The Savage Detectives

by Roberto Bolaño

  "Don't come inside of me," said María.

  "I'll try not to," I said.

  "What do you mean you'll try, you jerk? Don't come inside!"

  I looked to either side of the bed as María's legs laced and unlaced across my back (I would've been happy to keep going like that until I died). In the distance I glimpsed the shadow of Angélica's bed and the curve of Angélica's hips, like an island observed from another island. Suddenly I felt María's lips sucking my left nipple, almost as if she were biting my heart. I jumped, and pushed in all the way in one thrust, wanting to pin her to the bed (the springs of which began to squeak hideously so that I paused), while at the same time I kissed her hair and forehead with great delicacy and still managed to find the time to wonder how it was possible that the noise we were making hadn't woken Angélica. I didn't even notice when I came. Of course, I pulled out in time; I've always had good reflexes.

  "You didn't come inside, did you?" said María.

  I swore into her ear that I hadn't. For a few seconds we were busy breathing. I asked her whether she'd had an orgasm and her answer was perplexing:

  "I came twice, García Madero, didn't you notice?" she asked in utter seriousness.

  I was honest and told her no, I hadn't noticed anything.

  "You're still hard," said María.

  "I guess I am," I said. "Can we do it again?"

  "All right," she said.

  I don't know how much time went by. I pulled out and came again. This time I couldn't keep from crying out.

  "Now do me," said María.

  "You didn't have an orgasm?"

  "No, not this time, but it was good." She took my hand, selected my index finger, and guided it around her clitoris. "Kiss my nipples. You can bite them too, but very gently at first," she said. "Then bite them a little harder. And put your hand around my neck. Stroke my face. Put your fingers in my mouth."

  "Wouldn't you rather that I… suck your clitoris?" I said, vainly trying to find an elegant way to put it.

  "No, not right now, your finger is enough. But kiss my tits."

  "You have gorgeous breasts." I was unable to repeat the word tits.

  I got undressed without getting out from under the sheets (suddenly I had begun to sweat) and immediately began to carry out María's instructions. First her sighs and then her moans got me hard again. She noticed and with one hand she stroked my cock until she couldn't anymore.

  "What's wrong, María?" I whispered in her ear, afraid that I'd hurt her throat (squeeze, she kept whispering, squeeze) or bitten one of her nipples too hard.

  "Keep going, García Madero," said María, smiling in the dark, and she kissed me.

  When we were done she told me that she had come more than five times. To be honest, I had a hard time accepting that such an outrageous thing was possible, but when she gave me her word I had to believe her.

  "What are you thinking about?" said María.

  "About you," I lied; actually, I was thinking about my uncle and the law school and the magazine that Belano and Lima were going to publish. "What about you?"

  "I'm thinking about the pictures," she said.

  "What pictures?"

  "Ernesto's."

  "The pornographic pictures?"

  "Yes."

  The two of us shuddered in unison. Our faces were glued together. We could talk, vocalize, thanks to the space made by our noses, but even so I could feel her lips move against mine.

  "Do you want to do it again?"

  "Yes," said María.

  "Well," I said, a little queasy, "if you change your mind at the last minute, let me know."

  "Change my mind about what?" said María.

  The insides of her thighs were drenched in my semen. I felt cold and I couldn't help sighing deeply at the moment I penetrated her again.

  María whimpered and I started to move with increasing enthusiasm.

  "Try not to make too much noise, I don't want Angélica to hear us."

  "You try not to make noise," I said, and I added: "What did you give Angélica to make her sleep like that?"

  The two of us laughed quietly, me against her neck and her burying her face in the pillows. When I finished, I didn't even have the energy to ask her if she'd enjoyed herself, and the only thing I wanted was to gradually drift off to sleep with María in my arms. But she got up and made me get dressed and follow her to the bathroom in the big house. When we went out into the courtyard I realized that the sun was already coming up. For the first time that night I could see my lover a little more clearly. María was wearing a white nightgown with red embroidery on the sleeves, and her hair was pulled back with a ribbon or a piece of braided leather.

  After we dried ourselves I thought about calling home, but María said that my aunt and uncle would surely be asleep and I could do it later.

  "And now what?" I said.

  "Now let's sleep a little," said María, putting her arm around my waist.

  But the night or day held a last surprise for me. Huddled in a corner of the little house, I discovered Barrios and his American friend. The two of them were snoring. I would've liked to wake them with a kiss.

  NOVEMBER 19

  We all had breakfast together: Quim Font, Mrs. Font, María and Angélica, Jorgito Font, Barrios, Barbara Patterson, and me. Breakfast was scrambled eggs, slices of fried ham, bread, mango jam, strawberry jam, butter, salmon pâté, and coffee. Jorgito drank a glass of milk. Mrs. Font (she kissed me on the cheek when she saw me!) made something that she called crèpes but that were nothing like crèpes. The rest of breakfast was prepared by the servant (whose name I don't know or can't remember, which is inexcusable). Barrios and I washed the dishes.

  Afterward, when Quim went off to work and Mrs. Font began to plan her day (she works, so she told me, as a writer for a new Mexican family magazine), I finally decided to call home. My aunt Martita was the only one there, and when she heard my voice she started to scream like a crazy woman, then cry. After an uninterrupted series of prayers to the Virgin, appeals to duty, fragmented accounts of the night I had "put my uncle through," warnings in a tone more complicitous than recriminatory about the impending punishment that my uncle was surely pondering that very morning, I finally broke in and assured her that I was fine, that I'd spent the night with some friends and I wouldn't be home until "after dark" since I planned to head straight for the university. My aunt promised that she would call my uncle at work herself, and she made me swear that as long as I lived I would call home when I decided to spend the night out. For a few seconds I considered whether it might be a good idea to call my uncle myself, but in the end I decided that it wasn't necessary.

  I fell into an armchair with no idea what to do. I had the rest of the morning and day at my disposal, which is to say, I was conscious that they were at my disposal and in that sense they struck me as different from other mornings and other days (when I was a lost soul, wandering around the university or in the grips of my virginity), but here at the first sign of change I didn't know what to do. I had so many possibilities to choose from.

  The consumption of food-I ate like a wolf while Mrs. Font and Barbara Patterson talked about museums and Mexican families-had made me slightly sleepy and at the same time had reawakened my desire to have sex with María (whom I had avoided looking at during breakfast, trying when I did to adapt my gaze to the notions of brotherly love or disinterested camaraderie that I imagined were harbored by her father, who incidentally didn't seem the least bit surprised to see me at his table at such an early hour), but María was getting ready to go out, Angélica was getting ready to go out, Jorgito Font had already left, Barbara Patterson was in the shower, and only Barrios and the maid were wandering around the big library of the main house like the last survivors of a terrible shipwreck, so to stay out of their way and in a faint desire for symmetry, I crossed the courtyard for the millionth time and made myself comfortable in the sisters' little house, where the beds were still unmade (which was a
clear sign that it was the maid or servant or cleaning lady-or the naca of steel, as Jorgito called her-who did the work, a detail that increased my attraction to María rather than lessening it, tainting her pleasantly with frivolousness and indifference), contemplating the still-damp scene of my gateway to glory, and even though I ought to have wept or prayed, what I did was lie down on one of the unmade beds (Angélica's, as I found out later, not María's) and fall asleep.

  I was woken by Pancho Rodríguez hitting me (I think he may have been kicking me too, though I'm not sure). Only good manners prevented me from greeting him with a punch in the jaw. After saying good morning I went out into the courtyard and washed my face in the fountain (proof that I was still asleep), with Pancho behind me muttering unintelligibly.

  "There's no one home," he said. "I had to hop the wall to get in. What are you doing here?"

  I told him that I had spent the night there (I played it down, since I didn't like the way Pancho's nostrils were quivering, by adding that Barrios and Barbara Patterson had spent the night too), then we tried to get into the big house by the back door, the kitchen door, and the front door, but they were all locked tight.

  "If a neighbor sees us and calls the police," I said, "how will we explain that we're not breaking in?"

  "I don't give a shit. Sometimes I like to nose around my girlfriends' houses," said Pancho.

  "And also," I said, ignoring Pancho's remark, "I think I saw a curtain move in the house next door. If the police come…"

  "Did you have sex with Angélica, asshole?" asked Pancho suddenly, turning his eyes away from the front windows of the Fonts' house.

  "Of course not," I assured him.

  I don't know whether he believed me or not. But the two of us hopped the wall again and beat a retreat from Colonia Condesa.

  As we walked (in silence, through the Parque España, down Parras, through the Parque San Martín, and along Teotihuacán, where the only people out at that time of day were housewives, maids, and bums), I thought about what María had said about love and about the suffering that love would bring down on Pancho's head. By the time we got to Insurgentes, Pancho was in a better mood, talking about literature and recommending authors to me, trying to forget about Angélica. Then we headed down Manzanillo, turned onto Aguascalientes, and turned south again onto Medellín, walking until we reached Calle Tepeji. We stopped in front of a five-story building and Pancho invited me to have lunch with his family.

  We took the elevator up to the top floor.

  There, instead of going into one of the apartments, as I had expected, we climbed the stairs to the roof. A gray sky, but bright as if there had been a nuclear attack, welcomed us in the middle of a vibrant profusion of flowerpots and plants spilling into the passageways and laundry space.

  Pancho's family lived in two rooms on the roof.

  "Temporarily," explained Pancho, "until we save enough for a house around here."

  I was formally introduced to his mother, Doña Panchita; his brother Moctezuma, nineteen, Catullian poet and union organizer; and his younger brother Norberto, fifteen, high school student.

  One room served as dining and TV room during the day, and as Pancho, Moctezuma, and Norberto's bedroom at night. The other was a kind of giant closet or wardrobe, which held the refrigerator, the kitchen supplies (they brought the portable stove out into the hallway during the day and put it back in the room at night), and the mattress where Doña Panchita slept.

  As we were starting to eat, we were joined by a guy called Luscious Skin, twenty-three, rooftop neighbor, who was introduced as a visceral realist poet. A little before I left (many hours later; the time passed in a flash), I asked him again what his name was and he said Luscious Skin so naturally and confidently (much more naturally and confidently than I would've said Juan García Madero) that for a minute I actually believed that somewhere amid the back alley and swamps of our Mexican Republic there was actually a family named Skin.

  After lunch, Doña Panchita sat down to watch her favorite soap operas and Norberto began to study, his books spread out on the table. Pancho and Moctezuma washed the dishes in a sink from which there was a view of lots of the Parque de las Américas, and behind it the threatening hulks-looking as if they'd dropped from another planet, and an unlikely planet too-of the Medical Center, the Children's Hospital, the General Hospital.

  "The good thing about living here, if you don't mind the close quarters," said Pancho, "is that you're close to everything, right in the heart of Mexico City."

  Luscious Skin (called Skin, of course, by Pancho and his brother-and even Doña Panchita!) invited us to his room, where, he said, he had some marijuana left over from the last big party.

  "No time like the present," said Moctezuma.

  Unlike the two rooms occupied by the Rodríguezes, Luscious Skin's room was a model of bare austerity. I didn't see clothes strewn around, I didn't see household things, I didn't see books (Pancho and Moctezuma were poor, but where they lived I'd seen books in the most unexpected places, by Efraín Huerta, Augusto Monterroso, Julio Torri, Alfonso Reyes, the aforementioned Catullus in a translation by Ernesto Cardenal, Jaime Sabines, Max Aub, Andrés Henestrosa), just a thin mattress and a chair-no table-and a nice leather suitcase where he kept his clothes.

  Luscious Skin lived alone, although from remarks that he and the Rodríguez brothers made, I gathered that not long ago a woman (and her son), both pretty tough, had lived there and taken off with most of the furniture when they left.

  For a while we smoked marijuana and surveyed the landscape (which, as I've said, basically consisted of the silhouettes of the hospitals, endless rooftops like the one we were on, and a sky of low clouds moving swiftly toward the south), and then Pancho started to tell the story of his adventures that morning at the Fonts' house and his meeting with me.

  I was questioned about what had happened, this time by all three of them, but they didn't manage to get anything out of me that I hadn't already told Pancho. At some point they started to talk about María. From what I could gather, it seemed as though Luscious Skin and María had been lovers. And that Luscious Skin was banned from the Fonts' house. I wanted to know why. They explained to me that Mrs. Font had walked in on Luscious Skin and María one night as they were screwing in the little house. There was a party going on in the big house, in honor of a Spanish writer who had just come to Mexico, and at a certain point during the party, Mrs. Font wanted to introduce her older daughter-María, that is-to the writer and couldn't find her. So she went looking for her, arm in arm with the Spanish writer. When they got to the little house it was dark and from inside they could hear a noise like blows: loud, rhythmic blows. Mrs. Font surely wasn't thinking (if she'd thought first, said Moctezuma, she would've taken the Spaniard back to the party and come back alone to see what was going on in her daughter's room), but as it was, she didn't think, and she turned on the light. There, to her horror, was María, at the other end of the little house, dressed only in a shirt, her pants down, sucking Luscious Skin's dick as he slapped her on the ass and the cunt.

  "Really hard slaps," said Luscious Skin. "When they turned on the light I saw her ass and it was all red. I actually got scared."

  "But why were you hitting her?" I said angrily, afraid I would blush.

  "Isn't he an innocent. Because she asked for it," said Pancho.

  "I find that hard to believe," I said.

  "Stranger things have happened," said Luscious Skin.

  "It's all because of that French girl Simone Darrieux," said Moctezuma. "I know for a fact that María and Angélica invited her to a feminist meeting and afterward they talked about sex."

  "Who is this Simone?" I asked.

  "A friend of Arturo Belano's."

  "I went up to them. I was like, how's it going, girls, and the little sluts were talking about the Marquis de Sade," said Moctezuma.

  The rest of the story was predictable. María's mother tried to say something, but nothing came out of
her mouth. The Spaniard, who, according to Luscious Skin, turned visibly pale at the sight of María's raised and proffered backside, took Mrs. Font's arm with the solicitude reserved for the mentally ill and dragged her back to the party. In the sudden silence that fell over the little house, Luscious Skin could hear them talking in the courtyard, exchanging hurried words, as if the horny Spanish bastard were proposing something unsavory to poor Mrs. Font as she leaned there on the fountain. But then he heard their footsteps fade away in the direction of the big house and María said that they should keep going.