The Insufferable Gaucho

by Roberto Bolaño

  It is, of course, only reasonable to accept and indeed to demand that a novel should be clear and entertaining, since the novel, as an art form, is at best tenuously related to the great forces that shape public history and our private stories, namely science and television; nevertheless, when the rule of clarity and entertainment-value is extended to serious non-fiction and philosophy, the results can be catastrophic, at least at first glance, although the idea, the ideal, remains compelling, a goal to be desired and aspired to in the longer term. “Weak thought,” for example. Honestly, I have no idea what weak thought was or is supposed to be. Its promoter, I seem to remember, was a 20th-century Italian philosopher. I never read any of his books or any book about him. One reason—this is a fact, not an excuse—is that I had no money to buy books. So I must have learned of his existence in the pages of some newspaper. That’s how I discovered that there was such a thing as weak thought. The philosopher is probably still alive. But in the end he’s immaterial. Maybe I completely misunderstood what he meant by weak thought. Probably. But what matters is the title of his book. Just as when we talk about Don Quixote, what we’re usually referring to is not so much the book itself as the title and a couple of windmills. And when we talk about Kafka (may God forgive me), it’s less about Kafka and the fire than a lady or a gentleman at a window. (This is known as encapsulation, an image retained and metabolized by the body, fixed in historical memory, the solidification of chance and fate.) The strength of weak thought—this intuition came to me in a fit of dizziness, brought on by hunger—sprang from the way it presented itself as a philosophical method for people unfamiliar with philosophical systems. Weak thought for the weak classes. With a bit of well-targeted marketing, a construction worker in Gerona, who has never sat down on the scaffolding, thirty yards above street level, with his copy of the Tractatus logico-philosophicus, or reread it while chewing through his chope roll, might be prompted to read the Italian philosopher instead or one of his disciples, whose clear, enjoyable, intelligible style is bound to go straight to his heart.

  At that moment, in spite of the dizziness, I felt like Nietzsche when he had his Eternal Return epiphany. An inexorable succession of nanoseconds, each one blessed by eternity.

  What is chope? What does a chope roll consist of? Is the bread rubbed with tomato and a few drops of olive oil, or is it just plain bread that is wrapped in aluminum foil, also known by its brand name as albal? And what does the chopeconsist of? Mortadella cheese, maybe? Or a mixture of mortadella and boiled ham? Or salami and mortadella? Does it contain chorizo or sausage? And how did the foil come to have the brand name albal? Is it a family name, the name of Mr. Nemesio Albal? Or is it an allusion to el alba, the dawn, the bright dawn of lovers and workers who, before setting off for their daily labor, put a pound of bread and the corresponding ration of sliced chope into their lunch boxes?

  Dawn with a slight metallic sheen. Bright dawn over the shithole. That was the title of a poem I wrote with Bruno Montané centuries ago. The other day I came across the title and the poem attributed to another poet. Honestly, honestly, what are these people thinking? The lengths they go to, tracking, poaching, harassing. And the worst thing is, it’s an appalling title.

  But let us return to weak thought, which goes down like a treat on the scaffolding. It’s pleasant to read, you can’t deny that. It isn’t short on clarity either. And the socially weak or powerless understand the message perfectly. Hitler, to take another example, there was an essayist or philosopher—take your pick—who specialized in weak thought. He’s always understandable! Self-help books are in fact books of practical philosophy, enjoyable down-to-earth philosophy that the woman and the man in the street can understand. That Spanish philosopher, who analyzes and interprets the ups and downs of Big Brother, is a readable and clear philosopher, although in his case the revelation came a couple of decades late. I can’t recall his name for the moment, because, as many of you will have guessed, I am writing this speech on the fly a few days before delivering it. All I can remember is that the philosopher in question lived for many years in a Latin American country; I imagine him there feeling thoroughly sick of his tropical exile, and the mosquitoes, and the ghastly exuberance of the flowers of evil. Now the old philosopher lives in a Spanish city, somewhere north of Andalusia, enduring endless winters, muffled in a scarf and a woolen cap, watching the competitors in Big Brother and taking notes in a notebook with pages white and cold as snow.

  For books about theology, there’s no one to match Sánchez Dragó. For books about popular science, there’s no one to match some guy whose name escapes me for the moment, a specialist in UFOs. For books about intertextuality, there’s no one to match Lucía Extebarría. For books about multiculturalism, there’s no one to match Sánchez Dragó. For political books, there’s no one to match Juan Goytisolo. For books about history and mythology, there’s no one to match Sánchez Dragó. For a book about the ill-treatment of women today, there’s no one to match that lovely talk-show host Ana Rosa Quintana. For books about travel, there’s no one to match Sánchez Dragó. I just love Sánchez Dragó. He doesn’t look his age. I wonder if he dyes his hair with henna or ordinary dye from the hairdresser. Maybe his hair hasn’t gone grey. And if he hasn’t gone grey, how come he hasn’t gone bald, which is what usually happens to men whose hair doesn’t lose its original color?

  And now for the question that has been tormenting me: Why hasn’t Sánchez Dragó invited me to appear on his TV show? What is he waiting for? Does he want me to get down on my knees and grovel at his feet like a sinner before the burning bush? Is he waiting for my health to deteriorate even further? Or for me to get a recommendation from Pitita Ridruejo? Well, you watch out, Víctor Sánchez Dragó! There’s a limit to my patience and I was a gangster in a former life! Don’t say you weren’t warned, Gregorio Sánchez Dragó!

  Hear this. To the right hand side of the routine signpost (coming—of course—from north-northwest), right where a bored skeleton yawns, you can already see Comala, the city of death. This speech is bound for that city, mounted on an ass, as all of us in our various more or less premeditated ways are bound for the city of Comala. But before we get there, I would like to relate a story told by Nicanor Parra, whom I would consider my master if I was worthy to be his disciple, which I’m not. One day, not so long ago, Nicanor Parra received an honorary doctorate from the University of Concepción. The honor might have been conferred by the University of Santa Barbara or Mulchén or Coigüe; I’ve been told that in the '90s all you needed to start up a private university in Chile was to have finished primary school and secured the use of a reasonable sized house; it’s one of the boons of the free-market system. The University of Concepción, however, has a certain prestige; it’s a big university and still a state-run institution as far as I know, and a tribute to Nicanor Parra was organized there and they gave him an honorary doctorate and invited him to conduct a master class. So Nicanor Parra turns up and the first thing he explains is that when he was a kid or a teenager, he went to that university—not to study, but to sell sandwiches (sometimes called sánguches in Chile), which the students used to wolf down between classes. Sometimes Nicanor Parra went there with his uncle, sometimes he went with his mother, and occasionally he went on his own, with a bag full of sandwiches, wrapped not in albal foil but in newspaper or
brown paper, and perhaps he didn’t carry them in a bag but in a basket, covered with a dish cloth, for hygienic and aesthetic and even practical reasons. And addressing that roomful of smiling southern professors, Nicanor Parra evoked the old University of Concepción, which was probably disappearing into the void, and continues to disappear, even now, into the void’s inertia or our perception of it; and he remembered his younger self: badly dressed, we can assume, wearing sandals and the ill-fitting clothes of a poor adolescent, and everything—even the smell of that time, a smell of Chilean colds and southern flus—was trapped like a butterfly by the question that Wittgenstein asks himself and us, speaking from another time, from faraway Europe, a question to which there is no answer: Is this hand a hand or isn’t it?

  Latin America was Europe’s mental asylum just as North America was its factory. The foremen have taken over the factory now and the labor force is made up of escapees from the asylum. For over sixty years, the asylum has been burning in its own oil, its own fat.

  Today I read an interview with a famous and shrewd Latin American author. They ask him to name three people he admires. He replies: Nelson Mandela, Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. With that answer as a starting point, you could write a whole thesis about the current state of Latin American literature. The casual reader might wonder what links those three figures. There is something that links two of them: the Nobel Prize. And there is something more that links all three: years ago they were all left wing. They probably all admire the voice of Miriam Makeba. All three have probably danced to her catchy hit song “Pata-pata,” García Márquez and Vargas Llosa in colorful Latin American apartments, Mandela in the solitude of his prison cell. All three have made way for deplorable heirs: the clear and entertaining epigones of García Márquez and Vargas Llosa, and, in the case of Mandela, the indescribable Thabo Mbeki, the current president of South Africa, who denies the existence of AIDS. How could anyone name those three, without batting an eyelid, as the figures he most admires? Why not Bush, Putin and Castro? Why not Mullah Omar, Haider and Berlusconi? Why not Sánchez Dragó, Sánchez Dragó and Sánchez Dragó, disguised as the Holy Trinity?

  Declarations like that are a sign of the times. Of course, I’m prepared to do whatever’s necessary (though that sounds unnecessarily melodramatic) to ensure that the shrewd writer in question remains free to make that declaration or any other, according to his taste and inclinations—to ensure that everyone can say what they want to say and write what they want to write and publish it as well. I’m against censorship and self-censorship. But on one condition, as Alcaeus of Mytilene said: if you’re going to say what you want to say, you’re going to hear what you don’t want to hear.

  The fact is, Latin American literature isn’t Borges or Macedonio Fernández or Onetti or Bioy or Cortázar or Rulfo or Revueltas or even that pair of old bucks García Márquez and Vargas Llosa. Latin American literature is Isabel Allende, Luís Sepúlveda, Ángeles Mastretta, Sergio Ramírez, Tomás Eloy Martínez, a certain Aguilar Camín or Comín and many other illustrious names that escape me for the moment.

  The work of Reinaldo Arenas is already lost. And the work of Puig, Copi, Roberto Arlt. No one reads Ibargüengoitia any more. Monterroso, who might well have included Mandela, García Márquez and Vargas Llosa in his list of unforgettable figures (though maybe he would have replaced Vargas Llosa with Bryce Echenique), will soon be swallowed up by the mechanism of oblivion. This is the age of the writer as civil servant, the writer as thug, the writer as gym rat, the writer who goes to Houston or the Mayo Clinic in New York for medical treatment. Vargas Llosa never gave a better lesson in literature than when he went jogging at the crack of dawn. And García Márquez never taught us more than when he welcomed the Pope in Havana, wearing patent leather boots—García, not the Pope, who I guess would have been wearing sandals—along with Castro, who was booted too. I can still remember the smile that García Márquez was not quite able to contain on that grand occasion. Half-closed eyes, taut skin as if he’d just had a face-lift, slightly puckered lips, Saracen lips, as Amado Nervo would have said, green with envy.

  What can Sergio Pitol, Fernando Vallejo, and Ricardo Piglia do to counter the avalanche of glamour? Not much. They can write. But writing and literature are worthless if they aren’t accompanied by something more imposing than mere survival. Literature, especially in Latin America, and I suspect in Spain as well, means success, by which, of course, I mean social success: massive print runs; translations into more than thirty languages (I can name twenty languages, but beyond twenty-five I run into trouble, not because I doubt that language number twenty-six exists, but because it’s hard for me to imagine the Burmese publishing industry or Burmese readers quivering with emotion at the magical-realist escapades of Eva Luna); a house in New York or Los Angeles; dinners with the rich and famous (as a result of which we learn that Bill Clinton can recite whole paragraphs of Huckleberry Finn by heart, or that President Aznar reads Cernuda); making the cover of Newsweek and landing six-figure advances.

  Writers today, as Pere Gimferrer would be quick to point out, are no longer young men of means unafraid to inveigh against the norms of respectable society, much less a bunch of misfits, but products of the middle and working classes determined to scale the Everest of respectability, hungry for respectability. Blond- and dark-haired children of Madrid, born into the lower-middle class and hoping to end their days on the next rung up. They don’t reject respectability. They pursue it desperately. And in order to attain it they really have to sweat. They have to sign books, smile, travel to unfamiliar places, smile, make fools of themselves on celebrity talk shows, keep on smiling, never, never bite the hand that feeds them, participate in literary festivals and reply good-humoredly to the most moronic questions, smile in the most appalling situations, look intelligent, control population growth, and always say thank you.

  It’s hardly surprising that they are prone to sudden fatigue. The struggle for respectability is exhausting. But the new writers had and in some cases still have parents (may God preserve them for many years to come), parents who exhausted themselves, who wore themselves out for a manual laborer’s paltry wages, and as a result the new writers know that there are things in life far more exhausting than smiling incessantly and saying yes to the powerful. Of course there are far more exhausting things. And there’s something touching about their efforts to secure a place in the pastures of respectability, although it means elbowing others aside. There are no more heroes like Aldana, who said, Now it is time to die, but there are professional pundits and talk show guests, there are members of the academy and political party animals (on the left and the right), there are cunning plagiarists, seasoned social climbers, Machiavellian cowards, figures who would not be out of place in earlier ages of literary history, and who, in the face of numerous obstacles, play their parts, often with a certain elegance—and they are precisely the writers that we, the readers or the viewers or the public (the public, the public, as Margarita Xirgu whispered into García Lorca’s ear) deserve.

  God bless Hernán Rivera Letelier, God bless his schmaltz, his sentimentality, his politically correct opinions, his clumsy formal tricks, since I am partly responsible. God bless the idiot children of García Márquez and the idiot children of Octavio Paz, since I am to blame for them seeing the light. God bless Fidel
Castro’s concentration camps for homosexuals and the twenty thousand who disappeared in Argentina and Videla’s puzzled mug and Perón’s old macho grin projected into the sky and the child-killers of Rio de Janeiro and Hugo Chávez’s Spanish which smells of shit and is shit, since I created it.

  Everything is folklore in the end. We’re good at fighting and lousy in bed. Or was it the other way round, Maquieira? I can’t remember any more. Fuguet is right: you have to land those fellowships and massive advances. You have to sell yourself before the buyers (whoever they are) lose interest. The last Latin Americans who knew who Jacques Vaché was were Julio Cortázar and Mario Santiago, and both of them are dead. The story of Penelope Cruz in India is worthy of our most illustrious stylists. Pe arrives in India. Since she likes local color or authenticity she goes to eat in one of the worst restaurants in Calcutta or Bombay. Pe’s own words. One of the worst or one of the cheapest or one of the most down-market places. She sees a hungry little boy at the door who stares back at her fixedly. Pe gets up, goes out and asks the boy what’s wrong. The boy asks her for a glass of milk. Which is odd, because Pe isn’t drinking milk. Nevertheless, the actress gets a glass of milk and takes it to the boy, who is waiting patiently at the door. He gulps the glass of milk straight down, under Pe’s benevolent gaze. When the boy finishes the glass, Pe tells us, his grateful happy smile makes her think of all the things she has but doesn’t need, although Pe is wrong there, because in fact she needs everything she has, absolutely everything. A few days later, Pe has a long philosophical but also practical conversation with Mother Teresa of Calcutta. At one point she tells the story of the boy. She talks about the necessary and the superfluous, about being and not-being, about being-in-relation-to and not-being-in-relation-with . . . what? How does it work? And in the end what does it mean “to be”? To be oneself? Pe gets confused. Meanwhile Mother Teresa keeps moving like a rheumatic weasel around the room or the porch where they’re talking, while the Calcutta sun, the balmy sun, but also the sun of the living dead, scatters its dying rays, as it sinks away in the west. Yes, yes, says Mother Teresa and then she murmurs something that Pe doesn’t understand. What? asks Pe in English. Be yourself. Don’t worry about fixing the world, says Mother Teresa: help, help, help one person, give a glass of milk to one child, and that will be enough, sponsor one child, just one, and that will be enough, says Mother Teresa in Italian, clearly in a bad mood. When night falls, Pe returns to her hotel. She takes a shower, changes her clothes, dabs herself with perfume, all the while unable to forget Mother Teresa’s words. When dessert is served: suddenly—illumination! It’s all a matter of taking a tiny pinch out of your savings. It’s all a matter of not getting distressed. Give an Indian child twelve thousand pesetas a year and you’re already doing something. And don’t get distressed and don’t feel guilty. Don’t smoke, eat dried fruit, and don’t feel guilty. Thrift and goodness are indissolubly linked.