The Spirit of Science Fiction

by Roberto Bolaño

  “I could never be so alone, so silent, so disciplined about myself and my fate, pardon the expression.”

  “Fuck . . .”

  A broad, bright smile appeared on José Arco’s face.

  “Come on, my friend’s garage is around here. Let’s see if he’ll fix the bike and give us coffee.”

  Dear James Tiptree Jr.:

  The rain teaches us things. It’s night and it’s raining: the city spins like a shiny top, but some areas are opaque, emptier; they’re like flickering dots; the city spins happy in the middle of the deluge, and the dots throb. From where I am, they seem to swell like a feverish temple or like black lungs with no notion of the shine that the rain is trying to give them. Sometimes I have the impression that the dots manage to touch: it’s raining, there’s lightning, and an opaque circle brushes another opaque circle, making a supreme effort. But that’s as far as it goes. Immediately they shrink into their own spaces and keep throbbing. Maybe brushing each other is enough; it’s possible that the message, whatever it is, has been sent. And so on, for hours or minutes, as long as the rain lasts. This, I think, is a happy night. I read, I wrote, I studied, I ate cookies and drank tea. Then I went out on the roof to stretch my legs, and when it got dark and it started to rain, I climbed up to the roof of the roof (in other words, the roof of my room) with an umbrella and binoculars, and I was there for almost three hours. It was then that I thought of you—I can’t remember why now—and of the letter that I sent you quite a while ago. (I don’t know whether you received it; to be safe, I’m sending this one to the Spiderman brothers’ agency.) About that first letter . . . well, I just want to say that I sincerely hope you didn’t take it the wrong way or you weren’t offended that I addressed it to Alice Sheldon. I swear it wasn’t a breach of trust. It’s just that unlike many of your current readers, I already knew your earlier work, back when everybody said that James Tiptree Jr. was a retiree who had come late to writing. And I liked it. Later, of course, I was surprised when I found out that the name was actually a pseudonym—and according to some accounts more than a pseudonym, a heteronym—for the psychologist Alice Sheldon. A simple superimposition of images, you see. And Alice Sheldon happens to be a much prettier, warmer name. That’s all. (Sometimes I imagine the retired Mr. Tiptree writing in a little house in Arizona. Why Arizona? I don’t know. I must have read it somewhere. Maybe it was Fredric Brown, who lived in Arizona for a few years, more or less as a retiree, in all the exile and equilibrium that the word implies. For argument’s sake, wouldn’t it be better to maintain a correspondence with North American retirees than with science fiction writers? Could I convince them to send letters to the White House demanding an end to the policy of aggression toward Latin America? It’s certainly possible, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.) The rain isn’t stopping. While I was perched on the roof gazing through my binoculars at the dark rooftops of other buildings, a question came into my mind: how many science fiction novels have been written in Paraguay? On the surface, it seems like a stupid question, but it made so much sense to me just then that it kept coming back to me, like a catchy pop song. Were the closed windows of Mexico City really Paraguay? Were the storm and the rooftops that I was watching through the binoculars really the science fiction of Paraguay? (For half a mile all around, there were lights in very few windows, maybe something like ten or fifteen of them, and almost all on a strip of Insurgentes Sur; none of the lights were on rooftops.) At the time, the question struck me as terrifying. Now not so much. But now I’m sitting in my room, not outside in the rain. I don’t know. I’ll send you a postcard of Mexico City with this letter. It’s a photograph, a shot taken from the Torre Latinoamericana. You can see the whole city. It’s daytime, around two in the afternoon, but the print or the photograph itself is slightly flawed: the image is fuzzy. It’s what I felt tonight, in the dark. I’ll keep you posted.

  Yours,

  Jan Schrella

  The motorcycle-repair shop was a single room, six meters long by three wide. At the back, a door hanging half off its hinges led to an inner courtyard where garbage piled up. Margarito Pacheco, a.k.a. El Mofles, had been living there for two years, since the day he turned seventeen and left his mother’s house, which actually was only about three blocks away, also in Peralvillo. He fixed motorcycles and sometimes cars, though he was a pretty bad car mechanic. He knew it, and he wasn’t ashamed to admit it: the night that José Arco and I showed up at his shop pushing the Honda, it had been more than a year since he’d touched a car. His specialty was motorcycles, though there wasn’t an abundance of work. Out of thrift or maybe because he liked it, he had set up house in the garage, though this was a detail that the unobservant visitor might miss: the only visible signs were a camp cot behind a heap of tires and a bookcase surrounded by old car calendars, oil calendars, and pinup calendars. The toilet was in the yard. He showered at his mother’s house.

  At first glance, he seemed like a shy kid, but he wasn’t. He was missing all his upper teeth. Maybe that explains his initial reserve, his polite, monosyllabic responses to our questions, his enigmatic smiles when we laughed. This would go on until the stranger—in this case, me—said something that he found really interesting or funny. Then he would laugh openly or start to talk very fast, in a Spanish full of slang and words he invented as he went along. His eyes were big—too big—and as you got to know him, his sickly thinness became a strange beauty, gentle and asymmetrical. He had lost his teeth in a fight at fifteen. The mechanic’s trade was something he had learned in that very garage, first watching and then helping a mechanic from Tijuana who, as El Mofles described him, might easily have been Castaneda’s Don Juan. When the mechanic died, which was about two years ago, his wife didn’t want anything to do with the shop, and in less than a week she’d gone back to where she was from. El Mofles had the keys to the shop, and he waited there for someone to come and claim it, or at least to charge rent. At first he slept on the floor; then he brought in the camp cot and his clothes. After a month, the only person who came by, other than a few clients, was a guy trying to sell him a stolen motorcycle. That was how he got started in the business.

  When I met him, he had just two motorcycles in the shop, his own and the Aztec Princess, which was the Benelli that José Arco had told me about. I said I liked it. El Mofles said it was a good bike and it was odd that it was still here in the shop. Days later I realized what he’d meant, and it seemed like a sign blinking half hidden among the oil stains and the dirty floorboards of the shop, a sign I could heed or not. In the business of stolen motorcycles, El Mofles worked with two people, one who brought the bikes and one who took them. Always the same two people. And always at set times. At the beginning of the month, a bike would appear, and halfway through the month the guy with the money would come and the bike would leave the shop. With the Aztec Princess, the routine had been interrupted for the first time in two years. The buyer didn’t turn up in fifteen days, or even a month, and the motorcycle was in danger of being orphaned or turned into spare parts and junk.

  I bought it that very night.

  You could say that the deal worked itself out. I didn’t have money, but El Mofles didn’t have a buyer either. I promised to pay him part when I got paid and the rest in two monthly installments. His counteroffer was better: I would give him whatever I could afford whenever I could afford it, and he would sell me the motorcycle for the price he had paid for it, on the condition that I take it that very night. As José Arco looked on, smiling, I accepted. I didn’t have a driver’s license—hell, I didn’t even know how to drive—but I had blind faith in my luck and in the signs I thought I had glimpsed. If you had a phone, everything would be perfect, I said.

  “A phone? Yeah, right, it’s a miracle that we have electricity here.”

  I didn’t ask whether he was referring to the neighborhood or the place. José Arco boiled water and made three Nescafés. From a plastic bag hanging on the wall
, El Mofles took some cold quesadillas. He warmed them on a hot plate. They were stiff, of course, but they looked good. As he was heating them up, he told me that I should come in one of these days to give the motorcycle a coat of paint.

  “I like it the way it is,” I said.

  “It’s always a good idea with a stolen motorcycle. That’s the way it’s done.”

  “These quesadillas are great,” said José Arco. “Did your mom make them?”

  El Mofles nodded. Then he shook his head, and as if he could hardly believe it, he said, “I don’t know why the fuck I didn’t think to get rid of the inscription. I just realized.”

  “What inscription?”

  “On the Aztec Princess. It’s practically screaming that it’s stolen.”

  “It’s a nice inscription. The letters are even metallic.”

  “I have no idea why I didn’t scrape it off.”

  “I like it this way,” I said. “I’m not going to get rid of it.”

  The rain wasn’t letting up outside. Sometimes gusts of wind shook the whole shop, as if it was about to be ripped from its foundations, and the doors groaned with a rasping sound that was like a laugh and then a sudden deep scream. It sounds like someone being beaten to death, muttered José Arco. We were serious all of a sudden, lost in the storm and our own thoughts, as if the space in between—that is, the shop and the words we could have been speaking—didn’t exist. In the yard, the wind whipped the empty cans and papers.

  After each sound, El Mofles looked up at the ceiling. Sometimes he paced back and forth with the cup of Nescafé in his hand, trying or pretending to read the grime-covered signs posted on the walls. Still, he didn’t seem nervous. On the contrary. Though you could say it was a deceptive calm, no more than a surface calm: a remoteness neither arctic nor ignorant but like that of a Christian just released from his torments. The remoteness of a body that’s been terribly beaten or utterly satiated.

  “The world is beautiful, isn’t it?” said El Mofles.

  It was five in the morning when we left. My two friends spent a while teaching me the basic principles of motorcycle riding. According to them, the trick was not to be afraid of cars and to know how to accelerate, brake, and use the clutch. What about changing speeds? That’s important, too. Try to keep your balance. Try to glance at stoplights every once in a while. Don’t worry about the rain.

  I went out into the yard to check the weather. The rain wasn’t as intense anymore. I asked José Arco what would happen if we were outside when it started coming down hard again. He didn’t answer. After El Mofles had tuned up the Honda, he asked us if we wanted to hear some poems he’d written. (Making these requests, El Mofles was like a village priest in the presence of the pope: he welcomed all criticism and never defended anything he’d written.) Of the five or six he read that night, there was one that I liked a lot: it was about his girlfriend, Lupita, and his mother watching from the distance as a building went up. The rest were pop-style poems: song lyrics, ballads. José Arco loved them. I didn’t. When we leave, José Arco said, I’m going to tell you the best story El Mofles ever came up with.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s the story of how Georges Perec, as a boy, prevented a duel to the death between Isidore Isou and Altagor in an old neighborhood of Paris.”

  “I’d rather read it.”

  “It isn’t written, it’s an oral story.”

  El Mofles smiled, blushing, wiped his hands on a rag, and put on water for the last round of Nescafé. Suddenly I realized that I was scared, panicked; I thought of a thousand different ways that things could end badly, seeing myself first at the police station and then at the hospital, every bone in my body broken. We drank our coffee. In silence I listened to the final instructions. When we went outside, the street looked dark and deserted. Without a word, José Arco got on my motorcycle and started it. The roar of the tailpipe made me shudder. Then he got on his bike, and we rolled down the street to the end of the block, testing the engines. We turned, with me always close behind, and returned to where El Mofles was waiting for us.

  “You’ve made it like new,” said José Arco. I was silent, all my senses focused on keeping the engine from stalling. Take care and come back soon, said El Mofles. Of course, said José Arco. How do you feel, Remo? Scared shitless, I said. It was strange—the sound of our voices was muted, even the sound of the bikes seemed to come from far away; meanwhile the sounds of the sleeping street were magnified in my ears: cats, the first morning birds, water running in the pipes, some distant door, the snores of a man in a house down the block.

  “All right, you’ll get over it; we’ll go slow, stay right next to each other.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “See you around, Mofles.”

  “Good-bye.”

  We coasted out of the neighborhood as if we were on bicycles. Every so often, José Arco asked me how I was doing. Soon we left the empty streets of El Mofles’s neighborhood and turned onto a wide avenue.

  “Stick close to me,” said José Arco.

  The two motorcycles lurched forward. I felt as if somebody had given me a kick somewhere in my insides. My hands were sweating, and I was afraid they would slip off the handlebars. Several times I thought about braking, but I was prevented by the certainty that if I did, the Aztec Princess would be left lying abandoned in the street while I went home on the Metro. At first all I could see was the asphalt lane, interminable and full of silences suddenly broken, and the hazy outline of my friend and his Honda, sometimes moving ahead of me and other times letting me move ahead. Then, as if a curtain was drawn back in the middle of the desert, a hulking mass appeared on the horizon, gigantic but far in the distance, seeming to flicker or cycle through every shade of gray in the world through the fine mist of rain. What the hell is that? I screamed in my head. The Turtle of Death? The Great Beetle? The thing was as big as a hill, I calculated, and it was coming straight at us, propelled by pseudopods or perhaps on a cushion of steam. Its progress, from where I sat, was unrelenting. I didn’t need to ask José Arco which way we were going.

  “La Villa!” he called, pointing his finger at Godzilla.

  “La Villa, La Villa!” I shouted happily.

  Only then did I notice the cars passing us; the half-hidden stoplights, corroded by smog, flashing on and off at the corners; the shadowy figures moving along the sidewalk, even smoking cigarettes; the buses, lit up like riverboats, carrying workers to their jobs. In the middle of the street, a kid, drunk or high, called out to death and then fell to his knees, impassively watching the cars go by. From inside a coffee shop that had just opened its doors came the strains of a ranchera.

  We stopped near the plaza in front of the basilica to stretch our legs and to see how I was doing so far on my first motorcycle ride. I told José Arco that a minute ago I’d been convinced that the basilica was a monster. Or a petrified atomic blast striding toward us. If that’s what it was, wouldn’t it be heading toward the center of the city? Maybe, I said, but still, we were in the way. Good thing you’re all right. How is the Aztec Princess behaving? Isn’t she a nice bike?

  I don’t know why, but the air seemed to be coming at us from a hole in the clouds. I lit a cigarette and said yes.

  “Well, it wasn’t an atomic bomb,” said José Arco as he cast an eye over my motorcycle. “It was the castle of the Virgin of Guadalupe, mother of all, the great babe.”

  “Yes,” I said watching the sunrise, which was only the faintest glow so far. “She’s the one who saved me from getting into an accident.”

  “No, man, that was me and Mofles, we’re pedagogues of the wheel.”

  I felt in my pockets for coins.

  “Wait for me a minute, I’m going to make a phone call.”

  “All right.”

  Nearby I found a public phone and called Laura. After a long time, her mother picke
d up. I apologized for calling so early and asked if she would be so kind as to get Laura. It’s urgent, I think; I don’t know, I said, playing dumb. I wasn’t tired, but I would have been happy to flop down on my mattress. The streets were bright, and next to me a couple of taxi drivers were talking about soccer—one liked Club América and the other preferred Guadalajara. When Laura came on the line, I apologized again, exactly as if I was back on the line with her mother, and then I told her that I loved her.

  “It’s hard to explain. I’m in love with you.”

  Laura said, “It’s nice that you called.”

  “That’s all I wanted to tell you, that I love you.”

  “Great,” said Laura. “That’s great.”

  We hung up, and I went back over to the motorcycles.

  “Everything okay? Ready to go?”

  “Yes,” I said, “let’s go.”

  “Do you think you can make it home?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “I’ll come with you anyway.”

  “There’s no need. You must be tired.”

  “Tired? Me? No, man, and anyway, I still haven’t told you the story of Isidore Isou and Altagor.”

  “What shit is that?”

  “El Mofles’s story, man, wake up.”

  We headed toward the center of the city, taking our time. The air finally cleared my head. It was nice to ride along on the bike and watch the streets and windows begin to wake up. People who’d been out all night drove their cars home or wherever, and workers drove their cars to work or piled into the vans or waited for the buses that would take them to work. The geometric landscape of the neighborhoods, even the colors, had a provisional look, filigreed and full of energy, and if you sharpened your gaze and a certain latent madness, you could feel sadness in the form of flying sparks, Speedy Gonzales slipping along the great arteries of Mexico City for no reason at all or for some secret reason. Not a melancholy sadness but a devastating, paradoxical sadness that cried out for life, radiant life, wherever it might be.