The Savage Detectives

by Roberto Bolaño

  22

  Susana Puig, Calle Josep Tarradellas, Calella de Mar, Catalonia, June 1994. He called me. It had been a long time since I talked to him. He said you have to go to such and such a beach, on such and such a day, at such and such a time. What are you talking about? I said. You have to be there, you have to, he said. Are you crazy? Are you drunk? I said. Please, I'll expect you there, he said, and he repeated the name of the beach and the date and the time. Can't you come to my apartment? I said. We can talk here if that's what you want. I don't want to talk, he said, I don't want to talk anymore, everything's over, it's pointless to talk, he said. I felt like hanging up, but I didn't. I'd just had dinner and I was watching a movie on TV, it was a French movie, I can't remember what it was called or who the director or the actors were, all I remember is that it was about a singer, a sort of hysterical girl, I think, and a pathetic guy she inexplicably falls in love with. I had the volume turned down low, as usual, and while I was talking to him I didn't take my eyes off the TV: rooms, windows, the faces of people whose presence in the movie didn't quite make sense. The table was cleared and there was a book on the sofa, a novel I was planning to start that night when I got tired of the movie and went to bed. Will you come? he said. What for? I said, but I was really thinking about something else, about the singer's stubbornness, about her tears, tears that flowed uncontainably, tears of hatred, although I don't know whether that makes sense. It's hard to cry with hatred, hard to hate someone so much it makes you sob. So you can see me, he said. For the last time, the last time, he insisted. Are you still there? I said. For a moment I thought he'd hung up. It wouldn't be the first time. I was sure he was calling me from a public phone, I could imagine it perfectly, a telephone on the Paseo Marítimo of the town where he lived, which was just twenty minutes from my town by train and fifteen by car, why I started to think about distances that night I don't know, but he couldn't have hung up, I could hear the sound of cars, unless I hadn't closed all the windows and what I was hearing was noise from my own street. Are you there? I said. Yes, he said, will you come? What a pain in the ass! What do you want me to come for if we aren't going to talk? What do you want me to come for when we have nothing left to say to each other? I really don't know, he said, I must be going crazy. I thought the same thing but didn't say so. Have you seen your son? Yes, he said. How is he? Very well, he said, good-looking, getting bigger every day. And your ex-wife? Very well, he said. Why don't you get back together? Don't ask idiotic questions, he said. I mean just as friends, I said, so she can take care of you a little. This seemed to strike him as funny, I heard him laugh, then he said that his wife (he didn't say ex-wife, he said wife) was doing fine now and he didn't want to be the one to ruin things for her. You're too thoughtful, I said. She isn't the one who broke my heart, he said. So sappy! So sentimental! Of course I knew the story by heart.

  He told it to me on the third night, as he begged me to give him a shot in the vein of Nolotil, that's exactly what he said, "a shot in the vein," not intravenous, which is essentially the same thing, but different, and of course I gave it to him, go on now, go to sleep, but we always talked, each night for a little longer, until he'd told me the whole story. At the time I thought it was a sad story, not because of the story itself, but because of the way he told it. I can't remember now how long he was in the hospital, maybe ten or twelve days, that's right, I remember that nothing happened between us, sometimes we might have looked at each other more intensely than a patient and a nurse usually do, but that was all. I had just ended a relationship (I can't really call it an engagement) with an intern, so you could say the climate was right, but nothing happened. Fifteen days after he was discharged, I went into a room during one of my shifts and there he was again. I thought I was seeing things! I went up to the bed without making a sound and took a good look from up close. It was him. I checked his chart: he had pancreatitis, although they hadn't put in a nasogastric tube. When I came back into the room (the man in the next bed was dying of cirrhosis and needed constant attention), he opened his eyes and said hello. How are you, Susana, he said. He held out his hand. I don't know why I didn't just shake his hand but instead I bent down and kissed him on the cheek. The next morning the other man died and when I came back he had the room to himself. That night we made love. He was still a little weak, still on an IV, and his pancreas hurt, but we did it, and although later I started to think it had been recklessness on my part, almost criminal recklessness, the truth is I'd never felt so happy at the hospital before, at least not since I got the job, but that was a different kind of happiness, nothing like what I felt when we made love. Of course, I already knew that he'd been married and he had a son (he'd told me so himself the first time he was hospitalized), although I'd never heard of his wife visiting him in the hospital, but mainly he'd told me the other story, the one that "broke his heart," a tacky story, really, although he had no clue.

  Anyone else (a more experienced person, a more practical person) would have known that what we had couldn't last very long, at most the time he was in the hospital, but I got my hopes up and didn't think about the obstacles. It was the first (and only) time that I'd gone to bed with someone so much older than me (sixteen years) and it didn't bother me at all, in fact, I liked it. In bed he was gentle, polite, and sometimes completely wild, I don't mind saying. Although as the days went by and the hospital faded in his memory, he seemed even more distracted and his visits were farther and farther apart. He lived, as I've said, in a town like mine on the coast, just twenty minutes away by train and fifteen by car, and some nights he would show up at my apartment and not leave until the next morning, and other nights I was the one who would drive past my house and keep driving till I got to his town, which was like a trip into the lion's den, because he didn't like visits. He never said so, but I knew it. He lived in a building in the center of town, the back wall right up against the movie theater, so if a horror movie was playing or the sound track was very loud, you could hear the shouts and the high notes from the kitchen, and especially if you'd already seen the movie, you'd more or less know what part it was at, whether they'd found the killer or not, how much longer until the end.

  After the last show, the apartment would be plunged into a deep silence, as if the building had suddenly dropped into a mine shaft, except that the shaft was liquid somehow, an underwater world, because soon afterward I started to imagine fish, those flat, blind deep-sea fish. Otherwise, the apartment was a disaster: the floor was dirty, the living room was taken up by an enormous table covered with papers, there was room for a couple of chairs and that was all, the bathroom was horrible (do all single men have bathrooms like that? I hope not), there was no washing machine, and the sheets left much to be desired, as did the towels, the kitchen rags, his clothes, basically everything was a wreck, even considering that when we started to date, if we ever really dated, I told him he should bring his dirty clothes to my house and I would throw them in the washing machine, I have a really good one, but he ignored me, he said that he washed his things by hand, one time we went up to the roof, he lived on the second floor and the only other person in the building was the landlady on the first floor, no one lived on the third floor, although some nights, as we made love (or fucked, which is more like what it really was), I heard noises, as if someone on the third floor were moving a chair or bed or walking from the door to the window, which the person didn't open, it must have been the wind, everyone knows how old houses make strange noises, creaking on winter nights, anyway, we went up to the roof and he showed me the sink, a sink made of chipped cement as if someone, some former tenant, had taken a hammer to it in desperation one afternoon, and he said that's where he washed his clothes, by hand, of course, he didn't need a washing machine, and then we stood there looking over the town roofs, there's always something haphazard and pretty about the roofs of the old town, the sea, the seagulls, the church bell tower, everything a pale brown or yellow, like bright earth or bright sand. Later, in
evitably, I came to my senses and realized that it was all wrong. You can't love someone who doesn't love you, you can't be with someone just for the sex. I told him it was over between us and he didn't object. It was as if he'd always known it would end that way. But we were still friends and sometimes, on nights when I felt lonely or depressed, I would get in the car and go see him. We would have dinner together and then we would make love, but I wouldn't spend the night at his apartment. Then I met someone else, nothing serious, and that ended too.

  Once we argued. Why? I've forgotten. It didn't have anything to do with jealousy, that much I remember. He wasn't jealous at all. For several days he didn't call me and I didn't visit him. I wrote him a letter. I told him that he should grow up, that he should take better care of himself, that his health was fragile (he had sclerosis of the bile duct, a sky-high liver count, extensive ulcerative colitis, he had just recovered from an attack of hyperthyroidism, and every once in a while his teeth hurt!), that he should get his life on track because he was still young, that he should forget the woman who'd "broken his heart," that he should buy a washing machine. I spent a whole afternoon writing it and then I ripped it up and started to cry. Sometime later I received his last phone call.

  You want to see me but we aren't going to talk? I said. That's right, he said, that's right, we aren't going to talk, I just need to know you're nearby, but we aren't going to see each other either. Have you gone crazy? No, no, no, he said. It's very simple. But it wasn't very simple. To make a long story short, what he wanted was for me to see him. You won't see me? I said. No, there's no way I'll be able to see you, I've worked it all out very carefully, you have to park the car at the curve by the gas station, on the shoulder, and from there you'll be able to see me, you won't even have to get out of the car. Are you planning to commit suicide, Arturo? I said. I heard him laugh. No suicide, at least not for now, he said. You could hardly hear what he was saying. I have a ticket to Africa. I'm leaving in a few days. Africa, what part of Africa? I said. Tanzania, he said, I've already gotten every vaccine there is. Will you be there? he asked. None of this makes any sense, I said, I don't see the point. There is a point! he said. But not for me, asshole, I said. All you have to do is park your car at the first curve after the gas station and wait. How long? I don't know, five minutes, he said. If you get there when I tell you to, only five minutes. And then what? I said. Then you wait for ten more minutes, then you leave. And that's all. So what about Africa? I said. Africa comes afterward, he said (his voice sounded the same as it always did, a tiny bit ironic, but not the least bit insane), it's the future. The future? Nice future. And what do you plan to do there? I said. His answer was vague, as always. Things, assignments, the usual, is what I think he said, or something like that. When I hung up I didn't know what baffled me most, his invitation or his announcement that he was leaving Spain.

  The day of the appointment I followed his instructions word for word. High up on the road, with the car parked on the shoulder, there was a view of almost the whole cove, a little beach where the local nudists came in the summer. To my left was a row of hills and crags with a house poking up every so often, to my right the railroad line, some brush, and then, past a dip in the ground, the beach. It was a gray day and when I got there I couldn't see anyone. At one end of the cove was the bar Los Calamares Felices, a wooden shack painted blue, and not a soul in sight. At the other end were some rocks hiding smaller coves, more sheltered from the public gaze, which was where most of the nudists congregated in summer. I got there half an hour before the specified time. I didn't want to get out of the car, but after waiting for ten minutes and smoking two cigarettes, it became suffocating inside, in every sense of the word. When I opened the door to get out, a car parked in front of Los Calamares Felices. I watched it closely: a man got out, a guy with long, straight hair, presumably young, and after looking all around (except up, toward where I was), he walked behind the bar and vanished from sight. I don't know why I was so nervous. I got back in the car and locked the doors. I was thinking seriously about leaving when a second car parked at the entrance to Los Calamares Felices. A man and a woman got out. After looking at the first car, the man raised his hands to his mouth and shouted or whistled, I don't know, because just then a truck went by and I couldn't hear anything. The man and woman waited for a moment and then they walked toward the beach down a little dirt path. After a while, the first man came out from behind the part of Los Calamares Felices that I couldn't see and walked toward them. They must have known each other, because they shook hands and the woman kissed the first man. Then, in a motion that struck me as excessively slow, the second man's hand pointed to a spot on the beach. Emerging from among the rocks, two men were heading toward the bar, walking just at the line where the waves vanished on the sand. Although they were far away, I recognized one of them as Arturo. I don't know why, but I got out of the car as fast as I could, maybe with the idea that I would go down to the beach, although I realized immediately that to get there I would have to make a huge detour through a pedestrian underpass, and that by the time I got there they might all be gone. So I stayed there beside the car and watched. Arturo and his companion stopped in the middle of the beach. The two men from the cars walked toward them and the woman sat on the sand and waited. When the four met, one of the men, Arturo's companion, set a package on the ground and unwrapped it. Then he stood up and moved back. The first man went over to the package, took something out of it, and moved back too. Then Arturo went over to the package and took something out himself, imitating the previous man. Now Arturo and the first man were each holding a long thing in their hands. The second man went up to the first man and said something. The first man nodded and the second man moved away, but he must have been a little confused because he moved toward the water and a wave washed over his shoes, which made him jump as if he'd been bitten by a piranha and retreat quickly in the opposite direction. The first man didn't even look at him: he was talking to Arturo in what seemed a friendly way, and Arturo was moving his left foot, as if while he was listening he was amusing himself by tracing something, a face or a few numbers, with the tip of his boot in the wet sand. Arturo's companion backed several feet away toward the rocks. The woman got up and went over to the second man, who was sitting on the sand cleaning his shoes. Only Arturo and the first man were left in the middle of the beach. Then they raised what they were holding in their hands and struck them together. At first glance I thought it was walking sticks and I laughed, because I realized that this was what Arturo had wanted me to see: some clowning around, a strange kind of clowning around, but definitely clowning around. But doubt crept into my mind. What if those weren't walking sticks? What if they were swords?