Read By Night in Chile for Free Online

officer’s uniform intently examining a two-by-two-meter canvas, an oil painting that Don Salvador had seen innumerable times and which bore the curious title
Landscape: Mexico City an hour before dawn
, a painting undeniably influenced by surrealism (to which movement the Guatemalan had attached himself in a determined if not entirely successful manner, never enjoying the official blessing of Breton’s acolytes), and in which an eccentric interpretation of certain Italian landscape painters could be detected, as well as a spontaneous attraction, not uncommon among extravagant and oversensitive Central Americans, to the French Symbolists, Redon and Moreau. The painting showed Mexico City seen from a hill or perhaps from the balcony of a tall building. Greens and grays predominated. Some suburbs looked like waves in the sea. Others looked like photographic negatives. There were no human figures, but, here and there, one could make out blurred skeletons that could have belonged to people or to animals. When Jünger saw Don Salvador, his face
    betrayed just a hint of surprise and then an equally subtle hint of pleasure. Of course they greeted each other effusively and exchanged the customary questions.
    Then Jünger started talking about painting. Don Salvador asked about German art, with which he was unacquainted. It seemed that Jünger was only really interested in Dürer, so for a good while they talked about Dürer exclusively. Both men became more and more enthusiastic. Suddenly Don Salvador realized that since arriving he had not exchanged a single word with his host. He looked around, while inside him a little alarm rang louder and louder. When we asked what had set off the alarm, he said he was worried that the Guatemalan had been arrested by the French police or, worse still, the Gestapo. But the Guatemalan was there, sitting by the window, absorbed (although “absorbed” is not the word, in fact it could hardly be less appropriate) in the unwavering contemplation of Paris.
    Relieved, our diplomat cleverly changed the subject and asked Jünger what he thought of the silent Central American’s work. Jünger said that the painter seemed to be suffering from acute anaemia and that, clearly, the best thing for him to do would be to eat something. At that point Don Salvador realized that he was still holding the packets of food he had brought for the Guatemalan, a little tea, a little sugar, a round loaf of bread and half a kilo of goat’s cheese that none of his Chilean colleagues would eat, purloined from the embassy kitchen. Jünger looked at the food. Don Salvador blushed and proceeded to put it on the shelves while explaining to the Guatemalan that he had “brought him a few little things.” The Guatemalan, as usual, neither thanked him nor turned around to see the little things in question. Don Salvador recalled that for a few seconds the situation seemed perfectly ridiculous. Jünger and himself standing there, not knowing what to say, and the Central American painter refusing to budge from the window, obstinately keeping his back turned. But Jünger knew how to respond to any situation, and compensating for his host’s torpor, made Don Salvador feel at home, drawing up two chairs and offering him Turkish
    cigarettes, which it seemed he kept exclusively for friends or unforeseen situations, since he himself smoked none that evening. Far from the idle but agitated and often indiscreet chatter of the Parisian salons, the Chilean writer and the German writer enjoyed a free-ranging conversation, touching on the human and the divine, war and peace, Italian painting and Nordic painting, the source of evil and the effects of evil that sometimes seem to be triggered by chance, the flora and fauna of Chile, which Jünger seemed to have read about in the works of his fellow countryman Philippi, who was at once a true Chilean and a true German, all the while drinking cups of tea prepared by Don Salvador himself (which