CAC Brétigny

“In the current socio-political climate, he said to himself, committing suicide is absurd and redundant. Better to become an undercover poet.”
Roberto Bolaño, Distant Star, 1996

“It was a night in Valparaíso, a port night. We’d heard there was a poetry gathering where Néstor Perlongher would be, so off we went. The truth is, Néstor and I clicked instantly, lots of ‘girl this’, ‘girl that.’ Apparently, Carrera didn’t like it at all; he said we were crossing the line. But that was nonsense; Perlongher was happy. I remember giving him a white bridal glove and heading out to party. But he couldn’t keep up. He wasn’t well anymore. He told me the Santo Daime therapy wasn’t working. His reading, I remember, was incredibly beautiful. So intense, so political. Néstor Perlongher moved me deeply. There are only a few poets one can quote, and he was one of them. […] After the biennial’s closing panel, the readings carried on in bars. At the Cinzano, the group said goodbye to Perlongher. He was already weakened and couldn’t join them on their night-time round.”[1]

I was researching the Chilean duo Yeguas del Apocalipsis for my doctoral thesis when I came across this passage in La convulsión coliza: Yeguas del Apocalipsis (1987–1997). My original focus was the relationship between the poet Pedro Lemebel and the artist Lorenza Böttner, who is the subject of my research. But along the way, I stumbled upon this brief encounter between las Yeguas and Argentine poet Néstor Perlongher​​. It was a night of poetry, queens, drinks, and drifting from bar to bar. And at some point, Perlongher leaves, slips away from the group because, as Lemebel tells us, he wasn’t feeling well. Perlongher died in 1992, at forty-two, from complications related to HIV.

Reading that scene, I found myself, for a moment, leaving the group and staying with Perlongher. I imagined his walk back to the hotel through Valparaíso: whether he took a taxi, or whether, despite his exhaustion, he chose to walk, pausing every hundred and fifty meters to rest and take in the view. I don’t know if that city has benches, but in my version, it does. There are benches. It’s a humid night, warm and full of light. He walks, he stops, he sits, he looks at the city. He repeats this twice before deciding on a taxi, the fatigue already blurring the landscape. There’s nothing better than sitting in a moving car and watching the world slide by, like in a film. He arrives at the hotel, a decent place, not luxurious, a local three-star. Wallpaper. Sheets are not new, but nice. He takes a shower, but soon finds himself a little unsure about stepping out of the bathtub. He manages the complex acrobatics: one hand on the wall, the other on the tub, one leg, then the other. Stepping into the room, naked and still a little wet, he remembers his medication. On the way, he sees the bridal glove Lemebel gave him. What a sweetheart, Lemebel. He slips it onto his right hand, the same hand that then reaches for the six pills he must take before bed. Water poured into a wine glass.

The intimate scenes of those who withdraw to rest, take care of themselves, and be alone rarely find a place in our collective imagination or in the sparkling shelves of Western visual culture. And when they do appear, they tend to be framed in flat, grey, tragic, horrifying terms; the way we so often speak of illness, of approaching death. The deaths caused by the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which took our friend Perlongher, that poet who surely would have kept partying through Valparaíso with his poet friends, are undeniably tragic and horrifying. But when the body asks for rest, does poetry, does glamour, come to an end? Maybe we should find out.

The American businesswoman, Alyssa Silva, once posted about her decision to wear a pink maxi dress to a routine hospital appointment because of her Spinal Muscular Atrophy. Perhaps a radical, almost binary example of rewriting the script of a hospital visit. Of breaking away from the joyless pastel tones, the worn vinyl floors reeking of disinfectant, the beds rolling by with sheets as sad (or sadder) than the pastel colors themselves. In such places, the only hint of glamour belongs to the doctor’s white coat. Everything else is pure tragedy. At least, that is how the story is told. Which is why I understand Alyssa Silva’s gesture, even if I have never had the nerve to do it myself. We could organize ourselves and make it a rule: when someone falls ill, they should go to the hospital in comfortable gala clothes. We could invent a new social ritual in which the hospital becomes a site of aesthetic interest. A whole new market would open up: haute-couture for the unwell. The doctor’s white coat would fade into dullness, or even disappear altogether, just as it does with the medical staff in Gideon Mendel’s book, The Ward.[2]

In one photo from that book, two men look into the camera, smiling. The man on the left is Black, with a broad smile and short hair. He seems so overcome with laughter that he leans forward slightly. He wears a white shirt, a printed tie, a coat. He is embraced by a White man, also smiling warmly: short hair, an earring, a silver chain with a large pendant, a white t-shirt, a coat. To the right, a nightstand. On it, a small vase with a few flowers and some medication bottles. On the lower shelf, piles of papers and pamphlets. The man on the right is sitting on a bed with patterned sheets. An image that reveals itself in more than one way. Two friends having fun. Only later do I notice: the man on the left is in a doctor’s coat, so he must be the doctor; the man on the right is in a dressing gown, so he must be the patient. But in the end, that distinction hardly matters, or at least it doesn’t seem to have been the photographer Gideon Mendel’s main concern. In 1993, Mendel spent weeks inside London’s Middlesex Hospital, photographing the daily lives of John, Ian, Steven, and Andre, all HIV positive patients who did not survive long enough to see treatment become widespread. It’s a black and white book filled with kisses, couples resting in each other’s arms, family gatherings, conversations, friends, bathing routines, death approaching. It is stark, and nothing like the delirious fantasy of the hospital gala I dreamed up a few paragraphs ago. Yet it is, at the same time, indescribably beautiful and tender.

In 1992, a year before Mendel entered Middlesex Hospital, the same year our poet Perlongher died, the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño was admitted to Barcelona’s Vall d’Hebron Hospital: his liver was wrecked. In the boring routine of that hospital, while reading several newspapers a day and watching endless television, he came across the triumphs, jokes, and anecdotes of Lorenza Böttner (the very one I had been looking for in the story of las Yeguas del Apocalipsis). “Sometimes I had laughing fits reading the interviews. Sometimes they made me cry. I saw him on television too. He played his role very well. Three years later, I found out he had died of AIDS. The person who told me wasn’t sure if he had died in Germany or South America (he didn’t know he was Chilean).”[3]

In 1992, Lorenza became the Paralympic star of the Barcelona Olympics. She performed as the mascot Petra, created by the Spanish artist Javier Mariscal, who was responsible for the entire visual identity of the event.

Bolaño brings Lorenza back in Distant Star. There, she emerges in the narrative of a life story that is at once true and false. I suspect the most fantastic parts are real, the dullest made-up. But in the end, that distinction hardly matters.

“So Lorenzo grew up in Chile without arms, an unfortunate situation for any child, but he also grew up in Pinochet’s Chile, which turned unfortunate situations into desperate ones, on top of which he soon discovered that he was homosexual, which made his already desperate situation inconceivable and indescribable. Given these circumstances, it is not surprising that Lorenzo became an artist. (What else could he do?) But it’s hard to be an artist in the third world if you are poor, have no arms and are gay to boot. […] . His friends used to ask him how he wiped his ass after shitting, how he paid at the fruit shop, how he dealt with money, how he cooked. How, for God’s sake, could he live on his own? Lorenzo answered all these questions and for almost every difficulty he had an ingenious solution.”[4]

Ingenuity: the beauty of the detail. The overturning of repeated ways of doing things, always the same gestures with the same body parts. Mouth for this, arm for that, legs for walking. A body that, by its very unimaginable existence, provokes such banal, ordinary questions, “how do you wipe after taking a shit?”, and in doing so, exposes the lack of imagination in what passes for normality.

The devil is in the details, and through them you can blow the world wide open.

Júlia Ayerbe
Translated from Spanish by Maria Paris Borda.

Publication made in partnership with Bétonsalon—Centre for Art and Research.

 

Notes

[1] Fernanda Carvajal, La convulsión coliza: Yeguas del Apocalipsis (1987–1997). Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Metales Pesados, 2023, p. 70. My translation.

[2] Gideon Mendel, The Ward. London: Trolleybooks, 2017.

[3] Roberto Bolaño, Distant Star (1996), translated from Spanish (Chile) by Chris Andrews, New Directions Publishing, 2004, pp. 52-53.

[4] Ibid, pp. 49-51.