That night I had nightmares and slept badly. The next morning I asked my mother for money and I went to say goodbye to Nicanor Parra.
I didn’t know where he lived, of course. From the Vargas sisters’ place I called a publishing house and the dean’s office at the University of Chile. Finally I got an address. From the start, I suspected that it would be hard to get there and just as hard to get back. I took a bus that dropped me at an intersection. Then I got on another bus. This one headed down narrow, winding streets full of stores and street vendors selling everything from aluminum pots and pans to toy soldiers. We navigated some roughly paved streets, then we came out into a vacant lot as big and flat as ten soccer fields, more or less surrounded by half-toppled brick walls. I got off there and continued on foot. Once I had left the vacant lot behind, the road forked. In one direction was a street with no buildings (it looked more like a country road than a street) and in the other was a neighborhood of single-story houses, with some unpaved streets and lots of children and dogs. I decided to follow the country road; other groups of houses soon appeared, looking flatter, more squashed or squat, a phenomenon that intensified as I got closer to the cordillera, as if the mountains or the air were crushing the houses to the ground. Then I came to a bus stop and asked for directions. People pointed me toward a street that ran uphill. That way, they said. I went up the street and ahead I saw a river and a bridge. I crossed over and made my way into a neighborhood of streets lined with larches. I saw a sign that said Lo Paigüe, and I guessed that was the name of the neighborhood. I went into a children’s clothing store and said I was looking for Nicanor Parra’s house. It’s at the other end of Lo Paigüe, answered a woman. All right, I said, and I kept walking along the riverbank. Soon the river split into channels, some blocked by dams made of big cans full of mud and assorted trash. I went to get a closer look, and in the riverbed two rats stared up at me from a path of twigs and fossilized bottles linking the islands in the delta of wastewater. One of them, the skinnier one, smiled at me. A humble smile, as if to say: Here I am, Arturo, getting by, how’s it going, man? I thought I was losing it but I stood motionless there on the bank between the path and the delta-turned-dump (though maybe it was the other way around: maybe as the dump grew, it had turned into a delta). The rat shot me a backward glance—over its shoulder, you might say—still with that smile of deep humility dripping from its snout, and then it followed its comrade down, leaping more whimsically than energetically (and not without a certain grace, radiating calm dignity). Across a dusty street, where some spindly apple and Japanese plum trees grew, was the house whose address I had written down on a piece of paper. From a garage set up as a workshop in the back came the sounds of chisel and handsaw. The house looked empty, with its drawn curtains, weedy yard, and general air of abandonment. I rang the bell and a man stuck his head out the open door of the garage. What do you want? I’m looking for Nicanor Parra, the poet, I said. Come in, he said. He was sitting on a little wicker stool and even when he beckoned me in he didn’t rise, only tilted forward on the stool’s front legs. When I was inside he looked me over and said that no poet lived there, though he could recite a poem for me if I wanted. He was about fifty, his hair longish and gray, with the look of an old hustler or a singer. I showed him the paper with the address on it. He read it a few times and said no, I had the wrong address. But did Nicanor Parra used to live here? I asked. A poet did live in the neighborhood, he said, but I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say it was Parra, no. Do you want a glass of wine, my friend, or are you too young for that? I accepted mostly just to put off the ride back for a few minutes, since I sensed it would be long and dull. What do you make? I asked, sitting down on another wicker stool. Guitars, he said. I make guitars, though not very good ones, to be honest. Do they sell? Not very well, but I make ends meet. For a while, the two of us were silent as he sanded a shapeless piece of wood, or at least that’s what it looked like to me, since I know nothing about guitars. In a few days I’m going to Mexico, I said. Ah, he said, in search of new shores, are you? Yes, I said. Things are turning ugly in these parts, he said, though in Mexico, not to say things are bad, but they probably aren’t much better, are they? My father is Mexican, I said. Good thing to have a father, he said, let’s drink to that. We clinked glasses. To the dads, he said, wherever they are. I shook my head in what was meant to be an incredulous way, as if to say: I get the joke, but I don’t share the sentiment. Do you live here? I asked. No, he said, I just have my workshop here, a friend rents it to me for next to nothing, but I live on the other side of the river. The Lo Paigüe River? I asked. That’s the one, he said, Avenida Manuel Rodríguez, number 353, you’re very welcome there. I used to live in the South, I said, not sure why I was saying it. So what brings you here to say goodbye to Parra the poet, if you don’t mind me asking, he said. Nothing in particular, I said, I’m a poet too and I thought… Man! he said, a poet! Then I really will recite that poem for you, to see what you think. I was quiet, waiting. He picked up a guitar to accompany himself and began. His voice was gravelly but warm.
Like the queen of the poooor
In jeeeans
long Jesus haaair
kniiife in the pocket
crude flower tattoooo
I was halfway throoough
my miserable liiife
when yooou turned up
flower of the gutter, flower of the diiirt
and I was saaaved.
Like the queen of the poooor.
Nice, I said, looking out the garage door at the passing clouds. It’s not bad, agreed the man, I wrote it three months ago, at La Gorda Martínez’s. After a dreamy silence, he added: where they make a tomato salsa that’s finger-licking good. Then the guitar maker began talking about trips to the Chilean interior as if it were a faraway, exotic country, and about singer-songwriters, pimps, and whores. But I always come back to the shop, he said at last. Before I left, he recited another of his poems for me.
Tempus fugit, darlin’
said the old man to his ladyyy
sittin’ on the edge of the abyss
as the light was fadin’
scraps of memoryyy
come back, come a-flittin’
torn photographs
oh how we wanted
to set life on fire
dressin’ the sky in tatters
Later he walked out to the street with me and showed me the way to a bus stop. We shook hands and I headed off. On a hill I saw two children playing with a metal hoop. I imagined that if I stepped through the hoop, like a trained pig, I would come out in another dimension. That night, I told Mónica everything that had happened to me and I returned the Rilke book. The next day, we went to the movies with my grandmother, who had come to Santiago to see us off and was staying with some relatives until the day of our departure—our first aborted attempt and then also the second (successful) one—though until the plane was in the air I wasn’t convinced we’d be able to leave the country. The rest of my memories are confused. I think I wrote a letter to Mónica (I don’t dare call it a poem) that I later ripped up, then I got my first passport and we went to the movies a few more times.
And here we are back at the airport, and my mother, followed with enormous effort by my sister and me, both of us dragging suitcases that we’re trying to pass off as carry-on luggage, are taken to the Interpol offices. And I remember that everybody was staring at us and that as I became conscious of being watched I was thinking two things: first, that if I’d had my gun (the shotgun that had turned up mysteriously at our house and that I now think belonged to one of my mother’s lovers), I would have shot at the police and then set fire to the airport; second, that they would never let us leave Chile, which meant that my fate was never to see anything or be seen. And then my mother sparred (verbally) with the policemen, and if she was afraid of being arrested, she managed to hide it very skillfully, and she insulted a creditor from the lands that we were leaving behind with the elegance and disdain of someone who practically lived on planes (the phrase jet set had begun to appear frequently in the magazines that she read), hopping from capital to great world capital. And then, assuming the voice of a woman in distress, she asked for a favor, from one Chilean to another. And then she even begged to be allowed to leave, saying that the father of her children was expecting her and he was the kind of man who might commit some foolish act at the slightest provocation. But nothing could be done and that night we weren’t able to get on a plane (there was some claim about an unpaid bill, that was all) and once we’d gotten over the shock we returned to the Vargas sisters’ place with my grandmother (who spent the night there too) and Rebeca Vargas (soothing my frantic mother, what a good friend she was) and one or two other people I can’t remember now. And Mónica was there. She didn’t like goodbyes and she probably had better things to do than go to the airport with some southerners she’d likely never see again, so she made us tell the whole story over, and despite the laughter, that was a sad night. More than sad: black, gloomy, sleepless. And when everyone had gone to bed, I sat out on the balcony in shirtsleeves, freezing to death, with the Parra book unopened in my hands. And when everything seemed most hopeless, my mother had an asthma attack.