By Night in Chile

“Don’t call me Father, mother, I am your son, or maybe I didn’t say Your son but The son, she began to cry or weep and then I thought, or maybe the thought has only occurred to me now, that life is a succession of misunderstandings, leading us on to the final truth, the only truth.”

Despite becoming a priest, Urrutia finds no consolation in faith. He does not live in the Christian world, a world of divinely-ordered wonder, but in a chaotic existential void in which even a mother and son can misunderstand each other. The one certainty Urrutia has is the certainty of death, “the final truth, the only truth.”

“I can still remember his shadow slipping from room to room in our house, as if it were the shadow of a weasel or an eel. And I remember, I don’t know how, but the fact is that I do remember my smile in the midst of the darkness, the smile of the child I was. And I remember a hunting scene on a tapestry. And a metal dish on which a meal was depicted with all the appropriate decorations. My smile and my trembling.”

The fear and gloom that define Urrutia originate in his childhood. Cold, unloving, and more absence than presence, Urrutia’s father is likened to the shadow of predatory animals. Without the foundation of a warm, structured childhood home, Urrutia’s fear of a cold, meaningless world is doubled when he goes out into the world. Though Urrutia suppresses this fear, it nonetheless motivates his desire for salvation from meaninglessness in The Illusion of Literary Immortality.

“I was silent too and, unable to meet Farewell’s penetrating gaze, I modestly lowered my eyes, like a wounded fledgling, and imagined that estate where the critic’s path was indeed strewn with roses, where knowing how to read was valued, and where taste was more important than practical necessities and obligations.”

This is the conception of Urrutia’s literary dream. He fantasizes about an ideal world in which erudition and aesthetic sensibility is valued over worldly skills. When this ideal world doesn’t materialize, Urrutia becomes contemptuous of those he blames for preventing its existence: the poor, the middle class, the Mapuche, the political left.

“Sordello, which Sordello? repeated Farewell’s voice sarcastically behind me, Dante’s Sordello, Pound’s Sordello, the Sordello of the Ensenhamens d’onor, the Sordello of the planh on the death of Blacatz, and then Farewell’s hand moved down from my hip towards my buttocks and a flurry of Provençal rogues blustered on to the terrace, making my black cassock flutter, and I thought: The second woe is past, and, behold, the third woe cometh quickly.”

The Divine Comedy (1308) is one of the many literary works to which By Night in Chile alludes. Farewell, with his encyclopedic knowledge of literature, acts as a medium for both the reader and Urrutia, connecting both to the somewhat-obscure, romantic figure of Sordello. His mention of “Dante’s Sordello” is an allusion to Cantos VI-VIII of The Purgatorio (1316), in which Sordello appears as a guide to Dante and Virgil. The relevance of Dante’s Sordello to By Night in Chile becomes clear through a reading of Canto VI, in which Sordello lambasts politicians for allowing Italy to descend into bloody chaos and accuses Catholic priests of exacerbating the situation by meddling in politics. This literary allusion establishes a political similarity between turn-of-the-14th century Italy and Chile in the 1960s and 70s. Moreover, the allusion suggests that Urrutia is one such priest exacerbating the situation with his meddling.

“I saw a boy and a girl, who, naked like Adam and Eve, were tilling the same furrow. The boy looked at me: a string of snot hung from his nose down to his chest. I quickly averted my gaze but could not stem an overwhelming nausea. I felt myself falling into the void, an intestinal void, made of stomachs and entrails.”

Bolaño develops the thematic contrast between nature and civilization (a dichotomy he introduces in order to deconstruct) in Urrutia’s second walk in the forest. After a couple more days spent in the glittering literary world of Là-bas, Urrutia is repulsed by the land and people outside that sphere, seeing in their nakedness unredeemable sin. His visceral reaction indicates his horror in everything human, in imperfection, in ugliness.

“I pushed my way through the sheets and shirts, and there before me, thirty metres away, I saw two women and three men standing bolt upright in an imperfect semi-circle, with their hands covering their faces. Just standing there like that. It was hard to believe, but there they were. Covering their faces!”

The peasants Urrutia encounters during his second walk outside Là-bas are performing a Mapuche symbol of communal identity. Urrutia senses that he—and his Catholicism—are foreign to this culture and these people. Their friendliness and equanimity unsettles him: He fears that the patience he reads in their faces is not “Christian resignation” but a patience “from outer space” (20). Despite these people being Catholics, Urrutia sees in them the vestiges of their old culture, and harbors the anti-Indigenous sentiment of many conservative priests of the church.

And when our writer’s eyes discovered the transparent line, the vanishing point upon which the Guatemalan’s gaze was focused, or from which on the contrary it emanated, well, at that point a chill shiver ran through his soul, a sudden desire to shut his eyes, to stop looking at that being who was looking at the tremulous dusk over Paris, a desire to be gone or to embrace him, a desire (arising from a reasonable curiosity) to ask him what he could see and to seize it then and there, and at the same time a fear of hearing what cannot be heard, the essential words to which we are deaf and which in all probability cannot be pronounced.”

In his contemplation of the vista of occupied Paris that the Guatemalan painter obsesses over, Reyes glimpses the devastation of World War II and the Holocaust to which he has inured himself. However, the full extent of the horror remains invisible to Reyes, and though he considers asking the painter what he sees, Reyes ultimately turns away from this inexpressible fact. Reyes’s reaction exemplifies the problem of complicity in dictatorships, emphasizing that possessing an artistic sensibility doesn’t guarantee morality.

“Not a single Chilean exists, as a human being or as the author of a book, in the dark, rich years of Jünger’s chronicle, except for Don Salvador Reyes.”

Reyes’s story of meeting Ernst Jünger in Paris is to Urrutia a romantic tale of a brush with literary immortality. At this stage in his life, Urrutia still believes inclusion in a great author’s memoir is sufficient to immortalize oneself and escape oblivion. The extreme language of Urrutia’s existential statement conveys the supreme value he places in literature: To exist outside of literature is not to exist at all.

“I told Farewell that for an instant, as we were walking down that quiet street lined with lime trees, I had seen myself writing a poem in praise of a writer or his golden shadow asleep inside a spaceship, like a young bird in a nest of smoking, twisted iron wreckage, and the writer who had set out for immortality was Jünger, and the spaceship had crashed in the Andes, and the immaculate body of the hero among the wreckage would be preserved by the everlasting snows, while the writings of the heroes together with the scribes who serve those writings would compose a hymn to the glory of God and civilization.”

After Reyes concludes his story and Urrutia walks alone with Farewell, Urrutia envisions his own immortalization in literature through writing a poem that in turn immortalizes Jünger. The extraterrestrial imagery conveys the transcendence Urrutia believes literature affords, while the preservation of Jünger’s body suggests the eternal life granted to great writers. Urrutia’s overblown description of “the immaculate body of the hero” belies the fact that Jünger was a Nazi and complicit in the terrible crimes of World War II, exposing both the problem of complicity in dictatorships and the illusion of literary immortality in Urrutia’s whitewashing.

“I sometimes confuse [the wizened youth] with the swarm of Chilean poets whose works implacable time was demolishing even then, as I walked away from Farewell’s house through the Santiago night, and continues to demolish now, as I prop myself up on one elbow, and will go on demolishing when I am gone, that is, when I shall exist no longer or only as a reputation, and my reputation resembling a sunset, as the reputations of others resemble a whale, a bare hill, a boat, a trail of smoke or a labyrinthine city, my reputation like a sunset will contemplate through half-closed eyelids time’s little twitch and the devastation it wreaks.”

In the first lines of this quote, Bolaño interweaves past and present in Urrutia’s narration, emphasizing the crush of time that Urrutia describes. He denigrates the wizened youth by associating him with the “swarm” of Chilean poets who weren’t notable enough to be remembered, reflecting the illusion of literary immortality. Urrutia places himself above this devastation, indicating his belief that he can escape oblivion through the persistence of his literary reputation.

“Father Ibacache, Father Ibacache, think of us as you walk away from Farewell’s house with a dancer’s sprightly gait, think of us as your steps lead you into the inexorable Santiago night, Father Ibacache, Father Ibacache, think of our ambitions and our hopes, think of our mute, inglorious lot as men and citizens, compatriots and writers, as you penetrate the phantasmagoric folds of time, time that we perceive in three dimensions only, although in fact it has four or maybe five, like the castellated shadow of Sordello, which Sordello? a shadow not even the sun can obliterate.”

In an indication of his hauteur, Urrutia imagines himself as the savior of Chilean poets, the one who, in his literary greatness, escapes the march of time that crushes them all. That Urrutia sees himself as superior to these poets is also indicated by the fact that he calls himself by his critical pseudonym, “Ibacache,” instead of his given name. His decision to publish criticism under a pseudonym (H. Ibacache) and poetry under his given name inaugurates a symbolic division between his rational and poetic self. After he gains a reputation under his pseudonym while his poetry falters, Urrutia begins prizing criticism over poetry. This is a further source the supercilious attitude he adopts toward the poets who beseech him to remember them.

How pleasant to hear nothing. How pleasant not to have to prop myself up on an elbow, on these poor old weary bones, to stretch out in the bed and rest and look at the grey sky and let the bed drift in the care of the saints, half-closing my eyes, to remember nothing and only to hear my blood pulsing. But then my lips begin to work again and I go on speaking.”

This quote expresses Urrutia’s dual nature: On the one hand, he’s unconcerned with the past and is content with peace in the present. On the other, his fear of the future—of death—drives him to correct the record of his past so that he may live on in his spotless reputation, reflecting The Past as Mutable and Uncertain. His passivity in this quote indicates that he is enthralled to this fear: He doesn’t choose to resume speaking, he just does.

“Fly, Rodrigo, and after I had said it twice more, Rodrigo took flight, and I saw him rise […] my cassock flew up like a flag in the grip of uncontrollable rage, and I remember at that point I cried out again, Fly, Rodrigo, and then I heard a sound of crazy, multitudinous flight, and the folds of my cassock covered my eyes while the wind swept the church and its surroundings clean, and when I managed to remove my own hood, so to speak, I saw bundles of feathers on the ground, the small bloody bodies of several pigeons, which the falcon had deposited at my feet.”

Urrutia wears his cassock to establish a moral boundary between himself and the world, between good and evil; however, this doesn’t work because there is evil in Urrutia, too. This is no more clear than when Urrutia releases the falcon Rodrigo to kill pigeons, a symbol for Urrutia’s hatred of those who follow liberation theology. This image of his cassock flying like a flag in an “uncontrollable rage” evokes the intimate connection between Urrutia’s priesthood and the political violence he denies his part in, reflecting the problem of complicity in dictatorships.

“[I]n Chile there were shortages and inflation and black marketeering and long queues for food and Farewell’s estate was expropriated in the Land Reform along with many others and the Bureau of Women’s Affairs was set up and Allende went to Mexico and visited the seat of the United Nations in in New York and there were terrorist attacks and I read Thucydides, the long wars of Thucydides, the rivers and plains […] nearly half a million people marched in support of Allende, and then came the coup d’état, the putsch, the military uprising, the bombing of La Moneda and when the bombing was finished, the president committed suicide and that put an end to it all. I sat there in silence, a finger between the pages to mark my place, and I thought: Peace at last. I got up and looked out the window: Peace and quiet. The sky was blue, a deep, clean blue, with a few scattered clouds.”

The breathlessness of Bolaño’s syntax in this excerpt conveys the anxiety Urrutia experiences as Chile descends into political turmoil. The interweaving of political turmoil and Urrutia’s readings in this one sentence (which begins pages earlier) ironizes his complacency. Urrutia reads about war, ignoring the incipient war on his doorstep. The coup marks the end of the sentence, the end of Urrutia’s breathless anxiety, and the resumption of normal syntax conveys the relief Urrutia feels.

“Then I don’t know what came over me. My poetry veered from the angelic to the demonic [..] I had begun to write in what might tentatively be described as a Dionysiac mode. But in fact it wasn’t Dionysiac poetry. Or demonic poetry. It was just raving mad. Those poor women who appeared in my poems, what had they ever done to me? Deceived me perhaps? What had those poor homosexuals done to me? Nothing. Nothing. Not the women, not the queers. And the children, for God’s sake, what could they possibly have done? So what were those hapless creatures doing there, stranded in those landscapes of decay?”

The poetic invective Urrutia writes under Pinochet stands in sharp contrast to the beatific odes he envisioned writing at the beginning of his literary journey. His violent subject matter echoes the violence consuming Chile and also expresses the parts of himself that he represses: his hatred; his sensual, Dionysian side; his same-sex attraction and internalized antigay prejudice; and his original childhood wound of growing up in a gloomy, unloving home.

“[T]he car drove into a garden and stopped in front of a house with only one light on, above the main door. I followed Pérez Latouche. He realized I was looking for the soldiers on guard duty and explained that the best guards were the ones you couldn’t see. So there are guards? I asked. Oh yes, and each one has his finger on the trigger. That’s good to know, I said. We entered a room where the furniture and the walls were blindingly white.”

Collaborating in Pinochet’s regime doesn’t protect Urrutia from the fear of dictatorial power. His arrival at the secret location for his classes on Marxism is filled with imagery of repression and surreptitiousness: the hidden, armed guards, ready to shoot; the dark exterior; and the blinding-white interior, symbolizing the facade of purity under which Pinochet’s regime operates and the problem of complicity in dictatorships.

“[P]roudly I cried myself hoarse in the desert, but my vociferations and on occasions my howling could only be heard by those who were able to scratch the surface of my writings with the nails of their index fingers, and they were not many, but enough for me, and life went on and on and on, like a necklace of rice grains, on each grain of which a landscape had been painted, tiny grains and microscopic landscapes, and I knew that everyone was putting that necklace on and wearing it, but no one had the patience or the strength or the courage to take it off and look at it closely and decipher each landscape grain by grain.”

Far from the rose-strewn path Urrutia dreamed of, criticism ends up being a futile pursuit. The beauty of the simile Urrutia uses to describe the resplendent, microscopic wonders of life that only an artistic mind can perceive contrasts with the banality and horror of everyday life that buries those wonders: death, diversions, and boredom. Nonetheless, Urrutia maintains his hauteur, ignoring the illusion of literary immortality.

He is wrinkling his nose, scanning the horizon, shaking from head to foot. I cannot actually see him, but there he is in my mind’s eye, crouching or down on all fours, on a hillock, black clouds racing past over his head, and the hillock becomes a hill and the next minute it is the atrium of a church, an atrium as black as the clouds, charged with electricity like the clouds, and glistening with moisture or blood, and the wizened youth trembles more and more violently, wrinkles his nose and then pounces on the story. But only I know the story, the real story. And it is simple and cruel and true and it should make us laugh, it should make us die laughing. But we only know how to cry, the only thing we do wholeheartedly is cry.”

Urrutia envisions the wizened youth as a bloodthirsty animal overeager to project his own, false version of the truth on the facts of Urrutia’s life, invoking the past as mutable and uncertain. In the conflict between Urrutia and the wizened youth—the personification of Urrutia’s conscience—this is the closest Urrutia gets to acknowledging the truth. The truth is, as he says, simple and cruel and macabrely ridiculous. Of course, Urrutia is never fully sincere in his desire to tell the truth—soon after this quote, he resumes equivocating and rationalizing.

Who remembers Juan de Armaza now? I thought as night fell with a snake-like hissing. Only Farewell and some old crone with an elephantine memory. A professor of literature in some remote southern town. A crazy grandson, living in a perfect, inexistent past. We have nothing, I murmured. What did you say? said Farewell. Nothing, I said.”

Just as Farewell became disillusioned with literature at his dinner with Urrutia, so to does Urrutia confront the illusion of literary immortality years later. This time, the roles are reversed. Farewell’s mind has faded with age and he is no longer gripped by the acute despair that beset him at that dinner. This time, it is Urrutia who is left alone in his acute despair, in the knowledge that the time he spent reviewing now-forgotten writers was to no avail. Night falls ominously, leaving Urrutia with nothing but the void.

“[T]hat double apparition, the maid and little Sebastián […] nausea rising from my stomach, and closely resembled a combination of weeping, perspiration and tachycardia, and after leaving the welcoming home of our hostess it seemed to me this state had been provoked by the vision of the boy, my little namesake, who looked around with unseeing eyes as his hideous nanny carried him downstairs, his lips sealed, his eyes sealed, his innocent little body all sealed up, as if he didn’t want to see or hear or speak, there in the midst of his mother’s weekly party, in the presence of that joyous, carefree band of literati brought together by his mother each week.”

Sebastián, Canales’s young son, pierces the intellectual detachment that Urrutia maintains. The presence of this figure of innocence amid the frivolous party in which Urrutia partakes jolts him from the decadence into which he has strayed. In his namesake, Sebastián, Urrutia sees his own lost innocence and the problem of complicity in dictatorships.

“The Judas Tree! I thought I was going to die right there and then. Everything stopped. Rodrigo was still perched on the branch. The paved courtyard was still illuminated by Selene’s rays. Everything stopped. Then I began to walk towards the Judas Tree. At first I tried to pray, but I had forgotten all the prayers I ever knew. I walked. Under that immense night sky my steps made hardly a sound. When I had gone far enough I turned around and tried to say something to Fr Antonio but he was nowhere to be seen. Fr Antonio is dead, I said to myself, by now he’ll be in heaven or in hell. Or the Burgos cemetery, more likely.”

In Christian folklore, the Judas Tree is the tree from which Judas Iscariot hanged himself after betraying Christ, his shame reddening the trees blossoms and contorting its branches. Here, Urrutia has a nightmare in which Father Antonio, the Spanish priest who condemns the use of falconry in church preservation, shows him the Judas Tree. The tree symbolizes Urrutia’s shame in his betrayal of his faith and the problem of complicity in dictatorships.

“I asked myself the following question: If María Canales knew what her husband was doing in the basement, why did she invite guests to her house? The answer was simple: Because, normally, when she had a soirée, the basement was unoccupied. I asked myself the following question: Why then, on that particular night, did a guest who lost his way find that poor man? The answer was simple: Because, with time, vigilance tends to relax, because all horrors are dulled by routine. I asked myself the following question: Why didn’t anyone say anything at the time? The answer was simple: Because they were afraid. I was not afraid. I would have been able to speak out, but I didn’t see anything, I didn’t know until it was too late. Why go stirring up things that have gradually settled down over the years?”

Though Urrutia is an unreliable narrator who has ample reason to twist his recollection to his favor, his account is the only one given; no other perspectives appear in the story to corroborate or contradict his account. Therefore, uncovering the truth of when he learned of the torture happening below the parties is a matter of discerning hints and inconsistencies in his own telling. While it’s ultimately unknowable whether Urrutia is lying about his knowledge, it doesn’t matter as much as he thinks. If he knew, he’s guilty of prizing art literary salons over human rights. If he didn’t, and only learned of the rumors later, as he claims in this elaborate rationalization, Urrutia isn’t absolved from guilt; the question remains not whether he knew, but whether he cared to find out. He acknowledges thinking it was odd that the police never raided the conspicuously loud parties, yet he never pursues this question. This makes him complicit in a more banal way, showing that, ultimately, people don’t care to uncover horrors literally beneath their feet.

Then she looked around, calm, serene, courageous in her own way, she looked at her house, her porch, the place where the cars used to park, the red bicycle, the trees, the garden path, the fence, the windows all shut except for the one I had opened, the stars twinkling far away, and she said, That’s how literature is made in Chile. I nodded and left. While I was driving back into Santiago, I thought about what she had said. That is how literature is made in Chile, but not just in Chile, in Argentina and Mexico too, in Guatemala and Uruguay, in Spain and France and Germany, in green England and carefree Italy. That is how literature is made.”

Canales final words express one of the central themes of the novel. The torture of dissidents in the basement wasn’t divorced from the literary salons two floors above, as Urrutia would like to believe; literature is built—in this case literally—on a foundation of violence and the problem of complicity in dictatorships. In the dilapidated house, a symbol of literature’s corruption, Urrutia nonetheless clings to his belief salvation through literature, encouraging Canales to continue writing under a pseudonym shortly after this quote. Unlike Canales, who scoffs at this suggestion, Urrutia cannot see the absurdity of believing fiction is the solution to her disgrace.