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

by Bolaño, Roberto

PLAYBOY: And hell?

  BOLAÑO: Like Ciudad Juárez, which is our curse and our mirror, the unquiet mirror of our frustrations and of our vile interpretation of freedom and of our desires.

  PLAYBOY: When did you learn that you were gravely ill?

  BOLAÑO: In 1992.

  PLAYBOY: What parts of your character were changed by your illness?

  BOLAÑO: Nothing changed. I discovered that I wasn’t immortal, which — at the age of thirty-eight — it was about time I discovered.

  PLAYBOY: What things would you like to do before you die?

  BOLAÑO: Nothing in particular. Well, I’d rather not die, of course. But sooner or later the great lady makes her entrance. The problem is that sometimes she’s no lady, let alone great. Instead, as Nicanor Parra says in a poem, she’s a cheap whore, which is enough to make anyone’s teeth chatter.

  PLAYBOY: Who would you most like to meet in the afterlife?

  BOLAÑO: I don’t believe in the afterlife. If it exists, I’ll be surprised. First thing, I’d sign up for whatever class Pascal was teaching.

  PLAYBOY: Did you ever think about killing yourself?

  BOLAÑO: Of course. At some point I survived precisely because I knew I could kill myself if things got worse.

  PLAYBOY: Did you ever think you were going crazy?

  BOLAÑO: Yes, but I was always saved by my sense of humor. I told myself stories that cracked me up. Or I remembered situations that made me roll on the ground laughing.

  PLAYBOY: Madness, death, love: Which of the three has there been most of in your life?

  BOLAÑO: I hope with all my heart that it’s love.

  PLAYBOY: What makes you laugh?

  BOLAÑO: My own misfortunes, and other people’s misfortunes.

  PLAYBOY: What makes you cry?

  BOLAÑO: The same thing: misfortunes, mine and other people’s.

  PLAYBOY: Do you like music?

  BOLAÑO: Very much.

  PLAYBOY: Would you cut anything from The Savage Detectives?

  BOLAÑO: No. To cut anything I would have to reread it and that’s against my religion.

  PLAYBOY: Aren’t you afraid that someone might make a movie of it?

  BOLAÑO: Ay, Mónica, I’m afraid of other things. More horrific things, shall we say; much more horrific things.

  PLAYBOY: Is “Mauricio (‘The Eye’) Silva” an homage to Julio Cortázar?

  BOLAÑO: Not at all.

  PLAYBOY: When you finished writing “Mauricio (‘The Eye’) Silva” didn’t you feel that you had written a story on a par with “House Taken Over”?

  BOLAÑO: When I finished writing “Mauricio (‘The Eye’) Silva” I stopped crying. Or something like that. I wish it was like a Cortázar story, though “House Taken Over” isn’t one of my favorites.

  PLAYBOY: Do you get along well with your editor?

  BOLAÑO: Fairly well. Herralde is an intelligent and often charming person. It might be better for me if he weren’t so charming. The truth is that I’ve known him for eight years now, and at least as far as I’m concerned the love just keeps growing, in the words of the bolero. Though it might be better for me if I weren’t so fond of him.

  PLAYBOY: What do you have to say about those who think The Savage Detectives is the great contemporary Mexican novel?

  BOLAÑO: They say it because they feel sorry for me, they see me looking depressed or as if I’m on my last legs and the best they can come up with is a white lie, which in fact is only appropriate in cases like this and isn’t even a venial sin.

  PLAYBOY: Is it true that it was Juan Villoro who convinced you not to give your novel By Night in Chile the title Storms of Shit ?

  BOLAÑO: Villoro and Herralde.

  PLAYBOY: Whose advice do you listen to most when it comes to your work?

  BOLAÑO: I don’t listen to anyone’s advice, not even my doctor’s. I give advice right and left, but I never take it.

  PLAYBOY: What is Blanes like?

  BOLAÑO: A pretty town. Or a small city of 30,000, quite pretty. It was founded two thousand years ago by the Romans, and then people came from all over. It’s not a luxury resort, it’s a place for the working class. People from Northern or Eastern Europe. Some end up staying forever. The bay is beautiful.

  PLAYBOY: Do you miss anything about your life in Mexico?

  BOLAÑO: My youth and my walks with Mario Santiago.

  PLAYBOY: What Mexican writer do you deeply admire?

  BOLAÑO: Of my generation I admire Sada, whose goals seem the most daring to me, Villoro, Carmen Boullosa. Among the younger writers I’m very interested in what Álvaro Enrigue and Mauricio Montiel are doing, or Volpi and Ignacio Padilla. I keep reading Sergio Pitol, who gets better every day. And Monsiváis, who, according to Villoro, gave Taibo II or III (or IV) the nickname “Pol Pit” which I think is a stroke of poetic genius. Monsiváis still keeps his talons filed. I also like what Sergio González Rodríguez is doing.

  PLAYBOY: Does the world have a cure?

  BOLAÑO: The world is alive and nothing alive needs a cure, which is lucky for us.

  PLAYBOY: In what or in whom do you place your hopes?

  BOLAÑO: My dear Maristaín, you propel me again into the realm of sappiness, which is my natural abode. I have hope in children. In children and warriors. In children who fuck like children and warriors who fight like brave men. Why? I refer you to the gravestone of Borges, as the illustrious Gervasio Montenegro, of the Academy, would say. And that’s enough of that.

  PLAYBOY: What does the word posthumous remind you of?

  BOLAÑO: It sounds like the name of a Roman gladiator. An undefeated gladiator. Or at least that’s what poor Posthumous imagines in order to give himself courage.

  PLAYBOY: What do you think about the people who say that you’ll win the Nobel Prize?

  BOLAÑO: I’m sure I won’t, just as I’m sure that some slacker from my generation will, and he won’t even give me a nod in his speech in Stockholm.

  PLAYBOY: What would you have liked to be instead of a writer?

  BOLAÑO: I would much rather have been a homicide detective than a writer. That’s one thing I’m absolutely sure of. A homicide cop, someone who returns alone at night to the scene of the crime and isn’t afraid of ghosts. Maybe then I really would have gone crazy, but when you’re a policeman, you solve that by shooting yourself in the mouth.

  PLAYBOY: Do you confess to having lived?

  BOLAÑO: I’m still alive, I’m still reading, I’m still writing and watching movies, and as Arturo Prat said to the sailors of the Esmeralda before their last stand, so long as I live, this flag will fly.

  Sources

  The references that follow don’t pretend to be exhaustive. As is not uncommon, Bolaño occasionally submitted for publication pieces that had previously appeared elsewhere, especially if in a different country. To follow the trail of each and every one of the pieces gathered here through the many Spanish and Latin American newspapers and magazines to which Bolaño contributed is a task that lies outside the scope of this volume. In fact, the volume was assembled in the knowledge that some pieces that had been overlooked would inevitably turn up here and there after it was published. At least there won’t be many of them, since access was had to the computer files where Bolaño himself kept most, if not all, of his contributions — in considerable disarray, it must be said. Which means that it’s impossible to be sure whether a few of the pieces included here were ever previously published. When it’s kn
own that a certain piece was published in more than one place, the different sources are given. In just a few cases, and in fairly arbitrary fashion, some explanatory notes are included when judged to be of interest to the reader.

  PREFACE

  Self-Portrait. Brief autobiographical statement written at the request of the Rómulo Gallegos Center for Latin American Studies when, in 1999, Bolaño won the prize awarded by the Center.

  THREE INSUFFERABLE SPEECHES

  The Vagaries of the Literature of Doom. Read December 14, 2002 at the Kosmópolis International Festival of Literature hosted by the Centre de Cultura Contemporànea (CCCB) in Barcelona. Bolaño introduced the reading of the text with the following remarks (which are transcribed from a tape recording): “This piece is very limited in scope and hasn’t been revised, which means that everything said in it is subject to subsequent rectification. Originally I wanted to discuss the literature of the Southern Cone of America, or Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay, but Argentine literature is so rich, so powerful, that in the end it seemed more fitting to focus exclusively on it; on Argentine fiction, basically. My initial idea was to talk about Argentine literature from Borges to Rodrigo Fresán, but I soon realized that in order to do that I would’ve needed one hundred pages, not ten, and I was no more prepared to write one hundred pages than you would’ve been to listen to them. The piece is therefore limited to the drift of Argentine literature since Borges’s death; to its gangster drift since Borges’s death, basically. Sadly, this gangster literature, or literature of doom is the most vital, the richest. Personally, it doesn’t excite me much, mostly because I’m sick of the literature of doom, but there’s no doubt that it’s the most vital, and that it has the most influence on the rest of Latin American literature. The literature of doom, as I’ve said, is a kind of sub-world or infra-world outside the law.” For his reading, Bolaño numbered the paragraphs of the text.

  Caracas Address. Read August 2, 1999 at the award ceremony for the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, in Caracas. Published in Diagonal (cultural supplement of the newspaper El Metropolitano, Santiago de Chile), September 5, 1999 (under the title “Corriendo la línea” [Running the Line]). Also published in the Spanish edition of the magazine Letras Libres, Number 10, October 1999, and in the magazine Lateral (Barcelona), Number 59, November 1999, pp. 40–41. Collected by Celina Manzoni in Roberto Bolaño: La escritura como tauromaquia [Writing as Tauromachy], Buenos Aires, Corregidor, 2002, pp. 207–214.

  Literature and Exile. Read April 3, 2000 as part of “Europe and Latin America: Literature, Immigration, and Identity,” a symposium organized by the Austrian Society for the Literature of Vienna. Published in sábado (cultural supplement of the newspaper unomásuno, Mexico), October 7, 2000; also published in the magazine Turia (Teruel), number 54, November 2000, pp. 41–46.

  FRAGMENTS OF A RETURN TO THE NATIVE LAND

  Exiles. Possibly unpublished text, in any case written before Bolaño’s first trip to Chile, in November 1998. It’s likely that Bolaño wrote it for the lecture series “Literature and its Limits,” organized by Jesús Ferrero as part of the Navarra Festivals, 1997. Bolaño gave his talk on August 13.

  Fragments of a Return to the Native Land. Published in the magazine Paula (Santiago de Chile), Number 792, February 1999, pp. 98–101. The piece was preceded by the following editor’s note: “Last November, when the writer Roberto Bolaño was in Chile as a juror for Paula’s story competition, we asked him to write his impressions of the country after 25 years away. Two months later he sent us what he’d written, begging us not to cut a thing or change a single comma. We obeyed, and here’s his piece in full, exclusively for our readers.”

  The Corridor with No Apparent Way Out. Ajoblanco (Barcelona), Number 116, May 1999, pp. 54–57. The piece was accompanied by the following editor’s note: “The writer Roberto Bolaño, winner of the Herralde Prize for The Savage Detectives, has returned to his native Chile after twenty-five years of exile. Three months ago he told us in these very pages that he hoped to find a ‘tolerant country,’ but that was ‘just a dream.’ This is the account of his bitter homecoming.” As noted in the Introduction, the piece soon made the rounds in Chile, arousing feelings of resentment, so that when Bolaño returned to Chile in November 1999, he was the frequent target of hostile remarks and attitudes. By then, Bolaño had won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize and his growing fame and prestige did much to heighten the suspicions and offense fostered by his often defiant declarations about the culture, politics, and society of his native country. An unpublished text discovered among Bolaño’s posthumous papers describes an incident that occurred during his first trip to Chile, in 1998: “The next year, in 1999, I traveled to Chile at the invitation of the Book Fair. Possibly to celebrate my recent receipt of the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, almost all the Chilean writers decided to attack me en patota, as they say in Chile, or en masse. I counterattacked. An older woman, who had lived all her life on the handouts that the State gives to artists, called me a lackey. I’ve never lived on the largesse of any country, so this accusation surprised me. It was also said that I was a patero, which doesn’t mean the same thing as patota. A patero doesn’t necessarily belong to a patota, as one might inadvertently assume, although in every patota there are always pateros. A patero is a flatterer, a smooth-talker, a bootlicker; an ass-kisser, in proper Spanish. The incredible thing about this is that the people who were calling me names were Chileans, left-wing as well as right-wing, who kissed ass incessantly to cling to their shreds of fame, whereas everything that I’ve achieved (which isn’t much) I’d gotten without the help of anyone. What was it they didn’t like about me? Well, someone said it was my teeth. There I have to say they were absolutely right.” This isn’t the place to explain the allusions that Bolaño makes here, though it’s worth confirming that everything he reports is true, including the remark by a distinguished Chilean writer about his teeth.

  Words from Outer Space. El Periódico (Barcelona), February 5, 1999. Bolaño alludes to some clandestine tape-recordings of telephone conversations between military commanders the day of the coup led by Augusto Pinochet, September 11, 1973.

  A Modest Proposal. Text found among Bolaño’s posthumous papers. It hasn’t been possible to discover whether it was ever published, though by all indications it was. In any case, the text was written after Bolaño’s first trip to Chile, in November 1998.

  Out in the Cold. Text found among Bolaño’s posthumous papers. As with the previous piece, it hasn’t been possible to discover whether it was published, though by all indications it was.

  Chilean Poetry Under Inclement Skies. Remarks commemorating the publication of a single-subject issue of the magazine Litoral (Málaga) titled Chile: Contemporary Poetry (with a Glance at Contemporary Art), Numbers 223–224, November 1999, pp. 9–10. Also published as a stand-alone piece in Las Últimas Noticias, May 2000.

  On Bruno Montané. Jacket copy for a book of poems by Bruno Montané, El maletín de Stevenson. El cielo de los topos [Stevenson’s Suitcase: The Moles’ Sky], Mexico, Ediciones El Aduanero, 2002.

  Eight Seconds with Nicanor Parra. Remarks commemorating the publication of the catalogue for the exhibition Artefactos visuales. Dirección obligada [Visual Artifacts: Address Required], by Nicanor Parra, on display at the Telefónica Foundation of Madrid from April 25 to June 10, 2001.

  The Lost. Text found among Roberto’s posthumous papers. It hasn’t been possible to discover whether it was ever published.
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  The Transparent Mystery of José Donoso. Hoja por Hoja (literary supplement of the Mexican newspaper Reforma, Mexico), special issue for the Guadalajara International Book Fair, November 1999.

  On Literature, the National Literature Prize, and the Rare Consolations of the Writing Life. Published as a stand-alone piece in Las Últimas Noticias, August 27, 2002. Shortly after sending this article to Las Últimas Noticias, Bolaño sent me a copy of it by email, with the following message: “Dear Ignacio: Restif de la Bretonne on the barricades or how to make more friends in Chile. The neo-pamphlet will be the great literary genre of the 22nd century. In this sense, I’m a minor author, but ahead of my times.” Soon afterward, in response to my questions and comments on the text, he wrote (August 26, 2002): “Friday is the national litherathure [sic] prize gala, tacky ceremony if ever there was one. I hope that my pamphlet won’t be read solely in that context. Frankly, I don’t give a damn what people think. Metaphor matters to me, meter matters to me. It’s not a suicidal gesture — no sir, as the excellent and always under-appreciated Lute said: legitimate self-defense, your honor, legitimate self-defense.” The National Prize that year was won by Teitelbaum.

  BETWEEN PARENTHESES

  As mentioned in the Introduction, the columns gathered in this section were published in the Diari de Girona (the early ones), and later on in the Chilean newspaper Las Últimas Noticias. The first Diari de Girona column appeared on January 10, 1999 (“The Best Gang”) and the last on April 2, 2000 (“Hell’s Angels”). Bolaño ended up publishing nearly forty columns in the Diari de Girona, at more or less weekly intervals. Here they’re presented in the order in which they appeared, except for a few which have been impossible to date. The columns were published in Catalan translation, and in some cases the Spanish originals couldn’t be found. Those pieces aren’t reproduced here, since it seemed pointless to include texts by Bolaño translated from another language. During the months that he published his column in the Diari de Girona, Bolaño gradually began to contribute to other publications (especially Diagonal, the cultural supplement of the now-defunct El Metropolitano of Santiago, Chile, which was headed by his friend Roberto Brodsky), to which he occasionally sent the same pieces, sometimes simultaneously. The reasons why Bolaño chose to stop writing for the Diari de Girona are unknown, though it’s easy to imagine that around this time, with his work in increasing demand, he might have grown tired of the weekly effort of writing a column that had a very limited readership and for which he couldn’t have been paid a very enticing amount.