The Savage Detectives

by Roberto Bolaño

  Around four in the morning we said our good nights. The Pirate and I headed for El Borrado. On our way out of Port-Vendres, we walked along quickly, singing as we walked. Then, where the road stops being a road and turns into a path that winds through the rocks to the caves, we slowed down, because even drunk as we were, we both knew one false step in the dark could be fatal with the waves breaking down below. There's usually plenty of noise along that path at night, but on this particular night it was mostly quiet, and for a while all we could hear was the sound of our footsteps and the gentle surf on the rocks. But then I heard a different kind of noise and I don't know why but I got the feeling there was someone behind us. I stopped and turned around, and looked into the dark, but I didn't see anything. A few feet ahead of me, the Pirate had stopped too and was standing there listening. Neither of us spoke, or even moved, and we just waited. From very far away came the whisper of a car and a muffled laugh, as if the driver had lost his mind. And still we didn't hear the noise that I'd heard, which was the sound of footsteps. It must have been a ghost, I heard the Pirate say, and we both started walking again. At the time, it was just him and me in the caves, because Mahmoud's cousin or uncle had come to get him so he could help get ready for the harvest in some village near Montpellier. Before we went to bed the Pirate and I smoked a cigarette, looking out to sea. Then we said good night and went off to our caves. I spent a while thinking about my stuff, the trip I had to make to Albi, the Isobel's bad streak, Marguerite and the Desnos poems, an article about the Baader-Meinhof group I'd read that morning in Libération. Just when my eyes were closing I heard it again, the footsteps coming closer, stopping, the shadowy figure that made the footsteps and watched the dark mouths of caves. It wasn't the Pirate, that much I knew, I knew the Pirate's walk and it wasn't him. But I was too tired to get out of my sleeping bag or maybe I was already asleep and still hearing the footsteps, and at any rate, I thought that whoever was making the noise was no threat to me, no threat to the Pirate, and if it was somebody looking for a fight then he'd find one, but for that to happen he would have to come right into our caves and I knew that the stranger wouldn't come in. I knew he was just looking for an empty cave of his own where he could sleep.

  The next morning I found him. He was sitting on a flat rock like a chair, watching the sea and smoking a cigarette. It was the stranger from Raoul's, and when he saw me come out of my cave he got up and offered me his hand. I don't like strangers to touch me before I've washed my face. So I stood there staring at him and tried to follow what he was saying, but all I could catch were stray words: "comfort," "nightmare," "girl." Then I headed off to Madame Francinet's orchard, where there's a well, and he stayed where he was, smoking his cigarette. When I got back he was still smoking (he smoked like a fiend) and when he saw me he got up again and said: Alain, let me buy you breakfast. I didn't remember telling him my name. As we were leaving El Borrado I asked how he'd found the caves, who had told him that there were caves at El Borrado where you could sleep. He said it was Marguerite, he called her the Desnos reader. He said that when the Pirate and I left he stayed behind with Marguerite and François and asked if there was somewhere he could spend the night. And Marguerite had told him that there were some empty caves outside of town where the Pirate and I lived. The rest was simple. He ran and caught up with us and then he chose a cave, and unrolled his sleeping bag, and that was it. When I asked him how he'd made his way across the rocks, where the road is so bad it isn't even a road, he said it hadn't been so hard, we were ahead of him and all he did was follow in our footsteps.

  That morning we had coffee and croissants for breakfast at Raoul's, and the stranger told me his name was Arturo Belano and he was looking for a friend. I asked who his friend was and why he was looking for him here, in Port-Vendres. He took the last francs out of his pocket, ordered two cognacs, and started to talk. He said his friend had been living with another friend, his friend was waiting for something, a job, maybe, I can't remember, and his friend's friend had kicked his friend out of the house, and then when Belano heard about it he went looking for him. Where does your friend live? I said. He doesn't have a home, he said. And where do you live? I said. In a cave, he said, but he was smiling, like he was kidding. In the end, it turned out that he was staying with a professor at the University of Perpignan, in Collioure, nearby. You can see Collioure from El Borrado. And then I asked him how he'd learned that his friend had been kicked out. And he said: my friend's friend told me. And I asked: the same one who kicked him out? And he said: that's right. And I said: in other words, first he kicks him out and then he tells you? And he said: what happened was, he got scared. And I asked: what was it that scared this so-called friend? And he said: that my friend might kill himself. And I said: so you mean that even though he thought your friend might kill himself, this friend of your friend goes and kicks him out? And he said: that's right, I couldn't have put it better myself. And by then he and I were laughing and half drunk, and when he left, with his little pack over his shoulder, when he left to go hitchhiking around the closest towns, well, by then we were pretty good friends. We'd had lunch together (the Pirate joined us a little later), and I'd told him how unfairly I was being treated by the judges in Albi, and where we worked, and when it started to get dark he left and a week went by before I saw him again. And he still hadn't found his friend, but I think he'd more or less given up on it by then. We bought a bottle of wine and took a stroll around the port and he told me that a year ago he'd worked unloading ships. This time he was only here for a few hours. He was dressed better than before. He asked me how things were going with my case in Albi. He also asked me about the Pirate and the caves. He wanted to know if we were still living there. I told him no, that we'd moved to the boat, not so much because of the cold, which was creeping in, as for financial reasons. We didn't have a franc and on the boat we at least got hot meals. A little while later, he left. According to the Pirate, the guy was in love with me. You're crazy, I said. Why else would he come to Port-Vendres? What does he want here?

  Halfway through October he showed up again. I was stretched out on my bunk daydreaming when I heard someone outside saying my name. When I went out on deck I saw him sitting on one of the piles. How's it going, Lebert, he said. I went down to say hello and we lit cigarettes. It was a cold morning, there was a light fog, and no one was around. Everybody, I guessed, must be at Raoul's. In the distance you could hear the sound of winches where a boat was being loaded. Let's get some breakfast, he said. All right, let's get some breakfast, I said. But neither of us moved. We saw a person walking toward us from the seawall. Belano smiled. Fuck, he said, it's Ulises Lima. We were quiet, waiting for him, until he got to where we were. Ulises Lima was shorter than Belano but sturdier. He was carrying a little pack over his shoulder like Belano. As soon as they saw each other they started to talk in Spanish, although their greeting, the way they greeted each other, was casual, flat. I told them I was heading over to Raoul's. Belano said all right, we'll come by later, and I left them there, talking.

  The crew of the Isobel were all at the bar. They were looking gloomy, for good reason, although if you ask me it only makes it worse to get depressed when things are going badly. So I came in, took a look around to see who was there, made a joke in a loud voice or made fun of them, and then I ordered coffee and a croissant and a cognac and started to read Libération from the day before, since François usually bought it and left it at the bar. I was reading an article about the Yuyu of Zaire when Belano and his friend came in and headed over to my table. They ordered four croissants and the disappeared Ulises Lima ate all four. Then they ordered three ham and cheese sandwiches, one for me. I remember that Lima had a strange voice. He spoke French better than his friend. I don't know what we talked about, maybe the Yuyu of Zaire. All I know is that at a certain moment in the conversation Belano asked me if I could find work for Lima. I wanted to laugh. All of us here are looking for work, I said. No, said Belano, I'm talking
about a job on the boat. On the Isobel? But it's the Isobel's crew that's looking for work! I said. Exactly, said Belano. So there has to be a free spot. And in fact, two of the fishermen from the Isobel had found construction jobs in Perpignan, which would keep them busy for at least a week. We'd have to talk to the skipper, I said. Lebert, said Belano, I'm sure you can get my friend the job. There's no money in it, I said. But there's a bunk, said Belano. The problem is, I doubt your friend knows anything about fishing or boats, I said. Of course he does, said Belano, don't you, Ulises? A shitload, said Ulises. I sat there looking at them because it was obvious it wasn't true, all you had to do was look at their faces, but then I asked myself who was I to be so sure what people did. I've never been in America. What do I know about the fishermen over there?

  That same morning I went to talk to the skipper and I told him I had a new crew member for him, and the skipper said: all right, Lebert, he can take Amidou's bunk, but only for a week. And when I got back to Raoul's there was a bottle of wine on Belano and Lima's table, and then Raoul brought out three plates of fish soup. It was pretty mediocre soup, but Belano and Lima kept going on about how it was French cooking at its best. I don't know if they were making fun of Raoul or themselves or if they were serious. I think they were serious. Then we ate a salad with boiled fish, and it was the same thing all over again, compliments to the chef, what a salad, what a classic Provençal salad, when it was obvious that it was hardly decent for Roussillon. But Raoul was happy and anyway they were paying cash, so what more could he ask? Then François and Marguerite came in and we invited them to sit with us and Belano made everyone eat dessert and then he ordered a bottle of champagne, but Raoul didn't have champagne and he had to settle for another bottle of wine, and a couple of the fishermen from the Isobel who were at the bar came over to our table and I introduced them to Lima. I said: this guy is going to work with us, he's a sailor from Mexico, yes sir, said Belano, the Flying Dutchman of Lake Pátzcuaro, and the fishermen said hello to Lima and shook his hand, although something about Lima's hand struck them as odd, of course it wasn't a fisherman's hand, that's something you notice right away, but they must have thought the same thing I did, which was who knows what the fishermen are like in a country that far away. The Fisher of Souls of the Casa del Lago of Chapultepec, said Belano, and things went on like that, if I'm remembering right, until six in the afternoon. Then Belano paid, said goodbye to everyone, and left for Collioure.

  That night Lima slept on the Isobel with us. The next day was a bad day. It dawned cloudy and we spent all morning and part of the afternoon getting our tackle in order. Lima was assigned to clean the hold. It smelled so bad down below that we all avoided the job, the stink of rotten fish so strong it could knock a man off his feet, but the Mexican stuck it out. I think the skipper did it to test him. He told him to clean the hold. And I said: pretend you're doing it and come back up on deck in two minutes. But Lima went down and stayed there for more than an hour. At lunchtime the Pirate made a fish stew and Lima wouldn't eat it. Eat, eat, said the Pirate, but Lima said he wasn't hungry. He sat resting for a while, away from us, as if he was afraid he'd throw up if he watched us eat, and then he went back down into the hold. The next day, at three in the morning, we set out to sea. A few hours were all it took for us to realize that Lima had never been on a boat in his life. Let's just hope he doesn't fall overboard, said the skipper. Everybody looked at Lima, who was trying his best but didn't know how to do anything, and at the Pirate, who was already drunk, and all they could do was shrug their shoulders, without complaining, although I'm sure that at that moment they were envying their two fellow workers who'd managed to find construction jobs in Perpignan. I remember the day was overcast, with rain clouds rolling in from the southeast, but then the wind changed and the clouds lifted. At twelve we brought in the nets and there was practically nothing in them. At lunch we were all in a miserable mood. I remember Lima asked me how long things had been like this and I told him it had been at least a month. As a joke the Pirate suggested we set the boat on fire, and the skipper said that if he heard anything like that from him again he'd punch his lights out. Then we set sail northeast and in the afternoon we dropped the nets again in a place we'd never fished before. None of us was putting much into it, I remember, except the Pirate, who by that time of day was completely drunk and babbling in the control room, talking about a gun he'd stashed away someplace or staring for a long time at the blade of a kitchen knife and then looking around for the skipper and saying that every man had his limits, that kind of thing.

  When it began to get dark we realized the nets were full. We hauled them in and there were more fish in the hold than on all the previous days combined. Suddenly we started to work like crazy. We kept heading northeast and we kept dropping the nets and bringing them in again full of fish. Even the Pirate did his best. We kept it up all night and all morning, not sleeping, following the shoal of fish as it moved toward the eastern end of the gulf. At six in the afternoon on the second day the hold was overflowing, something none of us had ever seen before, although the skipper said that ten years ago he'd seen a catch that was almost as big. When we got back to Port-Vendres, few of us could believe what had happened. We unloaded, slept a little, and went out again. This time we couldn't find the big shoal, but the fishing was very good. Those two weeks you could say we lived more at sea than in port. Afterward everything went back to normal, but we knew that we were rich, because our pay was a percentage of the catch. Then the Mexican said that he was finished, that he had enough money now to do what he needed to do and he was leaving. The Pirate and I asked him what he needed to do. Travel, he said. With what I've earned I can buy a plane ticket to Israel. I bet there's a girl waiting for you there, the Pirate said. More or less, said the Mexican. Then I went with him to talk to the skipper. The skipper didn't have the money yet. The fish-processing plants take a while to pay, especially if it's such a big haul, and Lima had to hang around a few more days. But he didn't want to sleep on the Isobel anymore. He disappeared for a couple of days. When I saw him again he told me he'd been to Paris. He'd hitchhiked there and back. That night the Pirate and I bought him dinner at Raoul's, and then he came to sleep on the boat even though he knew we were leaving Port-Vendres at four in the morning for the Gulf of Lion, trying to find that incredible shoal. We were at sea for two days and the fishing was only average.

  After that, Lima decided he'd rather spend the time until he was paid sleeping in one of the El Borrado caves. The Pirate and I went with him one afternoon and showed him which caves were the best, where the well was, which path he should take at night so he wouldn't fall over the cliff: basically, the secrets of gracious living al fresco. When we weren't at sea we saw him at Raoul's. Lima made friends with Marguerite and François and a German in his forties, Rudolph, who worked in and around Port-Vendres doing odd jobs and who claimed he'd been a soldier in the Wehrmacht when he was ten and been given the Iron Cross. When everyone expressed disbelief, he brought out the medal and showed it to whoever wanted to see it: a blackened, rusty iron cross. And then he spat on it and swore in German and French. He held the medal ten inches from his face and talked to it like it was a dwarf and made faces at it and then he put it down and spat on it with rage or disgust. One night I said to him: if you hate the fucking medal so much why don't you fucking throw it in the fucking ocean? Then Rudolph got quiet, he seemed ashamed, and he put the Iron Cross away in his pocket.

  And one morning we got our pay at last and that same morning Belano showed up again and we celebrated the Mexican's trip to Israel. Near midnight, the Pirate and I went with them to the station. Lima was taking the twelve o'clock train to Paris and from Paris he'd catch the first flight to Tel Aviv. I swear there wasn't a soul at the station. We sat on a bench outside, and a little while later the Pirate fell asleep. Well, said Belano, I get the feeling this is the last time we'll see each other. We'd been quiet for a long time and his voice startled me. I thought he was t
alking to me, but when Lima answered him in Spanish, I realized he wasn't. They talked for a while. Then the train came, the train from Cerbère, and Lima got up and said goodbye to me. Thank you for teaching me how to work on a boat, Lebert, that was what he said. He didn't want to wake the Pirate. Belano went with him to the train. I watched them shake hands and then the train left. That night Belano slept at El Borrado and the Pirate and I went to the Isobel. The next day Belano was gone from Port-Vendres.

  9

  Amadeo Salvatierra, Calle República de Venezuela, near the Palacio de la Inquisición, Mexico City DF, January 1976. Then I heard voices. They were talking to me, saying: Señor Salvatierra, Amadeo, are you all right? I opened my eyes and there were the two boys, one of them with the bottle of Sauza in his hand. I said: it's nothing, boys, I just drifted off. At my age sleep takes you when you least expect it and never when it should, I mean at midnight, when you're in your bed, which is just when the damn thing disappears or plays hard to get, and leaves old people wide awake. But I don't mind not being able to sleep because then I spend hours reading and sometimes I even have time to go through my papers. The trouble is I end up falling asleep anywhere, even at work, which is bad for my reputation. Don't worry, Amadeo, said the boys, if you want to take a nap, go ahead and take one, we can come back another day. No, boys, I'm all right now, I said, let's see, where's that tequila? And then one of them opened the bottle and poured forth the nectar of the gods into our respective glasses, the same ones we'd been drinking from before, which some consider a sign of slovenliness and others the ultimate refinement, since when the glass is, shall we say, glazed with mezcal, the tequila is more at ease, like a naked woman in a fur coat. Salud, then! I said. Salud, they said. Then I pulled out the magazine I still had under my arm and waved it before their eyes. Oh, those boys: they both grabbed for it, but they were too slow. This is the first and last issue of Caborca, I told them, Cesárea's magazine, the official organ, as they say, of visceral realism. Naturally, most of the contributors weren't members of the group. Here's Manuel, here's Germán, there's nothing by Arqueles, here's Salvador Gallardo, look: here's Salvador Novo, here's Pablito Lezcano, here's Encarnación Guzmán Arredondo, here's yours truly, and next come the foreigners: Tristan Tzara, André Breton, and Philippe Soupault, eh? what a trio. And then I did let them take the magazine from me and it was with great satisfaction that I watched the two of them bury their heads in those old octavo pages, Cesárea's magazine, though cosmopolites that they were, the first thing they turned to were the translations, the poems by Tzara, Breton, and Soupault, in translations by Pablito Lezcano, Cesárea Tinajero, and yours truly, respectively. If I remember correctly, the poems were "The White Swamp," "The White Night," and "Dawn and the City," which Cesárea wanted to translate as "The White City," but I refused to let her. Why did I refuse? Well, because it was wrong, gentlemen. Dawn and the city is one thing and a white city is another, and that's where I put my foot down, no matter how fond I was of Cesárea back then. Not as fond as I should have been, I grant you, but truly fond of her all the same. Our French certainly left much to be desired, except maybe Pablito's. Believe it or not, I've lost my French completely, but we still translated, Cesárea in a slapdash way, if you don't mind my saying so, reinventing the poem however she happened to see fit, while I stuck slavishly to the ineffable spirit as well as the letter of the original. Naturally, we made mistakes, the poems wound up battered like piñatas, and on top of it all, believe me, we had ideas of our own, opinions of our own. For example, Soupault's poem and me. To put it simply: as far as I was concerned, Soupault was the greatest French poet of the century, the one who would go farthest, you understand, and now it's been years and years since I've heard a word about him, even though as far as I know he's still alive. Meanwhile, I knew nothing about Éluard and look how far he's gotten, every prize but the Nobel, yes? Did Aragon get a Nobel? No, I suppose not. They gave one to Char, I think, but he probably wasn't writing poetry at the time. What about Saint John Perse? I have no opinion on the subject. They couldn't possibly have given one to Tristan Tzara. The strange turns life takes! Then the boys started to read Manuel, List, Salvador Novo (they loved him!), me (no, don't read me, I said, it's too depressing, a waste of time), Encarnación, Pablito. Who was this Encarnación Guzmán? they asked. Who was this Pablito Lezcano, who translated Tzara and wrote like Marinetti and supposedly spoke French like a scholarship student at the Alliance Française? It was as if I'd returned to life, as if night had stopped in its tracks, peeked through the blinds, and said: Señor Salvatierra, Amadeo, you have my permission, get out there and declaim until you're hoarse-I mean, what I'm trying to say is that I didn't feel sleepy at all anymore, it was as if the tequila I'd just swallowed had met up with the Los Suicidas in my guts, in my obsidian liver, and was bowing down to it, as well it should, since certain class distinctions still exist. So we poured another round and then I started to tell them stories about Pablito Lezcano and Encarnación Guzmán. They didn't like Encarnación's two poems, they were very frank with me, the poems didn't hold water, and goodness, as it happened, that was close enough to what I thought and believed, that poor Encarnación was included in Caborca less because she was any good than because Cesárea had a weakness for her, the weakness of one poetess for another, though who knows what Cesárea saw in Encarnación or exactly what kind of compromises she made for Encarnación's sake or for her own sake. It's a normal part of Mexican literary life, publishing one's friends. And Encarnación may not have been a good poet (as I myself wasn't), she may not even have been a poet at all, good or bad (as I myself wasn't, alas), but she was a good friend of Cesárea's. And Cesárea would have taken bread or tortilla from her own mouth to feed her friends! So I talked to them about Encarnación Guzmán. I told them that she was born in Mexico City in 1903, approximately, according to my calculations, and that she met Cesárea outside of a movie theater, don't laugh, it's true, I don't know what the movie was, though it must have been something sad, maybe with Chaplin in it, but anyway, both of them were crying as they came out and they looked at each other and started to laugh, Cesárea probably raucously, she had her own peculiar sense of humor, it would erupt, just a spark or a glance and bam! all of a sudden Cesárea would be rolling on the ground laughing, and Encarnación, well, Encarnación probably laughed more discreetly. At the time, Cesárea was living in a tenement on Calle Las Cruces and Encarnación was living with an aunt (the poor thing had lost her father and mother), on Calle Delicias, I think. The two of them worked long days, Cesárea at the office of mi general Diego Carvajal, a general who had befriended the stridentists, although he didn't know a goddamn thing about literature, that's the truth, and Encarnación as a salesgirl in a dress shop on Niño Perdido. Who knows why they became friends, what they saw in each other. Cesárea didn't have a thing in the world, but one look at her told you that she was a woman who knew what she wanted. Encarnación was the complete opposite, very pretty, certainly, and always well dressed (Cesárea would put on the first thing she could find and sometimes she even wore a peasant's shawl), but insecure and fragile as a porcelain statuette in the middle of a bar fight. Her voice was, how to put it? piping, a slight voice, not forceful at all, though she raised it so that others could hear her, the poor thing being accustomed since she was a child to doubting her powers of speech, a shrill voice, essentially, and an extremely unpleasant one, which I only heard again many years later, in a movie theater, as it happened, watching a cartoon short in which a cat or a dog or maybe a little mouse, you know how clever those gringos are at animated pictures, talked just like Encarnación Guzmán. If she had been dumb, I think more than one of us would have fallen in love with her, but with that voice it was impossible. Besides, she had no talent. It was Cesárea who brought her to one of our meetings one day, when we were all stridentists or stridentist sympathizers. At first people liked her. So long as she was quiet, I mean. Germán probably flirted with her, and I might have too. But she was
always distant and shy and stuck close to Cesárea. In time, however, she grew more confident, and one night she began to voice her opinions, offering criticism and making suggestions. And Manuel had no choice but to put her in her place. Encarnación, he said, you don't know the first thing about poetry, so why don't you be quiet? And that caused quite a hullaballoo. Cesárea, who would melt into the background when Encarnación was talking, as if she wasn't there, got up from her seat and told Manuel that that was no way to speak to a woman. But haven't you heard the silly things she's been saying? said Manuel. I heard, said Cesárea, who, remote as she might seem, never missed a single thing her friend and protégée did or said, and I still think an apology is in order. Well, then, I apologize, said Manuel, but from now on she'd better keep her mouth shut. Arqueles and Germán agreed with him. If she can't say anything worth saying, she shouldn't talk, was their argument. That shows a lack of respect, said Cesárea, depriving someone of her right to speak. Encarnación wasn't at the next meeting, and neither was Cesárea. The meetings were informal and no one missed them, or so it seemed. Only when the meeting was over and Pablito Lezcano and I set off along the streets of the city center, reciting the verse of the reactionary Tablada, did I realize that she hadn't been there, and also how little I knew about Cesárea Tinajero.