Distant Star (8 page)

There was a brief article in the Catalonian newspapers, but Bibiano told me all about it, in a very detailed letter, almost like a detective’s report. It was the last letter I received from him.

At first I was annoyed that he had stopped writing to me, but then, considering the fact that I hardly ever replied, I realized it was understandable and didn’t hold it against him. Years
later I heard a story that I would have liked to tell Bibiano, but by then I wasn’t sure of his address. It was the story of Petra, and, in a way, Petra is to Soto what Juan Stein’s double is to the Juan Stein we knew. Petra’s story should be told like a fairy tale: Once upon a time in Chile there was a poor little boy … I think the boy was called Lorenzo, I’m not sure, and I’ve forgotten his surname, but some readers may remember it, and he liked to play, and climb trees and high-tension pylons. One day he climbed up a pylon and got such a shock that he lost both his arms. They had to amputate them just below the shoulders. So Lorenzo grew up in Chile without arms, an unfortunate situation for any child, but he also grew up in Pinochet’s Chile, which turned unfortunate situations into desperate ones, on top of which he soon discovered that he was homosexual, which made his already desperate situation inconceivable and indescribable.

Given these circumstances, it is not surprising that Lorenzo became an artist. (What else could he do?) But it’s hard to be an artist in the third world if you are poor, have no arms and are gay to boot. So, for a time, Lorenzo had to do other things. He studied and improved himself. He sang in the streets. Being a hopeless romantic, he fell in love. His disappointments (not to mention humiliations, put-downs and insults) were terrible, and one day – to be marked retrospectively with a white stone – he decided to kill himself. One particularly sad summer evening, as the sun sank into the Pacific Ocean, Lorenzo jumped into the sea from a rock used exclusively by suicides (every self-respecting stretch of Chilean coastline has one). He sank like
a stone with his eyes open and saw the water grow darker and the bubbles streaming from his lips and then an involuntary movement of his legs sent him back up to the surface. Because of the waves he couldn’t see the beach, only the rocks and the masts of pleasure craft or fishing boats. Then he went under again. This time too he kept his eyes open: he turned his head calmly (as if under anaesthetic), looking for something, anything, as long as it was beautiful, to be his last memory. But darkness enveloped whatever else might have been sinking with him into the depths and he could see nothing. Then, as the saying goes, his whole life flashed before him like a film. Some parts were in black and white, others in color. His poor mother’s love, her pride, her weariness, how she hugged him at night when, in Chile’s poor neighborhoods everything seemed to be hanging by a thread (black and white); the trembling, the nights when he wet his bed, the hospitals, the staring, the zoo-like staring (color); friends sharing what little they had, the consolations of music, marijuana, beauty revealed in unlikely places (black and white); love perfect and brief like a sonnet by Góngora; knowing with a fatal certainty (but raging against the knowledge) that you only live once. Suddenly drawing courage from nowhere, he decided he was not going to die. Now or never, he thought, and began to swim back up. It seemed to take forever to reach the surface and then he could hardly manage to keep himself afloat, but he did. That afternoon he learnt to swim without arms, like an eel or a snake. In the current socio-political climate, he said to himself, committing suicide is absurd and redundant. Better to become an undercover poet.

From that day on he began to paint (with his mouth and his feet), he took up dancing, he started writing poems and love letters, he learnt to play musical instruments and compose songs (a photo shows him playing the piano with his toes, smiling at the camera), and he began to save money so that he could get out of Chile.

It was hard, but he managed to leave in the end. In Europe, of course, life wasn’t much easier. For some time, years perhaps (though Lorenzo, who was younger than Bibiano and me, and much younger than Soto and Stein, left Chile when the flood of emigrants had abated), he made a living as a street musician and dancer in Holland (a country he adored) and various cities in Germany and Italy. He stayed in boarding houses, in the districts where the Arab, Turkish and African immigrants lived, occasionally moving in with a lover, enjoying the idyll while it lasted, before walking out or being shown the door, and after each day’s work in the street and drinks at a gay bar or a visit to an art-house cinema with continuous screenings, Lorenzo (or Lorenza as he also liked to be called) would shut himself in his room to write and paint. For much of his life he lived alone. He was known to some as
the acrobatic hermit
. His friends used to ask him how he wiped his ass after shitting, how he paid at the fruit shop, how he dealt with money, how he cooked. How, for God’s sake, could he live on his own? Lorenzo answered all these questions and for almost every difficulty he had an ingenious solution. With a little ingenuity, my dear, you can find a way to do just about anything. If Blaise Cendrars, for instance, could out-box the best of them with one arm, Lorenza
could clean her ass after shitting, and very nicely too.

In Germany, an intriguing but often eerie land, he bought himself a pair of prosthetic arms. They looked real and what he liked best was the way they made him feel like a robot or a cyborg in a science fiction film when he put them on and walked around. Seen from a distance, as he stepped out, for example, to meet a friend against a backdrop of violet sky, the visual effect was quite convincing. But he took them off when he worked in the street and the first thing he told his lovers, if they didn’t know already, was that he had no arms. Some of them even liked him better that way.

Shortly before the historic Barcelona Olympics, an actor or actress or a whole theater company from Catalonia toured in Germany and saw him perform in the street, or maybe in a small theater, and mentioned him to the person who had been given the task of finding someone to represent Petra, Mariscal’s cartoon character, the mascot or, to be more precise, the emblem of the Paralympics, which were to be held immediately after the Olympic Games. They say that when Mariscal saw Lorenzo leaping about in his skin-tight Petra costume like a schizophrenic principal from the Bolshoi Ballet, he said: the Petra of my dreams (which was typical: he doesn’t waste words). When they talked afterwards, Mariscal was charmed and offered Lorenzo his studio so he could come to Barcelona to paint or write or whatever (which was typical of his generosity). But as it turned out, Lorenzo or Lorenza didn’t need Mariscal’s studio to put him on top of the world for the duration of the Paralympic Games. From the very first day he was a media favorite,
doing a string of interviews, and it even looked as if he might eclipse Cobi, the Olympic mascot. At the time I was flat on my back with a clapped-out liver in the Vall d’Hebron Hospital in Barcelona, reading two or three newspapers a day, which is how I kept up with his exploits, jokes and anecdotes. Sometimes I had laughing fits reading the interviews. Sometimes they made me cry. I saw him on television too. He played his role very well.

Three years later, I found out he had died of AIDS. The person who told me wasn’t sure if he had died in Germany or South America (he didn’t know he was Chilean).

Sometimes, when I think of Stein and Soto, I can’t help thinking of Lorenzo too.

Sometimes I think he was the best poet of the three. But usually I see them all together.

Although the only thing they had in common was having been born in Chile. And possibly a book: Stein may have read it; Soto certainly did (he mentioned it in a long article on exile and rootlessness published in Mexico), and Lorenzo devoured it enthusiastically, like almost every book he read. (How did he turn the pages? With his tongue: an example to us all!) The book was called
Ma Gestalt-thérapie
, and its author, Dr. Frederick S. Perls, was a psychiatrist, a fugitive from Nazi Germany and a wanderer on three continents. As far as I know, it hasn’t been published in Spain.

But let us return to the beginning, to Carlos Wieder and the year of grace 1974.

At that time Wieder was at the height of his fame. After his triumphant journey to Antarctica and aerial displays over numerous Chilean cities, he was called upon to undertake something grand in the capital, something spectacular to show the world that the new regime and avant-garde art were not at odds, quite the contrary.

Wieder was only too pleased to oblige. In Santiago he stayed in Providencia, at the flat of a friend from the air force academy, and spent his days training at the Captain Lindstrom airstrip, socializing at the military clubs and visiting friends at their parents’ houses, where he met or was more or less forcibly introduced to their sisters, cousins and various young lady friends, who were struck by his dashing appearance, his courteous and apparently shy manner, but also by his coldness, by something remote in his gaze. As Pía Valle put it, there seemed to be another pair of eyes behind his eyes. At night, free at last, he devoted his time to the solitary preparation of a photographic
exhibition to be held in the flat, using the walls of the spare bedroom, which was to open on the same day as his display of aerial poetry.

Years later, the owner of the flat declared that he had not seen the photographs Wieder was planning to exhibit until the night of the opening. His first reaction to Wieder’s project was naturally to offer him the living room, or the whole flat, to display the photos, but Wieder declined. He maintained that the photos required a restricted and well-defined space, such as the room that he, the photographer, was occupying. He said that after writing in the sky it would be appropriate – as well as charmingly paradoxical – to circumscribe the epilogue to his aerial poem within the bounds of the poet’s den. As to the nature of the photos, according to the owner of the flat, Wieder wanted to surprise the guests, and would only say that it was visual poetry – experimental, quintessential, art for art’s sake – and that everyone would find it amusing. He also made his host promise that neither he nor anyone else would go into the room until the night of the opening. The owner of the flat offered to dig out the key to the room so that Wieder could rest easy. But Wieder said that wouldn’t be necessary; a promise was enough for him. So, solemnly, the owner of the flat gave his word of honor.

Naturally the invitations to the party in Providencia were limited to a select group: various pilots and young army officers (the oldest of them had not reached the rank of commander) who could reasonably be supposed to have a certain degree of aesthetic sensibility, a trio of journalists, two artists, an old
right-wing, ex-avant-garde poet who seemed to have recovered his youthful vigor since the coup, a young society belle called Tatiana von Beck Iraola (apparently the only woman to attend the exhibition) and Carlos Wieder’s father, who lived in Viña del Mar and was in delicate health.

Things got off to a bad start. On the morning of the air show, bulging black cumulus clouds came down the valley, heading south. Some of Wieder’s superior officers advised him not to fly. He ignored the bad omens and apparently conferred with an unidentified individual in the dark corner of a hangar. Then he took off, and the spectators watched with more apprehension than admiration as he executed a few preliminary stunts. He did some hedge-hopping, then looped the loop right way up and upside down. But without releasing any smoke. The army men and their wives were enjoying the show, although some senior air force officers wondered what was really going on. Then the plane climbed and disappeared into the belly of an immense grey cloud that was moving slowly over the city as if it were guiding the black clouds of the storm.

Wieder travelled inside the cloud like Jonah inside the whale. For a while, the spectators awaited his thundering reappearance. A few began to get the uneasy feeling they had been tricked, left sitting there on makeshift stands at the Captain Lindstrom airstrip, staring at a sky that would yield only rain, not poetry. But most of them took advantage of the pause to get up from their seats, stretch their legs, mingle, greet friends or acquaintances, join the groups that kept forming and breaking
up just as someone was about to chip in with a comment on the latest rumors, who’d been promoted to which position or the grave problems the nation was facing. The younger and livelier members of the crowd were gossiping about recent parties and who was going out with whom. Soon even Wieder’s die-hard fans, rather than waiting in silence for the plane to reappear or reading all manner of omens in the blank sky, launched into down-to-earth discussions of everyday matters whose relevance to Chilean art or poetry was tenuous, to say the least.

Wieder’s plane emerged far from the airstrip, over an outlying suburb of Santiago. There he wrote the first line:
Death is friendship
. Then he flew over some railway sheds and what appeared to be disused factories, although down in the streets he could make out people dragging cardboard boxes, children climbing on fences, dogs. To the left, at nine o’clock, he recognized two enormous shanty towns, separated by the railway tracks. He wrote the second line:
Death is Chile
. Then he swung round to three o’clock and headed for the city center. Soon the river-like avenues appeared, the lattice of dull-hued snakes and ladders, the river itself, the zoo, the few high-rise buildings that were the city’s pride. Seen from the air, as Wieder himself noted somewhere, a city is like a photo ripped into pieces, which, counter-intuitively, seem to scatter: a fragmentary, shifting mask. Over the presidential palace of La Moneda, he wrote the third line:
Death is responsibility
. Some pedestrians saw him: a beetle-like silhouette against the dark and threatening sky. Very few could decipher his words: the wind effaced them almost straight away. At one point someone tried to communicate with
him by radio. Wieder didn’t answer. On the horizon, at eleven o’clock, he saw the shapes of two helicopters approaching. He circled until they drew near, then shook them off in a second. On the way back to the airstrip he wrote the fourth and fifth lines:
Death is love
and
Death is growth
. When the strip came into sight, he wrote:
Death is communion
. But none of the generals or the generals’ wives and children or the senior officers or the military, civil, ecclesiastical and cultural authorities present could read his words. An electric storm was building in the sky. From the control tower a colonel told him to hurry up and land. Wieder replied “Received,” and immediately began to climb. For a moment those watching from below thought he was going to disappear into a cloud again. A captain, who was not in the official box, remarked that in Chile all poetic acts spelt disaster, usually just for individuals or families, but occasionally for the nation as a whole. Then came the lightning – the first bolt fell on the far side of Santiago, but was clearly visible from the stands at the Captain Lindstrom airstrip – and Carlos Wieder wrote:
Death is cleansing
, but so unsteadily, given the adverse weather conditions, that very few of the spectators, who by now had started to get up from their seats and open their umbrellas, could understand what had been written. All that was left in the sky were dark shreds, cuneiform characters, hieroglyphics, a child’s scribble. The few who did manage to understand thought Carlos Wieder had gone mad. It started to rain and the crowd hurriedly dispersed. The cocktail party had to be shifted to a hangar, and by that stage, what with the delay and the downpour, everyone was in
need of refreshment. In less than fifteen minutes all the canapés had been devoured. The waiters, recruits from the Quartermaster Corps, were amazingly quick on their feet and their diligence provoked the envy of some of the ladies present. Some of the officers discussed the aviator-poet’s eccentric performance, but most of the conversations had moved on to questions of national (and even international) significance.