In the south of Chile, early September means late winter, and the weather is cold and damp. This comes as a shock to the system, if your body still thinks it’s summer. Driving from the airport into Valdivia, the fields and surrounding woods are draped in mist, and the melancholy that I described on the Sunday evening streets of Buenos Aires returns in pastoral mode, following a single day’s break in Santiago, where I deliver a talk at the Diego Portales University on Roberto Bolaño, at the Catedra Roberto Bolaño. Coals to Newcastle.
The drop in temperature – not that Santiago was warm – is accompanied by an appreciable increase in humidity. Chileans with any knowledge of Wales sometimes joke that I must like Valdivia because the weather reminds me of home. But last time I was here it was January, and considerably warmer than the average Welsh summer.
We walk through the early morning mist, past the fish stalls being set up along the riverside, to the Pedro de Valdivia bridge, named after the conquistador of that name (1497-1553) who was first governor of Chile. Valdivia met with resistance from the Mapuche Indians when attempting to conquer the south and, his army defeated, was captured. Stories about how he met his death vary, but one contemporary account suggests that offers of a ransom – and the return of all occupied lands – was rejected by the Mapuche, who cut off Valdivia’s arms, roasted them, and ate them in front of him before dispatching him.
A pair of sea lions lounge on a floating jetty; as we pass the male rises awkwardly on his forepaws and roars at a passing heron.
From the bridge the river appears to dissolve into a wall of mist, beyond which I imagine a world, entirely hidden from view, in which strange and terrible things might happen. It is a vision from The Heart of Darkness, or Juan José Saer’s great novel El Entenado (which means a foster child, but has been translated into English as The Witness) – which, while taking place on the other side of this continent, up the River Plate, is, like Conrad’s, a novel of European paranoia and dissolution: the reader is warned in both books that the view ahead presents possibilities that are as terrible as anything that can be imagined in a wide river shrouded in white mist.
At the University Austral, a long day of presentations, literary discourse and performance, much of it concerning our anthology The Other Tiger. In the evening, the poets Jorge Aulicino, Marina Serrano, Carlos López Beltrán, Jaime Pinos, Jorge Fondebrider, Pedro Serrano, Verónica Zondek and Damsi Figueroa read poems and students from the university read my English versions from The Other Tiger with great intelligence and fine dramatic emphasis.
Blanco, Jorge Fondebrider, Marina Serrano, Jaime Pinos, Carlos López Beltrán
After dinner as guests of the University Rector, Óscar Galindo, we return through a freezing downpour to the hotel. I go to sleep with the sound of the rain pattering on the glass dormer window above my head, a strangely comforting sound: percussive entry to a dream of rivers.
White Patagonian Dog.
