Occasionally someone, an old acquaintance, would see him in the streets of Vienna, but the shoemaker no longer greeted anyone or replied to greetings, and no one was surprised when he crossed to the other side of the street. A difficult, confusing period had begun, a terrible period indeed, in which difficulty, confusion and cruelty were as one. Writers went on invoking their muses. The Emperor died. A war broke out and the Empire collapsed. Composers went on composing and the public kept going to concerts. Nobody remembered the shoemaker any more, except, at odd and fleeting moments, the lucky few who still had a pair of his splendid, long-wearing shoes. For the shoemaking business too had been affected by the worldwide crisis and it changed hands and disappeared.
The following years were even more confused and difficult. People were assassinated and persecuted. Then another war broke out, the most terrible war of all. And one day Soviet tanks rolled into the valley and, looking through binoculars from the turret of his armored vehicle, the colonel in charge of the tank regiment saw Heroes’ Hill. And the caterpillar tracks creaked as the tanks approached the hill, which gleamed like dark metal in the last rays of the sun fanning out across the valley. And the Russian colonel got down from his tank and said, What the hell is that? And the Russians in the other tanks got out too and stretched their legs and lit cigarettes and stared at the fence of black wrought iron surrounding the hill and the massive gate and the letters cast in bronze, mounted on a rock at the entrance to inform the visitor that this was Heldenberg. And a farm laborer, who as a child had worked there, said when asked that it was a cemetery, the cemetery where all the heroes of the world would be buried. And then, after having broken open three big, rusty padlocks, the colonel and his men went in through the gate, and walked along the paths of Heroes’ Hill. And they saw neither statues nor tombs but only desolation and neglect, until at the very top of the hill they discovered a crypt that looked like a safe, with a sealed door, which they proceeded to open. Inside the crypt, sitting on a grand stone seat, they found the shoemaker’s body, his eye sockets empty as if he were never to contemplate anything but the valley spread out below Heroes’ Hill, and his jaw hanging open, as if he were still laughing after having glimpsed immortality, said Farewell. And then he said: Do you understand?
Do you understand? And once again I saw my father as the shadow of a weasel or a stoat scurrying from corner to corner in the house, and that house with its dim corners was like my vocation. And then Farewell repeated: Do you understand? Do you understand? while we ordered coffee and the people in the street rushed by, spurred on by an incomprehensible longing to get home, casting their shadows one after another, more and more quickly, on the walls of the restaurant where, undaunted by the agitation or perhaps I should say undaunted by the electromagnetic device that had been set off in the streets of Santiago and in the collective consciousness of the city’s inhabitants, Farewell and I stayed put and kept still, only our hands moving, lifting the coffee cups to our lips, while our eyes looked on, as if what they were seeing had nothing to do with us, as if we hadn’t noticed what was going on, in that typically Chilean way, watching the shadow play, figures appearing and disappearing like black flashes on the partition wall, a spectacle that seemed to have a hypnotic effect on Farewell while making me feel dizzy and causing an ache in my eyes that spread to my temples and then to the parietal bones and finally to the whole of my skull, an ache I soothed with prayers and aspirin, although, on that occasion, as I remember it now, struggling to prop myself up on one elbow, as if the moment of my heavenly flight were imminent, the pain persisted only in my eyes, and so could easily have been overcome, since shutting them would have disposed of the problem, and I could and should have done just that, but I did not, for there was something in Farewell’s expression, something in his stillness, hardly disturbed by a slight eye movement, which, as I went on looking at him, seemed with growing force to imply an infinite terror, or rather a terror shooting towards the infinite, as terror does by its very nature, rising and rising endlessly, thence our affliction, thence our grief, thence certain interpretations of Dante, stemming from that terror, slender and defenceless as a worm, and yet able to climb and climb and expand like one of Einstein’s equations, and Farewell’s expression, as I was saying, seemed somehow to imply this, although, had anyone passed our table and looked at him, they would only have seen a respectable-looking gentleman in a rather pensive mood. And then Farewell opened his mouth, and I thought he was going to ask me once again if I had understood, but he said: Pablo’s going to win the Nobel Prize. And he said it as if he were sobbing in the middle of an ashen field. And he said: America is going to change. And he said: Chile is going to change. And then his jawbone hung out of joint, but still he said: I won’t live to see it. And I said: Farewell, you’ll see it, you’ll see it all. And then I knew that my words did not refer to heaven or eternal life, for I was pronouncing my first prophecy: if what Farewell had predicted was to happen, he would witness it. And Farewell said: The story of that Austrian has saddened me, Urrutia. And I: You have many years left to live, Farewell. And he: What’s the use, what use are books, they’re shadows, nothing but shadows. And I: Like the shadows you have been watching? And Farewelclass="underline" Quite. And I: There’s a very interesting book by Plato on precisely that subject. And Farewelclass="underline" Don’t be an idiot. And I: What are those shadows telling you, Farewell, what is it? And Farewelclass="underline" They are telling me about the multiplicity of readings. And I: Multiple, perhaps, but thoroughly mediocre and miserable. And Farewelclass="underline" I don’t know what you’re talking about.