By Night in Chile

Chilean author Roberto Bolaño’s novella, By Night in Chile (Spanish: Nocturno de Chile) (2000), was translated into English by Chris Andrews in 2003. The story takes place on the deathbed of Jesuit priest Father Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix, as he confesses to his failure to resist the oppressive regime of Augusto Pinochet. A penetrating exploration of the ways both religion and art can be made complicit in terror and cruelty, By Night in Chile is regarded as one of Bolaño’s major achievements. The revered critic Susan Sontag declared the novella “the real thing…destined to have a permanent place in world literature” (New York Times).

Father Urrutia narrates the novel in the course of a single night: "I am dying now, but I still have many things to say.” His narrative is disjointed, feverish, and hallucinatory. Persistently defensive of his life and actions, Urrutia is nevertheless haunted from the beginning of his tale by a sense of failure and a need to confess: “One has a moral obligation to take responsibility for one’s actions, and that includes one’s words and silences, yes, one’s silences, because silences rise to heaven too, and God hears them, and only God understands and judges them, so one must be very careful with one’s silences. I am responsible in every way.”

Urrutia begins his story by relating how he came to join the priesthood, but he makes it clear that his life truly began when he came under the influence of Chile’s leading literary critic, Gonzalez Lamarca—known to all as “Farewell”—who invites the young priest to a weekend on his private estate. There, Urrutia meets the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. While the great man is “reciting verses to the moon,” Farewell fondles Urrutia. Although Urrutia does not return Farewell’s advances (the novella suggests that Urrutia may have rigorously repressed homosexual feelings), he does accept the critic’s patronage and friendship.



Henceforward, Urrutia is a man of letters, a poet, and a critic in his own right. The call to service and social justice entailed by his priestly vocation begins to fall by the wayside. His poetry meets with little approbation, and after a time, he comes to think of himself primarily as a critic.

Through Farewell, Urrutia meets many great literary figures, such as Don Salvador Reyes and German writer Ernst Jünger (a former soldier for the Nazi regime). In his religious life, Urrutia joins Opus Dei and becomes involved in charitable works—although his own involvement is passing and very comfortable. Throughout this time, Urrutia is tortured by the possibly hallucinated figure of a “wizened youth” that makes him feel his shortcomings.

Urrutia is approached by two shipping entrepreneurs (the novella hints that they are government agents), Mr. Raef and Mr. Etah, who pay for him to travel through Europe, visiting fellow clergymen to study “church preservation.”



In Europe Urrutia learns that the greatest threat to ancient church buildings is pigeon shit. In response, many ministers have installed birds of prey on the grounds of their churches or even taken up falconry. One elderly priest confesses to feeling ashamed of his willingness to hunt the pigeons, but he is the only one.

Urrutia returns to Chile, where President Allende’s democratic-socialist government is transforming the country. Soon, Allende is under attack by fascist nationalists within the military (sponsored by the CIA), but Urrutia pays little attention to the unraveling of Chilean democracy. Instead, he reads Greek tragedy.

Under the nationalist military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, Raef and Etah again recruit Urrutia to teach Marxist theory to the dictator and his leading generals. Pinochet thinks that he has to understand the theory in order to predict the actions of his enemies; in practice, Urrutia finds that the generals are more interested in the personal life of the attractive young Marxist thinker Marta Harnecker than they are in political doctrine.



Urrutia experiences some pangs of guilt about accepting a role in the undemocratic regime. However, he comes to realize that the people around him simply don’t care. Meanwhile, he is handsomely compensated for his cooperation.

Literary salons spring up all over Chile, and Urrutia becomes a regular attendee at the house of the ambitious young writer Maria Canales, where the great and good of Chile’s literary scene meet and mingle.

His attendance at these salons ultimately provokes his crisis of conscience. Much later—at least in his own account—Urrutia learns that in Canales’s basement, her husband tortured and murdered people on behalf of the government. Other members of the salon knew about this even at the time. Urrutia learns that one avant-garde theatre critic even discovered a torture victim in situ—he left the room, remembering to turn off the light.



Urrutia claims that for his part: “I was not afraid, I would have been able to speak out but I didn't see anything, I didn't know until it was too late.”

He visits Canales—in the wake of Pinochet’s downfall ostracized by literary society—and confronts her. She dares him to enter the basement where the torture took place. He refuses, and she scoffs, “That is how literature is made in Chile.” Urrutia concedes this point, “or at least what we call literature to prevent ourselves from falling into the rubbish dump.”