My friend Tongoy is seventy-four years old, has a shaved head, and ears like a bat’s. He has lived in Paris for half a century, but he was born into a family of Hungarian Jews who immigrated to Chile and settled in San Felipe. My friend’s real name is Felipe Kertész; he recently became quite famous in France when in a film he played the role of a sinister old man who goes about kidnapping children. He is also relatively well known for his roles as dragonfly-man in a film by Fellini and as Bela Lugosi in a biopic of this Hungarian actor.
With Margot’s valuable assistance, it took the ugly Tongoy and me very few minutes to establish a feeling of mutual sympathy, which led him to ask me, before we had even left the airport, whether I wanted to know how as a boy he came to realize that he was odd.
“I’d love to know,” I told him.
“Well, listen. I must have been about seven and I went on a trip with my family. We were accompanied by Olga, a friend of my mother. Olga was pregnant and at one point, having stared at me for a good long time, she asked my mother, ‘Do you think my baby will suck milk from my blood?’ When I heard this, I said to Olga in my childish way, ‘How can you be so stupid?’ She turned on me in a rage and said, ‘My God, how can you be so naughty and so ugly?’ When we got back home, I asked my mother if it was true that I was ugly, and she replied, ‘Only in Chile.’ At that precise moment I swore that one day I would have the world at my feet.”
In fact Tongoy has never felt ugly. Once, when he was young, a certain girl fell in love with him. She frequented a shop that was situated in the same basement where he lived. There was no light. She ended up pursuing him. Tongoy explained to her that her enthusiasm was an effect of the light, that it wasn’t good to be so literary in life and that she would die if she found out that he liked men. In this way he nipped her nascent feelings in the bud.
Tongoy is of the opinion that love stories for the most part are not sexual stories, but stories of tenderness. Tongoy maintains that people do not understand this or, even if it is only for ten minutes, they do not wish to understand.
Talk about ten minutes, I have run out of those I had to write all this down. I’m off in a hurry to make my appointment with Tongoy, monster and friend.
I’m back, having had lunch with Tongoy at the Envalira. He’s clearly very excited about the film in the Azores. We spent a large part of the meal talking about this diary that I am currently writing. We also talked about Montano, and I thanked Tongoy for the good advice and good ideas he was able to give me in Valparaiso. After that we went on to remember when we first saw each other, our meeting at Santiago Airport. We recalled the journey at nightfall in the Chevrolet driven by Margot, which took us along minor roads to Tunquén, facing the Pacific. I was seeing this ocean for the first time and for ages I stood on the terrace of the house contemplating it in silence and missing this diary, which I had left in Barcelona, wishing I had it with me so that I could record some stimulating impressions of this moment I had waited so many years to enjoy: my eyes before the violent blue of the Pacific, the long, impressive sunset, unforgettable. And the low but brutal murmur of ancient battle reaching me from the sea.
Tunquén consists of a few isolated, beautiful wooden houses supported on tall stilts, a few houses in a wide open space facing the ocean. Margot livened up the evening by singing songs from the mountain and the sea and by telling stories about some of her more risky excursions by airplane. One story in particular sticks in my memory, perhaps because of the special emphasis she gave to it; she talked of the day in the middle of the war when she lost control of her plane and realized that the anti-aircraft batteries were firing on the enemy and she was caught up in the crossfire. When she got back to base, she saw that a missile had hit her back wheel.
Tongoy, hearing this story, turned to me and said that he had an almost identical memory to Margot’s, all he had to do was substitute the back wheel of a fighter plane with his Achilles’ heel, hit not by a missile but by a Chilean train.
I asked Tongoy if he cared to elaborate.
So he spoke of the day when he was seventeen and wanted to die and tried to get run over by a train going so slowly — back then all Chilean trains went slowly — that it had time to brake, and he to scramble clear at the last minute, at the last second, although in chilling detail he described leaving half his heel under the wheel and having give up any plans he had of becoming a dancer, since he had no way of supporting himself for the acrobatics.
As the evening in Tunquén wore on, we laughed a fair amount, listened to many stories, I told some of my own, concentrating on certain memories. I recalled the figure of my father, a “self-made man” like Kafka’s father — obviously I couldn’t avoid the literary reference — and I also recalled my poor mother, who bore some resemblance — again the literary reference — to the Argentinian poet Alejandra Pizarnik, who was fragile and strange and, like my mother, was addicted to barbiturates and had clear suicidal tendencies. I remembered the time in the 1970s when I lived between Berlin and Paris and considered myself to be a radical leftist — with the help of my family’s money — and was friends with people in the underground movement like Ingrid Caven. I recalled my first wife’s suicide, how she jumped from the balcony as if she were a bucket of dirty water — she may have been, I said. I recalled my childhood in Barcelona’s Rovira Square during years of monotony and moral misery, which I spent disguised in school uniform, a perfect fool holding a ridiculous stick of chalk in front of the blackboard, with the irresistible look of a real bore. I remembered Rosa slaving away to establish herself as a film director. I remembered how my generation wanted to change the world and said that perhaps it was better that our dreams never came true. I recalled how as a teenager I read Cernuda a lot and sometimes cried if it rained. And then I remembered how I used to see myself remembering seeing myself writing and finally I remembered seeing myself remembering how I used to write.
After that I didn’t remember any more, because it was late and we went to bed, Margot and Tongoy together, it seemed to me. I stayed awake in the upstairs bedroom and, when I finally got to sleep, I thought I saw in minute detail — just as had happened to that character in Danilo Kiš’s story — a dramatic fight that would take place — perhaps I should say “will take place”—three years later in the same room: an argument between Montano, dressed as a British airman, and poor Margot, defending herself with a saber.
I woke up in a sweat and confused, and decided to go down to the porch to smoke a cigarette. While I was smoking and contemplating the Pacific, inclined as I am to think about everything in literature, I recalled a very precise moment in the life of someone I admire, Cyril Connolly, a moment reflected upon in his diary: he is alone in a railway carriage, records of slow foxtrots playing as the English countryside of the 1930s flashes past the window, and he feels that he has succeeded in becoming an interesting person.
The change I experienced was very pleasant. In a short time I had managed to go from my inner nightmare with Montano to a sense of outer happiness standing in front of the Pacific. I also, if I chose to think in this way, was an interesting person. I thought I heard a foxtrot, looked up at the sky, and confirmed that there was a full moon. There’s nothing like being alone at night, I thought. I decided to search for another stimulating memory from another private journal. Inclined as I am to think about everything in literature, I soon hit upon a new memory. I recalled a scene similar to Connolly’s, taken from a page in André Gide’s diary, where it says something like, “Though the silence be too great, I enjoy traveling in this railway carriage in the company of Fabrice [N.B. Gide is talking about himself]. Today, traveling first class, wearing a new suit cut in an unusual fashion, under a hat that suits him prodigiously well, he approaches himself in the mirror in amazement and is seduced, finds himself the most interesting person in the world.”