The Savage Detectives

by Roberto Bolaño

  That afternoon I showered.

  My body was covered in bruises but I didn't know who'd given them to me, whether it was Rosario or Lupe. In any case it hadn't been María, and strangely enough that hurt, although the pain was far from unbearable, as it had been when I first met her. On my chest, just under my left nipple, I have a bruise the size of a plum. On my collarbone there are scratches like tiny comet trails. I discovered some marks on my shoulders too.

  When I came out everyone was having coffee in the kitchen, some sitting and others standing. María had asked Lupe to tell the story of the whore Alberto almost choked to death with his cock. Every once in a while someone would interrupt Lupe's story and say my God, or what animals, and a female voice (Mrs. Font's or Angélica's) even said can you believe it, as Quim was saying to Laura Damián's father: you see the kind of person we have to deal with.

  At four the peasant poet left, and soon afterward Mrs. Font's sister appeared. Dinner preparations shifted into high gear.

  Between five and six there was a flurry of phone calls from people saying they couldn't make it to dinner and at six-thirty Mrs. Font said that she'd had enough, started to cry, and went upstairs to her bedroom, closing the door.

  At seven Mrs. Font's sister, with María and Lupe's help, set the table and put the finishing touches on the dinner. But a few ingredients were missing and she went out to get them. Before she left Quim called her into his study for a few seconds. When she came out she had an envelope in her hand, with money in it, I guess, and from inside the study I heard Mr. Font tell her that she should put the envelope in her bag, because otherwise there was a risk it would be stolen by the occupants of the Camaro, a suggestion Mrs. Font's sister seemed to ignore at first, but as she opened the front door and left, she followed his advice. As an additional safety measure, Jorgito and I walked her to the gate. The Camaro was still there, but the occupants didn't even move when Mrs. Font's sister went by, heading toward Calle Cuernavaca.

  At nine we sat down to dinner. Most of the guests had made their excuses and the only people who showed up were an older lady, a cousin of Quim's, I think; a tall, thin man who was introduced as an architect, or ex-architect, as he himself hastened to point out; and two painters who had no idea what was going on. Mrs. Font emerged from her room dressed to the nines and accompanied by her sister, who after returning had spent the final moments helping her dress, as if taking charge of dinner hadn't been enough. Lupe, who was becoming increasingly prickly as the new year approached, said that she had no right to have dinner with us and would eat in the kitchen, but María firmly refused to let her and finally (after an argument that to be honest I didn't understand) she ended up sitting at the table with everyone else.

  Dinner got off to an unusual start.

  Quim rose and said that he wanted to give a toast. I guessed that it would be a toast to his wife, who under the circumstances had demonstrated incredible fortitude, but it was a toast to me! He spoke of my youth and my poems, he recalled my friendship with his daughters (when he said this he stared at Laura Damián's father, who nodded) and my friendship with him, our conversations, our unexpected encounters on the streets of Mexico City, and bringing his speech to a close-it was actually short but to me it seemed to go on forever-he asked me, now addressing me directly, not to judge him too harshly when I grew up and became a responsible adult citizen. When he stopped talking, I was red with embarrassment. María, Angélica, and Lupe clapped. The clueless painters clapped too. Jorgito crawled under the table and no one seemed to notice. When I snuck a glance at Mrs. Font, she looked as mortified as I was.

  Despite this lively beginning, the New Year's Eve dinner was sad and silent. Mrs. Font and her sister busied themselves with serving; María hardly touched her food; Angélica sank into a silence more languid than sullen; Quim and Laura Damián's father generally kept to themselves, though they paid some attention to the architect, who spent the evening gently scolding Quim; the two painters only talked to each other and every once in a while to Laura Damián's father (it seemed he also collected art); and María and Lupe, who at the beginning of dinner had seemed the most inclined to have a good time, got up to help serve and finally disappeared into the kitchen. Sic transit gloria mundi, Quim said to me from the other end of the table.

  Then someone rang the doorbell and we all jumped. María and Lupe looked in from the kitchen.

  "Someone get the door," said Quim, but no one moved.

  I was the one to get up.

  The garden was dark and through the gate I could see two figures. I thought it must be Alberto and his policeman friend. I felt an irrational desire to fight and I headed purposefully toward them. When I got a little closer, however, I realized that it was Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano. They didn't say why they'd come. They weren't surprised to see me. I remember thinking: we're saved!

  There was more than enough food, and Ulises and Arturo were seated at the table and Mrs. Font served them dinner while the rest of us had dessert or talked. When they were done eating, Quim took them into his study. Laura Damián's father soon followed.

  A little while later Quim looked out the half-open door and called for Lupe. Those of us in the living room looked as if we were at a funeral. María asked me to come with her to the courtyard. She talked to me for what seemed like a long time but couldn't have been more than five minutes. This is a trap, she said. Then the two of us went into her father's study.

  Surprisingly, Álvaro Damián had taken charge. He was sitting in Quim's chair (Quim was standing in a corner) and signing several checks to the bearer. Belano and Lima were smiling. Lupe seemed worried but resigned. María asked Laura Damián's father what was going on. Laura Damián's father looked up from his checkbook and said that the Lupe problem had to be solved as quickly as possible.

  "I'm going north, mana," said Lupe.

  "What?" said María.

  "Here, with these guys, in your dad's car."

  It didn't take me long to figure out that Quim and Laura Damián's father had convinced my friends to take Lupe with them and go wherever they wanted, thus lifting the siege of the house.

  What surprised me most was that Quim was letting them take the Impala. That was something I certainly hadn't expected.

  When we left the room, Lupe and María went to pack. I followed them. Lupe's suitcase was almost empty because when she fled the hotel she'd left most of her clothes behind.

  After the countdown to midnight on TV we all hugged: María, Angélica, Jorgito, Quim, Mrs. Font, her sister, Laura Damián's father, the architect, the painters, Quim's cousin, Arturo Belano, Ulises Lima, Lupe, and I.

  There came a moment when none of us knew whom we were hugging anymore or whether we'd hugged the same person more than once.

  Until ten it had been possible to see the shapes of Alberto and his sidekicks through the gate. By eleven they weren't there anymore and Jorgito was brave enough to go out into the garden, look over the wall, and scan the whole street. They were gone. At twelve-fifteen we all made our way stealthily to the garage and the goodbyes began. I hugged Belano and Lima and asked them what would happen to visceral realism. They didn't answer me. I hugged Lupe and told her to take care of herself. In return I got a kiss on the cheek. Quim's car was a white Ford Impala, the latest model, and Quim and his wife wanted to know who the driver would be, as if at the last minute they were having second thoughts.

  "Me," said Ulises Lima.

  As Quim explained some of the finer points of the car to Ulises, Jorgito said that we should hurry up because Lupe's pimp had just come back. For a few seconds everyone started talking in normal voices and Mrs. Font said: the shame of it all, to be reduced to this. Then I hurried off to the Fonts' little house, got my books, and came back. The car's engine was already running and everyone looked frozen in place.

  I saw Arturo and Ulises in the front seats and Lupe in back.

  "Someone will have to go open the gate," said Quim.

  I offere
d to do it.

  I was on the sidewalk when I saw the lights of the Camaro and the lights of the Impala go on. It looked like a science fiction movie. As one car left the house, the other approached, as if the two were magnetically attracted to each other, or drawn together by fate, which the Greeks would say is the same thing.

  I heard voices. People were calling my name. Quim's car passed me. I saw the shape of Alberto getting out of the Camaro and the next moment he was alongside the car my friends were in. His friends, still sitting in the Camaro, yelled at him to break one of the Impala's windows. Why doesn't Ulises hit the gas? I thought. Lupe's pimp started to kick the doors. I saw María coming through the garden toward me. I saw the faces of the thugs inside the Camaro. One of them was smoking a cigar. I saw Ulises's face and his hands, which were moving on the dashboard of Quim's car. I saw Belano's face looking impassively at the pimp, as if none of this had anything to do with him. I saw Lupe, who was covering her face in the backseat. I thought that the window glass couldn't withstand another kick and the next moment I was up next to Alberto. Then I saw that Alberto was swaying. He smelled of alcohol. They'd been celebrating the new year too, of course. I saw my right fist (the only one I had free since my books were in my other hand) hurtling into the pimp's body and this time I saw him fall. I heard my name being called from the house and I didn't turn around. I kicked the body at my feet and I saw the Impala, which was moving at last. I saw the two thugs get out of the Camaro and I saw them coming toward me. I saw that Lupe was looking at me from inside the car and that she was opening the door. I realized that I'd always wanted to leave. I got in and before I could close the door Ulises stepped on the gas. I heard a shot or something that sounded like a shot. They're shooting at us, the bastards, said Lupe. I turned around and through the back window I saw a shadow in the middle of the street. All the sadness of the world was concentrated in that shadow, framed by the strict rectangle of the Impala's window. It's firecrackers, I heard Belano say as our car leaped forward and left behind the Fonts' house, the thugs' Camaro, Calle Colima, and in less than two seconds we were on Avenida Oaxaca, heading north out of the city.

  II

  THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES

  (1976-1996)

  1

  Amadeo Salvatierra, Calle República de Venezuela, near the Palacio de la Inquisición, Mexico City DF, January 1976. My dear boys, I said to them, I'm so glad to see you, come right in, make yourselves at home, and as they filed down the hall, or rather felt their way, because the hall is dark and the bulb had burned out and I hadn't changed it (I haven't changed it yet), I skipped joyfully ahead into the kitchen, where I got out a bottle of Los Suicidas mezcal, a mezcal only made in Chihuahua, limited run, of course, of which I used to receive two bottles each year by parcel post, until 1967. When I returned the boys were in the front room looking at my paintings and examining some books and I couldn't help telling them again how happy their visit made me. Who gave you my address, boys? Germán, Manuel, Arqueles? At which they looked at me as if they hadn't understood and then one of them said List Arzubide. But sit down, I said, have a seat, ah, my good friend Germán List Arzubide, he's not one to forget me, is he still the same big old wonderful man? And the boys shrugged their shoulders and said yes-well of course he'd hardly have shrunk, would he? but all they said was yes-and then I said let's try this mezcalito and I handed them two glasses and they sat there looking at the bottle as if they were afraid a dragon might come shooting out of it, and I laughed, but I wasn't laughing at them, I was laughing for sheer glee, it made me so happy just to be there with them, and then one of them asked if they'd heard right, if that was really what the mezcal was called, and I passed them the bottle, still laughing, I knew the name would impress them, and I stepped back a little to get a better look at them, God bless them, they were so young, with their hair down to their shoulders and carrying all those books-the memories they brought back!-and then one of them said are you sure this won't kill us, Señor Salvatierra? and I said what do you mean kill you, this is the essence of health, the water of life, drink it without fear, and to set an example I filled my glass and downed half of it and then I served them, and at first the rascals just wetted their lips, but little by little it grew on them, and they started to drink like men. Well, boys, how is it? I said, and one of them, the Chilean, said that he'd never heard of a mezcal called Los Suicidas, which struck me as a little presumptuous, there must be two hundred brands of mezcal in Mexico at the very least, so it would be hard to know them all, especially if you weren't from here, but of course the boy didn't realize that, and the other one said it's good, and then he said I've never heard of it before either, and I had to tell them that as far as I knew no one made it anymore, the factory went out of business, or burned down, or was sold and turned into a bottling plant for Refrescos Pascual, or the new owners didn't think the name was good for sales. And for a while we were quiet, the two of them standing and me sitting, drinking and savoring each drop of Los Suicidas and thinking who knows what. And then one of them said Señor Salvatierra, we want to talk to you about Cesárea Tinajero. And the other one said: and about the magazine Caborca. Those boys. Their brains and their tongues were interconnected. One of them could start to talk, then stop in the middle of what he was saying, and the other one would pick up the sentence or the idea as if he'd begun it himself. And when they spoke Cesárea's name I raised my eyes and looked at them as if I were seeing them through a curtain of gauze, surgical gauze, to be precise, and I said don't call me Señor, boys, call me Amadeo, which is what my friends call me. And they said all right, Amadeo. And they spoke the name Cesárea Tinajero again.

  Perla Avilés, Calle Leonardo da Vinci, Colonia Mixcoac, Mexico City DF, January 1976. I'm going to talk about 1970. I met him in 1970, at Porvenir, a high school in Talismán. The two of us were students there for a while. He started in 1968, which was when he came to Mexico, and I started in '69, although we didn't meet until 1970. For reasons that are beside the point we both quit school for a while. Financial reasons in his case, I think, and inner turmoil in mine. But then I went back and he did too, or his parents made him go back, and then we met. This was 1970 and by then I was older than anyone in my class, I was eighteen, and I should have been in college, not high school, but there I was at Porvenir, and one morning, after the school year had already begun, he showed up, I noticed him right away, he wasn't a new student, he had friends, and he was a year younger than me, although he'd repeated a grade. At the time, he lived in Colonia Lindavista, but after a few months he and his parents moved to Colonia Nápoles. I became his friend. In the beginning, as I was getting up the courage to talk to him, I watched him play soccer in the yard. He loved to play. I watched him from the stairs and I thought he was the most beautiful boy I'd ever seen. Long hair was forbidden in high school, but he had long hair and when he played soccer he took off his shirt and played bare-chested. I thought he looked just like a Greek god from those magazines with tales of the Greek myths and at other times (in class, when he seemed to be asleep), a Catholic saint. I watched him and that was enough for me. He didn't have many friends. He knew lots of people, sure, he kidded around with everybody (he was always laughing), making jokes, but he had very few friends, maybe none at all. He didn't do well at school. In chemistry and physics he was lost. That surprised me because neither one was really hard. All you had to do to pass was pay the tiniest bit of attention, study a little, but obviously he hardly ever studied, or maybe never studied at all, and in class his mind was elsewhere. One day he came up to me, I was on the stairs reading Lautréamont, and asked me whether I knew who owned Porvenir. I was so startled that I didn't know what to say, I think I opened my mouth but nothing came out, my face crumpled, and I might even have started to shake. He was shirtless, carrying his shirt in one hand and a backpack, a dusty backpack full of notebooks, in the other, and he looked at me with a smile on his lips and I looked at the sweat on his chest that was drying fast in the wind or th
e late afternoon air (which aren't the same thing), and most classes were over, I don't know what I was doing at school, maybe waiting for someone, some friend, though that's unlikely since I didn't have many friends either, maybe I'd just stayed to watch him play soccer. I remember that the sky was a bright, damp gray and that it was cold or that I felt cold at the time. I also remember that the only sounds were of distant footsteps, muted laughter, the empty school. He probably thought I hadn't heard him the first time and he repeated the question. I don't know who it belongs to, I said, I don't know whether it has an owner. Of course it has an owner, he said, it's owned by Opus Dei. He must have thought I was a complete idiot, because I told him that I didn't know what Opus Dei was. A Catholic sect in league with the devil, he said, laughing. Then I understood and I told him that I didn't care much about religion and that I already knew that Porvenir was owned by the church. No, he said, what's important is which part of the church it's owned by: Opus Dei. And what kind of people belong to Opus Dei? I asked. Then he sat down beside me on the stairs and we talked for a long time and it bothered me that he wasn't putting his shirt on and it kept getting colder and colder. I remember what he said in that first conversation about his parents: he said they were naïve and that he was naïve too and he probably said they were stupid (he and his parents) and gullible for not having realized until now that the school belonged to Opus Dei. Do your parents know who's in charge here? he asked me. My mother is dead, I said, and my father doesn't know or care. I don't care either, I added, all I want is to finish high school and go to college. What will you study there? he said. Literature, I said. That's when he told me he was a writer too. What a coincidence, I said, I'm a writer. Or something like that. Not making a big deal out of it. I thought he was kidding, of course. That's how we became friends. I was eighteen and he had just turned seventeen. He'd been living in Mexico since he was fifteen. Once I invited him to go riding with me. My father had some land in Tlaxcala and had bought a horse. He said he was a good rider and I said this Sunday I'm going to Tlaxcala with my father, you can come with us if you want. What bleak country that was. My father had built a thatched adobe hut and that was all there was, the rest was scrub and dirt. When we got there he looked around with a smile, as if to say, I knew this wasn't going to be a fancy ranch or a big spread, but this is too much. Even I was a little bit ashamed of my father's land. Among other things, there was no saddle, and some neighbors kept the horse for us. For a while, as my father was off getting the horse, we wandered the flats. I tried to talk about books I'd read that I knew he hadn't read, but he hardly listened to me. He walked and smoked, walked and smoked, and the scenery was always the same. Until we heard the horn of my father's car and then the man who kept the horse came, not riding the horse but leading it by the bridle. By the time we got back to the hut my father and the man had gone off in the car to settle some business and the horse was tied up waiting for us. You go first, I said. No, he said (it was clear his mind was on other things), you go. Not wanting to argue, I mounted the horse and broke straight into a gallop. When I got back he was sitting on the ground, against the wall of the hut, smoking. You ride well, he said. Then he got up and went over to the horse, saying that he wasn't used to riding bareback, but he vaulted up anyway, and I showed him which way to go, telling him that over in that direction there was a river or actually a riverbed that was dry now but that filled up when it rained and was pretty, then he galloped off. He rode well. I'm a good horsewoman, but he was as good as I was or maybe better, I don't know. At the time I thought he was better. Galloping without stirrups is hard and he galloped clinging to the horse's back until he was out of sight. As I waited I counted the cigarette butts that he had stubbed out beside the hut and they made me want to learn to smoke. Hours later, as we were on our way back in my father's car, him in front and me in back, he said that there was probably some pyramid lying buried under our land. I remember that my father turned his eyes from the road to look at him. Pyramids? Yes, he said, deep underground there must be lots of pyramids. My father didn't say anything. From the darkness of the backseat, I asked him why he thought that. He didn't answer. Then we started to talk about other things but I kept wondering why he'd said that about the pyramids. I kept thinking about pyramids. I kept thinking about my father's stony plot of land and much later, when I'd lost touch with him, each time I went back to that barren place I thought about the buried pyramids, about the one time I'd seen him riding over the tops of the pyramids, and I imagined him in the hut, when he was left alone and sat there smoking.