CHINESE CARNATION

............................................................................................Love is blind
............................................................................................Jon Hendricks

She was free to move between tall buildings. She was free, too, to seek for a position in the best institutions. But she always took two steps—one forward and one to the side—and when she did that, on that side of the world, someone lost an eye.

She was gorgeous and subtle. Her back was just starting to develop; the bones long and tough. She had a virgin's breasts, even though she had been three times a mother—the husband and two little daughters. It seemed no one had ever sucked from those breasts. No infant, at least.

We had a promise in front of us. next spring. Something still possible. To be free before any autumn. It was an idea among many. Because we were two beautiful prisoners of an idea, of an emptiness, of an action that did not exist. It was precisely the immovable total, the silence, Death dressed as an Admiral (1) .

We were prisoners as well of what we believed to be just and honorable. That was the pinnacle of our tower.

In those days she drank thick hot chocolate with me in the Pimpilimpausha Café in downtown Santiago , with churros (2) that looked like the food of the gods for our interwoven hands, because her Western person was looking for my natural warmth. Those were the best days. Our hands undressed then, to seek each other out and squeeze lovers in bed. We were free to set hours or minutes to any duty. We were also free to shut off the circuit breakers.

Like that, we ran along the parks or walked through the shops full of beautiful trinkets. And we began to loose ourselves, one into the other. We closed ourselves up in a small white car so as not to be eaten alive. But even so, the interior of the car —which every Saturday I would have cleaned at the Copec gas Station in Los Guindos Plaza (3) — but even so, it was invaded by moths (who are my friends) and pamphlets (who are my enemies)

Nevertheless, that was the only safe place in all the world. There, our lives were not in danger. Then she uncovered the gorgeous nape of her neck, so I could measure it with my lips; keep it like a white knot, which unties for us the fundamental inadequacy of the word. I approached her my eyes, so she could measure them too.

We also carried books along, and records, in order not to forget that, without wanting or seeking it, we were survivors of the poetry's shipwreck. We brought the Ballad for a Crazy Man (4) , the American musical Hair , and the Mozart Concerto from the movie Elvira Madigan . And we shut ourselves away to figure out what it all meant. That was a flat mistake. Because all that might have come from another planet, or another space, or another life, or another death. But loves makes visible at least one part, one face of that iridescent universe (how old Rosamel del Valle (5) must be laughing now, in the star where he leaves, seeing that I am stealing his words). We would go out driving to talk the city, that ant-hill of termites in neckties we were born into, without its deserving us, and we were birds who rarely hanged out during daytime: June 26 in the Drive-In Charles .

We were only free to the extent that we loved the same things, and this, maybe, we mistook for the love of each other. In those world's gray days, love meant something else. It meant, for example, to put a soap suppository in the paraplegic wife's rear end and later to lie down to dream a dream in which she was a

jeune fille en fleur and the cannons thundered in Abyssinia . There were none of these droputs mainlining on the street corners (ten years have passed, my dear old Beelzebub), which suggests the following syllogism: the wretched drug addict deals heroin retail so he can get some for himself, and works for the pusher who sells it wholesale, who in turn is protected by the Christian Democratic boss, who in turn is protected by the Pope. Consequently, the Holy Father protects and fosters the trade in hard drugs.

Like these, the ones then were only half-truths, and we looked therefore for that crevice of time in the golden cage, to escape for two or three minutes. And then we kissed so as to better look for that thought, and found it in the incredible fire that stops the other fires. But there were no other keys.

We were free—or or at least I was—to write this report, an article on so unfortunate a love, and to send it to the Journal of Love Biophysics , in the present world, or to a newspaper that will be out when Earth returns to Paradise but not before, on condition of immediately forgetting the wrods and erasing the scores.

And in our dreams we changed costumes. You were a gypsy, I a Chemistry professor. To think that it was an abyss, when truly it was a sharp mountain. In that stumbole we fell. We also did not know it was a sugar mountain—our garndparent's sugar loaf—and therefore it could be dissolved by our saliva, licking and dissolving it with a long kiss.

Photographs betrayed us, and sleep and silences were both timely and untimely. We chased each other in cars, despite nefarious consequences to the brakes, the oil, the Morehouse Comet, etc. and once, thanks to a kiss, we fell, car and all, into a chocolate-colores canal, this time very cold and with a disturbing smell, but the taste of the kiss overpowered all the world's decay, for an entire era. Next to where we fell there was a tunnel, symbol of urban progress. And not to forget, we were inside a beautiful envelope of flesh and terrible dreams, we ate tender lettuces and Scottish toffees, we drank orange juice with pisco (6) , to reach the minumum of necessary lucidity required to levitate in the abyss where, down below us, swam, always so sure of themselves, Kraken the immense octopus, the Horror of Dunwich, and Rodolfo Oroz, the Academician (beasts of that size)! We were walking down streets with three rows of cherry-trees in bloom, and this was before anything, before knowing, long before having feeling, long long before that uncertain awakening. You were going naked, beautiful in the Huidobro's (7) style, and this is saying it all. ( Every woman naked is a queen, every naked queen is a woman ) With your floral flesh absent underneath your yellow dress and the Spanish lace panties—Pocuro street in the springtime, anticipated only for us.

This proves that the universe, the big bang, was on our side, although not God's Calvinist eye, which tripped us up nastily like any old aunt of yours. But in truth we were only free to say no. The truth of others' navels surrounded us on all sides.

We were also something like slaves to relationships, to other's jaws that chewed, of Super-egos. Nonetheless, even our last names struggled to get close in the alphabet, and in the Zodiac our stars are the best ones of all. In those moments your back curved, your head tilted a bit toward I don't know where, helpless. Then, the better to love you—why must it always happen to me?—I vanished from the scene. I became purely a laugh that shines in the air, a Cheshire Cat of the Southern world with a little bit of a creole air.

We played at Cyclops, like the Maga with Horacio (8) . Why not, if after all you were a Surrealist woman? And we looked with pleasure to the bottom of our brains and were happy to know ourselves so alike, because dreams are held up by flesh and flesh doesn't exist without dreams that give to it corporality and render it visible, just like the dark background makes the lightning visible and silence makes thunder possible.

The world defended itself againts us cruelly, it attacked us with its gastric juices, with entreaties, with veiled judicial threats os scandalous conduct's gloomy consequences for wamankind; with blessings at the last minute. And then our faces too, with Venetian carnival masks (nothing less) to confuse us. Every person's sacred opinions based on our own experience, nonexistent aftar all, our maturity overtaking us, one more pretension. We needed at least disasters to reach it, as if our shadow were bigger than the body and darkened the world.

The future was moving skywalk where our bodies interlaced in a desperate embrace, but our ghosts or astral bodies or auras or whatever (the name, essential in our childish country, now no longered mattered. These truths are, precisely, unnamable) went definitely away. And that fact, undeniable, physical, palpable even to a blind, deaf and mute man, but not to somebody lovesick, caused an emptiness in the flesh, the fall of all comets to earth, a bunch of locusts.

It was a mechanical ladder with no steps, where you, on top, signaled unintelligibly to me in the language of flags in your yellow dress (which you'd taken off that one time and already too late), while my body rolled down in a more than violent fall, that injured me seriously, leaving scars that I still have to this day; I always will.

Now—ten years later—when my son asks me about those signs on the back of my hands and on my forearms, I tell him it was a lion, that I stuck my arms in the lion's cage in the Santiago Zoo, and that is one thing that nice children shouldn't do (although it isn't certainly a matter of unkindness but being a real dummy to stick your hand in a lion's open mouth).

I also have a kitty tha licks my wounds with a tongue that is so rough it reminds me nothing is free in life, or easy, or unforseen; that you earn your daily bread, and also a lot of laughs, by the sweat of your lips and with the harvest of your own laugh dried in the sun. A forget-me-not blossoms each year from these blisters, then vanishes as soon as the tongue of an animal touches them. They are better yhan homeopathic medicine.

We werefree, what's more—then, not nowadays—to open the windows that gave onto a courtyard, to solicit and to obtain certificates, and to make social visits. All that was part of the karma that we must evacuate, we don't well know where, or how or when. Butwe promised we'd found each other in Venice , Barcelona or San Gimignano, in some adequate site for runaways of a certain class, a certain pedigree.

It's quite likely that I will love you until Halley's Comet returns—truthsworthy data?—to earth, in fact. Listening to Joan Manuel Serrat's songs (9) , looking for bear's ear mushrooms in the rotten tree-trunks in the moss down there on Fresia Island, to write in them crazy poemas, anticipated declarations of love that would arrive some months later, a summary description of our subject matter experimented in vitro.

We still had some minutes left, and we traveled to the east and to the west, and that afternoon you gave me as a gift the Andes Mountains with pink hostsstill to be born, and also that first kiss, for my birthday. Our given names, remember? That weight behind the brain, the nape of the neck. And the brilliant thoughts we gave each other and exchanged, the styles of speech belonging to each other. Our sweet promenades, our hands interlaced, like the survivors that we were, of impure eras, of filthy Inquisitions, always with fear following us, fears of shadows authorized to wear hats on their heads . We were half dead because of what we loved. Also half alive, for the same reason.

We were happy to know it.

It was aday like any other, but suddenly the city was empty. All of us, who stayed behind here, said good-bye, staying in our undevelopment and it's memories (10) , in our perfect status of insects, yet you gave me the gift—how not to thank you—of pronouncing my name, the last of all in our world of hummingbirds, volcanoes and stupidly serious people. And already they were pushing you—the more serious and stupid ones—to go, while the hummingbirds cheered for our love, which from that moment on was indestructible, since it was metaphorical; and the volcanoes remained indifferent, sure of themselves, in their volcanic dignity. All the patriots of the best quality in the market pushed you to the tarmac, where the airplane roared like Lucifer having an asthma attack, waking up in a Hilton hotel. Someone decided to wake us up, too, that is, to make us fall in the midst of the deepest sleep, next to the Unknown Soldier, next to the Civic Beasts and also next to our colleagues from work. How not to gran a bit of glory to those clumsy pedants of science…

And I said, Vallejo, Lautreamont and you too, old pal Michaux, whom now I shamelessly parody, my beloved geniuses, why have you abandoned me? I was ready to give the best of myself, I only needed a little push, as is necessary for all good South Americans from the Pacific Coast . But the book, that is, oir life, which I am now telling you, was finally over in my lifetime (like lovers always, I lived thanks to your presence) and it was only later that I copied it over clean. We had been brought into this world so well made, almost geniuses. But the motherland failed us, among other things. We were born nobility, born to something that never was, but could have been.

And we were so happy, in spite of everything, in the fly's eyes of love, faceted, on its feet that wore the celebrated seven-league boots that hop over all frontiers and all shorelines. Although we were often sadder than the theme of Lara played by the Orfeon de Carabineros (11) . It was more beautiful than the gestures of an slaughtered angel.

And furthermore, they had chartered that tremendous black airplane that was rolling already, the engines boiling like the Tupungato volcano when it was young, to take you very far away, just as was convenient for the O.D.E.P.L.A.N., for the C.E.P.A.L., to A.I.D. (12), to all this Hemisphere (in th sense of Longitudes). Son of the tango, Gwenevere my queen, grandson of the rain, like tadpoles. And persistently dreaming. And daring to confirm all those dreams, at least in the cerebellum's kinetoscope, where anything can happen, including the Flecha del Sur running the rails once again, headed for Osorno, and the two of us happy as can be in a reserved train's apartment, and buying sustancias and pastries from little old ladies in white aprons. (13) In the kingdom of ghosts there are no laundries, although that ought to be the only useful busieness, and the Dream Horse raises once again its flight among the blond myrrh treas of the Loncoche fields, because the warmyh remains, the smile remains, the special qualities of the good passionate ones.

After all, you will not keep, I know, my gesture stretching my chin, which stretched because of you, in any case, nor words that seek and chain us. One only recovers what one gave up for lost for good, whitout tricks and with no false retreats. You will remember better that time when, to cheer you up, I sang you that little song from the good old days, that says,

Clavelito chino chino

Que dudái de l'existencia e'Dios

No seai existencialista

Por lo más que querai vos

¿Verdad de Dios? … que sí …(14)

making for you Chinese eyes with my fingers and doing my little Fred Astaire dance, late style, I mean, short of breath on a table, in your empty house, the furniture all packed up like strage mastodon presences or ghosts already too tires of going around scaring innocents. With that, I only wanted to tell you one thing: see how the future is already old, and us with it, and even so, not even half of it is said, half of what is sayeble, half of what is possible between two who love each other, or used to. The half of the word we didn't say, neither you nor I nor anybody else will say and our mouths will never pronounce it, that one is yours already without ever having passed through my body nor having been kissed by my shadow, nor touched a single heart-beat of the organ that pumps blood and death (because life is an inheritance all at once, a forfeit).

My Caveman-Id tenderness all goes in that unnameable half, unsayable, impossible perhaps truer tha delicious little things we never got to do for lack of time, of bravery and because of too much education. But above all, more real than the sardonic laugh from your grandfather's skeleton, seen passing in the window of the jet taking you, flying non-stop to Disneyland .

All that is already outside you and outside me belongs to us forever.

Santiago, August 1970

Translated from Spanish by Linda Black (1990) with later edition and added notes by the author (2004).

NOTES

(1) Paraphrase of a Pablo Neruda's verse in “Sólo la muerte”
( Residence on Earth ).

(2) Churros are a long fried cookie-snake that you eat sunk in hot chocolate.

(3) A middle class neighborhood in Santiago's uptown, where I lived on the Early seventies.

(4) A famous tango-ballad-serenade with surreal and provocatory lyrics by Horacio Ferrer and music by Astor Piazzolla, which was a hit in many Latin American countries during the late sixties.

(5) See note in “Images of Berkeley”, Winter Chorale, section Poetry.

(6) Pisco is a kind of grape brandy that is produced only in some special areas of Northern Chile and Peru .

(7) Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948), Chilean poet, one of the founders of Spanish American avant-garde movement.

(8) La Maga and Horacio Oliveira are characters from Julio Cortázar's master novel Rayuela (Hopscotch).

(9) Joan Manuel Serrat (1943) is a Spanish Catalunian songwriter and interpreter, internationally acclaimed for his original songs and for his superb musical versions of the poetry of Antonio Machado, Miguel Hernández, Mario Benedetti and others.

(10) Reference to Memories of Undevelopment , a film by Cuban Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (1927-1996).

(11) The theme of Lara is the central soundtrack song of George Cukor's Doctor Zhivago . The Orfeón de Carabineros is a band of the armed police in Chile . The political irony seems obvious after the events happened on 1973 aand thereafter.

(12) O.D.E.P.L.A.N., C.E.P.A.L., A.I.D. are international organizations for economic development in Latin American countries.

(13) The Flecha del Sur was a beautiful luxury train that runned from Santiago to Puerto Montt (about a thousand miles) during the forties and fifties. It is pictured by me on the tab Contact / Contacto in the main link's page of this website. Sustancias are pastries similar to marshmallow in consistence and taste, but softer and cut into rectangles.

(14) Chinese carnation / Why do you doubt God is alive? / Don't be an existentialist / For heaven's sake. /God's truth? …hell yes!