Some time later, we learned that he was a pathological liar and fraudster. For months he had sparked our admiration by reading us chapters from his magnificent novel The Swimmer without a Family in exchange for invitations to dinner, until one of our friends, a philosophy professor, discovered that it was a translation of Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, which had not yet been published in Spanish. Well then, did the magic mirror exist, or was it a lie made up with Lora Aldunate’s complicity? His anger had seemed sincere when he opened the blinds, but Lihn raised a doubt: no one fills a chamber pot with urine in a single night; it was hard to believe that such a distinguished man would accumulate so much of the yellow liquid just for the pleasure of collecting it. But countless depravities exist.
I have encountered this kind of certainty exhibited by Chico Molina, claiming something reason cannot accept is the truth, in almost all people who say they have had contact with higher planes. It was after this that I began to consider that lying, apart from its despicable quality, also has a mystical utility. In the Bible, in Genesis, Jacob cheats his brother Esau by persuading him to sell his birthright for a meal of lentil stew. He then takes advantage of his father’s blindness to impersonate his brother and get his blessing. Later, it became clear to me that lying, or “sacred trickery,” as I called it, is a technique used by all masters and shamans.
Thanks to Marie Lefevre, in 1950 I had my first encounter with the optical language that is the Tarot. At what age had Marie arrived in Chile? She never wanted to tell us. When we knew her, she was over sixty years old. A small woman made up and dressed like Dracula’s daughter with her long gray hair dyed with a blue rinse, she lived in a basement with her lover Nene who was an unemployed and uneducated youth of eighteen years, but of an angelic beauty. After having heated metaphysical discussions at Café Iris, we poets would arrive drunk around three in the morning at her basement, knowing that a pot full of tasty soup would be waiting for us there, heating up on a slow fire. Nene, naked as usual, with a pink silk ribbon tied in the shape of a butterfly around his penis, slept soundly. She, who never slept, got up to serve us cups of the delicious soup made from all the leftovers that the nearby restaurant gave her in exchange for reading the Tarot to customers. Lefevre had drawn her own deck of seventy-eight cards. Instead of cups, swords, wands, and coins, she shuffled sopaipillas (coins), gourds of maté (cups), Shivalingams, male and female genitalia forming a unit (wands), and eyes above a triangle (swords). I remember some of her major arcana: she had a cowboy and a beautiful cowgirl in place of the Emperor and Empress. The Priestess was a Mapuche machi. The World was a map of Chile. Despite the ingenuousness of this deck, she gave readings of a surprising psychological accuracy, her very Chilean language contrasting with her strong French accent. I had removed money from my life without feeling poor, surviving on adventure, caught up in the present without ever thinking about tomorrow; for me, she predicted hundreds, thousands of trips all around the world. It was hard for me to believe her, and yet her prediction came true. To Carlos Faz, an exceptionally talented painter, she said, “Never travel by sea!” A year later on his way to America at a stop in Ecuador where the passengers were forbidden to disembark Carlos, drunk as usual, jumped from the ship toward the dock, misjudged the distance, fell into the water, and drowned. He was twenty-two. For me, this lady was an example of generosity, freedom, and subtlety. She did not tell Faz that he was going to drown, which would have become an order to commit suicide (the mind tends to fulfill predictions), but warned him of danger, leaving him the possibility of either confronting it or not. She also taught me that one can create miracles for others: somewhere in this world, there was a well-intentioned woman who would receive you at any hour with a humble smile on her lips, give you a bowl of soup, and read the cards for you, for free, just out of love for human beings.
Another teacher who changed my worldview was Nicanor Parra. When I met him I was a teenager, he a grown man, a mathematics professor at the School of Engineering. As a revolutionary reaction against the emotional poetry of Neruda, Pablo de Rokha, García Lorca, and Vicente Huidobro, he had declared himself an anti-poet. For us young people, his emergence in the literary world was akin to that of a messiah. After my awkward encounter with him at Café Iris, my pathological shyness kept me from visiting him. Stella Díaz had to help me. Making what for her was an immense concession, she covered the flames of her hair with a beret. “Nica doesn’t want me to show up with my hair uncovered. He says that redheads drive the students mad.” And she took me into the territory of the great anti-poet. Parra was an unassuming man, and the admiration of young poets encouraged him. We met many times, also with Enrique Lihn present. We talked in a small bar near the National Library, over that wonderful drink that is sweet chicha. One day Nicanor handed me a large envelope full of typewritten sheets of paper of different sizes. “They’re various writings, a sort of literary journal. Can you organize them for me? I’ve reread them so many times that I can’t see their value. I labeled them ‘Notes on the edge of the abyss.’” To receive such a gesture of confidence from a consecrated poet was like a spiritual explosion for me. I spent many nights locked away, reverently reviewing these unpublished texts, sorting them by subject, eliminating repetitions. In a concise style—“I want a clinical-photographic art”—the poet described his inner life in prose. After fifteen days I returned the notes to him, copied onto regular size sheets of paper, in an order that seemed perfect to me. Parra never published them, nor did he ever speak of them again.
With a university education far superior to that of his predecessors, who were all self-taught, Parra had specialized in the study of the Vienna Circle and the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Galileo interested him just as much as Kafka, whose diary he admired above all else. He had his own interpretation of the famous phrase from the Tractatus, “What one cannot speak about, one must be silent about.” For him metaphysics, like religion, was forbidden territory; likewise the expression of personal feelings. “The poet should not exhibit himself: the strings must be pulled from outside.” Neruda and his followers presented themselves as great justices, great lovers, great humanists, with sublime anxieties and hopes — in short, as inflated romantic egos. Parra hid behind his intellect, then assumed one mask, then several. The poet was a professor with his tongue eaten away by cancer, a little man crushed by society, by women, a tragic clown; later he spoke through an ingenuous character who believed in Christ; then an old skeptic; and finally, he became a translator and took on the personality of Shakespeare. Lyricism was replaced by acerbic humor. “Knowledge and laughter become confounded.” Ultimately, he invented himself. As I write these lines, Parra must now be eighty-six years old, and like Castaneda—“the warrior leaves no footprints”—I am sure that no one can boast of knowing him intimately. The anti-poet has made his heart into an impenetrable fortress. The words of Jesus, “By their works ye shall know them,” cannot be applied to him.