Fiona’s Reviews > Chilean Poet > Status Update

They spend about another hour in the café talking about poetry, Chilean poetry, and drinking espressos. At times they talk as if they’d just met, as if they were on a blind date. There are silences, but they never grow uncomfortable, perhaps because the books remain on the table. Every once in a while Vicente rereads a poem, and at one point he also opens The Magic Mountain to a random page and reads:

There are people who in moments of desperation pick up the Bible or the I Ching or The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Gonzalo does the same but with poems. He looks for poems; that is really his job. If he had to define his job precisely, if he had to explain it honestly, he would say it consists of trying to understand the world through poems other people have written.

By the next Christmas Vicente had stopped believing in Santa Claus, but he decided to pretend he still believed. Out for revenge, he asked for so many things that Carla and Gonzalo had to explain to him that, even though Santa was in charge of buying and transporting the presents, a few days later he sent an invoice to the parents, who had to pay for it all with a credit card.

They believe themselves generous because they pay two hundred bucks a month, but they’ve never done homework with their children, who love them anyway and include them in all their drawings. Even if they don’t show up. Because sometimes they just don’t show up. Biological fathers, divorced fathers, part-time dads, they’re all the same shit. Sometimes they don’t show up and it’s fine.

A tall boy, thin and large-headed with huge, wet, black eyes, who was eating or more like devouring a handful of something: that was Gonzalo’s first image of Vicente. The child descended the stairs with coy, tentative steps, and his mother’s suitor greeted him with the somewhat exaggerated and pathetic cheerfulness characteristic of people who aren’t used to kids.