Cowboy Graves

by Roberto Bolaño

  We did get letters, long letters in terrible handwriting with lots of spelling mistakes. In them, he talked about “my adopted country,” as he pompously referred to Chile, or “my other country,” “my Chilean self,” “my other self.” Sometimes, though not often, he talked about my grandfather, who was Spanish, from Galicia, and about my Sonoran Indian grandmother, who seemed as remote as aliens to me. He said that he was the youngest of seven children, that my grandfather was ninety and owned land near Santa Teresa, and that my grandmother was sixty, exactly thirty years younger than my grandfather. Sometimes, when I was bored, I made calculations (though I hated math) and the numbers didn’t add up: according to my mother, who knew and liked to report everyone’s age except her own, my father was twenty-five when I was born; therefore, he must have been forty around the time we moved to Mexico. If my grandmother was sixty, that meant she was twenty when she had my father; but if my father was the youngest of seven children, how old could my grandmother have been when she gave birth to her first? Assuming that she’d had them one after another, she might have been thirteen, two years younger than me and one year younger than my sister. My grandmother, thirteen; my grandfather, forty-three. Of course, there was another possibility: my grandmother wasn’t the mother of all my grandfather’s children; just the last two, or just my father. According to my father’s horrible letters, which I sometimes didn’t even finish reading, until recently my grandfather could still get up on a horse. My father also said that when he talked to my grandfather on the phone, telling him how he’d sent money for a horse for me—though here he got his verb tenses mixed up, and nothing about the story quite made sense—the old man said that he hoped to see me ride someday in Sonora, on a real Sonoran horse. All this did was turn me against my grandfather, and anyway I never met him. Once I asked my father (casually, as if we were talking about soccer, when we were stuck in a traffic jam on Insurgentes) about my grandmother’s precocious motherhood and then he confessed that she was my grandfather’s second wife. She’d had her first child at nineteen and the second (and last) at twenty. For some reason, then I asked about his first wife (my father’s, not my grandfather’s), with no transition or preamble, as if everything we’d talked about that afternoon had been leading up to this point. At first my father was cool and quiet, staring forward with his hands on the wheel. Then he said that in Mexico, unlike in Chile, divorce had been possible for a long time, but it cost a lot, which was not the case in Chile. I don’t know why, he said, but it’s expensive to split up. It must be because of the fucking kids, I said, and I threw the cigarette out the window (ever since I’d turned fifteen, from the time I’d set foot in Mexico City, my father had let me smoke). That must be it, he said. I can’t remember anymore whether we were heading toward UNAM or toward La Villa, just that we were crawling along and my father didn’t look at me for a while (he was staring at the motionless crush of cars—carros, as they call them in Mexico—on the avenue, but by his expression he might have been gazing out over the great open spaces of America, the dive bars and factories, the shadowy buildings where men like him lived, men past forty), but when he did look at me, he smiled and started to speak, but in the end he didn’t say anything.

  The last time my father was in Chile, a year and a half before we left for Mexico, some friends of my mother’s invited us to their country house for the weekend. One afternoon we went riding. Some days I remember it clearly—the voices; the yellows and dark greens; the birds; the scattered clouds, incredibly high—and other days I remember it wreathed in fog, like some jumpy or distorted movie, or like somebody did something to my brain. There were seven of us Chileans and one Mexican, and the Chileans wanted to see if the Mexican was man enough to ride fast and not fall off the horse (I was one of the Chileans and I wanted to see too). I suspect that one of the Chileans, a doctor—though for all that it matters, he might have been a nurse—had slept with my mother, I remember him over at our house, my mother’s voice ordering Celestina to put us to bed, the music coming from the record player when they were alone, the soundtrack from Black Orpheus. I also remember the doctor’s (or nurse’s) sadness and occasional moodiness, though even at his moodiest he wouldn’t budge from my mother’s side in the hectic days before my father’s arrival. So my mother’s morose friend was there, and I was there, and five other Chileans, and I remember that they were drinking Maule wine and as we got farther from the big house I remember some jokes too, some allusions to the equestrian art in the two sister countries (which is a manner of speaking, since Chile and Mexico have nothing in common, except that one is at the top of Latin America and the other is at the bottom, the head and the tail of the subcontinent, but which is the head and which the tail depends on who’s looking or who’s suffering, and neither position is advantageous). (Actually, no Latin American country is in an advantageous position. We’re all on the slopes of the mountain, all at the bottom of the ravine. What ravine? The Yuro Ravine.) The point is, we were riding. Earlier, at the stables, my father had wanted to saddle his horse himself, then he checked my horse’s cinch, bridle, bit. He made a few remarks about the saddle, which he thought was showy. At first we began walking and the adults were drinking and laughing. I remember that we crossed a stream where my sister and I had swum in past summers. Then we came out into an empty field. On the other side of the fence, cows were grazing. Now two of the group, probably the older children of the country house’s owner, broke into a gallop and jumped the fence. My father followed. My father was just a few years older and I suppose he considered it his duty as a guest to follow them. Or maybe there was an earlier challenge or bet involved, I don’t know. All I know is that he went riding after them and I saw him reach the fence and jump it cleanly. Then I heard a cry, it was a bird, but I don’t know what kind of bird, maybe a southern lapwing, or maybe it was the two brothers galloping toward the next fence, but to me it sounded like the cry of a condor, as if a giant vulture had come out of the woods that we had left and was flying over the fields, invisible and menacing. Just as my father was about to jump the second fence I galloped after him. I felt the horse quiver, felt its power, and I approached the first fence like a drunk man. From here the field began to slope downhill, and though the slope seemed gentle from a distance, with the tall grass swaying a little in the wind, on horseback and galloping it was uneven, rutted, steep. When I looked up, the two brothers had come to a halt and one of the horses was rearing up in fear, maybe there was a snake, I thought, and I was scared, or maybe the rider was angry and was making the horse rear up in punishment. My father, farther away, reached the third fence, and from behind I seemed to hear shouts. Someone, the owner of the house, was calling for him to stop; someone, the nurse, was shrieking like in a Miguel Aceves Mejía movie, a Jorge Negrete movie, a Pedro Infante or Antonio Aguilar movie, a Resortes and Calambres movie, shrieks of pain and joy, shrieks of heartbreak and freedom, I realized all of a sudden as the second fence approached, and I shouted too and clung with my legs as my horse floated over it like a sigh and we kept rushing downhill, my father had already disappeared down the slope and the two brothers were to my left and then behind me, one of them on the ground examining his horse’s front hoof. Next came a steep rise and once I’d breasted it I could see a river walled with trees, and, a little farther off, a small wood, where some araucarias rose above the other trees. I didn’t see my father or his horse anywhere. I jumped the third fence and galloped down toward the wood. Before I got there I slowed the horse to a walk. I found my father sitting on a stump with an unlit cigarette in his hand. The hand holding the cigarette was shaking. He was sweating heavily, his face was flushed, and he had unbuttoned several buttons of his shirt. Until I got off the horse, he didn’t seem to notice my presence. I sat next to him on the ground and asked whether he’d had a good run. I don’t know why I did it, he said, I could have broken my neck. Then he said: it’s been a long time since I rode a horse. Far away, at the top of the hill, the others appea
red; maybe somebody saw us and waved a hand; then they gestured, pointing toward a stretch along the river where the hill became less steep, the way they planned to go. I raised an arm to show I’d gotten the message. My father didn’t look up. He’d lit his cigarette and was sweating even more profusely. For a moment I wondered whether he was crying. The other riders waved, signaling to me, and were swallowed up by the earth. I sat back down next to my father. At first the cigarette seemed to choke him. It was a Cabañas and he was used to Mexican Delicados, stronger but smoother (quality tobacco, basically), but then he started to blow distracted smoke rings, as if his lips didn’t belong to him, staring first at the ground covered in twigs, sprigs of grass, clumps of dirt, and then gazing upward, perfect smoke rings of different sizes and even thicknesses. Then, after putting out his cigarette, my father said: do you want to hear how cowboys travel in Mexico? Dad, there are no cowboys in Mexico, I said. Of course there are, said my father, I used to be a cowboy and your grandfather was a cowboy, and even your grandmother was a cowboy. Do you know why I’m here, so far from everywhere? The question didn’t seem fair to me, I lived here, so far from everywhere, and he seemed to be constantly forgetting that, but at the same time I imagined he was about to tell me something that would change my life. Because of my mother, I said. Yes, because of your mother, among other things, he said. Because of you and your sister, he said after a silence. Among other things. Then he was quiet, as if he’d suddenly forgotten what we had been talking about, and at the far edge of the wood the rest of the group appeared. My father got up and said that we should join them. All my life I’ve tried to be a sportsman, he said before getting on his horse, but I’ve never managed it.

  My mother read mail-order romance novels sent from Santiago and she read paranormal magazines. My father read only westerns. I read Nicanor Parra and I thought that gave me an advantage. It gave me no advantage at all, of course. Which was more or less what Mónica Vargas told me a few days before I left Chile. Back then, toward the end of 1968, it wasn’t easy to leave one Latin American country and enter another. Even today it’s hard, but back then it was worse. You had to fill out a big stack of papers required for the trip, forms that couldn’t be processed in the small provincial capital where we lived. So we sold everything we had, which wasn’t much—some furniture, more or less—and two weeks before the date of our trip (our first attempt to leave the country) we moved to Santiago, where we stayed with one of my mother’s friends, Rebeca Vargas, a high school teacher and southern transplant. She lived with her younger sister, Mónica Vargas, who was studying at the conservatory.

  Mónica was very thin, with long, straight hair and big breasts, and she played the flute. The first night we spent there, we stayed up late talking, and when everyone had gone to bed and we were about to go to bed too (she in her sister’s room and I on the sofa), we went out onto the balcony, maybe to look at the streetlights and the neon signs of Santiago, or to gaze at the mountains by the light of the moon, which looked like a reflector dangling in the abyss. Before that, in the living room or the kitchen, I remember helping her to make another round of tea and bread with avocado and jam (as if that night, my mother and all of us who had stayed up late listening to her talk had worked up an appetite: not for lunch or dinner, but for afternoon tea, which is the appetite of tales and legend), and when she asked me what I wanted to study in Mexico, I said medicine, but I really wanted to be a poet. That’s great, she said, setting out the tea, the milk, the yogurt (it was the first time I’d had yogurt that way, in a container), with a Hilton firmly pinched between her lips or her long fingers with bitten nails. What have you read? The question came as such a surprise that suddenly I had no idea what to say, at a time in my life when I had answers for everything. Nicanor Parra, I said. Ah, Nicanor, said Mónica, as if she knew him and they were dear friends. Poems and Antipoems, Editorial Nascimento, 1954, I said. He’s the only one worth reading, said Mónica, and that was it until we went out onto the balcony. She was holding a cigarette, her last of the night, and I was debating whether to ask her for one, afraid and embarrassed that she would say no because I wasn’t old enough to smoke, though now I know that she wouldn’t have. She was sitting in a wooden folding chair and I was standing, almost with my back to her, staring at the dark city, wishing I never had to leave. Then Mónica said that she was going to loan me a book to read before we left. What book? I asked. Rilke, she said. Letters to a Young Poet. I remember that we looked at each other, or it seemed to me that we did—Mónica actually had her eyes fixed on the hazy mass of Santiago—and I remember that I felt as offended, as humiliated, as if she had refused me a cigarette. I realized that the Letters were her way of advising me not to write poetry; I realized that the Young Poet never wrote anything worthwhile, that at best he’d been killed in some duel or war; I realized that Mónica might talk like Nicanor was her friend but she had no idea how to read him; I realized that Mónica knew that aside from Nicanor Parra (Mr. Parra), I hadn’t read much in my life. I realized all of this in a second, and I felt like crouching there on the balcony and saying: you’re so right, but you couldn’t be more wrong—not a very Chilean thing to say, though very Mexican. Instead I looked at her and asked for a cigarette. Silently, as if her thoughts were far from that balcony hanging innocently over Santiago, she handed me the pack and then gave me a light. We smoked for a while in silence. She finished hers (she smoked them down to the filter) and I smoked my whole cigarette. Then we shut the door to the balcony and I sat on the sofa waiting for her to leave so I could go to bed. Mónica vanished for a second and then she came back with the Rilke. If you’re not too tired, start it tonight, she said. Then she said good night and I kissed her on the mouth. She didn’t seem surprised, but she gave me a look of reproach before disappearing down the hallway. Actually, the hallway was small and the apartment was small, much smaller than the house we had just left, but unfamiliar places always seem bigger. The next night, when Mónica got back from her classes at the conservatory, I told her I thought the author of Letters to a Young Poet was a prude. That’s all? she said, her expression as serious as it had been the night before. That’s all, I said. That night, Mónica didn’t hang around after dinner to smoke a last cigarette with me.

  That night I had nightmares and slept badly. The next morning I asked my mother for money and I went to say goodbye to Nicanor Parra.

  I didn’t know where he lived, of course. From the Vargas sisters’ place I called a publishing house and the dean’s office at the University of Chile. Finally I got an address. From the start, I suspected that it would be hard to get there and just as hard to get back. I took a bus that dropped me at an intersection. Then I got on another bus. This one headed down narrow, winding streets full of stores and street vendors selling everything from aluminum pots and pans to toy soldiers. We navigated some roughly paved streets, then we came out into a vacant lot as big and flat as ten soccer fields, more or less surrounded by half-toppled brick walls. I got off there and continued on foot. Once I had left the vacant lot behind, the road forked. In one direction was a street with no buildings (it looked more like a country road than a street) and in the other was a neighborhood of single-story houses, with some unpaved streets and lots of children and dogs. I decided to follow the country road; other groups of houses soon appeared, looking flatter, more squashed or squat, a phenomenon that intensified as I got closer to the cordillera, as if the mountains or the air were crushing the houses to the ground. Then I came to a bus stop and asked for directions. People pointed me toward a street that ran uphill. That way, they said. I went up the street and ahead I saw a river and a bridge. I crossed over and made my way into a neighborhood of streets lined with larches. I saw a sign that said Lo Paigüe, and I guessed that was the name of the neighborhood. I went into a children’s clothing store and said I was looking for Nicanor Parra’s house. It’s at the other end of Lo Paigüe, answered a woman. All right, I said, and I kept walking along the r
iverbank. Soon the river split into channels, some blocked by dams made of big cans full of mud and assorted trash. I went to get a closer look, and in the riverbed two rats stared up at me from a path of twigs and fossilized bottles linking the islands in the delta of wastewater. One of them, the skinnier one, smiled at me. A humble smile, as if to say: Here I am, Arturo, getting by, how’s it going, man? I thought I was losing it but I stood motionless there on the bank between the path and the delta-turned-dump (though maybe it was the other way around: maybe as the dump grew, it had turned into a delta). The rat shot me a backward glance—over its shoulder, you might say—still with that smile of deep humility dripping from its snout, and then it followed its comrade down, leaping more whimsically than energetically (and not without a certain grace, radiating calm dignity). Across a dusty street, where some spindly apple and Japanese plum trees grew, was the house whose address I had written down on a piece of paper. From a garage set up as a workshop in the back came the sounds of chisel and handsaw. The house looked empty, with its drawn curtains, weedy yard, and general air of abandonment. I rang the bell and a man stuck his head out the open door of the garage. What do you want? I’m looking for Nicanor Parra, the poet, I said. Come in, he said. He was sitting on a little wicker stool and even when he beckoned me in he didn’t rise, only tilted forward on the stool’s front legs. When I was inside he looked me over and said that no poet lived there, though he could recite a poem for me if I wanted. He was about fifty, his hair longish and gray, with the look of an old hustler or a singer. I showed him the paper with the address on it. He read it a few times and said no, I had the wrong address. But did Nicanor Parra used to live here? I asked. A poet did live in the neighborhood, he said, but I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say it was Parra, no. Do you want a glass of wine, my friend, or are you too young for that? I accepted mostly just to put off the ride back for a few minutes, since I sensed it would be long and dull. What do you make? I asked, sitting down on another wicker stool. Guitars, he said. I make guitars, though not very good ones, to be honest. Do they sell? Not very well, but I make ends meet. For a while, the two of us were silent as he sanded a shapeless piece of wood, or at least that’s what it looked like to me, since I know nothing about guitars. In a few days I’m going to Mexico, I said. Ah, he said, in search of new shores, are you? Yes, I said. Things are turning ugly in these parts, he said, though in Mexico, not to say things are bad, but they probably aren’t much better, are they? My father is Mexican, I said. Good thing to have a father, he said, let’s drink to that. We clinked glasses. To the dads, he said, wherever they are. I shook my head in what was meant to be an incredulous way, as if to say: I get the joke, but I don’t share the sentiment. Do you live here? I asked. No, he said, I just have my workshop here, a friend rents it to me for next to nothing, but I live on the other side of the river. The Lo Paigüe River? I asked. That’s the one, he said, Avenida Manuel Rodríguez, number 353, you’re very welcome there. I used to live in the South, I said, not sure why I was saying it. So what brings you here to say goodbye to Parra the poet, if you don’t mind me asking, he said. Nothing in particular, I said, I’m a poet too and I thought . . . Man! he said, a poet! Then I really will recite that poem for you, to see what you think. I was quiet, waiting. He picked up a guitar to accompany himself and began. His voice was gravelly but warm.