by Rob Doyle
In perambulatory homage to the Julio Cortázar novel beloved by Bolaño, I hopscotched around the later stages of the tour rather than visit them in linear order. I made sure, though, to reach the final, melancholy stage last. The seventeenth plaque marked the author’s last studio. ‘In his later years,’ the text read, ‘aware of the countdown the serious diagnosis had started, he committed himself entirely to his writing.’ In the year he died, with his private life becoming painfully complicated, Bolaño actually moved into this studio, on the lively Rambla de Joaquim Ruyra. It was the site of his final, exhausting effort to salvage as many of the words, dreams and visions as he could before it all went dark. The result of this last great push was 2666, the unfinished, enigmatic masterwork that is certainly one of the great books of the century so far.
By mid-afternoon I had completed the tour. I climbed the hill to the Castell de Sant Joan, from where there were views over Blanes, the Costa Brava beyond, and the Mediterranean. When I reached the summit, thirsty and tired, my first thought was that this was a view worth photographing. A pang of sadness followed. For years, I had travelled around the world, passing through many places of beauty, and for all that time I had made a point of not owning a camera. Naturally I’d had an urge to capture moments, seize hold of images so that what I experienced would not be obliterated in time. The wager was that, by not having such an option, I would be forced to appreciate every moment in the moment, to embrace and honour the flux of my existence in all its singularity and transience. Everything I saw, heard and tasted would, I hoped, be intensified, bearing as it did such a weight. And now here I was, another schmuck with an iPhone, snapping happy, angling for his panorama shots, already wondering to whom he would send the pictures when he got back to a Wi-Fi zone. This was what all our devices were leading to: a world of perfect communication wherein nobody was interesting enough to be worth communicating with. I used to be interesting once, I thought glumly, framing the sea.
I returned to the hotel with the feeling that I’d earned my night in with the telly, only to find that there was no telly. This had escaped my notice the previous evening, when I’d crashed straight out after getting back from the seafront. Bereft of the box, I went downstairs and drank a couple of beers at the hotel bar. I was served by the beaming receptionist, who tonight wore a lovely, cream-coloured shawl. I pretended to read my book while she flitted between the bar and the reception desk. As she was putting on some music I glanced up at her. She smiled at me, then laughed and looked away. We started chatting: she was Romanian, and her family owned the hotel. Just then her sisters came in; all three of them were magnificent too. We chatted away, they were charming and vivacious, and I was feeling very good about the situation indeed. The mother and father presently appeared, which I was less happy about. The eldest sister, a blonde, told me she was studying fashion; she wanted to show me the dress she had designed, her first, to wear to a wedding that weekend. She took the dress from its protective sheath and held it up before me: it was long, pink, diamond-encrusted and tantalisingly translucent. I asked her whether she would wear anything underneath it and she said yes, flesh-coloured underwear. I told her I was certain she was going to be famous one day and she agreed. Just as I had turned my attention back to the receptionist and worked up the nerve to ask her out, the father, who did not say much, closed up shop, turned out the lights and ushered them all into the car, home for the night.
I paid for another couple of bottles and took them to my room, where I squandered the rest of the evening on the internet, posting tweets of an aggressive banality. I had spotted no other guests since checking in and assumed I was alone in the hotel. Around 2 a.m., however, the quiet was pierced by a woman’s unbridled erotic screams – a full-throated, prolonged howl of ecstasy. Such a noise goaded its hearer: someone else was having this rapturous sex tonight, not you. For a jealous moment I imagined it was the goddess from the reception desk, wearied by my indecisiveness and now gifting herself to some other man who doubtless couldn’t believe his luck, his entire life justified by this one night. Lying there in my TV-less room, with the shrieks so loud it was as if the fuckers were in the bed with me, I felt momentarily sorry for myself. Then I began to laugh. The thought was inevitable: it might have been a Bolaño story, one of those faintly hallucinatory narratives about a drifter who turns up in some town, has an inconclusive encounter or two and moves on, having learned nothing and finished up more lost than when he started out. I remembered some lines from Bolaño’s last interview, with his biographer Mónica Maristain for Playboy Mexico, when the shadows were drawing in:
What are the kind of things that make you laugh?
My own and other people’s misfortunes.
What sort of things make you weep?
The same: my own and other people’s misfortunes.
I slept badly, my dreams toxic with alcohol. The next afternoon, hot and tired, I returned to Barcelona and boarded the late train to Paris. Return journeys are always longer than the outward trip, and glummer. The promise of the journey has been spent: instead of an open horizon of possibility, the only destination now is familiar. You sign up for the melancholy of returning the moment you determine to undertake a journey. I brought my book to the cafe carriage. The hours dragged past. The train broke down deep inside a tunnel: I struggled to ward off a claustrophobia compounded by mental images of jihadists stalking through the carriages with AK-47s, executing anyone who couldn’t recite a page or two from the Koran. (A month earlier, passengers on a French train had avoided such a fate due to the fortuitous combination of a jammed assault rifle and the presence of two off-duty US marines and a British civilian.)
I was looking out the window when a dark-haired woman I had noticed earlier took the stool next to mine. She ate a salad and when she was finished she did not get up to leave. We got talking: she told me she was Algerian, had been living in Spain for a decade, was on her way to visit her sister in the north of France. She showed me pictures of her two children, who were beautiful. Her ex-husband was a communist, she said. She had left Algeria ‘because of the mentality’. Too many people she knew had died violently. We spoke in French that was peppered with Spanish phrases, and a few English ones. I found I was enjoying myself. Twilight was blazing out across the French countryside, the fields all darkening. I bought us a beer each: she laughed and said it would be a scandal in Algeria for a woman to drink alcohol, especially on a train with a strange man. The carriage was empty now, the vendors having retreated behind the counter. Our conversation had reached a comfortable pause. The woman glanced up at me and smiled, turned away, looked at me again. I touched her forearm and after a moment she ran her fingers over my own. We kissed. She drew me in close and I trailed a hand along her thigh, up inside her denim skirt. Her knickers were a thin, silken slip: I parted them and slid a finger inside her. Behind us the automatic door hummed open and we drew apart, giggling like teenagers, hiding in our hair. She said I shouldn’t think she was the kind of person who did this often, and I replied that neither was I.
It was past midnight when we arrived in Paris. The rain was coming down hard. She was staying the night in a hotel in Montmartre, would catch another train in the morning. Outside the Gare de Lyon there was a long queue for taxis. The cars arrived slowly, in ones and twos. We stood in line, holding each other in the rain. The night was cold. We moved slowly in the queue, pulling our luggage along beside us, like we were a married couple, a man and a woman who knew each other.
After I got back to Paris I didn’t see anyone for days. I haven’t been right at all, with hot coals in my skull. I’ve been drunk for a week, pouring Brouilly in my room when I wake up, wandering the grey city as in a dream. This constant oscillation between the desire to live forever and the desire to end it all right now. The suspicion that everyone gets everything he wants. I have an uncle who’s an alcoholic. He left his family, lost his job, now he sleeps in a hostel for destitutes where they give him three meals a day, mo
ney enough to stay drunk all the time. I imagine him happier than he’s ever been, free-falling through destiny.
I have all the chapters fanned out on the floor, in front of my desk. I hover over the pages, getting a sense of the whole and what it requires. At such times, when the work is going well and you feel its substance begin to cohere, there is respite – more than respite.
And what about your book? Is it vicious, or funny, or what? Are the men all awful? You make having children sound like hell, by the way, which is how so many novels I’ve read make it sound. In a parallel world, I never encountered certain books, ideas, works of corrupting art, and now I’m raising two kids, the age my father was when I was six or seven, sweating to pay off the mortgage, envying my bachelor friends their casual lovers, drinking up the courage for a first adultery.
Last night I joined Eddie for a party at the house on Villa Seurat where he and his ex-wife raised their children. She and Eddie are still friends, and their current partners attend the family gatherings. Eddie and I stayed late, dancing with Callisto and her friends till all the wine was gone. The family is half Greek, so their soirées have none of the stifling reserve of bourgeois Paris parties. Or to put it another way, Eddie and I got magnificently hammered. He told me that if he didn’t have children, he’d have no reason not to kill himself. I thought of John Berger’s insistence that suicide should not necessarily be seen as the tragic derailment of a life – what went wrong? – but may be part of that life’s destiny.
I still believe in amor fati – I wouldn’t exchange my existence for any other. Nietzsche wrote that anyone who has a why in life can put up with almost any how. For as long as you are working, you have a why: when you reach the end of a project, the why dissolves. You are left alone with yourself, in all the pain from which the work had offered relief. But there is another perspective, more comforting and no less valid: with the completion of every book, it gets easier to disappear.
Nightclub
When I was younger than I’ll ever be again I fixated on the idea of moving to Berlin. I spent a couple of years drifting around the world, and every place I went, the most interesting people I met would say: Berlin. By the time I returned to Ireland, I wanted so badly to move to Berlin that I began learning German, read up on the city’s history, packed my belongings, and finally moved to Sicily.
The reason I moved to Sicily back then and not Berlin involves my Berliner friend Linda, and the notorious week I spent at her apartment in Friedrichshain, prior to my planned move. But I’ll get back to that, or maybe I won’t. For now, suffice it to say it was a real shitshow, and consequently I only got round to living in Berlin a decade later, when I spent a winter there with the aim of researching a novel.
I arrived in the city in late November, just when everybody else wanted to leave. The winter was tightening its grip – the days were over before they began. I worked in my room in Schöneberg each afternoon, and in the evenings I rode the S-Bahn around the city. Because it was dark whenever I took the train, it was impossible to get a sense of Berlin’s visual character, what distinguished one neighbourhood from another. The streets seemed deserted as I soared above them, peering in the windows of cuboid offices – it was the emptiest capital in Europe. The Berliners wore black-hole clothes that sucked in whatever light there was – the city hid itself in its citizens, and vice versa. After a week or two the colourlessness of Berlin began to unsettle me. It wasn’t long before I came to believe that it was all a reflection: I saw no colour because I was colourless myself, saw no light because a light had gone out in me.
It was on one of my aimless night journeys, as a shoal of grey citizens poured off the train at Hauptbahnhof, that the thought hit me: I was jaded. The suicidal mania I’d endured in Paris and Spain had relented, but it had left in its stead a condition of surfeit and indifference. As the train trundled out of the station over the dark city, it seemed to me more shameful to be jaded than it did to be heartbroken or suicidal. Those were distressing experiences, obviously, but they were violent conditions, the consequences of passion gone awry. Jadedness was a more contemptible kind of defeat, a death in life without dignity or valour. You were so jaded when I met you, a woman had said to me once. She was right that I had been jaded, and right to imply that it was through her I became unjaded. There are worse descriptions of what it is to fall in love than that: an unjadening. The event of encountering an unanticipated, amazing other destabilises your categories, overturns your certainties, so that it is no longer viable to go on as you have been. But that – love – was in the past, and possibly in the future: in the present there was solitude, and a habit of promiscuity that iterated with diminishing zeal so that lovers had come to seem disposable, interchangeable, like the faces that scroll past on a dating app. I sensed I had strayed too long and lost the thread of return. The prospect of ever again being so enchanted by any one person that I would commit to making a life with them – or, if I did meet such a person, that I would be un-fucked-up enough to make them stay – seemed remoter as the years fell off. Already looming on my horizon were the stark years in which virility would dissipate, when my body would become as repulsive to the young as those of the middle-aged had been to me. I would continue to desire what I had always desired – the love and physical intimacy of women – but these longings and my efforts to satisfy them would increasingly find me branded a predator, vilified in a society that now endorsed the hatred of men, and reviled especially those past a certain age who have neither married nor renounced their sexual hunger. As I exited the S-Bahn at Alexanderplatz, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in a window. I thought, that is the face of a man who is jaded. Then I thought, that is the face of a man who used to be handsome. I wished I didn’t care so much about the fading of my looks, but looks were a sign of youth and I had never taken an interest in very much beyond youth culture, nor made any plan for getting older. Before moving to Berlin, I had asked my barber to put some dye in my hair for the first time, and got a spiky, youthful new haircut, but what I saw reflected in the station window was merely the haircut of a man trying to look younger than he was. At a certain age, when you shamble into the bathroom in the morning, instead of thrilling narcissistically at your reflection you start to avoid your own gaze, like that of a lecherous creep on the subway. I was almost certainly in the grip of Seasonal Affective Disorder – being a SAD bastard – but I was convinced the truth was written in wintry lines all over my face: somewhere along the way I had become the kind of man of whom it could be said The years have taken their toll on him.
On a Friday evening I met Linda and her friends at an Italian restaurant in Friedrichshain – the sixth-best Italian restaurant in Berlin, according to Linda – for a pre-club meal. Linda and I had reunited at a bar in Mitte the previous week, for the first time since my notorious stay years earlier. Linda had gamely offered to facilitate my explorations of the Berlin techno scene, in which she and her friends were immersed. Over vodka and Club-Mate I’d told Linda of my ambition to write the great Berlin techno novel. I had no sense of what this novel might look like, except that it would include an ageing expat druggie who dances a lot. In the meantime, its notional existence gave a sense of purpose to my intention of hanging out in grotty clubs every weekend, buying drugs in the toilets while friends in Ireland started having kids and buying homes.
Friedrichshain was thronged and we had to wait for a while even though we’d made a reservation. Smoking cigarettes outside the restaurant, Linda’s forty-ish friends looked like well-paid office workers at the end of the week, which is precisely what some of them were. But when they took off their elegant coats they revealed black, stylish clubbing gear – hoodies and techno T-shirts and runners. The waitress placed menus on the table and we ordered bottles of sparkling water, most of the group being straight-edge. Linda’s edge was anything but straight: she ordered a beer, then began rolling a joint under the table. The friends chatted about their week, mostly in English for my benefit,
although I urged them not to.
‘So what are you currently writing about?’ asked Marc politely. He had a narrow beard and a shaved head and he was a DJ.
I extemporised about the sedimented psychic histories of Berlin, layers of memory and hallucination. What I didn’t mention was that, ever since we’d sat down at the table, I’d become fired up on the idea of writing about them – Linda and her stylish, not-so-young techno friends. Clubbers who were pushing into their forties seemed to me a milieu worth exploring, one that might illumine a host of confluent themes that engaged me: what it meant, for instance, to age in twenty-first-century Europe, and the new kinds of family that emerged when the nuclear family blew itself up. Naturally, nightclubs teemed with sexy young things who could wear any ill-fitting, outlandish clothes and still look edgy and mesmeric. The techno kids danced with animal assurance because they knew the world was about them: they were the future and we – anyone over thirty – were already the past, sinking inexorably into it. Better to leave the gorgeous twenty-year-olds to their photogenic bliss: I would write about Linda and Marc and Thorsten, Julia and Katarina, and in writing about them I would be writing about myself, my own reckoning with the ancient headfuck of ageing, which was the dinosaur in the room of any club I danced at from here on in.
I gestured to the waitress and ordered a glass of wine, while the others studied the menus.
‘Prego.’
Hours later I sat in a grotty toilet cubicle at Griessmühle, a marvellously dilapidated club on the banks of a canal, hidden amid factories and business premises. The MDMA I had taken after we got inside was coming to life, and among its effects was an urgent quickening of the bowels. Outside the cubicle, girls and boys laughed and smoked and chattered, sitting on sinks overlooking a shadowy yard. Ostensibly these were the girls’ toilets but that did not matter: the toilets were a hangout, a chill-out room away from the actual chill-out room downstairs. Realising there was no toilet paper, I took the notebook from the pocket of my jeans, ripped out two blank pages and used those instead.