Distant Star (3 page)

At 5:00 in the morning I fell asleep on the sofa. Angelica woke me four
hours later. We had breakfast in the kitchen, in silence. At midday, they put a pair of
suitcases in their car, a lime-green ’68 model Citroneta and left for Nacimiento.
I never saw them again.

Their parents, both painters, had died before the twins’ fifteenth
birthday, in a car accident, I think. I once saw a photograph of them: he was dark and
lean with very prominent cheekbones and a certain look of sadness and perplexity
peculiar to those born south of the river Bío-Bío; she was or seemed to be
taller than him, slightly chubby, with a sweet, easy-going smile.

When they died, their daughters inherited the house in Nacimiento –
a three-story place (the top story was one big attic room, which the parents had used as
a studio) built of stone and wood, on the outskirts of town – as well as some land
near Mulchén, which provided the girls with a comfortable living. They often talked
about their parents (according to them, Julián Garmendia was one of the best
painters of his generation, although I have never heard or seen him mentioned anywhere)
and their poems often described painters lost in the wilds of southern Chile, embarking
on hopelessly ambitious works and hopelessly in love. Is that how Julián Garmendia
loved María Oyarzún? I find it hard to believe when I think of
that photo. But I don’t find it hard to believe that in the 1960s, in Chile,
there were people who were hopelessly in love. It seems strange to me now. Like a film
misplaced on a forgotten shelf in some enormous archive. But I don’t doubt it for
a moment.

From here on, my story is mainly conjecture. The Garmendia sisters went to
Nacimiento, to their big house on the outskirts of town where their mother’s older
sister, a certain Ema Oyarzún, lived together with an elderly maid, Amalia
Maluenda.

They went to Nacimiento and shut themselves up in the house, and one fine
day, say two weeks or a month later (although I doubt a month had gone by), Alberto
Ruiz-Tagle turned up on their doorstep.

It must have happened something like this. One afternoon, one of those
bracing yet melancholic southern afternoons, a car appears on the dirt road, but the
twins don’t hear, because they’re playing the piano or busy in the orchard
or stacking firewood at the back of the house with their aunt and the maid. Someone
knocks at the front door. Knocks and knocks and finally the maid opens the door and
there is Ruiz-Tagle. He says he has come to see the twins. The maid doesn’t let
him in and says she will go and call the girls. Ruiz-Tagle waits patiently, seated in a
cane armchair on the broad porch. When the twins see him, they greet him effusively and
scold the maid for not having shown him in. For the first half-hour, Ruiz-Tagle is
bombarded with questions. No doubt he strikes the aunt as a pleasant young man:
nice-looking, polite. The twins are happy. Ruiz-Tagle is invited to dinner, of course,
and in his honor they prepare a feast. I don’t want to think about what they might
have eaten. Corn-cakes perhaps or
empanadas
, but no, it
must have been something else. Naturally, they invite him to spend the night. Ruiz-Tagle
accepts without a fuss. After dinner they stay up late talking, and the twins read some
poems: the aunt in raptures, Ruiz-Tagle knowing and silent. He, of course, doesn’t
read anything; he says that after poems like theirs, his don’t rate. The aunt
insists, Please, Alberto, read us something of yours, but he will not be moved. He says
he has nearly finished something new, but until it is finished and corrected, he would
prefer not to talk about it. He smiles, shrugs, says, No, sorry, no, no, no, and the
twins take his side, Leave him alone, Aunty. In their innocence they
think
they
understand, but they don’t understand at all (the “New Chilean Poetry”
is about to be born), and yet they think they understand and they read their poems,
their wonderful poems, while Ruiz-Tagle looks on, smiling (and no doubt closing his eyes
the better to listen), and the aunt is occasionally offended or perplexed: Angelica, how
can you be so crude? Or, Veronica, dear, I didn’t understand a thing. Alberto, can
you explain that metaphor to me? And Ruiz-Tagle politely obliging, talking about
signifier and signified, about Joyce Mansour, Sylvia Plath and Alejandra Pizarnik
(although the twins say, No, no, we don’t like Pizarnik, by which they really mean
that they don’t
write
like Pizarnik), and the aunt nodding attentively as
Ruiz-Tagle goes on to mention Violeta and Nicanor Parra (I met Violeta, in her tent, I
did, says poor Ema Oyarzún), and then Enrique Lihn and “civil poetry,”
and here if the twins were more attentive they would have seen an ironic glint in his
eye (civil poetry, I’ll give you
civil poetry), and finally,
in full flight now, he starts talking about Jorge Cáceres, the Chilean surrealist
who died in 1949 at the age of twenty-six.

And then the twins get up, or perhaps it’s only Veronica who goes to
look in her father’s sizeable library and returns with a book by Cáceres,
Bound for the Great Polar Pyramid
, published when the poet was only twenty.
From time to time the Garmendia sisters, or maybe it was only Angelica, used to talk
about republishing the complete works of Cáceres, a legendary figure for our
generation, so it’s not surprising that Ruiz-Tagle brings him up (although he has
nothing to do with the sisters’ poetry; Violeta Parra does, Nicanor too, but not
Cáceres). He also mentions Anne Sexton and Elizabeth Bishop and Denise Levertov
(poets whose work the twins adore and have on occasion translated and read at the
workshop, to the evident satisfaction of Juan Stein) and then they all make fun of the
aunt, who doesn’t understand anything, and they eat homemade biscuits and play the
guitar and someone notices the maid, who has been standing in the corridor, watching
them from the shadows, not daring to come in, and the aunt says, Come on, Amalia,
don’t stand there like a waif, and the maid, drawn by the music and the revelry,
takes two steps forward, but no more, and then night falls and the party is over.

A few hours later Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, although from here on I should call
him Carlos Wieder, gets up.

Everyone is asleep. He has probably slept with Veronica Garmendia.
It’s not important. (What I mean is: not any more; at the time, of course, it was,
unfortunately for us.) At any rate,
Carlos Wieder gets up like a
sleepwalker, without hesitation, and quietly searches the house. He is looking for the
aunt’s bedroom. His shadow moves over the paintings by Julián Garmendia and
María Oyarzún that line the corridors, along with plates and dishes from the
area around Nacimiento (which is famous, I believe, for its china or pottery). Wieder
stealthily opens door after door. Finally he finds the aunt’s room, on the ground
floor, next to the kitchen. The room opposite is sure to be the maid’s. And as he
slips into the aunt’s room he hears the sound of a car approaching the house. He
smiles; no time to lose. In a bound he is beside the bed. In his right hand, he holds a
curved knife. Ema Oyarzún is sleeping placidly. Wieder takes the pillow and covers
her face with it. Straight away, with a single stroke of the knife, he cuts her throat.
The car pulls up in front of the house. Wieder has already left the aunts room and is
going into the maid’s. But the bed is empty. For a moment Wieder doesn’t
know what to do; he is seized by a desire to kick the bed, smash up the rickety old
chest of drawers in which Amalia Maluenda’s clothes are piled. But it lasts only a
moment. Soon he is at the front door, breathing normally, letting in the four men who
came in the car. They greet him with a discreet but respectful nod and peer obscenely at
the dark interior, the carpets, the curtains, as if from the very start they were
searching out and weighing up places to hide. But they are not the ones who will be
hiding.

With these men the night comes into the Garmendias’ house. Fifteen
minutes later, or ten perhaps, when they leave, the night leaves with them. The night
comes in, and out it goes again,
swift and efficient. And the bodies
will never be found; but no,
one
body, just one, will appear years later in a
mass grave, the body of Angelica Garmendia, my adorable, my incomparable Angelica, but
only hers, as if to prove that Carlos Wieder is a man and not a god.

Around that time, as the last life rafts of the Popular Unity Front were sinking, I was taken prisoner. The circumstances of my arrest were banal, if not grotesque, but being imprisoned, rather than hanging around in the street or in a café or, more likely, holed up in my room refusing to get out of bed, meant that I witnessed Carlos Wieder’s first poetic act, although at that stage I didn’t know who Carlos Wieder was or what had befallen the Garmendia sisters.

It happened late one afternoon – Wieder was fond of twilight – while the prisoners, about seventy of us, were killing time at La Peña, a transit center on the outskirts of Concepción, practically in Talcahuano, playing chess in the yard or just talking.

A few strands of cloud appeared in the sky, which half an hour earlier had been absolutely clear. Drifting east, shaped like cigarettes or pencils, the clouds were black and white at first, when they were still over the coast, but as they veered towards the city they turned pink, then bright vermilion as they headed up the valley.

For some reason I had the impression I was the only prisoner looking at the sky. It might have had something to do with being nineteen years old.

Then, among the clouds, the airplane appeared. At first it was a spot no bigger than a mosquito. I thought it must have come from an airstrip somewhere nearby and be returning to base after a flight along the coast. It approached the city slowly but steadily, as if it were gliding, hard to make out among the strips of high cirrus and the pencil-shaped clouds trailed by the wind just above the rooftops.

It seemed to be moving as slowly as the clouds, but that, I soon realized, was an optical illusion. When it flew over the transit center, it made a noise like a damaged washing-machine. The pilot’s face was visible, and for a moment I thought I saw him raise his hand and wave us good-bye. Then the plane turned its nose up and climbed, and soon it was flying over the center of Concepción.

There, high above the city, it began to write a poem in the sky. At first I thought the pilot had gone mad and I wasn’t surprised. Madness was not exceptional at the time. I thought he was looping around in a fit of desperation and would crash into a building or a square in the city. But then, suddenly, the letters appeared, as if the sky itself had secreted them. Perfectly formed letters of grey-black smoke on the sky’s enormous screen of rose-tinged blue, chilling the eyes of those who saw them. IN PRINCIPIO … CREAVIT DEUS … CAELUM ET TERRAM, I read as if in a dream. I supposed – or hoped – it was part of an advertizing campaign. I chuckled to myself. Then
the plane swung around and flew west, heading towards us, before turning again to make another pass. This time the line of words was much longer and it stretched out over the southern suburbs. TERRA AUTEM ERAT INANIS … ET VACUA … ET TENEBRAE … SUPER FACIEM ABYSSI… ET SPIRITUS DEI … FEREBATUR SUPER AQUAS …

For a moment it seemed the plane would disappear over the horizon, heading for the coastal range or the Andes, one or the other, I really couldn’t tell, heading south anyway, towards the great forests. But it came back.

By then almost everyone in the city center was watching the sky. One of the prisoners, a man called Norberto, who was going mad (or such, at least, was the diagnosis pronounced by a fellow prisoner, a socialist psychiatrist who was later executed, so I heard, in full possession of his intellectual and emotional faculties), tried to climb the fence that separated the men’s yard from the women’s, and started shouting, It’s a Messerschmitt 109, a Messerschmitt fighter from the Luftwaffe, the best fighter plane of 1940! I stared at him and then at the rest of the prisoners, and everything seemed to be immersed in a transparent grey wash, as if the La Peña Center were dissolving in time. The pair of guards at the entrance to the gymnasium, where we slept on the floor, had stopped talking and were looking at the sky. So were all the prisoners, who had risen to their feet, abandoning their games of chess, their confessions, their speculations on the days ahead and what they held in store. Clinging to the fence like a monkey, Mad Norberto laughed and said, The Second World War is returning to the Earth. All that talk
about the Third World War was wrong; it’s the Second returning, returning, returning. And it has fallen to us, the people of Chile, to greet and welcome it – Oh lucky day! he cried, as the white froth of his saliva, contrasting with the dominant tone of grey, ran down his chin, dripped onto the collar of his shirt and spread out in a large wet patch on his chest.

The plane veered around and came back over the center of Concepción. I managed to read the words DIXITQUE DEUS … FIAT LUX … ET FACTA EST LUX, though perhaps I was guessing or imagining or dreaming. The women on the other side of the fence were shading their eyes with their hands and following the plane’s loops attentively like us, but in heartrending silence. For a moment I thought that if Norberto had tried to jump the fence, no one would have stopped him. All the other prisoners and guards were frozen, staring up at the sky. Never in my life had I seen so much sadness in one place (or so I thought then; now, thinking back, certain mornings of my childhood seem sadder than that lost afternoon of 1973).

The plane came back and flew over us again. It traced a circle over the sea, climbed and returned to Concepción. What a pilot, said Norberto, not even Galland or Rudy Rudler could have done it better, or Hanna Reitsch, or Anton Vogel, or Karl Heinz Schwarz, or Talca’s answer to the Wolf of Bremen, or Curicó’s Breakneck of Stuttgart, or Hans Marseille himself reincarnate. Then Norberto looked at me and winked. His face was flushed.