The Spirit of Science Fiction

by Roberto Bolaño

  “They’re celebrating your triumph, my young friend.”

  “Look at that old man: he’s got his face in his wife’s crotch.”

  “That’s not his wife. Never mind. All his life he’s fought for the perfect word and silence. Otherness. Now he’s scared but happy. The reason for his happiness is you. You and your magnificent poems.”

  “I get the sense that the only sober person in this Republic of Letters bacchanal is me. You, dear reporter, have had a touch too much vodka. It’s clear that I’m not here for my ‘magnificent’ poems.”

  “Anyway, back to your work. How is the girl? Is she still sick?”

  “No. Now there’s a fiesta in town, and the girl walks the streets with a crown of flowers in her hair. The people gather in the Plaza de Armas, and then they stream along the streets of town. They’re singing as they go. There aren’t many of them, as I’ve said. The town isn’t big, and the song that they sing has no words: it’s a string of aa-ohh, aa-ohh, ee-ahh, ee-ahh sounds, a little like an Indian lament.”

  “At a certain point, they pass in front of the Potato Academy.”

  “Yes. The caretaker is watching from the window. The procession continues to the end of Calle Galvarino, turns onto Valdivia, and is gone. Only the girl is left standing in the middle of the street, and this time the caretaker notices her. The sky, of course, suddenly grows dark.”

  “Does the girl think it’s a haunted house?”

  “No. She’s still too little for that. In fact, she hesitates for a second and goes into the academy. From the window, the caretaker sees her shadow flit across the yard, and then he hears her light step on the stairs. The old man softens. Ah, he thinks, ah. The bride. The betrothed. The eyes that could look upon Boris with love. The immaculate child on her way up the stairs, believing herself unseen. Then, of course, he goes back to his cables and reels. He has time; the broadcast isn’t for a while yet. The electric bill for the grain shed at 800 Galvarino is the highest in Santa Bárbara. If he gets raided someday, that might be why. I think it was Dan Mitrione who, back in the day, taught the cops how to hunt leftists by reading the electric meter. Any house that uses too much or too little electricity is suspicious. The crowd, meanwhile, returns to the plaza after making a loop around town, and now they begin to disperse. Silence descends on the streets once again. A silence for which the caretaker is grateful: he can handle interruptions and curious girls, but not this revelry and celebration, painful because they remind him of his sad life devoted to his work. But let’s not exaggerate. The caretaker gets intoxicated and dances, too, in his own way. His holidays are pure potential. He doesn’t know what boredom is. The recipe for spicy potato cake is his exclusive property. Nothing to sniff at, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “It must be a sad life—yours, I mean, my young friend.”

  “Sure: I’ve squandered my adolescence in seedy movie theaters and pestilent libraries. To make matters worse, my girlfriends always leave me.”

  “Now everything might change. A bright future lies ahead of you.”

  “Do you say that because of the prize?”

  “Because of everything that the prize entails.”

  “You poor, naïve reporter. First you mistake this room in the middle of some random forest for a crystal palace on a hill. Then you actually predict a bright future for art. You don’t realize yet that this is a trap. Who the hell do you think I am, Sid Vicious?”

  Everything that happened at Angélica Torrente’s house, as I remember it, fades into the background, as a prelude to the loud ring of the bell. Someone’s at the door, and everyone’s in Lola Torrente’s room, and I go to answer it, the door: coming!

  But there are things that I remember vividly—books, records (the shiny black objects themselves, I mean, not the music), and, especially, Lola Torrente, two years older than Angélica, much darker, bigger-boned, not thin at all. To me, her smile is still the terminal smile of that other Mexico, a place sometimes revealed between the folds of a random dawn: part rabid will to live, part sacrifice stone. It’s not too much to say that for an hour I had been in love with Angélica. Or that around midnight, more or less, my love gradually faded until it perished entirely, amid glasses of alcohol and cigarettes and don’t touch Mallarmé, assholes, you’ll fuck it up. It’s possible that the rapid rise and fall of this great platonic love had something to do with Lola Torrente. I don’t mean—this would be the height of fickleness—that during the course of the party I transferred my affections from one sister to the other, but rather that first (let’s be honest), Angélica wouldn’t give me the time of day, and second, as the only person there who didn’t know everyone, I was limited to the role of observer (though unfortunately I did open my mouth, too), and at some point that was how I discovered that there was a structure of mirrors between the two sisters, mirrors in which each of them was distorted and reflected back at the other like a message, so that one sister might receive a still and harmless figure and the other a little glass ball under the bed, though most of the time they were firing deadly laser beams back and forth. The star of the party and of everything was Angélica. The powerful shadow was Lola. And it was this and the certainty with which Angélica handled the situation (but especially, as I’ve said, her manifest indifference to me) that left me on the sidelines, relegated to the joys of the observer. Anyway, Angélica wasn’t lacking in suitors; neither, I must admit, was Lola, though her suitors (actually just one suitor, but a nice one) were nothing like the promises made flesh who courted her sister. The issue, according to Pepe Colina, a Nicaraguan versed in Horace and Virgil, was that Angélica was a virgin and Lola wasn’t, and at least one or two hundred people knew it. I glared at him—some things are simply in bad taste—and then I asked him how two hundred people could be aware of such an intimate detail. From people like me, of course, he replied. I guessed, not without blushing, that Pepe Colina had slept with Lola Torrente. An odd couple, I thought, in the tradition of the short, glasses-wearing guy and the strong, independent woman. I lit a Delicado, feigning indifference. I felt myself getting an erection. I retreated to the bathroom and finished smoking the cigarette. At a certain point, I looked at myself in the mirror and started to laugh very softly. On my way out, I almost ran into Lola Torrente. She was a little bit drunk. Her eyes were dark and bright. She whispered something unintelligible, smiling, and closed the door. I knew that our friendship had been sealed.

  I went back to the living room, literally bouncing with joy. What was José Arco doing meanwhile? Surrounded by the shyest, least graceful, and worst dancers, my friend was telling stories: the new Peruvian poetry, the Hora Zero group, Martín Adán’s silver knife, Oquendo de Amat, and other stories, too, new to young Mexican poets back then, stories as true and horrifying as life itself, in which his Honda scaled the highways and trails of western Mexico until it reached an eagle’s crag of toughness, what Baldomero Lillo called the very center of the hot potato, whereupon he launched himself at 120 or 130 kilometers an hour along the twisting path of the story.

  That night’s tale was inspired by a prolonged absence from Mexico City, or something like that, not that it matters. It begins with José Arco arriving at a solitary beach where he finds nothing but a single dog. No fishermen, no houses, nothing—just the motorcycle, José Arco, and the dog. The rest is paradise, and in the sand my friend writes mi mamá me mima and all the other first words. He lives on cans of condensed milk and tuna. The dog is always with him. One afternoon, a ship appears. José Arco rides up the cliff on his motorcycle (in his telling, the black Honda will go wherever you want it to go if your heart is pure); the dog comes along, too. The people on the ship see him and wave. José Arco waves back. We’re from Greenpeace! they shout. Ay, whispers José Arco. What are you doing there, where are you from, who are you, how did you get that motorcycle up there, is there a road? Their questions are left unanswered. The captain announces that he’s coming ove
r. José Arco and the captain meet on the beach. As they’re about to shake hands, the dog attacks the eco-skipper. The crew members who came over with the captain rush to his defense, kicking the dog and then roughing up José Arco. Five against one and a dog. Then they patch him up, put Merthiolate on him and the dog, apologize, advise him to keep the mutt tied up. Before it gets dark, they return to the ship and sail off. José Arco, bruised and battered, watches them go from under a palm tree, his dog at his feet and his motorcycle nearby. The captain and the young men and women of the crew wave to him from the horizon. The dog whimpers, and so does my friend, but then, as the ship is about to vanish from sight, he leaps on the motorcycle and roars up to the top of the cliff. Behind him comes the dog, limping a little, and they watch the ship as it sails away.

  Teresa: I’ll die before you get me to believe that.

  Angélica: What did you do next?

  Pepe Colina (lighting a joint and passing it to Angélica): Man, the only decent eco-skipper there ever was or ever will be was Captain Ahab, a truly misunderstood man.

  Regina Castro (poetess, thirty, as yet unpublished, purveyor of birth-control pills to her younger peers, decent writer but nothing special): Tell me—what happened to the dog?

  Lola: And what is Greenpeace?

  Héctor Gómez (in love with Lola Torrente, twenty-seven, La Habana regular, elementary-school teacher): A pacifist movement, Lola . . . To be honest, Pepe, I find it hard to believe what you’re telling us.

  José Arco: Don’t call me Pepe.

  Teresa (smiling at Héctor Gómez, who pours more vodka): Well, of course it’s a complete lie. José doesn’t like the beach, and there’s no way he could spend three days in a row in a place where there weren’t any people.

  José Arco: Well, I was there.

  Two Lit. Dept. students: We believe you, poet.

  Regina Castro: What about the dog? Did you bring it back with you?

  José Arco: No, it got left there.

  Pepe Colina: Or Jonah, if we can call him a sailor. An eco-friendly guy, for sure, like everybody back then, but it might be a stretch to call him a skipper . . .

  Angélica: He didn’t follow you? Strange.

  Antonio Mendoza (bard of the proletariat, twenty, proofreader at a government agency): The thing is, José doesn’t have room for another dog.

  Angélica (giving Antonio a tender look): What?

  Antonio Mendoza: There’s no room at home for another dog.

  Lola: I didn’t know you had one already.

  Angélica: Who’s the dog, Antonio?

  Antonio Mendoza: Me. Sometimes.

  José Arco: What the fuck are you talking about?

  Antonio Mendoza: And him sometimes.

  Pepe Colina: Uh-huh, totally wasted. (He laughs.) They’re children. Unless it’s some kind of joke, man, but a fucked-up joke like that is bad news.

  Héctor Gómez (to Lola): How about we get some fresh air?

  Pepe Colina (when Héctor and Lola are gone): We should all get some fresh air . . .

  Antonio Mendoza (relaxed all of a sudden): They went to fuck in the yard . . .

  Teresa: Could you shut up for once, idiot?

  Antonio Mendoza: Are you jealous?

  Teresa: Me? You’re drunk . . .

  Two Lit. Dept. students: Bottles that haven’t been opened yet . . . Joy, joy . . .

  Angélica: No more drinking here!

  Antonio Mendoza (putting a hand on her waist): Hey, Angélica . . .

  Angélica: And don’t touch my sister!

  Antonio Mendoza: But I never—

  Regina Castro (commandingly and without raising her voice): Shut up for a change and sit down. I was going to read a poem, but the way you’re all acting . . .

  Teresa: Oh, please, read it.

  Pepe Colina: Madame Poetess, I’m all ears.

  Two Lit. Dept. students (pouring drinks for those present): Wait until we’re all ready.

  Estrellita (her head popping around the kitchen door): Oh, a reading, lovely . . .

  I couldn’t stand it, and I fled onto the balcony. The poem threatened to be uncommonly long: Regina Castro’s childhood and adolescence in San Luis Potosí, her family, her dolls, her Catholic school, recess, her Carrancista grandfather, the rocking chair, the dresses, the trunks, the cellar, Regina’s lips, her older sister’s lips, high heels, the poetry of López Velarde. Meanwhile it was a clear night, and the lights in the other apartments hinted at parties five meters above our heads, leisurely conversations five meters below our feet, maybe a couple of old men listening to classical music fifteen meters in a straight line from our ribs. I was happy. It didn’t seem very late, but even if every light went out and all that was left was me and the glow of my cigarette suspended on the wonderful balcony, this particular beauty or terrible fleeting calm wouldn’t melt away. The moon seemed to creak over reality. Behind me, through the bulk of the building, I heard the whisper of traffic. Sometimes, if I was quiet, holding my cigarette motionless in the air, I could hear the click of the lights changing and then another click or, more precisely, a rhrrr, and the long cars moved on down Avenida Universidad. Three floors below, the gravel yard and the building’s garden were connected by narrow paths of black dirt bordering big trees and planters. From the balcony, the garden looked like a capital B on its side, like this . Inside one of the semicircles, there was an open space, slanted like a Chinese eye, with three benches, two swing sets, and a seesaw, presided over by a good-size stone, probably a sculpture. Winding around behind this space was a sinuous black line, maybe a ditch, and two feet beyond it rose the wall separating the building from its neighbor. There, against the wall, in a space behind the bushes hidden to passersby but visible from the exact spot on the balcony where I was standing, Lola Torrente brought Héctor Gómez’s cock to her mouth and began to suck it, as if she had been waiting for me.

  But this was no ordinary blow job: shrine suddenly alight, soon all that existed were Lola’s hands, one around Hector’s penis, the other between his legs, and Héctor’s fingers buried in her hair—her beautiful, strong head of black hair—and Lola’s mouth and shoulders and knees on the black grass or black earth or shadow, and the smiles that weren’t smiles, every so often discreetly directed at each other.

  This, without a doubt, was secret Balinese theater.

  Only when I went back into the living room did a single shudder run through me.

  There was no one in the room.

  I think I drank something and sat down. I picked up a book from the table. From one of the rooms came voices, maybe the start of an argument. Then I heard laughter, nothing serious. I closed my eyes: sounds barely audible on the ghost channel. I remembered what Jan said about Boris. I had never believed him. It’s true, said Jan. You’ll go crazy, I said. No, no, no, no. Jungle, I thought, out there is the jungle. Boris was what, fifteen? No, no, no. I got up and went into the kitchen.

  I’m always amazed by refrigerators full of food.

  I went back to the living room with a glass of milk and sat down, sipping it slowly. I must have looked ridiculous there with my legs crossed and tears in my eyes. But why? Jan’s voice droned on in the background of the Balinese theater. I’ve told you a thousand times, Remo, and you still don’t get it. Fateful figures in an incomprehensible game of chess. All I can see, I said, is the silhouette of a boy . . . dancing in a room. He must be happy. A boy of thirteen dancing in his bedroom. Now he’s turning, and I can see his face, Boris’s face? And then the room is plunged into darkness, the power is out all over the neighborhood, and all I hear is the sound of his breathing, the sound of his body dancing in silence. I set the glass on a night table. The leg that was crossed over my knee began to jerk as if the Invisible Doctor was checking my reflexes with his little steel hammer. Stop, I said, quiet, come on, Rinti, stop, hee-hee, good boy.

/>   Then came that famous ring at the door, dingdong, ringgg, ttlililinggg, I swear I can’t remember the tones, screeekkkkk, brrrrringggg, lingalingaling, and I jumped up because I sensed or guessed, ronngggdronnggg, that from here to total happiness, ping ping-ping, hhhwhishh, there were just one or two or three million steps, and I set out on the path by making my way to the door, deet-deet-deet, which I opened. It was a girl with brown hair. Behind her: a very disagreeable—and very ugly—boy with hair the same color.

  Dear Ursula K. Le Guin:

  What can we, the creechies, do when the hour comes? Is our weapon our crushing majority? Is our weapon the ability to see our aggressor as a snake? Is our weapon our capacity to translate the word “death”? Is our weapon our Blind Deaf Mute Faith in survival? Is our weapon audacity? Are our weapons our arrows that fly up toward the helicopters like a dream or like the scattered fragments of a dream? Is our weapon implacability? Are our weapons the Dorados who ride drunk and never stop shooting at the column of tanks? An old Agustín Lara record on the exact border of nothing? Flying saucers that land in the Andes and take off from the Andes? Our creechie identity? The art of swift communication? The art of camouflage? Our explosive anal fixation? Pure fierceness? What will be given to us, and what must we seize in order to fight and triumph? Should we stop gazing at the moon forever and ever? Learn once and for all to stop Guderian’s tanks at the gates of Moscow? Who should we wake with a kiss and break the spell? Madness or Beauty? Madness and Beauty?

  Much love,

  Jan Schrella

  Ah, nights are for dreaming, don’t you think? Young people everywhere with the windows open . . . It would be so nice not to be working, not to have a job to do . . .”

  “If you want, we can go out on the terrace. A little fresh air won’t do us any harm.”

  “No. Let’s continue. But try to be serious. I’m telling you this for your own good, for your artistic future. Everything you say is being recorded.”