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 I was told that I would see different things than what I had lived and known until then.” It is the opening phrase – and promise – of Efímera (Contraband), a short novel whose author, despite being a debutant in the genre, is – even if he denies it – a legend for literary mythomaniacs: the Chilean Bruno Montané Krebs (Valparaíso, 1957), who inspired the character of Felipe Müller in Los detectives salvajes, by his friend Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003). Montané is preparing a second, expanded edition of El futuro (Candaya), which collects the impressive collected poetry. In the past, he was also a jazz saxophonist, but “I quit because of the horrible stench of the nightclubs at four in the morning”. When we say goodbye, he only asks us one thing: “Please, don’t title anything like ‘wild detective’, if possible.” it is
Many people will be surprised by the fact that you have published a novel.
There has been a conspiracy for me to give up poetry, which is the only thing I am moderately good at, and become a novice novelist…at my age! I wrote the first pages more than twenty years ago, in fact, Roberto got to read them.
And what did he tell her?
He liked them. He told me: “You are no longer afraid to narrate”, which was something he had told me about a previous story of mine. It was a matter of tone, of the type of voice. I hesitated whether to publish it, but in the end my ego got the better of me, as usually happens, especially because the publisher served me the occasion with a tray, I didn’t send the novel to anyone.
It is his first novel…
Actually, the third one, but the other two are unpublished. One reached the semifinals of the Herralde award years ago. But I’ve had enough of my verses, that’s what boils down to me.
Will you publish them?
I’ll have to burn them before I die, you know what happens with legacies.
Pretty fictional, right?
It was about masking my research. Maybe Darío in his diary narrates an episode in five lines and I develop it. It’s a mini road movie, a mini Bildungsroman. I have the itch not to defend it as a historical novel, which follows 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 of the country.
There will be readers who will not even realize that it is Rubén Darío.
It is made that way expressly. He signed Félix Rubén Darío, and I leave it as Félix. No city appears by real name, either.
What about you Felix?
He is, like me, like Roberto, a poet who travels, who comes this way. It is a novel about emigration, about young people looking for a place to live.
We read in the book that “life consists of learning to avoid bitterness” or that it is “a long walk in the belly of the beast”.
Here I am connecting with Bolaño! There is some secret tribute. To put it in Mexican, this little novel is full of situations in which people meet to tell each other stories, and yet it seems to be an action novel.
The humor arises from the distance with which the narrating voice refers to itself.
This comes to me from poetry and from the obsession of sticking my hand through the hole. The whole time I had to invent an old voice. The proses of Rubén Darío are beautiful, but very swallowed, although there is always a point where you notice the flesh and the bone, this is modernism.
There is cruelty, even gore, in the episodes of the torture of Uncle Toño and the murder of the boyfriend.
I got into this shit. The only thing Felix can tell the girl he’s in love with is a terrible story, and she tells another. But it all comes from a poem by Darío from a book called Abrojos, where he explains the case of a girl who kills her boyfriend for calling him ugly.
The fact of feeling foreign makes several characters equal, strangers to the place, regardless of where they were born. It is a theme that is in his poetry.
It is the inner exile. A model in which I recognize myself.
Don’t you think there’s not enough sex for a novel with young people?
It is hinted at. It’s that the context of the time is that all young people were whores, like Kafka, I invent believable scenes, like the one in the brothel called La Sorbonne, but I don’t show what can be understood anyway.
His Lucia is like a Dulcinea.
I show the teenage obsession and the poets’ obsession with being deeply in love, they need it. With Lucía there is no physical seduction, but psychic.
The scenes with the president are his dictator mini-novella.
But this president is the first antecedent of a nationalist politician in power, aware that he must defend the interests of the country, the era of plunder, which was first British and then American. The attempted corruption that he suffers, which outrages him, is real, they gave him a golden locomotive, so that he can see that reality writes better than us, it is only necessary to delimit its eternal entropy.
Another theme is exuberant nature, with parks, volcanoes, the sea…
There is a connection with the psyche of the poet and the landscape.
The final scene…
Panama Canal workers were locked in cages for protesting for rights. He feels the roar, the roar and the pain of the world. It is a powerful social entropic ending.
