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Veinte poemas de amor (which by that stage struck me as unintentionally funny) and Crepusculario (Twilight), including the poem "Farewell," to which I remain unshakeably faithful, though even then I saw it as the ultimate in schmaltz. 21. In 1971 I read Vallejo, Huidobro, Martнn Adбn, Borges, Oquendo de Amat, Pablo de Rokha, Gilberto Owen, Lуpez Velarde, Oliverio Girondo. I even read Nicanor Parra. I even read Pablo Neruda! 22. The Mexican poets I was hanging out and swapping books with at the time belonged for the most part to one of two camps: the Nerudians and the Vallejians. I was, unquestionably, Parrian in my isolation. 23. But the fathers must be killed; poets are born orphans. 24. In 1973 I went back to Chile: a long journey over land and sea, repeatedly delayed by hospitality. I met with revolutionaries of various stripes. The whirlwind of fire that would soon engulf Central America could already be glimpsed in the eyes of my friends, who spoke of death as if they were talking about a film. 25. I reached Chile in August 1973. I wanted to help build socialism. The first book of poems I bought was Parras Obra Gruesa {Construction Work). The second was Artefactos {Artifacts), also by Parra. 26. I had less than a month in which to enjoy building socialism. At the time, of course, I didn't know that. I was Parrian in my ingenuity. 27. I went to a conference and saw various Chilean poets; it was awful. 28. On the eleventh of September I turned up at the only functioning party cell in the suburb where I was living and volunteered. The man in charge was a communist factory worker, chubby and perplexed, but willing to fight. His wife seemed to be more courageous than he was. We all piled into their little wooden-floored dining room. While the man in charge was speaking, I examined the books on the sideboard. There weren't many, mostly cowboy novels like the ones my father used to read. 29. For me, the eleventh of September was a comic as well as a bloody spectacle. 30. I kept watch in an empty street. I forgot my password. My comrades were fifteen years old, retired, or out of work. 31. When Neruda died, I was already in Mulchйn, with my uncles, aunts, and cousins. In November, while traveling from Los Angeles to Concepciуn, I was arrested during a road check and taken prisoner. I was the only one they took from the bus. I thought they were going to kill me there and then. From the cell I could hear the officer in charge of the patrol, a fresh-faced policeman who looked like an asshole (an asshole wriggling around in a sack of flour) talking with his superiors in Concepciуn. He was saying he had captured a Mexican terrorist. Then he took it back and said: A foreign terrorist. He mentioned my accent, the dollars I was carrying, the brand of my shirt and trousers. 32. My great-grandparents, the Flores and the Granas, vainly attempted to tame the wilds of Araucanнa (when they couldn't even tame themselves), so they were probably Nerudian in their excess. My grandfather, Roberto Avalos Marti, was a colonel, stationed at various forts in the south until his mysteriously early retirement, which leads me to suspect that he was Nerudian in his sympathy for the blue and white. My paternal grandparents came from Galicia and Catalonia, gave their lives to the province of Bio-Bio and were Nerudian in their landscape and patient labor. 33. I was imprisoned in Concepciуn for a few days and then released. They didn't torture me, as I had feared; they didn't even rob me. But they didn't give me anything to eat either, or any kind of covering for the night, so I had to rely on the goodwill of the other prisoners, who shared their food with me. In the small hours I could hear them torturing others; I couldn't sleep and there was nothing to read except a magazine in English that someone had left behind. The only interesting article in it was about a house that had once belonged to Dylan Thomas. 34. I got out of that hole thanks to a pair of detectives who had been at high school with me in Los Angeles, and to my friend Fernando Fernбndez, who was twenty-one, just a year older than me, but possessed of a composure comparable to that of the idealized Englishman on whom Chileans were desperately and vainly trying to model themselves. 35. In January 1974 I left Chile. I have never been back. 36. Were the Chileans of my generation courageous? Yes, they were. 37. In Mexico I heard the story of a young woman from the MIR who had been tortured by having live rats put into her vagina. This woman managed to get out of the country and went to Mexico City. There she lived, but each day she grew sadder, until one day the sadness killed her. That's what I heard. I didn't know her personally. 38. The story isn't exceptional. We are told of peasant women in Guatemala being subjected to unspeakable humiliations. The amazing thing about the story is its ubiquity. In Paris I heard of a Chilean woman who had been tortured in the same way before emigrating to France. She too had been a member of the MIR; she was the same age as the woman in Mexico and, like her, had died of sadness. 39. Some time later, I was told of a Chilean woman in Stockholm: she was young, a member or ex-member of the MIR; in November 1973 she had been tortured, using rats, and she had died, to the astonishment of the doctors who were treating her, of sadness,
morbus melancholicus. 40. Is it possible to die of sadness? Yes, it is. It is possible (though painful) to die of hunger. It is even possible to die of spleen. 41. Was this anonymous Chilean, repeatedly subject to torture and death, a single woman, or three different women who happened to share the same political affiliation and the same kind of beauty? According to a friend, it was one woman, who, as in Vallejo's poem "Masa," multiplied in death without in any way surviving. (Actually, in Vallejo's poem, it is not the dead man who multiplies but the supplicants begging him not to die). 42. Once upon a time there was a Belgian poet called Sophie Podolski. She was born in 1953 and committed suicide in 1974. She published only one book, called Le pays ou tout est permis (The Country Where Everything Is Allowed, Montfaucon Research Center, 1970, 280 facsimile pages). 43. Germain Nouveau (1852–1920), a friend of Rimbaud's, spent the last years of his life as a vagabond and beggar. He went by the name of Humilis (in 1910 he published Les poemes d'Humilis) and slept on church porches. 44. Everything is possible. Every poet ought to know that. 45. I was once asked who were my favorite young Chilean poets. Maybe they didn't say "young" but "contemporary." I said I liked Rodrigo Lira, although he can't really be called contemporary anymore (though he is young, younger than any of us) because he's dead. 46. Dance partners for the new Chilean poetry: the mathematical scions of Neruda and the cruel progeny of Huidobro, the comic followers of Mistral and the humble disciples of De Rokha, the heirs to Parras bones and to Lihn's eyes. 47. A confession: I cannot read Neruda's memoirs without feeling seriously ill. What a mass of contradictions. All that effort to hide and beautify a thing with a disfigured face. So little generosity, so little sense of humor. 48. During a period of my life, thankfully behind me now, I used to see Adolf Hitler in the corridor of my house. All Hitler did was walk up and down the corridor, without even looking at me when he passed the open door of my bedroom. At first I thought it was the devil (who else could it have been?) and feared I had gone irreversibly mad. 49. After two weeks, Hitler disappeared, and I was expecting him to be replaced by Stalin. But Stalin didn't show. 50. It was Neruda who took up residence in my corridor. Not for two weeks, like Hitler, but three days — the shorter stay seemed to indicate that my depression was easing. 51. Neruda, however, made noises (Hitler had been as quiet as a block of drifting ice); he complained, murmuring incomprehensible words; his hands reached out and his lungs absorbed the air (the air of that cold European corridor) with relish. The pained gestures and beggarlike manner of the first night changed progressively, so that in the end the ghost seemed to have reconstituted himself as a grave and dignified courtier poet. 52. On the third and final night, as he was going past my door, he stopped and looked at me (Hitler had never done that) and, this is the strangest part, he tried to speak but could not, expressed his impotence with gestures and finally, before disappearing with the first light of dawn, smiled at me (as if to say that communication is impossible, but one should still make an attempt?)