It was a shabby 1970s flat which surrounds the Calvo Mackenna Hospital. There Adrián Solar and Antonio Skármeta interviewed the applicants for the workshop that the latter would give that year 1989 to celebrate in some way the return to Chile after a long and fruitful exile in Germany. I was 19 years old. I felt alone against everyone, and I accepted the idea that the mirrors were lying on us and that they agreed to show another face that was not ours.
I should remind him of the character in his novel nothing happened (1978), with a young exile who experiences the double foreignness of coming from Chile and being a teenager in Germany. As in many of his novels and stories, the young man finds his place in fighting and taking on the world, which was unacceptable to me when I read it in Paris as a teenager and in exile. I was very careful not to tell, and I thought that I would be forgotten among the 188 applicants in this workshop where the only thing that prohibited us was being over 30 years old. A few weeks later the acceptance letter arrived and my life changed.
Generosity was the sign of what Skármeta decided to live his life by. The dedication to others, the wonder and curiosity to the other, all this in a remarkable, huge way, which was a body built perfectly for the harsh winters and sweet summers of Croatia where his parents came from. All this was fundamentally at odds with the reduced meanness of the Chilean who always treated him a little, if not like a foreigner, then like a stranger. Pure and simple product of the secular merits of Chile—the National Institute, the University of Chile—the labyrinths and anti-personnel mines of the social classes were completely and voluntarily alien to him. He was perceptive and far-sighted, but when it came to his own country and its writers he calculated almost nothing. It was perfectly logical for him then, on his return to the country that had just been freed from the dictatorship, that he would spend the best part of his time teaching a workshop for young writers who had been selected in a competition. A workshop in which, by the way, thanks to the contribution of a German non-governmental organization, he was paid to attend. The first money I received in my life, an attractive stipend that made me believe that my life as a writer would be so simple, so happy and so profitable.
That was precisely the first thing I learned in this workshop at the Goethe Institut, not to be ashamed as a writer, to be someone without false modesty or false pride. That was Skármeta, a writer and nothing more (and nothing less) than a writer, although for him, being a writer also meant directing films, radio plays, his program own television host, or even become an ambassador. In all those different positions he did not forget to get him a prize, a scholarship, or simply to present writers, film directors, poets and academics that he constantly found, drawing him the whole Noah’s Ark of different artists with him. I remember when, in order to reward Juan Villoro, he forced me to pretend that I was a specialist in his work, that I had not read a single book. There was no internet and the only books Juan had available were two children’s books. Fortunately the conference was cancelled, but not the lunch where I met Juan, who would be one of those essential friends that Antonio gave you for the madness of the people he loved .
His books talked about that, about the meeting of a postman in love with Pablo Neruda who acts as a matchmaker, or that of a cyclist with the mysticism of Santa Teresa, the fat man on the course with the revolution. That revolution, Popular Unity, which Skármeta lived with enthusiasm, the title of one of his story books and a summary of the energy that best defines him. A revolution that was more the daughter of James Dean and John Lennon than Che or Karl Marx. A revolution without rage and almost without violence when we could somehow release the impulses of innocent freedom that lead so many of his characters towards their own emancipation.
Skármeta’s literature is a literature of freedom and generosity, a freedom and generosity that in a few moments manages to overcome the demons, the fear, the night and day terror of its own time and mine. A message full of clarity and charity in which I confess, I always expected the trap to appear, the dark side of the moon, without finding anything other than that clumsiness of a child suddenly grown up and in all directions in perpetual readiness for the game. that it allowed me and many others to continue with words and against them, playing all the games.
Rafael Gumucio He is a Chilean writer