The Spirit of Science Fiction

by Roberto Bolaño

  “Phew! That’s a relief.”

  “What’s a relief? That your best buddy is still in working order, despite the beating?”

  “Don’t be vulgar. I thought you had slept with Jan.”

  “No, I went back with César to the place with the soap. A cozy spot—you’ll have to show it to me by daylight. There I forced him to penetrate me. We almost fell over the parapet. It was quick, really quick. César was drunk and depressed. I was thinking of you, I felt really good. It was like I couldn’t stop laughing inside, I think.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me? That morning we talked for hours . . .”

  “It was none of your business. Also, I was tired and I was having a good time with you, so why start an argument?”

  “I wouldn’t have argued. I would have cried. Shit.”

  “Silly, it was a kind of good-bye. I think I had already decided that we were done. Poor César.” She sighed wickedly. “I wasn’t even saying good-bye to him, but to his penis. Ten inches. I measured it myself with my mother’s measuring tape.”

  “Shitshitshit. I’ll never let you come near me with a measuring tape.”

  “I won’t, I swear.”

  Dear Philip José Farmer:

  Wars can be ended with sex or religion. Everything seems to indicate that there are no other citizen alternatives; these are dark days, heaven knows. We can set aside religion for now. That leaves sex. Let’s try to put it to good use. First question: what can you in particular and American science fiction writers in general do about it? I propose the immediate creation of a committee to centralize and coordinate all efforts. As a first step—call it preparing the terrain—the committee must select ten or twenty authors for inclusion in an anthology, choosing those who have written most radically and enthusiastically about carnal relations and the future. (The committee should be free to select who they like, but I would presume to suggest the indispensable inclusion of entries by Joanna Russ and Anne McCaffrey; maybe later I’ll explain why, in another letter.) This anthology, to be titled something like American Orgasms in Space or A Radiant Future, should focus the reader’s attention on pleasure and make frequent use of flashbacks—to our times, I mean—to chart the path of hard work and peace that it has been necessary to travel to reach this no-man’s-land of love. In each story, there should be at least one sexual act (or, lacking that, one episode of ardent and devoted camaraderie) between Latin Americans and North Americans. For example: legendary space pilot Jack Higgins, commander of the Fidel Castro, participates in interesting physical and spiritual encounters with Gloria Díaz, a navigation engineer from Colombia. Or: shipwrecked on Asteroid BM101, Demetrio Aguilar and Jennifer Brown spend ten years practicing the Kama Sutra. Stories with a happy ending. Desperate socialist realism in the service of alluring, mind-blowing happiness. Every ship with a mixed crew and every ship with its requisite overdose of amatory activity! At the same time, the committee should establish contact with the rest of American science fiction writers, those who’re left cold by sex or who won’t touch it for reasons of style, ethics, market appeal, personal preference, plot, aesthetics, philosophy, etc. They must be taught to see the importance of writing about the orgies that future citizens of Latin America and the U.S. can take part in if we take action now. If they flatly refuse, they must be convinced, at the very least, to write to the White House to ask for a cease in hostilities. Or to pray along with the bishops of Washington. To pray for peace. But that’s our backup plan, and we’ll keep it in under wraps for now. In closing, let me tell you how much I admire your work. I don’t read your novels; I devour them. I’m seventeen, and maybe someday I’ll write decent science fiction stories. A week ago, I lost my virginity.

  Warmly,

  Jan Schrella, alias Roberto Bolaño

  MEXICAN MANIFESTO

  Laura and I didn’t make love that afternoon. We tried, but it didn’t happen. Or at least that’s what I thought at the time. Now I’m not so sure. We probably did make love. That was what Laura said, and she was the one who introduced me to the world of public bathhouses, which, beginning that day and for a long time after, I would associate with pleasure and play.

  The first was definitely the best. It was called the Gimnasio Moctezuma, and in the lobby some unknown artist had painted a mural of the Aztec emperor up to his neck in a pool. Around the edges of the pool, near the monarch but much smaller, smiling men and women washed. Everyone seemed cheerful, except for the king, who stared out of the mural as if pursuing the unlikely spectator with wide, dark eyes in which many times I thought I glimpsed terror. The water of the pool was green. The stones were gray. In the background, mountains and storm clouds were visible.

  The attendant at the Gimnasio Moctezuma was an orphan, and that was his main topic of conversation. On our third or fourth visit, we became friends. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen; he wanted to buy a car, so he was saving everything he could, basically his tips, which were few and far between. According to Laura, he was half retarded. I liked him. At every public bathhouse, there’s a fight at some point. At this place, we never saw or heard a single one. The clients, conditioned by some unknown mechanism, followed the attendant’s instructions to the letter. And the truth is that few people came, which is something I’ll never be able to explain, because it was a clean, relatively modern place, with private cubicles for steam baths, and bar service to the cubicles, and, most important, it was cheap.

  It was there, in Cubicle 10, that I saw Laura naked for the first time, and all I managed to do was smile and touch her shoulder and say that I didn’t know which tap to turn to make steam come out. The cubicles, though it would be more accurate to call them private rooms, were a set of two tiny compartments connected by a glass door; in the first, there was usually a divan or old sofa (shades of psychoanalysis and the brothel), a folding table, and a coatrack; the second room was the steam bath properly speaking, with a hot- and cold-water shower and a tile bench built into the wall, under which the steam pipes were hidden.

  Moving from one room to the next was extraordinary, especially if it was so steamy in the inner room that we couldn’t see each other. Then we would open the door and come into the divan room, where everything was sharp and clear, trailing clouds of vapor like the vanishing filaments of a dream. Lying there hand in hand, we listened or tried to listen to the barely perceptible sounds of the Gimnasio as our bodies cooled. Chilled nearly to the bone, deep in silence, at last we could hear the rumble that issued from floor and walls, the feline purr of hot-water pipes and boilers in some secret part of the building, fueling the enterprise.

  “Someday I’ll go exploring around here,” said Laura.

  She had more experience in trips to public bathhouses, which was easy enough, since I had never crossed the threshold of a place like this before. Nevertheless she claimed to know nothing about the baths. Or not enough. She had been with César a few times and, before César, with a guy twice her age, someone to whom she occasionally alluded mysteriously. In total she hadn’t been more than ten times, all to the same place, the Gimnasio Moctezuma.

  Together, on the Benelli, which I had mastered by now, we tried to make the rounds of every bathhouse in Mexico City, driven by an all-consuming urge that was a mixture of love and play. We never managed it. In fact, the more places we visited, the wider the abyss that yawned around us, the greater the black stage set of the public baths. Just as the hidden faces of other cities may be theaters, parks, docks, beaches, labyrinths, churches, brothels, bars, cheap movie houses, old buildings, and even supermarkets, the hidden face of Mexico City is its enormous network of public baths, legal, semilegal, and underground.

  Our strategy as we set off on this quest was simple: I asked the attendant at the Gimnasio Moctezuma to give me the addresses of a few cheap bathhouses. He passed me five business cards and wrote down the street names and numbers of a dozen different establishments. These were the
first. After each one, the search branched countless times. Schedules varied as widely as facilities. Some spots we came to at ten in the morning and left at lunchtime. These, as a rule, were bright, crumbling places, where sometimes we could hear the laughter of adolescents and the coughs of lost, lonely men who, after a while, feeling better, began to sing boleros. Here the motto seemed to be limbo, a dead child’s closed eyes. They weren’t very clean places, or maybe the cleaning was done after midday. At others we made our appearance at four or five in the afternoon and didn’t leave until nightfall. (This was our most common practice.) Bathhouses at this time of day seemed to luxuriate—or languish—in a permanent dusk. An artificial dusk, I mean: a dome or a palm tree, the closest thing to a marsupial pouch, welcome at first but gradually coming to weigh on visitors like a tombstone. The busiest time for bathhouses was seven, seven thirty, eight at night. On the sidewalk by the door, young men stood guard talking baseball and the latest hits. The hallways echoed with the grim jokes of workers just out of factories and shops. In the lobby, the old queers, birds of passage, called each of the receptionists and the loafers whiling away the time in chairs by their first names or noms de guerre. Wandering the hallways, feeding one’s indiscreet curiosity in small doses, or pinches, never failed to be highly instructive. Like landslides or earthquake cracks, the open or half-open doors presented vivid tableaux to the lucky observer: groups of naked men where any movement or action was courtesy of the steam; adolescents lost like jaguars in a labyrinth of showers; the tiny but terrifying gestures of athletes, weightlifters, and lone men; a leper’s clothes hanging on a hook; little old men drinking Lulú and smiling, propped against the wooden door to the sauna . . .

  It was easy to make friends, and we made them. Couples, after meeting a few times in the hallway, felt obliged to greet each other. This was due to a kind of heterosexual solidarity; in many of the public bathhouses, women were an absolute minority, and it wasn’t unusual to hear extravagant tales of assaults and harassment, though the truth is that those stories weren’t always trustworthy. Friendships like this never went further than a beer or a drink at the bar. At the baths, we said hello, or at most we got neighboring rooms. After a while, the first couple to finish knocked at the other couple’s door, and, without waiting for a reply, announced that they would be at Restaurant X. Then the second couple emerged, stopped by the restaurant, had a few drinks, and that was it until their next encounter. Sometimes the couple shared confidences, the woman or the man, especially if they were married but not to each other; they’d tell their life stories, and you’d have to nod, say that’s love, that’s life, that’s fate, that’s kids. Sweet but boring.

  The other, more troublesome kind of friends were those who came right into your private room. They could be as boring as the first kind, but much more dangerous. They turned up with no warning, just knocked at the door—a strange, quick knock—and said let us in. They were hardly ever alone; usually there were three of them, two men and a woman, or three men; the reasons offered for their visit were usually implausible or stupid: they wanted to smoke a little weed, which they couldn’t do in the collective showers, or they wanted to sell some random thing. Laura always let them in. The first few times, I got tense, ready to fight and fall bloodstained to the tiles. I thought it was only logical that they had come to rob us or rape Laura or even to rape me, and I was about to jump out of my skin. Somehow the visitors knew that, and they spoke to me only when they had to or when it would’ve been rude not to. All propositions, deals, and whisperings were addressed to Laura. It was she who opened the door, it was she who asked what the fuck they wanted, it was she who let them into the little divan room. (I listened from the steam room as they sat down, first one, then the other, then the other; Laura’s back, very still, was visible through the glass door that separated the steam room from the anteroom, which had suddenly become a place of mystery.) Finally I got up, wrapped a towel around my waist, and went in. A man and two boys or a man and a boy and a girl nodded uncertainly when they saw me, as if from the very beginning and against all logic they had come here for Laura and not for both of us; as if they had expected to find only her. They sat on the divan, their dark eyes not missing a single one of her movements, while their hands rolled joints as if of their own accord. The conversations seemed coded in a language I didn’t know, certainly not the slang I spoke with my friends, though now I can hardly remember it, but a much more affectionate kind of talk in which each word and each sentence had a trace of burials and holes. (Once when Laura was there, Jan said that it might be Air Hole, one of the bizarre manifestations of the Immaculate Grave. Maybe, maybe not.) In any case, I talked, too, or I tried. It wasn’t easy, but I tried. Sometimes, along with the weed, they brought out bottles of alcohol. The bottles weren’t free, but we didn’t pay for them. Our visitors were in the business of selling marijuana, whiskey, and turtle eggs in the private rooms, rarely with the blessing of the attendant or the cleaning people, who chased them relentlessly; that was why it was so important for them to be let in by somebody; they also sold performances, which was how they really made their money, or arranged for private shows in their clients’ bachelor apartments. The repertoire of these traveling companies could be meager or extremely varied, but the basic elements of the staging were always the same: the older man remained on the divan (thinking, I suppose), while the boy and the girl, or the two boys, followed the spectators into the steam room. As a rule, the performance lasted no more than half an hour or three-quarters of an hour, with or without the participation of the spectators. When the time was up, the man on the divan opened the door and, coughing in the steam that immediately tried to creep in from the other room, informed the respected audience that the show was over. Encores were expensive, even if they lasted only ten minutes. The boys showered quickly, and then the man handed them their clothes, which they put on over skin that was still wet. In the last few minutes, the hangdog but enterprising artistic director made sure to offer the satisfied spectators delicacies from his basket or bag: whiskey served in little paper cups, joints rolled with an expert hand, and turtle eggs that he opened with the enormous nail festooning his thumb and which, once in the cup, he sprinkled with lemon and chile powder.

  In our room, things were different. They talked in soft voices. They smoked marijuana. They let time go by, checking their watches every so often, until their faces were covered with droplets of sweat. Sometimes they touched each other, everybody touched each other, which was inevitable anyway if we were all sitting on the divan, and the brushing of legs, of arms, could become painful. It wasn’t the pain of sex but of something irretrievably lost or a single small hope wandering, walking, the country of Impossible. If they were people we knew, Laura invited them to undress and come with us into the steam room. They hardly ever accepted. They just wanted to smoke and drink and listen to stories. To rest. After a while, they closed their bag and left. Then, two or three times in the same evening, they came back, and the routine was always the same. If Laura was in the mood, she let them in; if not, she didn’t even bother to tell them through the door to fuck off. Relations were at all times harmonious, except for one or two isolated incidents. I sometimes think they were fond of Laura long before they got to know her.

  One night the old man who brought them (this time there were three of them, an old man and two boys) offered us a show. We had never seen one. How much does it cost? I asked. Nothing. Laura said they could come in. The steam room was cold. Laura took off her towel and turned the tap on: the steam began to issue from floor level. I had the feeling that we were in a Nazi bathhouse and we were about to be gassed; this feeling got stronger when the two boys came in, very thin and dark-skinned, and, bringing up the rear, the old pimp in nothing but an indescribably dirty pair of undershorts. Laura laughed. The boys looked at her, a little inhibited, standing in the middle of the room. Then they laughed, too. Between Laura and me, and without taking off his horrible underthings
, the old man sat down. Do you want to just watch, or do you want to take part? Watch, I said.

  “We’ll see,” said Laura, who liked puns.

  Then, as if following a command, the boys knelt and began to soap each other’s sex. Their movements, practiced and mechanical, betrayed weariness and a series of quiet tremors that it was easy to connect to Laura’s presence. A minute went by. The room grew thick with steam again. The actors, still engaged in their initial activity, nevertheless seemed frozen: kneeling face-to-face but in a grotesquely artistic way, masturbating each other with their left hands and keeping their balance with their right. They looked like birds. Tin birds. They must be tired, they can’t get it up, said the old man. It was true, the soaped cocks only pointed timidly upward. Is that the best you can do, boys? asked the old man. Laura laughed again. How are we supposed to concentrate if you keep laughing? said one of the boys. Laura got up, went around them, and leaned on the wall. Now the tired performers were between us. I felt that time, inside of me, was splitting open. The old man whispered something. I looked at him. His eyes were closed, and he seemed to be asleep. We haven’t slept for so long, said one of the boys, letting go of his companion’s penis. Laura smiled at him. Next to me, the old man began to snore. The boys smiled in relief and relaxed into more comfortable positions. I heard their bones creak. Laura slid down the wall until her buttocks touched the tiles. You’re very thin, she said to one of them. Me? So is he and so are you, replied the boy. The whistle of the steam made it hard to hear their voices sometimes, they were so low. Laura’s body, her back against the wall, her knees bent, was covered in sweat: drops rolled down her nose, her neck, ran between her breasts, and even hung from the hairs of her pubis, where they fell onto the hot tiles. We’re melting, I murmured, and immediately I felt sad. Laura nodded. How sweet she looked. Where are we? I wondered. With the back of my hand, I wiped away the droplets that were falling from my eyebrows into my eyes and blinding me. One of the boys sighed. I’m so tired, he said. Sleep, said Laura. It was strange: it seemed as if the lights were fading, growing dim; I was afraid I would pass out; then I guessed that it must be all the steam that was making the colors shade into something darker. (As if we were watching the sunset with no windows, I thought.) Whiskey and pot don’t mix.