The Savage Detectives

by Roberto Bolaño

  Hipólito Garcés, Avenue Marcel Proust, Paris, August 1977. When my buddy Ulises Lima showed up in Paris I was thrilled, honest to God. I found him a nice little chambre on the Rue des Eaux, close to where I was living. From Marcel Proust to his place it was hardly any distance at all. You went left, toward Avenue René Boylesve, then turned onto Charles Dickens, and you were on the Rue des Eaux. So we were practically next door, as they say. I had a hot plate in my room and I cooked every day, and Ulises would come eat at my place. But I said: you've got to let me have a little something for it, pues. And he said: Polito, I'll give you money, don't worry, that seems fair, since you buy the food and you cook it too. How much do you want? And I said give me one hundred dollars, pues, Ulises, and that'll be the end of it. And he said that he didn't have any dollars left, all he had were francs, so that was what he gave me. He had the cash and he was a trusting guy.

  One day, though, he said: Polito, I'm eating worse every day, how can a goddamn plate of rice cost so much? I explained to him that rice in France was expensive, not like in Mexico or Peru, here a kilo of rice costs an arm and a leg, pues, Ulises, I told him. He gave me this look, in the brooding kind of way Mexicans do, and he said all right, but at least buy a can of tomato sauce because I'm sick of eating white rice. Of course, I said, and I'll buy wine too, which I forgot because I was in a hurry, but you have to give me a little more money. He gave it to me and the next day I made him his plate of rice with tomato sauce and poured him a glass of red wine. But the next day the wine was gone (I drank it, I admit) and two days later the tomato sauce ran out and he was back to eating plain white rice. And then I made macaroni. Let's see, I'm trying to remember. Then I made lentils, which have lots of iron and are nutritious. And when the lentils were gone I made chickpeas. And then I made white rice again. And one day Ulises stood up and half jokingly let me have it. Polito, he said, I get the feeling you're pulling a fast one. You make the plainest and most expensive food in Paris. No, man, I told him, no, mi causita, you have no idea how expensive things are, but the next day he didn't come to eat. Three days went by and there was no sign of him. After that I stopped by his room on the Rue des Eaux. He wasn't there. But I had to see him, so I sat in the hall waiting for him to get home.

  He showed up around three in the morning. And when he saw me in the hall, in the dark of that long, nasty-smelling hall, he stopped and stood where he was, about twenty feet from me, with his legs braced, like he was expecting me to attack him. But the funny thing was that he was quiet too, he didn't say a word. Holy shit, I thought, old Ulises is pissed and he's going to disemfuckingbowel me right here in this hallway. So I thought it over and stayed where I was. What kind of threat is a shadow on the floor? And I called him by name, Ulises, causita, it's me, Polito, and he says Polito! what the hell are you doing here this time of night, Polito, and then I realized that he hadn't known who I was before and I thought who is this motherfucker expecting? Who did he think I was? And I swear on my mother's grave that right then I was more afraid than before, I don't know why, it must have been how late it was, or that gloomy hall, or my poet's imagination running away with me. Shit, I actually started to shake. I thought I saw another shadow behind Ulises Lima's shadow in the hall. By then, frankly, I was afraid to go down the eight flights of stairs to get out of that spooky place. And yet all I wanted was to run away. But at that moment my fear of being left alone was even stronger. When I got up, one of my legs had a cramp, and I asked Ulises if I could come in. Then he seemed to wake up, and he said of course, Polito, and he opened the door. When we were inside, with the light on, I felt the blood start to circulate in my veins again, and like a heartless bastard, I showed him the books I'd brought. Ulises looked at them one by one and said they were all right, though I know he was dying to have them. I brought them to sell to you, I said. How much do you want for them? he said. I named some crazy sum, to see what would happen.

  Ulises looked at me and said all right, then he put his hand in his pocket and paid me, and stood there looking at me without saying anything. All right, man, I said, well, I'm going now. Should I have a delicious meal waiting for you tomorrow? No, he said, don't expect me. But you will come one of these days, won't you? Remember that if you don't eat you'll starve to death, I said. I'm not coming again, Polito, he said. I don't know what was wrong with me. Inside I was scared shitless (the idea of heading out, walking down the hall, going down the stairs, was killing me), but on the outside I started to talk. Fuck, suddenly I was talking, hearing myself talk, like my voice wasn't mine and the bitch had taken off rambling on its own. I said you have no right, Ulises, with the money I've spent on provisions, if you could see all the good things I've bought, and what do I do with them now? do they rot? do I shove everything down my own throat, Ulises? Is that what you want me to do? What if I get indigestion or stomach cramps from stuffing my face? Answer me, pues, Ulises, don't pretend you can't hear me. That kind of thing. No matter that inside of me I was saying to myself shut up, pues, Polito, you're going too far, this could get ugly, don't push it, shithead-on the outside, in the kind of half-asleep state I was in, my face and lips numb, my tongue flapping loose, the words (words that for once I didn't want to speak!) kept coming out and I heard myself say: what kind of friend are you, Ulises? when I spoiled you like you were more than my buddy, like you were my own brother, causita, my little brother, goddamn it, Ulises, and now you turn your back on me like this. Etc., etc. Why go on? All I can say is that I talked and talked, and Ulises, who stood facing me in that room, so small it seemed more like a coffin, never once took his eyes off me, perfectly still, never doing what I assumed he'd do, what I was afraid he'd do, just standing there like he was letting me dig myself into a hole, like he was saying to himself Polito has two minutes left, a minute and a half, one minute, Polito's got fifty seconds left, poor guy, ten seconds. And I swear it was like I was seeing each and every hair on my body, as if while my eyes were open, another pair of eyes, closed eyes, were scanning every inch of my skin and counting up each hair, eyes that could see more when they were closed than my open eyes could see. I know that doesn't make any fucking sense. And then I couldn't take it anymore and I collapsed on the bed like a slut and I said: Ulises, I feel like shit, Ulises, man, my life is a disaster, I don't know what's wrong with me, I try to do things right but everything turns out wrong, I should go back to Peru, this city is fucking killing me, I'm not the same person I used to be, and on and on I went, letting out everything that was torturing me inside, with my face in the blankets, in Ulises's blankets, I have no idea where they came from but they smelled bad, not just the typical unwashed smell of a chambre de bonne, and not like Ulises, but like something else, like death, an ominous smell that suddenly wormed its way into my brain and made me sit up, holy shit, Ulises, where did you get these blankets, causita, from the morgue? And Ulises was still standing there, not moving, listening to me, and then I thought this is my chance to go and I got up and reached out my hand and touched his shoulder. It was like touching a statue.

  Roberto Rosas, Rue de Passy, Paris, September 1977. There were twelve rooms in our attic apartment. Eight of them were occupied by Latin Americans: one Chilean, Ricardito Barrientos; one Argentinian couple, Sofía Pellegrini and Miguelito Sabotinski; and the rest of us Peruvians, all poets, all at war with one another.

  We liked to call our attic the Passy Commune or Passy Shanty-town.

  We were always arguing and our favorite topics, or pretty much our only topics, were politics and literature. Ricardito Barrientos's room had been rented before by Polito Garcés, who was Peruvian and a poet too, but one day, after an emergency meeting, we decided to give him an ultimatum: Either you leave here this very week motherfucker or we'll kick you down the stairs, take a shit in your bed, put rat poison in your wine, or come up with something worse. Luckily Polito listened to us. If he hadn't I don't know what would've happened.

  One day he came by, though, shuffling along as always, going int
o one room after another asking to borrow money (money he would never return), getting somebody to offer him a little coffee here, a drop of maté there (Sofía Pellegrini hated him like the plague), asking to borrow books, saying that he'd seen Bryce Echenique that week, or Julio Ramón Ribeyro, or that he'd had tea with Hinostroza. The first time you might believe him, the second time you might laugh, but after you'd heard the same lies over and over all you felt was disgust, pity, and alarm because it was clear that Polito wasn't right in the head. Who is, when you get right down to it? Still, none of us is as crazy as Polito.

  Anyway, one day he came by, some evening when almost all of us happened to be around (I know because I heard him knock on other doors, I heard that voice of his, that unmistakable "how's it, causita"), and after a while his shadow fell across the threshold of my room, like he was afraid to come in without being asked, and then I said-and maybe I said it too abruptly-what do you want, motherfucker? and he laughed his little jackass laugh and said ay, Robertito, it's been a long time, man, I'm glad to see you haven't changed, look, I've got a poet here with me who I want you to meet, a buddy from Mexico.

  Only then did I realize that there was someone beside him. A dark, strong, Indian-looking guy. A guy with eyes that seemed sort of liquefied and blurry at the same time, and a doctor's smile, an unusual smile at the Passy Commune, where we all tended to have the smiles of folk musicians or lawyers.

  It was Ulises Lima. That's how I met him. We became friends. Paris friends. He was nothing like Polito, of course. If he had been, we couldn't have been friends.

  I don't remember how long he lived in Paris. I know we saw a lot of each other, even though we had very different personalities. But one day he told me he was leaving. How come, man? I asked, because as far as I knew he loved the city. I think I'm not well, he said, smiling. But is it anything serious? No, nothing serious, he said, just a nuisance. Well, I said, then that's all right, let's have a drink to celebrate. To Mexico! I said, raising my glass. I'm not going back to Mexico, he said, I'm going to Barcelona. What do you mean, man? I said. I have a friend there, and I'll stay at his place for a while. That was all he said and I didn't ask any more questions. Then we went out for more wine and sat drinking near the Porte de Bir Hakeim while I told him about my latest romantic adventures. But his mind was elsewhere, so we started to talk about poetry for a change, a subject I enjoy less and less these days.

  I remember Ulises liked the young French poets. I can testify to that. We, the Passy Shantytown, thought they were disgusting. Spoiled brats or drug addicts. You have to understand, Ulises, I would say to him, we're revolutionaries, we've seen the insides of the jails of Latin America. So how can we care about poetry like that? And the bastard didn't say anything, just laughed. Once he took me to meet Michel Bulteau. Ulises spoke terrible French, so I had to do most of the talking. Then I met Mathieu Messagier, Jean-Jacques Faussot, and Adeline, Bulteau's companion.

  I didn't hit it off with any of them. I asked Faussot whether he could get one of my articles published in the magazine where he worked, this shitty little pop magazine, and he said he'd have to read the article first. A few days later I brought it to him and he didn't like it. I asked Messagier for the address of a French poet, a "grand old man of French letters" who had supposedly met Martín Adán on a trip he took to Lima in the forties, but Messagier wouldn't give it to me. He tried to tell me that the poet was wary of visitors. I'm not going to borrow money from him, I said, I just want to interview him, but it made no difference, it was out of the question. Finally I told Bulteau that I was going to translate him. He liked that and made no objection. I was joking, of course. But then I thought maybe it wasn't such a bad idea. And in fact, I set to work a few nights later. The poem I chose was "Sang de satin." It had never occurred to me before to translate poetry, although I'm a poet and poets are supposed to translate other poets. But no one had translated me, so why should I translate anyone else? Well, so it goes. This time it didn't seem like such a bad idea. Maybe it was because of Ulises, whose influence was making me question old assumptions. Maybe it just seemed like time to do something I'd never done before. I don't know. All I know is that I told Bulteau that I planned to translate him and I planned to publish my translation (publish is the key word) in a nonexistent Peruvian magazine (I made up the name), a magazine that counted Westphalen among its contributors, that's what I told him, and he was happy to agree, although I think he had no idea who Westphalen was, I might as well have said that the magazine published Huamán Poma, or Salazar Bondy. Anyway, I set to work.

  I don't remember whether Ulises had already left or was still around. "Sang de satin." From the start I had trouble with that shitty poem. How to translate the title? "Satin Blood" or "Blood of Satin"? I thought about it for more than a week. And it was then that I was suddenly overcome by the full horror of Paris, the full horror of the French language, the poetry scene, our state as unwanted guests, the sad, hopeless state of South Americans lost in Europe, lost in the world, and then I realized that I wasn't going to be able to finish translating "Satin Blood" or "Blood of Satin," I knew that if I did I would end up murdering Bulteau in his study on the Rue de Téhéran and then fleeing Paris like an outlaw. So in the end I decided not to go through with it and when Ulises Lima left (I can't remember exactly when), that was the end of my dealings with the French poets.

  Simone Darrieux, Rue des Petites Écuries, Paris, September 1977. He never found anything remotely resembling a job. Honestly, I don't know what he lived on. He had money when he got here, that I know for a fact. The first few times we met he was always the one to pay, for coffee, calvados, a few glasses of wine, but he ran out of money fast and as far as I know he had no source of income.

  Once he told me that he'd found a five-thousand-franc note in the street. After that, he said, he walked with his eyes on the ground.

  After a while he found another bill.

  He had some Peruvian friends who gave him work occasionally, a group of Peruvian poets, probably poets in name only, since as everyone knows living in Paris wears you down and erodes your vocation if it isn't ironclad. It coarsens you, it pushes you into oblivion. At least that happens to a lot of the Latin Americans I know. I'm not trying to say it was true of Ulises, but it was definitely true of the Peruvians. They had a kind of cleaning cooperative. They waxed office floors, washed windows, that kind of thing, and Ulises helped them out when one of the cooperative was sick or away from the city. Mostly he filled in when someone was sick, since the Peruvians didn't travel much, although in the summer some of them went off to harvest grapes in the Roussillon. They would leave in groups of two or three, sometimes they traveled alone, and before they left they would say they were off to the Costa Brava for a vacation. I saw them three times. They were miserable human beings. More than one of them tried to get me into bed.

  With what you make, I said to Ulises once, you hardly manage to keep from starving. How do you expect to ever get to Israel? There's time, he answered, and that was the last we talked about money. Actually, now that I think about it, it's hard to say what kind of conversations we had. Just as with Arturo it was always clear (we talked about literature and sex, basically), with Ulises the boundaries were vague. Maybe this was because we saw each other so infrequently (although in his own way he was loyal to our friendship, loyal to my phone number). Maybe it was because he seemed to be, or was, someone who made no demands.

  Sofía Pellegrini, sitting in the Jardins du Trocadero, Paris, September 1977. They called him the Christ of the Rue des Eaux and they all made fun of him, even Roberto Rosas, who claimed to be his best friend in Paris. They laughed at him because he was dumb, basically, or so they said. They used to say only a complete moron could let himself be fooled more than three times by Polito Garcés, but they were forgetting that Polito had fooled them too. The Christ of the Rue des Eaux. No, I never went to see his place. I know people said horrible things about it, that it was a filthy hole, that the wors
t junk in Paris piled up there: trash, magazines, newspapers, books he stole from bookstores, and that all of it soon began to smell like the place and then rotted, blossomed, turned all kinds of crazy colors. They said he could spend whole days without eating a thing, months without a visit to the public baths, but I doubt it because I never saw him looking especially dirty. Anyway, I didn't know him well, I wasn't his friend, but one day he came to our attic in Passy and there was no one home, just me, and I was in bad shape, I was depressed, I had been fighting with my boyfriend, things weren't going well for me, when he showed up I was crying in my chambre, the others had gone to the film society or one of their political meetings (they were all activists and revolutionaries), and Ulises Lima walked down the hallway and didn't knock on any of the doors, as if he knew beforehand that no one would be there, and he headed straight for my chambre, where I was sitting alone on the bed, staring at the wall, and he came in (he was clean, he smelled good) and stood there next to me, not saying anything, all he said was hello, Sofía, and he stayed there until I stopped crying. And that's why I remember him fondly.

  Simone Darrieux, Rue des Petites Écuries, Paris, September 1977. Ulises Lima showered at my house. I was never thrilled about it. I don't like to use a towel after somebody else, especially if we aren't intimate in some way, physically and even emotionally, but still I let him use my shower, then I would gather up the towels and put them in the machine. It helped that he tried to be neat in my apartment. In his own way, but he tried and that's what counts. After I shower I scrub the bathtub and pick the hair out of the drain. It may seem trivial but it drives me up the wall. I hate to find clumps of hair clogging the drain, especially if it isn't mine. Then I pick up the towels I've used and fold them and leave them on the bidet until I have time to put them in the machine. The first few times he came he even brought his own soap, but I told him he didn't have to, that he should feel free to use my soap and shampoo but that he shouldn't even think about touching my sponge.