JORGE EDWARDS
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hygienic facilities. All right, we installed hygienic facilities in less than
twenty-four hours. Another time they cut off the lights. During those
days when I had
to
devote myself to defending
La
Carpa, I couldn't
read or write a single line." One night during the curfew hours, the
tent was set afire by unknown culprits and Nicanor decided to seek
refuge in exile at Isla Negra. He continues to offer several weekly
classes at the university and recognizes that he can speak about
anything he chooses. "What were your last classes on?" "On Fourier,
the utopian socialist, and his classification of cuckolds," Nicanor
answers. We decide to open another bottle of wine, in honor of Fourier,
and we search through a thick vol ume of Rabelais for his advice to
those he considered cuckolds by vocation. "I don't plan to move away
from here," Nicanor says, perhaps feeling that the outside world has
become excessively difficult for him after his recent personal and
political upsets. In his coastal refuge he has read a great deal and filled
innumerable notebooks with his poetry, evoking a character from our
good days, a saintly man who preached at Santiago's Normal School (a
kind of Chilean Hyde Park) and called himself the Christ of Elqui. Into
this character's mouth, Nicanor has put in verse some paradoxes and
truths that are not easy to express these days.
On the streets of Santiago and along the coastal roads the presence
of the police did not seem excessive to me, in contrast to what they say
about the first years after the coup. When I returned to Spain my
Catalan barber gave me the best explanation: "Here, when anyone who
moved was beaten, they didn' t need so many police on the street; but
now, with democracy and street demonstrations, you see much more of
the police." It seemed to me that my friend the barber was partly right:
after the first years of open repression in Chile, they can now afford the
luxury of showing a little civic calm. In contrast to the past, the police
squads, motorcycles, uniforms , and cars now looked very modern to
me, impeccable, but their presence in the city was rather circumspect.
The morning when Pinochet expelled General Leigh from the Junta, I
noticed that my friends in the opposition took precautions, didn't talk
on the telephone, or simply vanished into thin air. The streets re–
mained quiet, without soldiers, but suddenly on going into the subway
I had the impression that the calm had become spectral. Only the
sound of footsteps could be heard in the silence, as if by instinct the
people wanted to avoid commenting on the situation. At that time the
press abstained from publishing the statements of Leigh or of his
fellow officers in the Air Force. Nevertheless, for a Chilean who had
lived in Franco's Spain, the press took surprising liberties. For exam-
