Distant Star (10 page)

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.

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” (that 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.

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.