The Return

by Roberto Bolaño

  (The guy nods his head. It’s clear that he wants to express his agreement. The effort is making his face redden noticeably; his veins are swelling, his eyes are bulging.)

  “But you didn’t listen to my words, you couldn’t distinguish them from my moaning, those last words, which might have saved you. I chose you well. Television doesn’t lie, that’s its only virtue (that and the old movies they show in the small hours of the morning), and the sight of your face, against the wire fence, after the conga that everyone cheered, prefigured (and hastened) the inevitable ending. I brought you home on my motorbike, I took off your clothes, I left you unconscious, I tied your hands and feet to an old chair, I put a sticking plaster over your mouth, not because I’m scared that your cries might alert someone, but because I don’t want to hear you beg, I don’t want to hear your pathetic stuttering apologies, your weak insistence that you’re not like that, that it was all a game, that I’ve got it all wrong. Maybe I’ve got it all wrong. Maybe it’s all a game. Maybe you’re not like that. But the thing is, Max, no one’s like that. I wasn’t like that either. I’m not going to tell you about my pain, it’s not as if you caused it; on the contrary, you gave me an orgasm. You were the lost prince who gave me an orgasm; you can be proud of yourself. And I gave you an opportunity to escape, but you were also the deaf prince. Now it’s too late, it’s getting light; your legs must be numb and cramped, your wrists are swollen; you shouldn’t have struggled so much, I warned you when we started, Max, this was bound to happen. You’ll have to make the best of it. Now is not the time for crying, or remembering conga lines, threats or beatings; it’s time to look inside yourself and try to understand that sometimes, unexpectedly, people just walk away. You’re naked in my chamber of horrors, Max, and your eyes are following my knife as it swings, as if it were the pendulum of a cuckoo clock. Close your eyes, Max, there’s no need to go on looking; think of something nice, think of it as hard as you can . . .”

  (His eyes, instead of closing, open wildly, and all his muscles wrench in one last desperate effort: the shock is so violent that the chair to which he is securely tied falls over. He hits his head and his hip on the ground, he loses control of his anal sphincter and bladder; he is seized by spasms; dust and filth from the flagstones stick to his wet skin.)

  “I’m not going to pick you up, Max, you’re fine like that. Keep your eyes open or close them, it doesn’t matter; think of something nice or don’t think at all. It’s getting light out but, the way things are, it might just as well be getting dark. You’re the prince and you’re arriving at exactly the right time. You’re welcome whenever you come and wherever you come from, whether you’ve come on a motorbike or on foot, whether or not you know what awaits you, whether you were tricked or came knowing that you would meet your destiny here. Your face, which until recently could express only stupidity or rage or hatred, is reconfigured now and can express what can only be guessed at inside a tunnel where physical time and verbal time flow into one another and mingle. You proceed resolutely through the corridors of my palace, barely pausing for the few seconds it takes to look at the pictures of the Catholic Monarchs, to drink a glass of crystal-clear water, to touch the mirrors’ quicksilver with your fingertips. The castle only seems to be quiet, Max. Sometimes you think you’re alone, but deep down you know that you’re not. Your hand raised in salute, your naked torso, the tee-shirt furled around your waist, your warrior hymns about purity and the future, you leave all that behind. This castle is your mountain, and you will have to spend all your strength climbing and exploring it, because after that there will be nothing more; the mountain and the climbing will demand the highest price you can pay. Now think about what you’re leaving, what you could and had to leave behind, and think about chance, the greatest criminal that ever walked the earth. Free yourself of fear and regret, Max, because you are already inside the castle, and here there is only the movement that will bring you ineluctably to my arms. Now you are inside the castle and you hear the doors closing behind you. Deep in the dream you walk on through passages and rooms of bare stone. What weapons do you carry, Max? Only your solitude. You know that somewhere I am waiting for you. You know that I am naked too. Sometimes you feel my tears, you see my tears flow on the dark stone and you think you have found me, but the room is empty, which distresses and yet at the same time excites you. Keep climbing, Max. The next room is dirty and doesn’t seem to belong in a castle. There’s an old TV that doesn’t work and a folding bed with two mattresses on it. Someone is crying somewhere. You see children’s drawings, old clothes covered with mold, dried blood and dust. You open another door. You call someone. You tell them not to cry. Your footsteps show in the dust on the floor of the passage. The tears sometimes seem to be dripping from the ceiling. It doesn’t matter. The way things are, they might as well be spurting out the end of your dick. Sometimes all the rooms seem the same, the same room devastated by time. If you look at the ceiling you’ll imagine you can see a star or a comet or a cuckoo clock sailing through the space that separates the prince’s lips from those of the princess. Sometimes it all goes back to the way it used to be. The castle is dark, enormous, cold, and you are alone. But you know there is another person hidden somewhere, you feel the tears, you feel the nakedness. Peace and warmth are waiting for you in that person’s arms, so you keep going, drawn on by hope, stepping around boxes full of memories that no one will ever look at again, suitcases full of old clothes that someone forgot or didn’t want to throw away, and from time to time you call her, your princess—where is she?—your body stiff with cold, your teeth chattering, right in the middle of the tunnel, smiling in the darkness, free of fear for the first time perhaps, and with no intention of inspiring fear, spirited, exultant, full of life, feeling your way through the dark, opening doors, following passages that bring you closer to the tears, in the dark, guided only by your body’s need for another body, falling down and getting up again, and finally you arrive at the central chamber, and finally you see me and cry out. I remain silent and cannot tell the nature of your cry. All I know is that we have finally come together, that you are the zealous prince and I am the princess without pity.”

  The Return

  I have good news and bad news. The good news is that there is life (of a kind) after this life. The bad news is that Jean-Claude Villeneuve is a necrophiliac.

  Death caught up with me in a Paris disco at four in the morning. My doctor had warned me, but some things are stronger than reason. I was convinced, mistakenly (and even now it’s something I regret), that drinking and dancing were not the most hazardous of my passions. Another reason I kept going out every night to the fashionable places in Paris was my routine as a middle manager at Fracsa; I was after what I couldn’t find at work or in what people call the inner life: the buzz that you get from a certain excess.

  But I’d rather not talk about that, or only as much as I have to. When my death occurred, I was recently divorced and thirty-four years old. I hardly realized what was going on. A sudden sharp pain in the chest, her face, the face of Cécile Lamballe, the woman of my dreams, imperturbable as ever, the dance floor spinning in a brutal whirl, sucking in the dancers and the shadows, and then a brief moment of darkness.

  What happened next was like what you sometimes see in movies and I’d like to say a few words about that.

  In life I wasn’t especially intelligent. I’m still not (though I’ve learned a lot). When I say intelligent, what I really mean is thoughtful. But I have a certain en
ergy and a certain taste. What I mean is, I’m not a philistine. It couldn’t be said, objectively, that I’d ever behaved like a philistine. It’s true that I graduated in business studies, but that didn’t stop me from reading a good book or seeing a play every now and then, or being a keener moviegoer than most. Some of the movies I was pressured to see by my ex-wife. But the others I saw for love of the seventh art.

  Like just about everyone else, I went to see Ghost, I don’t know if you remember it, a box office hit, with Demi Moore and Whoopi Goldberg, the one where Patrick Swayze gets killed and his body is left lying on a Manhattan street, or in an alley, maybe, on a dirty pavement anyway, while in a special-effects extravaganza (they were special for the time, anyway) his soul comes out of his body and stares at it in astonishment. Well, apart from the special effects, I thought it was idiotic. A typical Hollywood cop-out, inane and unbelievable.

  But when my turn came, that was exactly what happened. I was stunned. First, because I had died, which always comes as a surprise, except, I guess, in some cases of suicide, and then because I was unwillingly acting out one of the worst scenes of Ghost. One of the many things experience has taught me is that there is sometimes more to American naiveté than meets the eye; it can hide something that we Europeans can’t or don’t want to understand. But once I was dead, I didn’t care about that. Once I was dead, I felt like bursting out laughing.

  You get used to anything in the end, but in the early hours of that morning I felt dizzy or drunk, not because I was under the influence of alcohol on the night of my death—I wasn’t; on the contrary, it had been a night of pineapple juice and non-alcoholic beer—but because of the shock of being dead, the fear of being dead and not knowing what was coming next. When you die the real world shifts slightly and that adds to the dizziness. It’s as if you’d suddenly put on a pair of glasses that don’t match your prescription; they’re not all that different, but not quite right. And the worst thing is you know that the glasses you’ve put on belong to you and nobody else. And the real world shifts slightly to the right, down a little, the distance separating you from a given object changes almost imperceptibly, but you perceive that change as an abyss, and the abyss adds to your dizziness, but in the end it doesn’t matter.

  It makes you want to cry or pray. The first minutes of ghosthood are minutes of imminent knockout. You’re like a punch-drunk boxer staggering around the ring in the drawn-out moment of the ring’s evaporation. But then you calm down and what generally happens is that you follow the people who were there when you died—your girlfriend, your friends—or you follow your own body.

  I was with Cécile Lamballe, the woman of my dreams, I was with her and saw her just before I died, but when my soul came out of my body I couldn’t see her anywhere. It was quite a surprise and a great disappointment, especially when I think about it now, though back then I didn’t have time to be sad. There I was, looking at my body lying in a grotesque heap on the floor, as if, seized by the dance and the heart attack, I’d completely fallen apart, or as if I hadn’t died of a heart attack at all but dropped from the top of a skyscraper, and while I looked on and walked around and fell over (because I was completely dizzy), a volunteer (there’s always someone) gave me (or my body) mouth-to-mouth, while another one thumped my chest, then someone thought of switching off the music and a murmur of disapproval swept through the disco, which was pretty full in spite of the late hour, and the deep voice of a waiter or a security guard told them all not to touch me, to wait for the police and the magistrate, and although I was groggy I would have liked to say, Keep going, keep trying to revive me, but they were tired, and as soon as the police were mentioned they all stepped back, and my body lay there on its own at the edge of the dance floor, eyes closed, until a charitable soul put a blanket over me to cover what was now definitively dead.

  Then the police turned up along with some guys who confirmed what everyone already knew, and later the magistrate arrived and only then did I realize that Cécile Lamballe had vanished from the disco, so when they picked up my body and put it in an ambulance, I followed the medics and slipped into the back of the vehicle, and off I went with them into the sad and weary Paris dawn.

  What a paltry thing it seemed, my body or my ex-body (I’m not sure how to put it), confronted with the labyrinthine bureaucracy of death. First they took me to the basement of a hospital, although I couldn’t swear it was a hospital, where a young woman with glasses ordered them to undress me, and when they left her on her own, she spent a few moments examining and touching me. Then they covered me with a sheet, and moved me to another room to take a complete set of fingerprints. Then they brought me back to the first room, which was empty now, and I stayed there for what seemed like a long time, though I couldn’t say how many hours. Maybe it was only minutes, but I was getting more and more bored.

  After a while, a black orderly came to get me and take me to another underground room, where he handed me over to a pair of young guys also dressed in white, who made me feel uneasy right from the start, I don’t know why. Maybe it was their would-be sophisticated way of talking, which identified them as a pair of tenth-rate artists, maybe it was their earrings, the sort all the hipsters were wearing that season in the discos that I had frequented with an irresponsible persistence: hexagonal in shape and somehow evocative of runaways from a fantastic bestiary.

  The new orderlies made some notes in a book, spoke with the black guy for a few minutes (I don’t know what that was about) and then the black guy went and left us alone. So in the room there were the two young guys behind the desk, filling out forms and chatting away, there was my body on the trolley, covered from head to foot, and me standing beside it, with my left hand resting on the trolley’s metal edge, trying to think with a modicum of clarity about what the days to come might hold, if there were any days to come, which was far from obvious to me right then.

  Then one of the young guys approached the trolley and uncovered me, or uncovered my body, and scrutinized it for a few seconds with a thoughtful expression that didn’t bode well. After a while he covered it up again, and the two of them wheeled the trolley into the next room, a sort of freezing honeycomb, which I soon discovered was a storehouse for corpses. I would never have imagined that so many people could die in the course of an ordinary night in Paris. They slid my body into a refrigerated niche and left. I didn’t follow them.

  I spent that whole day there in the morgue. Every so often I went to the door, which had a little glass window, and checked the time on the wall clock in the next room. The feeling of dizziness gradually abated, although at one point I got to thinking about heaven and hell, reward and punishment, and I had a panic attack, but that bout of irrational fear was soon over. And, in fact, I was starting to feel better.

  Throughout the day new bodies kept arriving, but never accompanied by ghosts, and at about four in the afternoon, a near-sighted young man performed an autopsy on me and established the causes of my accidental death. I have to admit I didn’t have the stomach to watch them open me up. But I went to the autopsy room and listened as the coroner and his assistant, quite a pretty girl, performed their task efficiently and quickly—if only all public servants worked like that—while I waited with my back turned, looking at the ivory-colored tiles on the wall. Then they washed me and sewed me up and an orderly took me back to the morgue again.