That night we talked almost until dawn. The Eye had been living in Berlin for some years and knew where to find the bars that stayed open all night. I asked him about his life. He gave me a general idea of the freelance photographer's lot. He had lived in Paris, Milan, and now Berlin, in modest apartments, where his books kept one another company during his long absences. It was only when we went into the first bar that I could tell how much he had changed. He was a lot thinner, his hair was going grey and wrinkles creased his face. I also noticed that he drank much more than he used to in Mexico. He wanted to know about me. Our meeting had not been a coincidence, of course. My name had been in the newspapers and The Eye had seen it or someone had told him that one of his compatriots was giving a reading or a talk, which he couldn't attend, but he called the organizers and found out where I was staying. He told me he'd been sitting there in the square thinking while he waited for me to turn up.
I laughed. I was very glad to have met him again. The Eye was the same as ever: an odd person but good-natured and unassuming. You felt you could say good-bye to him at any time of the night and he would simply say good-bye, without reproach or any bad feeling. He was the ideal Chilean, stoic and amiable, a type that has never been very numerous in Chile but cannot be found anywhere else.
Reading over the previous sentence I realize that it is not strictly true. The Eye would never have made such a sweeping generalization. In any case, the conversation we had, sitting in various bars, he with his whisky and I with my nonalcoholic beer, was made up essentially of recollections; it was, in other words, a confessional and melancholic dialogue. But the most interesting part for me, which was more like a monologue, came as he was walking me back to my hotel, around two in the morning, and coincidentally it began just as we were crossing the square in which we had met a few hours before. I remember it was cold and suddenly The Eye started talking, saying he wanted to tell me something he had never told anyone else. I looked at him. His gaze was fixed on the paved path winding across the square. I asked him what he wanted to tell me. About a trip, he replied immediately. And what happened on this trip? I asked. Then The Eye stopped and for a few moments nothing seemed to exist for him except the tops of the tall German trees and, above them, the fragments of sky and silently boiling clouds.
Something terrible, said The Eye. Do you remember a conversation we had in the Cafй La Habana before I left Mexico? Yes, I said. Did I tell you I was gay? asked The Eye. You said you were a homosexual, I said. Let's sit down, said The Eye.
He sat down on the very same bench as before, I swear, as if I still hadn't arrived, as if I hadn't yet started to cross the square and he was still waiting for me and thinking about his life and the story that he was compelled, by history or destiny or chance, to tell me. He turned up the collar of his coat and began to talk. I remained standing and lit a cigarette. The Eye's story was set in India. He had gone there for work, not as a tourist, and he had two assignments. The first was typical third-world photojournalism, a mixture of Marguerite Duras and Hermann Hesse (we smiled); there are people who like to imagine India as a cross between India Song and Siddhartha, he said, and we have to give the editors what they want. So the first assignment consisted of photos of colonial houses, derelict gardens, all sorts of restaurants, especially the seedier kind (or rather restaurants that looked seedy but were in fact normal Indian family restaurants); photos of the edges of cities, the really poor areas, then the country and the transportation system: roads, railway junctions, buses, and trains arriving and departing; and nature of course, in a dormant state quite unlike Western hibernation, trees that were clearly non-European, rivers and streams, bare fields and fields sown with crops, the Land of Holy Men, said The Eye.
The second assignment took him to the prostitutes' district in an Indian city whose name I will never know.
And that was where The Eye's story really began. He was still living in Paris at the time and had been commissioned to take photos to illustrate a text written by a well-known French writer who had become a specialist in the underworld of prostitution. In fact, the assignment was only the first of a series, which would cover red-light districts around the world, each one shot by a different photographer, but all described by the same writer.
I don't know which city The Eye flew into, Bombay maybe, or Calcutta, perhaps Benares or Madras; I remember I asked him but he ignored my question. Anyway, he arrived in India on his own, because the Frenchman had already written his text and he simply had to illustrate it, so he went to the districts mentioned in the text and started taking photographs. According to his plans — and the plans of his publisher — the work, and consequently his stay in India, shouldn't have lasted more than a week. He stayed in a hotel in a quiet part of town. His room was air-conditioned and the window looked onto a garden that didn't belong to the hotel, where he could see two trees on either side of a fountain and part of a terrace on which two women would sometimes appear, followed or preceded by several little boys. The women were dressed in what The Eye took to be traditional Indian style, but not the boys; once he even saw them wearing ties. In the afternoons he went to the red-light district, took photos and talked with the prostitutes, some of whom were very young and beautiful, while others were older or more faded, with the air of skeptical, laconic matrons. He came to like the smell, which had bothered him at first. The pimps (whom he rarely saw) were friendly and carried themselves like Western pimps or perhaps (but this thought only occurred to him later, in his air-conditioned hotel room) it was the other way around: Western pimps had adopted the body language of their Indian counterparts.
One afternoon he was invited to have sexual intercourse with one of the prostitutes. He refused politely. The pimp understood immediately that The Eye was a homosexual and the next night took him to a brothel where there were young male prostitutes. That night The Eye fell sick. It was only then, he said, examining the shadows in that Berlin square, that I really knew I was in India. What did you do? I asked. Nothing. I looked and smiled. And did nothing. Then it occurred to one of the boys that perhaps their guest would like to visit another kind of establishment. Or that is what The Eye supposed, because they didn't speak English among themselves. So they left the brothel and walked through narrow, filthy streets until they came to a building with a small facade, behind which lay a labyrinth of dim passages and tiny rooms, with altars and shrines gleaming in the shadows here and there.
It is customary in some parts of India, said The Eye, looking at the ground, to offer a young boy to a deity whose name I can't remember. I regret to say that here I interrupted to point out that as well as having forgotten the name of the deity, he couldn't remember the name of the city or of any of the people in his story. The Eye looked at me and smiled. I've tried to forget, he said.
At that point I started to fear the worst. I sat down beside him and for a while we remained there in silence with our coat collars turned up. After looking around the square as if he were afraid a stranger might be lurking in the shadows, he resumed his story. They make an offering of this boy and he becomes the incarnation of the god, for a time, I couldn't say how long. Maybe only as long as the procession lasts, maybe a week, a month, a year, I don't know. It's a barbaric ceremony, forbidden by Indian law, but that doesn't stop it from happening. During the festival the boy is showered with gifts, which his parents, who are generally poor, are only too glad to accept. When the festival is over the boy is sent back to his house, or the filthy hovel he lives in, and in a year's time it all begins again.