The Savage Detectives

by Roberto Bolaño

  When I opened them the circle of madmen who roved the courtyards of La Fortaleza had closed around me. Anyone else would have shouted in terror, begun wailing prayers, torn off all his clothes, and started to run like an American football player gone mad, withering under the gaze of the myriad eyes spinning like unmoored planets. But not me. The madmen circled around me and I kept as quiet as Rodin's thinker and watched them, and then I looked at the ground and I saw red ants and black ants locked in combat and I didn't say or do anything. The sky was very blue. The earth was light brown, with little stones and clumps of dirt. The clouds were white and drifting westward. Then I looked at the madmen who were stumbling here and there like pawns of an even madder fate, and I closed my eyes again.

  Xóchitl García, Calle Montes, near the Monumento a la Revolución, Mexico City DF, January 1986. The funny thing was when I tried to publish. For a long time I wrote and revised and rewrote and threw lots of poems away, but there came a day when I was ready to publish and I started to send my poems to magazines and cultural supplements. María warned me. They aren't going to answer, she said, they aren't even going to read your work. You should go in person and ask for a response face-to-face. So that's what I did. At some places they wouldn't see me. But at other places they would, and I got to talk to the deputy editor or the head of the books section. They would ask me things about my life, what I read, what I'd published so far, what workshops I'd been in, what college classes I'd taken. I was naïve: I told them about my dealings with the visceral realists. Most of the people I talked to didn't have any idea who the visceral realists were, but the mention of the group piqued their interest. The visceral realists? Who were they? Then I would explain, more or less, the brief history of visceral realism and they would smile. A few of them scrawled down a name or some other note. A few asked for further explanations, and then they'd thank me and say they'd call or that I should come by in two weeks and they would let me know. Others, the minority, remembered Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, but only vaguely. For example, they didn't know that Ulises was alive and that Belano didn't live in Mexico City anymore, but they had known them, they remembered the scenes Ulises and Arturo used to make, hassling the poets at readings, they remembered the way they were against everything, they remembered their friendship with Efraín Huerta, and they looked at me as if I were an alien, and they said, so you were a visceral realist, were you? and then they would say they were sorry, but they couldn't publish a single one of my poems. According to María, when I turned to her in growing disappointment, this was normal. Mexican literature, probably more than any other Latin American literature, was like that, a strict sect. Forgiveness was hard to come by. But I'm not asking to be forgiven for anything, I'd say. I know, she'd say, but if you want to publish you'd better never mention the visceral realists again.

  Still, I didn't give up. I was tired of working at Gigante and I thought my poetry deserved a little attention at least, if not respect. As time went by I discovered other magazines, not the ones I'd have wanted to publish in, but different ones, the inevitable magazines that spring up in a city of sixteen million. The publishers or editors were terrible men and women, people who had crept out of the sewers, you could tell just by looking, a mix of ousted officials and repentant killers. But they had never heard of visceral realism and had no interest at all in being told the story. Their notion of literature ended (and probably began) with Vasconcelos, although it was easy to guess the admiration they felt for Mariano Azuela, Yáñez, Martín Luis Guzmán, authors they probably knew only by reputation. One of these magazines was called Tamal, and its editor was a man named Fernando López Tapia. It was there that I published my first poem, in the two-page arts section, and López Tapia personally handed me the check for the amount I'd made. That night, after I cashed it, María, Franz, and I celebrated by going to the movies and then eating at a restaurant downtown. I was tired of cheap meals and I wanted to give myself a treat. From then on I stopped writing poems, at least I stopped writing as many as before, and I started to write articles, stories about Mexico City, pieces about gardens that very few people knew existed anymore, items about colonial houses, reports on specific subway lines, and everything or almost everything I wrote was published. Fernando López Tapia fit me into the magazine wherever he could, and on Saturdays, instead of going with Franz to Chapultepec, I would take him to the magazine's offices and while he banged on a typewriter I would help Tamal's few staff members put together the next issue, which was always a problem, since we had a hard time getting the magazine out on schedule.

  I learned to do layouts and edit, and sometimes I even chose the photographs. And everybody loved Franz too. Of course, I didn't make enough at the magazine to quit my job at Gigante, but even so it was nice for me, since while I was working at the supermarket, especially when the work was particularly annoying (Friday afternoons, for example, or Monday mornings), I would think about my next article, about the story I was planning to write on the peddlers of Coyoacán, or the fire-eaters of La Villa, or whatever it might be, and the time would fly. One day Fernando López Tapia asked me to write profiles of some low-level politicians, friends of his, I guess, or friends of friends, but I refused. I can only write about things I feel connected to, I said, and he replied: what's so interesting about the houses of the Colonia 10 de Mayo? I didn't know what to say, but I stood firm. One night Fernando López Tapia invited me out to dinner. I asked María to keep an eye on Franz and we went to a restaurant in Roma Sur. To be honest, I was expecting something better, more sophisticated, but I had lots of fun during dinner, although I hardly ate a thing. That night I slept with the publisher of Tamal. It'd been a long time since I'd had sex with anyone, and it wasn't exactly a pleasurable experience. We did it again a week later. And then the following week. Sometimes, to be honest, it was excruciating to stay up all night and then go to work early in the morning and spend hours stickering products like a sleepwalker. But I wanted to live my life. Deep down I knew that I had to live my life.

  One night Fernando López Tapia showed up on Calle Montes. He said he wanted to see where I lived. I introduced him to María, who treated him coldly at first, as if she were a princess and poor Fernando were an illiterate peasant. Luckily, I don't think he even noticed how rude she was. He was always a perfect gentleman. I liked that. After a while María went up to her room and I was left alone with Franz and Fernando. Then Fernando told me that he'd come because he wanted to see me, and then he said now he had seen me but he wanted to keep on seeing me. It was silly, but I liked that he said it. Later I went up to get María and the four of us went out to dinner. We laughed a lot that night. A week later I took some of María's poems to Tamal, and they published them. If your friend writes, said Fernando López Tapia, tell her that the pages of our magazine are at her disposal. The problem, as I soon discovered, was that for all her college studies, María hardly knew how to write prose: properly punctuated, grammatically correct prose without poetic pretensions, I mean. So for several days she tried to write an article on dance, but no matter how hard she tried and how much I helped her, she couldn't do it. What she came up with in the end was a very good poem that she called "Dance in Mexico." After she gave it to me to read, she filed it away with her other poems and forgot all about it. María was a powerful poet, definitely better than me, for example, but she had no idea how to write prose. It was too bad, but that put an end to her chances of being a regular contributor to Tamal. I don't think it made much difference to her, in any case, since she turned up her nose at the magazine, as if it were beneath her. But that's María for you, and I love her the way she is.

  My relationship with Fernando López Tapia lasted a while longer. He was married, as I suspected from the start, with two children, the older one twenty, and he wasn't about to separate from his wife (I wouldn't have let him, anyway). I went with him to business dinners now and then. He would introduce me as his most productive writer. I really tried to be that, and there
were weeks when, with Gigante on the one hand and the magazine on the other, I barely averaged three hours of sleep a night. But I didn't care because things were going well for me, just the way I wanted them to go, and even though I didn't want to publish any more of my own poems in Tamal, what I did was literally take over the arts pages and publish poems by Jacinto and other friends who didn't have a venue for their work. And I learned a lot. I learned everything there is to learn about editing a magazine in Mexico City. I learned to lay out pages, negotiate with advertisers, deal with the printers, talk to people who were theoretically important. Of course, no one knew that I worked at Gigante. Everyone thought I lived on what Fernando López Tapia paid me or that I was a college student, I, who'd never been to college, who'd never even finished high school. And that had its appealing side. It was like living the Cinderella story, and even when I had to return to Gigante and turn back into a salesgirl or cashier, I didn't mind and somehow I found the strength to do both jobs well, the one at Tamal because I liked it and I was learning, and the one at Gigante because I had to take care of Franz, I had to buy him clothes and school supplies, and pay for our room on Calle Montes, because my father, poor man, was having a hard time and couldn't give me rent money anymore, and Jacinto didn't even have enough money for himself. The bottom line was, I had to work and bring up Franz all on my own. And that was what I was doing, and I was writing and learning too.

  One day Fernando López Tapia told me he had to talk to me. When I went in to see him he said that he wanted us to live together. I thought he was kidding, because sometimes Fernando gets in these moods, wanting to live with everybody in the world, and I assumed we'd probably go to a hotel that night and make love and he would get over wanting to set me up in an apartment. But this time he was serious. Of course, he had no intention of leaving his wife, at least not all of a sudden, but gradually, in a series of done deeds, as he put it. For days we talked about the possibility. Or rather, Fernando talked to me, laying out the pros and cons, and I listened and thought carefully. When I told him no, he seemed crushed, and for a few days he was angry at me. By then I had started to send my pieces to other magazines. Most places turned them down, but a few accepted them. Things got worse with Fernando, I'm not sure why. He criticized everything I did and when we slept together he was even rough with me. Other times he would be sweet, giving me presents and crying at the least little thing, and by the end of the night he'd be dead drunk.

  Seeing my name published in other magazines was a great thing. It gave me a feeling of security and I began to distance myself from Fernando López Tapia and Tamal. At first it wasn't easy, but I was already used to hardships and they didn't faze me. Then I found work as a copy editor at a newspaper and I quit Gigante. We celebrated my last day with a dinner attended by Jacinto, María, Franz, and me. That night, while we were eating, Fernando López Tapia came to see me but I wouldn't let him in. He was shouting in the street for a while and then he left. Franz and Jacinto watched him from the window and laughed. They're so alike. María and I didn't want to look and we pretended (though maybe we weren't quite pretending) to be in hysterics. What we were really doing was staring into each other's eyes and saying everything we had to say without speaking a word.

  I remember that we had the lights off and that Fernando's shouts drifted up muffled from outside, they were desperate shouts, and that then we didn't hear anything, he's leaving, said Franz, they're taking him away, and that then María and I looked at each other, not pretending anymore but serious, tired but ready to go on, and that after a few seconds I got up and turned on the light.

  Amadeo Salvatierra, Calle República de Venezuela, near the Palacio de la Inquisición, Mexico City DF, January 1976. And then one of the boys asked me: where are Cesárea Tinajero's poems? and I emerged from the swamp of mi general Diego Carvajal's death or the boiling soup of his memory, an inedible, mysterious soup that's poised above our fates, it seems to me, like Damocles' sword or an advertisement for tequila, and I said: on the last page, boys. And I looked at their fresh, attentive faces and I watched their hands turn those old pages and then I peered into their faces again and they looked at me too and they said: we aren't losing you, are we, Amadeo? do you feel all right, Amadeo? do you want us to make you some coffee, Amadeo? and I thought oh, hell, I must be drunker than I thought, and I got up and walked unsteadily over to the front room mirror and looked myself in the face. I was still myself. Not the self I'd gotten used to, for better or for worse, but myself. And then I said, boys, what I need isn't coffee but a little more tequila, and when they'd brought me my cup and filled it and I'd drunk, I could separate myself from the confounded quicksilver of the mirror I was leaning against, or what I mean is, I could peel my hands off the glass of that old mirror (noticing, all the same, how my fingerprints lingered like ten tiny faces speaking in unison and so quickly that I couldn't make out their words). And when I had sat back down in my chair I asked them again what they thought, now that they had a real poem by Cesárea Tinajero herself in front of them, with no talk in the way, the poem and nothing else, and they looked at me and then, holding the magazine between them, they plunged back into that puddle from the 1920s, that closed eye full of dust, and they said gee, Amadeo, is this the only thing of hers you have? is this her only published poem? and I said, or maybe I whispered: why yes, boys, that's all there is. And I added, as if to gauge what they really felt: disappointing, isn't it? But I don't think they even heard me, they had their heads close together and they were looking at the poem, and one of them, the Chilean, seemed thoughtful, while his friend, the Mexican, was smiling. It's impossible to discourage those boys, I thought, and then I stopped watching them and I stopped talking and I stretched, crack, crack, and one of them lifted his gaze at the sound and looked at me as if to make sure I hadn't fallen to pieces, and then he went back to Cesárea, and I yawned or sighed and for a second, distant images passed before my eyes of Cesárea and her friends walking down a street in the north of Mexico City, and I saw myself among her friends, how curious, and I yawned again, and then one of the boys broke the silence and said in a clear and pleasant voice that it was interesting, and right away the other one agreed. Not only was it interesting, he said, he'd already seen it when he was little. How? I said. In a dream, said the boy, I couldn't have been more than seven, and I had a fever. Cesárea Tina-jero's poem? Had he seen it when he was seven years old? And did he understand it? Did he know what it meant? Because it had to mean something, didn't it? And the boys looked at me and said no, Amadeo, a poem doesn't necessarily have to mean anything, except that it's a poem, although this one, Cesárea's, might not even be that. So I said let me see it and I reached out my hand like someone begging and they put the only issue of Caborca left in the world into my cramped fingers. And I saw the poem that I'd seen so many times:

  And I asked the boys, I said, boys, what do you make of this poem? I said, boys, I've been looking at it for more than forty years and I've never understood a goddamn thing. Really. I might as well tell you the truth. And they said: it's a joke, Amadeo, the poem is a joke covering up something more serious. But what does it mean? I said. Let us think a little, Amadeo, they said. Of course, please do, I said. Then one of them got up and went to the bathroom and the other one got up and went to the kitchen, and I fell into a doze as, like Pedro Páramo, they wandered the hell of my house, or the hell of memories my house had become, and I let them do as they liked and I fell into a doze, because by then it was very late and we'd had a lot to drink, although from time to time I'd hear them walking, as if they were moving to stretch their legs, and every once in a while I would hear them talking, asking and telling each other who knows what, some serious things, I suppose, since there were long silences between question and answer, and other less serious things, because they would laugh, oh, those boys, I thought, oh, what an interesting evening, it's been so long since I drank so much and talked so much and remembered so much and had such a good time. When I ope
ned my eyes again the boys had turned on the light and there was a cup of steaming coffee in front of me. Drink this, they said. At your orders, I said. I remember that while I was drinking the coffee the boys sat down across from me again and talked about the other pieces in Caborca. Well, then, I said, what's the mystery? Then the boys looked at me and said: there is no mystery, Amadeo.

  18

  Joaquín Font, Calle Colima, Colonia Condesa, Mexico City DF, August 1987. Freedom is like a prime number. When I got home everything had changed. My wife didn't live here anymore and my daughter Angélica was sleeping in my bedroom now with her partner, a theater director a few years older than me. My son, meanwhile, had taken over the little house in the garden which he shared with a girl with Indian features. Both he and Angélica worked full-time, although they didn't make much money. My daughter María was living in a hotel near the Monumento a la Revolución and almost never saw her sister and brother. My wife, it seemed, had remarried. The theater director turned out to be quite a considerate person. He had been a friend of La Vieja Segura, or a disciple of his, I couldn't say for sure, and he didn't have much money or luck, but he hoped to direct a play someday that would catapult him to fame and fortune. At night, as we ate dinner, he liked to talk about that. My son's girlfriend, on the other hand, hardly said a word. I liked her.