Bookshops

  “Cybernetic Revolutionaries,” he interrupted as he keyed away. “Right now I’m out of stock, but I’ll get you a copy in a couple of days.” He’d already picked up the telephone and was ordering it from the distributor.

  A few minutes later he bade farewell with a flourish, giving me his card. He had corrected the telephone number in black ink. It was exactly the same card I had in my bookshop archive. The same red-lettered typography. “Libros Prólogo. Literatura-Cine-Teatro.” It was a very strong connection to the traveller I had been ten years earlier. Everything had changed in the city and myself except for that card. Touching it stirred me from my sleep-walking, dragged me violently from the past.

  It was only natural then that I should walk fifty paces, cross the street and enter Metales Pesados and the wavelength of the present. Not an ounce of wood in the place, only aluminium shelves, the bookshop as a giant Meccano structure that welcomes books as fervently as an ironmonger’s or a computer lab. There was Sergio Parra, in black suit and white shirt, a dandy and all sinew, sitting on a folding metal chair behind a café terrace table. I asked him for a copy of Leñador (Woodcutter) by Mike Wilson, which I had been hunting for in the Southern Cone for months. He handed it to me, hiding his gaze behind his hipster glasses. I asked him about Pedro Lemebel’s books and now he did finally look me in the eye.

  I later discovered he had led the campaign backing Lemebel for the National Literature Prize, and that they were friends, poets and neighbours. But right then I had eyes only for the large poster of the writer and performer and the prominent display of all his books, because every bookseller deals in visibility. He recommended a couple of books I did not have, which I bought. “Metales Pesados is more of an airport than a bookshop. At any moment Mario Bellatin will walk in, or a person Mario or somebody else encouraged to drop by, friends of friends from all over the world, many leave their suitcases here, because they’ve already checked out of their hotels and still have a few hours to go up the hill or to the Fine Arts Museum. As I practically live here, since I work here from Monday to Sunday, I’ve become a kind of reference point.”

  The bookshop as an airport. As a place of transit: for passengers and books. A pure to-and-fro of readings. Lolita, on the other hand, far from the centre, in a corner of a residential district, preferred people to stay on. It also had a writer behind the counter: Francisco Mouat, whose passion for football had led him to devote a corner of the shop to sport. The journalist Juan Pablo Meneses accompanied me to that recently opened bookshop and showed me how Juan Villoro, Martín Caparrós, Leonardo Faccio and other friends we had in common were sparsley represented there by volumes they had devoted to the small round god. Mouat’s gaze is gentle and his gestures are pleasant and welcoming, despite his intimidating height; I’m not surprised he has full reading groups every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

  “A book a week is quite a pace,” I say.

  “We’ve kept that up for some time. I have readers who’ve been following me for years. When I opened Lolita I brought them to this new place.”

  Loyalty is there in the slogan: “We can’t live without books.” Loyalty is on the logo: a dog that belonged to the Mouat family looks at us, embossed on the spines of the books from the Lolita publishing house.

  When on my last day in Santiago I finally visited Ulises, that space so crammed with books and where the distorting mirrors that reflect the shelves and the volumes ad infinitum fly over and multiply you, wonderful ceiling mirrors designed by the architect Sebastian Gray, perhaps because I was in one of the most beautiful, most Borgesian of bookshops in the world, the fourth vertex of an invisible rectangle, I reflected on how the other three, Libros Prólogo, Metales Pesados and Lolita, gave material form to the three tenses of every bookshop: the archival past, the transitory present and the future of communities united by desire. How, in combination they form the perfect bookshop, the bookshop I’d take to a desert island.

  And I suddenly remembered a scene I had forgotten. A repeated, distant scene, a fading echo or call from a black box in the depths of the ocean, and the accident. I must be nine or ten, it’s a Friday evening or Saturday morning, my mother is in the butcher’s or bakery or supermarket, and I’m killing time in the neighbourhood newsagent’s, Rocafonda, on the far outskirts of Barcelona. As there is no bookshop in the district, I am a true addict of kiosks, with their superhero comics and video-game magazines, of the tobacconist’s Ortega, who has quite a window display of his collection of books and popular educational magazines, and of this newsagent’s in the same street where the Vázquez brothers and other schoolfriends live. There are less than a hundred books at the back, behind the stands with coloured card, birthday cards and cut-outs; I have fallen in love with a manual for the perfect detective; I remember its blue cover, and I remember (the power of the memory upset me, as I left Ulises and got into a taxi and headed to the airport) how I would read a couple of pages every week, standing up, how to get fingerprints, how to make an identikit photo, every week until Christmas or Sant Jordi finally arrived and my parents gave me the book I had so coveted. At home, after I had read it, I realized I knew it by heart.

  How could I ever forget that for a large part of my childhood I had two vocations: writer and private detective. Something of the second stuck with me in my obsession for collecting stories and bookshops. Who knows whether we writers are not, above all, detectives investigating ourselves, Roberto Bolaño characters?

  On the terrace of the Café Zurich in Barcelona, Natu Poblet, who runs La Clásica y Moderna bookshop in Buenos Aires, told me that in 1981, when she gave up architecture to devote herself to the family business, with two years still left in the last dictatorship, they organized classes in literature, theatre and politics on their premises, given by people banned from the university, like David Viñas, Abelardo Castillo, Juan José Sebreli, Liliana Heker, Enrique Pezzoni or Horacio Verbitsky. “The classes turned into literary conversations, my brother and I took along wine and whisky, lots of people came and the conversations went on till very late,” she told me as she downed a glass of Jameson’s; that was when the idea of harnessing a bookshop to a bar was born. It implied a one-hundred-and-eighty degree turn. Her grandfather, the Madrid bookseller Don Emilio Poblet, founded the Poblet Brothers chain in Argentina at the beginning of the twentieth century. Her father, Francisco, opened La Clásica y Moderna in 1938 with his wife, Rosa Ferreiro. Brother and sister Natu and Paco took charge of the business after their father died in 1980. That was the year the Junta ordered the burning of a million-and-a-half books published by the Publishing Centre of Latin America. After seven years of activity in the catacombs, with democracy re-established, they commissioned the architect Ricardo Plant to radically transform the space that has been a bar and a restaurant ever since, as well as a bookshop and exhibition and concert hall. (“The first three years we opened twenty-four hours a day, but then we started to have problems with night-time drunks and decided to adopt a more conventional timetable.”) Since then, actors like José Sacristán and singers like Liza Minnelli have performed there. The piano was a present from Sandro, a habitué of La Clásica y Moderna from its frenetic heyday, and whose life story can be gleaned from the titles of some of his albums: Beat Latino, Sandro de América, Sandro . . . Un ídolo, Clásico, Para mamá.

  “I often dream of Dad’s bookshop,” Natu Poblet confessed as she drained her glass and we began a long stroll round night-time Barcelona. In Río de Janeiro, Milena Piraccini talked to me straight away about the importance that Vanna, her mother, attached to personal contact with each of her customers, a character trait that could be explained by her forebears in Europe. In Caracas, Ulises Milla told me about his Uruguayan family and about other booksellers from Montevideo and Caracas like Alberto Conte, who had taught him so much. Chachi Sanseviero writes:

  My teacher was Eduardo Sanseviero, a great bookseller and disciple of Don Domingo Maestro, a notable Urug
uayan bookseller. Eduardo’s weakness was chess, history and antique books. But he also liked poetry and had the strange gift of bringing poems into the conversation like funny stories. An unrepentant communist, in times of despots, he enjoyed organizing small conspiratorial cells. But at the end of the day, he went back to his feather duster and arranging his books.

  Bookselling is one of the most secretive traditions. It is often a family affair: Natu, Milena, Ulises, Rómulo and Guillermo and Malena, like so many other booksellers, are the children and even grandchildren of booksellers. Almost all of them began as apprentices in the bookshops of their parents or other traffickers in printed paper. Rafael Ramón Castellanos remembers that, when he reached Caracas from the interior of Venezuela, he worked in a bookshop, Viejo y Raro (Old and Rare), that belonged to a former Argentinian ambassador: “Later on, in 1962, I created my own bookshop with the knowledge that I had acquired,” the Librería de Historia that preceded the Gran Pulpería de Libros.

  Isn’t the figure of the bookseller rather odd? Is it not easier to understand writer, printer, publisher, distributor, or even a literary agent? Might this oddness explain the lack of genealogies and anatomies? Hector Yánover, in Memorias de un librero, illuminated these paradoxes thusly:

  This is the book of a bookseller with pretensions. These are the first lines of that book. These words constitute the first on the first page. And all these words, lines and pages will make up the book. Do you, hypothetical readers, have any idea how horrific it is for a bookseller to have to write a book? A bookseller is a man who reads when he rests, and what he reads is book catalogues; when he goes for a walk, he stops in front of the windows of other bookshops; when he goes to another city, another country, he visits booksellers and publishers. Then one day this man decided to write a book about his trade. A book inside another book that will go to join the others in the windows or on the shelves of bookshops. Another book to arrange, mark, clean, replace, remove definitively. A bookseller is the being who is most aware of the futility of a book, and of its importance. That is why he is a man torn apart; a book is a commodity to buy and sell and he now constitutes that commodity. He buys and sells himself.

  Yánover ran the Librería Norte in Buenos Aires and, according to Poblet, was the city’s most important bookseller in the final quarter of the last century. His daughter Débora now holds the reins of the business. He was also responsible for a renowned record collection which included recordings of Cortázar and Borges, amongst others, reciting their work. When the author of “The Pursuer” travelled back to his country, he made the Librería Norte his centre of operations: he spent the whole of his first day in the city there and it was there that his admirers could leave letters and parcels of books for him. I do not know if those records are in a corner of the Bolaño Archive, or whether he listened to their dead voices as he did to opera and jazz. However, the bookshop that marked the life of the author of Ficciones was the Librería de la Ciudad (the City’s Bookshop), which was next to his house, on the opposite side of the calle Maipú, inside the arcade that goes by the name of Galería del Este. He visited it daily and gave dozens of free lectures there on matters that appealed to him. He launched in its rooms the titles of the Library of Babel, the collection that he was commissioned to edit by the Milanese publisher Franco Maria Ricci and which was partly co-published by the bookshop itself. Borges and Cortázar didn’t meet in a bookshop, but in a private house on Diagonal Norte, where the younger of the two turned up to discover that the Maestro had so liked his story “House Taken Over” that it was already at the printer’s. They met again, years later, in Paris, by which time they had both been honoured by the Académie française. I have not been able to identify the bookshop where Cortázar bought Opium, by Jean Cocteau, the book that changed his work—I mean life, though I did find the interview with Hugo Guerrero Marthineitz in which the author of Nicaraguan Sketches tries to justify Borges’ behaviour during the military dictatorship, which he had backed to restore order and during which he had also defined himself as “a harmless anarchist” and as “someone revolutionized” who was “against the state and against the frontiers of states” (as his biographer, Edwin Williamson, amongst others, has pointed out). And who chose to die in Geneva. Cortázar’s rhetorical gymnastics are similar to those we find in Bolaño’s lines on Neruda: “He wrote some of the best stories in the world history of literature: he also wrote A Universal History of Infamy.”

  That is the model for Nazi Literature in America, a book written at a distance from Europe. Complexity is the most difficult thing to judge: Ibáñez Langlois defended Neruda and Parra, both fathers of Bolaño the poet, and supported the career of Raúl Zurita, whose poems written in the sky seem to have influenced the work of the infamous Ramírez Hoffman to some extent. It is not too far-fetched to read the whole of Bolaño’s oeuvre as an attempt to understand his own damaged, lost, re-formed library, with as many absentees as fellow travellers, compounded by the distance that did not allow him to fully understand what was happening in Chile while at the same time affording him the critical lucidity necessary for oblique readings; a complex, contradictory library, decimated by house moves and rebuilt in European bookshops. We read in one of the articles collected in Between Parentheses:

  As for my father, I don’t remember him ever giving me a book, although occasionally we would pass a bookshop and at my request he would buy me a magazine with a long article in it on the French electric poets. All those books, including the magazines, along with many other books, were lost during my travels and moves, or else I let people borrow them and never saw them again, or I sold them or gave them away.

  But there’s one book I’ll never forget. Not only do I remember when and where I bought it, but also the time of day, the person waiting for me outside the bookshop, what I did that night, and the happiness (completely irrational) that I felt when I had it in my hands. It was the first book I bought in Europe and I still have it. It’s Borges’ Obra poética, published by Alianza/Emecé in 1972 and long out of print. I bought it in Madrid in 1977 and, although Borges’ poetry wasn’t unfamiliar to me, I started to read it that night and didn’t stop until eight the next morning, as if there was nothing in the world worth reading except those poems, nothing else that could change the course of the wild life that I’d lived until then, nothing else that could lead me to reflect (because Borges’ poetry possesses a natural intelligence and also bravery and despair—in other words, the only things that inspire reflection and keep poetry alive).

  There is no ideological questioning. There is no moral suspicion. Borges quite simply does not belong to the revolutionary tradition, though that does not reduce his value. He is less problematic than Neruda. In Advice from a Follower of Morrison to a Joyce Fanatic, Bolaño and A.G. Porta refer insistently to the bookshops of Paris: as a bunker for political reading (the character reads El Viejo Topo [The Old Mole] there): the bookshop as an invitation to the moral voyeur (“I have always liked bookshop windows. The surprise you get looking through the glass and finding the latest book by the biggest bastard or the most out-and-out hoodlum”), the bookshop as something beautiful in itself (“I have been in two or three of the most beautiful bookshops I have ever seen”). One of them, although he does not say which, must be the fake Shakespeare and Company. Its remake. His idea of filming Ulysses in Super-8 comes from that visit.

  In “Vagabond in France and Belgium,” one of the stories in Last Evenings on Earth, a character by the name of B. takes a walk round the second-hand bookshops in Paris and in one on rue du Vieux-Colombier finds “an old copy of the magazine Luna Park” and the name of one of its contributors, Henri Lefebvre, “suddenly lights up like a match struck in a dark room.” He buys the magazine and goes into the street to lose himself, as Lima and Belano did before him. Another name, this time of a magazine, now lights up on this page I am writing: Berthe Trépat was the name he and Bruno Montané chose for a mimeographed magazin
e they published in Barcelona in 1983. The light doesn’t last long, but it is enough for us to be able to read about certain traditions of writers and booksellers, certain genetics common to the history of literature and bookshops, that is, culture, forever shifting—like a geological fault, like a quake—between the candle and the night, between the lighthouse and the night-time firmament, between the distant star and dark sorrow.

  IX

  Paris Without Its Myths

  In 1997, the film director and writer Edgardo Cozarinsky premiered the docu-drama Fantômes de Tanger (“Phantoms from Tangier”), with dialogue in French and Arabic. The protagonist is a writer in crisis who reaches the shores of Africa in pursuit of some of the American spectres who have appeared in this book as well as the French kind, who helped create the myth of the international white city. Their opposite is a boy looking for a way to emigrate to Spain. Literary Tangier coexists with sameful poverty-stricken Tangier. Writing and sexual tourism interpenetrate in an uneasy relation where the boundaries are clear: customer and worker, exploiter and exploited, the one who has francs or dollars and the one aspiring to have them, with French as the lingua franca on both sides, in conflict despite an apparent dialogue. Traces of Foucault and Barthes fuse with those of Burroughs and Ginsberg, and converge in the brothels where young Moroccans have always prostituted themselves.

  The documentary side of the film focuses on the survivors of a would-be golden era that is suddenly shown to be quite murky. “Everybody has passed this way,” says Rachel Muyal in the Librairie des Colonnes, “through this bookshop.” She follows this with an anecdote I expect she has told many a time: “I saw Genet, who was drinking coffee with Choukri, when a shoeshiner came and asked whether anyone wanted their shoes polished, then Juan Goytisolo took out a 500 franc note. That must have been a couple of years before he died.” Three contemporary myths in a single frame that only the bookseller seems to want to preserve intact. “I feel no nostalgia whatsoever for International Tangier, it was a wretched period,” says Choukri when interviewed in the film. Bowles badmouths Kerouac and the rest of the beats. Juan Goytisolo told me he never met up with Genet in Tangier. And Rachel Muyal insisted years later that I had got it wrong. Cozarinsky’s film is in one of my trunks from my travels; it is a VHS copy you can’t watch anymore.