Jorge Edwards: at the center of the party and at the same time on its side

The death of someone who liked to live is always a disconcerting event.

This trait, the taste for the pleasures and carelessness of this world, were in Jorge Edwards something more than a personal characteristic.

It was this taste that led his writing career along unique paths that make him an essential witness of the Chilean and Latin American 20th century.

Edwards began by writing short stories filled with fresh and ferocious observations about what he calls "The Order of Families."

His natural talent for looking through the locks of his social class, a more or less bankrupt oligarchy, destined him to be like his peers and friends from the boom, a creator and destroyer of myths.

But one of those first stories from his unforgettable book

led him to meet Pablo Neruda.

This meeting, parallel to the frequentation of Enrique Lihn and Nicanor Parra, made him see that there was invaluable material for writing in his life and in that of those around him.

He then became the biographer of an entire culture from its forgotten kitchens to its unforgettable living rooms, passing through its dark corridors without ever getting completely lost in the maze.

I never leave fiction, but use the texture and technique of the novel to tell what he saw and lived from the strange place where he always had to live: at the center of the party and at the same time on its margin.

testimony of a disagreement as personal as it is political, as literary as historical, it is the maximum representation of that double condition of main guest and disinherited outcast that gives his writing all its richness.

Representative of Salvador Allende's Chile in Fidel Castro's Cuba, instead of enjoying the party offered, he saw the kicks under the table and instead of keeping quiet he told what he saw.

Exiled by Pinochet and frowned upon by the rest of the Chilean exile, he sought in Spain and his literature a house in which to endure the storm.

Once this was gone, he returned to his first home, the Chilean culture where he continued to practice the sport of being in the middle and on the outskirts.

It is rare that that expression, "persona non grata", has been forever associated with his person.

Edwards was indeed an absolutely pleasant person.

A man for the four seasons that I saw adapt to the strangest environments and funny and unexpected situations late at night.

He was always the first to arrive and the last to leave and the only one who never lost his temper or his papers, although his seriousness at this hour was like Groucho Marx's, anything but serious.

Many writers suffer from "false humility", Jorge suffered from "false arrogance."

A career diplomat, he knew protocol but hated solemnity.

I was part of a literary workshop that I try to give in his apartment on Santa Lucia street, but the first session was dedicated to telling anecdotes, almost never literary, and the workshop was shipwrecked right there.

He did not like to give classes, not to mention literary techniques, techniques that he otherwise handled perfectly.

He had no respect for literary neurosis, although he lived surrounded by writers that he always liked or stopped loving for personal reasons.

Every time I met him we started from scratch, as if we didn't know each other, until he discovered all the people we had in common until we found, like good Chileans, some relationship.

In between these perpetual introductions we became friends.

I remember him one night going up a hill in Madrid with a bottle of wine under his arm asking me about his sentimental possibilities with the lady of the house.

He was 82 or 83 years old at the time but the old man was me.

That image, one of many like it, I like to remember now that he committed the unforgivable impudence of dying.

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