Meeting with Enrique Lihn
for Celina Manzoni
In 1999, after returning from Venezuela, I dreamed that I was being taken to Enrique Lihn’s apartment, in a country that could well have been Chile, in a city that could well have been Santiago, bearing in mind that Chile and Santiago once resembled Hell, a resemblance that, in some subterranean layer of the real city and the imaginary city, will forever remain. Of course I knew that Lihn was dead, but when they offered to take me to meet him I accepted without hesitation. Maybe I thought that the people I was with were playing a joke, or that a miracle might be possible. But probably I just wasn’t thinking, or had misunderstood the invitation. In any case we came to a seven-story building, with a façade painted a faded yellow and a bar on the ground floor, a bar of considerable dimensions, with a long counter and several booths, and my friends (although it seems odd to describe them like that; let’s just say the enthusiasts who had offered to take me to meet the poet) led me to a booth, and there was Lihn. At first I could hardly recognize him, it wasn’t the face I had seen on his books; he’d grown thinner and younger, he’d become more handsome, and his eyes looked much brighter than the black-and-white eyes in the back-cover photographs. In fact, Lihn didn’t look like Lihn at all, he looked like a Hollywood actor, a B-list actor, the kind who stars in TV movies or films that are never shown in European cinemas and go straight to video. But at the same time he was Lihn, although he no longer looked like him; I was in no doubt about that. The enthusiasts greeted him, calling him Enrique with a fake-sounding familiarity and asked him questions I couldn’t understand, and then they introduced us, although to tell the truth I didn’t need to be introduced, because for a time, a short time, I had corresponded with him, and his letters had, in a way, kept me going; I’m talking about 1981 or 1982, when I was living like a recluse in a house outside Gerona with practically no money and no prospects of ever getting any, and literature was a vast minefield occupied by enemies, except for a few classic authors (just a few), and every day I had to walk through that minefield, with only the poems of Archilocus to guide me, and any false move could have been fatal. It’s like that for all young writers. There comes a time when you have no support, not even from friends, forget about mentors, and there’s no one to give you a hand; publication, prizes and grants are reserved for the others, the ones who said “Yes, sir,” over and over, or those who praised the literary mandarins, a never-ending horde distinguished only by their aptitude for discipline and punishment — nothing escapes them and they forgive nothing. Anyway, as I was saying, all young writers feel like that at some point or other in their lives. But at the time I was twenty-eight years old and in no sense could I consider myself a young writer. I was adrift. I wasn’t the typical Latin American writer living in Europe thanks to some government sinecure. I was a nobody and not inclined to show any mercy or beg for it. Then I started corresponding with Enrique Lihn. Naturally I was the one who initiated the correspondence. I didn’t have to wait long for his reply. A long, crotchety letter, as we might say in Chile: gloomy and irritable. In my reply I told him about my life, my house in the country, on one of the hills outside Gerona, the medieval city before it, the countryside or the void behind. I also told him about my dog, Laika, and said that in my opinion Chilean literature, with one or two exceptions, was shit. It was evident from his next letter that we were already friends. What followed was what typically happens when a famous poet befriends an unknown. He read my poems and included some of them in a kind of reading he organized to present the work of the younger generation at the Chilean-North American Institute of Culture. In his letter he identified a set of hopefuls destined, so he thought, to be the six tigers of Chilean poetry in the year 2000. The six tigers were Bertoni, Maquieira, Gonzalo Muñoz, Martínez, Rodrigo Lira and myself. I think. Maybe there were seven tigers. But I think there were only six. And it would have been hard for the six of us to be anything much in 2000, because by then Rodrigo Lira, the best of the lot, had killed himself and what was left of him had been rotting for years in some cemetery, or else was ash, blowing around the streets mingled with the filth of Santiago. Cats would have been more appropriate than tigers. Bertoni, as far as I know, is a kind of hippie who lives by the sea, collecting shells and seaweed. Maquieira made a careful study of Cardenal and Coronel Urtecho’s anthology of North American poetry, published two books and then settled down to drinking. Gonzalo Muñoz went to Mexico, so I heard, where he disappeared, not into ethylic oblivion like Lowry’s consul, but into the advertising industry. Martínez made a careful study of