Distant Star

  After the initial hubbub, suddenly everyone fell silent. It was as if a high voltage current had run through the flat leaving us dumbstruck, says Muñoz Cano in a rare moment of lucidity. We stared at each other as if at strangers; our faces were still recognizable, of course, but different somehow, despicable and expressionless like the faces of sleepwalkers or idiots. Some guests left without saying good-bye, but among those who remained in the flat a peculiar atmosphere of camaraderie developed. And at that particularly delicate stage in the proceedings, a curious thing happened, adds Muñoz Cano: the telephone began to ring. Since the host failed to react, he answered it himself. An old man’s voice asked for a certain Lucho Alvarez. Hello? Hello? Is Lucho Alvarez there, please? Instead of replying, Muñoz Cano handed the phone to the owner of the flat, who after an interminable pause asked, Does anyone know a Lucho Alvarez? The old man on the line, surmises Muñoz Cano, must have gone on talking or asking questions, possibly to do with this Lucho Álvarez. Nobody knew the caller. A few of the men let out absurdly high-pitched, nervous laughs. After listening in silence again for some time, the owner of the flat said, There’s nobody here by that name, and hung up.

  No one was left in the room with the photos, except Wieder and the captain, and in the flat there were no more than eight people in all, according to Muñoz Cano, including Wieder’s father, who didn’t seem particularly disturbed (as if he were dutifully attending a cadets’ party, which, for some reason that escaped him or was none of his business, had gone wrong). The owner of the flat, whom he had known since he was a boy, was avoiding his eye. The other survivors of the party were talking or whispering amongst themselves, but stopped when Wieder senior approached. He attempted to break the awkward silence by offering them drinks, hot or cold, and sandwiches, which he made in the kitchen, calmly, on his own. Don’t worry, Mr. Wieder, said one of the officers, looking at the ground. I’m not worried, Javierito, he replied. Just a hiccup in Carlos’ career, that’s all it’ll be, said another. Wieder’s father looked at him as if he didn’t know what he was talking about. He was kind to us, recalls Muñoz Cano; he was on the edge of the abyss and he didn’t know it, or he didn’t care, or he was hiding it extraordinarily well.

  Then Wieder emerged from the spare bedroom and went to talk with his father in the kitchen. no one heard what they said, but they weren’t in there for more than five minutes. When they reappeared, both had drinks in their hands. The captain also came out to get a drink, then shut himself in the room with the photos again, insisting that he was not to be disturbed. At his suggestion one of the lieutenants made a list of all the guests who had been present. Someone referred to an oath. Someone else started talking about discretion and the word of a gentleman and a soldier. A soldier’s word, said a man who until then had seemed to be asleep. Another took offence and said the danger lay not with the soldiers but with the civilians, alluding to the pair of surrealist reporters. I’m sure our civilian friends know what’s best for them, replied the captain. The surrealists hastened to agree, affirming that, as far as they were concerned, nothing had happened in the flat that night; they were men of the world, after all. Then someone made coffee, and some time later, but still quite a while before dawn, three men in uniform and one in civilian dress knocked at the front door and identified themselves as Military Intelligence agents. Those who had remained in the flat let them in, assuming they had come to arrest Wieder. At first, their presence inspired respect and a certain fear (especially on the part of the reporters), but as the minutes went by uneventfully, without a word from the agents, who were completely focussed on their work, the survivors of the party began to ignore them, as if they were servants who had come to clean up ahead of time. The agents shut themselves in the bedroom for what seemed an eternity with the captain and Wieder, one of whose friends wanted to go in and “give him moral support,” but the agent in civilian dress told him not to be an idiot and to let them work in peace. Through the closed door, curses could be heard, the word “mad” repeated several times, and then only silence. Eventually the Intelligence agents left as quietly as they had arrived, carrying three shoe boxes provided by the owner of the flat, containing the photographs from the exhibition. Well, gentlemen, said the captain, before following them out, I advise you to get some sleep and forget everything that happened here tonight. A pair of lieutenants stood to attention, but the rest were too tired to observe protocol or any kind of ritual and they didn’t even say good night (or good morning, since day was breaking). Just as the captain left, slamming the door behind him, Wieder emerged from the bedroom (the timing, had anyone been in a state to appreciate it, was worthy of a sit-com) and walked across the living room to the window, without so much as a glance at the others. He drew the curtains (it was still dark outside, but a faint glow could be seen in the distance, towards the Cordillera) and lit a cigarette. What happened, Carlos? asked Wieder’s father. No answer. For a moment the silence seemed definitive, as if they had all fallen asleep on the spot, staring fixedly at Wieder’s silhouette. The room, Muñoz Cano recalls, felt like a hospital waiting room. Finally the owner of the flat asked, Are you under arrest? I guess so, said Wieder, without turning to face them, looking out at the lights of Santiago, the sparsely scattered lights of Santiago. With painfully slow movements, as if he had to gather his courage, Wieder’s father drew near and finally gave him a quick hug. Wieder did not respond. Why the drama? asked one of the surrealist reporters. You can shut up, said the owner of the flat. What do we do now? asked a lieutenant. Sleep it off, replied the host.

  Muñoz Cano never saw Wieder again. But that last image was indelible: the big living room a mess; bottles, plates and overflowing ashtrays, a group of pale, exhausted men, and Carlos Wieder at the window, showing no sign of fatigue, with a glass of whisky in his perfectly steady hand, contemplating the dark cityscape.

  7

  The reports of Carlos Wieder’s activities from that night on are vague and contradictory. His shadowy figure makes a number of brief appearances in the shifting anthology of Chilean literature. According to some rumors, he was expelled from the air force at a secret court martial, held at night, which he attended in full-dress uniform, although his die-hard fans prefer to imagine him wearing a black greatcoat and a monocle, smoking a long pipe made from an elephant’s tusk. The most unbalanced minds of his generation claim to have seen him wandering around Santiago, Valparaiso and Concepción, working at a variety of jobs and participating in strange artistic projects. He changed his name. He was associated with various ephemeral literary magazines, to which he contributed proposals for happenings that never happened, unless (and it hardly bears thinking about) he organized them in secret. A theatrical magazine published a short play in one act by a certain Octavio Pacheco, who was a mystery to everyone. This play is odd, to say the very least: the action unfolds in a world inhabited exclusively by Siamese twins, where sadism and masochism are children’s games. Death is the only punishable offense in this world and the main subject of the twins’ discussions throughout the work, along with non-being, nothingness and the next life. Each character devotes himself to torturing his Siamese twin for a certain period (a cycle, in the author’s words), after which the tortured becomes the torturer and vice versa. But the inversion can only take place when “the depths have been plumbed.” The reader of this play is, as one might imagine, confronted with every possible kind of cruelty. The action takes place in the principal characters’ house and the parking lot of a supermarket where they encounter other Siamese twins who display a broad variety of disfiguring scars. Predictably, the play does not end with the death of one of the twins, but with a new cycle of pain. The thesis is somewhat simplistic: pain is our only connection with life; only pain can reveal what life is.

  A university magazine published a poem called “The Zero Mouth.” The poem, apparently a Latin-American travesty of Klebnikhov, was accompanied by three of the author’s own sketches illustrating the “zero-mouth moment” (t
hat is, the act of opening one’s mouth as widely as possible to represent a zero or the letter “o”). Once again, the contribution was signed Octavio Pacheco, but Bibiano O’Ryan happened to discover a pamphlet box at the National Library containing the aerial poetry of Carlos Wieder as well as Pachecho’s works for the theater and texts signed in three or four other names, published in little magazines, some of which were marginal, low-budget affairs, while others were expensively produced and decently designed, with high-quality paper and abundant photographs (in one there were reproductions of almost all of Wieder’s aerial poems, along with a complete chronology of his performances). The provenance of the magazines was diverse: Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Chile. The names suggested strategies rather than mere aspirations: Hibernia, Germania, Storm, The Fourth Reich in Argentina, Iron Cross, Enough Hyperboles! (a Buenos Aires fanzine), Diphthongs and Synaloephae, Odin, Des Sängers Fluch (with eighty per cent of the contributions in German, and, in No. 4, a “politico-artistic” interview with a certain K. W., a “Chilean science-fiction author,” who partly reveals the plot of his forthcoming first novel), Precision Strike, The Brotherhood, Poetry Pastoral & Urban (a Colombian publication, and the only one of any interest: wild, destructive poetry by young, middle-class bikers, playing with drugs, crime and the symbols of the SS, as well as the prosody and theatricality of certain beat poets), Martian Beaches, The White Army, Mister Pete… Bibiano was flabbergasted. He thought he knew the Chilean literary scene inside out, but among the magazines in the box, there were at least seven published in Chile between 1973 and 1980 that he had never heard of. In one of them, Sunflowers of Meat (No. 1, April 1979), Wieder, under the pseudonym Masanobu (not, as one might be forgiven for thinking, a Samurai, but the Japanese painter Okumura Masanobu [1686-1784], discoursed on humor, the sense of the ridiculous, the atrocity of literary jokes, whether or not they draw blood, the private and the public grotesque, the laughable, gratuitous excess, and he concluded that no one, absolutely no one, had the right to pass judgment on the minor works that are born of mockery, develop through mockery and die in mockery. All writers are grotesque, writes Wieder. All writers are wretched, even those who come from well-to-do families, even Nobel Prize winners. Bibiano also came across a slender octavo volume, with a brown cover, entitled Interview with Juan Sauer. The book bore the imprint of The Fourth Reich in Argentina but gave no publisher’s address or year of publication. It didn’t take long to ascertain that Juan Sauer, who spoke in the interview about photography and poetry, was none other than Carlos Wieder. He replied to the interviewer’s questions with long, wandering monologues, in which he sketched out a theory of art. Disappointing, according to Bibiano, as if Wieder, in a moment of weakness, were yearning for a normality he had never possessed, longing to be adopted as official poet by the Chilean state “in its capacity as guardian of culture.” It was sickening: almost enough to make you believe the people who said they had seen Wieder selling socks and ties in Valparaíso.

  For a while, whenever he got the chance, Bibiano checked the contents of that obscure pamphlet box in the library, always with consummate discretion. He soon discovered that new (although often disappointing) contributions kept being added. For a few days he thought he had found the key that would allow him to locate the elusive Carlos Wieder, but (as he confessed to me in a letter) he was scared, and his progress was so timid and circumspect as to be virtually indistinguishable from immobility. He wanted to find Wieder, he wanted to see him, but without being seen, and his worst nightmare was that one night Wieder might find him. Finally he overcame his fear and resolved to go to the library every day and wait. There was never a sign of Wieder. Bibiano decided to consult a librarian, a little old man whose chief occupation was gathering news about the lives and miraculous deeds of every Chilean writer, published or unpublished. He revealed to Bibiano that the person who supplemented the archive at irregular intervals was, in all probability, Wieder’s father, who had retired to Viña del Mar and received copies of all his son’s works by post. Spurred on by this revelation, Bibiano went back through the contents of the pamphlet box and came to the conclusion that some of the names he had assumed to be Wieder’s pseudonyms were in fact nothing of the sort: they were real names, or invented ones, possibly, but invented by somebody else. Wieder was either deceiving his father with other people’s creations, or his father was deceiving himself. Having reached this provisional conclusion (it was, Bibiano insisted, by no means definitive), which struck him as both sad and sinister, he decided that henceforth, for the sake of his emotional balance and physical safety, he would follow Wieder’s career from a distance, without making any further attempt to approach him in person.

  This he was able to do without difficulty. In certain literary circles, the legend of Carlos Wieder had spread like wildfire. Some said he had become a Rosicrucian, or that a group of Joseph Peladan’s followers had tried to contact him, or that certain pages of L’Amphithéâtre des sciences mortes contained an encrypted prophecy or prediction of his momentous intervention “in the art and politics of a distant southern land.” Some said he had taken refuge on the estate of an older woman, where he spent his days reading and taking photographs. Some said he occasionally appeared unannounced at the salon of Rebeca Vivar Vivanco, better known as Madame VV, an ultra-rightwing painter (for her, Pinochet and the generals were a spineless lot who would end up turning the Republic over to the Christian Democrats) and the driving force behind a series of artistic and military communes in the province of Aysén; she squandered one of the oldest family fortunes in Chile and was eventually confined to an asylum in the mid-8os (her wide-ranging works include new designs for the uniforms of the Chilean armed forces and a twenty-minute musical poem to be intoned by fifteen-year-old boys on the occasion of their ritual initiation into adult life, a ceremony which should take place, according to Madame VV, in the northern deserts, the snow-laden Cordillera or in the dark forests of the south, according to the boy’s date of birth, the configuration of the planets, et cetera).

  Towards the end of 1977, a new strategic war game appeared on the emerging national market and promptly disappeared again, in spite of a modest publicity campaign. The man behind this enterprise, according to those in the know (and Bibiano O’Ryan did not contradict them), was Carlos Wieder. The game covered the whole duration of the War of the Pacific, which broke out in 1879 between Chile and the alliance of Peru and Bolivia, each turn corresponding to a period of two weeks. More fun than Monopoly, claimed the advertising, although it was soon apparent to the players that there was a good deal more to the game than mere fun. On the surface it was a complex but classic war game, with a multiplicity of boards. On a second level, it became a magical exploration of the personalities and characters of the commanders. With the help of period photographs, the players were asked to ponder questions such as: could Arturo Prat have been the reincarnation of Jesus Christ? (The photo of Prat that came in the box did in fact bear a striking resemblance to certain images of Our Lord.) In which case, was the resemblance between Prat and Christ a “coincidence,” a “symbol” or a “prophecy”? (Then the players were invited to consider the “real” meaning of events such as the boarding of the Huascar, the “real” significance of the fact that Prat’s ship was called the Esmeralda, or the fact that both adversaries, the Chilean Prat and the Peruvian Grau, were actually Catalan.) There was, in addition, a third level to the game, which concerned the ordinary men who swelled the ranks of the victorious Chilean army as it marched undefeated to Lima, and the secret meeting that was held in a small underground church dating from colonial times, a meeting which, supposedly, marked the foundation (in the Peruvian capital) of what various authors with more or less stylistic felicity but a common sense of the absurd, have ventured to call the “Chilean Race.” For the inventor of the game (probably Wieder), the Chilean Race was “founded” on a dark night in 1882, during Patricio Lynch’s term as commander-in-chief of the occupying army.
(There were also photos of Lynch, and a string of questions on subjects ranging from the meaning of his name to the secret reasons for certain campaigns he undertook both before and after his promotion to commander-in-chief. Why, for example, did the Chinese “adore” him?) How the game got past the censors and onto the market is a mystery; in any case it was a commercial failure and spelt doom for the manufacturers, who had to declare themselves bankrupt, although they had scheduled and announced the release of two more games by the same designer, one based on the wars against the Araucano Indians and the other, not really a war game, set in a city that bore a vague resemblance to Santiago, although it could also have been Buenos Aires (but bigger: a Mega-Buenos Aires or a Mega-Santiago), with a thriller-like scenario and a spiritual dimension, like Escape from Colditz, but exploring the mysteries of the soul and the human condition.