By Night in Chile

By Night in Chile (2000) is a novella by Roberto Bolaño. The story unfolds as the deathbed confession of Father Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix, a Jesuit priest and literary critic who collaborates with Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. Urrutia’s omissions, lies, and rationalizations betray the guilt he avoids until the moment before his death. By Night in Chile explores The Problem of Complicity in Dictatorships, The Illusion of Literary Immortality, and The Past as Mutable and Uncertain.  

Bolaño, who died in 2003, was the winner of numerous awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for his novel 2666 (2004). By Night in Chile (Nocturno de Chile, 2000) was his first book to be translated into English, garnering him international critical acclaim. It is widely regarded as one of his best works.

This guide uses the 2003 New Directions paperback edition, translated by Chris Andrews.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of torture, death, antigay bias, racism, antisemitism, and the Holocaust.

Plot Summary

From his deathbed, Father Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix begins a feverish defense of his actions under Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile. Hounded by the invective of a “wizened youth”—an enigmatic character who functions both as Urrutia’s conscience and an authorial insert—Urrutia declares his aim to vindicate himself against the youth’s false accusations.

Urrutia briefly recounts his early life. He proudly notes his European ancestry. The only childhood memories he recalls are of his gloomy home, where Urrutia hid his fear and trembling under a smile as his father slithered through the house like an eel—an image that haunts him throughout the novella.

Against his father’s wishes, Urrutia joins a seminary at 14. After graduating, he meets Chile’s preeminent literary critic, González Lamarca—known by his pen-name, “Farewell.” Farewell invites Urrutia, an aspiring literary critic and poet, to his country estate. There, Urrutia is inducted into the Chilean literary world, meeting the poet Pablo Neruda and others. After dinner one night, Farewell fondles a drunken Urrutia; Urrutia—who later acknowledges his lifelong repression of his gayness—rejects Farewell. During the days, Urrutia has two encounters with friendly peasants in the forest surrounding the estate. The poor, Indigenous peasants and the disordered forest repulse Urrutia.

Urrutia begins his literary career. He gains a reputation for his criticism, written under a pseudonym, but finds little recognition for his poetry. One night in Santiago, Farewell introduces Urrutia to the writer Salvador Reyes. Reyes recounts his friendship in Nazi-occupied Paris with the German writer Ernst Jünger, then a captain in the Wehrmacht. Reyes recalls his and Jünger’s visit to the attic room of a failed Guatemalan painter and their viewing of one of his paintings, a fractured landscape of a city scattered with unidentifiable skeletons. Neither writer realizes that the painting depicts the war-torn European landscape, not Mexico City, as its title suggests.

After this meeting, Farewell takes Urrutia to a restaurant, where he tells Urrutia the story of a shoe merchant in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The shoemaker gave up his business and sunk his fortune into the construction of a vast memorial to the heroes of the Empire. Everyone who knew the shoemaker forgot him, and years later, during World War II, a Soviet tank regiment found his mummified body posed upright in the mausoleum of the unfinished memorial. After finishing his story, Farewell despairs as he watches the shadows of people passing by, lamenting that literature is nothing but shadows.

Urrutia enters a period of despair and withdraws from his social life. At night, he writes poetry that he ashamedly burns every morning. At the nadir of his depression, two strangers, Mr. Raef and Mr. Etah, approach him with a proposal. Under the aegis of Opus Dei, Urrutia can spend a year researching the conservation of historic churches in Europe. He accepts.

On his passage to Europe, Urrutia regains his interest in literature. In Italy, he learns that the primary threat to historic churches is the corrosive droppings of pigeons. In response, parish priests across Italy, France, Spain, and Belgium have trained falcons to kill the birds. Urrutia relishes this method of preservation. He meets one elderly priest who, on his deathbed, condemns as blasphemy the killing of pigeons—symbols as they are of the Holy Spirit. However, all of the other priests Urrutia meets are proud of their use of falconry.

Urrutia returns to Chile, where President Salvador Allende’s democratic-socialist government is transforming the country. A conservative, Urrutia buries himself in the Greek classics and continues reading through the unraveling of Chilean democracy, only looking up once General Augusto Pinochet seizes power in a military coup. Finally able to relax, Urrutia calls Farewell, who is jubilant.

Mr. Raef and Mr. Etah recruit Urrutia to secretly teach Marxism to Pinochet and his junta, who want to better understand their enemies. The junta is mostly made up of lazy students, though Pinochet takes great pains to tell Urrutia that he is more intellectual than Allende.

After the classes conclude, Urrutia has a crisis of conscience. However, it is short-lived: Once the rumor of his lessons gets out, no one seems to care, and Farewell himself approves of Urrutia’s decision. His guilt assuaged, Urrutia resumes his normal life.

Under the strict curfew in Santiago, Urrutia becomes a regular attendee at the all-night literary salons of a young socialite writer, Maria Canales. His attendance at these salons, which he is careful to downplay, is the ultimate impetus for his apologia. After he stopped attending the salons—at least by his account—Urrutia learns that a party guest discovered a torture victim in the basement of Canales’s house. After democracy returns to Chile, it emerges that Canales’s husband, a member of the secret police, used their basement to torture and execute dissidents. Urrutia claims that if he had known about the torture when he attended the salons, fear would not have prevented him from speaking out.

With the Pinochet era over, Urrutia visits Canales, who has become a pariah. The house, once a luminous refuge of artistic discussion, is now derelict. Urrutia asks Canales to repent. She says she has—like everyone else—and challenges Urrutia to visit the basement. Enraged, he refuses. As Canales sees Urrutia off, she explains: “That is how literature is made in Chile” (115). As he drives home, Urrutia concedes her point, musing that literature is the only thing saving him and other writers from decay.

The narrative returns to the present. As day dawns on Urrutia’s night-long confession, he nears death. He hallucinates that he’s floating along a swift jungle river, clinging to his last hope for redemption. Suddenly, the irrevocability of his crimes confronts him in the image of the wizened youth. The faces of everyone Urrutia has known flash before him, and his narration ends.