The Savage Detectives

by Roberto Bolaño

"No," said Quim, "on a magazine. A magazine that's coming out soon."

  I don't know why, but I immediately thought (or knew, as if he had told me so himself) that he meant the visceral realist magazine.

  "I'm going to show them, everyone who's against me, yes, sir," he said.

  I went over to the table and studied the diagrams and drawings, leafing slowly through the rough stack of papers. The mock-up for the magazine was a chaos of geometric figures and randomly scribbled names or letters. It was obvious that poor Mr. Font was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

  "What do you think?"

  "Extremely interesting," I said.

  "Those jackasses will learn what the avant-garde is now, won't they? And that's even without the poems, see? This is where all of your poems will go."

  The space he showed me was full of lines, lines mimicking writing, but also little drawings, like when someone swears in the comics: snakes, bombs, knives, skulls, crossbones, little mushroom clouds. The rest of each page was a compendium of Quim Font's extravagant ideas about graphic design.

  "Look, this is the magazine's logo."

  A snake (which might have been smiling but more likely was writhing in a spasm of pain) was biting its tail with a hungry, agonized expression, its eyes fixed like daggers on the hypothetical reader.

  "But nobody knows what the magazine will be called yet," I said.

  "It doesn't matter. The snake is Mexican and it also symbolizes circularity. Have you read Nietzsche, García Madero?" he said suddenly.

  I confessed apologetically that I hadn't. Then I looked at each of the pages of the magazine (there were more than sixty), and just as I was getting ready to leave, Quim asked how things were going between me and his daughter. I told him that things were fine, that María and I were getting along better and better every day, and then I decided to shut my mouth.

  "Life is hard for parents," he said, "especially in Mexico City. How long has it been since you slept at home?"

  "Three nights," I said.

  "And isn't your mother worried?"

  "I talked to them on the phone. They know I'm all right."

  Quim looked me up and down.

  "You're not in great shape, my boy."

  I shrugged my shoulders. The two of us stood there pensively for a minute without saying anything, him drumming his fingers on the table and me looking at old plans tacked to the walls, plans for dream houses that Quim would probably never see built.

  "Come with me," he said.

  I followed him to his room on the second floor, which was about five times the size of his study.

  He opened the closet and took out a green sports shirt.

  "Try this on, see how it fits."

  I hesitated for a second, but Quim's gestures were abrupt, as if there were no time to lose. I dropped my shirt at the foot of the bed, an enormous bed where Quim, his wife, and his three children could've slept, and I put on the green shirt. It fit me well.

  "It's yours," said Quim. Then he stuck his hand in his pocket and handed me some bills: "So you can treat María to a soda."

  His hand was trembling, his outstretched arm was trembling, his other arm, which was hanging at his side, was trembling too, and his face was twisting into horrible expressions that forced me to look anywhere but at him. I thanked him but said there was no way I could accept such a gift.

  "Strange," said Quim, "everybody takes my money: my daughters, my son, my wife, my employees"-he used the plural, although I knew perfectly well that at this point he didn't have any employees, except for the maid, but he didn't mean the maid-"even my bosses love my money and that's why they keep it."

  "Thank you very much," I said.

  "Take it and put it in your pocket, damn it!"

  I took the money and put it away. It was quite a bit, though I didn't have the nerve to count it.

  "I'll return it as soon as I can," I said.

  Quim let himself fall backward on the bed. His body made a muffled sound and then quivered. For a second I wondered whether it could be a water bed.

  "Don't worry, boy. We were put on this earth to help each other. You help me with my daughter, I'll help you with a little cash for your expenses. Call it an extra allowance, all right?"

  His voice sounded tired, as if he were about to collapse in exhaustion and sleep, but his eyes were still open, staring nervously at the ceiling.

  "I like the way the magazine looks, I'll give those bastards something to talk about," he said, but his voice was a whisper now.

  "It's perfect," I said.

  "Well, naturally, I'm not an architect for nothing," he said. And then, after a moment: "We're artists too, but we do a good job hiding it, don't we?"

  "Sure you do," I said.

  He seemed to be snoring. I looked at his face: his eyes were open. Quim? I said. He didn't answer. Very slowly, I approached him and touched the mattress. Something inside it responded to my touch. Bubbles the size of an apple. I turned and left the room.

  I spent the rest of the day with María and chasing María.

  It rained a few times. The first time it stopped, a rainbow appeared. The second time there was nothing, black clouds and night in the valley.

  Catalina O'Hara is red-haired, twenty-five, has a son, is separated, is pretty.

  I also met Laura Jáuregui, who used to be Arturo Belano's girlfriend. She was at the party with Sofía Gálvez, Ulises Lima's lost love.

  Both of them are pretty.

  No, Laura is much prettier.

  I drank too much. Visceral realists were swarming everywhere, although more than half of them were just university students in disguise.

  Angélica and Pancho left early.

  At a certain point during the night, María said to me: disaster is imminent.

  NOVEMBER 22

  I woke up at Catalina O'Hara's house. As I was having breakfast, very early, with Catalina and her son, Davy, who had to be taken to nursery school (María wasn't there, everyone else was asleep), I remembered that the night before, when there were just a few of us left, Ernesto San Epifanio had said that all literature could be classified as heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. Novels, in general, were heterosexual, whereas poetry was completely homosexual; I guess short stories were bisexual, although he didn't say so.

  Within the vast ocean of poetry he identified various currents: faggots, queers, sissies, freaks, butches, fairies, nymphs, and philenes. But the two major currents were faggots and queers. Walt Whitman, for example, was a faggot poet. Pablo Neruda, a queer. William Blake was definitely a faggot. Octavio Paz was a queer. Borges was a philene, or in other words he might be a faggot one minute and simply asexual the next. Rubén Darío was a freak, in fact, the queen freak, the prototypical freak.

  "In our language, of course," he clarified. "In the wider world the reigning freak is still Verlaine the Generous."

  Freaks, according to San Epifanio, were closer to madhouse flamboyance and naked hallucination, while faggots and queers wandered in stagger-step from ethics to aesthetics and back again. Cernuda, dear Cernuda, was a nymph, and at moments of great bitterness, a faggot, whereas Guillén, Aleixandre, and Alberti could be considered a sissy, a butch, and a queer, respectively. As a general rule, poets like Carlos Pellicer were butches, while poets like Tablada, Novo, and Renato Leduc were sissies. In fact, there was a dearth of faggots in Mexican poetry, although some optimists might point to López Velarde or Efraín Huerta. There were lots of queers, on the other hand, from the mauler (although for a second I heard mobster) Díaz Mirón to the illustrious Homero Aridjis. It was necessary to go all the way back to Amado Nervo (whistles) to find a real poet, a faggot poet, that is, and not a philene like the resurrected and now renowned Manuel José Othón from San Luis Potosí, a bore if ever there was one. And speaking of bores: Manuel Acuña was a fairy and José Joaquín Pesado was a Grecian wood nymph, both longtime pimps of a certain kind of Mexican lyrical verse.

  "And Efrén Rebolledo?" I as
ked.

  "An extremely minor queer. His only virtue is that he was the first, if not the only, Mexican poet to publish a book in Tokyo: Japanese Poems, 1909. He was a diplomat, of course."

  Anyway, the poetry scene was essentially an (underground) battle, the result of the struggle between faggot poets and queer poets to seize control of the word. Sissies, according to San Epifanio, were faggot poets by birth, who out of weakness or for comfort's sake lived within and accepted-most of the time-the aesthetic and personal parameters of the queers. In Spain, France, and Italy, queer poets have always been legion, he said, although a superficial reader might never guess. What happens is that a faggot poet like Leopardi, for example, somehow reconstructs queers like Ungaretti, Montale, and Quasimodo, the deadly trio.

  "In the same way, Pasolini redraws contemporary Italian queerdom. Take the case of poor Sanguinetti (I won't start with Pavese, who was a sad freak, the only one of his kind, or Dino Campana, who dines at a separate table, the table of hopeless freaks). Not to mention France, great country of devouring mouths, where one hundred faggot poets, from Villon to our beloved Sophie Podolski, have nurtured, still nurture, and will nurture with the blood of their tits ten thousand queer poets with their entourage of philenes, nymphs, butches, and sissies, lofty editors of literary magazines, great translators, petty bureaucrats, and grand diplomats of the Kingdom of Letters (see, if you must, the shameful and malicious reflections of the Tel Quel poets). And the less said the better about the faggotry of the Russian Revolution, which, if we're to be honest, gave us just one faggot poet, a single one."

  "Who?" they asked him. "Mayakovsky?"

  "No."

  "Esenin?"

  "No."

  "Pasternak? Blok? Mandelstam? Akhmatova?"

  "Hardly."

  "Come on, Ernesto, tell us, the suspense is killing us."

  "There was only one," said San Epifanio, "and now I'll tell you who it was, but he was the real thing, a steppes-and-snow faggot, a faggot from head to toe: Khlebnikov."

  There was an opinion for every taste.

  "And in Latin America, how many true faggots do we find? Vallejo and Martín Adán. Period. New paragraph. Macedonio Fernández, maybe? The rest are queers like Huidobro, fairies like Alfonso Cortés (although some of his poems are authentically fagotty), butches like León de Greiff, butch nymphs like Pablo de Rokha (with bursts of freakishness that would've driven Lacan crazy), sissies like Lezama Lima, a misguided reader of Góngora, and, along with Lezama, all the poets of the Cuban Revolution (Diego, Vitier, horrible Retamar, pathetic Guillén, inconsolable Fina García) except for Rogelio Nogueras, who is a darling and a nymph with the spirit of a playful faggot. But moving on. In Nicaragua most poets are fairies like Coronel Urtecho or queers who wish they were philenes, like Ernesto Cardenal. The Mexican Contemporaries are queers too…"

  "No!" shouted Belano. "Not Gilberto Owen!"

  "In fact," San Epifanio continued unruffled, "Gorostiza's Death Without End, along with the poetry of Paz, is the 'Marseillaise' of the highly nervous and sedentary Mexican queer poets. More names: Gelman, nymph; Benedetti, queer; Nicanor Parra, fairy with a hint of faggot; Westphalen, freak; Enrique Lihn, sissy; Girondo, fairy; Rubén Bonifaz Nuño, fairy butch; Sabines, butchy butch; our beloved, untouchable Josemilio P., freak. And back to Spain, back to the beginning"-whistles-"Góngora and Quevedo, queers; San Juan de la Cruz and Fray Luis de León, faggots. End of story. And now, some differences between queers and faggots. Even in their sleep, the former beg for a twelve-inch cock to plow and fertilize them, but at the moment of truth, mountains must be moved to get them into bed with the pimps they love. Faggots, on the other hand, live as if a stake is permanently churning their insides and when they look at themselves in the mirror (something they both love and hate to do with all their heart), they see the Pimp of Death in their own sunken eyes. For faggots and queers, pimp is the one word that can cross unscathed through the realms of nothingness (or silence or otherness). But then, too, nothing prevents queers and faggots from being good friends if they so desire, from neatly ripping one another off, criticizing or praising one another, publishing or burying one another in the frantic and moribund world of letters."

  "And what about Cesárea Tinajero? Is she a faggot or a queer?" someone asked. I didn't recognize the voice.

  "Oh, Cesárea Tinajero is horror itself," said San Epifanio.

  NOVEMBER 23

  I told María that her father had given me money.

  "Do you think I'm a whore?" she said.

  "Of course not!"

  "Then don't take any money from that old nut-job!" she said.

  This afternoon we went to a lecture by Octavio Paz. On the subway, María didn't speak to me. Angélica was with us and we met Ernesto at the lecture, at the Capilla Alfonsina. Afterward we went to a restaurant on Calle Palma where all the waiters were octogenarians. The restaurant was called La Palma de la Vida. Suddenly I felt trapped. The waiters, who were about to die at any minute, María's indifference, as if she'd already had enough of me, San Epifanio's distant, ironic smile, and even Angélica, who was the same as always-it all seemed like a trap, a humorous commentary on my own existence.

  On top of everything, they said I hadn't understood Octavio Paz's lecture at all, and they might have been right. All I'd noticed were the poet's hands, which beat out the rhythm of his words as he read, a tic he'd probably picked up in adolescence.

  "The kid is a complete ignoramus," said María, "a typical product of the law school."

  I preferred not to respond. (Although several replies occurred to me.) What did I think about then? About my shirt, which stank. About Quim Font's money. About Laura Damián, who had died so young. About Octavio Paz's right hand, his index finger and middle finger, his ring finger, thumb and little finger, which cut through the air of the Capilla as if our lives depended on it. I also thought about home and bed.

  Later two guys with long hair and leather pants came in. They looked like musicians but they were students at the dance school.

  For a long time I stopped existing.

  "Why do you hate me, María? What have I done to you?" I whispered in her ear.

  She looked at me as if I were speaking to her from another planet. Don't be ridiculous, she said.

  Ernesto San Epifanio heard her reply and smiled at me in a disturbing way. In fact everybody heard her, and everybody was smiling at me as if I'd gone crazy! I think I closed my eyes. I tried to join some conversation. I tried to talk about the visceral realists. The pseudomusicians laughed. At some point María kissed one of them and Ernesto San Epifanio patted me on the back. I remember that I caught his hand in the air or grabbed his elbow, and that I looked him in the eye and told him to back off, that I didn't need anybody's pity. I remember that María and Angélica decided to go with the dancers. I remember hearing myself shout at some point during the night:

  "I earned your father's money!"

  But I don't remember whether María was there to hear me or if by then I was alone.

  NOVEMBER 24

  I'm back at home. I've been back to the university (but not to class). I'd like to sleep with María. I'd like to sleep with Catalina O'Hara. I'd like to sleep with Laura Jáuregui. Sometimes I'd like to sleep with Angélica, but the circles under her eyes keep getting darker, and every day she's paler, thinner, less there.

  NOVEMBER 25

  Today I only saw Barrios and Jacinto Requena at Café Quito, and our conversation was mostly gloomy, as if something irreparably bad was about to happen. Still, we laughed a lot. They told me that Arturo Belano once gave a lecture at the Casa del Lago and when it was his turn to talk he forgot everything. I think the lecture was supposed to be on Chilean poetry and Belano improvised a talk about horror movies. Another time, Ulises Lima gave a lecture and no one came. We talked until they kicked us out.

  NOVEMBER 26

  No one was at Café Quito and I didn't feel like sitting at a table and reading in the middle o
f the dreary bustle at that time of day. For a while I walked along Bucareli. I called María, who wasn't home, walked past the Encrucijada Veracruzana twice, went in the third time, and there, behind the bar, was Rosario.

  I thought she wouldn't recognize me. Sometimes I don't even recognize myself! But Rosario looked at me and smiled, and after a while, once she had waited on a table of regulars, she came over.

  "Have you written me my poem yet?" she said, sitting down beside me. Rosario has dark eyes, black, I'd say, and broad hips.

  "More or less," I said, with an ever-so-slight feeling of triumph.

  "All right, then, read it to me."

  "My poems are meant to be read, not spoken," I said. I think José Emilio Pacheco claimed something similar recently.

  "Exactly, so read it to me," said Rosario.

  "What I mean is, it's better if you read it yourself."

  "No, you'd better do it. If I read it myself, I probably won't understand it."

  I chose one of my latest poems at random and read it to her.

  "I don't understand it," said Rosario, "but thank you anyway."

  For a second I waited for her to ask me back to the storage room. But Rosario wasn't Brígida, that much was immediately clear. Then I started to think about the abyss that separates the poet from the reader and the next thing I knew I was deeply depressed. Rosario, who had gone off to wait on other tables, came back to me.

  "Have you written Brígida some poetry too?" she asked, gazing into my eyes, her thighs grazing the edge of the table.

  "No, just you," I said.

  "They told me what happened the other day."

  "What happened the other day?" I asked, trying to seem distant. Pleasant, but distant.

  "Poor Brígida has been crying over you," said Rosario.

  "And why is that? Have you seen her crying?"

  "We've all seen her. She's crazy about you, Mr. Poet. You must have some special thing with women."

  I think I blushed, but at the same time I was flattered.