me to live like a poet. Anyway my basic interest was to live like a poet. For me, being a poet meant being revolutionary and completely open to all cultural manifestations, all sexual expressions, in the end, being open to everyexperience with drugs. Tolerance meant—much more than tolerance, a word we didn’t much like—universal brotherhood, something totally utopian.
EA: Doesn’t prose make that sensibility more profound?
RB: Prose has always demanded more work. We were against work. Among other things, we were tirelessly lazy. There wasn’t a single person who could make us work. I worked only when I didn’t have any other choice. Also, we accepted living life with very little. We were complete Spartans, with meager means, but at the same time we were Athenians and sodomites enjoying all aspects of life, poor but luxurious. This was all related to the hippies, the North American model, May of ’68 in Europe, to many things in the end.
EA: Do you owe your sentimental education to Mexico?
RB: More than anything I owe Mexico my intellectual education. My sentimental education? I owe that more to Spain, I think. When I came to Spain, I was twenty-three or twenty-four years old. I arrived thinking I was already a man—through and through—and that I knew everything there was to know about sex, and for me a sentimental education is almost synonymous with a sexual education. In reality, I knew nothing, which I quickly realizedwith the first girl I met. I knew many positions, but positions are positions and sex is sex.
EA: It’s one thing to know methodology—
RB: Exactly. My sentimental education begins at age twenty-three in Europe.
EA: Have you not wanted to return to Mexico for fear of finding a completely different country from the one you left and having lost your connection?
RB: Yes, that’s true. But it’s also true that, although I’ve traveled a lot, I don’t recognize many countries from afar, and between getting to know a new country and returning to Mexico, a country I love but which is swarmed by ghosts, among them the ghost of my dead best friend, and where I believe I would have a very bad time, I prefer to go to other places. I’ve gotten too comfortable to go around choosing to spend a bad time in a particular place. I used to love to go to places where I knew I’d have a bad time. But, now, for what?
EA: Were you an anarchist when you arrived in Spain?
RB: Yes. I found many fellow anarchists and I started to cease being one myself. How did it occur to them? What kind of anarchy was that?
EA: In Spain, the people were coming out from under a dictatorship, and they had the power.
RB: Yes. The trouble is that in Barcelona I didn’t just find Catalan people, who I found to be magnificent, but also people from everywhere in Spain and Europe and South America too. There were people who had come from all over the world, above all from the West, to understand us. One lived very well. There was work. In 1977 and ’78 there were jobs that paid very little but that allowed you to subsist. State pressures had started to relax. Spain had begun to be a democratic country and there were wide margins of liberty. For a foreigner like me, that was a gift for which I will endlessly be grateful.
EA: Did you already believe that Chilean literature revolved around Pablo Neruda?
RB: I thought that even before. The problem is that this isn’t exactly how it is. For me, Chile’s great poet is Nicanor Parra and after Nicanor Parra there are several others. Neruda is one of them, without a doubt. Neruda is what I pretended to be at age twenty: living like a poet without writing. Neruda wrote three very good books; the rest—the great majority—are very bad, some truly infected. But he already lived like a poet and not just like a poet: he performed like a sun poet, like a poet king.
EA: The thing that happened with Neruda—the type of man who appeared to be against the establishment but then lives
EA: Doesn’t prose make that sensibility more profound?
RB: Prose has always demanded more work. We were against work. Among other things, we were tirelessly lazy. There wasn’t a single person who could make us work. I worked only when I didn’t have any other choice. Also, we accepted living life with very little. We were complete Spartans, with meager means, but at the same time we were Athenians and sodomites enjoying all aspects of life, poor but luxurious. This was all related to the hippies, the North American model, May of ’68 in Europe, to many things in the end.
EA: Do you owe your sentimental education to Mexico?
RB: More than anything I owe Mexico my intellectual education. My sentimental education? I owe that more to Spain, I think. When I came to Spain, I was twenty-three or twenty-four years old. I arrived thinking I was already a man—through and through—and that I knew everything there was to know about sex, and for me a sentimental education is almost synonymous with a sexual education. In reality, I knew nothing, which I quickly realizedwith the first girl I met. I knew many positions, but positions are positions and sex is sex.
EA: It’s one thing to know methodology—
RB: Exactly. My sentimental education begins at age twenty-three in Europe.
EA: Have you not wanted to return to Mexico for fear of finding a completely different country from the one you left and having lost your connection?
RB: Yes, that’s true. But it’s also true that, although I’ve traveled a lot, I don’t recognize many countries from afar, and between getting to know a new country and returning to Mexico, a country I love but which is swarmed by ghosts, among them the ghost of my dead best friend, and where I believe I would have a very bad time, I prefer to go to other places. I’ve gotten too comfortable to go around choosing to spend a bad time in a particular place. I used to love to go to places where I knew I’d have a bad time. But, now, for what?
EA: Were you an anarchist when you arrived in Spain?
RB: Yes. I found many fellow anarchists and I started to cease being one myself. How did it occur to them? What kind of anarchy was that?
EA: In Spain, the people were coming out from under a dictatorship, and they had the power.
RB: Yes. The trouble is that in Barcelona I didn’t just find Catalan people, who I found to be magnificent, but also people from everywhere in Spain and Europe and South America too. There were people who had come from all over the world, above all from the West, to understand us. One lived very well. There was work. In 1977 and ’78 there were jobs that paid very little but that allowed you to subsist. State pressures had started to relax. Spain had begun to be a democratic country and there were wide margins of liberty. For a foreigner like me, that was a gift for which I will endlessly be grateful.
EA: Did you already believe that Chilean literature revolved around Pablo Neruda?
RB: I thought that even before. The problem is that this isn’t exactly how it is. For me, Chile’s great poet is Nicanor Parra and after Nicanor Parra there are several others. Neruda is one of them, without a doubt. Neruda is what I pretended to be at age twenty: living like a poet without writing. Neruda wrote three very good books; the rest—the great majority—are very bad, some truly infected. But he already lived like a poet and not just like a poet: he performed like a sun poet, like a poet king.
EA: The thing that happened with Neruda—the type of man who appeared to be against the establishment but then lives
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