Bookshops

  While orderliness tends to predominate in bookshops that sell new books, chaos reigns in second-hand shops: the disorderly accumulation of knowledge. The names of the bookshops themselves often suggest as much. In calle Donceles and adjacent streets we find Inframundo, El Laberinto or El Callejón de los Milagros (Miracle Alley), non-computerized shops where finding a book depends exclusively on a precarious system of classification, good fortune, inertia and, above all, the memory and intuition of the bookseller. Echoes of the grotto or cavern, of the Zarathustra bookshop described by Valle-Inclán—that universal Spanish-Mexican writer and exceptional brain—in Bohemian Lights: “Shelves of books kick up a fuss and cover the walls. Four horrific prints from a serial novel paper over the four panes of glass in the door. The cat, parrot, dog and bookseller converse in the cavern.” In Caracas La Gran Pulpería del Libro (the Big Book Grocery Store) takes the reality of a subterranean, overflowing bookshop to the extreme: books pile up on the floor as if they had spilt from the shelves that had been attempting to contain them for years. When its owner, the historian and journalist Rafael Ramón Castellanos, who founded the business in 1976 and has ever since combined his work as a bookseller and writer, was asked in an interview how the books were classified, he replied that all attempts at computerizing them had failed and that everything was in “his memory and the memories of the shop assistants and his son Rómulo.”

  Having lunch one day with Ulises Milla in mid-2012 in a restaurant in Caracas, it suddenly occurred to me that this was the nearest I would ever be (at least phonetically) to Ulises Lima. The history he recounted was a history of exile from Spain and Latin America, a history of the migrations that populated that territory and built a culture, the route map to which Bolaño drew with jagged edges. Bookshops that transform deep, natural and overwhelming sorrow into individual memories that at once are human, brief and evanescent. Benito, Leonardo and Ulises: three generations of publishers and booksellers with a surname that suggests speed, distance and translation. Ulises Milla—I thought in that restaurant whose specialty is meat accompanied by cream cheese and avocado—is almost a tautology. He spent fifteen years dedicated to graphic design as a strategy to dodge the family inheritance. But he designed books. And he ended up as a publisher and bookseller.

  Benito Milla was born in Villena, Alicante, in 1918, and, as the secretary of the Libertarian Youth of Catalonia, became part of the Republican exile of 1939. After a few years in Paris, where Leonardo, his first son, was born, his wife persuaded him (“my grandmother was behind all my grandfather’s house moves”) to move to Montevideo, where for sixteen years of his life, between 1951 and 1967, years of economic crisis and political conflict in Uruguay that would lead to the military dictatorship in the following decade, he moved from a book stall in the Plaza de la Libertad to founding Editorial Alfa and managing several cultural magazines.

  My grand-father left Montevideo in 1967 to go to Caracas and take charge of the newly established Monte Ávila Editores,” he told me. “Alfa continued in Montevideo in the hands of my father and in 1973 we moved to Buenos Aires taking the publishing house with us, from where we had to flee when the military came to power after the death of Perón; it wasn’t until 1977 that Leonardo landed in Caracas and the Venezuelan period of Alfa began, which for administrative reasons had to be called Alfadil.” His grandfather’s project would have a third phase in Barcelona (“my grandmother is Catalan”), from 1980 until his death in 1987, when he was a partner in the Laia publishing house, which ended badly. Closing the circle. As if circles, which are tangible spaces, could be closed in the multiple time of parallel universes. He was the publisher of Juan Carlos Onetti, Eduardo Galeano, Mario Benedetti and Cristina Peri Rossi (here there is pride in Ulises’ voice). He progressed from anarchism to a humanism whose key word—as Fernando Aínsa has reminded us—was bridge: between human beings and their reading, between the countries of Latin America, between both shores of the Atlantic. And between different generations of the same family: Leonardo Milla, who as a child did not eat breakfast until the first book of the day was sold, transformed Alfa Publishing into the Alfa Publishing Group in the 1980s and expanded its network of bookshops (though he was never aware that it could be called a chain) with two premises known as Ludens and three as Alexandria 332 BC (the year when Alexander the Great defeated the Persians in Egypt and started building the city and its myth).

  In 1942, while he was inventing his own shorthand-based language, which he called “la taqui,” and in which several pieces of writing have been preserved that have yet to be decoded, Felisberto Hernández and his wife, the painter Amalia Nieto, opened a bookshop, El Burrito Blanco (the Little White Donkey), in the garage belonging to the house of his in-laws. Naturally, it was a failure. Montevideo is a mysterious city and the capital of a mysterious country full of such anecdotes and stories. It is similar to Switzerland and Portugal in its dimensions and pace of life. During the time I spent in Argentina, I used to travel to its neighbouring country every three months to renew my tourist visa, receive the payment for my articles in El País and visit its bookshops, full of decatalogued Argentinian and Uruguayan books you could only buy in Uruguay, like those published by the local branch of Alfaguara and by Trilce. With each fresh incursion I would uncover layers of a history of periodic migrations. And for that reason I wasn’t surprised to find other traces in Peru, years later, on my only visit to its capital.

  El Virrey (the Viceroy) in Lima has a corner with a chessboard between two armchairs. The ceiling fans turn slowly, like a gentle whisk. Everything is wood, books and wood, and the distant memory of exile. I decided to investigate the bookshop’s history and asked the bookseller whether a summary existed somewhere. Her name was Malena. She said she would have to speak to her mother and gave me the email of Chachi Sanseviero, to whom I wrote straight away hoping for an interview. It wasn’t possible, her excuse was that she had lost her voice, but with her reply she sent the text she had written for Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos. The Virrey in Lima opened its doors in 1973, financed by savings made in anticipation of a long exile from Uruguay. Its logo carries an image of the Inca Atahualpa holding a book in one hand and a quipu in the other: the two cultures’ means of communication, the imposed and the original, united in a symbol of assimilation. Apparently, the Inca leader, when he found out that Chachi’s book was sold as the genuine history of the true god, threw it to the ground in order to reaffirm that the truth was on his side of the pantheon. Chachi writes of the bookseller as somebody who always defers reading and transforms books into “eternal possibilities,” “because, except in a very few cases, she never finishes reading them.” She leafs through them, takes them to the counter, perhaps even home, to her desk or bedside table, where she will also not finish reading them.

  The family tradition took another turn—or performed an unexpected pirouette, in 2012, when Walter and Malena opened their own bookshop, Sur, with the idea of following the path their father Eduardo had pioneered. I can see on the web that it is a delightful bookshop in which the straight lines of the shelves and the curves of the tables full of new titles join up to ensure that books are one hundred percent the protagonists. I sometimes think the Internet is the limbo where the bookshops I could not experience personally await me. A limbo of virtual spectres.

  After spending the crucial years of his adolescence in Mexico City following the opposite route to the one followed by Ernesto Guevara twenty years earlier, in 1973 Bolaño travelled overland to Chile, where he intended to support Salvador Allende’s democratic revolution. He was arrested a few days after the Pinochet coup and saved from likely death thanks to the fact that one of the policemen guarding him had been a schoolfriend. He returned to Mexico, also overland, to complete the life experiences that would nourish his first masterpiece. He died three months before I arrived in the Chilean capital. In El Fondo de Cultura Económica bookshop I bought the Planeta editions of The Skating Rink and Nazi
Literature in America. In the latter, the most extended biographies belong to “the fantastic Schiaffino brothers” (Italo and Argentino, alias El Grasa) and Carlos Ramírez Hoffman (alias El Infame). Two Argentinians and a Chilean.

  Although he spent most of his life in Mexico and Spain, which were the settings for much of his work, his literary allegiance was with the Southern Cone. As a Latin-Americanist he read work from the whole continent, as an adoptive Catalan and Spaniard he read his contemporaries, as a passionate admirer of French poetry he learned from its great masters, as a compulsive reader he devoured every title of world literature that was put before him. As a young man in Mexico he fought the figure of Octavio Paz regarding what he meant in terms of cultural politics; in his adult life he would periodically encounter enemies, literary translations from the armies against which he competed in his meetings in Blanes with fans of war games and strategy, but most of all he felt part of the tradition of the Southern Cone—if such a tradition really exists—and in his ambitious writer’s mind that tradition was split in two: poetry and narrative. Chile and Argentina. Bolaño the poet felt close to Lihn and Nicanor Parra. And near and far at the same time, as regards Pablo Neruda, who is to Chilean poetry what Borges is to Argentinian narrative: they are Monsters, Fathers, Saturns devouring their children. It is strange that Juan Rulfo was not held in esteem by Mexican writers in the second half of the last century whereas Paz certainly did play that portentous, castrating role (as did Carlos Fuentes). I often wonder what would have happened if Rulfo had become the principal model for Spanish-American writers at our fin de siècle and had occupied the place history reserved for Borges. The rural, anachronistic, minimalist Rulfo, who looked to the past, who believed in History, who said no, in the place of urban, modern, precise Jorge Luis Borges, who looked to the future, who scorned history, who said yes. In “Dance Card,” Bolaño tells the story of his copy of Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair and the long distance it travelled between towns in southern Chile, and then around Spain, and recounts how, at the age of eighteen, he had read the great poets of Latin America and how his friends were split into supporters of Vellejo or Neruda and that he was thoroughly isolated as a supporter of Parra. In this account, Chilean poetry is organized into dancing partners, with descendants and disciples of Neruda, Huidobro, Mistral and De Rokha, and the heirs to Parra and Lihn. His alliance with Parra and Lihn is fissured by the crevice through which the hugeness of Neruda slips, an influence no poet in the Spanish language can escape. In “Dance Card,” recognition of Neruda’s political inconsistency leads to a crazy excursus on Hitler, Stalin and Neruda himself and a genuinely Bolañesque passage on institutional repression and common graves, the International Brigades and the torture racks. Ultimately, Neruda remains a contradictory mystery.

  When his sister gave him Neruda’s book, Bolaño was reading the complete works of Manuel Puig. In terms of story-writing, it was in “Sensini” (from Telephone Calls) where he best defined his connections with committed left-wing Argentinian literature, through the character of Antonio Di Benedetto. The theoretical essay “The Vagaries of the Literature of Doom” was where the Chilean positioned himself in respect to Argentinian literature and tackled the question of the canon with no holds barred. Bolaño repeatedly recalled his debt to Borges and Cortázar, without whom one cannot grasp the encyclopedic ambition of his work, his interest in auto-fiction and the short story or structure—the paths opened up by Hopscotch, The Savage Detectives and 2666. It was in the latter in particular that he put himself forward as Borges’ greatest heir, launching into severe criticism of his Argentinian contemporaries and the short cuts and roundabout routes they took to elude the centrality of Borges: those who followed Osvaldo Soriano, those who saw Roberto Arlt as the Anti-Borges, those who championed Osvaldo Lamborghini. That is to say, many writers who aren’t mentioned, like Ricardo Piglia and César Aira.

  During three of four days I spent in Santiago, I decided, no doubt in a rush, that Libros Prólogo was the bookshop that most interested me. I noted at the time:

  It’s not as big as the University Library in Alameda (with its wall-to-wall carpets and 1970s look) or the Chilean Feria del Libro chain, nor does it have the charm of the second-hand bookshops on calle San Diego, but it is well stocked and in calle Merced, next to a cinema, theatre and café and close to the antiquarian and second-hand bookshops in calle Lastarria.

  I haven’t kept any other notes. I remember it as a place of resistance, a centre that nourished cultural life during the dictatorship, but I have no way of proving that or finding out. Nothing on search engines. Perhaps mine was the delirium of a traveller seduced by By Night in Chile, the novel in which Bolaño constructs the lunatic discourse of the priest Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix, who under the pseudonym Ibacache celebrates the savage, reactionary poetry of Ramírez Hoffman in Distant Star, and who in the final part of the novel remembers the lessons in political theory he gave to the Junta and the literary conversations that took place in the house of Mariana Callejas. The character is inspired by the Opus Dei priest José Miguel Ibáñez Langlois, who wrote for the newspaper El Mercurio under the pseudonym Ignacio Valente, and was the author of books of philosophical and theological theory (Marxism: Critical Vision, The Social Doctrine of the Church), of literary criticism (Rilke, Pound, Neruda: Three Key Contemporary Poets, Reading Parra, and Josemaría Escrivá, as a Writer) and of poetry with a fondness for oxymoronic titles (Dogmatic Poems). He was not merely the most important literary critic during the dictatorship and the transition, he also gave seminars on Marxism to the Junta. ­Pinochet was one of his pupils. Pinochet: the reader, the writer, the lover of bookshops. Ricardo Cuadros has written:

  Ibáñez Langlois has never acknowledged or denied his presence at the literary soirées held by Mariana Callejas in her big mansion in the wealthy district of Santiago that she ran with Michael Townley, her husband, a D.I.N.A. agent; those get-togethers were real enough and in the mansion’s basement among others Carmelo Soria, a Spaniard working for the U.N., was tortured to death.

  That basement in a “taken over” house is the exact opposite of what the great majority of bookshops in the world have been, still are and will ever be. There were and are bookshops with the name of ­Cortázar’s story in several cities (Bogotá, Lima, Palma de Mallorca . . .) because the title has been freed of its associations with the story and come to mean “space taken over by books.” The story, on the contrary, speaks about how they disappear. The narrator of “House Taken Over” regrets that no new books have arrived in the French bookshops in Buenos Aires since 1939 so he cannot continue to nourish his library. If the political interpretation of the story is correct and the writer is creating a metaphor for Peronism as the invader of private spaces, it is no coincidence that the first part of the house that is taken over is the library. The protagonist’s sister is a weaver; he is a reader. But after the first takeover, reading is gradually erased from his life. When the house is definitively taken over and brother and sister close the door for good, they will only take with them the clothes they are wearing and a clock, but no books; the cord has been cut.

  When I returned to Santiago de Chile ten years later, I felt in a state of trance, like a sleepwalker pursuing the threads he had left trailing on his daily treks, as if in some invisible intrigue. It was twelve noon, the blistering sun beating down, and I was walking through the Lastarria district on the verge of unconsciousness. By chance I had just found the hostel where I had lodged on my only other previous stay: perhaps it was the charge of erotic memories that had provoked my mechanical promenade, which suddenly cloaked my skin with that of someone else, the person I used to be in my early twenties. I was not surprised to find myself suddenly outside Libros Prólogo, the bookshop that had most caught my attention at that time, on those days that followed my nights in that hostel with its games, kisses and topsy-turvy sheets. Nor to see Walter Zúñiga behind the counter, as if he had been waiting for
me in the same shirt, with the same wrinkles, for ten years.

  “What are you reading so intently?” I asked after browsing for a few minutes.

  “A biography of Fellini written by Tullo Kezich that I bought yesterday in La Feria,” he replied, with the big ears of an old man who really knew how to listen. “It’s odd, I’ve had this book here for ages, two copies, in fact, it’s extraordinary that I’ve never sold it.”

  “So if you’ve got it, why did you buy another?”

  “It was so cheap . . .”

  We spoke for a while about the bookshop’s other branch, which had closed down, and he confessed that the ones that really worked for him were his Karma bookshops, “specializing in fortune-telling, Tarot, New Age and martial arts.” I asked him for a copy of a recently published book about a pioneering cybernetic project during the years of Salvador Allende’s government—