Then the bodyguards disappeared. But what if one night you’re attacked by some group from Patria y Libertad? I asked for the hundredth time, ready to eat my dessert and go. I can only hope they don’t have my address, says Arrate. Never had a house seemed more vulnerable to me. The room where Diamela writes overlooks the yard and is big and full of books. Arrate’s office, meanwhile, is small, with photographs on the walls: most are of two kids, Jorge’s children, who live in Holland, others are of legendary leftist figures, a brief frozen history of lost dreams. At some point during the night we talk about Carson McCullers and her unhappy husband who wanted to write and couldn’t. Diamela knows McCullers’s work very well. Arrate, joking, says that he, a former writing workshop participant, has something in common with McCullers’s husband. I suppose he’s referring to his literary efforts. I don’t know. I’ve never read anything by Arrate and I probably never will. But he’s right about one thing: Carson McCullers’s husband fought in World War II and he was brave, and Arrate fought in the disastrous little wars of Latin America and he’s brave. Brave like Allende’s former comrades. In other words, stoically brave. But I don’t tell him that.
Chilean writers, real or aspiring, are hopeless. That’s what I’m thinking as, late that night, I leave the house where Diamela and the minister live, and outside we say goodbye to Pablo Azócar, who wants to leave Chile as soon as possible and never quite manages to go and finally is lost; that’s what I’m thinking as Lina, Carolina, and I wave goodbye on a dark street in the neighborhood that produced so many illustrious gladiators.
And that’s what I’m thinking when I talk late one night to Pedro Lemebel, one of Chile’s most brilliant writers. It’s his birthday. Lemebel — born in the mid-fifties, according to him, although I think he was born in the early fifties — has published four books (Incontables [Countless], 1986; La esquina es mi corazón [The Corner Is My Heart], 1995; Loco afán [Wild Desire], 1996; and De perlas y cicatrices [Of Pearls and Scars], 1998), and for some time, a pretty shitty time, as it happens, he was one of two members of the group Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis or The Mares of the Apocalypse, whose name is an accomplishment in itself and whose survival was something like a miracle.
Who were the Yeguas? First and foremost, the Yeguas were two penniless homosexuals, which in a homophobic and hierarchical country (where being poor is an embarrassment, and being poor and an artist is a crime) was almost an invitation to abuse, in every sense of the word. Much of the honor of the real Republic and the Republic of Letters was saved by the Yeguas. Then came the rift and Lemebel began his solo career. There is no battlefield on which Lemebel — cross-dresser, militant, third-world champion, anarchist, Mapuche Indian by adoption, a man reviled by an establishment that rejects the truth he speaks, possessor of a painfully long memory — hasn’t fought and lost.
In my opinion, Lemebel is one of Chile’s best writers and the best poet of my generation, though he doesn’t write poetry. Lemebel is one of those few who doesn’t seek respectability (the respectability for which Chilean writers would sell their own asses) but freedom. His contemporaries, the hordes of right-leaning and left-leaning mediocrities, glance at him over their shoulders and try to smile. He isn’t the first homosexual, god knows, of the Chilean Parnassus, with all its closeted queers, but he’s the first cross-dresser to appear on stage alone in the glare of the footlights, addressing a literally stupefied crowd.
They can’t forgive me for having a voice, Robert, says Lemebel at the other end of the line. Santiago glitters in the night. It looks like the last great city of the southern hemisphere. Cars pass under my balcony and Pinochet is in prison in London. How many years has it been since the last curfew? How many years will it be until the next? They can’t forgive me for remembering all the things they did, says Lemebel. But you want to know what they really can’t forgive, Robert? They can’t forgive me for not forgiving them.
I have the sense that Lemebel and Jorge Arrate wouldn’t get along. Anywhere in Europe, this would be a pity, but in Chile it’s a tragedy too.
And last of all, a true story. I repeat: this isn’t fiction, it’s real, it happened in Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship and more or less everybody (the small and remote “everybody” that is Chile) knows it. A right-wing young woman sets up house with a right-wing American, or marries him. The two of them aren’t just young, they’re good-looking and proud. He’s a DINA (National Intelligence Directorate) agent, possibly also a CIA agent. She loves literature and loves her man. They rent or buy a big house in the suburbs of Santiago. In the cellars of this house the American interrogates and tortures political prisoners who are later moved on to other detention centers or added to the list of the disappeared. She writes, and she attends writing workshops. In those days, I suppose, there weren’t as many workshops as there are today, but there were some. In Santiago people have grown accustomed to the curfew. At night there aren’t many places to go for fun, and the winters are long. So every weekend or every few nights she has a group of writers over to her house. It isn’t a set group. The guests vary. Some come only once, others several times. At the house there’s always whiskey, good wine, and sometimes the gatherings turn into dinners. One night a guest goes looking for the bathroom and gets lost. It’s his first time there and he doesn’t know the house. Probably he’s a bit tipsy or maybe he’s already lost in the alcoholic haze of the weekend. In any case, instead of turning right he turns left and then he goes down a flight of stairs that he shouldn’t have gone down and he opens a door at the end of a long hallway, long like Chile. The room is dark but even so he can make out a bound figure, in pain or possibly drugged. He knows what he’s seeing. He closes the door and returns to the party. He isn’t drunk anymore. He’s terrified, but he doesn’t say anything. “Surely the people who attended those post-coup, culturally stilted soireés will remember the annoyance of the flickering current that made lamps blink and music stop, interrupting the dancing. Just as surely, they knew nothing about another parallel dance, in which the jab of the prod tensed the tortured back of the knee in a voltaic arc. They might not have heard the cries over the blare of disco, which was all the rage back then,” says Pedro Lemebel. Whatever the case, the writers leave. But they come back for the next party. She, the hostess, even wins a short story or poetry prize from the only literary journal still in existence back then, a left-wing journal.
And this is how the literature of every country is built.
Words From Outer Space
So what is Secret Interference? It’s a clandestinely recorded tape. It’s voices talking and transmitting orders and counter-orders on September 11, 1973. Voices we’ve vaguely heard at some point in our lives, but to which we aren’t able to attach a body, as if they issued from forms without substance. Voices that are echoes of a nebulous fear located in some part of our bodies. Imaginary ghosts. A real fear, and also a vulgar fear.
Some orders are unequivocaclass="underline" there’s talk about killing on sight, arrests, bombings. Sometimes the men who’re talking make jokes: this doesn’t bring them any closer to us, in fact, it sinks them deeper into an abyss, they’re men who emerge from invisible and imperceptible pits and who, in vaguely military terms, promise to establish order. Despite it all, the humor they flaunt is familiar. A humor that one recognizes and would rather not recognize.
The man who’s talking could be my father or grandfather. The man who’s giving orders could be an old school friend, the bully or the teacher’s pet, the kid no one remembers or the kid we played with just once. In those familiar voices we can contemplate ourselves, at a remove, as if watching ourselves in a mirror. It isn’t Stendhal’s mirror, the mirror that strolls along a path, but it could be, and for many who hear the tape it surely will be precisely that.