Distant Star - pg. 144

When I looked again at Carlos Wieder, he had turned side on. It struck me that he had a hard look peculiar to certain Latin Americans over the age of forty, quite different from the hardness you see in Europeans or North Americans. A sad, irreparable sort of hardness. But Carlos Wieder (who had won the heart of at least one of the Garmendia sisters) did not appear to be sad and that is precisely where the infinite sadness lay. He seemed adult. But he wasn't adult, I knew that straightaway. He seemed self-possessed. And in his own way, on his own terms, whatever they were, he was more self-possessed than the rest of us in that sleepy bar, or most of the people walking by on the beach or invisibly at work, getting ready for the imminent tourist season. He was hard, he had nothing or very little and it didn't seem to bother him much. He seemed to be going through a rough patch. He had the face of a man who knows how to wait without losing his nerve or letting his imagination run wild. He didn't look like a poet. He didn't look as if he had been an officer in the Chilean Air Force. He didn't look like an infamous killer. He didn't look like a man who had flown to Antarctica to write a poem in the sky. Not at all.