By Jessica Sequeira.
In the ninth minute of Largo Viaje (1967), a film by Chilean director Patricio Kaulen, a little boy wearing shorts and a bowl cut enters the house with his grandfather. A mid-century Santiago house with a huge open door, through which people come and go, a flowing passage between worlds; a large but poor house, in a neighborhood where everybody works with their hands. A man in an apron greets the child: “Weno, y dónde andís tan tarde.” He speaks with the closed accent of the countryside, which swallows transitions; his treatment is brusque. The man works as a shoemaker, his job is to clean or repair shoes for others. There are the shoes, lined up on a rack like sardines in a can. Change of camera angle when we enter, below chest level, as if we too were working in a corner, sitting or crouching. There is a woman, the child’s mother. She is pregnant but works hard, too hard, washing other people’s clothes in a basin and carrying them around in a heavy basket. Her husband scolds her, but knows she needs to work; he treats her like their son, with tender abruptness. Money, work, endless labour: memories of a kind of childhood. The woman will give birth to a stillborn, and there will be an old-fashioned funeral, the baby mounted before all with wings attached, transformed into an angel.
This film was controversial because it used a real deceased baby, death an unsentimental incorporation into art. Afterward, there is singing and wine drinking, round after round, the lyrics changing slightly each time: a paya or mantra, each fresh verse accompanying a rosary bead. Violeta Parra composed her “Rin del angelito” after this traditional rite; it’s not a difficult song to play on guitar, because it’s just three chords, hypnotically strummed over and over. The words mutate verse to verse, the final lines always beginning “cuando se muere la carne . . .”, when the flesh dies, but ending a different way. When the flesh dies . . . the soul looks for its place inside a poppy, or little bird; the soul tries to find its centre in the gleam of a rose, or newborn fish; the soul pursues its reveille in the mysteries of the world its window opens for it; the soul races upward to greet the moon, and along the way, the bright star; the soul seeks an explanation in the heights for its life cut off with such haste, its death as prisoner in a tomb; the soul remains in darkness. The boy cries for his dead brother, and wants to return the wings of the ceremony to the “angelito”. He thinks if his baby brother is buried without them, he’ll never get to heaven.
So, he grabs them and runs after the coffin, but gets lost in the city, where he lives out dozens of scenes of misery and delinquency, and never finds his way home. He becomes a “huacho”, an orphan, one of many in that generation before mobile phones and digital identification. All thresholds in the film are precarious: between childhood and adulthood, between home and city, between carnal imprisonment and liberation in essence, between life and death. What is “cielo”, heaven? Death ends in “cielo”, but one also calls a boyfriend “cielo”. The “cielo” evokes happy and laughing children, united and prosperous families, tender and lasting love. In the popular imagination, dead babies go to heaven to pray for those left on earth; they become tiny lawyers, representatives and advocates of those lucky or unlucky enough to stay behind. In this idea, and Violeta’s lyrics, which she picked up from conversations with people in bars and plazas during her travels through Chile, there is a belief in terrestrial reincarnation, similar to that of certain Eastern religions. Each death is mysteriously linked to the seed of new life; substance becomes abstraction, which in turn becomes substance. In the ninth minute of Largo Viaje, these themes are condensed or foreshadowed in the anguish or stoicism of a miniature portrait of 1960s Chile.
I don’t know why, but I see those rows of shoes on the rack, with their worn yet shiny leather, as tired but resilient souls.
Previous essays in the Minute 9 series curated by Nicholas Rombes:
1. Nicholas Rombes
2. Alex Zamalin
3. Grant Maierhofer
4. Emma Jones
5. Des Barry
6. Lindsay Lerman
7. Joshua Glenn
To pitch a submission, contact Nicholas Rombes at nrombesudm@gmail.com
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jessica Sequeira is a writer, editor and literary translator in Santiago. Currently she is working on an album that sets Chilean poems to music.
