The Power and Glory of a Pinochet Priest

Roberto Bolańo’s fiction is timeless.  It reflects, comments and investigates the nuances of contemporary cultures with humor, sensitivity, and character sketches as intimate as the gaze of lovers in the wake of coitus.  Simultaneously, his stories rip away the pretense of civilization with which those in power like to disguise their murderous intent and brutal actions.  It is therefore fitting that his novel By Night in Chile contains the dying thoughts of a Catholic priest whose complicity—tacit and otherwise—with the western hemisphere’s most notorious modern dictatorship.  Installed with the active assistance of the United States, its CIA, and a half dozen US-based corporate enterprises, the Pinochet regime in Chile was fascist through and through.  The priest’s acceptance of the regime, indeed, his participation in it, can be interpreted as a commentary on those in Chile’s ruling cliques and their participation and profiteering from it as well.  Widening the web of complicity, it should be seen as an indictment of the role of those to the north whose participation was both deep and cruel.

The novel, first published in Spanish on 2000, saw its first English translation published three years later.  Recently, Picador published a new edition with a new introduction from Nicole Krauss.  The protagonist of the novel is Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix.  He is a Catholic priest whose Opus Dei membership suggests a traditionalist even fascist approach to Catholicism.  Better known as a famous literary critic, the text is a ramble through the priest’s memories as he lays dying.  The reader follows his fractured recollections as they recall a trip through Europe to take a look at the damage being done to old Catholic cathedrals by pigeons and their poop.  He discovers the solution chosen by most of the priests—caretakers of their ancient edifices—is the use of trained falcons, who kill the lessr birds and in doing so, scare others away.  Comical on its surface, the exterminator function of the falcons takes a wrong turn when the falcon of one church kills a bird that happens to be the mascot of a local sports team.  Like so many human attempts to control the world around them, the falcon project turns into a new problem that needs to be dealt with.

After Father Lacroix returns to Chile he begins attending parties at a home seemingly owned by a couple—a Chilean woman named Mariá Canales and her husband Jimmy Thompson. The couple have two children, with whom the priest converses with at these gatherings until they are taken off to bed.  It’s not exactly clear what Ms. Canales does for a living beyond being a mother and hosting the gahterings at her residence.  The gatherings themselves seem to be an attempt to lend legitimacy to the fascist dicatorship of Pinochet and, by suggestion, the coup with which it took power.  Of course, there are only too many artists, writers and hangers on only to willing to sidle up to those they believe will give them power and possibly even fame.  As for the husband Jimmy Thompson, the narrator has his priest tell the reader that he is gone for weeks at a time and lets people think he works for a US corporation.  It is only after a party guest gets lost in the house’s labyrinthine basement and discovers a room where torture victims languish in darkness and pain that it becomes known his real reason for living in Chile.  The torture of Pinochet’s opponents was a well-known fact that one did not speak of in polite company.  In other words, it was considered in much the same manner as the dark operations of power are considered in every state; the murders of civilians by police, the torture of prisoners and rebels by intelligence agencies and mercenaries, the intentional murders of civilians in the state’s pursuit of those it deems a threat.

Father Lacroix’s memories in his deathbed reveal the decadence of power and the similarities between the Church hierarchy and the state.  His rejection of sentiment for the opponents of fascism and his sense of awe when in the presence of the dictator Pinochet highlight the human nature of the Church while diminishing it godly identity.  It raises questions regarding those believers who claim a faith in the word of god and a comparable devotion to their national leader.  Likewise, it suggests a corruption built into a church so identified with reactionary politicians and their assumption of superiority.  Written in language that transcends the mundane circumstances it occasionally describes, the magnificence of Bolańo’s storytelling permits the reader to absorb a bigger story than the one written on the book’s pages.

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