The Russian handed me the three cards over the steaming tea. They were arranged in order of arrival and written in English. The first was from New York. I recognized Anne's handwriting. She said the usual things and at the end she told him to take care of himself and to eat every day. She said she was thinking of him, with love. There was a photo of Fifth Avenue on the other side. The second postcard was from Seattle. A view of the port from the air. It was much briefer than the first, and harder to understand. There was something about exile and crime. The third postcard was from Berkeley: a quiet street in bohemian Berkeley, read the caption. I'm seeing my old friends and making new ones, said Anne's clear handwriting. And it ended like the first card, advising dear Alexei to look after himself and eat every day, if only a little.
Sadly, curiously, I looked at the Russian. He looked back at me kindly. Have you been following her advice? I asked. Of course, he replied, I always follow a lady's advice.
MAURICIO ("THE EYE") SILVA
for Rodrigo Pinto and Marнa and Andrйs Braithwaite
Mauricio Silva, also known as "The Eye," always tried to avoid violence, even at the risk of being considered a coward, but violence, real violence, is unavoidable, at least for those of us who were born in Latin America during the fifties and were about twenty years old at the time of Salvador Allende's death. That's just the way it goes.
The case of The Eye is paradigmatic and exemplary, and it may well be worth recalling, especially now that so many years have passed.
In January 1974, four months after the military coup, The Eye left Chile. First he went to Buenos Aires, but then the ill winds blowing in the neighboring republic sent him to Mexico, where he lived for a couple of years. That's where I met him.
He wasn't like most of the Chileans living in Mexico City at the time: he didn't brag about his role in the largely phantasmal resistance; he didn't frequent the various groups of Chileans in exile.
We became friends and used to meet at least once a week at the Cafй La Habana in the Avenida Bucareli or at my house in the Calle Versalles, where I lived with my mother and sister. For the first few months, The Eye scraped by doing odd jobs, before finding work as a photographer for a newspaper. I can't remember which one it was, maybe El Sol, if such a newspaper ever existed in Mexico, or El Universal; I would like to think it was El Nacional, whose cultural supplement was edited by the old Spanish poet Juan Rejano, but it can't have been, because I worked there and I never saw him at the office. Anyway, he worked for one of the Mexico City papers, I'm quite sure of that, and his financial situation improved, imperceptibly at first, because The Eye had grown accustomed to a spartan way of life, but if you looked carefully, you could spot unequivocal signs of an economic upturn.
For example, during the first months I remember him wearing sweatshirts. Toward the end of his time in Mexico City he had bought himself a pair of shirts with collars and once I even saw him in a tie, an item of apparel quite foreign to me and my poet friends. In fact the only person wearing a tie who ever sat down at our table in the Cafй La Habana was Mauricio ("The Eye") Silva.
At the time, The Eye was reputed to be a homosexual. By which I mean that a rumor to that effect was circulating in the various groups of Chileans in exile, who made it their business partly for the sheer pleasure of denigration and partly to add a little spice to their rather boring lives. In spite of their left-wing convictions, when it came to sexuality, they reacted just like their enemies on the right, who had become the new masters of Chile.
The Eye came to dinner at my house once. My mother liked him and The Eye returned her affection by taking family photos from time to time: my mother and one of her friends, my sister and me. Everyone likes to be photographed, he once told me. At the time I thought, I don't care one way or the other, but on reflection I decided he was right. The only people who don't like it are certain Indians, he said. My mother thought he was talking about the Mapuche, but in fact he meant Indians from India, a country that was to play a major part in his life.
One night I ran into him in the Cafй La Habana. There was hardly anyone else there and The Eye was sitting by the windows that look out onto the Avenida Bucareli, with a white coffee in one of those big, thick glasses they used to have at La Habana (I've never come across them in any other cafй or restaurant). I sat down next to him and we talked for a while. He seemed translucent. That was the impression I had. The Eye seemed to be made of some vitreous material. His face and the glass of white coffee in front of him seemed to be exchanging signals: two incomprehensible phenomena whose paths had just crossed at that point in the vast universe, making valiant but probably vain attempts to find a common language.
That night he confessed to me that he was a homosexual, just as the exiled Chileans had been whispering, and that he was leaving Mexico. For a moment I thought he was leaving because he was homosexual. But no, a friend had found him a job with a photographic agency in Paris, the sort of work he had always dreamed of. He was in the mood for talking and I listened. He said that for years he had felt guilty and hidden his sexuality, mainly because he considered himself a socialist and there was a certain degree of prejudice among his friends on the Left. We talked about the antiquated word "invert," which conjured up desolate landscapes, and the term "ponce," which I would have written with a c, while The Eye thought it was spelt with an s.
I remember we ended up railing against the Chilean Left, and at one point I proposed a toast to the wandering fighters of Chile, a substantial subset of the wandering fighters of Latin America, a legion of orphans, who, as the name suggests, wander the face of the earth offering their services to the highest bidder, who is almost always the lowest as well. But when we finished laughing, The Eye said violence wasn't for him. I'm not like you, he said, with a sadness I didn't understand at the time, I hate violence. I assured him that I did too. Then we started talking about other things: books and movies, and after that we didn't see each other again.
One day I heard that The Eye had left Mexico. One of his former colleagues from the newspaper told me. I wasn't surprised that he hadn't said good-bye. The Eye never said good-bye to anyone. I never said good-bye to anyone either. None of my Mexican friends ever did. For my mother, however, it was a clear case of bad manners.
Two or three years later I left Mexico too. I went to Paris, where I tried (not very hard, admittedly) to find The Eye, without success. As time went by I began to forget what he looked like, although I still had a vague sense of his bearing and his manner. There was a certain way of expressing opinions, as if from a distance, sadly but gently, that I went on associating with The Eye, and even when his face had disappeared or receded into the shadows, that essence lingered in my memory: a way of moving, an almost abstract entity in which there was no place for calm.
Years went by. Many years. Some friends died. I got married, had a child, published some books.
At one point I had to go to Berlin. On my last night there, after dinner with Heinrich von Berenberg and his family, I took a taxi to my hotel (as a rule Heinrich drove me back at night) and told the driver to stop before we got there, because I felt like a walk. The driver (an elderly Asian man who was listening to Beethoven) dropped me about five blocks from the hotel. It wasn't very late, but there was hardly anyone about. I walked across a square. The Eye was sitting on a bench. I didn't recognize him until he spoke to me. He called my name and asked me how I was. I turned around and looked at him for a few moments without realizing who it was. He remained seated on the bench, looking at me, then glanced down at the ground or to the side, at the huge trees crowding that little square in Berlin and at the shadows surrounding him more densely than me (or so I thought). I took two steps toward him and asked who he was. It's me, Mauricio Silva, he said. The Eye, I asked, from Chile? He nodded and only then did I see him smile.