By Night in Chile

The epigraph of By Night in Chile invites the reader to distrust Urrutia. The quote, “Take off your wig,” from G.K. Chesterton’s detective story, “The Purple Wig,” introduces the themes of pretense and deception. A reading of the full story develops the epigraph’s bearing both on Urrutia’s confession and on the horrors Urrutia cannot bring himself to look at.

“The Purple Wig” follows a reporter, Finn, as he investigates the familial curse of an English aristocrat, the Duke of Exmoor. By chance, Finn meets the Duke and a detective, Father Brown, in a pub, where Finn learns that the Duke wears a purple wig to conceal the embarrassing effect of the curse: Deformed ears. Father Brown challenges the Duke’s motives, asking why, if he is so ashamed of the curse, he wears a wig that draws attention to himself, and readily tells everyone, including Finn, about the curse. Eventually, Finn rips off the Duke’s wig, revealing not deformed ears but a distinctive scar, identifying him as the former lawyer of the old Duke of Exmoor. After the lawyer tricked the Duke into giving him his assets, the Duke hit the lawyer over the head, giving him the distinctive scar. The lawyer then legally became the Duke of Exmoor.

Eager to assume not only the Duke’s assets but his status as well, the lawyer broadcast the myth of the family curse. Ostensibly a mark of shame, the family curse is in fact, Father Brown argues, a mark of aristocratic lineage that distinguishes the Duke from commoners, who have no such family lore. Father Brown broadens this idea to the nature of truth and mystery: “[W]herever you find men ruled merely by mystery, it is the mystery of iniquity. If the devil tells you something is too fearful to look at, look at it. If he says something is too terrible to hear, hear it. If you think some truth unbearable, bear it” (Chesterton, G.K., The Wisdom of Father Brown, “The Purple Wig,” Standard Ebooks eBook edition, p. 189).

Throughout By Night in Chile, Chilean authors commit this mistake, turning away from horrors they cannot bear. They refuse to confront the “hell and chaos” (14) about which the wizened youth writes, which Reyes and Urrutia believe cannot be borne. Later, Urrutia commits this sin of turning away himself, ignoring the torture happening beneath his feet in Canales’s house.

Ultimately, the epigraph suggests that, just as the Duke of Exmoor spreads his story out of self-interest, Urrutia confesses not to repent but to aggrandize himself. Though nominally a confession, his story is full of boasting: He brags of witnessing Neruda reciting poetry to the moon, of mingling with the cream of the Chilean literary world, of being selected for a year-long fellowship in Europe studying churches. His account of teaching Pinochet’s junta even reads as a disguised boast: Urrutia must be important to have been selected for such a high-level assignment. To Urrutia, these great moments of his life justify his attendance at Canales’s salons, the main source of his guilt; to abandon this rationalization would be to confront the horror of his actions.