[Marxism] A novel about Pinochet's Chile

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, January 16, 2004
BOOKS OF THE TIMES | 'BY NIGHT IN CHILE'
A Priest Who Lived Through the Grim Pinochet Era
By RICHARD EDER

In 1987, 14 years after Gen. Augusto Pinochet's military coup, the 
Argentine journalist Jacobo Timerman paid a visit to Chile. He was a 
scarred veteran, imprisoned and tortured under the chain of Argentina's 
military dictatorships, a firebrand that defied quenching.

Gritty and sardonic, his writing was charged with something rarer and 
hotter than anger: a growling down-to-earth reasonableness through 
successive upheavals in which reason slept, as in Goya, bringing forth 
monsters.

Mr. Timerman was prepared to find an equivalent next door in view of the 
bloody events of the early Pinochet years: the abductions and murders, a 
helicopter-borne general touching down around the country to execute 
arrested leftists, the newly appointed military rector of the university 
parachuting in, boots first, to take office. What Mr. Timerman did find was 
something quieter: a deeper sleep, odder monsters.

An opposition press was appearing, opposition parties were gingerly 
functioning, poets and novelists wrote and published, intellectuals 
frequented the salons. Occasionally one was arrested, beaten up or 
threatened. It was sufficient for an economical repression whose naked 
force was reserved for signs of worker or peasant dissidence. (It would be 
two more years before presidential elections began the long process, still 
continuing, of lifting the military grip.)

Mr. Timerman wrote of "a long leash." Long leashes are leashes, 
nonetheless, especially since they rarely need to be yanked. It can be more 
destructive to the human spirit when restraints are so largely 
internalized. Chilean writers have depicted as an illness a condition of 
numbing, if not quite smiling, acquiescence. None has done it in so dark 
and glittering a fashion as Roberto Bolaño.

His novel "By Night in Chile" is a 130-page rant ? part confession, part 
justification, part delirium ? by a dying man, representative of an 
intellectual class that the author depicts as alternately tugging its leash 
and licking it.

He is a priest, Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix, who had occupied a position as a 
leading literary critic, one whose passion for world literature was linked 
to visions of a right-wing world order embellished with mystical touches. 
He was also a member of Opus Dei, a conservative Roman Catholic group that 
discreetly served authoritarian regimes in Franco Spain and (according to 
Mr. Bolaño, whose fiction is also thinly disguised history) in Chile.

"Discretion" marked the career of Urrutia Lacroix; and it vies with 
hysteria in a deathbed monologue unbroken by paragraphs (those rhetorical 
pauses that allow thought to draw breath). Guilt negotiated twines with 
guilt denied: a damning moral stutter. His avowals fall suddenly mute; his 
omissions blare revelation.

Urrutia Lacroix tells a disjointed story of his young literary ambitions, 
his adoption for mentoring ? and surreptitious groping ? by the country's 
most eminent critic, a member of the landed aristocracy. He tells of a 
visit to the critic's estate, of walking out at night to encounter Pablo 
Neruda, a fellow guest, standing by an equestrian statue and reciting a 
poem to the moon.

The scene is haunting and mordant. Mr. Bolaño exempts few among Chile's 
intellectuals from accommodation with privilege and the equestrian classes 
(civil and military). Neruda's Communism only partly interfered with his 
comforts; his moon has no moral scruple about silvering the statue. By 
contrast the narrator wanders off the estate after a night of lofty 
literary discussion. Among the shanties and scruffy vegetable patches he 
comes upon a procession of peasants: hieratic, silent, surreal, with their 
faces covered.

Years later the coup comes. Urrutia Lacroix is cautious but acquiescent; in 
any case his baroque traditionalism favors him. Then he is sent for: 
Pinochet and the other members of the military junta need a quick course in 
Marxism.

In a grotesque sequence, Urrutia Lacroix gives a weekly seminar for the 
generals, smirking and diligent by turns. As for Pinochet, he needs to 
know, he explains, how far his enemies will go. Grotesque turns sinister: 
"I know how far I am prepared to go myself." Sinister turns farcical. 
Pinochet complains that he gets no respect as an intellectual. After all, 
he has written three books ? on military subjects ? which is more than his 
civilian predecessors had done.

All this prepares for the climactic horror: the story of Maria Canales, a 
wealthy would-be writer married to an American, and hostess of a 
fashionable salon for writers and artists. Urrutia Lacroix insists, against 
later post-Pinochet accusations, that he was only an occasional visitor. 
His denials are understandable: a visitor, looking for a bathroom, had 
discovered a basement room in which a man sat manacled and naked.

Canales and her husband worked for the secret police; their house was used 
for interrogations. In historical fact, furthermore, there was just such a 
couple. Mariana Callejas was the host of a salon, and torture took place in 
the basement. Last year her indictment was upheld in the precoup 
assassination of an anti-coup general, Carlos Prats. Michael Townley, her 
husband, had been convicted long before of the killing in Washington of 
Orlando Letelier, an opposition leader, and his assistant Ronni Moffit.

Finally ? one more among other historical parallels ? Urrutia Lacroix is 
modeled on a real figure, the priest and right-wing literary critic José 
Miguel Ibañez Langlois.

For Mr. Bolaño, who died last year, artists enjoy no safe haven from 
history's accounting. Yet his novel, though rough, is written with 
unsettling art; the more so, perhaps, because the most damning sentence 
among Father Urrutia Lacroix's confessional fireworks has the pallor and 
stillness of a shroud.

He insists on taking moral responsibility not only for his actions 
(ultimately taking none), but for his silences as well. "Yes, one's 
silences, because silences rise to heaven too, and God hears them, and only 
God understands and judges them, so one must be very careful with one's 
silences." His own silences, he adds, "are immaculate."

Hardly. Urrutia Lacroix's omissions spill out as messily as his 
affirmations. If they did rise to God they must have been instantly spewed, 
as with those exemplars in the Book of Revelations who are neither hot nor 
cold but lukewarm.



Louis Proyect
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org 


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