64 pages • 2-hour read
By Night in Chile
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Pages 96-118Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section contains discussion of torture, death, antisemitism, and cursing.
Pages 96-111 Summary
Urrutia argues that nonstop reading and writing bores the intellectual; they need social stimulation, too. This, Urrutia explains, is how under Pinochet’s regime he came to frequent the literary salon of the socialite writer María Canales. Young, pretty, and vivacious, Canales hosts multiple parties a week at her house on the outskirts of Santiago. The all-night parties provide both a meeting place for the remains of the city’s literati (many fled the country under Pinochet—for personal, not political reasons, Urrutia insists) and a workaround to the curfew.
Canales is married and has two sons with an American man, James Thompson, who works for Pinochet’s secret police (DINA). Urrutia only reveals this information later in the narrative and claims that he didn’t know Thompson’s nationality or true occupation when he attended Canales’s salons.
At a typical party at Canales’s house, people drink, recite poetry, and discuss the New Chilean Scene, the nascent literary movement young writers hope will fill the gap left by those who fled the regime. Urrutia prefers to spend the parties in a chair in the corner, holding court with an exclusive clique of young writers. Urrutia insists that, despite some accusations, he didn’t attend the gatherings multiple times a week, but only once every few months, and that he rarely talked to Canales herself. Nonetheless, Urrutia insists that Canales was always a writer of hidden talent, even if in the years following Pinochet’s fall everyone disavowed her work.
Urrutia develops a one-sided connection to Canales’s eight-year-old son, Sebastián, in whom Urrutia sees great sadness and innocence. To Urrutia’s chagrin, the Mapuche maid keeps Sebastián away from him. At one party, Canales praises a feminist novelist to Urrutia; he replies that her work is mostly plagiarism of female French writers from the 1950s. Canales’s face goes blank, then appears to show a faint smile. Behind her, the maid brings Sebastián down the stairs to say goodnight to his parents; the boy looks to Urrutia like a sealed vessel of innocence. The image of Sebastián behind his mother prompts a paroxysm of anxiety in Urrutia, and he resolves to stop attending the parties (though he’s unsure of this memory).
During this time, Urrutia visits Farewell occasionally. One evening, Urrutia brings Farewell one of Canales’s short stories, which has just won a prize. Farewell derides it and launches into a lamentation about the poor state of Chilean literature. Urrutia wonders who but he and Farewell still remembers the great Chilean writers of the past. Urrutia murmurs that he and Farewell have nothing.
Farewell grows senile. Urrutia feels both sadness and schadenfreude at the once-great critic’s fall. Urrutia tries to write poetry but produces only trite work, so he resumes attending Canales’s salons (though he now abstains from drinking). He questions why the police never break up the conspicuously loud parties.
Urrutia has a disturbing dream. Father Antonio, the elderly priest who died in Burgos, beckons Urrutia to a moonlit courtyard in which stands a denuded tree. Perched in the tree is Rodrigo, Father Antonio’s falcon that Urrutia let loose. Pointing in sequence from the portico surrounding the courtyard, to the moon, to the night sky, to the tree, and finally to Rodrigo, Father Antonio cries that they are looking at the Judas Tree. Shocked, Urrutia touches the tree and finds that it is artificial. Rodrigo flies off, and Urrutia cries out that he’s dead. Days later, after habitually singing a tune about the Judas Tree, Urrutia realizes that the tree symbolizes Chile.
Urrutia attends another of Canales’s salons—his last, he claims. Instead of asking Canales about her novel in progress, he asks about her family, explaining that life is more important than literature. Canales replies that she has always known that, and Urrutia feels his authority collapse. He retreats to his corner to recuperate.
Urrutia tells a story he claims to have heard only after he stopped attending Canales’s salons. In the most detailed version of the story, a theorist of avant-garde theater gets lost looking for the bathroom at one of Canales’s parties. Behind the door of the last room in the basement, the theorist finds a blindfolded and badly beaten man tied to a metal bed frame. Seeing that the man isn’t near death, the theorist silently retreats to the party, switching off the lights as he goes.
Pages 111-118 Summary
Urrutia’s narrative jumps ahead to the return of democracy to Chile. It emerges that Canales’s husband, Thompson, was a member of DINA and used the basement of their house to torture and murder dissidents. Urrutia maintains that the house was meant for interrogation, not execution, although a few deaths did occur.
It also emerges that Thompson organized the assassinations of exiled Chileans in Argentina and Europe, and that in Washington, DC, he himself assassinated one of Allende’s former ministers, murdering an uninvolved woman in the process. Urrutia explains that Canales knew all of this, but she loved her husband and wanted to be a writer, and he loved her, so her literary salons were held above a torture room. Urrutia maintains that people didn’t speak out at the time out of fear, and that if he had known, he would’ve condemned the torture. Eventually, Thompson is arrested in the United States but then put in witness protection. Urrutia thinks this is ridiculous—Chilean generals, he argues, don’t have the far-reaching power of mafia bosses.
Canales becomes a social pariah. One day, Urrutia visits her. Once magnificent, her large house is now derelict. Canales mistakes Urrutia for one of the many journalists interested in her story. After he identifies himself, she invites him inside. The once-radiant rooms are now empty and covered in red dust. Urrutia sits in the chair in the corner where he always sat.
Canales complains that she will soon lose her house: The Jewish owners of the land who were expelled under Pinochet are suing her to reclaim their property. Canales assures Urrutia that she will never tell the reporters who attended her salons. Urrutia asks whether she repents for her complicity in her husband’s crimes; she says she does, “like everyone else” (114).
Struggling for breath, Urrutia stands to open a window and gets red dust on his cuffs. He advises Canales to restart her literary career under a pseudonym. Insulted, Canales asks if Urrutia would like to see the basement. Urrutia feels like slapping her but instead closes his eyes. Canales names the people murdered by Thompson and his men in the basement. Sometimes when she and the children were watching television and Thompson was in the basement, the power would cut off for a moment, though there were no screams. Canales asks Urrutia again whether he’d like to see the basement, then breaks into laughter (Urrutia qualifies that he can’t remember whether she actually laughed).
As night falls, Urrutia bids goodbye to Canales on the porch. He exhorts her to pray as much as she can, for the sake of her sons. She looks out on the overgrown gardens and the driveway where the cars used to park overnight for her parties, and remarks, “[t]hat is how literature is made in Chile” (115). As Urrutia drives back to Santiago, he reflects on Canales’s words and sings his song about the Judas Tree.
Farewell dies. Urrutia attends his funeral, asking what has become of his mentor. Some youths reply that he is in the coffin at the front of the procession. He tells them not to be idiots. This memory dissolves into the present, with Urrutia on his deathbed. He hallucinates that his brass bed is spinning down a swift—but not turbulent—river, a sign Urrutia interprets to mean that he still has hope. In a sudden moment of lucidity, Urrutia sees his actual surroundings: His bookcase and the hazy window of his bedroom. He fantasizes about leaving bed and resuming his normal life.
Urrutia wonders where the wizened youth is now; he has stopped lambasting Urrutia and other writers. Addressing the wizened youth, Urrutia repeats Canales’s final words to him. The youth mouths “no.” Urrutia reasons that the wizened youth has always been alone, whereas he, Urrutia, has always been on the side of history. Urrutia recalls how after Farewell’s death, he made the mistake of revisiting the woods he once walked in outside Là-bas; there he found only abandoned cabins. He recalls a left-wing novelist denying he ever attended Canales’s parties. Urrutia wonders again where the wizened youth has gone.
Then, the truth begins to dawn on Urrutia, like the shadow of “a dead body rising from the bottom of the sea or from the bottom of a gully” (118). This shadow transforms into the fierce, gentle face of the wizened youth (118). In terror, Urrutia realizes that he himself might be the wizened youth crying out into the void. All the faces Urrutia has known flash before his eyes, and the first paragraph break of the novella separates Urrutia’s confession from the following line: “And then the storm of shit begins” (118).
Pages 96-118 Analysis
Canales’s salons are the ultimate impetus for Urrutia’s apologia, bringing The Problem of Complicity in Dictatorships to the forefront. He hedges his defense of his attendance at the salons, adopting many, sometimes contradictory, stances. This hedging belies his dishonesty, including his dishonesty with himself.
When he broaches the topic of the salons, Urrutia is careful to frame the parties as necessary to the health of Santiago’s literary community; the implicit corollary to this argument is that to avoid the parties would have been to abandon Chilean literature. Urrutia then undermines this defense in his assertion that he rarely attended the salons: If he believed in their vitality to the literary community, then he should’ve attended them regularly. In a second contradiction, Urrutia proclaims his continuing belief in Canales’s literary talent and describes her as a welcoming host with a sincere interest in the arts. However, he begins criticizing Canales as he draws closer to the topic of torture, seeking to distance himself from culpability.
Urrutia also takes care to show that he didn’t get caught up in the parties. He claims he never let alcohol cloud his judgment; however, if this is true, it makes it all the more reprehensible that he never connected the clues about the house’s other purpose as a torture center. Urrutia also associates himself with an innocent, his namesake, Canales’s young son, Sebastián. In Urrutia’s telling, he is the only one who notices the child’s withdrawn sadness, and the only one— including Canales—sensitive to Sebastián’s suffering. In Urrutia’s mind, his passing interest in the innocent Sebastián gives him license to denigrate the Mapuche maid for keeping the child from him.
Urrutia minimizes his involvement and bolsters the story of his ignorance in two other main ways. He describes James Thompson as a North American, framing this murderer as an outwardly friendly person whose nationality he didn’t even know. Second, Urrutia claims his visits to Canales’s salon were rare, “infrequent, at worst” (100), and that the writers who now claim he attended regularly were themselves the regulars. This defensiveness undermines Urrutia’s credibility, and his tacit acknowledgement that it was worse to attend the parties more regularly than less undermines his claim that they were innocuous.
In the final episode of the novella, Canales is a foil to Urrutia. He returns to the house he once frequented in a vague hope for resolution. There, he encounters a ruin of the place he once embraced: “The house was no longer the same: all its former splendor, that untouchable, nocturnal splendor, had vanished” (112). In this deterioration of place in which he once found literary refuge, Urrutia encounters further proof of his greatest fear: That time devours everything. Through Canales, he vicariously experiences the fact of his own complicity, a fact Canales challenges him to acknowledge in her invitation to the basement. Urrutia balks because unlike Canales, who has become a social pariah, he can pretend he had nothing to do with the house’s true purpose.
The refrain “Is there a solution?” structures the final stage of Urrutia’s confession (116-18). Urrutia’s lifelong quest to escape the inexorable march of time, the decay and oblivion that consumes everything, culminates in this refrain. Urrutia first asks this question after his recollection of Farewell’s funeral bleeds into Urrutia’s own incipient death, and he wonders why the wizened youth—the personification of his conscience—has abandoned him. Urrutia asks the question again after acknowledging that he no longer has the strength to review books, and again when he returns to Là-bas and finds the land empty, the passage of time having swept away the estate he remembered. Again, he asks the question when farmers tell him that they never worked the land and have always worked in factories, as if the pastoral past Urrutia remembers from his first visit to Là-bas never existed.
Finally, the answer to Urrutia’s question emerges like a corpse from the bottom of the sea and the “fierce […] gentle face” of the wizened youth reappears (118). The reappearance of the wizened youth is the reemergence of Urrutia’s conscience, which ties him to his past actions. Though Urrutia fears the “giant meat-grinder of time” (116), he also benefits from time consuming his crimes. However, the past is not entirely, as Urrutia fears—or hopes—destroyed. Instead, the past persists through memory and conscience. As the image of the wizened youth, Urrutia’s conscience ensures that in the moment before death he confronts the irrevocability of his crimes, the impossibility of absolution, and the incipient horror of oblivion—the “storm of shit” that consumes him (118).
Unlock all 64 pages of this Study Guide
Get in-depth, chapter-by-chapter summaries and analysis from our literary experts.
- Grasp challenging concepts with clear, comprehensive explanations
- Revisit key plot points and ideas without rereading the book
- Share impressive insights in classes and book clubs