Antonio Skármeta had managed to leave Chile with his wife and children in those days of curfew, persecutions, prison, murders and exile, and after a year of uncertainty lived in Argentina he arrived in West Berlin favored by the same scholarship that I had. then, in the Resident Artists program where there were writers, filmmakers, painters, musicians from all over the world. Here in this photo we are at the door of our apartment building, number 27 Helmstedter Strasse in the Wilmersdorf neighborhood, a former Jewish neighborhood. In the sidewalk mosaic there is a Star of David. His children Beltrán and Gabriel with ours, Sergio, María Dorel. January 1975. The sky is dark, everything seems gray. It will surely snow.
Antonio and I had long hair in the style of the time, a bushy mustache, except that the baldness was already clearing his forehead, but under the glasses with large rims, also the style of the time, his smile was since then and as always ironic, somewhat evil, she will never burst into laughter, but she will always be laughing at her neighbor and their whims.
Here in this other one we are both very serious, glass in hand, at one of the receptions offered by the DAAD, the entity that invites us, in one of the rooms of the Academy of Arts.
There is no photo of the afternoon in April 1975 when we sat in a café on Kant Strasse. I had given him a photocopy of the ones on photographic paper that smelled of developing acid, of my novel Were you afraid of blood?he was going to tell me about her. By then he had begun to write his own, I dreamed that the snow was burningand the afternoon turned into night because she went through page by page with cordial and implacable thoroughness, highlighting what amused her because in matters of perverse humor no one beat her, and from then on the name Donkey’s Ear became a saint and sign between us because in my novel this Nicaraguan musician appeared, Gastón Pérez, alias Oreja de Burro, a poor trumpeter who had composed an excellent bolero, Sinceritywhich Lucho Gatica sang and Antonio until now discovered the origin of that song.
And then in this other photo, it must be from May 1975, Zoo station. Ariel Dorfman arrives on the train from Amsterdam, and the three of us are on the platform, I have Ariel’s suitcase in my hand because he is going to be our guest at Helmstedter Strasse for the duration of his stay in Berlin. From now on we will call him the Flying Dutchman because he will always be running from one place to another, with the skirts of his coat raised, in the impossible and exhausting task of conciliating or reconciling the exiles who, like in all exiles, are fighting between grievances and endless ideological discussions.
And here is another one, at the doors of the Berliner Ensemble, Bertol Brecht’s theater, in East Berlin. That night we crossed the wall to go see Erich Maria Brandauer, if I remember correctly. The Threepenny Operaa small odyssey each time those trips to the other side of the divided city, we took the elevated train that left us at the Friederich Strasse station, which always smelled of creolin, like the hospitals and prisons, or we went in my second-hand Renault hand through Check Point Charlie, pointed to Brecht’s performances at the Volksbühe or the Berliner Ensemble. Berlin was a strange city then, where the ruins of the war were still visible, desolate wastelands, blocked off streets, the omnipresent wall, barbed wire, no man’s land, watchtowers. Here is this photo, May 1975? Antonio and I in front of the Brandenburg Gate surrounded by barbed wire.
I returned to Nicaragua That year, Antonio stayed in Berlin. We overthrew Somoza, he came to Managua in 1980 to film Peter Lilienthal’s Insurrection, for which he wrote the script, and which was filmed in the streets with the same guerrillas who had fought in the city disguised in guerrilla uniforms. There is also a photo, Antonio in our house in Managua, with Gabo, with Roberto Mata, with Julio Cortázar.
And the last one, the photo of Santiago, the one that came back to my mind this morning in Istanbul when I received the news of Antonio’s death. September, 1990. The revolution was dissolving in Nicaragua in a bitter mirage, but in Chile democracy had returned. And there was Antonio, there was Ariel, and I had arrived invited to President Allende’s funeral by Doña Hortensia, his widow. That photo of the three of them together again was taken by the waiter in a restaurant in Providencia. I am sitting in the center and Antonio, from the left, points at me laughing, Ariel, on the other side, is going to say something funny too. A lot of absence, a lot of pain from the past, and so much has happened, but we will always want to laugh.
Then we will have to speak on a panel at the National Library, I don’t remember what, about literature and commitment, about art and life, the usual stuff. There must be a photo of that panel, the three of them in front of the public in the library’s assembly hall, but I don’t have it.
Memory becomes a matter of still photos. There is no such movie of life. What you are left with are frozen moments. Antonio telling you one day, September 2010, again in Santiago, at his house, that he was going to Los Angeles the next day for the premiere of the opera composed by Daniel Catán based on his novel The postmanwith Plácido Domingo in the role of Neruda. The postman that went around the world when Michael Radford’s film.
And there are no more photos. The album closes there.
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