I started this column almost as a response to Norge Espinosa‘s column (“The old libraries are falling apart”), published on this same site. Espinosa’s wanderings (patiperreos in Chilean slang) through Havana in search of the lost volume reminded me of the thousands of afternoons I wasted in my native Santiago, pounding the streets in search of that book that would explain everything to me and that I have never found.
I have never been, strictly speaking, a bibliophile, someone who seeks a book for the inherent beauty of the volume, for its rarity, for—let’s say—the exquisiteness of a very difficult-to-find edition. I had two things against me: the first and most important was that in the early 1990s, when I started building my library, I was a young literature student who did not have the necessary resources for such an undertaking. I am the son of the Chilean middle class, and although my father was very generous, that generosity did not necessarily extend to my feverish desire to acquire every book within my reach.
The other disadvantage had to do with the fact that Chile at that time did not yet receive all the new releases from the strongest Spanish-language book markets (Argentina, Mexico, Spain), so we waited like cats in front of a distant butcher shop, gloomily awaiting the arrival of those volumes that would satisfy, at least momentarily, our needs.
Given this situation, some of the alternatives were: 1) San Diego and its second-hand bookstores, and 2) university libraries, both our own and others’, where we could satisfy, at least partially, our urgent need to read.
San Diego was, and still is, one of those places (what they now call heritage sites) where Santiago, at least for me, becomes friendlier and more mine. Originally a shopping arcade on San Diego Street, behind both the National Institute and the University of Chile, id est, at the gates of the civic district, which has never lived up to its name, San Diego was the epicenter of old books (nowadays “second-hand”), those gems that awaited avid readers and hordes of literature students who only existed in my head. Rumor had it that Rivano, the infamous Paco Rivano, author of, among other notable titles, El rucio de los cuchillos, had treasures of incalculable value and far beyond the reach of the hungry (that is, me).
Rumor also had it, although I don’t know how bad the gossip was, that immediately after the coup, Rivano had acquired entire libraries from various figures and representatives who had no choice but to flee Chile for less than peanuts. Who knows? The truth is that it was there that I began the purchases that would also be part of my fragmented, haphazard, and always insufficient education.
One title was always next to another I didn’t know, a title that from that moment on would become the small, nagging obsession of that young man who was determined—is determined—to fill gaps that were impossible to fill by talking about books he didn’t know and would take a long time to get to know. But there they were: the Ercilla editions of Panait Istrati, Coirón, by a certain Daniel Belmar, but beyond that there were also Los túneles morados, by the same author and of a contemporaneity that few have noticed, editions on Bible paper of each and every one of the authors we had not read but would have to read immediately on pain of having nothing to say in conversation, those large print runs by Aguilar that kept me awake at night, but also the books by Nascimento that were still piled up in the display cases in front of which we used to fall asleep. The first books by Joseph Conrad accompanied by a first edition of Pablo de Rokha (U, first, then Escritura de Raimundo Contreras, then Idioma del Mundo, years later Fuego Negro, among others) which immediately acquired a place of privilege on the still gleaming shelves, the 1923 edition of Desolación, a year after it was published in the United States, all of Lihn a few years later, when San Diego had been replaced in my visits to the bookstores that were (are?) located almost next to the Tajamar Towers, where, with a more or less stable job, it was possible to sustain the vice without resorting to those arts that are best not mentioned in a magazine as noble as this one.
That was also when I discovered my fondness for Persa Bío-Bío, a commercial area south of Avenida Matta in the República neighborhood, where you can find everything under the sun, including books you never dreamed of finding. I had already finished my degree and my first postgraduate studies, but the anxiety to fill my head with authors is imperceptible (a word that is not in the RAE dictionary, but you know what I mean). At the flea market, you would come across luxury furniture next to a neo-Nazi shop, which, alongside German World War II uniforms, whose authenticity we always had our doubts about, sold editions of Mein Kampf at prices equivalent to their supposed value. The Persian market was much more than that, and to this day it is a must-see destination for anyone who wants to understand something about the capital of Chile, bibliophile searches included.
I mentioned above that the other source of despair for bibliophiles in the mid-1990s was the university libraries of the institutions where one (or one’s friends) attended. That is a chapter too long to deal with now, but perhaps, if the generosity and acquiescence of the editors of Bookish & Co. allow, I will be able to address it in a future chapter of my personal Library of Alexandria.
Image: Titus reading, 1657, by Rembrandt. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
