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This afternoon I went to a shopping center filled with small used book stores and found something I’d been looking for: Entre paréntesis (In Parentheses), a book of essays, reviews and articles by Roberto Bolaño, the Chilean writer who’s gotten all sorts of acclaim in the US lately. After I bought it, I went to a little plaza next to the shopping center. There was a fountain in the center, and a sculpture of indeterminate character, which was simply a cube carved out of stone and balanced on one of its corners, so that it looked like a die suspended in the middle of its roll. I sat down on one of the benches and opened up my new book, browsing through it until I came to a brief piece about William S. Burroughs. It contained this description of the American writer:

Literature . . . interested him, but not too much, and in that he was similar to other classic Americans who concentrated their powers on the observation of life or of experience. When he spoke of his work, one had the impression that what he was doing was remembering various moments spent in prison cells.

While I was reading, an old woman, or a woman aged and enervated by life ahead of schedule, came shuffling through the plaza. When I say shuffling, I mean exactly that: one foot scooting just ahead of the other, as if she were a marionette under the operation of an inexperienced puppeteer. Her meticulous, abbreviated gait reminded me of certain of the mentally retarded adults that my father works with, though her face showed no signs of any of the many conditions my father’s clients were born with, only those conditions, and frustrations, that she, apparently, met with during her life, in abundance.

I watched make her way across the plaza, slowing down almost imperceptibly near the fountain and then veering off to the left, to arrive at another bench. She sat down, but only for a few moments, then pulled herself up and started another pilgrimage across the plaza, back in the direction she had come from, to finally arrive at one of the little restaurants in the shopping center. She got to the storefront and reached out her hand to the stool that was placed there, running her fingertips across the seat, and it looked like she might sit down, but a man came along, a man who earlier had been sitting in that stool, and, in the quickest motion that I saw her make, he withdrew her hand from the seat and resumed her arm’s previous position, hanging limply at her side. She made her way back across the plaza, then through another corridor and out of my sight.

I watched her during her whole ordeal, fascinated. Watching her stunted, syrupy movements, I thought of a game, or an activity, from my childhood, where I would hold a pencil in my hand, place the tip of the pencil on a blank sheet of paper, then have someone else move the sheet of paper in order to write out a word or a sentence. The words always came out enormous and misshapen, but I always liked to watch the lines coming from the pencil form themselves into legible, recognizable shapes, slowly and determinedly, and though it was someone else who was physically moving the paper, if I narrowed my sight of focus, it would look as if the pencil were learning how to write on its own, as if it had become sentient of itself and wished to fulfill its purpose.

I thought of this game as I was watching this woman, and then I wondered what word or message her peregrinations might spell out, were I able to rise above the plaza like a bird and observe the whole scene from a position of greater, more hidden authority, and I wondered what such a message could mean and who it could be intended for, and then I wondered what William S. Burroughs might make of this woman, what his powers of observations might discover in her movements, or what message he might infer in her movements, and then present it to all of his readers, and then what Roberto Bolaño might think of it, of what the American writer William S. Burroughs thought of his native country, as expressed and embodied in the retarded yet certain movements of this old woman, and what he might think of the message that Burroughs read in her movements, and then I wondered why I thought there might be a message in her movements. And then I realized: that was what Daniel Quinn discovered in the movements of Peter Stillman, in Paul Auster’s book The New York Trilogy, and that the actions of this real woman were making me think of the actions of a fictional man, and that literature interests me, too much.

Seasonal Music

Merry Christmas, everyone/ Feliz Navidad a todos.

POV

Sometimes these things just write themselves. Here I am, around midnight in my apartment, trawling around on the internet, while outside of my window in Plaza Italia, I can hear a group of people singing and playing and dancing a cueca, a famous dance here in Chile. And of the two options, I'd rather be here, on my computer, than down in the plaza, watching and listening to real actual Chileans doing a real actual Chilean dance. Maybe I should feel guilty for this, but I am simply not interested in Chile right now.

This thought is somewhat comforting, in a roundabout way. From what I remember of my semester in Spain, my feelings about the country described a downward-arcing parabola. First, the ecxitement of being in a new place, then the process of the place growing more and more familiar until one is sick of it, and then a new, considered appreciation of the country.

I'd like to think that I'm currently heading towards the zenith of this cultural parabola, which means that, eventually, I should come out of it with a new appreciation of this place and people. The fact that gives me pause, though, is that my arrival here didn't give me excitement so much as anxiety, concerning money, housing and language acquisition. However, I now have a job, and an apartment (though I'll be moving into a new one shortly), and as for language, well, I don't think I've improved all that much, but I'm not as worried about learning it, simply because worrying about it so much has me exhausted. A fact that makes me think that I am following that parabola along its course, and that perhaps I'll come out higher than I am right now.

Make no mistake, I am, at the moment, sick of Santiago. It's big, and loud, like any other city, and simply doesn't have much that makes it unique. More specifically, the neighborhoods and buildings that are specific to the city--the older colonial buildings and neighborhoods--are being either neglected or transformed to look like the rest of downtown, which resembles any other major city, anywhere else. Hell, even the Christmas decorations feature snowflakes here, and it's summer this side of equator. I've talked to many people about this , actually: the fact that Chileans have something of an inferiority complex, continually saying that Peruvians speak better than them, or that Argentina has come culture. Because of this anxiety, which is, in part, attributable to the fact that Chile is isolated from the rest of the continent by the Andes mountains, this country seems particularly eager to accept the customs and fashions and habits that are readily available from other parts of the world, an eagerness met most easily by, of course, the United States.

And what's the last thing an American wants to see when he travels? America! Why else would we leave the damn place?

I could continue, but think I'd better not. I'll end by saying that I am, indeed, sick of Santiago, but I think I'm sick of it in the way that everyone else here is, what with the traffic and the noise and the pollution. And maybe, if I can dislike Chile like a Chilean, I can like it, too. Eventually.