Read Online Distant Star by Roberto Bolaño - Free Book Online

piece of nonsense (but one thing was clear, at least: he was happy), accompanied by a press cutting, probably from a Santiago newspaper. The article mentioned various “Chilean terrorists” who had crossed into Nicaragua from Costa Rica with the Sandinista troops. One of them was Juan Stein.
    From then on there was no shortage of news about Stein. He appeared and disappeared like a ghost wherever there was fighting, wherever desperate, generous, mad, courageous, despicable Latin Americans were destroying, rebuilding and redestroying reality, in a final bid that was doomed to failure. I saw him in a documentary about the capture of Rivas, a town in southern Nicaragua, with a ragged haircut, thinner than before, dressed like a cross between a soldier and a professor at a summer school, smoking a pipe, his broken glasses held together with wire. Bibiano sent me a cutting in which it was reported that Stein, along with five other ex-members of the MIR, was fighting the South Africans in Angola. Later I received two photocopied pages from a Mexican magazine (so by then I must have been in Paris) which referred to conflicts between the Cubans in Angola and certain international groups, one of which consisted of two Chilean adventurers, the sole survivors (or so they said, and I presume the journalist interviewed them in a bar in Luanda, from which I deduce that they were drunk), supposedly the sole survivors of a group known as the Flying Chileans, whichreminded me of the Human Eagles, a circus that used to do marathon tours of southern Chile every year. Stein, of course, was one of these survivors. From Angola, it seems, he went to Nicaragua. In Nicaragua we kept losing track of him. He was lieutenant to a priest and guerrilla leader who died in the capture of Rivas. Then he commanded a battalion or a brigade or was second in charge of something or withdrew from the front line to train new recruits. He didn’t take part in the triumphal entry into Managua. Then he disappeared again for some time. He was rumored to be among the members of the commando unit that assassinated Somoza in Paraguay. He was rumored to have joined a Colombian guerrilla group. Some even said he had returned to Africa, and was in Angola or Mozambique or with the Namibian guerrilla fighters. He lived dangerously, but as they say in the westerns, the bullet with his name on it was still waiting to be cast. Then he went back to America and for a while he lived in Managua. Bibiano told me that an Argentine poet called Di Angeli, one of his correspondents, had been involved in organizing a reading of poetry from Argentina, Uruguay and Chile at the Managua Cultural Center, during which a member of the audience, “a tall, fair-haired guy with glasses,” made various remarks about Chilean poetry and the criteria used to select the poems for the reading (the organizers, including Di Angeli, had prohibited the inclusion of poems by Nicanor Parra and Enrique Lihn for political reasons); in a word, he said it was a load of shit, at least the Chilean section, but the way he said it was very calm, not at all aggressive, according to Di Angeli, very ironic and a bit sad or tired, maybe,hard to tell. (Of the countless correspondents scattered throughout the world with whom Bibiano maintained regular epistolary contact from his shoe shop in Concepción, this Di Angeli was, by the way, one of the most shameless, cynical and amusing. Although a typical leftist social climber, he was constantly apologizing for oversights and errors of all kinds; his gaffes, according to Bibiano, were legendary. Under Stalin, his pathetic existence could have inspired a great picaresque novel, but in Latin America in the ’70s, it was just a pathetic existence, full of little acts of meanness, some of which were not even intentional. He would have been better off on the right, said Bibiano, but, curiously, among the hosts of the left, Di Angeli’s kind are legion. At least he hasn’t