JOSE DONOSO
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behind that closed shutter where you can see a little light shining
through.
The truth is that even if people believed the opposite - and
back when he had to sacrifice everything to his politicized image, he
preferred not to explain this insignificant fraud - he had not named
his son Juan Pablo after Neruda, but after Sartre . As a university
student, he'd stayed up night after night reading Sartre in his board–
ing house , so absorbed that he didn't hear the rats coming up from
the river to gnaw at the shingles on the roof. Marx , yes , he'd read the
necessary dose. He leaned more toward Bakunin and Lenin. But
most of all, he read Sartre, with his questioning of the changing cer–
tainties of youth, the residue of which Manungo had almost forgot–
ten because of the alienating effect of his career. Sartre, with whose
words he had fertilized the Chiloe dirt from which he'd sprung.
On the other hand, who the hell was this Mr. Thayer-Ojeda,
whose name honored this street darkened by so many interlocked
branches? Who could Thayer-Ojeda be? Perhaps an honest minister
in some remote government, maybe no more than a pompous ,
white-whiskered judge now forgotten by everyone except those who
liked to stroll at night, illuminated by the car that turns the corner
and then abandons the silhouettes of Manungo and J udit to the
foliage of these elms heavy with sleeping birds. How could Mr.
Thayer-Ojeda help resolve Manungo's confusion?
This was another Manungo. He was not the same man who
watched in rain on Rue Servandoni, the tempest of tinnitus tortur–
ing his ears, hearing instead the rain on the houses built over the
water, where his mother had died in a tidal wave shortly after giving
birth. These days there were barely enough of those houses over the
water to illustrate the postcards his father would send him every year
from Chiloe. But since the past is not usually one's own experience,
but rather experience refracted through the memory of others ,
Manungo relived through the memory of don Manuel his mother's
cadaver, glowing with lampreys and crowned with algae and kelp,
and the way they pulled it out of the cove the night after the disaster.
That was when a town with plank catwalks under which the
moon swelled the tides stood on posts driven into the silt at the foot
of the Castro Hills. There were stores that sold what people needed,
products brought over in launches to the doors of the shops by the
natives who had caught , salted, hunted or gathered them, then
dried, cured, or roasted them in the aromatic blue smoke of their
patios. In that village of weathered shingles, which he had never
