64 pages • 2-hour read
By Night in Chile
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Pages 51-73Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section contains discussion of death and antigay bias.
Pages 51-61 Summary
Leaving Farewell’s doorstep, Urrutia wanders the streets of Santiago, feeling he’s caught in a dream. He hears the voices of all the past popes as the screeching of a flock of birds. He sees time obliterating Chilean poets, past, present, and future. The narrative returns to Urrutia’s deathbed, where he envisions his own reputation as H. Ibacache outliving him and watching as obscure writers are swept into oblivion. The writers implore him to remember them.
Urrutia’s thoughts turn to the wizened youth. The night Urrutia walked the streets of Santiago, the wizened youth was a child living on the banks of the Bío-Bío River, in the distant south of Chile. Only later did the wizened youth start his diatribe, accusing Urrutia of being a member of Opus Dei, a fact Urrutia insists he never tried to hide. Propping himself up on his deathbed, Urrutia explains that despite his own conservative politics, he praised poets who were members of the Chilean Communist Party.
Urrutia hallucinates that his deathbed is floating down a river through a jungle. The current spins the bed, silencing the wizened youth. Urrutia enjoys the silent reprieve before resuming his defense of his membership in Opus Dei, even though the wizened youth hasn’t reappeared. Chattering monkeys on the shore prompt Urrutia to take his hand from the blankets and spin the raft again. The chattering stops, and the gray sky turns blue.
The blue reminds Urrutia of the luminous blue skies in Santiago that defined the period of his life after that dinner with Farewell, a period of extreme listlessness. Urrutia remembers the grating yellowness of the streets of Santiago under the vast blue sky, “the abominable yellow and the abominable luminous blue of my boredom” (55). The poetry Urrutia writes during this period, which he describes only as blasphemous and insulting, disturbs him, and he burns it in the morning after he writes it. He stops all of his normal activities—teaching, preaching, reading the newspaper—but continues writing book reviews. Urrutia becomes an insomniac, and his book reviews become muddled. He goes to confession and prays.
On one of his morning walks through the city, Urrutia is mugged. Afterwards, he half-heartedly prays for the muggers, then alters his daily route. He enjoys the views of the Cordillera (the part of the Andes visible from Santiago) on his walks, but is otherwise afflicted by ever-growing despair. When this feeling becomes most acute, causing Urrutia to shake, he tries to quell it with a soda. In one cafe, while praying over his soda, Urrutia hears in the laughter of nearby children the sound of his defeat.
One day, a well-dressed, nondescript stranger calls to Urrutia on the street. The man, Mr. Raef, explains that two priests whom Urrutia respects have recommended him for a mission in Europe. Urrutia accompanies Mr. Raef to a cafe frequented by middle managers, whom Urrutia describes as pitiful pigs.
Mr. Raef introduces Urrutia to another man, Mr. Etah. Their proposal is for Opus Dei to pay Urrutia to spend a year traveling Europe, researching a solution to the deterioration of old churches, and bringing that essential knowledge back to Chile. Despite finding both men uncultured, Urrutia accepts the assignment.
Pages 61-73 Summary
After arranging to continue publishing book reviews in Chile while he’s away, Urrutia embarks for Europe on a ship, the Donizetti. Over the weeks-long journey, Urrutia becomes the de facto priest for the passengers, leading them in mass, hearing their confessions, and reciting poetry to them. He spends much of the journey reading classic Greek and Latin works and contemporary Chilean literature.
Urrutia disembarks in Italy to begin his project. In Pistoia, the parish priest informs Urrutia that the primary threat to historic churches is pigeon droppings. The following day, the priest introduces Urrutia to his solution: A trained falcon. In Turin, the parish priest has also trained a falcon to hunt pigeons. In Strasbourg, France, the parish priest’s falcon not only hunts pigeons but oversees mass from a perch atop the church organ, a habit Urrutia finds distracting.
In Avignon, France, Urrutia meets the parish priest and his falcon, Ta Gueule. The three wander the countryside where Sordello once wandered, and Urrutia relishes the sight of Ta Gueule attacking a flock of starlings.
Urrutia reluctantly leaves Avignon for Pamplona, Spain; there, the non-falcon-related methods of church preservation bore him. He visits his Opus Dei colleagues and accepts their offer to publish a book with them. Mr. Raef sends Urrutia a seemingly innocent letter about the project. Urrutia senses the letter has a subtext but either can’t discern it or doesn’t want to reveal it.
In Burgos, Spain, Urrutia finds the parish priest, Father Antonio, and his falcon, Rodrigo, wasting away in the priest’s ascetic chamber. Having become convinced that killing pigeons is wrong—they are not only God’s creations, but also symbols of the Holy Spirit—Father Antonio has stopped Rodrigo from hunting. As the priest raises himself on his elbow to express his scruples about the church’s use of falconry, the wizened youth flashes before Urrutia’s eyes. Urrutia feels Father Antonio’s forehead and detects a high fever. As he waits for a doctor, Urrutia dons the falcon gauntlet and releases Rodrigo into the cold, cloudless night:
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. (69)
The falcon disappears into the night sky, and Urrutia refrains from calling it back. That night, Father Antonio dies. The new priest who arrives the next day doesn’t notice the falcon’s absence, and Urrutia departs.
In Namur, Belgium, Urrutia befriends Father Charles, who has a falcon named Ronnie. The two priests get into the habit of picnicking together in the woods. One day, Father Charles hears Urrutia’s confession on the picturesque bank of a small river; Urrutia doesn’t mention the night in Burgos when he lost Rodrigo.
In Saint Quentin, France, Father Paul’s falcon, Fever, kills a white dove, the mascot of an athletic organization, above the crowded town square. Everyone is outraged, including the local communists, who, after Pablo Picasso’s famous lithograph of a white dove, regard the dove as a symbol of peace. Father Paul apologizes and answers questions about Fever from children, the only ones not dismayed by the dove’s death.
Urrutia spends a month in Paris writing poetry and visiting museums, churches, and libraries. He drafts his report, emphasizing the efficacy of falcons in church preservation. For pleasure, Urrutia tours around Europe. He visits Rome, where, after crying at the pope’s feet, a series of images overwhelm him: Father Antonio in Burgos condemning the use of falconry, thousands of falcons flying over the Atlantic to America, and the total eclipse of the sun.
He has a recurring dream of a German priest telling a joke. One day, two French archaeologists burst into a room where the Pope is conversing with a German theologian. The archaeologists have good news and bad: They have, beyond a shadow of a doubt, found the Holy Sepulcher in Israel; the Pope weeps with joy. However, the archaeologists continue, when they opened the Sepulcher, Christ’s body was inside. The Pope faints. The archaeologists rush to his side, and the German theologian remarks, “Ah, so Jesus really existed?” (73).
Pages 51-73 Analysis
In Santiago, Urrutia experiences a prolonged spell of despair caused by the dawning failure of his poetic ambitions, a crisis of faith, and the repression of feelings—especially his same-sex attraction—that Urrutia deems sinful. In the voices of children at play, Urrutia hears “an all too pertinent commentary on [his] defeat” (56), recalling the artistic defeat of the Guatemalan painter in Reyes’s story from occupied Paris, and speaking to The Illusion of Literary Immortality. Like the painter, Urrutia is overcome by Sehnsucht and melancholia. Contrary to Urrutia’s dream of writing sublime, timeless verses, he produces poetry that is “full of insults and blasphemy and worse” (54). Excluding this description, Urrutia withholds the content of this poetry; however, the reaction it provokes in him—he burns the verses every morning—suggests that this confessional poetry expresses his greatest sources of shame: His hatred, his religious doubts, and his same-sex attraction.
Following the associative nature of his stream-of-consciousness narration, Urrutia arrives at the topic of his mounting despair through the image of “luminous blue skies” (54). On his deathbed, Urrutia hallucinates that his bed is a raft floating along a jungle river, and he spins the raft away from the din of the jungle to a vista of serene blue skies. As is the case throughout his life, Urrutia finds solace in detachment from everything earthly and everything human in the life of the mind.
The downside of this turning away becomes clear in the memories evoked by the blue sky. In Santiago, during his prolonged spell of despair, the luminous blue sky symbolizes his mounting depression, and the color becomes “abominable” to him (55). Meanwhile, the “abominable” (55) yellow of Santiago’s streets thematizes Urrutia’s hatred of his country and his compatriots. The yellowness is, to Urrutia, a manifestation of the disorder and barbarism he so despises. Longing for cleanliness and order—which he only finds in Santiago’s center, where a gray facade conceals the yellow—Urrutia embraces the opportunity to escape to what he regards as the “civilized” land of Europe.
Europe and its uncompromising cultural conservation, symbolized by the Church’s use of falconry in church preservation, revivifies Urrutia. Unlike in Chile, he feels close to the center of culture, the land that produced the Western canon that he exalts, the land in which Sordello wandered. Urrutia’s trip, therefore, affords him a reprieve from his doubts about literature, his faith, and his life’s purpose. However, these doubts resurge upon the conclusion of Urrutia’s trip. The dream of the German priest’s joke is a manifestation of Urrutia’s internal conflict. He prides himself on his rationality—nowhere as clear as in the dispassionate criticism he writes as H. Ibacache—yet he is also a priest. Urrutia is torn between faith and reason. In the joke, the German theologian plays the role of the stereotypically rational German—a symbol of Urrutia’s rational side. The pope symbolizes Urrutia’s irrational side, the part of him that believes in poetry and faith above all else. The archeologists’ discovery of Christ’s mortal remains symbolizes the unequivocal defeat of Urrutia’s faith.
Mr. Raef and Mr. Etah personify the temptation of fear and hatred—their names are anonyms of those emotions, invoking The Problem of Complicity in Dictatorships. The project for which they recruit Urrutia is an allegory for the persecution of priests who espoused liberation theology in Latin America in the latter half of the 20th century. The Vatican censored many of these priests, and radical right-wing groups across the continent murdered a number of proponents of the theology. The violent measures used in church preservation—using falcons to cull pigeons—mirror this repression of liberation theology. The violent beauty of falcons killing pigeons renews Urrutia’s faith in both art and God: The falcon Ta Gueule “[splashes] colour like an abstract expressionist painter” (67), and when Urrutia releases the retired falcon Rodrigo to resume hunting, “the folds of [his] cassock covered [his] eyes while the wind swept the church and its surroundings clean” (67). Urrutia’s revelry in this beautiful, purifying violence symbolizes his willing role in the Church’s repression of liberation theology and foreshadows the hate and fear that later drives Urrutia’s participation in Pinochet’s regime.
There is further symbolism in the killing of a white dove by Father Paul’s falcon, Fever. Chagrined that there are no pigeons around the church for Fever to kill, Fr. Paul and Urrutia go to the town’s main square. Fr. Paul releases the falcon when he spots a pigeon, which turns out to be a white dove that is the mascot for an athletic competition. Crucially, neither Fr. Paul nor Urrutia is remorseful for this unjustified killing of the bird that is the Catholic symbol for the Holy Spirit; their allegorical crusade against pigeons corrupts the tenets of their faith. The allegory to political persecution is made more explicit by the displeasure of a communist group, to whom the dove—after Picasso’s famous lithograph—is a symbol of peace. The political symbolism is clear: Urrutia is on the side of violence, not peace.
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