The Savage Detectives

by Roberto Bolaño

  DECEMBER 19

  First thing in the morning, Requena, Xóchitl, Rafael Barrios, and Barbara Patterson came to visit me. I asked them who had given them my address. Ulises and Arturo, they said. So they've appeared, I said. They've appeared and disappeared again, said Xóchitl. They're finishing work on an anthology of young Mexican poets, said Barrios. Requena laughed. It wasn't true, according to him. Too bad: for a moment I had hoped that they'd include some poems of mine. What they're doing is getting the money together to go to Europe, said Requena. Getting it together how? Selling pot left and right, how else, said Requena. The other day I saw them on Reforma with a backpack full of Acapulco Gold. I can't believe it, I said (but I remembered that the last time I'd seen them they had, in fact, been carrying a backpack). They gave me a little, said Jacinto, and he pulled out some weed. Xóchitl said that it wasn't good for me to smoke in my condition. I told her not to worry, that I was already feeling much better. You're the one who shouldn't smoke, said Jacinto, unless you want our baby to turn out retarded. Xóchitl said that there was no reason marijuana should hurt the fetus. Don't smoke, Xóchitl, said Requena. What hurts the fetus is bad vibes, said Xóchitl, bad food, alcohol, abuse of the mother, not marijuana. Don't smoke anyway, said Requena, just in case. Let her smoke if she wants, said Barbara Patterson. Fucking gringa, don't butt in, said Barrios. Once you've given birth, you can do whatever you want, but for now you'll have to go without, said Requena. While we smoked, Xóchitl went to sit in a corner of the room, next to some cardboard boxes where Rosario keeps the clothes she isn't wearing. Arturo and Ulises aren't saving money, she said (although they are setting a little aside, why deny it), they're putting the final touches on something that's going to blow everybody's minds. We looked at her, waiting to hear more. But Xóchitl was silent.

  DECEMBER 20

  Tonight I had sex with Rosario three times. I'm better now. But I'm still taking the medicine she bought for me, more to make her happy than anything else.

  DECEMBER 21

  Nothing to report. Life seems to have ground to a halt. Every day I make love to Rosario. While she's at work, I write and read. At night I make the rounds of the bars on Bucareli. Sometimes I stop in at the Encrucijada and the waitresses serve me first. At four in the morning Rosario comes home (when she's working the night shift) and we eat something light in our room, usually food that she brings from the bar. Then we make love until she falls asleep, and I begin to write.

  DECEMBER 22

  Today I went out early to take a walk. I'd been planning to head to the Batalla del Ebro and spend the time until lunch with Don Crispín, but when I got to the store it was closed. So I started to wander aimlessly, enjoying the morning sun, and almost without realizing it I came to Calle Mesones, where the Rebeca Nodier bookstore is. Although on my first visit I'd ruled the store out as a target, I decided to go in. No one was there. A sickly sweet, stuffy air hung over the books and the shelves. I heard voices coming from the back room, by which I deduced that the blind lady must be busy wrapping up some deal. I decided to wait and started leafing through old books. There was Ifigenia cruel and El plano oblicuo and Retratos reales e imaginarios, in addition to the five volumes of Simpatías y diferencias, all by Alfonso Reyes, and Prosas dispersas, by Julio Torri, and a book of stories, Mujeres, by someone called Eduardo Colín whom I'd never heard of, and Li-Po y otros poemas, by Tablada, and Catorce poemas burocráticos y un corrido reaccionario, by Renato Leduc, and Incidentes melódicos del mundo irracional, by Juan de la Cabada, and Dios en la tierra and Los días terrenales, by José Revueltas. Soon I got tired and took a seat in a little wicker chair. Just as I sat down, I heard a cry. The first thing that occurred to me was that someone was attacking Rebeca Nodier, and without thinking, I dashed into the inner room. A surprise awaited me behind the door. Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano were poring over an old catalog on a table. When I burst into the room they raised their heads and for the first time I saw them look truly surprised. Beside them, Doña Rebeca was gazing up at the ceiling as if she were thinking or reminiscing. Nothing had happened to her. It was she who'd cried out, but her cry was a cry of surprise, not fear.

  DECEMBER 23

  Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I'd rather not talk about it, because I didn't understand it.

  DECEMBER 24

  A miserable Christmas. I called María. Finally I got to talk to her! I told her what was going on with Lupe and she said she knew everything. What do you know? I said.

  "Well, that she ran away from her pimp and that she's finally decided to study at the dance school," she said.

  "Do you know where she's living?"

  "At a hotel," said María.

  "Do you know which hotel?"

  "Of course I know. The Media Luna. I go see her every afternoon. She's awfully lonely, poor thing."

  "No, she isn't awfully lonely, your father makes sure of that," I said.

  "My father is a saint and he's killing himself for despicable brats like you," she said.

  I wanted to know what she meant by killing himself.

  "Nothing."

  "Tell me what the fuck you're trying to say!"

  "Don't shout," she said.

  "I want to know where I stand! I want to know who I'm talking to!"

  "Don't shout," she said again.

  Then she said that she had things to do, and she hung up.

  DECEMBER 25

  I've decided not to sleep with María ever again, but the Christmas holidays, the tension radiating from people on the streets downtown, poor Rosario's plans (she's all set to spend New Year's Eve at a nightclub-with me, of course, and dancing), only make me want to see María again, to undress her, to feel her legs on my back again, to slap (if she asks me to) the perfect tight curve of her ass.

  DECEMBER 26

  "Today I have a surprise for you, papuchi," announced Rosario as soon as she got home.

  She started to kiss me, saying over and over again that she loved me and promising that she was going to start reading a book every two weeks to be "up to my level," which only embarrassed me, finally confessing that no one had ever made her so happy.

  I must be getting old, because her verbal excesses gave me goose bumps.

  Half an hour later we went walking to El Amanuense Azteca, a public bathhouse on Calle Lorenzo Boturini.

  That was the surprise.

  "We have to be nice and clean now that the new year is coming," said Rosario, winking at me.

  I would've liked to slap her right there, then walk away and never see her again. (My nerves are shot.)

  And yet, when we had passed through the frosted glass doors of the bathhouse, the mural or fresco that arched over the front desk seized my attention with mysterious force.

  The anonymous artist had painted an Indian scribe writing on paper or parchment, lost in thought. Clearly, he was the Amanuense Azteca. Behind the scribe stretched hot springs, where Indians and conquistadors, bathing in pools set three in a row, were joined by Mexicans from colonial times, El Cura Hidalgo and Morelos, Emperor Maximilian and Empress Carlota, Benito Juárez surrounded by friends and enemies, President Madero, Carranza, Zapata, Obregón, soldiers in different uniforms or out of uniform, peasants, Mexico City workers, and movie actors: Cantinflas, Dolores del Río, Pedro Armendáriz, Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete, Javier Solís, Aceves Mejía, María Félix, Tin Tan, Resortes, Calambres, Irma Serrano, and others I didn't recognize because they were in the farthest pools, and those really were tiny.

  "Cool, huh?"

  I stood there with my arms at my sides. Ecstatic.

  Rosario's voice made me jump.

  Before we turned down the hallway with our little towels and soap, I discovered that at each end of the mural there was a stone wall surrounding the springs. And on the other side of the wall, on a kind of plain or frozen sea, I saw shadowy animals, maybe the ghosts of animals (or the ghosts of plants) lying in wait, multiplying in a seething but silent siege.
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br />   DECEMBER 27

  We've been back to El Amanuense Azteca. A success. The private rooms are carpeted, with a table, coat rack, and sofa, and a cement stall where the shower and steam taps are. The steam jet is at floor level, like in a Nazi movie. The door between the room and the stall is heavy, and there's a creepy, perpetually fogged-up peephole at eye level (although I have to stoop since I'm taller than the average person it was designed for). There's restaurant service. We shut ourselves in and order cuba libres. We shower, take steam baths, rest and dry ourselves on the sofa, then shower again. We make love in the stall, in a cloud of steam that hides our bodies. We fuck, shower, let the steam smother us. All we can see are our hands, our knees, sometimes the back of a neck or the tip of a breast.

  DECEMBER 28

  How many poems have I written?

  Since it all began: 55 poems.

  Total pages: 76.

  Total lines: 2,453

  I could put together a book by now. My complete works.

  DECEMBER 29

  Tonight, while I was waiting for Rosario at the bar of the Encrucijada Veracruzana, Brígida came by and said something about time passing.

  "Pour me another tequila," I said, "and tell me what you mean."

  In her look I caught something that I can only call victory, although it was a sad, resigned victory, more attuned to small signs of death than signs of life.

  "What I meant was that time goes by," said Brígida as she filled my glass, "and once you were a stranger, but now you're like part of the family."

  "I don't give a shit about the family," I said as I wondered where the fuck Rosario had gone.

  "I didn't mean to insult you," said Brígida. "Or pick a fight. These days I don't feel like fighting with anyone."

  I sat looking at her for a while, not knowing what to say. I would've liked to say you're being an idiot, Brígida, but I wasn't in the mood to fight with anyone either.

  "What I meant was," said Brígida, looking behind her as if to make sure Rosario wasn't coming, "that I would've liked to fall in love with you too, believe me, I would've liked to live with you, give you spending money, make your meals, take care of you when you were sick, but it wasn't meant to be. We have to accept things the way they are, don't we? But it would've been nice."

  "I'm impossible to live with," I said.

  "You are who you are and you have a cock that's worth its weight in gold," said Brígida.

  "Thank you," I said.

  "I know what I'm talking about," said Brígida.

  "So what else do you know?"

  "About you?" Now Brígida was smiling, and this, I guessed, was her victory.

  "About me, of course," I said as I swallowed the last of the tequila.

  "That you're going to die young, Juan, and that you're going to do Rosario wrong."

  DECEMBER 30

  Today I went back to the Fonts' house. Today I did Rosario wrong.

  I got up early, around seven, and went out to roam the streets downtown. Before I left I heard Rosario's voice saying: wait a second and I'll make you breakfast. I didn't answer. I closed the door quietly and left the tenement.

  For a long time I walked as if I were in a foreign country, feeling choked and sick. When I got to the Zócalo my pores opened at last. I started to sweat freely, and my nausea vanished.

  Then suddenly I was starving and I went into the first cafeteria I found open, a little place on Madero called Nueva Síbaris, where I ordered coffee and a ham sandwich.

  To my great surprise, there was Pancho Rodríguez, sitting at the bar. His hair was freshly combed (it was still wet) and his eyes were red. He didn't look surprised to see me. I asked him what he was doing there, so far from home and so early in the morning.

  "I was out whoring all night," he said, "to see whether I was finally ready to get the fuck over you-know-who."

  I guessed that he meant Angélica, and as I took the first sips of coffee I thought about Angélica, María, my first visits to the Fonts' house. I felt happy. I felt hungry. Pancho, on the other hand, seemed listless. To distract him I told him that I'd left my aunt and uncle's place and that I was living with a woman in a tenement straight out of a 1940s movie, but Pancho wasn't in the right frame of mind to listen to me or anybody else.

  After he'd smoked a few cigarettes, he said he felt like stretching his legs.

  "Where do you want to go?" I asked, although deep down I already knew the answer, and if he didn't say what I expected to hear, I was ready to get it out of him by any means necessary.

  "To Angélica's," said Pancho.

  "That's the spirit," I said and I hurried to finish my breakfast.

  Pancho went ahead and paid my bill (which was a first) and we left. A feeling of lightness settled in our legs. Suddenly Pancho didn't seem quite so trashed and I didn't feel so clueless about what to do with my life. Instead, the morning light returned us to ourselves, refreshed. Pancho was cheery and quick again, gliding along on words, and the window of a shoe store on Madero reflected back a mirror image of my inner vision of myself: someone tall, with pleasant features, neither gawky nor sickeningly shy, striding along followed by a smaller, stockier person in pursuit of his true love-or whatever else came his way!

  Of course I had no idea then what the day had in store for us.

  For the first half of the trip, Pancho was enthusiastic, friendly, and extroverted, but after that, as we got closer to Colonia Condesa, his mood changed and he seemed to succumb again to the old fears that his strange (or rather histrionic and enigmatic) relationship with Angélica awakened in him. The whole problem, he confided, gloomy again, had to do with the social divide between his family, who were lowly and working-class, and Angélica's, firmly ensconced as they were in Mexico City's petit bourgeoisie. To cheer him up, I argued that although this would surely make it harder to start a relationship, the chasm of class struggle narrowed considerably once the relationship was already under way. To which Pancho replied by asking what I meant by saying the relationship was already under way, a stupid question I didn't bother to answer. Instead I responded with another question: were he and Angélica really two average people, two typical, rigid representatives of the petit bourgeoisie and the proletariat?

  "No, I guess not," said Pancho pensively as the taxi we'd caught at Reforma and Juárez headed at breakneck speed toward Calle Colima.

  That's what I was trying to say, I told him, that since he and Angélica were poets, what difference did it make if one belonged to one social class and the other to another?

  "Plenty, I'm telling you," said Pancho.

  "Don't be mechanistic, man," I said, more and more irrationally happy.

  Unexpectedly, the taxi driver backed me up: "If you've already gotten what you came for, there's no such thing as barriers. When love is good, nothing else matters."

  "See?" I said.

  "No, actually," said Pancho, "not really."

  "You go at it with your girl and forget that communist crap," said the taxi driver.

  "What do you mean communist crap?" said Pancho.

  "You know, all that social class business."

  "So according to you social classes don't exist," said Pancho.

  The taxi driver, who had been watching us in the rearview mirror as he talked, turned around now, his right hand resting on the back of the passenger seat, his left firmly grasping the wheel. We're going to crash, I thought.

  "For all intents and purposes, no. When it comes to love all Mexicans are equal. In the eyes of God too," said the taxi driver.

  "What a load of bullshit!" said Pancho.

  "If that's what you want to call it," replied the taxi driver.

  With that, Pancho and the taxi driver started to argue about religion and politics, and meanwhile I stared out the window, watching the scenery (the storefronts of Juárez and Roma Norte) rolling monotonously past, and I also started to think about María and what separated me from her, which wasn't class but experience, and about
Rosario and our tenement room and the wonderful nights I'd spent there with her, though I was prepared to give them up for a few seconds with María, a word from María, a smile from María. And I also started to think about my aunt and uncle and I even thought I saw them, walking arm in arm down one of the streets that we were passing, never turning to look at the taxi as it zigzagged perilously away down other streets, the two of them immersed in their solitude just as Pancho, the taxi driver, and I were immersed in ours. And then I realized that something had gone wrong in the last few days, something had gone wrong in my relationship with the new Mexican poets or with the new women in my life, but no matter how much I thought about it I couldn't figure out what the problem was, the abyss that opened up behind me if I looked over my shoulder. All the same, it didn't frighten me. It was an abyss without monsters, holding only darkness, silence, and emptiness, three extremes that caused me pain, a lesser pain, true, a flutter in the stomach, but a pain that sometimes felt like fear. And then, with my face glued to the window, we turned onto Calle Colima, and Pancho and the taxi driver stopped talking, or maybe only Pancho stopped, as if he'd given up trying to win his argument, and my silence and Pancho's silence clutched at my heart.

  We got out a few feet past the Fonts' house.

  "Something strange is going on here," said Pancho, as the taxi driver drove happily away, with a few choice words about our mothers.