Tale of a Politicized Bard
RODMAN, SELDEN
Tale of a Politicized Bard Curfew By José Donoso Weidenfeld and Nicolson. 310pp. $18.95. Reviewed by Seiden Rodman Author, "Tongues of Fallen Angels," "South America of the Poets" Pablo...
...In a closing scene Manungo lifts Lopito's daughter to his shoulders, his face transformed by his decision to stay in Chile...
...Or here with the would-be revolutionaries...
...Why was Judit's family so repulsive...
...About one character, eligible for a national prize, he writes: "The regime, of course, had refused to hear of it, since she was a Communist—something she never was—or because she was a dissident, which for the government was the same thing as being a Communist...
...And the author's...
...All of these contradictions are alluded to, although not too explicitly, in the politicking that surrounds Matilde's obsequies...
...He does not pull his punches...
...And what about those fulsome odes to Stalin...
...In Paris' rue Monsieur le Prince...
...The principal characters are Judit, who has rebelled against her aristocratic family almost from birth, and has witnessed the torture of her fellow militants in jail...
...Allende, whatever his good intentions, was overthrown because the 400-600 per cent inflation that threatened to wipe out the most prosperous middle class in Latin America was followed by a last desperate attempt to give free rein to the extreme Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MRI), engaged in seizing unconstitutionally the rich individual farms of the south...
...What caused her to rebel and become a loner...
...He begged her to let him see her naked so that he could masturbate dreaming of her...
...José Donoso's novel, despite these loose ends that are never pursued, succeeds because his two principal characters do change...
...Judit yielded to him then, out of pity, and four months later the MRI had expelled Lopito for stealing money from a student union...
...Did Manungo fail to take Judit to Chiloé in the beginning because he had to do more than seek redemption in the primitive existence there that apparently meant so much to him...
...Wasn't even a drop of pain allowed to go to waste...
...Was Matilde Neruda's deathbed request for a priest ignored because politics in Chile rules everything...
...Judit's neurotic behavior perfectly complements Manungo's...
...Still, now Judit pities the drunken Lopito again when she sees him being carried inside to die after suffering a heart attack in the courtyard...
...Where did Manungo belong...
...It was a courageous act...
...and Manungo Vera, born on the primitive island of Chiloé but an internationally famous pop singer just returned to Chile to expiate his guilt for making a fortune out of his "revolutionary" songs...
...Coincidentally, Neruda died of cancer in San Cristobal on the very day in 1973 that Allende was overthrown by the Chilean military— who are still in power under General Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship...
...He first embraces her after watching her fearlessly fondle and even provoke a sex-maddened Doberman watchdog: "Manungo felt that Judit took danger as the raw material for play...
...The time and place are well chosen...
...Did everything have to be used, then...
...I met the poet and his wife in the San Cristobal house in 1967, and I spent several delightful weeks with them during the two following years at Isla Negra...
...Neruda's double identity symbolized, and still symbolizes, liberalism's split...
...José Donoso's novel opens in January 1985 with a conclave in the San Cristobal house where Matilde, who has just died, lies in state...
...Manungo's son, Juan Pablo (named after Sartre, not Neruda), has never recovered from the Paris experience...
...Assuredly he was...
...They are allowed to go only because the police feel threatened by the enormous publicity that would result from holding the famous pop singer under arrest...
...Was he the great bard of national unity and all-encompassing love...
...Among the fishermen and weavers of Chilo...
...To see them gain a sense of purpose in the final chapters is a moving experience...
...Up to that point the military had stood by...
...Donoso, who had lived abroad and achieved fame both as a novelist and as an anti-Pinochet activist, finally came home and was permitted to publish Curfew in Santiago...
...The hopeless alcoholic, Lopito, is being beaten with sticks in the courtyard because he refuses to stop insulting the police, who had arrested him to begin with for provoking them in the streets...
...Manungo seems an obvious stand-in for the author, though he may also be modeled after Victor Jara, a pro-Allende songwriter killed within days of Pinochet's coup...
...Manungo and Judit will go underground to pursue the revolution together...
...Reviewed by Seiden Rodman Author, "Tongues of Fallen Angels," "South America of the Poets" Pablo Neritda, the great poet, divided his time while in his native Chile between two houses he owned...
...and it concludes the next day with every faction from Right to Left at the funeral trying to capitalize politically on the event...
...Chile's future, if it has a future as a pluralistic society, is in their hands...
...What finally eases the two into an opposite decision, to face the (ambiguous) music, is a ludicrous yet tragic encounter at a local police station...
...Neither of them is likable, but they do become believable...
...And what about the millionaire poet's role in his friend Allende's rise to power and ultimate attempt to subvert democracy in Chile...
...But he was also the party loyalist who, as Chilean Consul in Mexico in 1938, gave the Communist painter David Alfaro Siqueiros, the leader of the armed attack on Leon Trotsky, a passport and a commission to paint murals in Chile until he could safely return to Mexico...
...Even when Judit first encountered Lopito years before, as an informer for the MRI who gave her access to the revolutionary Left, he was a repulsive creature...
...Our friendship foundered following a violent argument about the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the party-line politics of his friend Salvador Allende, who had begun to campaign for the presidency...
...Judit and Manungo accuse the police of one more brutal murder...
...Did both of them have the need to expiate their guilt violently...
...Herein Chile, how could Manungo "demand that the boy be decisive, when even he isn't sure where his acoustic nightmares could take him...
...All of this would be a little more credible if the author had taken the time to tell us more about the early lives of Judit and Manungo...
...Chilean democratic liberalism has always been a house divided...
...They toy with the idea of escaping to Chiloé or to Paris, rather than yielding to the romanticism of the famous song Manungo had been goaded into singing in Neruda's house: I shall walk the streets again Of a Santiago bathed in blood And in a beautiful plaza now free I shall stop to weep for the dead...
...In the one at Isla Negra, south of Valparaiso on the Pacific Ocean, he kept his collection of monumental mermaids, angels and ships' figureheads, wrote most of his poems, and entertained those of his friends who could appreciate his art...
...In the one in Santiago, high on the outcropping called San Cristobal, near the zoo, he and his lovely wife Matilde held more formal functions and (presumably) conferred with officials of the Communist Party, to which Neruda belonged for 40 years...
...His mother "made him choose so many times that the poor kid viewed any situation that presented more than one option with horror-stricken eyes...
Vol. 72 • January 1989 • No. 2
