The Savage Detectives

by Roberto Bolaño

  To put it briefly, I sweated blood, although to be honest I didn't notice a thing. A little later I met you, Belano, and I gave you a job. The dishwasher had gotten sick and I had to hire a replacement. I don't remember now who sent you to me, probably some other Chilean. This was around the time I was staying late at the restaurant pretending to be going over my accounts while really I was daydreaming in my chair. One night I went to say hello to you, remember? and I was impressed by how polite you were. It was obvious that you'd read a lot, and traveled a lot, and that you were going through a hard time. We hit it off, and incredibly enough, it wasn't twenty-four hours before I'd opened up to you in a way I hadn't once opened up to anyone in all these years. I told you about my soccer pools (that was common knowledge), but I also told you about the numbers that hammered in my head, my darkest secret. I invited you home to meet my family, and I offered you a steady job at one of my bars. You accepted the invitation (my mother made empanadas de horno), but you wouldn't even hear of coming to work for me. You said you didn't see yourself working at a bar for long, because dealing with the public was a thankless task and the burnout factor was high. Anyway, and despite the friction that always exists between employer and employee, I think we became friends. Although you may not have realized it, that was a critical time for me. I had never come so close to the numbers before, or at least not consciously, seeking them out myself instead of letting them come to me. You would be washing dishes in the kitchen of the Cuerno de Oro, Belano, and I would sit at one of the tables near the door, spread out my account books and novels, and close my eyes. Knowing you were there made me that much more fearless, I think. Maybe it was all foolishness. Have you ever heard the theory of Easter Island? According to the theory, Chile is the real Easter Island. You know: to the east we're bordered by the Andes, to the north by the Atacama Desert, to the south by Antarctica, and to the west by the Pacific Ocean. We were born on Easter Island and our moai are ourselves, the Chileans, looking in bewilderment toward the four points of the compass. One night, while you were washing dishes, Belano, I imagined that I was still on board the cargo ship Napoli. You must remember that night. I imagined that I was dying in the bowels of the Napoli, forgotten by everyone, and in my final delirium I dreamed I'd made it to Barcelona and I was riding astride the shining numbers and that I made money, enough to bring my family here and indulge myself a little, and my dream included my wife, Rosa, and my children and my bars, and then I thought that if I was dreaming so vividly it must be because I was about to die, because I was dying in the hold of the Napoli, in that airless, stinking hold, and then I said to myself open your eyes, Andrés, Mighty Mouse, open your eyes! but I was speaking in a voice I didn't recognize, a voice that scared me, to tell the truth, and I couldn't open my eyes, but with my Mighty Mouse ears I heard you, Belano, washing dishes in the kitchen of my bar, and then I said to myself for fuck's sake, Andrés, you can't go off the rails now, if you're dreaming, just keep dreaming, you bastard, and if you aren't dreaming, open your eyes and don't be afraid. And then I opened my eyes and I was in the Cuerno de Oro and the numbers clattered on the walls like radioactivity, an endless swarm of numbers, as if an atomic bomb had finally fallen on Barcelona. If I'd known they were there, I would have kept my eyes shut a little longer, but I opened my eyes, Belano, and I got up from my chair and I went into the kitchen where you were working and when I saw you I felt like telling you the whole story, remember? I was shaky and sweating like a pig, and no one would've believed that my brain was working the best it ever had, better than now, which is maybe why I didn't say anything. I offered you a better job, I made you a rum and Coke and brought it to you, I asked your opinion about some books, but I didn't tell you what had happened.

  From that night on I knew that maybe, with a little luck, I could win the pools again, but I didn't play. She's laying thousands of eggs, said the voice in my dream, and one of the eggs dropped down to me. I've had enough of the pools. Business is good. Now you're going to leave and I'd like it if you went away with a good impression of me. A sad impression, maybe, but a good one. I have your last paycheck here and I've added a month or two of paid vacation. Don't say anything, it's already done. You told me once that you didn't have much patience, but I think you were wrong.

  Abel Romero, Café L'Alsatien, Rue de Vaugirard, near the Luxembourg Gardens, Paris, September 1989. It was at Victor's Café, on Rue St. Sauveur, on September 11 in 1983. A group of masochistic Chileans had gathered to remember that dismal day. There were twenty or thirty of us and we were scattered around inside the café and at the outside tables. Suddenly someone, I don't know who, started to talk about evil, about the crime that had spread its enormous black wing over us. Please! Its enormous black wing! It's clear we Chileans will never learn. Then, as you might expect, an argument broke out and bits of bread even flew from table to table. A mutual friend must have introduced us in the middle of the pandemonium. Or maybe we introduced ourselves, and he seemed to recognize me. Are you a writer? he said. No, I said, I was a policeman under Guatón Hormazábal and now I work for a cooperative, vacuuming offices and cleaning windows. It must be a dangerous job, he said. For people who are afraid of heights it is, I answered, for everyone else it's mostly boring. Then we joined the general conversation. People were talking about evil, about corruption, as I said. Friend Belano made two or three fairly pertinent remarks. I didn't say a word. Everyone drank lots of wine that night, and when we left, without knowing how, I found myself walking with him for several blocks. Then I said what had been going around in my head. Belano, I said, the heart of the matter is knowing whether evil (or sin or crime or whatever you want to call it) is random or purposeful. If it's purposeful, we can fight it, it's hard to defeat, but we have a chance, like two boxers in the same weight class, more or less. If it's random, on the other hand, we're fucked, and we'll just have to hope that God, if He exists, has mercy on us. And that's what it all comes down to.

  19

  Amadeo Salvatierra, Calle República de Venezuela, near the Palacio de la Inquisición, Mexico City DF, January 1976. What do you mean there's no mystery to it? I said. There's no mystery to it, Amadeo, they said. And then they asked: what does the poem mean to you? Nothing, I said, it doesn't mean a thing. So why do you say it's a poem? Well, because Cesárea said so, I remembered. That's the only reason why, because I had Cesárea's word for it. If that woman had told me that a piece of her shit wrapped in a shopping bag was a poem I would have believed it, I said. How modern, said the Chilean, and then he mentioned someone named Manzoni. Alessandro Manzoni? I asked, remembering a translation of I Promessi Sposi penned by Remigio López Valle, that upstanding gentleman, and published in Mexico in approximately 1930, I'm not sure, Alessandro Manzoni? but they said: Piero Manzoni! the arte povera artist who canned his own shit. Well, what do you know. Art has gone crazy, boys, I said, and they said: it's always been crazy. At that moment I saw something like the shadows of grasshoppers on the walls of the front room, behind the boys and to each side, shadows that slid down from the ceiling and seemed to want to glide across the wallpaper to the kitchen but finally sank into the floor, so I rubbed my eyes and said all right, let's see whether you can explain this poem to me once and for all, because I've been dreaming about it for more than fifty years, give or take a year or two. And the boys rubbed their hands together in sheer excitement, the little angels, and came over to my chair. Let's begin with the title, one of them said. What do you think it means? Zion, Mount Zion in Jerusalem, I said promptly, and also the Swiss city of Sion, Sitten in German, in the canton of Valais. Very good, Amadeo, they said, it's clear you've given it some thought. And which do you choose? Mount Zion, yes? I think so, I said. Obviously, they said. Now let's take the first part of the poem. What do we have? A straight line with a rectangle on it, I said. All right, said the Chilean, forget the rectangle, pretend it doesn't exist. Just look at the straight line. What do you see?

  A straight line, I said. What else i
s there to see, boys? And what does a straight line suggest to you, Amadeo? The horizon, I said. The edge of a table, I said. Peace, said one of them. Yes, peace, calm. All right, then: a horizon and calmness. Now let's look at the second part of the poem:

  What do you see, Amadeo? A wavy line, I suppose, what else is there to see? Good, Amadeo, they said, now you see a wavy line. Before, you saw a straight line that made you think of calmness and now you see a wavy line. Does it still suggest calmness to you? I guess not, I said, suddenly seeing what they were getting at, what they wanted me to see. What does the wavy line suggest to you? Hills on the horizon? The sea, waves? Could be, could be. A premonition that the calm will be broken? Movement, change? Hills on the horizon, I said. Maybe waves. Now let's look at the third part of the poem:

  We have a jagged line, Amadeo, which might be many things. Shark's teeth, boys? Mountains on the horizon? The western Sierra Madre? Lots of things, really. And then one of them said: when I was little, I couldn't have been more than six, I would dream about these three lines, the straight line, the wavy line, and the jagged line. I don't know why, but back then I slept under the stairs, or at least in a very low-ceilinged room next to the stairs. It might not have been my house, maybe we were only there for a little while, maybe it was my grandparents' house. And each night, after I'd gone to sleep, the straight line would appear. So far so good. The dream was even pleasant. But little by little the scene would start to change and the straight line would become a wavy line. Then I would start to feel sick and get hotter and hotter and lose my sense of things, my sense of stability, and all I wanted was to go back to the straight line. And yet, nine times out of ten, after the wavy line would come the jagged line, and at that point the best way to describe how I felt was as if I were being torn apart, not from the outside but from the inside, a tearing that began in the belly but that I soon felt in my head and my throat too, and the only way I could escape the pain was by waking up, although waking up wasn't exactly easy. Isn't that strange? I said. Yes, they said, it is strange. It really is strange, I said. Sometimes I would wet my bed, said one of them. Dear, dear, I said. Do you understand now? they said. Well, to be honest, I don't, boys, I said. The poem is a joke, they said, it's easy to see, Amadeo, look: add a sail to each of the rectangles, like this:

  What do we have now? A boat? I said. Exactly, Amadeo, a boat. And hidden behind the title, Sión, we have the word navigation. And that's all, Amadeo, it's as simple as that, nothing else to it, said the boys and I would have liked to say that they had taken a weight off my mind, that's what I would have liked to say, or that Sión could also be a front for Simón, a word from the past meaning yes in street slang, but the only thing I did was say well, well, and reach for the bottle of tequila and pour myself a glass, another one. That was all there was left of Cesárea, I thought, a boat on a calm sea, a boat on a choppy sea, and a boat in a storm. For a moment, I can tell you, my head was like a stormy sea and I couldn't hear what the boys were saying, although I did catch some phrases, some stray words, the predictable ones, I suppose: Quetzalcoatl's ship, the nighttime fever of some boy or girl, Captain Ahab's encephalogram or the whale's, the surface of the sea that for sharks is the enormous mouth of hell, the ship without a sail that might also be a coffin, the paradox of the rectangle, the rectangle of consciousness, Einstein's impossible rectangle (in a universe where rectangles are unthinkable), a page by Alfonso Reyes, the desolation of poetry. And then, after I'd drunk my tequila, I filled my cup again and filled theirs, and I said that we should drink to Cesárea, and I saw their eyes, those damn boys were so happy, and the three of us raised our glasses as our little ship was tossed by the gale.

  Edith Oster, sitting on a bench in the Alameda, Mexico City DF, May 1990. In Mexico, in Mexico City, I only saw him once, outside the María Morillo gallery, in the Zona Rosa, at eleven in the morning. I had come out onto the sidewalk to smoke a cigarette and he was passing by and stopped to say hello. He crossed the street and said I'm Arturo Belano, Claudia's told me about you. Now I know who you are, I said. I was seventeen then, and I liked to read poetry, but I hadn't read anything by him. He didn't look good, he looked like he'd been up all night, but he was handsome. I mean, he seemed handsome to me then, although I wasn't attracted to him. He wasn't my type. Why is he talking to me? I wondered. Why did he cross the street and stop in front of the gallery? I wondered. There was no one inside and I invited him in, but he said that it was nice outside. The two of us stood there, me with a cigarette in my hand and him just a few feet away in a kind of cloud of dust, looking at me. I don't know what we talked about. I think he asked me to come have coffee at the restaurant next door and I told him I couldn't leave the gallery. He asked me whether I liked my job. It's temporary, I said, I'm quitting next week. Anyway, the pay is really bad. Do you sell a lot of paintings? he said. None yet, I answered, and then we said goodbye and he left. I don't think he was attracted to me, although later he told me that he'd liked me from the first moment he saw me. Back then I was fat or I thought I was fat and I was a nervous wreck. I cried at night and I had an iron will. I was also leading two lives, or a life that was like two lives. On the one hand, I was a philosophy student and I worked temporary jobs like the one at the María Morillo gallery. On the other hand, I was a militant in a Trotskyite party with a clandestine existence that in some confused way I knew served my interests well, although I didn't know what my interests were. One afternoon, when we were handing out leaflets to cars stopped in traffic, I suddenly found myself in front of my mother's Chrysler. Poor thing, the shock almost killed her. And I got so nervous that I handed her the mimeographed sheet and said read this and turned around and left, although as I walked away I heard her say that we would talk at home. We always talked at home. Endless discussions that ended with recommendations, about doctors, movies, books, money, politics.

  It was a few years before I saw Arturo Belano again. The first time was in 1976, the second in-1979? 1980? Dates aren't my forte. It was in Barcelona. There's no way I could forget that. I had gone there to live with the painter Abraham Manzur, my partner, boyfriend, friend, fiancé. Before that, I'd lived in Italy, London, and Tel Aviv. One day Abraham called me from Mexico City and told me that he loved me, that he was moving to Barcelona and he wanted me to live with him. I was in Rome then and I wasn't well. I told him yes. We would have a romantic meeting at the airport in Paris and then we would take the train to Barcelona. Abraham had a grant, or something like that, probably his parents had decided it would be good for him to spend a while in Europe and they were bankrolling him. I'm not sure about any of this. Abraham's face is lost to me in a cloud of fog that just keeps getting bigger. Things were going well for Abraham. They'd always gone well for him, actually. He was exactly the same age as me (we were born in the same month of the same year), but while I went back and forth not knowing what I wanted to do, he was completely sure of himself and he had an enormous capacity for work, energy like Picasso, he said, and although sometimes he might be unhappy, or sick and in pain, he would paint every day for five hours straight, eight hours straight, including Saturday and Sunday. He was the first person I made love with. We were both sixteen. Then we were together on and off, we kept breaking up, he never supported my political militancy, I don't mean he was right-wing, just that he wasn't interested in militancy, he probably didn't have time for it, I had other lovers, and he started to go out with a girl called Nora Castro Bilenfeld, and when it looked like they were about to move in together, they broke up, I was in the hospital a few times, my body changed. So I took the train to Paris and waited for Abraham at the airport. After ten hours I realized that he wasn't coming and I left the airport crying, although it was only later that I fully realized I'd been crying. That night I stayed at a cheap hotel in Montparnasse and I spent hours thinking about my life so far and when my body couldn't take it anymore I stopped thinking and lay down in bed, staring at the ceiling, and then I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, but I c
ouldn't, and I was like that for days, unable to sleep, holed up in the hotel, only going out in the morning, eating almost nothing, hardly washing, constipated, with terrible headaches, basically wanting to die.

  Until I fell asleep. Then I dreamed that I was traveling to Barcelona and that the trip, in a mysterious, vital way, was like starting my life over from scratch. When I woke up I paid the bill and took the first train to Spain. For the first few days I lived in a boardinghouse on Rambla Capuchinos. I was happy. I bought a canary, two pots of geraniums, and some books. But I needed money and I had to call my mother. When I talked to her I found out that Abraham had been looking for me like crazy all over Paris and that my family had assumed I'd disappeared. My mother asked me whether I'd lost my mind. Then I explained my long wait at the airport and being stood up by Abraham. No one stood you up, darling, my mother said, what happened is that you got the date wrong. It seemed strange that my mother would say that. It sounded like Abraham Manzur's official version of the story. Tell me where you are and Abraham will come get you right away, said my mother. I gave her my address, told her to wire me money, and hung up.