Blessed vision! Her winged presence produced something akin to astonishment, of the sort usually elicited only by poems, whether on canvas or on the page. Abstracted traveler of imaginary lands, from the very start she dazzled her dear parents and the select circle to which they belonged with her intellect and beauty. I can say without hesitation that it was from Eliseo Arancibia that she inherited her open, unwavering intelligence, and from Elena Múgica Echevarría the beauty and grace that were hers until the final dusk.
As evidence of her cleverness, let me say that by the age of ten she could already hold forth on the vagaries of criollo and French surrealism. She valued the work of our dear Juan Miguel Marot, of blessed memory, and she dispelled any confusion about the overvalued paintbrush of Roberto Antonio Matta. Spellbound, the grown-ups—our fun-loving Here and Abroad gang, who back then were just skimming the edge of their forties (oh, happy age!)—heard her say in her deep, confident little voice, her body leaning like a Harlequin on her beloved father’s knee, that Leonora Carrington’s main defect was her dreadful thinness.
As I’ve said, she was blessed with her father’s talent and the beauty of the woman who bore her, but there was something else, something visible only to the artist’s discerning eye, if I may say so: a quality of character (and character, as everyone knows, is the seat of talent, its palace and its lair), a quality of character, as I was saying, that was singular, unique, incommutable. Chiseled in fire. It was a Chilean quality, but English too, something to astound the shrewdest psychologist.
She had it all (or all that anyone can have by the age of twenty-one), but she wasn’t spoiled. A good daughter, a good student, a good friend, steadfast in everything that she undertook, free as a bird; sometimes my tired eyes seemed to see a human being with a lifetime of experiences and vicissitudes, not a person—an exquisite person—born in 1952. Such was her kindness and her sweetness, her understanding and her grace.
I saw her for the last time eight or nine months before her death, at her father’s opening at the Círculo Francés of Santiago. It goes without saying that she was a grown woman by then. As always, she exuded life and talent from every pore. We exchanged a few words. I learned that she was studying literature at the University of Concepción, that she wrote poems (I begged her to recite one on the spot, but she modestly declined, judging it unseemly), that she was planning to travel to Europe at the end of the year, that she lived alone or rather with her old Mapuche nurse at her enchanted and enchanting house in Nacimiento, that it had been a while since she gave up drawing. I thought this was a shame, and she graced me with one of her frank, crystalline laughs, ripe with health.
After the opening, we threw a party for Eliseo at the home of the Ortega Basauris. Some among us will still remember the event with fondness and nostalgia. Present were new and old members of the group of Here and Abroad painters, joined in fruitful camaraderie. The times were tumultuous, but we were undaunted. Patricia turned up too, though just for a moment, with her parents and a friend with whom she planned to leave for Viña del Mar. Surrounded as I was by reporters and strangers asking my opinion on a wide range of topics, it was impossible for us to approach each other. After a while, she and her friend were gone and Eliseo himself conveyed her goodbyes.
Did I suspect, perhaps, that it would be the last time?
Who knows!
All I know is that I cried like a child when, months later, Eliseo called to give me the news. And in my cathartic weeping, I was accompanied by my wife and my son, Juan Carlos.
She’s gone. She has flown far from our woes and tribulations. She is no longer with us. God has deprived us of her laughter and her gaze. We’ve all lost. The whole of Chile has lost. Her death might seem the best argument for discouragement.
And yet it’s necessary to carry on. Carry on, we must! Now more than ever.
I’ll conclude by saying that Patricia loved the night. She loved it for the gift and consolation of the stars, she confessed to me and her father one distant (pure and distant) day, on the sprawling veranda of La Refalosa, sipping a cold tea after a tiring excursion. In the vast night, the same night in which all of us will be lost, the stars twinkle. That’s our Southern Cross. Beyond it, the firmament extends its mantle of orbs and lights. That’s where Patricia lives. She’s waiting for us there.
The Biggest. The Border-Maker. The Prettiest River at the Ass End of the Earth.
These aren’t the roads of the counterrevolution, said Patricia Arancibia, as I quaked. These are the roads of Los Ángeles, Nacimiento, the province of Bío-Bío. We’re on our way to my house.
The Messerschmitt
In December, a few lucky people saw the old plane flying over Concepción. It was the time of day when the sun sinks into the Pacific, rolling toward the islands, the happy places, toward Japan and the Philippines. The plane appeared from the north, as if approaching from Tomé. It came in over Talcahuano and spent a long time circling over Concepción. I was in the police station gymnasium, now a holding pen for political prisoners, recovering from my last beating, and I don’t know where I got the strength to come to the window; where I got the idea that it was important to see that plane.
It was Gaspar Yáñez who said that a Messerschmitt was flying over the city. A what? A Messerschmitt, comrades, a Third Reich fighter plane, let me get a good look at it, a 109, the crown jewel of the Luftwaffe, two 15-mm machine guns and a 30-mm cannon. What’s it doing? the prisoners asked. For a few seconds, Gaspar Yáñez studied the red rectangle in silence… Aerobatics! Spins! Loops! Rolls! The pilot must be ecstatic!
I remember that the light inside the gymnasium was a dusky yellow and every face was turned toward Gaspar Yáñez, who was peering out the window like a pirate. Christ almighty, what a pilot, what a plane, what a sight! Sitting on the floor, the men and women listened in silence: Gaspar’s thin, bony face, his broad nose and full lips, seemed to smolder in the red of the sunset. They were the fighter planes in the Battle of England, he said as if in prayer. Wait until a Hawker Hunter turns up and see what happens to your fighter, spat someone from a dark corner. Never was so much owed by so many to so few, added the dean of the Law School, who was dozing on a filthy mattress between two miners from Lota.
But this one seems to be retrofitted, said Gaspar. Look, there’s smoke coming from it! The beauty of it, gentlemen! The elegance, the grace! Don’t bad-mouth German technology to me! Does the smoke mean it’s going down, Gasparcito? asked a woman of about fifty, also from Lota. Going down? No! It’s writing something in the sky. Holy mother, what can it be, what can it be, cried Gaspar in agony. It must be an advertisement, said one of the prisoners. Then I leaped over the blankets, the mattresses, and the bodies and I looked out the window.
Through the bars, I saw the plane, the silent propellers, the square-tipped wings, just like in Spitfire magazine, the steel-blue enemy fighter plane, strangely lovely. And then I saw the words: the bold script swiftly whittled away by the wind, the dark text written in the sky as if by someone with the secret wish to be read only in a mirror. And the lines of poetry, words that I had heard before, stolen—like so much else—from Patricia Arancibia’s house.