By Night in Chile Read Online Free PDF Page B

the imaginary streets of Santiago, but which, in those years and in that city subjected to Germanic will, afflicted Guatemalan painters living in dim attic rooms at the top of precipitous stairs, and was not referred to as anorexia but melancholia, morbus melancholicus , the malady that beleaguers the pusillanimous, and then Don Salvador Reyes or perhaps Farewell, but if it was Farewell it must have been much later on, recalled Robert Burton’s book, The Anatomy of Melancholy , which contains many perspicacious observations on that malady, and it may be that all those present at the time fell silent and held their peace for a minute in memory of those who had succumbed to the influence of black bile, the black bile that is eating away at me now, sapping my strength, bringing me to the brink of tears when I hear the wizened youth’s words, and that night when we fell silent it was as if, in close collaboration with chance, we had composed a scene that might have figured in a silent film, a white screen, test tubes and retorts, and the film burning, burning, burning, and then Don Salvador spoke of Schelling (whom he had never read, according to Farewell), Schelling’s notion of melancholy as yearning for the infinite — Sehnsucht — and cited neurosurgical operations in which the nerve fibers joining the thalamus to the cerebral cortex of the frontal lobe had been severed, and then he went back to the Guatemalan painter, skinny, wasted, rickety, pinched, scrawny, gaunt, haggard, debilitated, emaciated, feeble, drawn, in a word: extremely thin, so thin it frightened Don Salvador, who thought, This has gone on long enough, So-and-so (whatever the Central American was called), and like a good Chilean his first impulse was to invite the man out for dinner or supper, but the Guatemalan refused, on the pretext that for some reason or other he was incapable of going out into the street at that time of day or night, at which point our diplomat hit the roof or at least the table and asked him how long it had been since he had last eaten, and the Guatemalan said he had eaten a little while ago, just how long ago he didn’t remember. Don Salvador however did remember a detail and that detail was this: when he stopped talking and put the few bits and pieces of food he had brought with him on the sideboard beside the gas burner, in other words, when silence reigned once more in the Guatemalan’s attic room and Don Salvador’s presence became less
    obtrusive, busy as he was setting out the food or looking for the hundredth time at the Guatemalan’s canvases hanging on the walls, or sitting and thinking and smoking to pass the time with a will (and an impassibility) possessed only by those who have spent long years in the diplomatic corps or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Guatemalan sat down on the other chair, deliberately placed beside the only window, and while Don Salvador let time slip away sitting in the chair at the back of the room, watching the shifting landscape of his own soul, the gaunt, melancholic Guatemalan let time slip away watching the repetitive and unpredictable landscape of Paris. And when our writer’s eyes discovered the transparent line, the vanishing point upon which the Guatemalan’s gaze was focused, or from which on the contrary it emanated, well, at that point a chill shiver ran through his soul, a sudden desire to shut his eyes, to stop looking at that being who was looking at the tremulous dusk over Paris, a desire to be gone or to embrace him, a desire (arising from a reasonable curiosity) to ask him what he could see and to seize it then and there, and at the same time a fear of hearing what cannot be heard, the essential words to which we are deaf and which in all probability cannot be pronounced. And it was there, in that attic room, by pure chance, that some time later, Salvador Reyes happened to meet Ernst Jünger, who had come to visit the Guatemalan, guided by his aesthetic flair and