“He”
“Namaste!: I greet the god which is within you”
The Most Important Things Happen in the Least Important Moments
This was several years ago. I was traveling to the south in a bus, to the city of Puerto Montt. I don’t remember if it was dawn or dusk. Soon, I had fallen into a sort of light doze, neither asleep not awake. And there appeared a being without form, clear, luminous, which was not I myself, but which in some way, was. And this gave me an immense feeling of safety, because this was an indestructible, eternal being.
It is extraordinarily difficult to be be able to reproduce that event; furthermore, with time, the impression has worn away, like the image of a dream, and all that remains of the experience is a sort of reflection, which is not the same. I know this happened to me. And this seems to be all. It will be all. Because I don’t believe it will ever happen to me again, although I am unsure. It was a gift for me, already at an advanced age. Never before had anything similar happened to me and more and more in my memory this image became as mysterious as the occurrence itself, leading me one day to wonder: How do I remember this? Where and when did it happen? If it were not for the voyage by bus, it would already have been erased. I was sitting in front, on the left and I think in the aisle seat, although I am unsure about this. Who else was there? Was it on the way to or back from Puerto Montt? And this being —this Being — where was it and who was it? Was it something more than a light, a bolt of light?
With what does one remember?
I was born in Santiago del Nuevo Extremo, on the old street of Santo Domingo 661, at 3:45 in the morning of the 10th of September, 1917. I am, therefore, a Virgo. The cannons of the First World War were thundering in Europe. I was born with my eyes closed and without the ability to breathe, or to cry. Years later, my father told me that they had to dump a pitcher of cold water on me. And he showed me the crystal jug, saying, “this pitcher brought you life.” It was on a dresser, somewhere. All this did not happen to me, but to that child, who was later I. Did he leave any trace? The water that gave me life, will it one day take it away? The Great Wave that sunk Atlantis?
Today I’ve returned to look for the old house on Santo Domingo without success. It’s no longer there. There’s another building, beside a small church or school. I remember nothing of this, or next to nothing. I know that it was a dirt road with little cobblestones, more than seventy years ago, and that it was crossed by horse-driven carriages. There was a great library with a balcony that opened onto the street. It was the library of my paternal grandfather. Father and mother were living in the countryside and had come to the city for the birth of their first son. My memory of this house goes back to the age of two, perhaps younger. I see a child sitting on the balcony of that library, holding in his right hand, firmly, grandfather’s ring. A golden ring with a blue sapphire, engraved with the initials of his name, also in gold. The women —the grandmother, mother, servants?— hurtle to take it from him; they are afraid that that he might throw it into the street from the balcony. I still remember the terrible impression. That little boy felt deeply offended that they would believe he could do something like that: Lose such a treasure!
In the mists of times gone by, this is a crisp, precise memory, and it has become even stronger upon writing it down today. And I have to wonder: What do I remember with? Where is all of this stored? This boy was not “I”, he did not yet have an “I”. The appearance of the “I” is very much later, and I will speak of it anon. But this boy, this being, was older than I, or at least more ancient, marveling at people he knew to be newer, less wise and more inexperienced than “he”, wondering that they would do him violence, seizing his ring (the ring of his grandfather Alberich).
This is an extraordinary event that years later, in India and then in Switzerland, with Professor C.G. Jung, I discussed without either penetrating or understanding it completely. And it is better that it be thus, because the mystery will forever be a sign of something that transcends ourselves and that is better to let escape us.
Professor Jung thought it strange that men with bullet wounds to their heads, with the function of their cortex paralyzed, would remember later the images and visions they had in that state. And he would ask: with what do they remember? And the dreams of children still without an “I”, which yet mark them for life. What do they dream with? And who is it that dreams?
In Delhi I had an important conversation with a very intelligent woman, Mrs. Leela Dayal, the wife of a United Nations functionary, of distinguished service in Africa, I believe in the Congo. She told me: “Our difference with the Europeans is found in that they relate in the personal and we in the impersonal. Although not all, of course.” And she began to explain this with an example. The General Secretary of the UN, Hammarskjöld. This was a very special character, shy in his personal relations, introverted, but who had managed to establish with her and her husband, because they were Indian, a profound and very delicate relationship. In the impersonal, precisely.
Hammarskjöld went to visit them in Africa. He came one night by surprise. She was alone in the house. They sat down on the porch and without knowing why she began telling him of a dream she had the night before: a river of clear water surged torrentially. Suddenly, a great stone interrupted its current, dividing its course and making it slower and more difficult. This produced in her an anguished impression and she awoke weeping. Now, retelling the dream to Hammarskjöld, she became emotional once more, unable to contain her tears.
He said nothing. Rather, he changed the subject. Only when saying goodby did he let her know that he had brought her a gift, and left it on a small table in the entranceway. When Hammarskjöld left, she went to find it. And there was indeed a little package, and upon opening it she found a little stone, similar to the one in her dream, but smaller.
An example of an impersonal, eternal relationship.
Nietzsche said: “Objects come to us wanting to be transformed into symbols.”
But they do not come to us through the “I”, but the “He”.
Hammarskjöld died and, perhaps, so has his friend. Where are they now? In that “Stone”, holding back the current of the river of Maya for an instant, of the metamorphosis of forms. Here also is the memory stopped and stored. The memory of the ring, and the pitcher of water.
*
My grandfather, the owner of the magic ring, was don José Miguel Serrano Urmeneta, the son of don Diego Serrano y Castro and doña Dolores Urmeneta y Ovalle. What beautiful and well-groomed hands he had! I remember them at suppertime, laying on the table, displaying that blue saphire with golden incrustations. In the morning he would bring my younger brother, Diego, to his bed and entertain him with his Longines watch chain, a “cholito”, as they used to call it, which I still have, together with a silver plaque with his name and the date of 14 February 1879, of the War of the Pacific in which he participated.
The original name of the family was García-Serrano, later removing the García, as Vicente Huidobro would also do with his surname, García-Huidobro. I’ve never known why. I recall that an old president of the Supreme Court, don Pedro Silva Fernández, once stopped me in the street to tell me that the “Memoir” of the lawyer of don Diego Serrano y Castro calls him Diego García-Serrano. What’s certain is that nobody ever spoke in my family of how don Diego died, it being a well-kept secret. It seems that he took his own life over some grave gambling loss. The portrait of this great-grandfather, painted by W.H. Walton, has traveled with me all over the world, staying always by my side since my adolescence. I had it retouched in Austria by a Spanish restorer, in Melk Abbey. Something endears me to this ancestor, more than to any other whose image I have seen. I find in him a certain resemblance to Edgar Allen Poe, in his hairstyle and attire. And perhaps also in his disgrace. Something of the poet and the artist.
My grandfather, don José Miguel, left without a father at a very young age and being the only man in the family, had to take responsibility for his mother and two sisters. At fourteen he had to leave for the north of Chile to work in Antofa*gasta, in the factory of an uncle, Errázuriz Urmeneta, where he made twelve pesos a month weighing the loaded sacks brought in by the workers. He sent nine to his mother and kept the little remainder for himself. Thus he progressed until entering the State railroad business. With twenty indigenes and a woman to cook for them, he laid the first railroad line from Arica to La Paz. In those days he had met the woman who would become his wife, my grandmother, doña Fresia Manterola Goyenechea, in the city of Copiapó, so important in those years for the mining industry and also for politics; a center of intellectual and revolutionary life, with the founders of the Radical Party of Chile, the Gallos, the Mattas and the Blest-Ganas. Names like Manuel Antonio and Guillermo Matta, Guillermo Blest-Gana, Amalia Julio de Amor, Margarita Montt, Mercedes Aguinaga, Delia Matte, Carmela Matta, daughters of eminent men and even eminent themselves, were to me relatives or known to me from infancy. From Carmela Matta I inherited the private library of Guillermo Matta, with the first edition of “Azul”, signed by its author, Rubén Darío, among other valuable works, in addition to some handwritten letters to President Santa María from when he was his Minister Plenipotentiary in Berlin, during the conflict with the English over saltpeter, after the War of the Pacific. I would have to lose all these valuable belongings, after the Second World War, with the sanctions imposed by the Black List of the “Allies” on those of us who were on the side of the Germans. I had to sell them to survive.
However, the family of my paternal grandmother was not originally from Copiapó but from Valparaiso, on the side of her father, don Martín Manterola Paramá. On the side of her mother, she was the immediate relative of doña Isidora Goyenechea, responsible for the fortune of the Cousiño family, the owners of the Park, of the Palacio Cousiño and of the Vineyards of the same name. I grew up receiving the visits to our home of doña Olga Cousiño and Mrs. Luisa de Mussi, the widow of Cousiño, owner of the Port of Quinteros. I can still see her driving up in her Rolls-Royce, driven by a Japanese chauffeur. Slim and dressed in black, with her French accent. They felt great affection for my grandmother, not devoid, in my opinion, of a sense of guilt for the Cousiños having taken over the inheritance of doña Isidora, depriving her nearer descendants. We also received visits from doña Delia Matte de Izquierdo, with her enormous hats, the old President of the Ladies’ Club, where my grandmother Fresia was the Vice-President. This Club began the emancipation of women in Chile and supported liberal presidents against the conservatives. Despite being Catholic, with her rosary in the evenings, my grandmother was a “progressive” and had nothing of the “Church lady”, doing honor to the libertarian tradition of the relatives and friends of her father. She put my sisters in public high schools, instead of the nuns’ schools where the young women of the era’s aristocracy were educated. And I, very soon, was boarded in the public Barros Arana, founded by President Balmaceda.
Something I now remember with a smile and with tenderness, but which in those days seemed to us children rather strange, was the trouble my grandmother Fresia took to to hide us when doña Olga Cousiño came to visit. She was an emancipated woman, who wore riding breeches and featured in many society scandals, with her parties and manners. My grandmother’s fear was that she might kiss us and infect us with some disease.
The history of my grandmother’s family is extremely interesting, as far as it is possible for me to know it, which isn’t far. It starts in Valparaiso, that legendary port, where I now live, without quite knowing why. I can, nevertheless, go back four generations, when in the last years of the 18th century a brigantine moored which had a strange captain, don José Paramá Bernal, a citizen of Salamanca. He met there, on his way from Sunday mass, a beautiful woman, doña Elena Viñas y Cortés. Fascinated by her, he delayed setting sail again until he could marry her. When he cast off once more, on a voyage with no return, he left two chests, one full of gold coins and another with parchments that referred to two mysterious orders to which Paramá belonged: one, the Order of the White Cape and the other, of the Red Cape. What’s more, Elena was pregnant. A daughter would be born to her.
I can imagine the young and beautiful Elena, intensely watching the horizon of this sea which I now also contemplate, waiting for the reappearance of a ship that would never return. The love which that strange sailor awoke in her was so great that she gave her daughter the name Josefa, in memory of her husband, don José. In this way, if the captain were shipwrecked at sea, she shipwrecked on the land, we might say, paraphrasing Byron.
What happened to don José Paramá? Nobody ever knew. Who was he? The White Cape and the Red Cape are alchemical colors, albedo and rubedo, the final steps of the Opus Regal, for the production of gold (the chest of coins) and the Rebis, the Androgyne. Before his exit and disappearance “on this earth” he fulfilled an archetypal symbolism, which allows me, his descendent, to decipher the symbol and think that he was a link in the chain of that timeless Order, the aurea catena, which obliged him to abandon everything, go beyond the limits and break the bonds of a human love, to lose himself in the mystical death and resurrection. He had to leave, however, in this magic zone in the south of the world, a physical seed that could allow this attempt to overcome man and recover the immortality of the Gods to be continued. Was Paramá conscious of this archetypal drama, or was he only the instrument of a grand design?
His daughter, Josefa, took it upon herself to reveal this mystery in part, or make it even more inscrutable, it being myself who must take it up and to penetrate it, since I am at the heart of it and so am obliged to do so. Pepita Paramá, as she was called, my great-great-grandmother, has always curiously fascinated me, even though I have no reliable information about her and not a single image or description that could make her visible to me or recognizable in “her presence and her figure.” Nothing, absolutely nothing, only by navigating through my own blood, like don José upon the awful sea.
It is here that Josefa Paramá, around the year 1862 —I imagine—, that is, more than one hundred and thirty years ago, and one year before her death in 1863, according to my documents, did something incredibly strange. Contemplating the sea, surely, she began to embroider a delicate and most beautiful garment of silk, a swaddling band, destined for the navel of a yet unborn infant, a descendent that would come to this earth in 1917; in other words, 55 years later. Josefa had embroidered this garment for her great-great-grandson (for me!) as explained in the a message written on its wrapping paper, written in the hand of a great aunt of mine, who also lived and died without straying from this port of Valparaiso, from the suburbs of Playa Ancha. It says: “This venerable garment was embroidered by the hand of our paternal grandmother, Josefa Paramá, and destined for the little belly of her great-great grandson.” It was found by my grandmother, doña Fresia Manterola, upon the death of her older sister, doña María Luisa (“Nina”, as we used to call her), among her belongings in one of the secret drawers of the jacaranda-wood writing-desk of her father, don Martín Manterola Paramá, which I inherited after my grandmother’s death and on which I wrote for years.
I have imagined this date of 1862 for the embroidering of this ritual swaddling band, which was never used, because it had not been destined for the use of a midwife, but for the transmission of a more recondite inheritance, more mysterious and esoteric, overcoming even the very intentions of its maker, perhaps. Although I’m not sure, because Pepita would have been very strange and secretive, enveloped in a great loneliness, after marrying don Martín Manterola Cantuaria, a man of rationalist antecedents and perhaps an atheist, a “voltaireian” as they used to say then, cultured, lettered, a son of Revolutionary France and anti-absolutist democracy, who was responsible for that act of “liberal and positivist fanaticism”, let’s say, of burning on the patio of his house the parchments that belonged to don José Paramá, the Navigator, the Captain of the Ghost Ship, the “Wafeln”, thinking them to be titles of nobility, absolutely contrary to his mentality and republican principals. Thus ,the secret history of the White Cape and the Red Cape also wrecked in the Great Ocean. But not in the designs of Josefa Paramá, who has passed on the secret to her posterity, to “me”, appropriately, or better said, to “Him”, the continuer of the that Chain, which she knew to save from the great wreck and pass on, like the ancient Norns, or the Frisian Mothers, the guardians of the “magic lamps”, of the Sacred Fire, after the sinking of Hyperborea, of Atland.
The colors of the swaddling band are white and red, the albedo and the rubedo, of the Opus Alchimicum which I would have to try and complete by command of the Great Captain of my Blood, don José de Paramá, who was lost at sea. Because I was also born drowning and I wrecked upon the land.
When I practice the opus, the meditation of the King, the Hero and the Warrior, with the sword gripped in my right hand, to awaken, fight and love the Serpent, I wear the Swaddling Band of my magical and divine lineage, over the Manipura Chakra, for which it was exactly destined. And don José and doña Josefa return to life, resuscitated in me.
As I’ve said, I believe this garment to have been embroidered in 1862 because that would be 55 years before the birth of the great-great-grandson, who was I. Five and five, numbers of the Hyperborean Kabala, of the Hiranyagarbakabdha.
That Pepita Paramá had been a woman beyond the common run of her era, one can discover in her tomb in the Cemetery of Valparaiso, which I have now found. There is no cross there, only a great marble cup, upon which sits a bee of the same material, which sticks out noticeably. Was this her decision, or that of her husband, who I have perhaps prejudged and been too hard on? The bee is a symbol of immortality from Egyptian antiquity. In the impersonal, in the return to “He” or “She”, in death, the Golden Bee weaves, embroiders (like Pepita) the “Panel” of immortality. It makes it possible.
**
One day I shall rebuild the tomb of my great-grandmother, the tombstone destroyed by some earthquake, and I will replace the Cup of Immortality, the Grail Cup, over that which still brings libations to the golden Bee and I will inscribe an epitaph, which must be that verse of Lord Byron’s: “He had no rest at sea, nor I on shore.” And adding: “In 55 more years, one of our line will return to wreck upon the land. You will recognize him by the stole which I have embroidered for him.” —Josefa Paramá, 1862
If I must be buried somewhere, I would like it to be here, beside by magical ancestor, this extraordinary woman, who sent to me her message across time and dark years; and across the Great Ocean of the Collective Unconscious (the Impersonal), where sails the Archetype of the Astral Family. Yes, but there is another more recent tomb that calls me and which belongs to the legend of my “I”, more than that of “He”. But, “He” must die that “I” might live” and vice-versa. This is indicated by the record of mystical life. For this was also the reason for ancient cremation, in precious sandalwood, as in India and Baldur’s funeral. Nevertheless, all these solutions are now impossible for me, because Destiny has placed me at a crossroads. Neither one nor the other possibility belong to me, because in either my body will be profaned by the satanic rituals of the Enemy. Today there is no cremation in sandalwood, but in ovens and iron machines. But, I know that “He”, or the Archetype, who resides somewhere, within or without the Galaxy, or don José, or doña Pepita, will find the solution for their descendent, another member of this timeless alchemical Order, of the White Cape and the Red Cape, and they will bring him with his body in a Chariot of Fire (of red Vajra), when the the right hour draws near and not a moment before…
***
The son of Pepita was don Martín Manterola Paramá, married to a woman of Basque origin like himself, doña Manuela Goyenechea, direct relation of doña Isidora, of the immense fortune and also of the Matta Goyenechea family, with Guillermo and Manuel Antonio, already mentioned.
Don Martín, a prestigious lawyer in Valparaiso, where he would die, had only one male son, also named Martín, and three daughters: doña María Luisa, doña Clarisa and doña Fresia, the only one who would ever marry, meeting my grandfather, José Miguel Serrano Urmeneta in the northern city of Copiapó, where don Martín had moved to ply his trade, for a time.
And so we return to the story of my grandfather, don José Miguel, picaresque and archetypal like that of the Paramá’s, although without quite such an explicit atmosphere of esoteric saga.
Don José Miguel is on the rise in the north of Chile, and has become a high ranking chief of the State Railroad. He will be transferred to Santiago, already married to doña Fresia.
He was eating one day in his house when the servant informed him that a man with the look of a beggar had come to the door saying that he wanted to speak with him. Bewildered, my grandfather stood up to receive him. He found himself looking at one of the Indians who had worked under his orders laying the Arica-La Paz line. He embraced him affectionately and ushered him into the house, asking if he had eaten. The Indian said no, and my grandfather himself brought him to the kitchen with the other servants. Later, they met in his office and he asked for the reason for such an unexpected visit. The man told him that he had found a gold mine in the north and had inscribed it in the name of my grandfather. Don José Miguel, surprised, thanked him, desirous to return it to its discoverer. The Indian insisted, and my grandfather became the owner of a gold mine that would make his fortune, as a rare gift of Providence.
This scene, with the simple Indian of the northern pampas, from the desert, perhaps a descendent of the atumarunas of Tiahuanacu, is not difficult for me to imagine. The Indian sat there, before his blond god, with blue eyes, my grandfather so humane and just in his manner, he is brought a present from the deepest parts of the earth and history, as Atahualpa had done for the Spanish “viracochas”: gold (also alchemical gold in its synchronistic image). My grandfather could not refuse.
What became of this mythic messenger, come from the depths of pre-Hispanic history, from the rock, the sand, the metals of this our earth? What could my grandfather have done for him? It was Alberich, once again.
My grandfather knew nothing of mines. But he had a friend, surnamed Villegas, who did know and was then in a bad economic situation. He proposed putting him in charge of the business. For one year his friend worked in the north without much to show for it. My grandfather insisted, financing his labors. And the gold mine gave up its metal secret. It was one of the richest mines in the north of Chile: the “Bolaco”, making the great fortune of my grandfather and the Villegas family. Don José Miguel left the Railroad and moved to Valparaiso in its greatest epoch, and then to Viña del Mar, to a mansion that I was able to visit after it had been acquired by the High School of that town.
Don José Miguel and doña Fresia had only one son, Diego, my father. They lived in that marvelous mansion with carriages, servants and luxurious garments, made in London and Paris. My father was dressed like a “little prince” in velvets and ruffles. He was sculpted in marble and his portrait was painted by artists in vogue in the 19th century. When in London, I also had my suits made in Saville Row, or bought ties in Edward & Buttler, and they remembered there the last names of my grandfather and the Cousiño’s as those of very valued clients. Extraordinary people, those old Englishmen of now more than forty years ago! They declared that only South American gentlemen (and their descendants, of course), the Serranos, the Cousiños and the Menéndezes, still preserved the good tradition in dress which was already lost in England. I remember going to Edward & Buttler with my son, when I was Ambassador to India, and introducing him to one of the owners. This gentleman told him: “Listen son, if you are in London without your father and without enough money to go see cricket, don’t worry and come to me. I’ll take you…”
When we were children and even in later years, my grandmother would open old trunks full of men’s and women’s clothing of fine fabrics. My sisters still keep furs and brocades and I hang in my house curtains of fine burgundy velvet from those bygone times.
In the mining and saltpeter north of Chile, as in Valparaiso at the end of the 19th century, German and English influence preponderated. Commerce and industry made Valparaiso the principal port of the Pacific, with maritime traffic coming by way of the Strait of Magellan. Its mansions, now uninhabited or in ruins, still speak to that past, with their fine woods, their carvings, parquets and marbles. The house in which I live is an example; it was built by a German who lived here until his death. My grandfather, despite being very Chilean, resembled a British gentleman, even in his bearing and manners. My father learned English before Spanish, from a governess who was in charge of his early education and who came directly from England.
A great friend of my grandfather in Valparaiso was Admiral Gómez Carreño, who became famous during the devastating earthquake in the early years of the century. He established martial law in the Port, shooting thieves and looters on the spot. He often visited the house in Viña del Mar and one day he told my grandfather: “If you want your son to become a man, give him to me for my Naval Academy, because here in your house, dressed like a little prince, things will turn out badly…”
My grandfather agreed. And thus it was that my father entered the Naval Academy, and was formed by its iron discipline, its studies and sports. He came to be the “Drum Major” or “Guaripola” of the Academy Band. I have a historic photo of those times, of the courtyard of the old Naval Academy of Playa Ancha, with the whole Band in formation and my father in front, holding the “Guaripola”. The photo is historic because in it also appear the military instructors with their Prussian uniforms and helmets. I have gifted a framed copy with my dedication to the headquarters of the Marine Commandos, my good friends. Thus, my father has returned to be among his own, to the Navy he loved so much and would have to leave before his time thanks to a mistaken decision by his parents, my grandmother’s, I think, an authoritarian and dominating woman. So he was never able to sail around the world in the Academy Ship, although he had dearly wished to. He had inherited the sailing blood of his great-grandfather, don José Paramá, the Captain of us all.
It was there, in that moment and with that decision, when the string of destiny was drawn taut, with decisive and inscrutable consequences that nobody, surely, could have calculated. My grandparents abandoned Valparaiso forever, moving to Santiago. And such drastic and definite determination had to do primarily with love. My father’s great love. Perhaps his only one, the most profound in the whole of his short life.
In Valparaiso and Viña del Mar in those years, at the beginning of the 20th century, the elegant youth of the aristocratic families would meet, the most beautiful women, criollas and the descendants of Germans and English; the Wilms, for example, the sisters of Teresa Wilms Montt, the writer and friend of don Ramón del Valle-Inclán, of a unique beauty, universally admired, the mother of other beauties who had very tragic lives. As was also that of Blanca Errázuriz who, frustrated in her great love, married an alcoholic American, who she shot to death in the United States. The trial moved all of Chile. The young woman was eventually aquitted. She was of a fragile beauty, very pale, almost transparent skin, the face of an ancient medallion or a cameo, adorned by dark hair that reflected the light of precious woods, and seaweed-green eyes. Long legs, a thin waist and hands with long, fine and manicured fingers, such as no longer exist nowadays. She was capricious and perhaps fickle in appearances, because inside, deep inside, she was a tortured being and suffered, concentrating on one love only, as long as she lived. So I wish to believe, because that love was my father. They met when very young in that port and in the Viña del Mar of the 1900s, when he was a cadet at the old Naval Academy. For many years I have also dreamed of a woman like that, as though my father had transmitted her image with his genes. That he loved her passionately I do not doubt, although he never spoke to me of her, though I was his child-confidante of other adventures and other dreams. He did so out of delicacy and respect for my mother, I think. What’s certain is that Blanca Errázuriz was decisive in the life of my father and as a result in mine, in my appearance in this world. She was the reason my grandparents removed him from the Naval Academy and moved to Santiago. They thought that Blanca Errázuriz was a danger, given her temperament and manners, to the future life of my father. In this way they interrupted their love. What Blanca did later might have convinced them that they acted rightly. But a love does not end in its non-realization here. On the contrary, this makes it imperishable, eternal. And so I believe it was for my father and also for her. If this love had lasted into matrimony, it would certainly have been destroyed. Like the Love of Elena for José Paramá, it grew in dreams and distance. If don José had returned, what would have happened? Paradise exists once it is lost. Only once it is lost… And it is never recovered. It must not be.
I notice that in all these stories I have only been speaking of love. Love as the essential background to all family events, which in one way or another affects individual lives in the mysterious game of Fate. And all this has also been linked, and will continue to be, with the history of a people and of a country, which at one time was hom*ogenous in its ruling class; because we were few.
I have loved my father above all the things of this world. He was my first friend, my first comrade. Between he and I (between he and “He”, first) a relation of equals was established, since I was no more than two years old. At times, he was older than I was, but other times he wasn’t, because I saw him as a less experienced person, who I wanted to protect and advise. I penetrated the depths of his soul and suffered with him. This, beyond words, which would have been insufficient, or hard to understand for their incarnation in a boy.
His body was thin, tall, lanky, as can be seen in his photo from the Naval Academy. Of a dark cast, black, straight hair, his green eyes stood out, and his goatee, which made him irresistible to the opposite sex, as did his great charm. He was athletic and manly, a boxer, equestrian, fencer and swimmer.
After years of separation, he met again with Blanca Errázuriz, I think when he was already married to my mother, in some furtive moment, and they loved madly, passionately. I learned this not from him, as I’ve said, but from a great friend of the family, the doctor Arístides Aguirre Sayago, who told me one day of the confession my father made to him of his pain and depression for having realized that ideal love. Now nothing was left to him, he had lost everything; the dream, the superb and sublimated dream had been “unstarred”. Beethoven, in a similar trance, is supposed to have fled from a lover who was throwing herself at him, crying out “Nothing would be left for my music!” And then there was the Greek lover who went to the slopes of Mount Olympus and there grabbed fistfuls of snow to rub on his chest, to calm the fire of love which consumed him, screaming the name of his beloved. She heard, and went to him. The man looked at her strangely and asked her, “Why have you come?” “I came because I heard you calling me,” she told him. “Ah!” —he said— “the thing is, this Love that I feel, does not leave me time for you…”
Father! I understand you, because our lives have been pointed like darts in the direction of the eternal feminine and the woman in this earth, the greatest adventure on which we’ve staked our lives and our immortality. We have inherited this from our ancestors, perhaps from that Captain, who put in us a seed with a touch of Alchemy and left in the direction of the Paradise Lost, of Hyperborea, the City of the Caesars, now unrecoverable in the Great Sea, like Pytheas; or escaping, like Beethoven, to save his dream, beyond “the presence and the figure.”
How difficult, how tremendously difficult is all this for us, who have so passionately loved the body of woman, even knowing the laws that the Sea establishes, the Great Ocean! And the “Mahabharata”, which states: “Like two pieces of driftwood that meet in the Great Ocean and then separate, thus are the meetings of creatures”… But I remain in the fight, father, and if I manage to come someday to the enchanted riverbanks of Hyperborea, where She will be waiting for me, the Eternal Beloved, I know that I shall go with you and that She will also be called Blanca, or will have the Face of Blanca, in addition to that of my Beloved, because you and I will remain united, since it is also through you that I have received the dream of Eternal Love…
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