The Savage Detectives

by Roberto Bolaño

  6

  Rafael Barrios, Café Quito, Calle Bucareli, Mexico City DF, May 1977. Our visceral realist activities after Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano left: automatic writing, exquisite corpses, solo performances with no spectators, contraintes, two-handed writing, three-handed writing, masturba-tory writing (we wrote with the right hand and masturbated with the left, or vice versa if we were left-handed), madrigals, poem-novels, sonnets always ending with the same word, three-word messages written on walls ("This is it," "Laura, my love," etc.), outrageous diaries, mail-poetry, projective verse, conversational poetry, antipoetry, Brazilian concrete poetry (written in Portuguese cribbed from the dictionary), poems in hard-boiled prose (detective stories told with great economy, the last verse revealing the solution or not), parables, fables, theater of the absurd, pop art, haikus, epigrams (actually imitations of or variations on Catullus, almost all by Moctezuma Rodríguez), desperado poetry (Western ballads), Georgian poetry, poetry of experience, beat poetry, apocryphal poems by bpNichol, John Giorno, John Cage (A Year from Monday), Ted Berrigan, Brother Antoninus, Armand Schwerner (The Tablets), lettrist poetry, calligrams, electric poetry (Bulteau, Messagier), bloody poetry (three deaths at least), pornographic poetry (heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual, with no relation to the poet's personal preference), apocryphal poems by the Colombian Nadaístas, Peruvian Horazerianos, Uruguayan Cataleptics, Ecuadorian Tzantzicos, Brazilian cannibals, NÔ theater of the proletariat… We even put out a magazine… We kept moving… We kept moving… We did what we could… But nothing turned out right.

  Joaquín Font, El Reposo Mental Health Clinic, Camino Desierto de los Leones, on the outskirts of Mexico City DF, March 1977. Sometimes I think about Laura Damián. Not often. Four or five times a day. Eight or sixteen times if I can't sleep, which makes sense since there's room for a lot of memories in a twenty-four-hour day. But usually I only think of her four or five times, and each memory, each memory capsule, is approximately two minutes long, although I can't say for sure because a little while ago someone stole my watch, and keeping time on one's own is risky.

  When I was young I had a friend called Dolores. Dolores Pacheco. She really did know how to keep time. I wanted to go to bed with her. I want you to make me see stars, Dolores, I said to her one day. How long do you think stars last? she said. What do you mean? I asked. How long does one of your orgasms last? she said. Long enough, I said. But how long? I don't know, I said. A long time. You ask funny questions, Dolores. How long is a long time? she persisted. Then I assured her that I had never timed an orgasm, and she said pretend you're having an orgasm now, Quim, close your eyes and imagine that you're coming. With you? I said, seeing my chance. Whoever you want, she said, just imagine it, all right? Let's do it, I said. Fine, she said, when you start, raise your hand. Then I closed my eyes, imagined myself screwing Dolores, and raised my hand. And then I heard her voice saying: one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four Mississippi, and unable to keep from laughing anymore, I opened my eyes and asked her what she was doing. I'm timing you, she said. Have you come yet? I don't know, I said, it's usually longer. Don't lie to me, Quim, she said, most orgasms are over by four Mississippi. Try again and you'll see. And I closed my eyes and at first I imagined myself screwing Dolores, but then I didn't imagine myself with anyone. Instead, I was in a riverboat, in a white, sterile room very much like the one I'm in now, and from the walls, from a hidden megaphone, Dolores's count came dripping down: one Mississippi, two Mississippi, as if someone were radioing me from shore and I couldn't reply, although deep in my heart all I wanted was to answer, to say: do you read me? I'm fine, I'm alive, I want to come back. And when I opened my eyes Dolores said: that's how you time an orgasm, each Mississippi is a second and no orgasm lasts more than six seconds. We never ended up fucking, Dolores and I, but we were good friends, and when she got married (this was after she graduated) I went to her wedding, and when I congratulated her I said: may your Mississippis be full of joy. The groom, who had been an architecture student like the two of us, but was a year ahead, or had graduated a little while before us, overheard me and thought I was referring to their honeymoon, which of course they were going to spend in the United States. A long time has passed since then. It's been a long time since I thought about Dolores. Dolores taught me to time things.

  Now I time my memories of Laura Damián. Sitting on the floor, I begin: one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four Mississippi, five Mississippi, six Mississippi, and Laura Damián's face, Laura Damián's long hair, settle in my vacant mind for fifty Mississippis or one hundred and fifty Mississippis, until I can't stand it anymore and I open my mouth and-ahh-let my breath out all at once or I spit on the walls. And I'm alone again, I'm empty. The echo of the word Mississippi bounces around in my cranial vault, the image of Laura's body destroyed by a killer car fading again, Laura's eyes open in the sky of Mexico City, no, in the sky of Colonia Roma, Colonia Hipódromo- La Condesa, Colonia Juárez, Colonia Cuauhtémoc, Laura's eyes illuminating the greens and sepias and all the shades of brick and stone of Coyoacán. And then I stop and take a deep breath or two, as if I'm having an attack, and I whisper go away, Laura Damián. Go away, Laura Damián. And then at last her face grows dim and my room isn't Laura Damián's face anymore but a room in a modern asylum, with every modern convenience, and the eyes watching me are the nurses' eyes again and not Laura Damián's (she has eyes in the back of her head!), and if no moonface of a watch glows on my wrist it's not because Laura has taken it, not because Laura has made me swallow it, but because it's been stolen by the lunatics you see running around here, these poor Mexican lunatics of ours, these ignoramuses who strike out or cry but who don't know a thing.

  Amadeo Salvatierra, Calle República de Venezuela, near the Palacio de la Inquisición, Mexico City DF, January 1976. When I found my copy of Caborca I cradled it in my arms, I gazed at it and closed my eyes, gentlemen, because no one is made of stone. And then I opened my eyes and kept rummaging through my papers and came up with Manuel's broadsheet, the Actual no. 1, that he pasted on the walls of Puebla in 1921, the one where he talks about the "Mexican actualist avant garde," terrible sounding, isn't it? but wonderful too. That's also where he says "my madness never figured in any budget," ah, the life of leisure, "my madness never figured in any budget." But there are nice things too, like when he says: "I exert all the young poets, painters, and sculptors of Mexico, those who have yet to be tainted by the coffered gold of government sinecures, those who have yet to be corrupted by the crooked praise of official criticism and the applause of a crass and concupiscent public, those who have yet to lick the plates at the culinary celebrations of Enrique González Martínez, I exert all of them to make art with the steady drip of their intellectual menses. All those of good faith, all those who haven't yet crumbled in the sad, mephitic efflorescence of our nationalist media with its stink of pulquerías and the dying embers of fried food, all are exerted in the name of the Mexican actualist avant-garde to come and fight alongside us in the resplendent ranks of the decouvert…" That Manuel had a silver tongue. A silver tongue! Now, some of the words I don't understand. For example: exert. He must have meant summon, call, convoke, even command, let's see, let's look it up in the dictionary. That's right. Exert means something else. But you never know, it might have been a printer's error, and where it says exert it should say exhort, which would be very like Manuel, or at least the Manuel I knew back then. Or it might be a Latinism or a neologism, who can say. Or a term fallen into disuse. And that's what I told the boys. I said: boys, this was what Manuel Maples Arce's prose was like, hurtling and incendiary, full of words that got us hot and bothered, prose that might not mean anything to you now, but that in its day captivated generals of the Revolution, stalwart men who had seen death and who had killed and who when they read or heard Manuel's words were stopped in their tracks, stopped cold, as if to say what the hell is this, prose that promised poetry like the sea, the sea in the skies of M
exico. But where was I? I had my only copy of Caborca under my arm, the Actual no. 1 in my left hand, and in my right my glass of Los Suicidas mezcal, and as I drank I read to them from that distant year of 1921 and we discussed it all, the passages and the mezcal, what a lovely way to read and drink, at leisure and among friends (young people have always been my friends), and when there was only a little bit left I poured a last round of Los Suicidas, saying a mental goodbye to that old elixir of mine, and I read the last part of the Actual, the Directory of the Avant-Garde, which in its time (and afterward, certainly, and after that too) came as such a surprise to insiders and outsiders, creators and scholars. The directory began with the names of Rafael Cansinos-Assens and Ramón Gómez de la Serna. Strange, isn't it? Cansinos-Assens and Gómez de la Serna, as if Borges and Manuel had been in telepathic communication, wouldn't you say? (The Argentinian, you know, reviewed Manuel's 1922 book, Andamios interiors.) And it went on like this: Rafael Lasso de la Vega. Guillermo de Torre. Jorge Luis Borges. Cleotilde Luisi. (Who was Cleotilde Luisi?) Vicente Ruiz Huidobro. A countryman of yours, I said to one of the boys. Gerardo Diego. Eugenio Montes. Pedro Garfias. Lucía Sánchez Saornil. J. Rivas Panedas. Ernesto López Parra. Juan Larrea. Joaquín de la Escosura. José de Ciria y Escalante. César A. Comet. Isac del Vando Villar. As you see it, with a single a. Probably another printer's error. Adriano del Valle. Juan Las. What a name. Mauricio Bacarisse. Rogelio Buendía. Vicente Risco. Pedro Raida. Antonio Espina. Adolfo Salazar. Miguel Romero Martínez. Ciriquiain Caitarro. Another clunker. Antonio M. Cubero. Joaquín Edwards. He must be a countryman of mine too, said one of the boys. Pedro Iglesias. Joaquín de Aroca. León Felipe. Eliodoro Puche. Prieto Romero. Correa Calderón. Look, I said, all we're getting are the last names now. That has to be a bad sign. Francisco Vighi. Hugo Mayo. Bartolomé Galíndez. Juan Ramón Jiménez. Ramón del Valle-Inclán. José Ortega y Gasset. What in the world is Don José doing on this list! Alfonso Reyes. José Juan Tablada. Diego Rivera. David Alfaro Siqueiros. Mario de Zayas. José D. Frías. Fermín Revueltas. Silvestre Revueltas. P. Echeverría. Atl. The great Dr. Atl, I presume. J. Torres-García. Rafael P. Barradas. J. Salvat Papasseit. José María Yenoy. Jean Epstein. Jean Richard Bloch. Pierre Brune. Do you know who he is? Marie Blanchard. Corneau. Farrey. Here I think Manuel was just pulling names out of a hat. Fournier. Riou. In fact, I'd bet my life on it. Mme. Ghy Lohem. Bloody hell, pardon me. Marie Laurencin. Here things start to improve. Dunozer de Segonzac. Worse again. What French son of a bitch was pulling Manuel's leg? Or did he find the name in some magazine? Honneger. Georges Auric. Ozenfant. Alberto Gleizes. Pierre Reverdy. Out of the swamp at last. Juan Gris. Nicolás Beauduin. William Speth. Jean Paulhan. Guillaume Apollinaire. Cypien. Max Jacob. Jorge Braque. Survage. Coris. Tristan Tzara. Francisco Picabia. Jorge Ribemont-Dessaigne. Renée Dunan. Archipenko. Soupault. Bretón. Paul Élouard. Marcel Duchamp. And here the boys and I agreed that it was arbitrary, to say the least, to call Francis Picabia Francisco and Georges Braque Jorge Braque and not to call Marcel del Campo Marcelo or Paul Éluard Pablo, Éluard without the o, as every lover of French poetry knows. Not to mention Breton with an accent. And the Directory of the Avant-Garde continued with its heroes and errors: Frankel. Sernen. Erik Satie. Elie Faure. Pablo Picasso. Walter Bonrad Arensberg. Celine Arnauld. Walter Pach. Bruce. Please! Morgan Russel. Marc Chagall. Herr Baader. Max Ernst. Christian Schaad. Lipchitz. Ortiz de Zárate. Correia d'Araujo. Jacobsen. Schkold. Adam Fischer. Mme. Fischer. Peer Kroogh. Alf Rolfsen. Jeauneiet. Piet Mondrian. Torstenson. Mme. Alika. Ostrom. Geline. Salto. Weber. Wuster. Kokodika. Kandinsky. Steremberg (com. de B. A. de Moscou). The parenthetical reference is Manuel's, of course. As if people would know perfectly well who all the others were, said one of the boys. Herr Baader, for example, or Coris, or that Kokodika who sounds like Kokoschka, or Riou, or Adam and Mme. Fisher. And why write Moscou and not Moscow? I wondered out loud. But on we go. After the commissioner of Moskva there was no lack of Russians. Mme. Lunacharsky. Erhenbourg. Taline. Konchalowsky. Machkoff. Mme. Ekster. Wlle Monate. Marewna. Larionow. Gondiarowa. Belova. Sontine. With Soutine surely hidden behind the n. Daiiblet. Doesburg. Raynal. Zahn. Derain. Walterowua Zur = Mueklen. He's the best of the lot, no doubt about it. Or she is, because who's to know (in Mexico at least) whether Walterowua Zur = Mueklen is male or female. Jean Cocteau. Pierre Albert Birot. Metsinger. Jean Charlot. Maurice Reynal. Pieux. F. T. Marinetti. G. P. Lucinni. Paolo Buzzi. A. Palazzeschi. Enrique Cavac-chioli. Libero Altomare. Which for some reason, I don't know why, my memory is failing me, boys, sounds like Alberto Savinio to me. Luciano Folgore. What a pretty name, don't you think? there was a division of parachutists in the Duce's army called Folgore. A bunch of queers who got their asses kicked by the Australians. E. Cardile. G. Carrieri. F. Mansella Fontini. Auro d'Alba. Mario Betuda. Armando Mazza. M. Boccioni. C. D. CarrÁ. G. Severini. Balilla Pratella. Cangiullo. Corra. Mariano. Boccioni. It's not me repeating myself, it's Manuel or his wretched printers. Fessy. Setimelli. Carli. Ochsé. Linati. Tita Rosa. Saint-Point. Divoire. Martini. Moretti. Pirandello. Tozzi. Evola. Ardengo. Sarcinio. Tovolato. Daubler. Doesburg. Broglio. Utrillo. Fabri. Vatrignat. Liege. Norah Borges. Savory. Gimmi. Van Gogh. Grunewald. Derain. Cauconnet. Boussingautl. Marquet. Gernez. Fobeen. Delaunay. Kurk. Schwitters. Kurt Schwitters, said one of the boys, the Mexican, as if he'd just found his twin brother lost in linotype hell. Heyniche. Klem. Who might've been Klee. Zirner. Gino. Devil take him, could anything be more obscure! Galli. Bottai. Ciocatto. George Bellows. Giorgio de Chirico. Modigliani. Cantarelli. Soficci. Carena. And that was where the directory ended, with the ominous word etc. after Carena. And when I had finished reading that long list, the boys kneeled or stood at attention, I swear I can't remember which and anyway it doesn't matter, they stood at attention like soldiers or kneeled like true believers, and they drank the last drops of Los Suicidas mezcal in honor of all those strange or familiar names, remembered or forgotten even by their own grandchildren. And I looked at those two boys who just a minute ago had seemed so serious, standing there at attention before me, saluting the flag or their fallen companions, and I too raised my glass and drained it, toasting all our dead.