Distant Star

  And what happened to the Garmendia sisters? I asked. I don’t know, said Fat Marta, emerging from her reverie, how should I know? Why didn’t he do anything to you? asked Bibiano. Because we really were friends, I guess, she said.

  We went on talking for a long time. Wieder, Bibiano informed us, meant “once more,” “again,” “a second time,” and in some contexts “over and over”; or “the next time,” in sentences referring to future events. And according to his friend Anselmo Sanjuán, who had studied German philology at the University of Concepción, it was only in the seventeenth century that the adverb wieder and the accusative preposition wider came to be spelt differently in order to differentiate their meanings. Wider (widar or widari in Old High German) means “against,” “contrary to,” and sometimes “in opposition to.” And he showered us with examples: Widerchrist, “the Antichrist”; Widerhaken, “barb, hook”; widerraten, “to dissuade”; Widerlegung, “refutation, rebuttal”; Widerlager, “buttress”; Widerklage, “counter-accusation, counter-plea”; Widernatürlichkeit, “monstrosity, aberration.” For Bibiano each one of these terms was charged with significance. In full flight now, he went on to explain that Weide meant “weeping willow,” and that weiden meant “to graze, to put out to pasture” or “to look after grazing animals,” which reminded him of Silva Acevedo’s poem “Wolves and Sheep,” to which certain readers had attributed a prophetic character. There was more: weiden also meant to take morbid pleasure in the contemplation of an object that excites sexual desire and/or sadistic tendencies. At which point Bibiano stared at us, eyes wide open, and we looked back at him, the three of us sitting there quietly, hands clasped, as if in prayer or meditation. And then he returned to Wieder, exhausted and terrified, as if time were not a river but an earthquake happening nearby, and he pointed out that the pilot’s grandfather may have been called Weider; perhaps an official at the immigration office, back at the beginning of the century, had made a spelling error and converted his name to Wieder. Unless of course his real name had been Bieder, “upright, honest,” which was conceivable given the phonetic proximity of the labiodental W and the bilabial B. And finally he remembered that the noun Widder meant “ram” or “Aries,” from which any number of conclusions could be drawn.

  Two days later Fat Marta rang Bibiano and told him that Alberto Ruiz-Tagle was indeed Carlos Wieder. She had recognized him from the photo published in El Mercurio. Which was hard to believe, as Bibiano pointed out to me some weeks or months later, since the image was so blurry it could have been almost anyone. What did she have to go on? Her sixth sense, if you ask me, said Bibiano. She says she can recognize Ruiz-Tagle by his posture. In any case, by that time, Ruiz-Tagle had disappeared for good, and Wieder was all we had to give our wretched, empty days some meaning.

  Around that time, Bibiano started work as a salesman in a shoe shop. It was a nondescript sort of place, not far from the center of the city, surrounded by narrow, dimly-lit clothing stores, second-hand bookshops slowly going broke and sad restaurants whose waiters doubled as touts, working the street, making amazing but ambiguously worded offers. Of course we never set foot in a writing workshop again. Occasionally Bibiano would inform me of his projects: he wanted to write stories in English about life in the Irish countryside; he wanted to learn French, at least enough to read Stendhal in the original; he dreamed of barricading himself inside Stendhal and letting the years go by (although he contradicted himself immediately by adding that such a stratagem might work with Chateaubriand, the Octavio Paz of the nineteenth century, but not with Stendhal, no, definitely not); most of all, he wanted to write a book, an anthology of Nazi literature of the Americas. A comprehensive overview, as he used to say when I met him outside the shoe shop at closing time, covering every type of Nazi literature spawned by the Americas, from Canada (the French Canadian writers would be a rich source) to Chile, where he would certainly find variety enough to satisfy all tastes. Meanwhile he had not forgotten Carlos Wieder and was gathering everything he could find about the aviator-poet and his work with the obsessive dedication of a stamp-collector.

  One fine day, in 1974 I’m fairly sure it was, the papers informed us that, under the sponsorship of various companies, Carlos Wieder was flying to the South Pole. It was a long and difficult voyage, but at each of his numerous refuelling stops he wrote poems in the sky. These poems, declared his admirers, heralded a new age of iron for the Chilean race. Bibiano followed the journey step by step. Personally, to tell the truth, I no longer cared much what Lieutenant Wieder did or didn’t do. At one stage Bibiano showed me a photo, much clearer than the one in which Fat Marta had thought she recognized Ruiz-Tagle. True, there was a resemblance between Ruiz-Tagle and Carlos Wieder, but by that time all I could think about was getting out of the country. In any case, neither the photo nor Wieder’s declarations showed even a trace of the old Ruiz-Tagle, so tactful, so considerate and so charmingly shy (after all, he was an autodidact). Wieder was confidence and audacity personified. He spoke of poetry (not Chilean or Latin American poetry, but poetry full stop) with an authority that disarmed all his interviewers (although I should add that, at the time, he was interviewed exclusively by journalists who supported the new regime and would not have dreamt of arguing with an officer of the nation’s air force), and although his transcribed replies were full of neologisms and awkward turns of phrase, which are hard to avoid in our intractable language, you could sense a force in the way he talked, the purity and sheen of the absolute, the reflection of a monolithic will.

  Before he set off for the Arturo Prat Antarctic base on the last leg of his polar voyage, a gala dinner was held in his honour at a restaurant in Punta Arenas. According to the reports, Wieder drank to excess and slapped a naval officer for having failed to treat a lady with due respect. Concerning this lady the reports vary, but they all coincide on one point: she had not been invited by the organizers and none of the other guests knew her; the only plausible explanations for her presence were that she was a gatecrasher or that she had come with Wieder. He referred to her as “my lady” or “my young lady.” She was about twenty-five-years old, tall, with dark hair and a shapely figure. At one point in the evening, perhaps during dessert, she shouted at Wieder, You’re going to kill yourself tomorrow, Carlos! An appalling lapse of taste, as everyone agreed. That was when the incident with the sailor occurred. Afterwards there were speeches, and the next day, after three or four hours’ sleep, Wieder flew to the South Pole. It was, to say the least, an eventful flight, and on more than one occasion the unidentified woman’s prediction almost came true (none of the guests ever saw her again, incidentally). When he returned to Punta Arenas, Wieder declared that the most dangerous thing had been the silence. To the genuine or simulated astonishment of the journalists, he explained that by “silence” he meant the waves of Cape Horn trying to lick the belly of his plane, waves like vast Melvillean whales or severed hands groping at the fuselage throughout the journey, but silently, dumbly, as if in those latitudes sound could only be made by humans. Silence is like leprosy, declared Wieder; silence is like communism; silence is like a blank screen that must be filled. If you fill it, nothing bad can happen to you. If you are pure, nothing bad can happen to you. If you are not afraid, nothing bad can happen to you. According to Bibiano, he was describing an angel. A proudly human angel? I hazarded, quoting Blas de Otero. No, dick-head, replied Bibiano, the angel of our misfortune.

  In the crystal clear sky over the Arturo Prat base, Wieder wrote ANTARCTICA IS CHILE, and his exploit was recorded on film and in photographs. He wrote other verses too, about the color white and the color black, about ice, the occult and the smile of the Fatherland, a fine, frank, clear-cut smile, a smile like an eye that is in fact watching us. Afterwards he returned to Concepción and then went to Santiago, where he appeared on television (I couldn’t avoid seeing the program; there was no TV set in Bibiano’s boarding house, so he came round to my place), and yes, Carlos Wieder was Ruiz-Tagle (What a
nerve, said Bibiano, stealing a good name like that) and yet, in a way, he wasn’t, or so it seemed to me. My parents had an old black-and-white TV (they were glad Bibiano was there, watching the program and having dinner with us, as if they knew I was going to leave and would never have a friend like him again), and Carlos Wieder’s photogenic pallor recalled not only the shadowy figure of Ruiz-Tagle, but many other figures, other faces, other phantom pilots who had flown from Chile to Antarctica and back in planes which Mad Norberto, peering from the depths of the night, identified as Messerschmitt fighters, squadrons of Messerchmitts that had escaped from the Second World War. But Wieder, we knew, did not fly in a squadron. He flew a light plane and he flew alone.

  4

  Like the story of Chile itself in those years, the story of Juan Stein, who ran our poetry workshop, is larger than life.

  Born in 1945, he published two books before the coup, one in Concepción (with a print run of five hundred) and another in Santiago (five hundred copies again). Together, they came to less than fifty pages. His poems were short. Like most of the poets of his generation, he was influenced by Nicanor Parra and Ernesto Cardenal, but also by Jorge Teillier’s home-grown imagism, although Stein recommended we read Lihn rather than Teillier. His tastes were quite often different from and even opposed to our own: he didn’t care for Jorge Cáceres (the Chilean surrealist who had become our cult hero) or Rosamel del Valle or Anguita. He liked Pezoa Véliz (and knew some of his poems by heart), Magallanes Moure (a foible for which we compensated by dipping into the verse of the dreadful Braulio Arenas), the geographical and gastronomical poems of Pablo de Rokha (which we, and when I say we, I realize now I am referring only to Bibiano O’Ryan and myself; as to the others, I can’t remember a thing about them, not even their literary loves and hates; in any case we kept well clear of de Rokha, as if he were a bottomless pit, and anyway you’re better off reading Rabelais), Neruda’s love poetry and Residence on Earth (which we, having suffered from Neruditis since early childhood, could not so much as look at without breaking out in hives). We shared Stein’s esteem for the aforementioned Parra, Lihn and Teillier, although we differed over the relative merits of certain works (the publication of Artefactos, which we adored, prompted Stein to write a letter to old Nicanor, in a tone somewhere between indignation and perplexity, reproaching him for some of the jokes he had seen fit to crack at that crucial moment in Latin America’s revolutionary struggle. Parra replied on the back of an Artefactos postcard, telling him not to worry, because no one, on the right or the left, was reading anyway, and I’m sure Stein treasured that card). We also liked Armando Uribe Arce, Gonzalo Rojas and some of the poets from Stein’s generation, born in the ’40s, whom we used to frequent, mainly because they happened to live in the area; we had no particular aesthetic affinities with them, but in the end they probably influenced us more than anyone else. Juan Luis Martínez (who, for us, was a compass lost in the wilds of Chile), Oscar Hahn (who was born at the end of the ’30s, but that didn’t matter), Gonzalo Millán (who came to the workshop twice and read his poems, which were all short, but there were lots of them), Claudio Bertoni (who was almost young enough to qualify as one of our generation: the poets born in the ’50s), Jaime Quezada (who got drunk with us one day, knelt down and started bellowing a novena), Waldo Rojas (who was one of the first to distance himself from the so-called “accessible poetry” that was all the rage at the time – cut-rate versions of Parra and Cardenal) and, of course, Diego Soto, who according to Stein was the best poet of his generation, and according to us was one of the two best, the other being Stein himself.

  We would often go to his house, Bibiano and I, a little house near the station that Stein, who was a lecturer at the University of Concepción, had been renting since his student days. There were maps everywhere, more maps than books it seemed. That was the first thing that struck Bibiano and me; we were surprised to see so few books (Diego Soto’s house, by contrast, was like a library). Maps of Chile, Argentina and Peru, maps of the Andes, a road map of Central America that I have never seen anywhere else, published by a Protestant church in North America, maps of Mexico, maps showing the conquest of Mexico and the advance of the Mexican Revolution, maps of France, Spain, Germany and Italy, a map of the English railway system and a map showing train journeys in English literature, maps of Greece and Egypt, Israel and the Middle East, Jerusalem in ancient and modern times, India and Pakistan, Burma and Cambodia, a map of the mountains and rivers of China and one of the Shinto temples of Japan, a map of the Australian desert and one of Micronesia, a map of Easter Island and a map of the town of Puerto Montt in southern Chile.

  Juan Stein possessed a great many maps, as people often do when they have a passionate but unrequited desire to travel.

  There were also two framed photographs hanging on the wall. Both were in black and white. In one, you could see a man and a woman sitting by the doorway of their house. The man looked like Juan Stein, with straw-colored hair and very deep-set blue eyes. It was a photo of his mother and father, he told us. The other one was a portrait – an official portrait – of a Red Army general called Ivan Chernyakhovsky. According to Stein, he was the greatest general of the Second World War. Bibiano, who knew about these things, mentioned Zhukov, Koniev, Rokossovsky, Vatutin and Malinovski, but Stein stood firm: Zhukov was brilliant and cold, Koniev was a hard man, Rokossovsky had talent and the help of Zhukov, Vatutin was a good general but no better than the German generals he was pitted against, you could say the same of Malinovski really, none of them was a patch on Chernyakhovsky (to equal him you’d have to roll Zhukov, Vasilevsky and the three best tank commanders into one). Chernyakhovsky had innate talent (if there is such a thing in the art of war), he was loved by his men (in so far as the rank and file can love a general) and he was young, the youngest general in charge of an army (known as a front in the Soviet Union), and one of the few high-ranking officers to die in the front line, in 1945, when the war was already won, at the age of thirty-nine.

  We soon realized that there was something more between Stein and Chernyakhovsky than an admiration for the strategic and tactical gifts of the Soviet general. One afternoon, during a conversation about politics, we asked him how he, a Trotskyite, could have lowered himself to ask the Soviet Embassy for the general’s photo. We were joking, but Stein took us seriously, confessing that the photo had been a gift from his mother, who was Ivan Chernyakhovsky’s cousin. She was the one who had requested the photo from the Embassy, many years back, as a blood relative of the hero. When Stein had left home to come and study in Concepción, his mother had given him the photo without a word of explanation. He went on to tell us about the Chernyakhovskys, a family of dirt-poor Ukrainian Jews, and the various destinies that had scattered them all over the world. It turned out that his mother’s father was the brother of the generals father, which made him one of the great man’s third cousins. Our admiration for Stein was already unconditional, but after that revelation it knew no bounds. Over the years we learnt more about Chernyakhovsky: he commanded an armored division in the first months of the war, the 28th Tank Division, which was driven back through the Baltic Republics to the vicinity of Novgorod. Then he was at a loose end until he was given the command of a corps (which in Soviet military terminology is equivalent to a division) in the region of Voronezh; this corps was part of the 60th Army, and when, during the Nazi offensive in ’42, the commander of the Army was dismissed, his post was offered to Chernyakhovsky, the youngest of the eligible officers, which naturally provoked jealousy and suspicion among his comrades. We learnt that, in this new post, he served under Vatutin (who was then commanding the Voronezh Front, which in Russian military terminology is equivalent to an army, but I think I already said that), whom he respected and admired; that he converted the 60th Army into an invincible fighting machine, steadily advancing through Russia and then through the Ukraine; nothing and no one could stop it. In 1944 he was promoted to the command of a front, the Third Beloru
ssian Front, and during the ’44 offensive he played a key role in destroying the Army Group Center, consisting of four German armies, and this was probably the greatest blow suffered by the Nazis in the Second World War, worse than the siege of Stalingrad or the Normandy landings, worse than Operation Cobra and the crossing of the Dnepr (in which Chernyakhovsky took part), worse than the counter-offensive in the Ardennes or the battle of Kursk (in which he also took part). We discovered that of the Russian armies which participated in Operation Bagration (the destruction of the Army Group Center), by far the most distinguished was the Third Belorussian Front, which advanced unstoppably, with unprecedented speed and penetration, and was the first to arrive in Eastern Prussia. We also found out that Chernyakhovsky had lost his parents when he was an adolescent, and had boarded in other peoples houses, with other people’s families, that he was mocked and humiliated for being a Jew, but proved to those who insulted him that he was not only their equal but their superior, that as a child he had witnessed the followers of the Ukrainian nationalist Petliura torturing then trying to assassinate his father in the village of Verbovo (with its little white houses scattered over the slopes of the rolling hills), that his adolescence was a mixture of Dickens and Makarenko, that during the war he lost his brother Alexander, knowledge of which was kept from him for an afternoon and a whole night because he was in the midst of an offensive, that he died alone in the middle of a road, that he was twice named Hero of the Soviet Union, awarded the Order of Lenin, four Orders of the Red Banner, two Orders of Suvorov (first class), the Order of Kutuzov (first class), the order of Bogdan Kmelnitzky (first class), and numerous, countless medals, that by order of the Government and the Party monuments to him were erected in Vilnius and Vinnitsa (no doubt the one in Vilnius has disappeared and the one in Vinnitsa has probably been torn down too), that the city of Insterburg in the old Eastern Prussia is now called Chernyakhovsk in his honour, that the kolkhoz for the village of Verbovo in the district of Tomashpol is also named after him (although the kolkhoz is a thing of the past), and that in the village of Oksino in the district of Umanski in the region of Cherkassy, a bronze bust was set up to commemorate the great general (I’d bet a month’s pay the bust has been replaced; Petliura’s the hero now and tomorrow, who knows?). To sum up, as Bibiano said, quoting Parra: that’s how it goes, the glory of the world; no glory, no world, not even a miserable mortadella sandwich.