’m concerned, Parra has long been the best living poet in the Spanish language. So the visit makes me nervous. It makes no sense when you think about it, but the truth is that I’m nervous: at last I’m going to meet the great man, the poet who sleeps sitting in a chair, though his chair is sometimes a flying chair, jet-propelled, and sometimes a chair that drills down into the earth, but anyway, I’m going to meet the author of Poems and Antipoems, the most clear-sighted resident of this island-corridor that is strolled from end to end by the ghosts of Huidobro, Gabriela Mistral, Neruda, de Rokha, and Violeta Parra, looking in vain for a way out.
We’re met at the door by Corita. A bit wary, Corita, though you can see she isn’t a bad person. Then we’re left alone and soon we hear footsteps approaching the living room. Nicanor comes in. His first words, after he greets us, are in English. It’s the welcome Hamlet receives from some peasants of Denmark. Then Nicanor talks about old age, about Shakespeare’s fate, about cats, about his first house in Las Cruces, which burned down, about Ernesto Cardenal, about Paz, whom he values more as an essayist than a poet, about his father, who was a musician, and about his mother, who was a seamstress and made shirts out of scraps for him and his siblings, about Huidobro, whose tomb on the other side of the bay, above a forest, is visible from the balcony, a white spot like bird shit, about his sister Violeta and her daughter Colombina, about loneliness, about a few afternoons in New York, about car accidents, about India, about dead friends, about his childhood in the south, about Corita’s mussels, which really are very good, about Corita’s fish with mashed potatoes, which is also very good, about Mexico, about Dutch Chile and the Mapuches who fought on the side of the Spanish crown, about the university in Chile, about Pinochet (Nicanor is prophetic regarding the judgment of the House of Lords), about new Chilean fiction (he speaks highly of Pablo Azócar and I’m in complete agreement), about his old friend Tomás Lago, about Gonzalo de Berceo, about Shakespeare’s ghosts and Shakespeare’s madness (always visible, always circumstantial), and I listen to him talk — live — and then I watch a video of him talking about Luis Oyarzún and I feel like I’m falling into an asymmetrical well, the well of the great poets, where all that can be heard is his voice gradually mingling with other voices, and I don’t know who those other voices belong to, and I also hear footsteps echoing through that wooden house as Corita listens to the radio in the kitchen and hoots with laughter, and Nicanor goes up to the second floor and then comes down with a book for me (the first edition of which I’ve owned for years; Nicanor gives me the sixth) that he inscribes, and then I thank him for everything, for the book that I don’t tell him I already have, for the food, for the very pleasant few hours that I’ve spent with him and Marcial, and we say hasta luego though we know it isn’t hasta luego, and then the best thing is to get the fuck out of there, the best thing is to find a way out of the asymetrical well and hurry silently away as Nicanor’s steps echo up and down the corridor.
The Corridor With No Apparent Way Out
It’s strange to come back to Chile, the corridor country, but when you think twice (or even three times) about it, it’s strange to come back anywhere. Assuming, of course, that you’re really back, and not dreaming that you’re back. It was twenty-five years before I came back. The streets actually seemed the same as always. The faces, too. Which can spell deadly boredom or madness. So this time, for a change, I decided to keep calm and wait and see what would happen, sitting in a chair, which is the best place to keep a corridor from surprising you.