I remember scrutinizing his face. I remember drinking his face down to the last drop trying to elucidate the character, the psychology of such an individual.
And yet the only thing about him that has remained in my memory is his ugliness.
He was ugly and his neck was extremely short. In fact they were all ugly. The women were ugly and their words were incoherent. The silent man was ugly and his stillness was incoherent. The men who were walking away were ugly and their zigzag paths were incoherent. God have mercy on me and on them. Lost souls in the desert. I turned my back on them and walked away. I smiled at them, said something, asked them the way to the lodge at Là-bas and walked away. One of the women wanted to come with me. I refused. The woman insisted, I will escort you there, Father, she said, and the verb “to escort” sounded so incongruous in her mouth, it sent a wave of hilarity all through my body. You will escort me, will you? I asked. That I will, Father, she said. Or something like that, something a wind from the end of the fifties is still blowing around the innumerable nooks and crannies of a memory that is not mine. In any case I shuddered and shook with suppressed laughter. That won’t be necessary, I said. You have been too kind already, I said. That will be all for today, I said. And I turned my back on them and walked away at a decidedly brisk pace, swinging my arms and wearing a smile that relaxed into unbridled laughter as soon as I passed through the barrier of washing, my walk at that point becoming a trot with a vaguely military rhythm to it. In the garden at Là-bas, beside a pergola built of fine timber, Farewell’s guests were listening to Neruda recite. I approached quietly and stood beside his young disciple, who was smoking with a rather unpleasant frown of concentration on his face, while the words of the great man burrowed down through the various layers of the earth’s crust and rose up to the pergola’s carved crossbeams and beyond, to the Baudelairean clouds on their solitary voyages through the clear skies of Chile. At six that evening my first visit to Là-bas came to an end. A car belonging to one of Farewell’s guests dropped me at Chillán, just in time to catch the train, which took me back to Santiago. My literary baptism had reached its conclusion. During the nights that followed, so many varied and often contradictory images crowded in on me, inhabiting my thoughts and my sleeplessness! Again and again I would see Farewell’s black, rotund silhouette in an enormous doorway. His hands were in his pockets and he seemed to be intently watching time go by. I also saw Farewell sitting in a chair at his club, with his legs crossed, speaking of literary immortality. Ah, literary immortality. At times I could make out a group of figures joined at the waist, as if they were dancing the conga, up and down, back and forth in a salon whose walls were crammed with paintings.
Somebody I could not see was saying, Dance, Father. I can’t, I replied, it is contrary to my vows. With one hand I was holding a little notebook in which, with the other, I was drafting a book review. The book was called As Time Goes By. As time goes by, as time goes by, the whipcrack of the years, the precipice of illusions, the ravine that swallows up all human endeavor except the struggle to survive. The syncopated serpent of the conga line kept moving steadily towards my corner, lifting first its left legs all at once, then the right ones, and then I spotted Farewell among the dancers, Farewell with his hands on the hips of a woman who moved in the most exclusive circles of Chilean society at the time, a woman with a Basque surname, which unfortunately I have forgotten, while Farewell’s hips in turn were gripped by an old man whose body was perilously frail, more dead than alive, but who beamed a smile at all and sundry and seemed to be having as much fun as anyone in the conga line.
Sometimes, images from my childhood and adolescence would come back to me: my father’s shadow slipping away down the corridors of the house as if it were a weasel, a ferret, or to employ a more appropriate simile, an eel in an inadequate container. All conversation, all dialogue, is forbidden, said a voice. Sometimes I wondered about the nature of that voice. Was it the voice of an angel? Was it the voice of my guardian angel? Was it the voice of a demon? It did not take me long to discover that it was my own voice, the voice of my superego guiding my dream like a pilot with nerves of steel, it was the super-I driving a refrigerated truck down the middle of a road engulfed in flames, while the id groaned and rambled on in a vaguely Mycenaean jargon. My ego, of course, was sleeping. Sleeping and toiling. It was around this time that I started working at the Catholic University. It was around this time that I published my first poems, my first reviews and my notes on literary life in Santiago. I prop myself up on one elbow, stretch my neck and I remember. Enrique Lihn, the most brilliant poet of his generation, Giacone, Uribe Arce, Jorge Teillier, Efraín Barquero, Delia Domínguez, Carlos de Rokha, all the gilded youth. All of them or almost all under the influence of Neruda, except for a few who succumbed to the influence or rather the teaching of Nicanor Parra. And I remember Rosamel del Valle. I knew him, of course. I reviewed them alclass="underline" Rosamel, Díaz Casanueva, Braulio Arenas and his associates at La Mandrágora, Teillier and the young poets from the rainy south, the novelists of the fifties, Donoso, Edwards, Lafourcade.
All of them good people, all of them splendid writers. Gonzalo Rojas, Anguita. I reviewed Manuel Rojas and wrote about Juan Emar, María Luisa Bombal and Marta Brunet. I published studies and explications of the work of Blest Gana, Augusto D’Halmar and Salvador Reyes. And I decided, or perhaps I had already decided, probably I had, it is all so vague and mixed up now, in any case I felt I needed a pseudonym for the critical articles, so that I could retain my real name for my poetical efforts. So I adopted the name of H. Ibacache. And little by little the reputation of H. Ibacache outstripped that of Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix, to my surprise, and to my satisfaction, since Urrutia Lacroix was preparing a body of poetic work for posterity, an oeuvre of canonical ambition, which would take shape gradually as the years went by, in a meter that nobody was using in Chile any more, what am I saying, a meter that nobody had ever used in Chile, while Ibacache read other people’s books and explained them to the public, just as Farewell had done before him, endeavoring to elucidate our literature, a reasonable endeavor, a civilized endeavor, an endeavor pursued in a measured, conciliatory tone, like a humble lighthouse on the fatal shore. And Ibacache’s purity — clothed as it was in the simple garments of critical prose, yet none the less admirable, since it was perfectly clear, whether reading between the lines or viewing the full sweep of the enterprise, that Ibacache was engaged in an ongoing exercise in dispassionate analysis and rationality, that is to say in civic virtue — Ibacache’s purity would be able to illuminate far more powerfully than any other strategy the body of work taking shape verse by verse in the diamond-pure mind of his double: Urrutia Lacroix. And speaking of purity or while I’m on the subject of purity, one evening, when I was at the house of Don Salvador Reyes, with five or six other guests, Farewell among them, Don Salvador said that one of the purest men he had met in Europe was the German writer Ernst Jünger. And Farewell, who no doubt knew the story already, but wanted me to hear it from Don Salvador himself, asked him how and in what circumstances he had come to meet Jünger, and Don Salvador settled into an armchair with gilded trim and said that it had happened many years before, during the Second World War, in Paris, when he was on a diplomatic posting at the Chilean embassy. And then he told us about a party, I don’t remember if it was at the Chilean embassy, or the German or Italian one, and he spoke of a very beautiful woman who asked if he would like to be introduced to the well-known German writer. And Don Salvador, who at that time must have been less than fifty years old according to my estimate, that is to say considerably younger and more vigorous than I am now, said, Yes, I would be delighted, please do, Giovanna, and the Italian woman, the Italian duchess or countess who was so fond of our eminent writer and diplomat, led him through various salons, each opening on to the next like mystical roses, and in the last salon there was a group of officers of the Wehrmacht and several civilians and the center of attention for all present was Captain Jünger, the First World War hero, author of