A Central American poet very similar to Rubén Darío travels, at the end of the 19th century, to a South American nation: “I came to this country because they told me that I would see things different from those I had lived and known until then.” That is the initial sentence –and promise– of Efímera (Smuggling), a short novel whose author, despite being a debutant in the genre, is –although he denies it– a legend for literary mythomaniacs: the Chilean Bruno Montané Krebs (Valparaíso, 1957 ), which inspired the character of Felipe Müller in The Savage Detectives by his friend Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003). Montané is also preparing a second expanded edition of El futuro that includes his poetry collected from him. In the past, he was also a jazz saxophonist but “I gave it up because of the horrible stench of the discos at 4 in the morning”. As we say goodbye, he requests, “Please don’t title anything ‘wild detective,’ if possible.” It is.
Many people will be surprised that you have published a novel.
There has been a conspiracy to make me abandon poetry, which is the only thing I do moderately well, and become a new novelist… at my age! I wrote the first pages more than twenty years ago, in fact Roberto managed to read them.
And what did he tell her?
They liked it. He told me: ‘You are no longer afraid to narrate’, which was something he had told me from a previous story of mine. It was a tonal, voice type thing. I have doubted whether to publish it, but in the end my ego got the better of me, as usually happens, especially since the editor served me the opportunity on a platter, I did not send the novel to anyone.
It’s his first novel…
Actually, the third, but the other two are unpublished. One reached, years ago, the semifinal of the Herralde award. But I have enough with my little verses, that’s what boils in my brain.
Will you post them?
I’ll have to burn them myself before I die, you know what happens with legacies.
Where does this story come from?
I read a biography of Rubén Darío in which his Chilean period did not appear. That’s when I started to imagine.
It’s pretty fictional, isn’t it?
It was about masking my research. Perhaps Dario in his diary narrates an episode in five lines and I develop it. It is a mini-road-movie, a mini-bildungsroman. I have the itch not to defend it as a historical novel, which follows the real events. For example, the episode of the poet with the president is actually based on a meeting of Pablo Neruda, not Rubén Darío, with the president.
There will be readers who do not even realize that it is Rubén Darío.
It’s done that way on purpose. He signed Félix Rubén Darío and I left it in Félix. No city appears with his real name either.
What does the Montané narrator have to do with the poet?
Without getting great, I would say that it is a novel that deals with power and the literary field. We find the theme of tension, of how the poet is received, someone who was tremendously talented and, at the age of 15, was already recognized.
And what about you in Felix?
He is, like me, like Roberto, a poet who travels, who comes here. It is a novel about emigration, about young people looking for a place to live.
We read in his book that life consists of learning to avoid troubles, which is “a long walk in the belly of the beast.”
That is where I am connecting with Bolaño! There is some secret tribute. To say it in Mexican, this fucking novel is full of situations in which people find themselves to tell each other stories and yet it seems that it is an action novel, some have seen it as a script.
The humor arises from the detachment with which the narrating voice refers to itself.
That comes to me from poetry and from the obsession of putting my hand in the hole. All the time I had to make up an old voice. Rubén’s prose is beautiful but very goofy, although there is always a point where you notice the flesh and bone, that is modernism. He is the author who really modernized Spanish on both sides.
There is cruelty, even gore, in the episodes of the torture of Uncle Toño and in the murder of the boyfriend.
I got into that trap. The only thing that Felix can tell the girl he is in love with is one terrible story and she tells him another. But she comes out of a poem by Dario from a little book called Abrojos, where she tells the case of a girl who kills her boyfriend for calling her ugly.
There are some Germans who…
He tells that in Santiago he lived for a few months with a German family. My German grandfather was born in Chile just at that time, the dates coincided and he invented that maybe…
Feeling like foreigners makes several characters equal, strangers in the place, regardless of where they were born. That is a theme that is in his poetry.
It is the internal exile. A model in which I recognize myself.
Don’t you think there is little sex for a novel with young people?
It’s hinted. It is that the context of the time is that all these young people were whoremongers, like Kafka, I invent credible scenes, like the one in the brothel called La Sorbonne, but I do not show what can be equally understood.
His Lucia is like a Dulcinea.
I show the adolescent and poets’ obsession with being in love, intensely, they have that need. With Lucía there is no physical seduction but a mental one.
The scenes with the president’s son and the president are like his dictator mini-novel.
But this president is the first antecedent of a nationalist politician in power, aware that he has to defend the interests of the country, at the time of the plunder, which was first British and then American. The attempted corruption that he suffers, that outrages him, is real, they gave him a golden locomotive, so that he sees that reality writes better than us, you just have to limit his eternal entropy.
Another theme is exuberant nature, with parks, volcanoes, the sea…
There is a connection with the poet’s psyche and his landscape.
Here your Captain Ahab is Captain Yoyer.
That character existed and gave for more. Rubén Darío carried out inspections at customs in Valparaíso, accompanying the inspectors as secretary. It is said that, on those ships, there was nocturnal marine social life…
The ending scene…
The workers of the Panama Canal were locked in cages for protesting demanding rights. He hears in them the racket and the pain of the world. It’s a potent social entropic finisher.
