Santiago

Forrest Gander

A door is a door. So says poet Raúl Zurita in dispraise of abstraction. And maybe torture (now that everything in your life has changed) inclines survivors, like Zurita, toward identification with the tangible world.

He says in those days of brutality, distrust, and terror, the reign of Pinochet, he began to imagine writing poems in the sky, on the faces of cliffs, in the desert. A city poet all of his life, he began to dream of nature. He started to imagine fighting sadistic force with poems as insubstantial as contrails over a city.

His words Ni Pena, Ni Miedo (Neither Shame Nor Fear), bulldozed into the sand of the Atacama Desert, would gradually fade away joining thousands of men, women, and children who disappeared in shame and fear during the Pinochet years. But schoolchildren from the closest pueblo come with shovels and turn over the ground inside the letters, refreshing them. And so, in situ, new editions of the poem are published.

Zurita's remarkable presence. His nose, expressive as a collie's, marks him for melancholy. His grandmother was Italian and he talks with his hands. His face, tense with gravitas, suddenly zooms forward, breaking into a smile, a laugh that issues from the whole of him. The warmth he emits. But even after his recent operation, it was nothing, he still has four kidney stones and doesn't look comfortable on the hard wooden seat at the small breakfast table in The Orly Hotel.