The two men are working for the Archepiscopal College and they need someone to travel to Europe to research “the preservation of churches.” Urrutia would travel Europe for a year in order to write a report on European preservation of churches. Etah then explains the job that the two men want Urrutia to do. In the bar, however, he has the thought that “Pigs suffer too,” and he imagines the people around him as pigs whose “pain purifies and ennobles them.”Īfter coffee, Raef takes Urrutia to meet his partner, Mr. Urrutia is disgusted by the bar, a “repulsive place that collects the scum of the city offices, the middle management, vice-this, assitant-that.” and he is embarrassed that a person like himself, a man “with a name, indeed with two names, and a reputation to think of.” would be seen in a place like this. He takes him to several different restaurants, suspiciously leaving one and going to another, then finally ending up at a bar called “Haiti” where they drink coffee.

Raef tells Urrutia that he has been keeping up with him and the literary circles he runs in and that he would be perfect for this particular job. Raef was in the import-export buisiness and several fellow priests had recommended Urrutia to go to Europe to do some business for Mr. It is on one of these walks that Urrutia meets Mr. He takes long walks through town, once getting mugged, and can’t help but be dismayed by the change in the city. Fellow priests and poets come to call on him, but he has nothing to give to them or say to them. He still writes book reviews, but they aren’t of the same quality as his previous work. He frustratingly writes poems that he then destroys the next day. It is during this time that Urrutia begins to suffer from an incurable state of boredom. Urrutia, from his deathbed, can hear the “wizened youth” yelling at him, accusing him of selling his soul to the dictatorship that would come, but Urrutia retorts back to the youth that “even the poets of the Chilean Communist Party were dying for a kind word from me, a word of praise for their poetry. He relates, perhaps hyperbolically, the amount of literary power he amassed in ensuing years. Urrutia tells readers that he was a member of Opus Dei, a secret Catholic order that held influential political ties.

By night in chile by roberto bolaño