Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches, 1998-2003

by Bolaño, Roberto

  Another fragment: “Hang iambics. / This is no time / for poetry.” And: “Father Zeus, / I’ve had / No wedding feast.” And: “His mane the infantry / cropped down to stubble.” And: “Balanced on the keen edge / Now of the wind’s sword, / Now of the wave’s blade.” And this, which could only have been written by someone buffeted by fate:

  Attribute all to the gods.

  They pick a man up,

  Stretched on the black loam,

  And set him on his two feet,

  Firm, and then again

  Shake solid men until

  They fall backward

  Into the worst of luck,

  Wandering hungry,

  Wild of mind.

  And this, spotlessly cruel and clear:

  Seven of the enemy

  were cut down in that encounter

  And a thousand of us,

  mark you,

  Ran them through.

  And:

  Soul, soul,

  Torn by perplexity,

  On your feet now!

  Throw forward your chest

  To the enemy;

  Keep close in the attack;

  Move back not an inch.

  But never crow in victory,

  Nor mope hangdog in loss.

  Overdo neither sorrow nor joy:

  A measured motion governs man.

  And this, sad and pragmatic:

  The heart of mortal man,

  Glaukos, son of Leptines,

  Is what Zeus makes it,

  Day after day,

  And what the world makes it,

  That passes before our eyes.

  And this, in which the human condition shines:

  Hear me here,

  Hugging your knees,

  Hephaistos Lord.

  My battle mate,

  My good luck be;

  That famous grace

  Be my grace too.

  And this, in which Archilochus gives us a portrait of himself and then vanishes into immortality, an immortality in which he didn’t happen to believe: “My ash spear is my barley bread, / My ash spear is my Ismarian wine. / I lean on my spear and drink.”

  ‡All translations from Archilochus are by Guy Davenport, from Archilochus, Sappho, Alkman: Three Lyric Poets of the Late Greek Bronze Age, U. Cal Press, 1980. — tr.

  Fragments of a Return to the Native Land

  THE INVITATION

  Twenty days in Chile that shook the (mental) world that I inhabit. Twenty days that were like twenty sessions of humanity falling with a thud. Twenty days that would make anyone weep or roll on the floor laughing. But let’s start from the beginning. I left Chile in January 1974. The last time I flew anywhere was in 1977. I thought I’d never go back to Chile again. I thought I’d never get on a plane again. One day a girl called me from Paula Magazine and asked if I wanted to be on the jury for a story contest that the magazine organizes. Right away I said yes. I don’t know what I was thinking. Maybe I was thinking about the glorious sunsets of Los Angeles, though not the Los Ángeles of Bío-Bío, in Chile, but the Los Angeles of California, the sunsets of the city that sprang up from nothing and from whose rooftops you can see see the radiance that oozes from every inch of the planet. I might have been thinking about that. I might have been making love. Yes, now I remember, that was it. Then the phone rang and I got out of bed and answered and a female voice asked if I’d like to come to Chile and then the city of Los Angeles full of skyscrapers and palm trees became the city of Los Ángeles full of one-story buildings and dirt roads. Los Ángeles, the capital of the province of Bío-Bío, the city where Fernando Fernández played foosball in yards that were like something dreamed up by deranged adolescents, the city where Lebert and Cárcamo were constant companions and where tolerant Cárdenas was class president at a boys’ school designed by some petty demon and where El Pescado suddenly went underground. City of evening raids. Savage city whose sunsets were like the aphasic commentary of privilege. So I said yes in the same tone that I might have said no. The room was dark; I was expecting a phone call, but not this one; the voice that spoke to me from the other side of the world was sweet. At that moment I could have said no. But I said yes because like a mountain cat, the capital of the province of Bío-Bío suddenly leaped onto the map of the city of happiness and was clawing at it, and in those (invisible) claw marks it was written that I had to return to Chile and I had to get back on a plane.

  THE TRIP

  So I went back to Chile. I got on a plane. I don’t know how planes manage to stay up in the air. Turbulence over the Atlantic, turbulence over the Amazon. Turbulence over Argentina and just before crossing the Andes. On top of it all, Lautaro, my eight-year-old son, couldn’t play his Game Boy during the flight. But it’s okay. We’re flying. My son is sleeping peacefully. My wife, Carolina López, is sleeping peacefully. The two of them are Spanish and it’s their first trip to America. I’m not asleep. I was born in America. I’m Chilean. I’m awake and I’m holding up the wings of the plane mentally. I listen to the other passengers talk. Most of them are asleep but they’re talking in their sleep. They have nightmares or recurring dreams. They’re Chilean. The Spanish stewardesses glance at them as they walk back and forth down the aisles, sometimes parallel to each other and sometimes in opposite directions. When it’s the latter and their paths intersect, the stewardesses raise their eyebrows in the dark and continue on unperturbed. Wonderful, the women of Spain. Would you like a glass of water, orange juice? they ask when they pass me. No, thanks very much, I say. No, many thanks, I say, as the jet engines drill through the night, the night itself a plane flying inside another plane. The ancients depicted this as a fish eating a fish eating another fish. Meanwhile, the real night, outside the plane, is huge and the moon is very small, like Pezoa Véliz’s moon. I’m on my way to Chile. Every once in a while I drop off to sleep, too, and I have strange and vivid dreams. Brief dreams in black and white that take me back to lives I’ll never live. If people slept during the day they’d dream in color, my son said to me once. Fuck, I’m approaching Chile at more than five hundred miles an hour. And finally dawn begins to break and the plane crosses the Andes and now we’re back and here’s the first change: the last time I left Chile, on a Santiago-Buenos Aires flight, the Andes seemed much bigger and whiter; now they don’t seem so big and the snow is striking for its absence. But they’re still pretty. They seem wilder, more lost, less sleepy. Then the plane is over a dusty stretch of ground, and with no time even to think “Pure, Chile, are your blue skies,” it lands.

  A HOOKER RETURNS

  I’m back home. No problem. The passengers get up out of their seats: I don’t see any especially happy faces. Instead everyone seems worried, except for the woman sitting directly behind me. During the night I heard her talking. From what she says I deduce that she’s a hooker. A Chilean hooker who works in Europe and is returning to Chile after a more or less extended absence to buy real estate, although it’s not clear to me where: sometimes she seems to say the south and other times she talks about abandoned buildings in Santiago. In any case, she’s a woman with a nice face and dyed blonde hair, her body still lovely, and — surprise — she talks in her sleep too. Unintelligible words in Spanish and Italian and German. For a few minutes, I heard her snoring almost as loudly as the engines of the plane that had miraculously brought us to Chile. When I heard her, I thought those exaggerated snores might be
a bad omen. I thought about saying something. But in the end I decided not to do anything and the snoring stopped all of a sudden, as if it were simply the physical manifestation of a nightmare she’d had, this hooker with a heart of gold, and then moved beyond, just as one leaves behind bad days and illnesses.

  A while ago I met a Chilean who was always having a hard time. No matter where he was or what he was doing, he was having a hard time. This Chilean, a drifter, sometimes reminisced about his native country and he always ended his ramblings in the same way: I’m going to kiss the ground, he’d say. When I get back to Chile the first thing I’ll do is kiss the ground. He had forgotten the terror, the injustice, the folly. Baffled and amused, we made fun of him, but he didn’t care. Go ahead and laugh, he’d say, but the first thing I’ll do when I get back is kiss Chilean soil. I think he died in some South or Central American country, and if he had returned, I imagine his face would look just like the faces of the other Chilean passengers (except the hooker), deadly serious, worried, as if seen from several angles at once, mutating in seconds from Cézanne to Picasso to Basquiat, the usual face of the natives of this long and narrow country, this island-corridor. Of course, I didn’t kiss my native soil. I tried not to trip on the way out of the plane and I tried to light one of my last Spanish cigarettes with a steady hand. Then I breathed the air of Santiago and we headed toward Customs.

  THE FACES

  And all of a sudden, there were the Chilean faces, the faces of my childhood and adolescence, everywhere, streaming, I was surrounded by Chileans, Chileans who looked like Chileans, Chileans who looked like Martians, Chileans walking around with nothing to do in an airport that I guess wasn’t the old Pudahuel Airport though at moments it seemed like it, and also Chileans waiting for passengers and waving white handkerchiefs, and even Chileans crying (a common sight, as I remembered, Chileans cry a lot, sometimes for no reason, sometimes even when they don’t feel like crying), and also Chileans laughing as if the world were about to end and they were the only ones who knew it. But most of all what I saw in those first few moments were Chileans standing still and silent, Chileans staring at the floor as if they were floating over an uncertain abyss, as if the airport were a specter and all of us were suspended over a kind of nothing that miraculously (or inevitably) kept us aloft and that demanded in return a mysterious and unspeakable tribute, a tribute that no one was prepared to pay, but that no one was prepared to say they wouldn’t pay, either.

  THE DANCE BEGINS

  Getting through Customs was simple. It’s been years since they let me into a country so easily. My wife had to fill out a form and I think she had to pay something. When I asked what forms I had to fill out, a round, friendly little customs agent told me I didn’t have to fill out anything. That was the first welcome. The second came from a second customs agent, who decided not to search any of our suitcases. You’re all right, she said, go ahead. The third came from my grandmother and Alexandra Edwards and Totó Romero and Carlos Orellana and La Malala Ansieta, who greeted us as if we were lifelong friends. By now we were outside the airport and we were waiting for a taxi to take us to the hotel and everything was going fine, but somehow I wasn’t back in Chile yet. Or to put it another way, I was there, surrounded by Chileans, which was something I hadn’t experienced since January 1974, but I still wasn’t back, in the real sense of the word. I was still on the plane, I was still sprinting down the corridors of the airport in Madrid, I was still in bed in my house on Calle del Loro, in Blanes, I was still dreaming that I was about to go somewhere.

  YOU CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN

  It was Samuel Valenzuela, of Las Últimas Noticias, who really let me know that I was back. We talked for a while. I didn’t have much to say. So what I did was ask questions and Samuel Valenzuela answered them all. Samuel Valenzuela looks like someone out of a Manuel Rojas novel. I think he paints in his spare time. It was the first day, I was still jet-lagged, and we were at a ranch that they’d brought me to, an agrarian nightmare as painted by Miquel Barceló. Vicente Huidobro used to spend his vacations here, someone said behind me. This ranch — where one hundred and twenty patriots or maybe two hundred and twenty, or maybe just twenty or maybe even only two took refuge during the War of Independence, and which is now a vineyard, museum, and restaurant — is the dadaist setting of my first event on native soil. I look around and the ghosts of those patriots appear and disappear, fading into the whitewashed walls and the huge, sad trees of the great park that surrounds the ranch, in one corner of which there’s a Roman bath built by a previous owner that gave me the shivers when it was pointed out to me. The tweeness of Chileans has no equal on the planet. Neither does Chilean hospitality, and in my case it’s unceasing. Until Samuel Valenzuela takes me aside for an interview. We talk about Chilean wine. Wine that I can no longer drink. We also talk about empanadas. What does it feel like to be back? he asks. I tell him I don’t know. Nothing, I say, it doesn’t feel like anything. The next day our interview is in the paper. The headline reads: “Bolaño Can’t Go Home Again.” When I read it, I think: it’s true! With that headline, Samuel Valenzuela told me everything that he could humanly, metaphysically, ontologically, or tellurically tell me. That was when I knew I was back in Chile.

  PHONE CONVERSATIONS WITH PEDRO LEMEBEL

  The first thing Lemebel asked me was how old I was when I left Chile. Twenty, I said. So how could you lose your Chilean accent? he asked. I don’t know, but I lost it. You can’t have lost it, he said, by the time you’re twenty you can’t lose anything. You can lose lots of things, I said. But not your accent, he said. Well, I lost it, I said. Impossible, he said. That might have been the end of everything: the conversation didn’t seem to be going anywhere. But Lemebel is the greatest poet of my generation and from Spain I had already admired the glorious and provocative wake left by his performance art duo Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis (The Mares of the Apocalypse). So I took the plunge and we went to eat at a Peruvian restaurant and I talked to all the other people we were with — Soledad Bianchi, Lina Meruane, Alejandra Costamagna, the poet Sergio Parra — and meanwhile Lemebel lapsed into a state of general melancholy and was silent for the rest of the evening, which was too bad. No one speaks a more Chilean Spanish than Lemebel. Lemebel doesn’t need to write poetry to be the best poet of my generation. No one goes deeper than Lemebel. And also, as if that weren’t enough, Lemebel is brave. That is, he understands how to open his eyes in the darkness, in those lands where no one dares to tread. How do I know all this? Easy. By reading his books. And after reading them, in exhilaration, in hilarity, in dread, I called him on the phone and we talked for a long time, a long conversation of golden howls, during which I recognized in Lemebel the indomitable spirit of the Mexican poet Mario Santiago, dead, and the blazing images of La Araucana, dead, forgotten, which Lemebel brought back to life and then I knew that this queer writer, my hero, might be on the side of the losers but that victory, the sad victory offered by Literature (capitalized, as it is here), was surely his. When everyone who has treated him like dirt is lost in the cesspit or in nothingness, Pedro Lemebel will still be a star.

  THE FAT REPORTER

  One day a fat reporter came to interview me. He wasn’t as young as the others. He might have been my age, maybe a bit younger, and he was from La Serena. He gave me a copy of his paper, a La Serena paper, and then he sat down in a chair, panting, and he spotted my cigarettes and asked for one. He didn’t buy them anymore because he had stopped smoking, but that morning he was in the
mood for one.

  There was no photographer with him, so he took my picture. Do you know how these cameras work? he asked. I looked at the camera and said I had no idea. For a while we stood there studying the camera. A photographer colleague at La Serena had loaned it to him. His indecisiveness, I soon realized, was greater than mine. Let’s take the pictures on the balcony, he said, there’s more light. I don’t know why, but I didn’t like the idea. I have a sore throat, I said, I don’t want to go outside. The problem is you smoke too much, he said, leaving his cigarette in the ashtray. Finally I sat in a chair and I said take the pictures now or never. He sighed and took three or four pictures. Being a local reporter is boring, he said. But there must be interesting parts too, I said. The guys on the police beat have more fun, he said. Yes, there are interesting parts. Like in any life.

  CHILEAN LITERATURE

  This is what Chilean literature taught me. Ask for nothing, because you’ll be given nothing. Don’t get sick because no one will help you. Don’t ask to be included in any anthology because your name will always be omitted. Don’t fight because you’ll always be defeated. Don’t turn your back on power because power is everything. Don’t be stinting in your praise for idiots, the dogmatic, the mediocre, if you don’t want to live a season in hell. Life here goes on more or less unchanged.