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The footnotes made it very clear in what kind of drunken
ship Kilapan had set sail, if it wasn't clear already. Note 55,
Adkintmve,
read:
"After many years the Spaniards became aware of its existence, but they
were never able to decipher it." Note 56:
"Lautaro,
swift
noise
(taws
in Greek means swift)." Note 57:
"Prom,
word
handed down from the Greek by way of Prometheus, the Titan who stole writing
from the gods to give to man." Note 58:
"Adentunemul,
secret
writing consisting of triangles." Note 59:
"Machi,
seer. From
the Greek verb
mantis,
which means to divine." Note 60:
"Spring,
Admapu law ordered that children should be conceived in summer, when all
fruits were ripe; thus they would be born in spring when the land awakens in
the fullness of its strength; when all the animals and birds are born."

From this one could conclude that: (1) all Araucanians or
most of them were telepathic, (2) the Araucanian language was closely linked to
the language of Homer, (3) Araucanians had traveled all over the globe,
especially to India, ancient Germania, and the Peloponnese, (4) Araucanians
were amazing sailors, (5) Araucanians had two kinds of writing, one based on
knots and the other on triangles, the latter secret, (6) the exact nature of
the mode of communication that Kilapan called Adkintuwe (and that had been
discovered by the Spaniards, although they were unable to decipher it) wasn't
very clear. Maybe it was the sending of messages by the movement of tree
branches located in strategic places, like at the tops of hills? Something like
the smoke signals of the Plains Indians of America? (7) in contrast, telepathic
communication was never discovered and if at some point it stopped working this
was because the Spaniards killed the telepaths, (8) telepathy also permitted
the Araucanians of Chile to remain in permanent contact with Chilean migrants
scattered in places as far-flung as populous India or green Germany, (9) should
one deduce from this that Bernardo O'Higgins was also a telepath? Should one
deduce that the author himself, Lonko Kilapan, was a telepath? Yes, in fact,
one should.

One could also deduce (and, with a little effort, see)
other things, thought Amalfitano as he diligently gauged his mood, watching
Dieste's book hanging in the dark in the backyard. One could see, for example,
the date that Kilapan's book was published, 1978, in other words during the
military dictatorship, and deduce the atmosphere of triumph, loneliness, and
fear in which it was published. One could see, for example, a gentleman of
Indian appearance, half out of his head but hiding it well, dealing with the
printers of the prestigious Editorial Universitaria, located on Calle San
Francisco, number 454, in
Santiago
.
One could see the sum that the publication of the little book would cost the
Historian of the Race, the President of the Indigenous Confederation of Chile,
and the Secretary of the Academy of the Araucanian Language, a sum that Mr.
Kilapan tries to bargain down more wishfully than effectively, although the
manager of the print shop knows that they aren't exactly overrun with work and
that he could very well give this Mr. Kilapan a little discount, especially
since the man swears he has two more books already finished and edited
(Araucanian
Legends and Greek Legends
and
Origins of the American Man and Kinship
Between Araucanians, Aryans, Early Germans, and Greeks)
and he swears up
and down that he'll bring them here, because, gentlemen, a book published by
the Editorial Universitaria is a book distinguished at first glance, a book of
distinction, and it's this final argument that convinces the printer, the
manager, the office drudge who handles these matters, to let him have his
little discount. The word
distinguished.
The word
distinction.
Ah,
ah, ah, ah, pants Amalfitano, struggling for breath as if he's having a sudden
asthma attack. Ah,
Chile
.

Although it was possible to imagine other scenarios, of
course, or it was possible to see the same sad picture from different angles.
And just as the book began with a jab to the jaw ("the Yekmonchi, called
Chile, was geographically and politically identical to the Greek state"),
the active reader—the reader as envisioned by Cortazar—could begin his reading
with a kick to the author's testicles, viewing him from the start as a straw
man, a factotum in the service of some colonel in the intelligence services, or
maybe of some general who fancied himself an intellectual, which wouldn't be so
strange either, this being Chile, in fact the reverse would be stranger, in
Chile military men behaved like writers, and writers, so as not to be outdone,
behaved like military men, and politicians (of every stripe) behaved like
writers and like military men, and diplomats behaved like cretinous cherubim,
and doctors and lawyers behaved like thieves, and so on ad nauseam, impervious
to discouragement. But picking up the thread where he had left off, it seemed
possible that Kilapan hadn't been the one who wrote the book. And if Kilapan
hadn't written the book, it might be that Kilapan didn't exist, in other words
that there was no President of the Indigenous Confederation of Chile, among
other reasons because perhaps the Indigenous Confederation didn't exist, nor
was there any Secretary of the Academy of the Araucanian Language, among other
reasons because perhaps said Academy of the Araucanian Language never existed.
All fake. All nonexistent. Kilapan, from that perspective, thought Amalfitano,
moving his head in time to the (very slight) swaying of Dieste's book outside
the window, might easily be a nom de plume for Pinochet, representing
Pinochet's long sleepless nights or his productive mornings, when he got up at six
or five-thirty and after he showered and performed a few calisthenics he shut
himself in his library to review international slights, to meditate on Chile's
negative reputation abroad. But there was no reason to get too excited.
Kilapan's prose could be Pinochet's, certainly. But it could also be Aylwin's
or
Lagos
's.
Kilapan's prose could be Frei's (which was saying something) or the prose of
any right-wing neo-Fascist. Not only did Lonko Kilapan's prose encapsulate all
of
Chile
's
styles, it also represented all of its political factions, from the
conservatives to the Communists, from the new liberals to the old survivors of
the MIR. Kilapan was the high-grade Spanish spoken and written in Chile, its
cadences revealing not only the leathery nose of Abate Molina, but also the
butchery of Patricio Lynch, the endless shipwrecks of the
Esmeralda,
the
Atacama desert and cattle grazing, the Guggenheim Fellowships, the Socialist
politicians praising the economic policy of the junta, the corners where
pumpkin fritters were sold, the
mote con huesillos,
the ghost of the
Berlin Wall rippling on motionless red flags, the domestic abuse, the
good-hearted whores, the cheap housing, what in Chile they called grudge
holding and Amalfitano called madness.

But what he was really looking for was a name. The name of
O'Higgins's telepathic mother. According to Kilapan: Kinturay Treulen, daughter
of Killenkusi and Waramanke Treulen. According to the official story: Dona
Isabel Riquelme. Having reached this point, Amalfitano decided to stop watching
Dieste's book swaying (ever so slightly) in the darkness and sit down and think
about his own mother's name: Dona Eugenia Riquelme (actually Dona Filia Maria
Eugenia Riquelme Grana). He was briefly startled. For five seconds, his hair stood
on end. He tried to laugh but he couldn't.

I understand you, Marco Antonio Guerra said to him. I mean,
if I'm right, I think I understand you. You're like me and I'm like you. We
aren't happy. The atmosphere around us is stifling. We pretend there's nothing
wrong, but there is. What's wrong? We're being fucking stifled. You let off
steam your own way. I beat the shit out of people or let them beat the shit out
of me. But the fights I get into aren't just any fights, they're fucking
apocalyptic mayhem. I'm going to tell you a secret. Sometimes I go out at
night, to bars you can't even imagine. And I pretend to be a faggot. But not
just any kind of faggot: smooth, stuck-up, sarcastic, a daisy in the filthiest
pigsty in
Sonora
.
Of course, I don't have a gay bone in me, I can swear that on the grave of my
dead mother. But I pretend that's what I am. An arrogant little faggot with
money who looks down on everyone. And then the inevitable happens. Two or three
vultures ask me to step outside. And then the shit kicking begins. I know it
and I don't care. Sometimes they're the ones who get the worst of it,
especially when I have my gun. Other times it's me. I don't give a fuck. I need
the fucking release. Sometimes my friends, the few friends I have, guys my age who
are lawyers now, tell me I should be careful, I'm a time bomb, I'm a masochist.
One of them, someone I was really close to, told me that only somebody like me
could get away with what I did because I had my father to bail me out. Pure
coincidence, that's all. I've never asked my father for a thing. The truth is,
I don't have friends. I don't want any. At least, I'd rather not have friends
who're Mexicans. Mexicans are rotten inside, did you know? Every last one of
them. No one escapes. From the president of the republic to that clown
Subcomandante Marcos. If I were Subcomandante Marcos, you know what I'd do? I'd
launch an attack with my whole army on any city in
Chiapas
, so long as it had a strong military
garrison. And there I'd sacrifice my poor Indians. And then I'd probably go
live in
Miami
.
What kind of music do you like? asked Amalfitano. Classical music, Professor,
Vivaldi, Cimarosa, Bach. And what books do you read? I used to read everything,
Professor, I read all the time. Now all I read is poetry. Poetry is the one
thing that isn't contaminated, the one thing that isn't part of the game. I
don't know if you follow me, Professor. Only poetry—and let me be clear, only
some of it—is good for you, only poetry isn't shit.

Young
Guerra's voice, breaking into flat, harmless shards, issued from a climbing
vine, and he said: Georg Trakl is one of my favorites.

The
mention of Trakl made Amalfitano think, as he went through the motions of
teaching a class, about a drugstore near where he lived in
Barcelona
,
a place he used to go when he needed medicine for
Rosa
.
One of the employees was a young pharmacist, barely out of his teens, extremely
thin and with big glasses, who would sit up at night reading a book when the
pharmacy was open twenty-four hours. One night, while the kid was scanning the
shelves, Amalfitano asked him what books he liked and what book he was reading,
just to make conversation. Without turning, the pharmacist answered that he
liked books like
The Metamorphosis, Bartleby, A Simple Heart, A Christmas
Carol.
And then he said that he was reading Capote's
Breakfast at
Tiffany's.
Leaving aside the fact that
A Simple Heart
and
A
Christmas Carol
were stories, not books, there was something revelatory
about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist, who in another life might
have been Trakl or who in this life might still be writing poems as desperate
as those of his distant Austrian counterpart, and who clearly and inarguably
preferred minor works to major ones. He chose
The Metamorphosis
over
The
Trial,
he chose
Bartleby
over
Moby-Dick,
he chose A
Simple
Heart
over
Bouvard and Pecuchet,
and A
Christmas Carol
over A
Tale of Two Cities
or
The Pickwick Papers.
What a sad paradox,
thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the
great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown.
They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the
same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no
interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that
something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us
and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

That night, as young Guerra's grandiloquent words were
still echoing in the depths of his brain, Amalfitano dreamed that he saw the
last Communist philosopher of the twentieth century appear in a pink marble
courtyard. He was speaking Russian. Or rather: he was singing a song in Russian
as his big body went weaving toward a patch of red-streaked majolica that stood
out on the flat plane of the courtyard like a kind of crater or latrine. The
last Communist philosopher was dressed in a dark suit and sky-blue tie and had
gray hair. Although he seemed about to collapse at any moment, he remained
miraculously upright. The song wasn't always the same, since sometimes he mixed
in words in English or French, words to other songs, pop ballads or tangos,
tunes that celebrated drunkenness or love. And yet these interruptions were
brief and sporadic and he soon returned to the original song, in Russian, the
words of which Amalfitano didn't understand (although in dreams, as in the
Gospels, one usually possesses the gift of tongues). Still, he sensed that the
words were sad, the story or lament of a
Volga
boatman who sails all night and commiserates with the moon about the sad fate
of men condemned to be born and to die. When the last Communist philosopher
finally reached the crater or latrine, Amalfitano discovered in astonishment
that it was none other than Boris Yeltsin. This is the last Communist
philosopher? What kind of lunatic am I if this is the kind of nonsense I dream?
And yet the dream was at peace with Amalfitano's soul. It wasn't a nightmare.
And it also granted him a kind of feather-light sense of well-being. Then Boris
Yeltsin looked at Amalfitano with curiosity, as if it were Amalfitano who had
invaded his dream, not the other way around. And he said: listen carefully to
what I have to say, comrade. I'm going to explain what the third leg of the
human table is. I'm going to tell you. And then leave me alone. Life is demand
and supply, or supply and demand, that's what it all boils down to, but that's
no way to live. A third leg is needed to keep the table from collapsing into
the garbage pit of history, which in turn is permanently collapsing into the
garbage pit of the void. So take note. This is the equation: supply + demand +
magic. And what is magic? Magic is epic and it's also sex and Dionysian mists
and play. And then Yeltsin sat on the crater or the latrine and showed
Amalfitano the fingers he was missing and talked about his childhood and about
the Urals and
Siberia
and about a white tiger
that roamed the infinite snowy spaces. And then he took a flask of vodka out of
his suit pocket and said: