The Secret of Evil

by Roberto Bolaño

  When night falls over the photograph again, J.-J. Goux will head straight for his apartment, make himself a sandwich, watch television for exactly fifteen minutes, not one more, then sit in an armchair in the living room and call Philippe Sollers. The phone will ring five times and J.-J. will hang up slowly, holding the receiver in his right hand, raising his left hand to his lips, and touching them with two fingers, as if to check that he’s still there, that the person there is him, in a living room that’s not too big, not too small, crowded with books, and dark.

  As for Carla Devade, having lost her acquiescent smile, she’ll call Marie-Thérèse Réveillé, who will pick up the phone after three rings. In a roundabout way, they’ll talk about things they don’t really want to talk about at all, and arrange to meet in three days’ time at a café on Rue Galande. Tonight Marie-Thérèse will go out on her own, with nowhere in particular to go, and Carla will shut herself in her room as soon as she hears the sound of Marc Devade’s key sliding into the lock. But for now nothing tragic will happen. Marc Devade will read an essay by a Bulgarian linguist; Guyotat will go to see a film by Jacques Rivette; Julia Kristeva will stay up late reading; Philippe Sollers will stay up late writing, and he and his wife will barely exchange a few words, shut away in their respective studies; Jacques Henric will sit down at his typewriter but nothing will occur to him, so after twenty minutes he’ll put on his leather jacket and his boots and go down to the underground parking garage and look for his Honda in the dark; for some reason the lights in the parking lot don’t seem to be working, but Henric can remember where he left his bike, so he walks in the dark, in the belly of that whale-like parking lot, without fear or apprehension of any kind, until about halfway there he hears an unusual noise (not a knocking in the pipes or the noise of a car door opening or closing) and he stops, without really understanding why, and listens, but the noise is not repeated, and now the silence is absolute.

  And then the night ends (or a small part of the night, at least, a manageable part) and light wraps the photo like a bandage on fire, and there he is again, Pierre Guyotat, almost a familiar presence now, with his powerful, shiny bald head and his leather jacket, the jacket of an anarchist or a commissar from the Spanish Civil War, and his sidelong gaze, veering off to the right, as if into the space behind the photographer, as if directed at someone near or at the bar, perhaps, standing or sitting on a stool, someone whose back is turned to Guyotat and whose face would be invisible to him unless, and this is not unlikely, there is a mirror behind the bar. It may be a woman. A young woman, maybe. Guyotat looks at her reflection in the mirror and looks at the back of her neck. Guyotat’s gaze, however, is far less intense than the gaze of this woman, which is plumbing an abyss. Here we can reasonably conclude that, while Guyotat is looking at a stranger, Marie-Thérèse and Carla are looking at a man they know, although, as is usually (or, in fact, inevitably) the case, their perceptions of him are entirely different.

  Let’s call these two beyond the frame X and Z. X is the woman at the bar. Z is the man who is known to Marie-Thérèse and Carla. They don’t know him very well, of course. From Carla’s gaze (which is not only gentle but protective) it could be inferred that he is young, although from Marie-Thérèse’s gaze it could also be inferred that he is a potentially dangerous individual. Who else knows Z? No one, or at least there is nothing to suggest that his presence is of any concern to the others. Maybe he’s a young writer who at some stage has tried to get his work published in Tel Quel; maybe he’s a young journalist from South America — no, from Central America — who at some point tried to write an article about the group. He may well be an ambitious young man. If he’s a Central American in Paris, as well as ambitious, he may well be bitter. Of the people sitting around the table, he knows only Marie-Thérèse, Carla, Sollers and Marc Devade. Let’s say he once visited the Tel Quel office and was introduced to those four (he also once shook hands with Marcelin Pleynet, but Pleynet’s not in the photo). He has never seen the others in his life, or only (in the cases of Guyotat and Jacques Henric) in author photos. So we can imagine the young Central American, hungry and bitter, in the Tel Quel office, and we can imagine Philippe Sollers and Marc Devade, wavering between puzzlement and indifference as they listen to him, and we can even imagine that Carla Devade is there by pure chance; she has come to meet her husband, she has brought some papers that Marc left behind on his desk, she’s there because she couldn’t stand being alone in the apartment a minute longer, etc. What we can’t imagine (or justify) in any way at all is Marie-Thérèse’s presence in the office. She is Guyotat’s partner, she doesn’t work for Tel Quel and she has no reason to be there. And yet there she is and that is where she meets the young Central American. Is she there on that day because of Carla Devade? Has Carla arranged to meet Marie-Thérèse at the office because she knows that Marc will not be coming home with her? Or has Marie-Thérèse come to meet someone else? Let’s return, discreetly, to the afternoon when the Central American came to the office on Rue Jacob to pay his respects.

  It’s the end of the working day. The secretary has already gone home, and when the bell rings it’s Marc Devade who opens the door and lets the visitor in without meeting his eye. The Central American crosses the threshold and follows Marc Devade to an office at the end of the corridor. He leaves a trail of drops on the wooden floor behind him, although it stopped raining quite some time ago. Devade is, of course, oblivious to this detail; he walks ahead talking about something or other — the weather, money, chores — with that elegance that only certain Frenchmen seem to possess. In the office, which is spacious, and contains a desk, several chairs, two armchairs, and shelves full of books and magazines, Sollers is waiting, and as soon as the introductions are over the Central American hails him as a genius, one of the century’s most brilliant minds, a compliment that would be par for the course in certain tropical nations on the far side of the Atlantic but which, in the Tel Quel office and the ears of Philippe Sollers, verges on the preposterous. In fact, as soon as the Central American makes his declaration, Sollers catches Devade’s eye and both of them are wondering whether they’ve let a madman in. Deep down, however, Sollers is eighty per cent in agreement with the Central American’s appraisal, so once he has set aside the idea that the visitor might be mocking him, the conversation proceeds in an amicable fashion, at least for a start. The Central American speaks of Julia Kristeva (and winks at Sollers as he mentions that eminent Bulgarian), he speaks of Marcelin Pleynet (whom he has already met), and of Denis Roche (whose work he claims to be translating). Devade listens to him with a slightly wry smile. Sollers listens, nodding from time to time, his boredom increasing with every passing second. Suddenly, a sound of steps in the corridor. The door opens. Carla Devade appears, wearing tight corduroy trousers, flat shoes and a disconsolate smile on her pretty Mediterranean face. Marc Devade gets up from his chair; for a moment the couple whisper questions and answers. The Central American has fallen silent; Sollers is mechanically flipping through an English magazine. Then Carla and Marc walk across the room (Carla taking tentative little steps, holding her husband’s arm), the Central American stands up, is introduced, and obsequiously greets the newcomer. The conversation is immediately resumed, but the Central American’s chatter veers off in a new direction, unfortunately for him (he changes the subject from literature to the matchless beauty and grace of French women), at which point Sollers completely loses interest. Shortly afterward, the visit is brought to a close: Sollers looks
at his watch, says it’s late; Devade shows the Central American to the door, shakes his hand, and the visitor, instead of waiting for the elevator, rushes down the stairs. On the second-floor landing he runs into Marie-Thérèse Réveillé. The Central American is talking to himself in Spanish, not under his breath but out loud. As their paths cross, Marie-Thérèse notices a fierce look in his eyes. They bump into each other. Both apologize. They look at each other again (and this is surprising, the way their eyes meet again after the apology), and what she sees, beneath the expedient mask of bitterness, is a well of unbearable horror and fear.

  So the Central American, Z, is there in the café when the photo is taken, and Carla and Marie-Thérèse have recognized him, they’ve remembered him; perhaps he has just arrived, perhaps he walked past the table at which the group is sitting and greeted them, but except for the two women, they had no idea who he was; this happens quite often, of course, but it’s something that the Central American still can’t accept with equanimity. There he is, to the left of the group, with some Central American friends, or waiting for them, maybe, and deep within him — nourished by affronts and grudges, fuelled by bitterness and the chill of the City of Light — there’s a seething. His appearance, however, is equivocal: it makes Carla Devade feel like a protective older sister or a missionary nun in Africa, but it catches at Marie-Thérèse Réveillé like barbed wire and triggers a vague erotic longing.

  And then night falls again and the photo empties out or disappears under a scribble of lines entirely traced by the night’s mechanism, and Sollers is writing in his study, and Kristeva is writing in the study next door, soundproofed studies so they can’t hear each other typing, for example, or getting up to consult a book, or coughing or talking to themselves, and Carla and Marc Devade are leaving a cinema (they’ve been to a film by Rivette), not talking to each other, although, a couple of times, Marc and then Carla, who’s more distracted, greet people they know, and J.-J. Goux is preparing his dinner, a frugal dinner consisting of bread, pâté, cheese and a glass of wine, and Guyotat is undressing Marie-Thérèse Réveillé and throwing her onto the sofa with a violent thrust that Marie-Thérèse intercepts in midair as if she were catching a butterfly of lucidity in a net of lucidity, and Henric is leaving his apartment, going down to the parking lot and he stops again as the lights go out, first the ones near the metal roller gate that opens onto the street, and then the others, till there is only the light down at the back, flickering helplessly, illuminating his multicolored Honda, and then it fails as well. And it occurs to Henric that his motorbike is like an Assyrian god, but for the moment his legs refuse to walk on into the darkness, and Marie-Thérèse shuts her eyes and opens her legs, one foot on the sofa, the other on the carpet, while Guyotat pushes into her, the panties still around her thighs, and calls her his little whore, his little bitch, and asks her what she did all day, what happened to her, what streets she wandered down, and J.-J. Goux is sitting at the table and spreading pâté on a piece of bread and lifting it to his mouth and chewing, first on the right side, then on the left, unhurriedly, with a book by Robert Pinget open beside him at page two and the television switched off but the screen reflecting his image, a man on his own with his mouth closed and his cheeks full, looking thoughtful and absent, and Carla Devade and Marc Devade are making love, Carla on top, illuminated only by the light in the corridor, a light they usually leave on, and Carla is groaning and trying not to look at her husband’s face, his blond hair in a mess now, his light eyes, his broad and placid face, his delicate, elegant hands, devoid of the fire she’s longing for, ineffectually holding her hips, as if he were trying to keep her there with him, but he has no real sense of what she might be fleeing from or what her flight might mean, a flight that goes on and on like torture, and Kristeva and Sollers are going to bed, first her, she has to lecture early the next day, then him, and both of them take books that they will leave on their bedside tables when sleep comes to close their eyes, and Philippe Sollers will dream that he is walking along a beach in Brittany with a scientist who has discovered a way to destroy the world; they will be walking westward along this long, deserted beach, bounded by rocks and black cliffs, and suddenly Sollers will realize that the scientist (who is talking and explaining) is himself and that the man walking beside him is a murderer; this will dawn on him when he looks down at the wet sand (with its soup-like consistency) and the crabs skittering away to hide and the prints the two of them are leaving on the beach (there is a certain logic to this: identifying the murderer by his footprints), and Julia Kristeva will dream of a little village in Germany where years ago she participated in a seminar, and she’ll see the streets of the village, clean and empty, and sit down in a square that’s tiny but full of plants and trees, and close her eyes and listen to the distant cheeping of a single bird and wonder if the bird is in a cage or free, and she’ll feel a breeze on her neck and her face, neither cold nor warm, a perfect breeze, perfumed with lavender and orange blossom, and then she’ll remember her seminar and look at her watch, but it will have stopped.

  So the Central American is outside the frame of the photograph, sharing that pristine and deceptive territory with the object of Guyotat’s gaze: an unknown woman armed only, for the moment, with her beauty. Their eyes will not meet. They will pass each other by like shadows, briefly sharing the same hazardous ambit: the itinerant theater of Paris. The Central American could quite easily become a murderer. Perhaps, back in his country, he will, but not here, where the only blood he could possibly shed is his own. This Pol Pot won’t kill anyone in Paris. And actually, back in Tegucigalpa or San Salvador, he’ll probably end up teaching in a university. As for the unknown woman, she will not be captured by Guyotat’s asbestos nets. She’s at the bar, waiting for the boyfriend she’ll marry before long (him or the next one), and their marriage will be disastrous, though not without its moments of comfort. Literature brushes past these literary creatures and kisses them on the lips, but they don’t even notice.

  The section of restaurant or café that contains the photo’s nest of smoke continues imperturbably on its voyage through nothingness. Behind Sollers, for instance, we can make out the fragmentary figures of three men. None of the faces can be seen in its entirety. The man on the left, in profile: a forehead, one eyebrow, the back part of his ear, the top of his head. The man on the right: a little piece of his forehead, his cheekbone, strands of dark hair. The man in the middle, who seems to be calling the tune: most of his forehead, traversed by two clearly visible wrinkles, his eyebrows, the bridge of his nose, and a discreet quiff. Behind them, there is a pane of glass and behind the glass many people walking about curiously among stalls or exhibition stands, bookstands perhaps, mostly facing away from our characters (who have their backs to them in turn), except for a child with a round face and straight bangs, wearing a jacket that may be too small for him, looking sideways toward the café, as if from that distance he could observe everything going on inside, which, on the face of it, seems rather unlikely.

  And in a corner, to the right: the waiting man, the listening man. His face appears just above Marc Devade’s blond hair. His hair is dark and abundant, his eyebrows are thick, he is thin. In one hand (a hand resting listlessly against his right temple), he is holding a cigarette. A spiral of smoke is rising from the cigarette toward the ceiling, and the camera has captured it almost as if it were the image of a ghost. Telekinesis. An expert could identify the brand of cigarette that he’s smoking in half a second just by the solid loo
k of that smoke. Gauloises, no doubt. He’s gazing off toward the photo’s right-hand side — that is, he’s pretending not to know that the photo is being taken, but in a way he too is posing.

  And there is yet another person: careful examination reveals something protruding from Guyotat’s neck like a cancerous growth, which turns out to be made up of a nose, a withered forehead, the outline of an upper lip, the profile of a man who is looking, with a certain gravity, in the same direction as the smoking man, although their gazes could not be more different.

  And then the photo is occluded and all that is left is the smoke of a Gauloise floating in the air, as if the viewfinder had suddenly swung to the right, toward the black hole of chance, and Sollers comes to a sudden halt in the street, a street near the Place Wagram, and feels in his pockets as if he had left his address book behind or lost it, and Marie-Thérèse Réveillé is driving on the Boulevard Malesherbes, near the Place Wagram, and J.-J. Goux is talking on the phone with Marc Devade (J.-J.’s voice is unsteady, Devade isn’t saying a word), and Guyotat and Henric are walking on Rue Saint-André des Arts, heading for Rue Dauphine, and by chance they run into Carla Devade who says hello and joins them, and Julia Kristeva is coming out of class surrounded by a retinue of students, quite a few of whom are foreign (two Spaniards, a Mexican, an Italian, two Germans), and once more the photo dissolves into nothingness.

  Aurora borealis. Terrible dawn. As they open their eyes, they are almost transparent. Marc Devade, alone in bed, snug in gray pajamas, dreaming of the Académie Goncourt. J.-J. Goux at his window, watching clouds float through the sky over Paris and comparing them unfavorably to certain clouds in paintings by Pisarro or the clouds in his nightmare. Julia Kristeva is sleeping and her calm face seems an Assyrian mask until, with a very slight wince of discomfort, she wakes. Philippe Sollers is in the kitchen, leaning on the edge of the sink, and blood is dripping from his right index finger. Carla Devade is climbing the stairs to her apartment after having spent the night with Guyotat. Marie-Thérèse Réveillé is making coffee and reading a book.