Benjamín bought two apples, some cornstarch pudding, and a bottle of wine. He happily invited the typographer to a picnic in the garbage dump next to the Mapocho River. There, surrounded by a pestilence that for them was non-existent but which scattered passersby, they could develop their friendship. My uncle, searching for a language that would be worthy of his friend’s beauty, dedicated himself to getting him out of his depression:
“Everything you fought for and seemed a defeat, a mire of dry leaves, dense emotions, plans that smashed into walls, and, even more, nightmares, desires suffocated by enormous shame, now burst out transformed into fertile land, like a fire of such living green. It comes from below, from the clear root of sex, which feeds on the great hidden coal, and its growth — if you don’t fight it; if you learn the language of what is pure, conscious power; and if you give it blindness as a goal — will drag you toward all that you thought you desired, but which after all was the desire for Life seeking itself.”
Birdie Baquedano, without realizing it, drunk on those words and the wine, ate the two apples and the cornstarch pudding. Benjamín became lyricaclass="underline"
“Open doors toward the south, the north, to the right, to the left; that’s right, open yourself as if you were a flower, from the center extending your invisible petals. Make yourself a wheel of hands that give, bless, and receive. Transform yourself into a long bridge along which pass unthinkable energies, which are impossible to define but in which you feel that distant immensity that soaks you to the bones. Let the entire Earth come to you so you push it toward the sky. Let spaces without depth come to you so you can submerge them in the earth. Make yourself a point where all roads cross.”
A small stray dog clutched Benjamín’s calf with his front paws and began to hump him. The poet refused to take any notice of such lowly stuff and, without bothering to scare him away, left him in his rapid hip work, continuing with his fiery speech:
“The angel of flesh, the angel transformed into earth, there, within the dark skull, pure from the beginning of time, accumulating virgin energy, he, with his cosmic trumpet voice, speaks to you, singing from the flower of the instant. His belly, like an oven hotter than a thousand moons, spurts out tongues of cold fire that dissolve the frontiers of our two languages. Your body swimming in its own soul, thanks to that grace, will always have something new to offer me. Open your mouth so the cataclysm may enter!”
At that moment, perhaps hypnotized by the last sentence, Birdie Baquedano kicked the dog aside and kissed my uncle Benjamín on the mouth, a kiss that lasted at least five minutes. When their lips separated, they didn’t know what to do. The poet stood there with the muse caught in his throat. They were staring into each other’s eyes as if a mountain had fallen on their heads. The first to speak was the typographer:
“Let’s not be ashamed. The greater suffering is being separated. Let’s accept the freedom of tying ourselves to those we love. What we give, we shall give it to ourselves. We are recalling the existence of the bridges because everything that seemed cut has been united for all eternity. Let’s submerge into each other’s dreams, and let’s find the road without limits.”
My uncle was left agape, in blessed admiration. Birdie too was a poet! They kissed again. Benjamín felt a desire to dance. He tried a few steps in the garbage, but he came back chased by a furious rat. Birdie smashed it with a brick. Feeling himself protected, Benjamín dreamed aloud:
“Let’s imitate the poet Augusto D’Halmar and Tolstoy, Gorky, Zola, and Maupassant by going to live in the virgin territories of southern Chile to plant roses and fruit trees, to teach literature to the peasants.
“Look, Baldy (please let me call you by that pet name), it’s my duty to remind you that when D’Halmar, supplied only with a wide-brimmed black hat and a Spanish cape, reached Concepción in his search for Arauco, he couldn’t even find anything to eat, he found nowhere to sleep, and he got lost out in the country. He was almost raped by a group of horsemen. He quickly came back to the capital and with three friends founded, just outside the city, an agrarian colony that failed because they planted out of season, their neighbors stole their water, and their oxen ran away.”
“Quite right, Birdie, but we can save ourselves from the materialist world living like the ‘Group of Ten’ in a tower facing the sea.”
“I’m sorry, Baldy, but those writers froze in the winter because the tower’s windows had no glass in them. Then it filled up with bats. Finally — remember, they wanted to live only from fishing so they wouldn’t exploit the people — some sea urchins they pulled off the rocks near the beach (none of them knew how to dive) gave them such bad hives they all ended up in the hospital, covered with rashes and swollen so much they looked Chinese.”
“Why is your name ‘Birdie’ when you put so many obstacles to taking flight? “Could it be because your last name, Baquedano, ends with a ‘no’? Change it to a ‘sí!’”
“Baquedasi? I’m Chilean, not Italian.” So let’s stop beating around the bush. What we want is to sleep together. At the printing house, they’ve lent me a room (for obvious reasons) out on the upstairs terrace, where no one ever goes. It isn’t a tower, but it’s just as isolated, and from the window you can see the ocean; it’s on the building across the street, which has a seafood restaurant in it, so it’s all painted blue. Shall we go?”
Benjamín, with a broken voice, answered in verse:
Like transparent vessels
Sailing immortal
Along the river of death.
Then he lowered his eyes, blushing, only to raise them again immediately, because they fixed on an indiscreet bulge growing in his friend’s fly. They walked along the banks of the river, holding hands. Benjamín’s mind filled with words, but he didn’t dare speak them. (I only want to breathe the air that comes from your mouth; kiss you with ten thousand lips; cover your body with my saliva, that of a revived dead man; run my tongue over your brains with the thirst of an Arab dog; place you on the pedestal of the goddess. I also want you to murder me with kisses, like someone who enters the darkness of a millennial temple seeking the luminous frog in order to cook it nailed to a cross. I want you to pierce me surrounded by a black aura so that nothing more transpires and everything becomes eternal.) This mixture of high-pitched lyricism and volcanic desires aroused a curious feeling in him where felicity galloped riding on anguish. The fight transformed into rabid hunger. When they reached the fire escape ladder, he didn’t dare climb it and suggested to his friend that they go into the seafood restaurant.
“What are you talking about? I’m broke. Besides, you’re a vegetarian.”
“Don’t worry. I’ve got my week’s pay on me. I should go to the market to do my mom’s shopping, but we have to celebrate finding each other. Let’s have a banquet.”
“And then what will your mother eat?”
“Parrot food: banana and rice for seven days. It will do her good because she’s getting very fat.”
“In that case, let’s have the banquet!”
Benjamín went in first and asked for an isolated table at the rear of the garden. Birdie Baquedano followed, crossed the main room so he’d leave just a whiff of himself, and sat down shouting out an order for two bottles of chichi, or corn whiskey, and the menu. They chose fried silverside, mussel soup, conger eel with tomato, meat and vegetable stew with algae, stuffed crabs, meat with tomato and onion, and fish stew. For dessert, two more liters of chicha and crullers in syrup. Alternating between hilarity and high seriousness, they devoured everything, satisfying simultaneously their hunger and the sadness of many years. Before leaving, Benjamín, in the style of an Oriental prince, emptied his pay envelope into the waiter’s hand.