The Insufferable Gaucho

by Roberto Bolaño

  Illness and Height

  But let’s if not get to the point at least approach it briefly, where it lies like a seed deposited by the wind or a pure chance bang in the middle of a vast bare tabletop. Not long ago, as I was leaving the consulting rooms of my specialist Victor Vargas, among the patients waiting to go in I found a woman waiting for me to come out. She was a small woman, by which I mean short; her head barely came up to my chest—the top of it would have been about an inch above my nipples—even though, as I soon realized, she was wearing spectacularly high heels. Needless to say, the consultation had not been reassuring, at all; the news my doctor had for me was unequivocally bad. I felt—I don’t know—not exactly dizzy, which would have been understandable after all, but more as if everyone else had been stricken with dizziness, while I was the only one keeping reasonably calm and standing up straight, more or less. I had the impression that they were crawling on all fours, while I was upright or seated with my legs crossed, which to all intents and purposes is as good as standing or walking or maintaining a vertical position. I wouldn’t, however, go so far as to say that I felt well, because it’s one thing to remain upright while everyone else is on their hands and knees, and another thing entirely to watch, with a feeling I shall, for want of a better word, call tenderness or curiosity or morbid curiosity, while those around you are suddenly reduced, one and all, to crawling. Tenderness, melancholy, nostalgia: feelings befitting the sentimental lover, but hardly appropriate in the outpatients’ ward of a Barcelona hospital. Of course, had that hospital been a mental asylum, such a vision would not have disturbed me at all, since from a tender age I have been familiar with—though never obeyed—the proverbial injunction, When in Rome, do as the Romans do, and the best way to behave in an asylum, apart from maintaining a dignified silence, is to crawl or observe the crawling of one’s partners in misfortune. But I wasn’t in an asylum; I was in one of the best public hospitals in Barcelona, a hospital that I know well, because I’ve been a patient there five or six times, and until that occasion I had never seen anyone on all fours, although I had seen some patients turn canary yellow, and others suddenly stop breathing—they were dying, which is not unusual in such a place, but crawling, I’d never seen anyone do that, which made me think that the doctor’s news must have been much worse than I had initially realized, in other words, I was in seriously bad condition. And when I came out of the consulting rooms and saw everyone crawling, this sense of my own illness intensified, and I was about to succumb to fear and start crawling too. But I didn’t, because of that little woman: she stepped forward and said her name, Dr. X, and then pronounced the name of my specialist, my dear Dr. Vargas—my relationship with him is like the marriage of a Greek shipping magnate who loves his wife but prefers to see her as rarely as he can—and Dr. X went on to say that she knew about my illness or the progress of my illness and that she would like me to participate in a study she was conducting. I asked her politely about the nature of the study. Her reply was vague. She explained that it would only take half an hour of my time, if that; she had a series of tests for me. I don’t know why, but I ended up saying yes, and then she led me away from the consulting rooms to an elevator of impressive proportions, in which there was a gurney, with no one to push it, and no one on it, of course, a gurney that lived in the elevator, going up and down, like a normal-sized girl alongside—or inside—her oversized boyfriend. It really was very large, that elevator, large enough to accommodate not just one gurney but two, plus a wheelchair, all with their respective occupants, and the strangest thing was that we were alone in there, the tiny doctor and myself, and at that point, having calmed down or become more excited, I’m not sure which, I realized that the tiny doctor was not at all bad-looking. No sooner had I come to that realization than I found myself wondering what would happen if I suggested that we make love in the elevator, since we had a bed at our disposal. And then, inevitably, I remembered Susan Sarandon, dressed up as a nun, asking Sean Penn how he could think about fucking when he had only a few days left to live. In a censorious tone of voice, of course. And, unsurprisingly, I’ve forgotten the name of the film, but it was a good film, I think it was directed by Tim Robbins, who’s a good actor and maybe a good director too, but he’s never been on death row. When people are about to die, all they want to do is fuck. People in jails and hospitals, all they want to do is fuck. The helpless, the impotent, the castrated, all they want to do is fuck. The seriously injured, the suicidal, the impenitent disciples of Heidegger. Even Wittgenstein, the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, all he wanted to do was fuck. Even the dead, I read somewhere, all they want to do is fuck. Sad to say and hard to admit, but that’s the way it is.

  Illness and Dionysus

  To tell the truth, the honest truth, cross my heart and hope to die, it’s something I find very hard to admit. That seminal explosion, those cumulus and cirrus clouds that blanket our imaginary geography are enough to sadden anyone. Fucking when you don’t have the strength to fuck can be beautiful, even epic. Then it turns into a nightmare. But what can you do? That’s how it is. Consider, for instance, a Mexican jail. A new prisoner arrives. Not what you’d call handsome: squat, greasy, pot-bellied, cross-eyed, malevolent and smelly into the bargain. Before long, this guy, whose shadow creeps over the prison walls or the walls of the corridors at an exasperating, slug-like pace, becomes the lover of another guy, who is just as ugly, but stronger. It’s not a long, drawn-out romance, proceeding by tentative steps and hesitations. It’s not a case of elective affinity, as Goethe understood it. It’s love at first sight; primitive, if you like, but their objective is not so different from that of many normal couples or couples we consider to be normal. They are sweethearts. Their flirting and their swooning are like X-ray images. They fuck every night. Sometimes they hit each other. Sometimes they tell the stories of their lives, as if they were friends, but they’re not really friends, they’re lovers. And on Sundays, their respective wives, who are every bit as ugly as they are, come to visit. Obviously, neither of these men is what we would normally call a homosexual. If someone called them homosexuals to their faces, they’d probably get so angry and be so offended, they’d brutally rape the offender, then kill him. That’s how it is. Victor Hugo, who, according to Daudet, was capable of eating a whole orange in one mouthful—a supreme test of good health, according to Daudet, and a sign of pig-like manners, according to my wife—set down the following reflection in Les Misérables: sinister people, malicious people know a sinister and malicious happiness. Or that’s what I seem to remember, because Les Misérables is a book I read in Mexico many years ago and left behind in Mexico when I left Mexico for good, and I’m not planning to buy it or reread it, because there’s no point reading, much less rereading, books that have been made into movies, and I think Les Misérables has even been turned into a musical. Anyway, the malicious people in question, with their malicious happiness, are the horrible family who adopt Cosette when she is a little girl, and not only are they the perfect incarnations of evil and a certain petit bourgeois meanness or rather the meanness of those who aspire to join the petit bourgeoisie, they are also, at this point in history, thanks to technological progress, emblematic of the middle class in its entirety, or almost, be it left- or right-wing, educated or illiterate, corrupt or apparently upstanding: healthy individuals, busily maintaining their good health; they may be less violent, less courageous, more prudent and more discreet, but basically they’re just the same as the two Mexican
gunmen living out their idyll in the confines of a penitentiary. There’s no stopping Dionysus. He has infiltrated the churches and the NGOs, the governments and the royal families, the offices and the shantytowns. Dionysus is to blame for everything. Dionysus rules. And his antagonist or counterpart is not even Apollo but Mr. Uppity or Mrs. Toplofty, Mr. Prissy or Mrs. Lonely Neuron—bodyguards who are ready to cross over to the enemy camp at the first suspicious bang.

  Illness and Apollo

  Where has that faggot Apollo got to? Apollo is ill, seriously ill.

  Illness and French Poetry

  As the French are well aware, the finest poetry of the nineteenth century was written in France, and in some sense the pages and the lines of that poetry prefigured the major and still unresolved problems that Europe and Western culture were to face in the twentieth century. A short list of the key themes would include revolution, death, boredom and escape. That great poetry is the work of a handful of poets, and its point of departure is not Lamartine, or Hugo or Nerval, but Baudelaire. Let’s say that it begins with Baudelaire, reaches its highest volatility with Lautréamont and Rimbaud and comes to an end with Mallarmé. Of course there are other remarkable poets, like Corbière or Verlaine, and others of considerable talent, like Laforgue or Catulle Mendès or Charles Cros, and even a few who are not entirely insignificant, like Banville. But, really, with Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé, there’s plenty to be going on with. Let’s begin with the last of the four. I don’t mean the youngest, but the last one to die, Mallarmé, who missed out on the twentieth century by two years. He wrote in Brise marine:

  The flesh is sad—and I’ve read every book.

  O to escape—to get away. Birds look

  as though they’re drunk for unknown spray and skies.

  No ancient gardens mirrored in the eyes,

  nothing can hold this heart steeped in the sea —

  not my lamp’s desolate luminosity

  nor the blank paper guarded by its white

  nor the young wife feeding her child, O night!

  I’m off! You steamer with your swaying helm,

  raise anchor for some more exotic realm!

  Ennui, crushed down by cruel hopes, still relies

  on handkerchief’s definitive goodbyes!

  Is this the kind of squall-inviting mast

  the storm winds buckle above shipwrecks cast

  away—no mast, no islets flourishing? . . .

  Still, my soul, listen to the sailors sing!

  A charming poem. Although Nabokov would have advised the translators, E.H. and A.M. Blackmore, to abandon the rhyme scheme, to use free verse, to produce a deliberately ugly version, and if he’d known Alfonso Reyes, who translated the poem into Spanish, with rhymes, he’d have given him the same advice. Now Reyes might not mean a lot to Western culture as a whole, but he does (or should) mean a great deal to that part of Western culture that is Latin America. What did Mallarmé mean when he said that the flesh was sad and that he’d read all the books? That he’d had his fill of reading and of fucking? That beyond a certain point, every book we read and every act of carnal knowledge is a repetition? And after that there is only travel? That fucking and reading are boring in the end, and that travel is the only way out? I think Mallarmé is talking about illness, about the battle between illness and health: two totalitarian states, or powers if you prefer. I think he’s talking about illness tricked out in the rags of boredom. And yet he presents an image of illness that has a certain originality; he speaks of illness as resignation, resignation to living, or to whatever. In other words, he’s talking about defeat. And in order to counter that defeat, he vainly invokes sex and reading, which, I suspect, in Mallarmé’s case—to his greater glory and the bemusement of his good wife—were interchangeable, because how else could anyone in their right mind say that the flesh is sad, period, in that emphatic way? How could anyone declare that the flesh is essentially sad, that la petite mort, which doesn’t even last a minute, casts a pall over all lovemaking, which, it is widely known, can last for hours and hours, and go on interminably? If the line had been written by a Spanish poet like Campoamor, it might have meant something like that, but such a reading is quite at odds with the work and life of Mallarmé, which are indissolubly linked, except in this poem, this encoded manifesto, which Paul Gauguin, and he alone, followed to the letter (as far as we know, Mallarmé himself never listened to the sailors singing, or if he did, it certainly wasn’t on board a ship bound for an unknown destination). And the claim to have read all the books makes even less sense, because although books themselves may come to an end, no one ever finishes reading them all, and Mallarmé was well aware of that. Books are finite, sexual encounters are finite, but the desire to read and to fuck is infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace. And what is left for Mallarmé, in this famous poem, when the desire to read and the desire to fuck, so he says, are all used up? Well, what is left is travel, the desire to go traveling. And maybe that’s the key to the crime. Because if Mallarmé had concluded that the only thing left to do was pray or cry or go crazy, maybe he’d have come up with the perfect alibi. But no, what Mallarmé says is that the only thing left to do is travel—which is like saying “to sail is necessary, to live is not necessary,” a sentence I used to be able to quote in Latin, but that’s just one of the many things I’ve forgotten with the help of my liver’s traveling toxins—in other words he sides with the bare-chested traveler, with Freedom (who’s bare-chested too), with the simple existence of the sailor and the explorer, which isn’t so simple when you get right down to it: an affirmation of life, but also a constant game with death, and the first rung on the ladder, the first step in a certain kind of poetic apprenticeship. The second step is sex, and the third, books. Which means that the Mallarmean choice is paradoxical or regressive, a starting over. And at this point, before we return to the elevator, I can’t help recalling a poem by Baudelaire, the father of them all, in which he speaks of travel, the voyage, the naïve enthusiasm of setting out, and the bitterness that every voyage bequeaths to the voyager when all is said and done, and it occurs to me that perhaps Mallarmé’s sonnet is a reply to Baudelaire’s poem, one of the most terrible poems I have read, an ill poem, a poem that offers no way out, but perhaps the most clear-eyed poem of the entire nineteenth century.

  Illness and Travel

  Traveling makes you ill. In the old days, doctors used to recommend travel, especially for patients suffering from nervous illnesses. The patients, who were generally wealthy, complied and set off on long trips that lasted months and sometimes years. Poor people who had nervous illnesses didn’t get to travel. Some, presumably, went crazy. But the traveling patients also went crazy, or, worse still, acquired new illnesses as they moved from one city or climate or culinary culture to another. Really, it’s healthier not to travel; it’s healthier not to budge and never leave home, warmly wrapped up in winter, only removing your scarf in summertime; it’s healthier not to open your mouth or blink; it’s healthier not to breathe. But the fact is, we breathe and travel. Myself, for example, I began traveling very young, at the age of seven or eight. First in my father’s truck, on lonely Chilean highways that had a post-nuclear feel to them and made my hair bristle, then in trains and buses, until at the age of fifteen, I boarded a plane for the first time and went to live in Mexico. From that moment on, I was constantly traveling. Consequence: multiple illnesses. In childhood: major headaches, which made my parents
wonder if I had a nervous illness, and whether it might be advisable for me to undertake, as soon as possible, a long therapeutic voyage. In adolescence: insomnia and problems of a sexual nature. As a young man: the loss of my teeth, which I left here and there on my way from country to country, like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs; a bad diet, which gave me heartburn and then gastritis; excessive reading, which weakened my eyes, so I had to wear glasses; calluses on my feet from long, aimless walks; and an endless string of lingering colds and flus. I was poor, lived rough, and thought myself lucky because, after all, I was free of life-threatening illnesses. My sex-life was immoderate but I never caught a venereal disease. I read immoderately, but I never wanted to be a successful author. I even regarded the loss of my teeth as a kind of homage to Gary Snyder, whose life of Zen wandering had led him to neglect dental care. But it all catches up with you. Children. Books. Illness. The voyage comes to an end.

  Illness and Dead Ends

  Baudelaire’s poem is called “The Voyage.” It is a long and delirious poem, possessed of the delirium that results from extreme lucidity, and this is not the moment to read it all the way through. Here are the first lines in Richard Howard’s translation:

  The child enthralled by lithographs and maps

  can satisfy his hunger for the world