Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998-2003

  And now that I’ve mentioned Trakl, let me digress, because it occurs to me that when Trakl gave up his studies and went to work as a druggist’s apprentice, at the tender but no longer innocent age of eighteen, he was also choosing exile — and choosing it in a natural way — because going to work for a druggist at eighteen is a form of exile, just as drug addiction is a form of exile, and incest another, as the Ancient Greeks knew very well. So we’ve got Rubén Darío and we’ve got Alonso de Ercilla, who are the four great Chilean poets, and we’ve got the first thing that Parra’s poem teaches us, which is that we don’t have Darío or Ercilla, that we can’t appropriate them, only read them, which is enough.

  The second thing that Parra’s poem teaches us is that nationalism is wretched and collapses under its own weight. If the expression “collapses under its own weight” doesn’t make sense to you, imagine a statue made of shit slowly sinking into the desert: well, that’s what it means for something to collapse under its own weight. And the third thing that Parra’s poem teaches us is that probably our two best poets, Chile’s best poets, were a Spaniard and a Nicaraguan who swung through these southern lands, one as a soldier and a person of great intellectual curiosity, the other as an immigrant, a penniless young man eager to make a name for himself, neither of them with any intention of staying, neither with any intention of becoming a great Chilean poet, simply two people, two travelers. And now I’d say it’s clear what I think about literature and exile, or literature and banishment.

  2.

  Fragments

  of a Return

  to the Native Land

  Exiles

  To be exiled is not to disappear but to shrink, to slowly or quickly get smaller and smaller until we reach our real height, the true height of the self. Swift, master of exile, knew this. For him exile was the secret word for journey. Many of the exiled, freighted with more suffering than reasons to leave, would reject this statement.

  All literature carries exile within it, whether the writer has had to pick up and go at the age of twenty or has never left home.

  Probably the first exiles on record were Adam and Eve. This is indisputable and it raises a few questions: Can it be that we’re all exiles? Is it possible that all of us are wandering strange lands?

  The concept of “strange lands” (like that of “home ground”) has some holes in it, presents new questions. Are “strange lands” an objective geographic reality, or a mental construct in constant flux?

  Let’s recall Alonso de Ercilla.

  After a few trips through Europe, Ercilla, soldier and nobleman, travels to Chile and fights the Araucanians under Alderete. In 1561, when he’s not yet thirty, he returns and settles in Madrid. Twenty years later he publishes La Araucana, the best epic poem of his age, in which he relates the clash between Araucanians and Spaniards, with clear sympathy for the former. Was Ercilla in exile during his American ramblings through the lands of Chile and Peru? Or did he feel exiled when he returned to court, and is La Araucana the fruit of that morbus melancholicus, of his keen awareness of a kingdom lost? And if this is so, which I can’t say for sure, what has Ercilla lost in 1589, just five years before his death, but youth? And with his youth, the arduous journeys, the human experience of being exposed to the elements of an enormous and unknown continent, the long rides on horseback, the skirmishes with the Indians, the battles, the shadows of Lautaro and Caupolicán that, as time passes, loom large and speak to him, to Ercilla, the only poet and the only survivor of something that, when set down on paper, will be a poem, but that in the memory of the old poet is just a life or many lives, which amounts to the same thing.

  And what is Ercilla left with before he writes La Araucana and dies? Ercilla is left with something — if in its most extreme and bizarre form — that all great poets possess. He’s left with courage. A courage worth nothing in old age, just as, incidentally, it’s worth nothing in youth, but that keeps poets from throwing themselves off a cliff or shooting themselves in the head, and that, in the presence of a blank page, serves the humble purpose of writing.

  Exile is courage. True exile is the true measure of each writer.

  At this point I should say that at least where literature is concerned, I don’t believe in exile. Exile is a question of tastes, personalities, likes, dislikes. For some writers exile means leaving the family home; for others, leaving the childhood town or city; for others, more radically, growing up. There are exiles that last a lifetime and others that last a weekend. Bartleby, who prefers not to, is an absolute exile, an alien on planet Earth. Melville, who was always leaving, didn’t experience — or wasn’t adversely affected by — the chilliness of the word exile. Philip K. Dick knew better than anyone how to recognize the disturbances of exile. William Burroughs was the incarnation of every one of those disturbances.

  Probably all of us, writers and readers alike, set out into exile, or at least into a certain kind of exile, when we leave childhood behind. Which would lead to the conclusion that the exiled person or the category of exile doesn’t exist, especially in regards to literature. The immigrant, the nomad, the traveler, the sleepwalker all exist, but not the exile, since every writer becomes an exile simply by venturing into literature, and every reader becomes an exile simply by opening a book.

  The country that I come from, according to some of its native writers, is an island, the strangest island in the southern hemisphere. It’s bordered to the north by the Atacama Desert, which Chileans say with utter conviction is the most inhospitable in the world; to the east by the Andes, which, according to the same native writers, is the highest and most impassable mountain range on earth (though occasionally news comes from the other side of a fearsome and infuriating tribe called “the Argentines”); to the west by the Pacific Ocean, the largest stretch of water on the planet; and to the south by the deadly white lands of Arthur Gordon Pym, traveler and exile ad honorem. The country that I come from is an island. But that isn’t the worst of it. The country that I come from is or believes itself to be Easter Island (and a sovereign nation, too). And, like the old Easter Islanders, the natives of my country believe that they’re the navel of the world, to a ridiculous degree.

  The moai of Chile are the Chileans themselves who, bewildered, face out toward the four cardinal points.

  Just a few years ago, a gay dance club in Valparaíso burned down. The club — maybe it was just a pub or a bar — was in a wooden building and the fire was quite large; more than twenty people died. The story was reported by a few news agencies. Soon after hearing about it, a Chilean living in Paris remarked to a friend of mine how surprised he was: there were no homosexuals in Chile, according to him, so it was impossible for a bar of that description to have caught fire. The only possible explanation was either that the news agency had made a mistake, or that the story was a conscious attempt to injure the country. This Chilean, bless his soul, was no peasant from Chillán or lumberjack from Aysén, but someone who lived in the capital of France, where he even had a job and was a legal resident. He went to the movies from time to time, and from time to time he slept with a woman. Occasionally he read books in Spanish and he frequently read the newspaper in French. On top of it all, I think he was on the left politically, though that doesn’t have much to do with this story. Still, he couldn’t believe that in Valparaíso, a port city celebrated by Darío and Neruda, more than twenty homosexuals could gather in a bar. Probably occupying a key place in his vast unconscious was the information we received in o
ur childhood, which is that in Chile everyone is brave, no tears are shed, and all hearts are pure.

  In 1973, when I returned to Los Ángeles, capital of the province of Bío-Bío, I was told that the only homosexual in town, whose name I’ve forgotten but who even back then wasn’t the only one, had been sought out by a group of soldiers, lifelong clients, who took him out by the river and killed him. From that moment on, Los Ángeles was liberated of faggots. Now everyone was brave, no one shed a tear, and all were pure of heart.

  Almost all Chilean writers, at some point in their lives, have gone into exile. Many have been followed doggedly by the ghost of Chile, and have been caught and returned to the fold. Others have managed to shake the ghost and gone into hiding; still others have changed their names and their ways and Chile has luckily forgotten them.

  When I was fifteen, in 1968, I left Chile for Mexico. For me, back then, Mexico City was like the Border, that vast nonexistent territory where freedom and metamorphosis are common currency.

  Despite everything, the shadow of my native land wasn’t erased and in the depths of my stupid heart the certainty persisted that it was there that my destiny lay.

  I returned to Chile when I was twenty to take part in the Revolution, with such bad luck that a few days after I got to Santiago the coup came and the army seized power. My trip to Chile was long, and sometimes I’ve thought that if I’d spent more time in Honduras, for example, or waited a little before shipping out from Panama, the coup would’ve come before I got to Chile and my fate would have been different.

  In any case, and despite the collective disasters and my small personal misfortunes, I remember the days after the coup as full days, crammed with energy, crammed with eroticism, days and nights in which anything could happen. There’s no way I’d wish a twentieth year like that on my son, but I should also acknowledge that it was an unforgettable year. The experience of love, black humor, friendship, prison, and the threat of death were condensed into no more than five interminable months that I lived in a state of amazement and urgency. During that time, I wrote one poem, which wasn’t just bad like the other poems I wrote back then, but excruciatingly bad. When those five months were up, I left Chile again and I haven’t been back since.

  That was the beginning of my exile, or what is commonly known as exile, although the truth is I didn’t see it that way.

  Sometimes exile simply means that Chileans tell me I talk like a Spaniard, Mexicans tell me I talk like a Chilean, and Spaniards tell me I talk like an Argentine: it’s a question of accents.

  As it happens, Argentine transplants — who are as likely to be writers as soccer players — have occasionally faced the dichotomy of exile with success. They’ve been naturalized and they’ve adopted the languages of their new places of residence with an ease that leads us to wonder whether they’re aliens, not Argentines. Copi and Bianciotti are cases in point.

  But Argentina isn’t just a country, or at least at one time it wasn’t: it’s also a way station for immigrants. An immigrant factory. I’m thinking, for example, about Di Stéfano, an older example, and about Che Guevara, another older example, and about the much stranger case of Cantatore, coach of the Real Valladolid in Spain, who was born in Argentina and talks like an Argentine, but is a naturalized Chilean, which comes as a surprise. But he’s not the only one : Manuel Rojas, one of the founders of the contemporary Chilean novel, was also born in Argentina and left for Chile as an adolescent, never to return.

  Able to see in Argentina that quality of exile and capacity for exile, Gombrowicz recognized it as a land where Form is constantly dismantled, a land whose history remains unwritten, which is to say a land with room for freedom and immaturity.

  Strange cases of exile are fairly easy to turn up, if we dig a little. One Argentine novelist, whose name, I believe, was Cataño, author of the notable and now forgotten novel Las Varonesas [The Man-Ladies], published by Seix Barral at the end of the 1970s, left for Costa Rica, where he lived until the triumph of the Sandinista revolution, after which he moved to Managua. What took Cataño to Costa Rica? Political repression in Argentina? Probably. It’s also possible that his wife was Costa Rican. Why not? Or that he wanted to live in the tropics. Or maybe he was offered a more interesting job in Costa Rica than anything he could find in Argentina. In any case, imagine that you have to go into exile and you’re offered three destinations: France, Italy, and Senegal. Cataño chose Senegal. Where is Cataño now? I have no idea. I’ve only read one novel by him. I hope he’s still writing. I hope he’s still alive.

  The fates chosen by those who go into exile are often strange. After the Chilean coup in 1973, I remember that few political refugees made their way to the embassies of Bulgaria or Romania, for example, with France or Italy preferred by many, although as I recall, top honors went to Mexico, and also Sweden, two very different countries that must have stood for two opposite manifestations of desire in the Chilean collective unconscious, although it’s true that in time the balance tilted toward the Mexican side and many of those who went into exile in Sweden began to turn up in Mexico. Many others, however, remained in Stockholm or Göteborg, and when I was living in Spain I ran into them every summer on vacation, speaking a Spanish that to me, at least, was startling, because it was the Spanish that was spoken in Chile in 1973, and that now is spoken nowhere but in Sweden.

  Enrique Vila-Matas told me a story. A while ago he attended a conference on exile. The participants were Mario Benedetti, Cristina Peri Rossi, and Augusto Monterroso. Probably a few others, I don’t know. The point is that Benedetti and Peri Rossi talked about exile as something terrible, horrible, etc., and when it was Monterroso’s turn, he said that for him exile had been a delightful, happy experience. In other words, he was satisfied with everything that had happened to him during his long stay in Mexico. I wasn’t at this conference, and Vila-Matas didn’t say much else about it, but I’m absolutely in agreement with Monterroso’s account. In even the worst case, going into exile is better than needing to go into exile and not being able to. And exile, in most cases, is a voluntary decision. No one forced Thomas Mann to go into exile. No one forced James Joyce to go into exile. Back in Joyce’s day, the Irish probably couldn’t have cared less whether he stayed in Dublin or left, whether he became a priest or killed himself. In the best case, exile is a literary option, similar to the option of writing. No one forces you to write. The writer enters the labyrinth voluntarily — for many reasons, of course: because he doesn’t want to die, because he wants to be loved, etc. — but he isn’t forced into it. In the final instance he’s no more forced than a politician is forced into politics or a lawyer is forced into law school. With the great advantage for the writer that the lawyer or politician, outside his country of origin, tends to flounder like a fish out of water, at least for a while — whereas a writer outside his native country seems to grow wings. The same thing applies to other situations. What does a politician do in prison? What does a lawyer do in the hospital? Anything but work. What, on the other hand, does a writer do in prison or in the hospital? He works. Sometimes he even works a lot. (Not to mention poets.) Of course the claim can be made that in prison the libraries are no good and that in hospitals there often are no libraries. It can be argued that in most cases exile means the loss of the writer’s books, among other material losses, and in some cases even the loss of his papers, his unfinished manuscripts, projects, letters. It doesn’t matter. Better to lose manuscripts than to lose your life. In any case, th
e point is that the writer works wherever he is, even while he sleeps, which isn’t true of those in other professions. Actors, it can be said, are always working, but it isn’t the same: the writer writes and is conscious of writing, whereas the actor, under great duress, only howls. Policemen are always policemen, but that isn’t the same either, because it’s one thing to be and another to work. The writer is and works in any situation. The policeman only is. And the same is true of the professional assassin, the soldier, the banker. Whores, perhaps, come closest in the exercise of their profession to the practice of literature.

  Archilochus, Greek poet of the seventh century BC, is a perfect example of this phenomenon. Born on the island of Paros, he was a mercenary, and, according to legend, he died in combat. We can imagine his life spent wandering the cities of Greece.

  In one fragment, Archilochus doesn’t hesitate to admit that in the midst of battle, probably a skirmish, he drops his weapons and runs away, which for the Greeks was undoubtedly the greatest mark of shame, let alone for a soldier who has to earn his daily bread by his courage in combat. Archilochus says:

  Some Saian mountaineer

  Struts today with my shield.

  I threw it down behind a bush and ran

  When the fighting got hot.

  Life seemed somehow more precious.

  It was a beautiful shield.

  I know where I can buy another

  Exactly like it, just as round.‡

  According to the classical scholar Carlos García Gual, Archilochus had to leave the island where he was born to earn a living with his lance, as a soldier of fortune: he knew war only as a toilsome chore, not as a field of heroic deeds. He won renown for his cynicism in a few lines of verse that tell how he flees the battlefield after he throws away his shield. His openness in confessing such a shameful act is striking. (In hoplite tactics, the shield is the weapon that protects the flank of the next soldier, symbol of courage, something never to be lost. “Return with the shield or on the shield,” it was said in Sparta.) All the pragmatic poet cared about was saving his own life. He cared nothing for glory or the code of honor.