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follower of Pablo Neruda. She wasn’t a university student, like Carmen, although she hoped one day to do teacher training; in the meantime she had a job in an electrical goods shop. Bibiano visited Patricia’s mother, who showed him an old school exercise book with poems in it. They were bad, according to Bibiano, under the spell of Neruda at his worst, a mishmash of
Twenty Love Poems
and
Incitation to Nixoncide
, but there was something in them, you could glimpseit, reading between the lines. Freshness, wonder, a taste for life. In any case, wrote Bibiano at the end of his letter, no one deserves to be killed for writing badly, especially not under the age of twenty.
    In his air show at El Condor, Wieder also wrote:
Pupils of Fire
. The generals looking up from the official box assumed, in all sincerity I suppose, that he was writing the names of his sweethearts or his friends, or the professional names of whores from Talcahuano. Some of those who were close to Wieder, however, were aware that he was conjuring up the shades of dead women. But these associates knew nothing about poetry. Or so they thought. (Naturally Wieder disagreed, assuring them they knew more about poetry than most people, more than a good many poets and professors, at any rate, living in their oases or miserably immaculate deserts; but his thugs didn’t understand, or dismissed it good-humoredly as another one of the lieutenant’s jokes.) For them what Wieder did in his plane was just a “daring feat,” daring in more ways than one, but not poetry.
    Around the same time, he participated in two other air shows, one in Santiago, where he wrote more verses from the Bible and quotes from
The Rebirth of Chile
, the other in Los Ángeles (in the province of Bío-Bío), where he flew with two other pilots, who unlike him were civilians and had been working as skywriters for many years. In collaboration, the three of them drew a large (and rather wobbly) Chilean flag in the sky.
    Newspaper and radio reports credited Wieder with truly prodigious abilities. No challenge was too great for him. Hisinstructor from the air force academy declared that he was a born pilot: seasoned, instinctive, capable of handling fighter planes and bombers without the slightest difficulty. An old school friend who had once invited Wieder to the family property during the holidays revealed that, to the amazement and subsequent indignation of his parents, the young guest had taken out their dilapidated Piper without permission and landed it on a narrow back road full of potholes. He seems to have spent that summer, presumably the summer of ’68, away from his parents (meanwhile, on the other side of the world, the cramped flat of a Parisian caretaker was about to give birth to
Barbaric Writing
, a literary movement that would play a decisive role in the last years of Wieder’s life). He was a courageous but shy adolescent (according to his school friend), given to quite unpredictable outbursts and reckless acts, but in the end he always won the hearts of those who came to know him. My mother and my grandmother adored him (his friend said); they used to say he looked as if he had just come through a storm: vulnerable, drenched to the bone, but with his charm intact.
    When it came to the company he kept, however, he wasn’t exactly squeaky clean: he was known to associate with various shady characters, informers and low-life types, with whom he would go out, always at night, to drink or to frequent establishments of ill repute. But all things considered, these little minor blemishes in no way affected the rest of his character or behavior, and certainly not his manners. Some even regarded them as indispensable to the career of a writer who aspired to knowledge of the Absolute.
    Around that time, the time of the air shows, Wieder’s career received a boost from one of Chile’s most influential literary critics (although notoriously unreliable as indicators of literary worth,