One day I was invited to dinner at the house of a government minister. The chance of a lifetime to write an in-depth article on power. Actually, I was invited to dinner at the house of the writer Diamela Eltit, whose lover or partner, or anyway the man she lived with, was the Socialist minister Jorge Arrate, spokesman of the Frei government. That was enough to make anybody nervous. Our friend Lina Meruane came to pick us up at eight at the hotel where we were staying and off we went.
First surprise: the neighborhood where Eltit and Arrate live is a middle-middle class neighborhood, not upper class or upper-middle class. The kind of neighborhood that produced the illustrious (and not so illustrious) gladiators of the seventies. Second surprise: the house is relatively small and not ostentatious at all, not the kind of house where one expects a Chilean minister to live. Third surprise: when we get out of the car I scan the street for the unmarked car driven by the minister’s bodyguard and I don’t see it.
Many hours later, when I ask Jorge about his bodyguards, he says he doesn’t have any. What do you mean you don’t have any? I ask. I just don’t, he says, Diamela doesn’t like bodyguards and anyway they’re a nuisance. But is it safe? I ask. Jorge Arrate is well-acquainted with persecution and exile and he knows that no one is ever safe. Diamela glances at him. We’re at the table, eating the dinner that Jorge personally prepared. There’s no meat. Someone in the house is a vegetarian and presumably he or she has imposed the diet on everyone else. In any case, it’s Jorge who cooks and he does a fine job. I enjoy vegetarian food the way I enjoy a kick in the stomach, but I eat what they put in front of me. Diamela looks at Jorge and then she looks at my wife, Carolina, and then at Lina and at the novelist Pablo Azócar, the fifth guest, and she doesn’t look at me. I get the sense she doesn’t like me. Or maybe she’s very shy. Anyway. The truth is, all I can think about right now is a band of Nazis bursting into the house to kill the minister and along the way killing my wife and my son, Lautaro (who hasn’t come to the table and is asleep in a room with the TV on). And what if those bastards from Patria y Libertad turn up? I ask. I hope they don’t, says Jorge, so calmly it makes my hair stand on end.
This is no country for me, I think.
That morning, Jorge Arrate went out all by himself to shop for provisions for dinner. It’s clear at a glance that he hasn’t gotten rich as a minister under Frei. I think he was a minister in the Aylwin government too. I’m not sure. What I do know is that he hasn’t gotten rich. Still, as he waited patiently in line to pay for his lettuce and tomatoes, some kids who probably weren’t even born when he was already a political exile started chanting “yellow, yellow, yellow.” Other times, of course, what they yell (different kids, horribly vulgar women) is “red, red.” So what did you do when they called you yellow? I asked. Nothing, what could I do? said Jorge. Take the two slurs together, I tell him, and you’d have the Spanish flag. Jorge doesn’t hear me. He’s telling my wife the story of an independent candidate in the first democratic elections who, in the name of equal opportunity, was allotted fifteen seconds of free advertising space on television. The candidate had decided to say only her name. But then she wasn’t even given enough time for that. She said her name, but so fast that you could hardly understand her, the whole thing reduced to a short and desperate squawk.
The surprising thing is that the candidate won, which gave the big party strategists and advertising people much food for thought. Anyway, says Jorge, as if to play down this — and any other story — the point is that soon afterward the independent candidate joined a party on the far right.
And so any fantasy about a heroic or at least eccentric woman taking a solitary stance was shattered, as everything is shattered in Chile, and herein perhaps lies the country’s charm, its strength: in its insistence on sinking when it could soar and soaring when it’s hopelessly sunk. In its taste for bloody paradoxes. In its schizophrenic reactions.
Maybe that’s why there are so many writers in Chile, I say to myself. Because here, as I confirm on a daily basis, everybody writes. A writer publishes just one collection of stories at a bottom-tier publishing house and he’s got an ad in one of the newspapers or magazines, and out of nothing comes another writing workshop, full of young people and people no longer so young, all eager to face up to the mystery of the blank page. This is how writers make a living, of course. Most don’t make much, but there are some who rake it in. People flock to these workshops (it scares me to think how many there must be up and down the Republic) in the same frame of mind in which some New Yorkers go to see a therapist. Not desperate, but close. Not calm, but close. They aren’t tightrope walkers, but when it comes to teetering on the brink of the abyss — an abyss that seems more Latin American every day — they manage to keep their balance, a precarious balance that is in some sense deeply pathetic, but also heroic.
Of course, not everybody limits themselves to attending workshops. Some are also in therapy. One very dear friend, during dinner at a restaurant, told me about her psychoanalyst, who turned out to be none other than Norman Mailer’s daughter. Another friend (a writer, and not a bad one, either) was listening and said that he was in therapy with Norman Mailer’s daughter too. Almost instantly, another girl jumps in and says the same thing. For a moment I thought they were kidding me. Everyone had drunk lots of pisco and I hadn’t touched anything because I can’t drink anymore, but the sense I got was that I was the only drunk person in the room. Norman Mailer’s daughter is a psychoanalyst and she lives in Chile? Hard to believe. But it’s true. What could possibly bring Norman Mailer’s daughter to Chile? If we were in Mexico, it would make more sense: there’s a tradition of outrageousness there that encompasses a sub-genre of bizarre visitors. But not in Chile. And yet Norman Mailer’s daughter lives here and has been seeing these people for a while now. So is she any good? I ask. My friend says she’s very good, although I don’t think she sounds very convinced. The writer says sometimes she’s good and sometimes she has no clue. But why did she come to live in Chile? I ask, on the verge of tears. No one knows.
Jorge Arrate, as far as I know, isn’t in therapy. But he hasn’t been able to avoid writing workshops. Somebody told me the story of how he met Diamela Eltit. She ran a workshop and he decided to enroll. At first he came at the scheduled time, like everyone else in the group, except that Arrate had a chauffeur and an official car since he was already a minister. Then one day he came half an hour early. And another day he came an hour early. And finally he came three hours early. And while they were waiting for the workshop to begin — while Diamela, I suppose, wrote or cooked or ironed her son’s clothes — Arrate would sit himself down in a chair in her house, which is where writers hold their workshops, and talk to her about literature. I like to imagine them like that, Jorge sitting and Diamela ironing and every so often giving him one of those Diamelian looks, at once brooding and innocent, and talking about her writing, which is as complex as anything you’ll come across in Spanish today, and probably also about other people’s work, books by women, avant-garde texts, works that Arrate, a socialist and an exile forged in fights where such things had no place, wasn’t familiar with and that from then on he set to reading with passion and humor — the same passion and humor that he brings to everything he does — and also with the boldness of love. After a while he was dating Diamela, contemporary Chilean literature’s most maudit writer, and then, basically, as sometimes happens, they moved in together.