(Translated from Spanish by Zubaer Mahboob)Many people made the pilgrimage to Nicanor Parra’s house in the coastal town of Las Cruces, but only he chose the ones that he would call his friends. A devoted reader of the daily news, he was constantly on the lookout for accomplices, people who would complete what he liked to call his “mafia”. He would send for you along with others of his assorted spies, and before you knew it, you found yourself in the fragile living room of his home, among the typewriters and the replica statues of Venus de Milo, among the notebooks full of rage, the empty bottles and the posters with which he perfected his “practical works”, or his “public works”, or his “visual artifacts”. Their names would change with the season, those installations that were made up of lost objects and implacable phrases, that occupied the lion’s share of his time after he had abandoned the illusion of being part of the literary mainstream. Every now and then, he would repeat as if it were a great secret: “With Homer began the decline.”
Once you were inside the house, he forbade the use of the respectful “usted”**; likewise, you were not to use the word “Don” (or “Mister”) before his name. The only sort of relationship that he would put up with was collaboration. To Nicanor, we were all of the same age. We were always at the beginning, we were always competing. I used to dawdle around the house, leaving behind copies of my books on various tables just so that he would give me his comments about them. But this was his verdict at the very outset: "The novel DOES NOT SEE reality" (“La novela NO VE LA realidad”).
As for books written by other people, at the time I met him, Nicanor was only interested in their titles. It was as if he had rescued from a thousand pages of mathematical formulae just one single line that had survived, that still stood on its own. He uttered most of these phrases in passing to squatters, to his little grandchildren – to people, that is, who only speak out of necessity and not for the sake of art. Above all, he was greatly interested in the present moment, and here we, his fresh young friends, served as his ears on the ground. As for older friends, his usual crowd, they found this obsession with the “now” to be something of an embarrassment that was best ignored, with more or less courtesy as the case deserved.
He was forever scribbling down in his notebook phrases that he had perfected in conversation. He pondered over many voices, some of which might even be your own.
In that sense, it can be said that the death of old friends and enemies was a form of necessary hygiene. From time to time he might long for the poet Enrique Lihn or the writer Luis Oyarzún or his sister Violeta Parra, but in truth he did so to affirm to himself over and over that he was still alive and they were not, that he was still connected like a lightning rod to the here and now, with almost as much immediacy as his youngest friends.
For Nicanor, I was a colleague from The Clinic, the satirical magazine which was for him the endpoint of all Western culture. He would refer to Patricio Fernández, the editor of the magazine, as "our boss". Later on, the boss became Matías Rivas, the publisher of UDP Editions; all his later works were published under this imprint. According to those who were accorded the rare privilege, editing his books was very easy and at the same time completely impossible. He would pass over pages and pages without any comment, only to get caught up in the small matter of a few words; indeed, a single syllable could delay publication by several weeks. He would call up the editors and give them his opinions about the words or verses in question, all of which he was able to recall at great length.
Nicanor never delivered any work as fully finished. Signing book contracts gave him a world of grief, and he hated words like “complete”, “definitive”, and “final”. With Parra, nothing was ever finished until the last minute, least of all his complete works. As careful as he was with the tiniest detail, he knew that sometimes carelessness and chance could tell us things that we ourselves didn’t know. I never saw him write, indeed I never saw him do anything else. He was forever scribbling down in his notebook phrases that he had perfected in conversation. He pondered over many voices, some of which might even be your own. At least it was yours until he had absorbed it, until he had turned it into one of his artifacts, his trays of cakes, his visual works of art. He may have despised novels and novelists, but like them he lived his own life through the lives of others. You damned vampire, Nicanor, you were like those flawless birds that come to stand on overhead powerlines. A thousand volts jolting through each leg, you smiled with that joy that might have been so much more terrible than we realised, that smile that I thought would last forever. "Forever," a word just on the other side of "now" – Nicanor, forever Nicanor.
** equivalent to the Bengali “apni”.Rafael Gumucio is a Chilean writer. He is currently working on a book on his friend Nicanor Parra. This essay was published upon the death of Parra in the Spanish newspaper El Pais on January 23.