The Savage Detectives

by Roberto Bolaño

  One night, while we were making love, I told him. I told him that I thought I was going crazy, that I kept having the same symptoms. I talked for a long time. His response surprised me (it was the last time he surprised me). He said that if I was going crazy then he would go crazy too, that he didn't mind going crazy with me. Do you like to tempt fate? I said. It's not fate I'm tempting, he said. I searched for his eyes in the dark and asked whether he was serious. Of course I'm serious, he said, and he pressed his body close to mine. That night I slept peacefully. The next morning I knew I had to leave him, the sooner the better, and at noon I called my mother from Telefónica. In those days, Arturo and his friends didn't pay for the international calls they made. I never knew how they did it. All I knew was that they had more than one method and they had to be swindling Telefónica out of thousands of millions of pesetas. They would find some telephone and hook up a few wires and that was it, they had a connection. The Argentinians were the best at it, hands down, and then the Chileans. I never met a Mexican who knew how to rig a phone, maybe because we weren't ready for the modern world, or maybe because the few Mexicans who lived in Barcelona at the time had enough money so that they didn't need to break the law. The rigged telephones were easy to tell by the lines that formed around them, especially at night. The best and the worst of Latin America came together in those lines, the old revolutionaries and the rapists, the former political prisoners and the hawkers of junk jewelry. When I saw those lines, on my way back from the movies, around the phone booth in Plaza Ramalleras, for example, I would freeze and start to shake, a metallic cold like a security wand running from the back of my neck down to my heels. Adolescents, young women with nursing children, old men and women: what did they think about out there, at midnight or one in the morning, while they waited for a stranger to finish talking, able not to hear but to guess at what was being said, since the person on the phone would gesture or cry or stand there without speaking for a long time, just nodding or shaking his head? What were those people in line waiting for? Were they only hoping that their turn would come soon, that the police wouldn't show up? Was that all? In any case, I distanced myself from that too. I called my mother and asked for money.

  One afternoon I told Arturo that I was leaving, that we had to stop living together. He asked me why. I told him I couldn't stand him anymore. What have I done to you? he said. Nothing, I'm the one doing terrible things to myself, I said. I need to be alone. We ended up shouting at each other. I moved to Daniel's apartment. Sometimes Arturo would come by and we'd talk, but each day it was more painful for me to see him. When my mother sent me money I left for good and flew to Rome. At this point I should probably mention my kitten. Before we were living together, a friend or ex-lover of Arturo's had been forced to move unexpectedly and she left him six kittens that her cat had just had. She left him the kittens and took her cat. Arturo kept the kittens for a while, when they were still little. Later, when he realized that his friend or ex-lover was never coming back, he began to look for owners for them. His friends took most of them, except for one gray kitten that no one wanted and I took, which annoyed Abraham, because he was afraid the kitten would claw his canvases. I called her Zia, in memory of another kitten I'd seen one afternoon in Rome. When I left for Mexico, Zia came with me. When I went back to Barcelona to Arturo's apartment, Zia came with me. I think she loved to fly. When I went to stay with Daniel Grossman, naturally I brought Zia with me. And when I caught the flight to Rome, the cat was in a straw bag on my lap. She was going to see Rome at last, the city she was from, namewise at least.

  My life in Rome was a disaster. Everything went badly, and worst of all, or at least so I was told later, was that I refused to ask for help. All I had was Zia and all I cared about was taking care of Zia and feeding her. I did read a lot, but when I try to remember what I read a kind of hot, quivery wall gets in the way. Maybe I read Dante in Italian. Maybe Gadda. I don't know. I'd already read them both in Spanish. The only person who had more than a vague indication of my whereabouts was Daniel. I got some letters from him. In one of them he told me that Arturo was shattered by my leaving and each time he saw Daniel he asked about me. Don't give him my address, I said, because he's capable of following me to Rome. I won't give it to him, said Daniel in his next letter. I also heard from him that my mother and father were worried and that they kept calling Barcelona. Don't give them my address, I said, and Daniel promised he wouldn't. His letters were long. My letters were short, almost always postcards. My life in Rome was short and simple. I worked in a shoe store and lived in a boardinghouse on Via della Luce, in Trastevere. At night, when I got home, I would take Zia out for a walk. We usually went to a park behind the church of Sant'Egidio, and as the cat wandered among the plants I would open a book and try to read. I must have read Dante, I guess, or Guido Cavalcanti or Cecco Angiolieri or Cino da Pistoia, but all I remember of what I read is a hot curtain or maybe just a warm curtain fluttering in the slight breeze of Rome at dusk, and plants and trees and the sound of footsteps. One night I met the devil. That's all I remember. I met the devil and I knew I was going to die. The owner of the shoe store saw me come to work with bruises on my neck and watched me for a week. Then he wanted to sleep with me and I refused. One day Zia got lost in the park, not the one behind Sant'Egidio, but another one, on Via Garibaldi, with no trees or lights. Zia just strayed too far and the darkness swallowed her up.

  I looked for her until seven in the morning. Until the sun came up and people started slowly heading to work. That day I didn't go to the shoe store. I went to bed, pulled the covers up to my chin, and slept. When I woke up I went out to look for my cat again. I couldn't find her. One night I dreamed of Arturo. The two of us were at the top of an office building, the kind built out of glass and steel, and we opened a window and looked down. It was nighttime. I wasn't planning to jump, but Arturo looked at me and said if you jump, I will too. I wanted to call him an idiot, but I didn't have the strength to insult him.

  One day the door of my room opened and I saw my mother and younger brother come in, my brother who'd been a soldier in the Tsahal and who lived most of the year in Israel. They moved me to a hospital in Rome right away, and two days later I was flying back to Mexico. As I found out later, my mother had flown to Barcelona and between her and my brother they had managed to get my address in Rome out of Daniel, after he refused to give it to them at first.

  In Mexico I was admitted to a private clinic in Cuernavaca, and the first thing the doctors told my mother was that there was nothing they could do if I didn't make an effort. By then I weighed ninety pounds and I could hardly walk. Then I got on a plane again and was admitted to a clinic in Los Angeles. There I met a Doctor Kalb and gradually we became friends. I weighed seventy-five pounds and in the afternoon I watched television and that was pretty much it. My mother moved into a hotel in downtown Los Angeles, on Sixth Street, and every day she would come to see me. After a month I had gained weight and I was back up to ninety pounds. My mother was very happy and decided to return to Mexico City, to take care of business. With my mother gone, Dr. Kalb and I established a friendship. We talked about food and tranquilizers and other kinds of drugs. We didn't talk much about books because Dr. Kalb only read bestsellers. We talked about film. He'd seen many more movies than I had and he loved movies from the fifties. In the afternoons I'd turn on the television and find some movie so I could discuss it with him later, but the medicine I was taking made me fall asleep halfway through. When I talked to Dr. Kalb he would tell me what had happened in the part I hadn't seen, although by then I'd usually forgotten the part I had seen. My memory of those movies is strange, images and scenes filtered through the lens of my doctor's simple enthusiasm. My mother came most weekends. She would arrive Friday night and return to Mexico City on Sunday night. Once she told me that she was thinking about moving permanently to Los Angeles. Not to the city itself, but to some nice place nearby, like Corona del Mar or Laguna Beach. Then what will happ
en to the factory? I said. Grandfather wouldn't have wanted you to sell it. Mexico is going to hell, said my mother, sooner or later it'll have to be sold. Sometimes she would show up with some friend of mine whom she'd invited along because, according to the doctors, including Dr. Kalb, it was good for my health to see my "old gang." One Saturday she showed up with Greta, a friend of mine from high school whom I hadn't seen since then. Another Saturday she showed up with a guy I didn't even recognize. You're the one who should be bringing friends and trying to have a good time, I told her one night. When I said things like that my mother would laugh, as if she couldn't believe what she was hearing, or start to cry. Aren't you dating anyone? Don't you have a boyfriend? I asked her. She admitted that she was seeing someone in Mexico City, a man who was divorced like she was, or a widower. I didn't try very hard to get it straight. I guess I didn't really care. After four months I weighed one hundred and five pounds and my mother started to prepare for my transfer to a Mexican clinic. The day before I left, Dr. Kalb came to say goodbye. I gave him my phone number and begged him to call me sometime. When I asked for his number, he claimed something about a move so he wouldn't have to give it to me. I didn't believe him, but I didn't call his bluff either.

  We went back to Mexico City. This time I was admitted to a clinic in Colonia Buenos Aires. I had a big room with lots of light, a window overlooking a park, and a television with more than one hundred channels. In the morning I would sit in the park and read novels. In the afternoon I would shut myself in my room and sleep. One day Daniel, who had just gotten back from Barcelona, came to visit me. He wasn't going to be in Mexico for long and as soon as he found out that I was in the hospital he came to see me. I asked him how I looked. He said fine, but thin. The two of us laughed. By then it didn't hurt to laugh anymore, which was a good sign. Before he left I asked him about Arturo. Daniel said he didn't live in Barcelona anymore, or at least he didn't think so, but it had been a while since they stopped seeing each other. A month later I weighed one hundred and ten pounds and I was discharged from the hospital.

  Still, my life changed very little. I lived with my mother and I never went out, not because I couldn't but because I didn't want to. My mother gave me her old car, a Mercedes, but the only time I drove it I almost had an accident. Any little thing made me cry. A house seen from the distance, traffic jams, people trapped inside their cars, the daily news. One night Abraham called me from Paris, where he had work in a group show of young Mexican painters. He wanted to talk about my health, but I wouldn't let him. He ended up talking about his painting, the progress he'd made, his successes. When we said goodbye I realized that I'd managed not to shed a single tear. Not long afterward, around the same time my mother decided to move to Los Angeles, I began to lose weight. One day, without having sold the factory, we got on a plane and settled in Laguna Beach. I spent the first two weeks at my old hospital in Los Angeles, undergoing exhaustive tests, and then I joined my mother in a little house on Lincoln Street, in Laguna Beach. My mother had been there before, but visiting was one thing and daily life something entirely different. For a while we would take the car out early in the morning and go looking for some other place we might like. We tried Dana Point, San Clemente, San Onofre, finally ending up in a town called Silverado, like in the movie, on the edge of the Cleveland National Forest, where we rented a two-story house with a yard and bought a police dog that my mother called Hugo, after the friend she'd just left behind in Mexico.

  We lived there two years. During that time my mother sold my grandfather's main factory and I was subjected to regular and increasingly routine doctors' appointments. Once a month my mother traveled to Mexico City. When she came back, she would bring me novels, Mexican novels that she knew I liked, old favorites or new books by José Agustín or Gustavo Sainz or even younger writers. But one day I realized that I couldn't read them anymore and little by little the books in Spanish were set aside. Shortly afterward, without warning, my mother showed up with a friend, an engineer called Cabrera who worked for a construction company in Guadalajara. The engineer was a widower and had two children a little older than me who lived in the United States, on the East Coast. He and my mother got along easily, and it seemed like they'd stay together. One night my mother and I talked about sex. I told her that my sexual life was over and after a long argument my mother started to cry and hugged me and said I was her little girl and she'd never leave me. Otherwise, we hardly ever fought. Our life consisted solely of reading, watching television (we never went to the movies), and weekly trips to Los Angeles, where we saw gallery shows or went to concerts. We had no friends in Silverado, except for a Jewish couple in their eighties whom my mother met at the supermarket, or so she told me, and whom we saw every three or four days, just for a few minutes and always at their house. According to my mother, it was our duty to visit them, because old people could have an accident or one of them might die all of a sudden and the other one might not know what to do, something I doubted since the old people had been in a German concentration camp during World War II and were hardly unacquainted with death. But it made my mother happy to help them and I didn't want to argue with her. The couple were called Mr. and Mrs. Schwartz, and they called us the Mexican Ladies.

  One weekend when my mother was in Mexico City I went to see them. It was the first time I'd gone alone, and to my surprise I stayed a long time at their house and I enjoyed talking to them. I had lemonade and Mr. and Mrs. Schwartz poured themselves whiskey. At their age it was the best medicine, they claimed. We talked about Europe, which they knew pretty well, and about Mexico, where they'd also been a few times. But the idea they had of Mexico couldn't have been more wrong or superficial. I remember that after we'd been talking for a long time they looked at me and said I was clearly Mexican. Of course I'm Mexican, I said. Still, they were very nice and I started to visit them more often. Sometimes, when they didn't feel well, they would call me and ask me to do their shopping at the supermarket that day or take their clothes to the cleaners or go to the newsstand and buy them a paper. Sometimes they would ask for the Los Angeles Times and other times for the local Silverado paper, a four-page flyer devoid of anything of interest. They liked Brahms, whom they thought was both a dreamer and a rationalist, and only very rarely did they watch television. I was the complete opposite. I almost never listened to music and I had the TV on most of the day.

  When we'd been living there for over a year, Mr. Schwartz died and my mother and I went with Mrs. Schwartz to the burial at the Jewish cemetery in Los Angeles. We insisted that she come in our car, but Mrs. Schwartz refused, and that morning she drove off behind the hearse in a rented limousine, alone, or at least so my mother and I thought. When we got to the cemetery some guy in his forties, dressed entirely in black and with his head shaved, got out of the car and helped Mrs. Schwartz out as if he was her beau. When they left, the same scene was repeated: Mrs. Schwartz got in the car, then the bald man got in and they left, followed closely by my mother's white Nissan. When we got to Silverado, the limousine stopped in front of the Schwartzes' house and the bald man helped Mrs. Schwartz out, then got back in the limousine, which immediately drove away. Mrs. Schwartz was left alone in the middle of the deserted sidewalk. It's a good thing we followed her, said my mother. We parked the car and went over to her. Mrs. Schwartz seemed lost somehow, gazing down the street after the limousine. We got her inside and my mother made us tea. Until then Mrs. Schwartz had let herself be led, but after the first sip of tea she pushed the cup away and asked for whiskey. My mother looked at me. There was a gleam of triumph in her eyes. Then I asked where the whiskey was and I poured her one. With water or without? Straight up, dear, said Mrs. Schwartz. Ice or no ice? I heard my mother's voice from the kitchen. Straight up! repeated Mrs. Schwartz. After that we grew closer. When my mother went to Mexico I would spend all day at Mrs. Schwartz's house, and sometimes I would even spend the night there. And although Mrs. Schwartz never ate at night, she would prepare a salad a
nd grill a steak and make me eat. She would sit beside me, with her whiskey nearby, and tell me stories about her youth in Europe, when food, she said, was a necessity and a luxury. We listened to records too, and commented on the local news.

  During the long and peaceful year of Mrs. Schwartz's widowhood, I met a man in Silverado, a plumber, and slept with him. It wasn't a pleasant experience. The plumber's name was John and he wanted to see me again. I told him no, that once was enough. My refusal didn't convince him and he started to call me every day. Once my mother picked up the phone and they spent a while telling each other off. A week later my mother and I decided to take a vacation in Mexico. We were at the beach and then we went to Mexico City. I don't know why my mother got the idea into her head that I needed to see Abraham. One night he called me and we agreed to meet the next day. By this time, Abraham had left Europe for good and was living in Mexico City, where he had a studio. Things seemed to be going well for him. The studio was in Coyoacán, near his apartment, and after we had dinner he wanted me to see his most recent paintings. I can't say whether I liked them or not. They probably left me cold. They were very large canvases, strongly resembling the work of a Catalan painter Abraham admired, or had admired when he lived in Barcelona, although to be fair, they'd been filtered through his own sensibility: where once there'd been ochers and earth tones, now there were yellows, reds, blues. He also showed me a series of drawings and I liked those a little better. Then we talked about money, or he talked about money, about the instability of the peso, about the possibility of going to live in California, about friends we no longer saw.