The Savage Detectives

by Roberto Bolaño

  He was always very formal. He usually called the day before to ask whether it was a good time for him to come, checking to make sure I wouldn't have guests or plans, then we would set a time, and the next day he would arrive right when he said he would, then we'd talk a little and he would head into the bathroom. Then any number of days might go by before I heard from him again, sometimes a week, sometimes two or even three. In the meantime he must have showered at the public baths.

  Once, at the bar on the Rue de la Lune, he told me that he liked the public baths where foreigners went to bathe, black people from Francophone Africa or the Maghreb. I pointed out that poor students went there too. That's true, he said, but especially foreigners. And once, I remember, he asked me whether I had ever been to the public baths in Mexico. Of course I hadn't. They're the real thing, he said. They have saunas, Turkish baths, steam baths. Some of the ones here do too, I told him, but they're more expensive. Not in Mexico, he said. In Mexico they're cheap. I'd never thought twice about Mexican public baths, to be honest. Don't tell me you went to those baths, I said. No, not really, he said. Only once or twice.

  He was a strange person. He wrote in the margins of books. I'm glad I never lent him any of mine. Why? Because I don't like people to write in my books. You won't believe this, but he used to shower with a book. I swear. He read in the shower. How do I know? Easy. Almost all his books were wet. At first I thought it was the rain. Ulises was a big walker. He hardly ever took the metro. He walked back and forth across Paris and when it rained he got soaked because he never stopped to wait for it to clear up. So his books, at least the ones he read most often, were always a little warped, sort of stiff, and I thought it was from the rain. But one day I noticed that he went into the bathroom with a dry book and when he came out the book was wet. That day my curiosity got the better of me. I went up to him and pulled the book away from him. Not only was the cover wet, some of the pages were too, and so were the notes in the margins, some maybe even written under the spray, the water making the ink run, and then I said, for God's sake, I can't believe it, you read in the shower! have you gone crazy? and he said he couldn't help it but at least he only read poetry (and I didn't understand why he said he only read poetry, not at the time, but now I do: he meant that he only read two or three pages, not a whole book), and then I started to laugh, I threw myself on the sofa, writhing in laughter, and he started to laugh too, both of us laughed for I don't know how long.

  Michel Bulteau, Rue de Téhéran, Paris, January 1978. I don't know how he got my phone number, but one night, it must have been after midnight, he called me at home. He asked for Michel Bulteau. I said: this is Michel Bulteau. He said: this is Ulises Lima. Silence. I said: yes? He said: I'm glad I caught you at home, I hope you weren't asleep. I said: no, no I wasn't asleep. Silence. He said: I'd like to see you. I said: now? He said: all right, yes, now, I can come to your place if you want. I said: where are you? but he misunderstood me, and said: I'm Mexican. Then I remembered, very vaguely, that I had received a magazine from Mexico. Still, the name Ulises Lima didn't ring any bells. I said: have you ever heard of the Question Marks? He said: no, I've never heard them. I said: I think they're Mexican. He said: the Question Marks? Who are the Question Marks? I said: a rock group, of course. He said: do they wear masks when they play? At first I didn't understand what he'd said. Masks? No, of course they don't wear masks. Why would they? Are there rock groups in Mexico that perform in masks? He said: sometimes. I said: it sounds ridiculous, but it might be interesting. Where are you calling me from? Your hotel? He said: no, from the street. I said: do you know how to get to the metro station Miromesnil? He said: sure, no problem. I said: twenty minutes. He said: I'm on my way, and hung up. As I was putting on my jacket I thought: but I don't know what he looks like! What do Mexican poets look like? I don't know a single one! All I've seen is a picture of Octavio Paz! But this poet, I sensed, would definitely not look like Octavio Paz. Then I thought about the Question Marks, and Elliot Murphie, and something Elliot had told me when I was in New York, about the Mexican Death's-Head, a guy they called the Mexican Death's-Head, who I only saw from a distance at a bar on Franklin Street and Broadway. The Mexican Death's-Head was a musician but all I saw was a shadow, and I asked Elliot what it was about the guy he wanted to show me, and Elliot said: he's a kind of worm, he has worm eyes and he talks like a worm. How do worms talk? In doublespeak, said Elliot. All right. Clear enough. And why is he called the Mexican Death's-Head? I asked. But Elliot wasn't listening to me anymore or he was talking to someone else, so I just assumed this guy must be Mexican or have spent time in Mexico at some point in his life, in addition to being as thin as a rail. But I didn't see his face, just his shadow as it crossed the bar. A shadow empty of metaphor, evoking nothing, a shadow that was only a shadow with no wish to be anything else. So I put on my black jacket, combed my hair, and went out thinking about the stranger who had called me and the Mexican Death's-Head I'd seen in New York. It's only a few minutes from Rue Téhéran to the Miromesnil metro station, walking fairly quickly, but you have to cross Boulevard Haussmann and then head along Avenue Percier and part of Rue la Boétie, streets that at that time of night are mostly lifeless, as if starting at ten they were bombarded with X-rays, and then I thought that it might have been better to meet the stranger at the Monceau metro station, so that I would've had to walk in the opposite direction, from Rue Téhéran to Rue de Monceau, on to Avenue Ruysdaël and then Avenue Ferdousi, which crosses the Parc de Monceau, because at that time of night it's full of junkies and dealers and sad policemen beamed in from other worlds, the languid gloom of the park leading up to the Place de la République Dominicaine, an auspicious place for a meeting with the Mexican Death's-Head. But I'd chosen my path and I followed it to the steps of the Rue de Miromesnil station, which was deserted and immaculate. I confess that the metro steps had never seemed so suggestive, and at the same time so inscrutable. And yet they looked the same as ever. I realized immediately that this was an aura I'd conjured up myself by agreeing to meet a stranger at such an ungodly hour, which isn't something I'd normally do. And yet I'm not in the habit of ignoring the call of fate. There I was and that was all that mattered. But except for a clerk who was reading a book and must have been waiting for someone, there was no one on the stairs. So I started down. I'd made up my mind to wait five minutes, then leave and forget the whole thing. At the first turn I came upon an old woman wrapped in rags and cardboard, sleeping or pretending to sleep. A few feet farther on, watching the old woman as if she were a snake, I saw a man with long black hair whose features may have been what you'd call Mexican, though I really wouldn't know. I stopped and took a good look at him. He was shorter than me and he was wearing a worn leather jacket, carrying four or five books under his arm. All at once he seemed to awake and he fixed me with his gaze. It was him, beyond a doubt. He came up and offered me his hand. His grip was peculiar. As if, as we shook, he threw in Masonic code and signals from the Mexican underworld. A tickling and morphologically peculiar handshake, in any case, as if the hand shaking mine had no skin or were only a sheath, a tattooed sheath. But never mind his hand. I said that it was a beautiful night and we should go outside and walk. It's as if it were still summer, I said. He followed me in silence. For a moment I was afraid he wouldn't say a word the entire time we were together. I looked at his books. One of them was my Ether-Mouth, another was by Claude Pelieu, and the rest might have been by Mexican authors I'd never heard of. I asked him how long he'd been in Paris. A long time, he said. His French was terrible. I suggested that we speak in English and he agreed. We walked along the Rue de Miromesnil to the Faubourg St. Honoré. Our strides were long and rapid, as if we were late to an important meeting. I'm not the kind of person who likes to walk. And yet that night we walked nonstop, at top speed, along the Faubourg St. Honoré to the Rue Boissy d'Anglas and on to the Champs-Élyseés, where we turned right again, continuing on to the Avenue Churchill and turning left, the vague s
hadow of the Grand Palais behind us, making straight for the Pont Alexandre III, our pace never slackening, while in occasionally unintelligible English the Mexican reeled off a story that I had trouble following, a story of lost poets and lost magazines and works no one had ever heard of, in the middle of a landscape that might have been California or Arizona or some Mexican region bordering those states, a real or imaginary place, bleached by the sun and lost in the past, forgotten, or at least no longer of the slightest importance here, in Paris, in the 1970s. A story from the edge of civilization, I said. And he said yes, yes, I guess so, yes. And then I said to him: so you've never heard the Question Marks? And he said no, he'd never heard them. And then I said that he had to hear them someday, because they were very good, but really I only said that because I didn't know what else to say.

  8

  Amadeo Salvatierra, Calle República de Venezuela, near the Palacio de la Inquisición, Mexico City DF, January 1976. I said to them: boys, the Los Suicidas mezcal is gone, that's an undeniable, incontrovertible fact, so why doesn't one of you go down and buy me a bottle of Sauza? and one of them, the Mexican, said: I'll go, Amadeo, and he was already on his way to the door when I stopped him and said wait a minute, you're forgetting the money, my friend, and he looked at me and said don't even think about it, Amadeo, we'll get this one. Such nice boys. I did give him some instructions before he left, though: I told him to head down Venezuela to Brasil, then turn right and walk up to Calle Honduras, to the Plaza de Santa Catarina, and turn left, then walk until he came to Chile and then turn right again and keep on as if he were going to La Lagunilla market, and there, on the left side of the street, he would find the bar La Guerrerense, next to the hardware store El Buen Tono, you couldn't miss it, and at La Guerrerense he should say that I, the scribe Amadeo Salvatierra, had sent him, and he should hurry. Then, as I was going through some papers, the other boy got up from his seat and started to examine my library. In fact, I didn't see him, I just heard him, stepping forward, pulling out a book, putting it back. I heard the noise his finger made as he ran it along the spines of my books! But I couldn't see him. I was sitting down again, I had put my money back in my wallet, and with shaky hands (once you reach a certain age drinking isn't what it used to be), I was going through my old, yellowing papers. My head was bent and my vision was blurred and the Chilean boy moved silently around my library and all I heard was the sound of his index finger or his little finger, such a need that boy had to touch everything, skimming like lightning along the spines of my massive tomes, his finger a buzz of flesh and leather, of skin and pasteboard, a sound pleasing to the ear and sleep inducing, and I must really have fallen asleep because suddenly I closed my eyes (or maybe they'd been closed for a while) and I saw the Plaza de Santo Domingo with its archways, Calle Venezuela, the Palacio de la Inquisición, the Cantina Las Dos Estrellas on Calle Loreto, the Cafetería La Sevillana on Justo Sierra, the Cantina Mi Oficina on Misionero near Pino Suárez, where men in uniform and dogs and women weren't allowed in, with the exception of one woman, the only woman who ever went there, and I saw that woman walking those streets again, down Loreto, down Soledad, down Correo Mayor, down Moneda, I saw her hurry across the Zócalo, ah, what a sight, a woman in her twenties in the 1920s crossing the Zócalo as fast as if she were late to meet a lover or on her way to some little job in one of the stores downtown, a woman modestly dressed in cheap but pretty clothes, her hair jet-black, her back straight, her legs not very long but unutterably graceful like all young women's legs, whether they be skinny, fat, or shapely-sweet, determined little legs, and feet clad in shoes with no heel or the lowest possible heel, cheap but pretty and most of all comfortable, as if they were made for walking fast, for meeting someone or getting to work, although I know she isn't meeting anyone, nor is she expected at any job. So where is she going? Or is she going nowhere at all, and is this the way she always walks? By now the woman has crossed the Zócalo and she's walking along Monte Piedad to Tacuba, where the crowds are thicker and she can't walk as fast anymore, and she turns down Tacuba, slowing, and for an instant the throngs hide her from sight, but then she appears again, there she is, walking toward the Alameda, or maybe she's stopping somewhere nearer by, maybe she's headed to the post office, because now I can clearly see papers in her hands, they could be letters, but she doesn't go into the post office, she crosses the street to the Alameda and stops, as if she's trying to catch her breath, and then she keeps walking, at the same pace, through the gardens, under the trees, and just as there are women who see the future, I see the past, Mexico's past, and I see the back of this woman walking out of my dream, and I say to her: where are you going, Cesárea? where are you going, Cesárea Tinajero?

  Felipe Müller, Bar Céntrico, Calle Tallers, Barcelona, January 1978. For me, 1977 was the year I moved in with my girlfriend. We had both just turned twenty. We found an apartment on Calle Tallers and went to live there. I was doing proofreading for a publishing house and she had a scholarship at the same school where Arturo Belano's mother was on scholarship. In fact, it was Arturo's mother who introduced us. Nineteen seventy-seven was also the year we traveled to Paris. We stayed in Ulises Lima's chambre de bonne. Ulises, I have to say, wasn't doing so well. The room was a dump. Between the two of us, my girlfriend and I tidied things up a little bit, but no matter how much we swept and mopped there was something there that couldn't be scrubbed away. At night (my girlfriend slept in the bed and Ulises and I slept on the floor) there was something shiny on the ceiling, a glow that came from the only window (which was crusted with dirt) and spread over the walls and ceiling like a tide of seaweed. When we got back to Barcelona we discovered that we had scabies. It was a blow. The only person we could have gotten it from was Ulises. Why didn't he warn us? my girlfriend complained. Maybe he didn't know, I said. But then I thought back on those days in Paris and I saw Ulises scratching himself, drinking wine straight out of the bottle and scratching himself, and the image convinced me my girlfriend was right. He knew it and he kept it to himself. For a while I held a grudge against him because of the scabies, but then it stopped mattering so much and we even laughed about it. Our problem was curing ourselves. We didn't have a shower at our apartment and we had to wash at least once a day with sulfur soap and then use a special cream, Sarnatín. So besides being a good year, 1977 was also the year when for a month or a month and a half we were constantly visiting friends who had showers. One of those friends was Arturo Belano. He didn't just have a shower, he had an enormous claw-foot bathtub that could easily fit three people. The problem was, Arturo didn't live alone, he lived with seven or eight other people, in a kind of urban commune, and some of them didn't like my girlfriend and me showering at their house. Well, it wasn't as if we really showered there much, in the end. Nineteen seventy-seven was the year Arturo Belano found work as a night watchman at a campground. Once I went to visit him. They called him the sheriff, and that made him laugh. I think that was the summer when the two of us broke with visceral realism. We were publishing a magazine in Barcelona, a magazine with hardly any funding and almost no distribution, and we wrote a letter announcing our resignation from visceral realism. We didn't repudiate anything, we didn't bad-mouth our friends in Mexico, we just said we weren't members of the group anymore. Mostly we were busy working and trying to get by.

  Mary Watson, Sutherland Place, London, May 1978. In the summer of 1977 I traveled to France with my friend Hugh Marks. At the time I was reading literature at Oxford and I was living on a tiny scholarship. Hugh was on the dole. We weren't lovers, just friends. The truth is, we left London together that summer because we'd each been through a bad relationship, and we knew nothing like that could ever happen between us. Hugh had been dumped by a horrible Scottish girl. I had been dumped by a boy from university, someone who was always surrounded by girls and whom I thought I was in love with.

  Our money ran out in Paris, but we weren't ready to go home, so we made our way out of the city somehow and hitched
south. Near Orléans we were picked up by a camper van. The driver was German and his name was Hans. He was heading south too, with his wife, a Frenchwoman called Monique, and their little boy. Hans had long hair and a bushy beard. He looked like a blond Rasputin, and he'd been all the way around the world.

  A little while later we picked up Steve, from Leicester, who worked in a nursery school, and a few miles on we picked up John, from London, who was out of work, like Hugh. It was a big van and there was plenty of room for all of us. Besides-I noticed this immediately-Hans liked to have company, people he could talk to and tell his stories to. Monique didn't seem quite as comfortable having so many strangers around, but she did what Hans told her to do and anyway she was busy taking care of the boy.

  Just before we got to Carcassonne, Hans told us that he had business in a town in the Roussillon, and that if we wanted he could find good work for all of us. Hugh and I thought this was fantastic and we said yes straightaway. Steve and John asked what kind of work it was. Hans said we'd be picking grapes on land that belonged to one of Monique's uncles. And when we had finished picking her uncle's grapes we could go on our way with plenty of money, since while we were working our food and lodging would be free. When Hans finished we all agreed that it sounded like a good deal and we turned off the main road and made our way through one tiny village after another, all surrounded by vineyards, down rough tracks, a place like a labyrinth, I said to Hugh, a place (and this I didn't say) that in other circumstances would have frightened or repelled me. If, for example, I'd been alone instead of with Hugh, and Steve and John too. But I wasn't alone, luckily. I was with friends. Hugh is like a brother. And Steve and I hit it off right away too. John and Hans were another story. John was a kind of zombie and I didn't like him much. Hans was pure brute force, a megalomaniac, but you could count on him, or that's what I thought at the time.