Distant Star

  For some time Bibiano O’Ryan was obsessed with the two games that never saw the light of day. In one of his last letters to me he said he had contacted the largest private games library in the United States, in case either of them had been commercialized there. By return post he received a thirty-page catalogue of all the products in the war games category available in the United States over the previous five years. No trace of the Araucano game. As to the other one, about detectives in a Mega-Santiago, which was much harder to classify, they couldn’t help at all.

  Bibiano’s investigations in the United States were not, however, limited to the world of board games. I heard from a friend (though I don’t know if the story is true) that Bibiano contacted a member of the Philip K. Dick Society in Glen Ellen, California, who was, for want of a better expression, a collector of literary curiosities. Apparently Bibiano entered into correspondence with this individual, who specialized in “secret messages in literature, painting, theater and cinema,” and told him the story of Carlos Wieder. A specimen of that sort, the collector reckoned, was bound to wash up sooner or later in the United States. Bibiano’s correspondent was called Graham Greenwood and like a true North American he had a firm and militant belief in the existence of evil, absolute evil. In his personal theology, hell was a framework or chain of coincidences. He explained serial killings as “explosions of chance.” He explained the death of the innocent (and everything our minds refuse to accept) as the expression of chance set free. Fortune and Luck, he said, are the names of the devil’s house. He appeared on local television stations and spoke on community radio up and down the west coast as well as in New Mexico, Arizona and Texas, promulgating his vision of crime. The way to fight evil, he said, was to learn how to read, and by this he meant not only words but numbers, colors, signs, arrangements of tiny objects, late-night and early-morning television shows, obscure films. He did not, however, believe in revenge: he was opposed to the death penalty and in favor of radical prison reform. He always carried a gun and defended the citizen’s right to do so as the only way to prevent the rise of a fascist state. He did not limit the fight against evil to the planet Earth, which, in some of his cosmological rants resembled a penal colony. In space, he said, there are liberated zones, where chance cannot penetrate and the only source of pain is memory. The inhabitants of these zones are called angels, and their armies, legions. In a less literary but more radical way than Bibiano, Greenwood spent his time ferreting around in every weird underworld he could find. He had a wide range of friends: detectives, activists fighting for the rights of minority groups, feminists marooned in west coast motels, directors and producers who would never get a film off the ground and led lives as reckless and solitary as his own. The members of the Philip K. Dick Society, enthusiastic but discreet people as a rule, regarded him as a madman, but harmless and basically a good guy, as well as being a genuine expert on the works of Dick. For some time, Graham Greenwood kept an eye out for any traces that Wieder might have left in the United States, but he found nothing.

  Meanwhile, Wieder’s traces in the shifting anthology of Chilean poetry were becoming progressively fainter. A short-lived magazine published what appeared at first glance to be a shameless copy of a poem by Octavio Paz, signed “The Pilot.” A reasonably prestigious Argentine periodical published a longer poem about a poet’s gaze, a new kind of love and an old Indian maid fleeing a house in terror. This poem, according to the indefatigable Bibiano, referred to Amalia Maluenda, the Garmendia sisters’ Mapuche maid, who had vanished along with her employers, although members of a team set up by the Catholic Church to investigate the disappearances claimed to have seen her in the vicinity of Mulchén or Santa Bárbara, on a ranch in the foothills of the Cordillera, where she was living under the protection of her nephews, having sworn never to speak to white people again. The poem (Bibiano sent me a photocopy) was certainly intriguing, but it proved nothing, and may not even have been written by Wieder.

  Everything seemed to suggest that he had turned his back on literature.

  Nevertheless his work lived on, precariously, desperately (as he would have wished, perhaps), yet it lived on. A handful of young men read it, reinvented him, tried to become his followers, but how can you follow someone who is not moving, someone who is trying, with every appearance of success, to become invisible?

  Finally Wieder left Chile behind, along with the little magazines in which he had published his last, half-hearted creative efforts, imitations that left the reader wondering why, signed with his initials or improbable pseudonyms. He disappeared, but his physical absence (in fact he had always been an absent figure) did not put an end to the speculations, the passionate and contradictory readings to which his work gave rise.

  When the followers of the critic Ibacache gathered after his cremation in 1986, a letter turned up, presumably sent by someone close to Wieder, announcing the death of the aviator-poet. The existence of this letter soon became public knowledge. It referred vaguely to literary executors, but Ibacache’s circle of friends, eager not to have their names or that of the deceased sullied in any way, closed ranks and declined to reply. According to Bibiano, the news of Wieder’s death was false, and was probably invented by Ibacache’s cronies themselves, who were following their master into dementia.

  Shortly afterwards, however, Wieder featured prominently in a posthumous volume by Ibacache entitled What the Writers Read. This exercise in anecdote and name-dropping, possibly apocryphal in content and supposedly light-hearted in tone, purported to record the desert-island choices of authors whom Ibacache had favoured with fervent or indulgent commentaries in the course of his protracted career. It was composed of observations on the reading habits – and bookshelves – of such writers as Huidobro (surprising), Neruda (predictable), Nicanor Parra (Wittgenstein and Chilean folk poetry: Parra was probably pulling his leg, or was it Ibacache’s joke on the reader?), Rosamel del Valle, Díaz Casanueva, and others, with the notable exception of Enrique Lihn, who was a sworn enemy of the Catholic critic and antique collector. Of the younger writers, the youngest was Carlos Wieder, and this was an indication of the hopes Ibacache had pinned on him. In the section devoted to Wieder’s readings, the critic’s style, usually full of the flourishes and generalities that are the stock in trade of the pompous literary journalist (which is what, at bottom, he had always been), underwent a gradual, in fact a perfectly smooth, transformation, losing the festive and familiar tone of the sections in which he had dealt with his other idols, friends or followers. Alone in his study, Ibacache tried to bring Carlos Wieder into focus. Calling on all the resources of his memory, he strove to recapture Wieder’s voice and spirit, the face he had imagined during a long telephone conversation one night; but he failed, and his miserable failure was evident in the style of his notes, veering from jaunty to pedantic (which is not uncommon in Latin American criticism), then from pedantic to melancholy and perplexed. Wieder’s favorite authors, as recorded by Ibacache, are a varied lot, although the list may tell us more about the critic’s erratic and out-of-step preferences: Heraclitus, Empedocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, Simonides, Anacreon, Callimachus, Honestus of Corinth. Ibacache allowed himself a dig at Wieder, betting that his bedside table was burdened with the Palatine Anthology and the Anthology of Chilean Poetry (though perhaps, on second thoughts, this was not a joke). He pointed out that Wieder – whose voice at the other end of the telephone line sounded like wind and rain, and this, from a man who collected antiques, should be taken literally – knew the Dialogue of a Man with His Soul and had made a careful study of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore by John Ford, whose complete works, including those written in collaboration, he had annotated in detail. (Ever the skeptic, Bibiano thought it more likely that Wieder’s familiarity with Ford was limited to the Italian film based on his best known play, which came out in Latin America in 1973 or thereabouts, and whose main and perhaps sole redeeming feature was the presence of a young and hauntingly beautiful Charlotte Rampli
ng.)

  The fragment concerning the erudition of the “promising poet Carlos Wieder” broke off abruptly, as if Ibacache had suddenly realized he was stepping into a void.

  But there was more to come: in an article about seaside cemeteries on the Pacific coast, a rambling, sentimental piece, republished in a volume entitled Etchings and Watercolors, between discoursing on a cemetery near Las Ventanas and another in the vicinity of Valparaiso, for no apparent reason Ibacache described night falling in a nameless village, an empty square where long shadows flickered and trembled, and a silhouette, the silhouette of a young man wearing a trench coat, and a scarf or cravat around his neck, which partly hid his face. Ibacache and the stranger talked, but between them lay a strip or rectangle of lamplight, which neither dared to cross. In spite of the distance, their voices carried clearly. Although the general tone of the exchange was civilized and the stranger had a pleasant-sounding voice, occasionally he lapsed into coarse or violent language. The meeting, being strictly confidential in nature, came to an end when a pair of lovers appeared in the square, followed by a dog (it might as well have been a pair of policemen on the beat). They were gone again in the space of a breath or the wink of an eye, but so was the stranger, who disappeared into the shadows and the unkempt greenery of the square, leaving Ibacache leaning on his stick, meditating on the inscrutable ways of destiny. Was it Wieder? Or a figment of the critic’s imagination? Who knows.

  In spite of the rumors of his death and the lack of evidence to the contrary, rather than sinking into oblivion with the passing years Wieder became a mythic figure and his alleged ideas found a following. Certain enthusiasts set off into the wide world intending, if not to bring him back to Chile, at least to have their photos taken with the great man. But all their efforts were in vain. They lost track of him in South Africa, Germany or Italy … After a long pilgrimage (or several months of tourism, according to the cynics) the young men returned from their quests penniless and empty-handed.

  Carlos Wieder’s father, presumably the one person who knew his whereabouts, died in 1990. And nobody came to visit his recess in a neglected corner of the Valparaiso municipal cemetery.

  As the years went by it was gradually supposed in Chilean literary circles that Carlos Wieder was dead too, a reassuring thought for many, as times began to change.

  In 1992 his name appeared prominently in a judicial report on torture and the disappearance of prisoners. It was the first time he had come to public notice in a non-literary context. In 1993 he was linked to an “independent operational group” responsible for the death of various students in and around Concepción and Santiago. In 1994 a collective of Chilean journalists published a book about the disappearances in which he was again mentioned. In the same year, Muñoz Cano, who had left the air force, published his memoir, one chapter of which described the photographic exhibition in the Providencia flat: a detailed account, though marred in places by the excessive intensity and nervous agitation of the prose. A few years earlier, an obscure press specialising in small-format poetry books had published Bibiano O’Ryan’s The Warlocks Return. The book was a success and the print runs soon outstripped the publisher’s fondest dreams. The Warlocks Return is a highly readable study of fascist literary movements in South America from 1972 to 1989 (stylistically, it owes something to the detective novels Bibiano and I used to devour during our years in Concepción). Among the enigmatic and extravagant characters who crowd the pages of the book, by far the most imposing is Carlos Wieder; he alone stands out clearly from the vertigo and babble of those accursed decades. He is (as I’m afraid we say in Latin America) a shining example. In the chapter devoted to Wieder (the longest in the book), entitled “Exploring the Limits,” Bibiano relinquishes his generally measured and objective tone, and evokes the shining of the example in question; it is as if he were retelling a horror film. At one point, rather inappropriately, he even compares the story of Wieder to William Beckford’s Vathek, quoting Borges’ commentary on that work: “I would go so far as to affirm that it is the first truly atrocious Hell in literature.” Bibiano’s account of Wieder and his poetics is faltering, as if the presence of the aviator-poet had disturbed and disoriented him. Oddly, although he is quite at ease with Argentine or Brazilian torturers and even makes fun of them, when faced with Wieder, he becomes tense, accumulates adjectives ineptly and indulges in scatology, as if he were trying not to blink, not to let his subject (Carlos Wieder the pilot, Ruiz-Tagle the autodidact) disappear over the horizon. But everyone blinks in the end, even writers, especially writers, and, as always, Wieder vanishes.

  Only three former comrades spoke out in the lieutenant’s defense. All three were retired and all three were prompted by a passion for truth and a concern for the common good. The first, a major in the army, said that Wieder was a sensitive and refined individual; in his own way, he was yet another victim of those dark years during which the destiny of the Republic hung in the balance. The second, a sergeant from Military Intelligence, spoke in plainer terms of Wieder as an energetic, good-humored and hard-working young man (which was more than you could say for some of them), who treated his men decently, not like sons exactly, because most of us were older than he was, more like younger brothers. My little brothers, Wieder used to call them, for no apparent reason, while a broad smile spread across his face (what was he so happy about?). Wieder’s third defender, an officer who had accompanied him on a number of missions in Santiago – a small number, as he was quick to point out – affirmed that Air Force Lieutenant Wieder had only done his duty as a Chilean: what other Chileans should have done, or had tried to do but could not. Prisoners are a dead weight in times of civil war. Such was the maxim that had guided Wieder and several of his colleagues, and with the nation in the throes of that catastrophe, who could blame them for overstepping the bounds of duty? Sometimes, he added pensively, finishing off a prisoner is more an act of kindness than a punishment: “What you have to understand is that Carlitos Wieder looked down on the world as if he were standing on top of a volcano; he saw you and me and himself from a great height, and, in his eyes, we were all, to be quite frank, pathetic insects. That is how he was; he believed that Nature intervenes actively in history, shaping it, buffeting our lives, although in our pitiful ignorance we usually attribute these blows to bad luck or destiny.”

  Finally, a courageous and pessimistic judge indicted Wieder in a case that would never get very far. The defendant, of course, did not appear for the trial. Another judge, in Concepción this time, named him as the prime suspect in the murder of Angelica Garmendia and the disappearance of her sister and aunt. Amalia Maluenda, the Mapuche maid, made a surprise appearance in the witness box and her presence kept the journalists busy for a week. Over the years her Spanish had dwindled. When she spoke in court, every second word was in Mapuche, and the two young Catholic priests who escorted her like bodyguards, never leaving her alone for a moment, had to serve as interpreters. In her memory, the night of the crime was one episode in a long history of killing and injustice. Her account of the events was swept up in a cyclical, epic poem, which, as her dumbfounded listeners came to realize, was partly her story, the story of the Chilean citizen Amalia Maluenda, who used to work for the Garmendias, and partly the story of the Chilean nation. A story of terror. When she spoke of Wieder, she seemed to be talking about several different people: an invader, a lover, a warrior, a demon. When she spoke of the Garmendia sisters, she likened them to the air, to garden plants or puppies. Remembering the black night of the crime, she said she had heard the music of the Spanish. When asked to clarify what she meant by “the music of the Spanish,” she replied: “Rage, sir, sheer, futile rage.”

  None of the cases made much headway. The country had too many problems to concern itself for long with the fading figure of a serial killer who had disappeared years ago.

  Chile forgot him.

  8

  This is where Abel Romero appears on the scene and I make my reappearan
ce. Chile had forgotten us as well.

  During the time of Allende, Romero had been something of a celebrity in the police force. Now he was in his fifties: short, dark, all skin and bone, his black hair slicked back with brilliantine or gel. His owed his modest fame to two cases, which had, as the saying goes, rocked the nation, or at least the readers of the crime reports. The first was a murder (or, according to Romero, a puzzle). The scene was a boarding-house on the Calle Ugalde in Valparaiso. The victim was found shot in the forehead; the door of the room was bolted and jammed shut from the inside with a chair. The windows had also been shut from the inside, besides which anyone trying to escape that way would have been seen from the street. Since the weapon was found beside the dead man’s body, the case was initially treated, logically enough, as a suicide. But the forensic reports soon revealed that the victim had not fired the weapon. The dead man’s name was Pizarro, and as far as anyone knew he had no enemies. He led a quiet, rather solitary life and had no occupation or means of earning a living, although it was later discovered that he received a monthly allowance from his wealthy family in the south. The newspapers took up this curious case: how had the killer got out of the victims room? Experiments with the doors of the other rooms showed that it was virtually impossible to shoot the bolt from the outside. As for shooting the bolt and jamming the door shut with a chair against the handle, it was simply inconceivable. Tests on the windows revealed that, one in ten times, if they were shut from the outside with a quick, firm action, the clasp fell into place. But only a tight-rope walker could have escaped from there, and, besides, the window was in full view of the street below, which was normally very busy at the time the murder took place. Nevertheless, in the end, for want of a plausible alternative, the police concluded that the killer had escaped through the window, and the national press nicknamed him the “tightrope walker.” Then Romero was sent down from Santiago, and he solved the mystery in twenty-four hours. After a further eight hours of interrogation (in which Romero had no part), the killer signed a confession that coincided almost exactly with the detective’s deductions.