By Night in Chile: : How Elegance Becomes Evidence

Part of: The Deep Reader

Companion essay to: The Poet Inside the Novelist

By Night in Chile and the Self-Defending Narrator

A dying priest begins to speak.

He has been accused of something, though the accusation is never stated cleanly; in this novel the evasion is already part of the charge.

Father Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix raises himself on one elbow and begins to explain. The explanation runs for the length of the novel without a paragraph break. By the time he stops, he has indicted himself more thoroughly than any prosecutor could have managed, because the instrument of the indictment is his own refinement, and the refinement never stops working.

The novel gets called a monologue, which is true, or a confession, which is less true, or an exercise in unreliable narration, which misses the real move.

Urrutia is not unreliable in the usual sense. He is scrupulous. He reports what he did and where he was and who was present, and he narrates these facts in prose so careful it could have been written by a man trying to pass a literary examination.

He omits almost no fact. He omits weight.

Bolaño's achievement here — the thing the book teaches you to hear by the fifth or sixth page — is that Urrutia's cultivation is itself the record of the crime. The elegance is the guilt in evening clothes.

How Bolaño Uses Elegance as Evidence

I am dying now, but I still have many things to say. I used to be at peace with myself. Quiet and at peace. But it all blew up unexpectedly. That wizened youth is to blame. I was at peace. I am no longer at peace. There are a couple of points that have to be cleared up. So, propped up on one elbow, I will lift my noble, trembling head, and rummage through my memories to turn up the deeds that shall vindicate me and belie the slanderous rumours the wizened youth spread in a single storm-lit night to sully my name.

— By Night in Chile (New Directions, 2003)

A dying man does not usually begin by praising his own head. Urrutia does.

My noble, trembling head — the adjective comes before the priest has started on the memories the head is supposed to contain. The sentence arranges itself around a self-image the speaker wants accepted before any evidence appears, and the sequencing matters: noble first, trembling second, so that infirmity reads as a minor qualification of a prior dignity.

Urrutia is already litigating. He is already casting himself.

What the passage does not contain is the offense. No charge is named. No accuser is described beyond the epithet that wizened youth.

The opening is grammatically organized around injured self-regard: the crime stays offstage while Urrutia speaks about what has been said about him.

I was at peace. I am no longer at peace. 

The offense the book will eventually disclose — that Urrutia toured European cathedrals studying pigeon-abatement while his country was being emptied into detention centers, that he attended literary salons held in a house whose basement was used for torture, that he said nothing and said nothing and said nothing — is subordinated, from its first sentence, to the question of whether Urrutia's name has been fairly treated.

A priest dying after Chile’s great rupture opens his deathbed account with a complaint about his reputation.

Satire would let the reader laugh and move on. Bolaño withholds the permission. The prose is too good, the speaker too educated, the rhythm too persuasive for the reader to sit outside the monologue and judge. Urrutia's opening asks to be heard as a cultivated man under unjust attack — which is precisely how cultivated men under just attack have always sounded. The book's whole moral architecture depends on the reader briefly believing him, or half-believing him, or enjoying his sentences enough not to ask what they are covering. If the reader stays outside, the book has no grip.

Bolaño wants the reader inside the room.

The long-sentence inheritance is already at work here. The long opening sentence beginning, propped up on one elbow buries the subject under qualifying clauses, delays commitment, and lets grammar negotiate what the speaker is not yet willing to state.

I will lift my noble, trembling head, and rummage through my memories to turn up the deeds that shall vindicate me and belie the slanderous rumors the wizened youth spread in a single storm-lit night to sully my name. 

A chain of conjunctions stretches the sentence between grammatical beginning and grammatical close.

Each clause is a small negotiation between the speaker and his own memory.

Rummage — he will not look, he will rummage, the verb of a man searching among mostly-irrelevant objects for the single relevant one.

Belie — he will not disprove the charges, he will belie them, a literary word chosen because a plain word would expose the speaker too clearly.

The sentence functions as courtroom, church, and confessional at once, and Urrutia has designed it to be heard in all three registers simultaneously.

Why Urrutia’s Cultivated Sentences Sound Guilty

Later in the monologue, Urrutia states a principle.

He delivers it in the register of moral instruction, as if addressing a parishioner. The principle, taken by itself, is correct.

What he does with it is the book's central obscenity.

One has a moral obligation to take responsibility for one's actions, and that includes one's words and silences, yes, one's silences, because silences rise to heaven too, and God hears them, and only God understands and judges them, so one must be very careful with one's silences. — By Night in Chile

A man who has spent his life refusing to name what he knows is telling the reader, in a voice of pastoral gravity, that silences are morally consequential and divinely audited. Silences rise to heaven too. The speaker's own silences are the crime.

The moral principle is irreproachable; the irony is savage; the speaker registers neither, because registering would collapse the whole structure he has built to die in peace.

Urrutia's silences, specifically, are these: he traveled to Europe on a Church commission to study the preservation of cathedrals from bird droppings — a commission that required poisoning pigeons in cities across Italy and France while much of Chile was disappearing into detention centers, and he tells the story of the trip without ever mentioning what was happening at home.

He gave literature classes to Pinochet, Leigh, Merino, and Mendoza, four men who had just overthrown an elected government and were currently murdering trade unionists, and he remembers the general's intelligent questions and leaves out what his student would do the following week. He attended María Canales's literary evenings, where writers drank wine upstairs while a man named James Thompson tortured prisoners in the basement, and narrates only the wine. He is silent about knowing. He is silent about suspecting. He is silent about the one night a guest opened the wrong door and saw what was on the other side.

One’s silences rise to heaven. His rise like smoke from every page he speaks.

The homily sits in Urrutia's mouth with such formal perfection that the reader has to work to remember that the speaker is the object of his own sermon.

Conventional moral irony wants the reader to feel smarter than the narrator.

The prose was the trap all along.

How Style Becomes Moral Pressure in By Night in Chile

The book’s moral engine arrives late, then locks into place.

Urrutia attends the literary evenings of María Canales, a minor novelist married to an American expatriate who works for — it is never named, but it is clear — the regime's intelligence apparatus. The gatherings are convivial. Wine is served. Poets read. Novelists argue. The country is in its long dark. One night a guest wanders into the basement, looking for the bathroom or the cellar or something else, and sees a man tied to a metal bed.

Urrutia did not see the man. Urrutia only heard about the man later. The distinction matters to him. He repeats it.

I asked myself the following question: If María Canales knew what her husband was doing in the basement, why did she invite guests to her house? The answer was obvious: because she was an idiot, or because she was innocent, (...) or because she was a woman who needed to feel cultured, or because she was a woman. And then I asked myself another question: And I, why did I go to her house? And the answer was the same, with one difference: because I was a coward.

— By Night in Chile

Fourteen alternatives. Fourteen possible explanations for why a woman hosted literary parties upstairs while her husband tortured men downstairs. The catalogue moves through psychology (an idiot, innocent, a saint, a fool), through social role (a good hostess, a bad hostess), through emotional situation (a woman in love, a woman who had been abandoned), through need (needed money, needed company, needed to feel important, needed to feel modern, needed to feel cultured) and terminates in the most devastating phrase in the book: because she was a woman. 

The closing clause reads at first like exhaustion — the list has run out of differentiation, every explanation collapsing into the bare fact of gender — but in context it is monstrous. A woman hosted torture parties because she was a woman. The catalogue tries to absolve her by dissolving her into a category so broad it can no longer hold moral weight.

Then Urrutia asks the question he has been avoiding for the entire book:

And I, why did I go to her house? Because I was a coward.

The single-sentence response at the end of the catalogue lays the book's whole method bare. Urrutia has applied his elegance to María Canales and given her fourteen alibis. He has applied the same machinery to himself and it has failed. One word — coward — survived the sieve. The catalogue was a device for generating possibilities, and possibility is the enemy of responsibility. María Canales's behavior becomes inscrutable because fourteen motives are offered for it. Urrutia's behavior becomes unambiguous because one motive is offered for it. The instrument partly shelters the woman he is judging and fully exposes the man doing the judging.

And he does not notice. He states because I was a coward with the same fluency he brought to the preceding fourteen clauses. No rupture. Another sentence. He moves on. The monologue continues for pages afterward, because The confession costs him almost nothing; it is absorbed back into a prose that seems able to accommodate any admission made in its own register. Bolaño has shown the reader what Urrutia cannot do: remain inside the meaning of the single word he has uttered about himself.

What Makes Bolaño’s Narrator Condemn Himself

One sentence, placed near the end of the book, delivers the indictment's final form.

I sat there in silence, a finger between the pages to mark my place, and I thought: Peace at last.

The sentence arrives during the coup, or shortly after, in the middle of Santiago. Urrutia has been reading — he is always reading; reading is the register he retreats into when history tries to speak to him — and he looks up, and the country has fallen, and he has his finger between the pages to mark his place, and what he thinks is Peace at last. The reader has been prepared for the moment for a hundred and twenty pages. It still lands like a blow.

Peace at last. 

The phrase has the cadence of spiritual resolution. A man uses it when a long spiritual struggle has finally resolved. Urrutia applies it to a military coup that ended democratic government, murdered thousands, tortured tens of thousands, and inaugurated seventeen years of regime violence.

Peace, for the cleric, is the arrival of the junta. The distorted faith required to think such a thing inside a cultivated Catholic priest is the book’s final disclosure. Collaboration, silence, evasion: each of these Urrutia has been accused of, each of them the reader has watched him commit. What the last pages reveal is something worse. He felt relief. He wanted the coup. He marked his place in the book he was reading and settled into the restored order.

The finger between the pages is the most damning detail in the scene. A man in the presence of historical catastrophe does not mark his place. He drops the book. He goes to the window. He weeps or runs or prays. Urrutia keeps his finger in the page because he intends to return to the reading — the coup has not interrupted his life; it has concluded an interruption, and the reading can resume now that the country has been tidied. The image is small and exact and intolerable, and Bolaño leaves it exactly as small and as exact and as intolerable as it is.

Bolaño offers no commentary, no moral enlargement, no rescue. A priest, a book, and the thought Peace at last inside a cultured head.

Urrutia Lacroix attended literary parties held in a torture house.

He poisoned pigeons in European capitals while his country was disappearing into cellars. He stood in front of four generals who had just overthrown an elected government and gave them literature classes. While his culture was being dismantled and his colleagues killed, he kept his silence; while a country he professed to love was being converted into a silence machine, he added his own silence to it; and when the coup finally ended what little remained of the argument, he marked his place in the book he was reading and thought Peace at last. 

The prose reporting that thought is beautiful. That beauty is the indictment.

The wizened youth who has been haunting the monologue — who may be, as the book quietly suggests, a younger Bolaño-figure — reappears one last time at the end, and the novel closes on a single sentence that is its own verdict:

And then the storm of shit begins. 

Urrutia does not explain the sentence. He does not need to. The whole country has arrived at last into his prose, carrying everything the prose has kept out, and the book ends inside the storm, with the priest still speaking into what his prose can no longer keep out.