It was in such a frame of mind that I arrived in Santiago. We traveled from there by road — making good progress except for a brief blockage where the mechanical shovels of repair crews tore out great bites of the red earth that characterizes Chile’s central valley — and we smelled our destination before we saw it; Valparaiso lay on the briny Pacific and was hidden from view by a crest of hills.
The chief of the publishing company was an old man by the name of Juan-Bautista, given to smoking unfiltered cigarettes and sporting glasses thick enough to burn through paper on a sunny day. He reminded me of my maternal grandfather; I liked him at once. “What do you know of books?” he asked us. “I specialize in the media industry,” Jim replied. “I’ve valued a dozen publishers over two decades.” “That is finance,” Juan-Bautista retorted. “I asked what you knew of books.” “My father’s uncle was a poet,” I found myself saying. “He was well-known in the Punjab. Books are loved in my family.” Juan-Bautista looked at me as though becoming aware of the presence of this youngster before him for the first time; I did not speak in that meeting again.
Jim explained to us afterwards that Juan-Bautista was not pleased to have us there. Although he had run the company for many years, he did not own it; the owners wanted to sell, and the prospective buyer — our client was unlikely to continue to subsidize the loss-making trade division with income from the profitable educational and professional publishing arms. Trade, with its stable of literary — defined for all practical purposes as commercially unviable — authors was a drag on the rest of the enterprise; our task was to determine the value of the asset if that drag were shut down.
We set ourselves up in a handsome, if aging, conference room with a large oval table and bookshelves lining the walls. When a strong breeze blew, I could hear outside our windows the clicking of wooden storm shutters against their restraints. It was hot during the afternoons — we had come during the southern summer — but sometimes we would wake to fog and a morning chill, and in those moments I was glad for the wool of my suit. Jim left after two days, remarking in my presence to the vice president that he could expect impressive things of me. But although my laptop was open, my Internet connection enabled, and my pen and notebook positioned by my side — I found myself unable to concentrate on our work.
Instead I perused news websites which informed me that Pakistan and India were conducting tit-for-tat tests of their ballistic missiles and that a stream of foreign dignitaries was visiting the capitals of both countries, urging Delhi to desist from its warlike rhetoric and Islamabad to make concessions that would enable a retreat from the brink of catastrophe. I wondered, sir, about your country’s role in all this: surely, with American bases already established in Pakistan for the conduct of the Afghanistan campaign, all America would have to do would be to inform India that an attack on Pakistan would be treated as an attack on any American ally and would be responded to by the overwhelming force of America’s military. Yet your country was signally failing to do this; indeed, America was maintaining a strict neutrality between the two potential combatants, a position that favored, of course, the larger and — at that moment in history — the more belligerent of them.
These thoughts preoccupied me when I should have been gathering data and building my financial model. Moreover, Valparaiso was itself a distraction: the city was powerfully atmospheric; a sense of melancholy pervaded its boulevards and hillsides. I read online about its history and discovered that it had been in decline for over a century; once a great port fought over by rivals because of its status as the last stop for vessels making their way from the Pacific to the Atlantic, it had been bypassed and rendered peripheral by the Panama Canal. In this — Valparaiso’s former aspirations to grandeur — I was reminded of Lahore and of that saying, so evocative in our language: the ruins proclaim the building was beautiful.
I sensed the vice president was growing increasingly irritated with me; I could hardly blame him: he was working from morning until midnight, poor fellow, with little support from his only teammate. I pretended to be keeping myself busy, but as the days passed and my deadlines began to slip, he lost patience. “Look, man,” he said, “what’s the problem? You’re not getting anything done. I know you’re supposed to be good, but from my perspective, you aren’t delivering squat. Tell me what you need. You want help with your model, more direction? Tell me and I’ll give it to you, but for God’s sake pull it together.” He was a manager of excellent repute, and I might have considered revealing to him the turmoil taking place inside me, but at the level of human beings our connection was nil. So I apologized, saying that his feedback had hit the mark, but that he need not worry because I would redouble my efforts. “Everything,” I said, mustering a tone of maximum reassurance, “is under control.”
For a time this appeared to satisfy him, although it was patently untrue. Yet I knew he had begun to resent me — and rightly so, after alclass="underline" by not performing to plan I was making him look bad — and for my part I was beginning to resent him as well. I could not respect how he functioned so completely immersed in the structures of his professional micro-universe. Yes, I too had previously derived comfort from my firm’s exhortations to focus intensely on work, but now I saw that in this constant striving to realize a financial future, no thought was given to the critical personal and political issues that affect one’s emotional present. In other words, my blinders were coming off, and I was dazzled and rendered immobile by the sudden broadening of my arc of vision.
I noticed Juan-Bautista watching me as I shuffled about half-heartedly from one meeting to another. He kept his door open and his desk was positioned in such a way that it was possible for him to gaze down the corridor. Once, as I was passing by, he called me to him. “I have,” he said, “looked into this matter of the contemporary poets of the Punjab. Tell me, what was the name of your father’s uncle?” I told him and he nodded; he had indeed seen him mentioned in an anthology available in Spanish translation. I was surprised and pleased to hear that this was the case, but before I could respond he went on to say, “You seem very unlike your colleagues. You appear somewhat lost.” “Not at all,” I replied, taken aback. Then I added, “Although I must say I am quite moved by Valparaiso.” He suggested that I visit the house of Pablo Neruda, but to go during the day as it was shut in the evening, and with that our brief conversation concluded.
I never came to know why Juan-Bautista singled me out. Perhaps he was gifted with remarkable powers of empathy and had observed in me a dilemma that out of compassion he thought he could help me resolve; perhaps he saw among his enemies one who was weak and could easily be brought down; perhaps it was mere coincidence. Sentimentally, I would like to believe in the first of these possibilities. But regardless, Juan-Bautista added considerable momentum to my inflective journey, a journey that continues to this day…