A Little Lumpen Novelita

by Roberto Bolaño

  A voice — Maciste’s — told me to stay where I was, not to move forward or back, and then he greeted my brother’s friends, hello, how are you? And in that brief how are you I sensed an incredible fragility, a fragility like a manta ray falling from the ceiling, the dark foyer the bottom of the sea and the manta ray watching us from above, halfway between the sea floor and the surface.

  Then I heard the Bolognan and the Libyan saying they were fine, and how are you, Mr. Bruno? and Maciste, who wasn’t up above anymore and whose voice no longer echoed with infinite shades of fragility, replied:

  “Plagued by ailments, my friends, that’s the way of it.”

  And he said this in a voice in which there wasn’t a hint of ailing, a voice that boomed in the darkness as if it, the darkness, was a muzzle, and he was straining at it furiously, itching to come out on the porch and gobble up my brother’s friends, who just then, the cowards, were saying that their business here was done, they hoped everything would go well, and then they left, wishing us goodnight, Maciste and me, and as they were backing away almost at a run to the garden gate, the door to the house closed and since I didn’t see any shadow cross the threshold, I deduced that Maciste had closed the door with some kind of remote control.

  Then, for the first time in a long time, I was plunged into total darkness.

  What happened next is hard to describe. Maciste’s voice guided me to a room on the second floor, lit by a dim bulb half-hidden in a corner. I know I went up some stairs, but I know I went down some stairs too. Maciste’s voice was always ahead of me, guiding me. I wasn’t afraid. I crossed a dark room with a wall of windows that overlooked the back garden and the tall ivy-covered walls separating the house from the building next door. I felt calm. I opened a door. It wasn’t Maciste’s room, as I had imagined it would be, but a kind of gym. His private gym, the one my brother’s friends had told me about.

  I turned on the light. On a wooden table there were several bottles of liniment and various lotions. I took off my jacket and waited. After a while the lights went out. Only then did the door open and I saw Maciste.

  X

  All of this is hard to describe, as I’ve said. What happened, what I felt, what I saw. What might have happened, what I might have seen, and what I might have felt. What he felt, I don’t know. I’ll never know.

  He was big and fat. But that wasn’t really Maciste. He was big, yes. Tall, broad. He was also fat. He had been a world bodybuilding champion and a tiny part of that glory still lived on somewhere, not in his body, maybe, but in the way he moved. His body was the pallid color of bodies that never see the sun. Either his head was shaved or he had gone totally bald. He was polite. He was wearing an old black robe that fell to his ankles, and sunglasses that looked small on his big face.

  I remember that he advanced toward the middle of the gym, where I was standing, his steps so slow that I could tell he was nervous or uncomfortable too.

  He asked me how I was, and how old I was. I lied to him, as we had agreed I would, and in turn I asked him why he was called Maciste.

  “Are you comfortable?” he asked.

  “I’m fine and I’m nineteen. Why do people call you Maciste?”

  He felt for a chair and then I knew, without a doubt, that he was blind.

  He murmured that in his day he’d played a character called Maciste in a few movies.

  I didn’t know what to say, not because of his response, but because I realized that I had a blind man in front of me. My brother’s friends hadn’t warned me about this. Assholes, I thought angrily, and I moved to grab my jacket and go running out of the house. But then I thought: what if they didn’t know? Was I going to spoil an ambitious plan, ambitious by our lights, I mean, just because of a mistake? Would my brother be left wandering the streets of Rome just because of a misunderstanding of no consequence in the end, anyway? And what if no one knew that he was blind, or hardly anyone? Because Maciste’s life was a mystery, or so I’d been told, and neither the Bolognan nor the Libyan could be said to be part of his inner circle, if such a circle existed.

  This was when Maciste said:

  “My stage name was Franco Bruno.”

  And I thought: what?

  And he said:

  “These days, bodybuilding is considered a sport but when I practiced it, it was an art . . . Like magic . . . There was a time when it was an art and magicians were artists . . . Now it’s just a part of the show.”

  And after a long silence during which I thought about other things, I said:

  “I know what you mean.” Though in fact I hadn’t understood a thing, because as far as I knew Maciste had been an actor and a top bodybuilder, not a magician. Maybe he just felt a kinship with magicians.

  And when Maciste heard me he turned his face toward me and asked if I was naked. I said no, that I had only taken off my jacket.

  “Did they explain to you? . . . I need company . . . I don’t know whether they explained to you.”

  I said yes, that they had explained everything. “Don’t worry,” I said.

  Then he took off his robe and I saw him naked for the first time. He said: “Come here and turn out the light.”

  “The light isn’t on,” I said.

  “Can you see in the dark?”

  “More or less,” I said.

  “Strange — have you always?”

  No,” I said. “If this had happened to me when I was little, I would have gone crazy. It’s only been a little while. Since my parents died in a crash.”

  “A car crash?”

  “Yes. I don’t like to talk about it. They died.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Maciste.

  We were quiet, each of us sitting in our respective chairs. After a while he asked me whether I wanted something to drink. I said yes.

  Maciste left the gym, walking just like anyone. For a few seconds I wondered whether I’d been mistaken, though everybody knows that blind people get around with no trouble in a familiar place.

  He came back with a two-liter bottle of Coca-Cola and two mini-whiskey bottles, like the kind I knew people got on planes or in hotel minibars. I thought he had forgotten to bring glasses and I waited. When I saw him drink straight from the bottle, I did too.

  “Were you driving the car when your parents died?”

  It bothered me that he would ask a question like that. I told him that I didn’t know how to drive and that when my parents died I was in Rome, at home, with my brother.

  “Interesting,” said Maciste. “And ever since then you can see in the dark?”

  “Yes, ever since, or after the second or third day . . .”

  “So it’s some kind of psychosomatic thing,” said Maciste.

  “I don’t know whether it’s psychosomatic or supernatural, and I don’t care either,” I said.

  Then, as I walked over to his chair, a ray of moonlight, fat as a wave, rolled into the gym. Maciste undressed me. He felt my face and my hips and my legs. Then he got up and went to get the bottles of lotion and liniment.

  XI

  I started to go twice a week to his house on Via Germanico. Sometimes I had to wait a long time outside the door before he let me in. Sometimes we didn’t go straight to the gym, and instead he brought me into the kitchen, a kitchen twice as big as our living room, where Maciste made sandwiches for both of us — his specialty — American sandwiches which, according to him, he had been taught to make by an actress named Dolly Plimpton, from Oregon; she had been in the cast of one of his movies, and her recipe consisted of sandwich bread, lettuce, cucumber, tomato, sliced ham, sliced cheese, and various spreads that he could tell apart by the size and shape of the jars and that, mixed, often made the sandwiches taste strange — strong and strange, like the sandwiches you get in airports, he said, but good.

  The kitchen was big and it was dirty. Not because it got much use, which it didn’t, but because it needed someone to come and give it a deep cleaning, to sweep away the dust that had been gathe
ring in the corners for months, maybe years, but Maciste didn’t want to hear it.

  The bathroom we used after fucking was the only place in the house that was really clean. The bathtub was huge and

  instead of a shower curtain it had glass doors, like the kind you see in some movies, doors that Maciste had gotten specially installed, in addition to handrails on the walls that he didn’t need, since he moved around the house like someone who could see.

  Next to the bathtub there was a little stall with a high-pressure cold-water shower that Maciste called a Norwegian shower. It had a glass door too.

  While I showered, Maciste sometimes sat on a wooden stool in the bathroom and ate his sandwiches. We talked about all kinds of things. About my parents’ accident and how the loss had affected me (his parents were dead too). About recent movies that I had seen (he’d seen his last movie fifteen years ago). About things that happened next door.

  The truth is, I didn’t have much to say to him.

  When I opened the glass door and saw him eating, it gave me a funny feeling — it was like he was someone else, and I was someone else too, and I didn’t like it.

  Then I would ask him questions, because the silence he was used to was more than I could stand. So I learned his real name, Giovanni Dellacroce, though real only stands for a different kind of unreality, a less random, more fleshed-out unreality, and I learned the exact dates, from before I was born, when he had been crowned Mr. Italy and then Mr. Europe and finally Mr. Universe, which was the first time an Italian had won the world bodybuilding championship, at a competition held in Las Vegas, and I also learned that he’d been to all the great cities of Europe and America (the exact dates: year, month, day), and that he’d been the friend of politicians and famous artists, of movie actresses and soccer players on the national team or for Rome, and that he’d worked on lots of movies, among them the three or four (he was precise about the number, but I’ve forgotten it) in which he played Maciste, and that sometimes he’d been the good guy and other times, in the end, the bad guy, because that’s how it goes, he said, in the beginning you’re almost always the good guy and in the end you’re always the bad guy.

  Other times I tried to go off on my own in the house.

  “I’m going to take a walk around your castle,” I would say, and hurry off, before he could object or say no.

  The house had two floors and it was the biggest house I’d ever seen from the inside (it still is). It was so big that it seemed rooted in the earth. On the second floor there were at least four or five empty rooms. On the first floor was the living room, which Maciste used occasionally, mostly to take naps, and the dining room, which had become a kind of passageway or labyrinth where furniture from other rooms was piled up, cots and mattresses, electric heaters, chairs and tables, wardrobes full of cobwebs, and where there were stacks of old sports or movie magazines. Everything was organized in some way that Maciste never explained to me, though it wasn’t hard to figure out that the room’s main purpose was to clear obstacles and hazards from other parts of the house.

  Then there was the kitchen, which I’ve already described, and a full bathroom with broken mirrors and a huge gouge in the bathtub. There was also a windowed room that led to the big, crowded foyer, full of useless curtains, and a terrace that led to the back garden and the walls of the neighboring houses. To either side the buildings looked normal, but in back, the houses with entrances on Via degli Scipioni were as silent as Maciste’s, no sound of television or radio or children’s voices or adults calling to children or to each other. Once I heard the chirp of a cell phone, but only once.

  On the second floor, besides the empty rooms, was Maciste’s room, big, with its shutters always closed. There was a full-length mirror abandoned in a corner, which Maciste must once have used for daily self-evaluations and possibly also to make love with movie actresses, and a huge bed with a reinforced frame custom-built to support the weight of its owner. Otherwise, the room had a monastic air, of spaciousness and poverty.

  Then there were two bathrooms, the big one where I showered and a small one where the last cleaning woman had piled the tools of her trade — a couple of buckets, a mop, several bottles of bleach — before leaving for good, sick of the blind man.

  Past the windowed room was the gym where Maciste seemed to spend most of his time, pedaling on a stationary bike or lifting weights, his mind elsewhere, or, more frequently, lying indolently on a long wooden bench in his black robe and sunglasses with a white towel around his neck, thinking about his glory years or maybe — hopefully — thinking about nothing, his mind blank.

  Next to the gym was the reading room or library (that’s what he called it), in which there wasn’t a single book. There were two oil paintings, though. One of them was of Maciste, half-naked, accepting the world bodybuilding championship belt. The other was of Maciste sitting in that very library, behind an oak table that was still there, wearing a suit and tie and with a faint smile on his face, as if he were laughing at the painter and everyone who would ever look at the painting, as if behind everything that surrounded him there was a secret and only he knew it.

  Between the two paintings there was a niche holding an icon of St. Pietrino of the Seychelles.

  “St. Pietrino of the Seychelles? The Seychelle islands?”

  “Yes,” said Maciste.

  “He went so far away — who is this St. Pietrino?”

  “A saint.”

  “Yes, but what kind of saint? I’ve never heard of him. It must be a joke.”

  “No, it isn’t a joke,” said Maciste. “He’s a modern-day Roman saint who was born in Santa Loreto, like me, and one day he went to preach in the Seychelles, that’s all.”

  Since I didn’t feel like arguing, I let it go and walked around the house some more. There was no safe anywhere to be seen. I looked for it many times, but I could never find it.

  XII

  Sometimes, while I was looking for the safe and going from room to room, moving things and putting them back again, I would hear — or rather sense — the presence of Maciste, in his black bathrobe or naked, moving through the darkness of the house following the sound of my footsteps, the almost imperceptible noises I made, until suddenly he would grab me from behind, wrapping me in a bear hug, no matter how careful I tried to be, no matter how stealthy my movements.

  And then, when I was in his arms and he was bearing me off through the darkness, or when I was under him or next to him, in the bed or in the gym, every inch of my body slathered with lotion, I would give thanks that I hadn’t found the safe, at least not yet.

  And sometimes I imagined sleeping there every night, with Maciste, and I imagined hiring a woman to do the cleaning (because in my dreams I didn’t intend to be his slave), and convincing him to go out every once in a while, maybe not to the movies but for a walk, like two normal people or two people who pretend to be normal and by pretending actually are normal or become normal, and I saw myself calling a taxi once a week, on Fridays maybe, to come and pick us up and take us to a nice restaurant where we would have a leisurely dinner, with conversation about all kinds of things, or to take us downtown, where I would buy clothes for him at one of those stores for big men, and then clothes for me, and I even imagined myself going to the movies with Maciste, and describing what was on the screen, the way companions of the blind are supposed to.

  But the reality is that I hardly ever slept at his house, and also that after dreaming for a while about our life together I would start to wonder where the hell that safe could be.

  Late at night, when I got home and my brother and his friends were half-awake, we argued about it. The Bolognan was getting impatient, he said we’d didn’t have all the time in the world, and sometimes he talked about breaking in, armed with a knife or whatever, but when he said this he trembled, he and the Libyan and my brother, the very idea made them tremble, and it wasn’t hard for me to steer them back to the original plan.

  Other times we talk
ed about Maciste’s story, about the movies he’d made that had been such hits. For weeks my brother even looked around the neighborhood video stores and then downtown for the movie called Maciste vs. the Tartars, which according to the Bolognan was the best, but he never found it.

  I was glad he couldn’t find it because I didn’t like the idea of seeing Maciste as a young man, when he still had his sight and his hair and a perfect body. I didn’t want to see that because I knew what was to come, twenty years later. But once I dreamed about the movie. First, two armies clashed on a dry plain. Then Maciste fought twenty warriors inside a palace and defeated them all. At some point a woman appeared in a tunic of gauzy silk and kissed Maciste. The two of them stood on the edge of a cliff. An abyss yawned at their feet and wisps of smoke rose on the horizon. Then I saw Maciste sleeping in a room with marble walls and a marble floor. And in the dream I thought: this is a movie, he’s not really sleeping, he’s just pretending to sleep, and in fact he’s awake, and only then did I realize that Maciste, making the movie, was in the present, and I, watching the movie or dreaming that I was watching it, was in the future, Maciste’s future, or, in other words, nothingness. Then I woke up.

  Anyway, I preferred to see him the way he really was when I went to visit him at his house, twice a week.

  At the salon things weren’t good. Though in some ways they were better than they had been. I was usually exhausted when I got there and sometimes I stumbled through the day like a sleepwalker. Once the boss, who was an understanding woman, pulled me into the bathroom and pushed up my sleeves, looking for needle tracks on my arms.

  “I’m not doing drugs,” I said.

  “What’s wrong with you, Bianca? You’re looking worse and worse.”

  “I’m sleeping badly,” I said.

  It was true. Sometimes I’d go for weeks getting three or four hours of sleep a night.