Distant Star (4 page)

In the sky over Concepción the following words appeared: ET VIDIT DEUS … LUCEM QUOD … ESSET BONA
… ET DIVISIT … LUCEM AC TENEBRAS. To the east the last letters trailed off among the pencil-shaped clouds proceeding up the Bío-Bío valley. And at one point the plane flew straight up and out of sight, disappearing completely. As if the whole thing were simply a mirage or a nightmare. I heard a miner from Lota ask, What’s he written, brother? Half the prisoners at the La Peña Center, both men and women, were from Lota. No idea, came the reply, but it must be important. Someone else said, Just some crap, but you could hear fear and wonder in the tone of voice. There were more policemen at the entrance to the gymnasium now, six of them whispering amongst themselves. In front of me, Norberto, clasping the fence, scraping and scraping at the ground with his feet as if he were trying to dig a hole, whispered, Either the Blitzkrieg has come again or I’m going totally mad. Calm down, I said. I couldn’t be calmer, I’m floating on a cloud, he replied. He took a deep breath and did, in fact, seem to calm down.

Then, preceded by an odd crunching noise, as if someone had stepped on a very large insect or a very small biscuit, the plane reappeared. It was coming in from the sea again. I saw the pointing hands stretch out, the dirty cuffs rise to signal its passage; I heard voices, but perhaps it was only the wind, for in fact, at that moment, no one dared speak. Norberto squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them very wide. Our Father in heaven, he began, forgive us the sins of our brothers and forgive us our own sins. We are only Chileans, Lord, he went on, innocents, innocents. He said it loud and clear, with a steady voice. Everyone heard him, of course. Some laughed. Behind
me I heard anti-clerical wisecracks. I turned around and tried to see who had spoken. Pale and haggard, the faces of the prisoners and policemen were turning like the wheel of fortune. Norberto’s face, by contrast, was a still center. A likeable face, sinking into the earth. Twitching occasionally like the face of a hapless prophet witnessing the arrival of a long-awaited, much-feared Messiah. The plane roared past over our heads. Norberto gripped his elbows as if he were freezing to death.

I caught a glimpse of the pilot. This time he didn’t wave. He looked like a stone statue enclosed in the cockpit. The sky was darkening; soon the night would engulf everything. The clouds were no longer pink, but black with streaks of red. Over Concepción the symmetrical outline of the plane looked like a Rorschach blot.

This time it wrote only one word, in larger letters, over what must have been the center of the city: LEARN. Then, for a moment, it seemed to hesitate and lose altitude, as if it were about to plummet into the roof of a building, as if the pilot had switched off the motor and were giving us a practical demonstration, a first example from which to learn. But only for a moment, the time it took for night and wind to blur the letters of the last word. Then the plane vanished.

For a few seconds no one said anything. I heard a woman crying on the other side of the fence. Norberto was talking to two young girls, with a very calm expression on his face, as if nothing had happened. It looked as if they were asking him for advice. My God, they were asking a madman for advice! Behind me an unintelligible murmur started up. Something
had happened, but in fact it was nothing. Two teachers said something about the church running a publicity campaign. Which church? I asked them. Which church do you think? they said, and turned away. They didn’t like me. Then the policemen came out of their daze and made us line up in the yard for a last count. Other voices ordered the women to line up in their yard. Did you enjoy that? asked Norberto. I shrugged. All I know is I’ll never forget it, I said. Did you see it was a Messerschmitt? If you say so, I believe you, I said. It was a Messerschmitt, said Norberto, and I think it came from the other world. I slapped him on the back and said, Of course it did. The line was beginning to move; we were going back into the gymnasium. And it wrote in Latin, said Norberto. Yes, I said, but I didn’t understand anything. I did, said Norberto, I wasn’t a master typesetter for nothing you know. It was about the beginning of the world, about will, light and darkness. Lux is light. Tenebrae is darkness. Fiat is let there be. Let there be light, get it? Sounds more like an Italian car to me, I said. Well, you’re mistaken, brother. And at the end, he wished us all good luck. You think so? I said. Yes, all of us, every one. A poet, I said. Polite, anyway, said Norberto.

Carlos Wieder’s first poetic performance in the sky over Concepción instantly won him admirers among the nation’s enterprising minds.

Soon he was in demand for more sky-writing displays. Initially tentative, the invitations to participate in ceremonies and commemorations were soon being issued with greater frequency and the self-assurance befitting soldiers and gentlemen who know how to recognize a work of art when they see one, whether or not they understand it. Over the airstrip at Las Tencas, for the benefit of a select group of high-ranking officers and businessmen, accompanied by their families (the unmarried daughters were all hopelessly in love with Wieder, while their married sisters were inconsolable), as night was about to fall, he drew a star, the star of our flag, sparkling and solitary over the implacable horizon. A few days later, for a motley and democratic crowd milling among festive marquees at the El Condor air force base, he wrote a poem that an enquiring and well-read spectator described as
“lettriste
.” (To be more precise, the opening lines were worthy of Isidore Isou, while the unexpected
ending would not have been out of place in a Chilean folk song.) One of the lines alluded obliquely to the Garmendia sisters. They were referred to as “the twins.” A hurricane and lips were also mentioned. Although the poem went on to contradict itself, it would have been clear to an informed, attentive reader that the girls were already dead.

In another poem Wieder mentioned a Patricia and a Carmen. “Carmen” was probably the poet Carmen Villagrán, who disappeared at the beginning of December. According to a statement taken by investigators from the Catholic Church, she told her mother she was going to meet a friend and never came back. All her mother had time to ask was, Who’s this friend? As she went out of the door, Carmen replied, A poet. Years later, Bibiano O’Ryan identified “Patricia.” According to him, it was Patricia Méndez, seventeen years of age, who used to attend a writing workshop run by the Young Communists and who disappeared around the same time as Carmen Villagrán. The differences between the two were striking: Carmen read Michel Leiris in French and came from a middle-class family; Patricia Méndez, as well as being younger, was a working-class girl and a devout follower of Pablo Neruda. She wasn’t a university student, like Carmen, although she hoped one day to do teacher training; in the meantime she had a job in an electrical goods shop. Bibiano visited Patricia’s mother, who showed him an old school exercise book with poems in it. They were bad, according to Bibiano, under the spell of Neruda at his worst, a mishmash of
Twenty Love Poems
and
Incitation to Nixoncide
, but there was something in them, you could glimpse
it, reading between the lines. Freshness, wonder, a taste for life. In any case, wrote Bibiano at the end of his letter, no one deserves to be killed for writing badly, especially not under the age of twenty.

In his air show at El Condor, Wieder also wrote:
Pupils of Fire
. The generals looking up from the official box assumed, in all sincerity I suppose, that he was writing the names of his sweethearts or his friends, or the professional names of whores from Talcahuano. Some of those who were close to Wieder, however, were aware that he was conjuring up the shades of dead women. But these associates knew nothing about poetry. Or so they thought. (Naturally Wieder disagreed, assuring them they knew more about poetry than most people, more than a good many poets and professors, at any rate, living in their oases or miserably immaculate deserts; but his thugs didn’t understand, or dismissed it good-humoredly as another one of the lieutenant’s jokes.) For them what Wieder did in his plane was just a “daring feat,” daring in more ways than one, but not poetry.

Around the same time, he participated in two other air shows, one in Santiago, where he wrote more verses from the Bible and quotes from
The Rebirth of Chile
, the other in Los Ángeles (in the province of Bío-Bío), where he flew with two other pilots, who unlike him were civilians and had been working as skywriters for many years. In collaboration, the three of them drew a large (and rather wobbly) Chilean flag in the sky.

Newspaper and radio reports credited Wieder with truly prodigious abilities. No challenge was too great for him. His
instructor from the air force academy declared that he was a born pilot: seasoned, instinctive, capable of handling fighter planes and bombers without the slightest difficulty. An old school friend who had once invited Wieder to the family property during the holidays revealed that, to the amazement and subsequent indignation of his parents, the young guest had taken out their dilapidated Piper without permission and landed it on a narrow back road full of potholes. He seems to have spent that summer, presumably the summer of ’68, away from his parents (meanwhile, on the other side of the world, the cramped flat of a Parisian caretaker was about to give birth to
Barbaric Writing
, a literary movement that would play a decisive role in the last years of Wieder’s life). He was a courageous but shy adolescent (according to his school friend), given to quite unpredictable outbursts and reckless acts, but in the end he always won the hearts of those who came to know him. My mother and my grandmother adored him (his friend said); they used to say he looked as if he had just come through a storm: vulnerable, drenched to the bone, but with his charm intact.

When it came to the company he kept, however, he wasn’t exactly squeaky clean: he was known to associate with various shady characters, informers and low-life types, with whom he would go out, always at night, to drink or to frequent establishments of ill repute. But all things considered, these little minor blemishes in no way affected the rest of his character or behavior, and certainly not his manners. Some even regarded them as indispensable to the career of a writer who aspired to knowledge of the Absolute.

Around that time, the time of the air shows, Wieder’s career received a boost from one of Chile’s most influential literary critics (although notoriously unreliable as indicators of literary worth, accolades of this kind have carried a great deal of weight in Chile since the time of Alone
*
), a certain Nicasio Ibacache, who collected antiques and was a devout Catholic, which hadn’t prevented him from being a personal friend of Pablo Neruda (and Huidobro before that). He had also corresponded with Gabriela Mistral, been Pablo de Rokha’s whipping boy, and (so he said) discovered Nicanor Parra. To cut his c.v. short, he spoke French and English and died in the mid-’8os of a heart attack. In his weekly column in
El Mercurio
, Ibacache published an explication of Wieder’s highly individual poetic style. In the article in question he said that we (Chile’s literate public) were witnessing the emergence of the new era’s major poet. Then, true to form, he went on to give Wieder the benefit of his advice and expatiated in a cryptic and occasionally incoherent fashion on various editions of the Bible, informing us that for his first appearance in the sky over Concepción and the La Peña Center, Wieder had quoted from the Vulgate, using the edition that includes a Spanish translation by the honorable D. Felipe Scio de S. Miguel, made “in accordance with the interpretations of the Holy Fathers and the Catholic exegetes,” published by Gaspar & Roig of Madrid in 1852, as Wieder himself had confided to him one night in the course of a long telephone conversation, during which the critic had asked why the poet
had not used the Reverend Fr Scio’s translation, to which Wieder had replied, Because Latin makes more of an impression in the sky, although in fact he probably used the word “impact,” Latin makes more of an impact in the sky; which didn’t prevent him from using Spanish in his subsequent appearances. Naturally Ibacache referred to the various editions of the Bible mentioned by Borges and even to the inauspicious Jerusalem Bible, translated into Spanish by Raimundo Pellegrí and published in Valparaiso in 1875, which, according to the critic, foreshadowed and anticipated the Pacific War that a few years later would bring Chile into conflict with the alliance of Peru and Bolivia. By way of advice, he warned our young poet against the dangers of “premature glory” and the drawbacks of the literary avant-garde, which is prone to “create confusion at the frontiers that separate poetry from painting and theater or, more precisely, from visual and theatrical events.” He stressed the importance of unstinting effort in the task of continuous education; in other words, he encouraged Wieder to keep reading. Read, young man, he seemed to be saying, read the English poets, the French poets, the Chilean poets and Octavio Paz.

Ibacache’s tribute, the only article that prolific critic ever devoted explicitly to Wieder, was illustrated with two photographs. The first showed a light aircraft and its pilot in the middle of what appeared to be a minor military airstrip. The photo was taken at a fair distance, so Wieder’s features were indistinct. He was wearing a leather jacket with a fur collar, the peaked cap of the Chilean Air Force, jeans and cowboy boots. The caption read: Lieutenant Carlos Wieder on the airstrip at Los Muleros. In the
second photo, with a little effort and imagination, one could make out some of the verses that the poet had written in the sky over Los Ángeles as an epilogue to the grand composition of the Chilean flag.

Shortly before the article appeared, I was released from La Peña without charges, as were most of my fellow prisoners there. The first few days back home I didn’t go outside at all, which worried my mother and father and provoked ironic comments from my two younger brothers, who were perfectly justified in calling me a coward. After a week, Bibiano O’Ryan came to visit me. When we were alone in my room, he told me he had some good news and some bad news. The good news was that we had been expelled from the university. The bad news was that almost all our friends had disappeared. I said they were probably under arrest or had retreated to their houses in the country, like the Garmendia sisters. No, said Bibiano, the twins have disappeared too. His voice faltered as he said the word “twins.” It’s hard to explain what happened next (although everything in this story is hard to explain). I was sitting on the end of the bed. Bibiano threw himself into my arms (literally), put his head on my chest and started weeping inconsolably. At first I thought he was having some kind of attack. Then I realized, without the slightest shadow of a doubt, that we would never see the Garmendia sisters again. Bibiano got up, went over to the window and promptly composed himself. It’s all speculation, he said with his back to me. Yes, I replied, not knowing what he was referring to. There’s a third piece of news, said Bibiano. I might have guessed. Good or bad? I asked.
Frightening, said Bibiano. Go on, I said, before cutting him off, No, wait, let me catch my breath; by which I meant, Let me take a last look at my room, my house, my parents’ faces.