The Burden of Chile’s Night

I had not seen Jose Donoso for 30 years. Then, late last year, I visited him at UC Davis as he finished leading a three-month graduate seminar on himself and his work and prepared to return to Santiago. I remembered my high school teacher, a man in his early 30s, wearing alien Ivy League suits from Princeton, rocking from foot to foot as he yelped at the class to shut up and pay attention. I found one of El Boom’s grand old men (aren’t they all GOM’s by now?), complete with white beard and hair curling over his collar.

The 30 years have yielded Donoso a harvest including Spain’s gloriously bejeweled Order of Alfonso X the Wise, four New Yorker magazine pages of John Updike’s faint praise, more than 500 theses, and a catalogue listing 800 separate writings about him and his opus, and status as a “banner” to Pinochet’s opposition.

Because the Pinochet government doesn’t allow me to visit Chile, my awareness of Donoso’s fame there was incomplete. He was frozen in my mind as the dear teacher who persisted in opening a window out of Santiago’s provincial smother; who kept alive hope that there really was a world “out there” where people discoursed coolly, meaningfully and with precision, about literature, philosophy, justice and taste.

To my classmates and myself, Donoso was unquestionably a writer. We granted him that status long before concrete evidence emerged as a slim paperbound volume of cuentos (stories) which, like his first novel, “Coronacion,” a few years later, the faithful peddled to friends, relatives, and anyone who came up with the equivalent of a couple weeks allowance. I seem to remember selling 18 copies. Maybe 50.

Donoso said he had rehearsed the writer’s role since he was 12: lectures, literary prize acceptances, awards, lionizing . . . the whole thing. As a teacher, he would warn his students not to confuse life and literature. For at least one of them this truth remained hidden until the rebirth that middle age is for the lucky. I wonder still how “Pepe” Donoso, then a mere boy of 30-odd, acquired that wisdom.

El peso de la noche, “the burden of night” was another of Pepe’s gifts. He attributed the phrase to Diego Portales, a dictator assassinated after he cudgeled Chile out of anarchy in the 1830s. Portales, a merchant, wrote in his letters, Donoso told us, that he created order solely to pursue his passions for women and money more smoothly. Exasperation must have driven him to coin el peso de la noche : exasperation at his naturally gifted countrymen, suffocating in their miasmas.

There are countries and regions that are overlush or too harsh. ( La banana es el peor enemigo de la civilizacion : “Bananas are civilization’s worst enemy,” my junior high school teacher, Maria Marchant, a militant Communist, used to say, explaining why Central America is more at U.S. mercy than the rest of Spanish America). Much of Chile is just challenging enough. The young Donoso once complained that the land is inhospitable, at least compared to the friendly green pastures of New Jersey. Nowhere in Chile can one live off the (uncultivated) land, except perhaps spiritually. Much of it is heartbreakingly beautiful, a land that won’t harm you but won’t feed you. The web of Chilean society, on the other hand, pervades everything and lies over everything, and never stops demanding.

Donoso’s latest novel, “La Desesperanza,” (“Curfew”) is really about el peso de la noche , the burden of night under the Pinochet regime. Characters act out fear, greed, the search for love, with the dictatorship casting a straining, nightmare glow, as in an Edward Hopper painting. The scenes are uniquely and thoroughly Chilean, developing naturally from a curiously immobile social order that only lets you go in one direction: away. And even that takes some effort.

Donoso (an oligarch born and bred) left and stayed away--mostly in Spain--for 20 years. He went home because Chile is a highly rewarding habitat for literary lions, particularly of the home-grown variety. One of the more literate peoples in the world, Chileans uncritically revere internationally known (home-grown alone don’t qualify) writers and poets, no matter where they are from. Arnold Toynbee, the historian, remarked to Donoso at Princeton that Chile had to be a fascinating country: It was the only one where Thomas Mann’s “Magic Mountain” was a best seller.

Where successful intellectuals are concerned, Chileans trade their whiplash wit for craven awe. Donoso said he went home from Spain because he wanted recognition, to “be what one is.” In Santiago, he is recognized on the street as the reigning king of the literary jungle who is a member of the oligarchy. He is also, as his wife proudly declared, a “banner,” a rallying point, for Pinochet’s opponents. And he is also the survivor of the trio (with Nobel Prize-winning poets Pablo Neruda, 1971, and Gabriela Mistral, 1945) of Chile’s unofficial equivalents of Japan’s National Treasures.

Although Chileans love jokes--the more irreverent and dirtier the better--and tell them constantly, not once in 20 years did I hear a joke about Mistral or Neruda (or Donoso, for that matter). Neruda’s absence from the pillory is specially surprising because he was, from all accounts, a pompous, self-indulgent ass who allowed himself, while flaunting his lifelong Communist Party membership, to be kept in a luxurious Paris mansion as ambassador to France.

Poverty is the norm in Chile and always has been, no matter what the government; working people live on hunger’s edge. Still, the wolfish humor of the poor and the constantly dispossessed middle class tenderly avoids literary idols. The savage wit is the bastard twin of an almost religious reverence of education which, in turn, is bonded to Chile’s national self-esteem. This secular religion of education produced what used to be and maybe still is one of the best elementary-through-university education systems in the world.

Like other peoples, Chileans use literacy (statistically at the level of the more developed European countries and much higher than the United States) and an avid interest in the outside world to help cope with a reality often too painful or dreary to take straight. That reality stems primarily from being semi-willing prisoners of a minority that has ruled for 200 years by, first, owning the land and monopolizing politics, then by extruding itself into a class system that taints every relation and weights lives with the leaden pervasiveness of nightmare: This is the burden of night . . . el peso de la noche.

Pinochet has named an office building for Portales: Both forcibly brought an arguable order from inarguable chaos. But Portales merely wanted the country to go about business; Pinochet attempts to restore intact the feudal social order. And, somewhere deep in the Chilean psyche there’s a thin but unfailing source of nourishment for such an enterprise.

Perhaps that same source animates whatever it is that prevents a mass uprising against military rule. In one Machiavellian scenario, the dictatorship’s strategists plumb their imaginations for ways to let imagination make cowards of their countrymen: They let la copucha (Chilean bush radio) spread the stories of live rats pushed bodily up vaginas, besides better-known and more subtle tortures. Under the burden of night, terror doubles its effectiveness and keeps resistance to the level of gesture, and in the cities. The strength of “Curfew” is in illustrating how terror and the temptation of survival undermine the will to resist. Judit, “Curfew’s” anti-heroine, is unable to shoot the man who had her friends raped by dogs in the dungeons of the secret police. She feels she is an accomplice: The man made her scream as if raped while he sat sweating at her side.

Another “Curfew” character is Lopito, a former hanger-on at the university. Ugly and poor but tolerated--even to the point of having once slept with Judit, who recollects only his stench and her pity--Lopito is almost literally taunted to death by police who make him pull a turf-roller until his heart bursts. He doesn’t even get the dignity and drama of a death by legitimate torture. Lopito (like everyone else in the novel except some background figures) fights Pinochet only with thoughts and words. And as a roto , a low-class person, Lopito gets no comfort from the secular religion that the class system is. Only in death does he set down the burden of night.