Distant Star by Roberto Bolaño Page B

sparkling glasses, yet there was nothing extreme or excessive about their brightness; he didn’t look intensely happy or sad, but content (perhaps because he was warmly wrapped up in his jacket, perhaps because he knew that the patient he was going to see was not fatally ill), walking along calmly, at, say, five o’clock on a winter’s evening.
    But Stein never replaced the portrait of Chernyakhovsky withhis photo of William Carlos Williams. Some of us in the workshop, and Stein himself on occasion, had doubts about the authenticity of the photo. According to the Garmendia sisters, it looked more like President Truman disguised as
something
, not necessarily a doctor, walking down the street in his home town, incognito. In Bibiano’s view, it was a clever montage: Williams’s face with someone else’s body, some other small-town doctor probably, while the background was a mosaic: the wooden fences taken from one picture, the lawn and the lawn-mower from another; then there were the birds perched on the fences and even on the mower-handle, the light-grey evening sky; in all eight or nine different photos had been used. Stein was baffled, but he wasn’t ruling out any possibilities. Whatever its origins, he used to call it “the photo of Dr. Williams” and he didn’t throw it out (sometimes he called it “the photo of Dr. Norman Rockwell” or “the photo of Dr. William Rockwell”). It was clearly one of his most treasured possessions, not that, poor as he was, he had many to treasure. On one occasion (I think we were discussing beauty and truth) Veronica Garmendia asked him why he was so attached to the photo when it almost certainly wasn’t Williams. I just like it, said Stein. I like to think it
is
William Carlos Williams. But most of all, he added after a while, by which stage we had already got onto Gramsci, I like its tranquillity, the idea that Williams is going about his business, walking unhurriedly down a calm street to make a house call. And later still, when we were talking about poetry and the Paris Commune, he said very softly, I don’t know; but I don’t think anyone heard.
    After the coup, Stein disappeared, and for a long time Bibiano and I assumed he was dead.
    In fact everyone assumed he was dead; everyone thought they were bound to have killed that Jewish Bolshevik son of a bitch. One afternoon Bibiano and I went to his house. We were afraid to knock at the door. In our paranoia we imagined that the house might be under surveillance; we even thought a policeman might open the door, invite us in and never let us out again. So we walked past the house three or four times. There were no lights on, and we went away feeling deeply ashamed but also secretly relieved. A week later, by tacit accord, we returned to Stein’s house. no one answered our knock. A woman watched us from the window of the adjoining house, then disappeared, and as well as reviving a host of vague cinematic memories, this intensified the loneliness and dereliction we could feel emanating not just from Stein’s house but from the whole street. The third time we went there, a young woman opened the door, followed by two children, both under three, one walking, the other on all fours. She told us she was living there now with her husband and hadn’t met the previous tenant. She said that if we wanted to find out more we’d have to go and talk to the landlady. She was a kind woman. She invited us in and offered us a cup of tea, which Bibiano and I declined. We don’t want to bother you, we said. The maps and the photo of General Chernyakhovsky were gone from the walls. This man was a good friend of yours and he left suddenly, without telling you? asked the woman, smiling. Yes, we said, something like that.
    Shortly afterwards I left Chile for good.
    Some time later – I can’t remember if I was living in Mexico or in France – I received a very short letter from Bibiano, so telegraphic in style it was almost a riddle or a