...of the gaze

…like a good Chilean his first impulse was to invite the man out for dinner or supper, but the Guatemalan refused, on the pretext that for some reason or other he was incapable of going out into the street at that time of day or night, at which point our diplomat hit the roof or at least the table and asked him how long it had been since he had last eaten, and the Guatemalan said he had eaten a little while ago, just how long he didn’t remember, Don Salvador however did remember a detail and that detail was this: when he stopped talking and put the few bits and pieces of food he had brought with him on the sideboard beside the gas burner, in other words, when silence reigned once more in the Guatemalan’s attic room and Don Salvador’s presence became less obtrusive, busy as he was setting out the food or looking for the hundredth time at the Guatemalan’s canvases hanging on the walls or sitting and thinking and smoking to pass the time with a will (and an impassibility) possessed only by those who have spent long years in the diplomatic corps or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Guatemalan sat down on the other chair, deliberately placed beside the only window, and while Don Salvador let time slip away sitting in the chair at the back of the room, watching the shifting landscape of his own soul, the gaunt, melancholic Guatemalan let time slip away watching the repetitive and unpredictable landscape of Paris. And when our writer’s eyes discovered the transparent line, the vanishing point upon which the Guatemalan’s gaze was focused, or from which on the contrary it emanated, well, at that point a chill shiver ran through his soul, a sudden desire to shut his eyes, to stop looking at that tremulous dusk over Paris, a desire to be gone or to embrace him, a desire (arising from a reasonable curiosity) to ask him what he could see and to seize it then and there, and at the same time a fear of hearing what cannot be heard, the essential words to which we are deaf and which in all probability cannot be pronounced…

[By Night in Chile, Bolano, R.]