The Return

by Roberto Bolaño

  We remained silent for a long time. I knew that both of us were, if not overwhelmed with joy, at least reasonably happy.

  Before long the orderlies arrived. Villeneuve looked at the floor and asked me what he should do. After all, the body they had come for was mine. I thanked him for his thoughtfulness but also assured him that I was now beyond caring about such things. Do what you normally do, I said. Will you go? he asked. I had already made up my mind, and yet I pretended to think for a few seconds before saying no, I wasn’t going to leave. If he didn’t mind, of course. Villeneuve seemed relieved: I don’t mind, on the contrary, he said. Then a bell rang, and Villeneuve switched on the monitors and opened the gates for the rent-a-corpse guys, who came in without saying a word.

  Exhausted by the night’s events, Villeneuve didn’t get up from the sofa. The pseudo-artists greeted him, and it seemed to me that one of them was in the mood for a chat, but the other one gave him a nudge and they went down to get my body without further ado. Villeneuve had his eyes closed and seemed to be asleep. I followed the orderlies down to the basement. My body was lying there half covered by the body bag from the morgue. I watched them put it back in the bag and carry it up and place it in the trunk of the car. I imagined it waiting there, in the cold morgue, until a relative or my ex-wife came to claim it. But I mustn’t give in to sentimentality, I thought, and when the orderlies’ car left the garden and vanished down that elegant, tree-lined street, I didn’t feel the slightest twinge of nostalgia or sadness or melancholy.

  When I returned to the living room, Villeneuve was still on the sofa, with his arms crossed, shivering with cold, and he was talking to himself (though I soon realized that he thought he was talking to me). I sat on a chair in front of him, a chair of carved wood with a satin backrest, facing the window and the garden and the beautiful morning light, and I let him go on talking as long as he liked.

  Buba

  for Juan Villoro

  The city of sanity. The city of common sense. That’s what the people of Barcelona used to call their city. I liked it. It was a beautiful city and I think I felt at home there from the second day on (if I said from the very first day I’d be exaggerating) but the club wasn’t doing so well, and people started going kind of sour, it always happens, I’m speaking from experience, at first the fans want your autograph, they hang around outside the hotel, they’re so friendly it’s exhausting, but then you have a run of bad luck, which leads to another, and soon enough they start making faces, maybe you’re just lazy, they think, or partying too much, or whoring, you know what I mean, people start to take an interest in what you’re getting paid, they speculate, they calculate, and there’s always a wise guy who’ll come out and accuse you of being a thief or something a thousand times worse. This stuff happens everywhere, I’d already been through it once, but that was back home, in my country, and this time I was a foreigner, and the press and the fans always expect something extra special from foreigners. I mean, why else would they hire us?

  Me, for example, I’m a left winger, everyone knows that. When I played in Latin America (in Chile, then in Argentina) I scored an average of ten goals per season. But my debut here was disastrous; I got injured in the third game, had to have an operation on my ligaments, and my recovery, which in theory should have been quick, was laborious and drawn-out, but I won’t go into that. Suddenly I was back to feeling as lonely as a lighthouse. That’s the way it was. I spent a fortune on calls to Santiago, but that only made Mom and Dad worry; they didn’t understand at all. So one day I decided to go whoring. Why should I deny it? That’s the way it was. Actually, I was just following some advice that Cerrone, the Argentinean goalkeeper, had given me one day. He said to me, Kid, if you can’t think of anything else to do, and your problems are eating away at you, go see a whore. He was great guy, Cerrone. I would have been nineteen at the most and I had just joined Gimnasia y Esgrima in La Plata. Cerrone was already around 35 or 40, his age was a mystery, and he was the only one of the older players who wasn’t married. Some said Cerrone was queer. That made me wary of him for a start. I was a shy sort of kid and I thought that if I got to know a homosexual, he’d try and get me into bed straightway. Anyway, maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t, all I know for sure is that one afternoon, when I was lower than ever, he took me aside, it was the first time we’d talked, really, and said he was going to take me to meet some girls from Buenos Aires. I’ll never forget that night. The apartment was downtown, and while Cerrone stayed in the living room drinking and watching a late show on TV, I slept with an Argentinean woman for the first time, and my depression began to lift. Going home the next morning, I knew that things would get better and that I still had plenty of glory days to look forward to in the Argentinean League. I was bound to get depressed occasionally, I thought, but Cerrone had given me the remedy to make it bearable.

  And I did the same thing at my first European club: I went whoring and it helped me to get over the injury, the recovery period and the loneliness. Did it become a habit? Maybe, maybe not; that’s not something I can really judge objectively. The whores there are gorgeous, the high-class whores I mean, and most of them are pretty smart and educated too, so it really isn’t difficult to develop a serious taste for them.

  Anyhow, I started going out every night, even Sundays when there was a match on, and the injured players were expected to be there, in the stands, doing their bit as VIP supporters. But that doesn’t help your injuries to heal, and I preferred to spend Sunday afternoons in some massage parlor with a glass of whiskey and one or two lady friends on either side, discussing more serious matters. At first, of course, no one realized. I wasn’t the only injured player, there must have been six or seven of us in the dry dock—bad luck seemed to be dogging the club. But of course, there’s always some fucking journalist who sees you coming out of a nightclub at four in the morning, and the game’s up. News travels fast in Barcelona, though it seems such a big and civilized city. Soccer news, I mean.

  One morning the trainer called and said he’d found out about the life I was leading: it was inappropriate for a professional athlete and had to stop. Naturally I said, Yes, I’d just been having a bit of fun, and then I went on like before, because, come on, what else was I going to do while I was still unfit to play and the team slid down the ranking and opening the paper on a Monday morning to look at the league table was a downer week after week. Also, I was convinced that what had worked for me in Argentina was going to work for me in Spain, and the worst thing was, I was right: it did work. But then the bureaucrats got involved and told me: Listen, Acevedo, this has got to stop, you’re becoming a bad example for the young and a disastrous investment for the club, we only employ hard workers here, so from now on, no more nightlife, or else. And then, before I knew it, I was liable for a fine if I broke the curfew; I could have paid it, of course, but if I was going to be throwing money away, I’d rather have sent it to someone in Chile, like my uncle Julio, so he could fix up his house.

  These things happen and you have to deal with it. So I dealt with it and resolved to go out less often, once every two weeks, say, but then Buba turned up and the management decided that the best thing for me would be to move out of the hotel and share the apartment they’d rented for him right next to our training ground; it was small but kind of cozy, with two bedrooms and a terrace that was tiny but had a good view. So that was what I had to do. I packed my bags and went to the apartment with one of the club’s administrators, and since Buba wasn’t
there, I chose the bedroom I wanted and took out my stuff and put it in the closet, and then the administrator gave me my keys and left and I lay down to take a siesta.

  It was about five, and earlier that afternoon I’d put away a fideuà, a Barcelona specialty, which I’d already tried (I love it, but it isn’t easy to digest) and as soon as I flopped onto my new bed I felt so tired it was all I could do to pull off my shoes before I fell asleep. Then I had the weirdest dream. I dreamed I was in Santiago again, in my neighborhood, La Cisterna, and I was with my father, crossing the square where there’s a statue of Che Guevara, the first statue of Che in the Americas, outside Cuba, and that was what my father was telling me in the dream, the story of the statue and the various attempts to destroy it before the soldiers came and blew it away, and as we walked I was looking all around and it was like we were deep in the jungle, and my father was saying the statue should be around here somewhere, but you couldn’t see anything, the grass was high and only a few feeble rays of sunlight were filtering down through the trees, just enough to see by, to show that it was daytime, and we were following a path of earth and stones, but the vegetation on either side was dense, there were even lianas, and you couldn’t see anything, only shadows, until suddenly we came to a sort of clearing, with forest all around, and then my father stopped, put one hand on my shoulder and pointed with the other hand to something rearing up in the middle of the clearing, a pedestal of light-colored cement, and on top of the pedestal there was nothing, not a trace of the statue of Che, but my father and I already knew that, Che had been removed from there a long time ago, it didn’t come as a surprise, what mattered was that we were there together, my old man and me, and we had found the exact place where the statue used to stand before, but while we looked around the clearing, standing still, as if absorbed in our discovery, I noticed that there was something at the bottom of the pedestal, on the other side, something dark, which was moving, and I broke away from my father (he had been holding me by the hand) and began to walk slowly toward it.

  Then I saw what it was: on the other side of the pedestal there was a black man, stark naked, drawing on the ground, and I knew straightaway that the black man was Buba, my teammate, my housemate, although to tell you the truth, like the rest of the players, I’d only ever seen Buba in a couple of photos, and when you’ve only glanced at someone’s picture in the paper you can’t have a clear idea of how they look. But it was Buba, I had no doubts about that. And then I thought: Fucking hell! I must be dreaming, I’m not in Chile, I’m not in La Cisterna, my father hasn’t brought me to any square, and this jerk in his birthday suit isn’t Buba, the African midfielder who just signed with our club.

  Just as I came to the end of that train of thought, the black guy looked up and smiled at me, dropped the stick he’d been using to draw in the yellow earth (and it really was genuine Chilean earth), leaped to his feet and held out his hand. You’re Acevedo, he said, glad to meet you, kid, that’s what he said. And I thought: Maybe we’re on tour? But where? In Chile? Impossible. And then we shook hands and Buba squeezed my hand hard and held onto it, and while he was squeezing my hand I looked down and saw the drawings on the earth, just scribbles, what else could they have been, but it was like I could join them up, if you see what I mean, and the scribbles made sense, that is, they weren’t just scribbles, they were something more. Then I tried to bend down and get a closer look, but I couldn’t because Buba’s hand was gripping mine and when I tried to free myself (not so much to see the drawings anymore, but to get away from him, to put some distance between us, because I was starting to feel something like fear), I couldn’t; Buba’s hand and his arm seemed to be the hand and arm of a statue, a freshly cast statue, and my hand was embedded in that material, which felt like mud and then like molten lava.

  I think that was when I woke up. I heard noises in the kitchen and then steps going from the living room to the other bedroom, and my arm was numb (I’d fallen asleep in an awkward position, which happened quite often back then, while I was recovering from the injury), and I stayed in my bedroom waiting; the door was open, so he must have seen me; I waited and waited but he didn’t come to the door. I heard his footsteps, I cleared my throat, coughed, stood up; then I heard someone opening the front door and shutting it again, very quietly. I spent the rest of the day alone, sitting in front of the TV, getting more and more nervous. I had a look in his room (I’m not a busybody but I couldn’t help myself); he’d put his clothes in the closet drawers: track suits, some formal wear and some African robes that looked like fancy dress to me but actually they were beautiful. He’d laid out his toiletries in the bathroom: a straight-edge razor (I use disposable razors and hadn’t seen a straight-edge for a while), lotion, English aftershave (or bought in England anyway), and a very large, earth-colored sponge in the bathtub.

  Buba returned to our new home at nine o’clock that night. My eyes were hurting from watching so much TV, and he told me he’d come back from a session with the city’s sportswriters. We didn’t really hit it off at the start and it took us a while to become friends, though sometimes, thinking back, I come to the melancholy conclusion that we were never what you would really call friends. Other times, though, right now for example, I think we were pretty good friends, and one thing’s for sure, anyway: if Buba had a friend in that club, it was me.

  It’s not like our life together was difficult. A woman came in twice a week to clean the apartment and we tidied up after ourselves, washed our own dishes, made our beds, you know, the usual deal. Sometimes I went out at night with Herrera, a local kid who’d come up through the ranks and ended up securing a place on the national team, and sometimes Buba came with us, but not very often, because he didn’t really like going out. When I stayed home I’d watch TV and Buba would shut himself in his room and put on music. African music. At first I didn’t like Buba’s cassettes at all. In fact, the first time I heard them, the day after he moved in, I got a fright. I was watching a documentary about the Amazon, waiting for a Van Damme movie to begin, and all of a sudden it was like someone was being killed in Buba’s room. Put yourself in my place. It’s not every day you face something like that; it would have rattled anyone. What did I do? Well, I stood up, I had my back to Buba’s door, and naturally I braced myself, but then I realized it was a tape, the shouts were coming from the cassette player. Then the noises died away, all you could hear was something like a drum, and then someone groaning, or weeping, gradually getting louder. I could only take so much. I remember walking to the door, rapping on it with my knuckles: no response. At that point I thought it was Buba weeping and groaning, not the cassette. But then I heard Buba’s voice asking what I wanted and I didn’t know what to say. It was all quite embarrassing. I asked him to turn it down. I tried as hard as I possibly could to make my voice sound normal. Buba was quiet for a while. Then the music stopped (by then it was just a drum beat really, with maybe some kind of flute as well) and Buba said he was going to sleep. Good night, I said and returned to the armchair, where I sat for a while watching the documentary about Amazon Indians with the sound off.

  Otherwise, everyday life, as they say, was easy enough. Buba had just arrived and he still hadn’t played a game with the first team. The club had a surplus of players at the time but there’s no point going into that. In addition to the Spaniards, including four players from the national team, there was Antoine García the French sweeper, Delève the Belgian forward, Neuhuys the Dutch center-back, Jovanovic the Yugoslavian forward, plu
s the Argentinean Percutti and the Uruguayan Buzatti, who were midfielders. But things were going badly for us: after ten disastrous matches we were in the middle of the rankings and it looked like we were heading down. To tell the truth, I don’t know why they signed Buba. I guess they did it to appease the fans, who were complaining more and more bitterly, but on the face of it, at least, they’d screwed up completely. Everyone was hoping they’d sign an emergency replacement for me, a winger, that is, not a midfielder, because we already had Percutti, but managers everywhere tend to be pretty stupid: they jumped at the first opportunity and that’s how Buba ended up with us. Lots of people thought the plan was to get him to do a stint with the second team, which was way down in the second division B at the time, but Buba’s agent said no way, the contract was perfectly clear: either Buba played with the first team or he didn’t play at all. So there we were, the two of us, in our apartment near the training ground, him on the bench every Sunday, and me still recovering from the injury and sunk in that awful depression. And we were the two youngest players, like I told you already, and if I didn’t I’m telling you now, although there was some speculation about that too for a while. I was twenty-two at the time, no doubt there. People said Buba was nineteen, though he looked more like he was twenty-nine, and naturally some smartass journalist claimed that our managers had been duped: in Buba’s country birth certificates were issued à la carte, he said; Buba not only looked older but was older; in short, the deal had been a rip-off.