Read By Night in Chile for Free Online Page A

the Guatemalan, when invited to join them, refused almost inaudibly), the tea being followed by two glasses of cognac from the supply that Jünger carried in his silver hip flask, and this time the Guatemalan did not say no, which made both writers smile discreetly at first, then laugh long and loud, proffering the appropriate witticisms. And then, when the Guatemalan had gone back to the window with his due ration of cognac, Jünger, returning to the canvas that had intrigued him, asked the painter if he had spent long in the Aztec capital and what impression his time there had left, to which the Guatemalan replied that the week or slightly less he had spent in Mexico City had left no more than a vague blur in his memory, and, in any case, he had painted that picture, now the object of the German’s attention or curiosity, many years later, in Paris, without really thinking about Mexico at all, although under the influence of what, for want of a better expression, he called a Mexican mood. And that set Jünger musing on the sealed wells of memory, perhaps imagining that during his brief stay in Mexico City the Guatemalan had unwittingly stored away a vision that would not surface again until many years later, although Don Salvador, who was agreeing with everything the Teuton hero said, thought to himself perhaps it was not a question of sealed wells suddenly reopened, or in any case not the sealed wells Jünger had in mind, and as soon as this thought occurred to him his head began to buzz, as if hundreds of sand flies or horseflies were escaping from it, flies visible only through the prism of a hot, dizzy feeling, in spite of the fact that the Guatemalan’s attic room could hardly have been described as a warm place, and the sand flies flew back and forth in front of his eyelids, transparently, like winged droplets of sweat, making the buzzing noise that horseflies make, or the noise that sand flies make, which is more or less the same, although of course there are no sand flies in Paris, and then Don
    Salvador, as he nodded in agreement once again, by this stage understanding only snatches of Jünger’s oblivious disquisition in French, glimpsed or thought he glimpsed a part of the truth, and in that tiny part of the truth he could see the Guatemalan in Paris, the war already underway or about to begin, the
    Guatemalan already accustomed to spending long, dead (or dying) hours in front of his only window, contemplating the landscape of Paris, and
Landscape: Mexico City an hour before dawn
emerging from that contemplation, from a Guatemalan’s sleepless contemplation of Paris, and in its own way the painting was an altar for human sacrifice, and in its own way the painting was an
    expression of supreme boredom, and in its own way the painting was an
    acknowledgement of defeat, not the defeat of Paris or the defeat of European culture bravely determined to burn itself down, not the political defeat of certain ideals that the painter tepidly espoused, but his personal defeat, the defeat of an obscure, poor Guatemalan, who had come to the City of Light
    determined to make his name in its artistic circles, and the way in which the Guatemalan accepted his defeat, with a clear-sightedness reaching far beyond the realm of the particular and the anecdotal, made the hair on our diplomat’s arms stand up, or, in vulgar parlance, gave him goose bumps. And then, in a single draught, Don Salvador drained what was left of his cognac and started listening to Jünger again, who all this time had been holding forth imperturbably, while he, that is to say our writer, had become entangled in a spiderweb of futile thoughts, and the Guatemalan, predictably, remained slumped beside the window, his life seeping away in the obsessive and sterile contemplation of Paris. And having grasped the drift of the monologue without too much difficulty (or so he thought), Don Salvador was able to insert a word edgeways into that parade of ideas, which