By Night in Chile

delight, the yawning would begin, sometimes a young poet opposed to the regime would come up to me and start talking about Pound and end up talking about his own work (I was always i nterested in the work of the younger generation, whatever their political affiliations), the hostess would suddenly appear carrying a tray piled high with empanadas, someone would start crying, others would burst into song, at six in the morning, or seven, when the curfew was over, we would make our unsteady way back to the cars in Indian file, some in pairs, others half asleep, most of us happy, and then the motors of six or seven cars would startle the quiet morning, and for a few seconds drown out the sound of birdsong in the garden, and the hostess would wave goodbye from the porch, as the cars began to drive away, one of us having opened the iron gate, and María Canales would stand there on the porch until the last car had left her property, her hospitable domain, and the cars went off down the empty avenues of outer Santiago, those endless avenues, lined with solitary houses, abandoned or neglected villas and vacant lots, their profiles repeated over and over on either side, while the sun came up over the Cordillera and we heard the dissonant rumor of a new day coming from the hub of the city. And a week later we would be back there again. By we I mean the group. I didn’t go every week. I put in an appearance chez María Canales once a month. Or even less often. But there were writers who went every week. Or more! They all deny it now. They even claim I was the true habitué, present every week without fail. Or twice, three times a week! But even the wizened youth knows that is patently false. So we can rule that out
    straightaway. My visits were rare. Infrequent, at worst. But when I did go, I kept my wits about me, and the whiskey didn’t cloud my judgement. For example I noticed that young Sebastián, my little namesake, looked rather drawn. One day the maid brought him downstairs, and I took him from her arms and asked what was wrong with him. The maid, who was a full-blood Mapuche, stared at me and tried to take the child back. I ducked away. What’s wrong, Sebastián? I said, with a tenderness I had never felt before. The child looked at me with his big blue eyes. I touched his face. What a cold little face it was. Suddenly I felt my eyes brimming with tears. Then the maid snatched him away from me in a most ungracious manner. I wanted to tell her that I was a priest. But something stopped me, perhaps that sense we Chileans possess to an uncommon degree, the sharpest of all our senses, the sense of the ridiculous. When the maid carried the little boy upstairs again, he looked at me over her shoulder and it seemed to me that those wide eyes were seeing something they did not want to see. María Canales was very proud of him: she told me how intelligent he was. The younger son, she said, was wonderfully inquisitive and bold. I didn’t pay much
    attention: all mothers prattle on like that. Mainly I talked with the
    up-and-coming artists, who, armed with nothing but what they had gleaned from a few books read in secret, were preparing to create the New Chilean Scene, a rather awkward anglicism invented to name the gap left by the emigrants, which my fellow guests were planning to occupy and populate with their as yet
    embryonic works. I talked with them and with old friends from years back who turned up from time to time (like me) in the house on the outskirts of Santiago to discuss English metaphysical poetry or the films they had seen recently in New York. I can’t have had more than about two conversations with María Canales, just short chats really, and once I read a story she had written, a story that went on to win first prize in a competition organized by a left-leaning literary magazine. I remember that competition. I wasn’t on the judging panel. They didn’t even ask me. If they had asked me, I would have done it. Literature is literature. But anyhow I wasn’t one of the judges. Perhaps if I had been, María Canales wouldn’t have won first prize. Not that it was a positively bad story, but it certainly wasn’t good. Like its author, it was laborious and mediocre.
    When I showed it to Farewell, who was still alive at the time, although he never attended a literary gathering at María Canales’s house, mostly because by then he rarely went out or talked with anyone except his faithful crones, when I showed