The Savage Detectives

by Roberto Bolaño

  Pelayo Barrendoaín, Feria del Libro, Madrid, July 1994. First: here I am, doped, the antidepressants coming out of my ears, walking around this feria that's supposedly so nice, where Hernando García León has all kinds of readers, and Baca, the diametrical opposite of García León but just as revered, has all kinds of readers, and even my old friend Pere Ordóñez has some readers, and even I, why beat around the bush, why not just say so, even I have my share of readers too, the burnouts, the whipped, the people with little lithium bombs in their heads, rivers of Prozac, lakes of Epaminol, dead seas of Rohypnol, stoppered wells of Tranquimazín, my brothers and sisters, those who feed on my madness to nourish their madness. And here I am with my nurse, although instead of a nurse she might be a social worker, a special education teacher, maybe even a lawyer. In any case here I am with a woman who seems to be my nurse, or at least one might draw that conclusion seeing how quick she is to offer me the miracle pills, the bombs that go off in my brain and stop me from doing anything crazy. She walks beside me and her graceful shadow brushes my spreading, heavy shadow when I turn. My shadow seems ashamed to flow beside her shadow, but look again and you see it's perfectly happy that way. My shadow, the Yogi Bear of the third millennium, and her shadow, disciple of Hypatia. And it's precisely then that I'm happy to be here, more than anything because my nurse likes to see so many books all together and likes to walk alongside the most famous madman of so-called Spanish poetry or so-called Spanish literature. And that's when I realize I'm laughing mysteriously or singing mysteriously under my breath and she asks me why I'm laughing or why I'm singing and I tell her I'm laughing because the whole thing seems ludicrous to me, because Hernando García León pretending to be Saint John the Baptist or Saint Ignatius Loyola or the sainted Escrivá is ridiculous, and because the great struggle of all these writers for recognition and readers, hunkered down in their respective asbestos booths, is ludicrous. And she looks at me and asks why I'm singing. And I tell her it's my poems, that my singing is poems I'm thinking up or trying to memorize. And then my nurse smiles and nods, satisfied with my answers, and it's at times like this, when the crowd is enormous and the crush begins to seem faintly menacing (we're near Aurelio Baca's booth, she tells me), that her hand seeks and easily finds my hand, and hand in hand we slowly traverse the patches of blazing sun and icy shade, her shadow dragging my shadow after it but especially her body dragging my body. And although what I told her isn't true (I smile to keep from howling, I sing so I won't pray or curse), my explanation is more than good enough for my nurse, which doesn't say much for her skills as a psychologist but says plenty for her zest for life, her yearning to enjoy the sun shining on Retiro Park, her irrepressible desire to be happy. And that's when I think about things that from a certain perspective might not seem very poetic, like unemployment (my nurse has just been rescued from unemployment, thanks to me being crazy), and also the lost time rising before my eyes like a single red balloon that floats up and up until it makes me cry, Daedalus mourning the fate of Icarus, Daedalus doomed, and then I come back down to planet Earth, to the Feria del Libro, and try to give her a half smile, just for her, but she's not the one who sees, it's my readers, the whipped, the massacred, the madmen who feed on my madness and who'll end up doing away with me or my infinite patience, it's my critics who see me, those who want to have their pictures taken with me but wouldn't be able to stand my presence for more than eight hours straight, it's the writer-television hosts, those who love how crazy Barrendoaín is and at the same time gravely shake their heads. She doesn't see, she never sees, the fool, the idiot, the innocent, this woman who's come too late, who's interested in literature with no idea of the hells lurking beneath the tainted or pristine pages, who loves flowers and doesn't realize there's a monster in the bottom of the vase, who strolls around the Feria del Libro and drags me around behind her, who smiles at the photographers when they point their cameras at me, who drags my shadow along, and her shadow too, the ignorant, the dispossessed, the disinherited, who will outlive me and is my only consolation. Everything that begins as comedy ends as a dirge in the void.

  Felipe Müller, Bar Céntrico, Calle Tallers, Barcelona, September 1995. This is an airport story. Arturo told it to me in the Barcelona airport. It's the story of two writers. Nebulous, in the end. Stories told in airports are soon forgotten, unless they're love stories, and this one isn't. I think we'd met the writers. At least he had. In Barcelona, Paris, Mexico? That I don't know. One of the writers was from Peru, the other was Cuban, although I'm not one hundred percent sure of that either. When he told me the story, Arturo not only knew where they were from, he also told me their names. But I wasn't paying much attention. I think, at least I'd guess, that they were of our generation, which means they were born in the 1950s. Their fates, according to Arturo, and this I do remember clearly, were instructive. The Peruvian was a Marxist, or at least his reading followed those lines: he was acquainted with Gramsci, Lukacs, Althusser. But he had also read Hegel, Kant, some of the Greeks. The Cuban was a happy storyteller. That should be capitalized: a Happy Storyteller. Instead of theory, he read novelists, poets, short story writers. Both of them, the Peruvian and the Cuban, were born into poor families, working-class in the one case, peasants in the other. Both grew up happy, with a talent for happiness. Each had the will to be happy. Arturo said that they must both have been beautiful children. Well, I think all children are beautiful. They discovered their literary callings early on, of course: the Peruvian wrote poems and the Cuban wrote stories. Both believed in the revolution and freedom, like pretty much every Latin American writer born in the fifties. Then they grew up and experienced the full flush of success: their books were published, all the critics unanimously praised them, they were hailed as the continent's top young writers, one in poetry and the other in fiction, and although it was never spoken everyone began to await their definitive works. But then the same thing happened to them that almost always happens to the best Latin American writers or the best of the writers born in the fifties: the trinity of youth, love, and death was revealed to them, like an epiphany. How did this vision affect their works? At first, in a scarcely perceptible way: as if a sheet of glass lying on top of another sheet of glass were shifted slightly. Only a few friends noticed. Then, inescapably, they headed for catastrophe or the abyss. The Peruvian received a grant and left Lima. For a while he traveled through Latin America, but he soon set off for Barcelona and then Paris. Arturo met him in Mexico, I think, but it was in Barcelona that they became close. In those days everything seemed to point to a meteoric career, and yet with very few exceptions, Spanish editors and writers showed no interest in his work. Who can say why? Then he left for Paris, where he made contact with a student group of Peruvian Maoists. According to Arturo, the Peruvian had always been a Maoist, a playful and irresponsible Maoist, a salon Maoist, but in Paris he let himself be convinced, one way or another, that he was the reincarnation of Mariátegui, the hammer or the anvil, I don't remember which, scourge of the paper tigers roaming in Latin America. Why did Belano think it was all just a game for his Peruvian friend? Well, he had reason enough: one day the Peruvian might write pages of revolting propaganda and the next day an almost illegible essay on Octavio Paz full of flattery and praise of the Mexican poet. For a Maoist, that showed a certain lack of seriousness. It wasn't consistent. Actually, the Peruvian had always been hopeless as an essayist, it didn't matter if he was playing spokesman of the dispossessed or extolling Paz's poetry. And yet he was still a good poet, occasionally very good. Daring, innovative. One day, the Peruvian decided to return to Peru. Maybe he thought the moment had come for the new Mariátegui to return to his native soil, or maybe he just wanted to use what was left of his grant to live somewhere cheaper and set to work on his new projects without interruption. But he was unlucky. He had hardly set foot in the Lima airport when the Shining Path rose up as if it had been waiting for him. Here, suddenly, was a force to be reckoned with, a force that threatened to
spread all over Peru. Clearly, the Peruvian couldn't retreat to a little town in the mountains to write. That was when everything started to go wrong. The bright hope of Peruvian letters disappeared and was replaced by someone who was increasingly afraid, increasingly unbalanced, someone who couldn't get over having traded Barcelona and Paris for Lima, where the only people who didn't despise his poetry loathed him as a revisionist or a traitorous dog, and where, in the eyes of the police, he had been one of the ideologues of the millenarian guerrilla movement (which, in a certain way, was true). In other words, the Peruvian suddenly found himself stranded in a country where he might just as easily be assassinated by the police as by the Shining Path. Both groups had more than sufficient cause; both felt affronted by what he had written. From that moment on, everything he did to save himself brought him irrevocably closer to destruction. To make a long story short: the Peruvian came unglued. The former admirer of the Gang of Four and the Cultural Revolution was transformed into a believer in the theories of Madame Blavatsky. He returned to the Catholic church. He became a fervent follower of John Paul II and a bitter enemy of liberation theology. And yet the police refused to believe in this metamorphosis and he remained on file as a potential threat. His poet friends, on the other hand, those who expected something of him, did believe him and stopped speaking to him. It wasn't long before his wife left him too. But the Peruvian persisted in his madness and stood his ground, digging in his heels. He wasn't making any money, of course. He went to live with his father, who supported him. When his father died, his mother supported him. And of course, he never stopped writing or turning out huge, uneven books punctuated by occasional moments of brilliant, shaky humor. Years later, he would sometimes boast that he'd been chaste since 1985. Also: he lost any hint of shame, composure, or discretion. He went over the top (notably over the top, that is, since this is Latin American writers we're talking about) in his praise of others and he completely lost his sense of the ridiculous in complimenting himself. And yet, every once in a while he wrote beautiful poems. According to Arturo, the Peruvian believed that the two greatest American poets were Whitman and himself. A strange case. The Cuban was a different story. He was gay and the revolutionary authorities weren't prepared to tolerate homosexuals, so after a brief moment of glory during which he wrote two excellent novels (also brief), it wasn't long before he was dragged through the shit and madness that passes for a revolution. Gradually, they began to take away what little he had. He lost his job, no one would publish him, he was pressured to become a police informer, he was followed, his mail was intercepted, in the end they threw him in jail. It seems the revolutionaries had two aims: to cure the Cuban of his homosexuality and, once he was cured, to persuade him to work for his country. Both were a joke. The Cuban held out. Like all good (or bad) Latin Americans, he wasn't afraid of the police or poverty or not being published. He had countless adventures on the island. He survived it all and kept his wits about him. One day he escaped. He made it to the United States. His books began to be published. He started to work even harder than before, if possible, but he and Miami weren't made for each other. He headed to New York. He had lovers. He got AIDS. In Cuba they went so far as to say: you see, if he'd stayed here, he wouldn't have died. For a while he was in Spain. His last days were hard: he wanted to finish the book he was writing and he could barely type. Still, he finished it. Sometimes he would sit at the window of his New York apartment and think about what he could have done and what, in the end, he did. His last days were days of loneliness, suffering, and rage at what he had lost forever. He didn't want to die in a hospital. That's what Arturo told me as we were waiting for the plane that would carry him away from Spain forever. The dream of Revolution, a hot nightmare. You and I are Chilean, I told him, and none of this is our fault. He looked at me and didn't answer. Then he laughed. He gave me a kiss on each cheek and left. Everything that begins as comedy ends as a comic monologue, but we aren't laughing anymore.

  24

  Clara Cabeza, Parque Hundido, Mexico City DF, October 1995. I was Octavio Paz's secretary. You can't imagine how much work it was. Writing letters, finding impossible-to-find manuscripts, calling contributors to the magazine, tracking down books that had ceased to exist outside of one or two North American universities. After two years of working for Don Octavio I had a chronic headache that set in around eleven in the morning and wouldn't go away until six in the evening, no matter how many aspirin I took. In general, I preferred the tasks that were most like housework, making breakfast or helping the maid with lunch. That was work I enjoyed, and it was also a rest for my tortured mind. I usually got to the house around seven in the morning, before the traffic got too bad, or at least before it was as terrible as at rush hour, and I would prepare coffee, tea, orange juice, two pieces of toast, a simple breakfast, and then take the tray into Don Octavio's bedroom and say Don Octavio, wake up, it's a new day. But Señora María José would be the first to open her eyes and she was always cheerful when she woke up, her voice coming out of the darkness and saying: leave breakfast on the bedside table, Clara, and I would say good morning, Señora, it's a new day. Then I would go back to the kitchen and make my own breakfast, something light like the señores' breakfast, coffee, orange juice, a piece of toast or two with jam, and then I would go into the library and get to work.

  You don't know the stacks of letters Don Octavio received and how hard it was to file them. As you can imagine, people wrote to him from every corner of the globe, all kinds of people, from other Nobel laureates to young English or Italian or French poets. I'm not saying that Don Octavio answered every letter, he probably only answered fifteen or twenty percent of them, but the rest still had to be classified and filed, don't ask me why, I'd have been happy to throw them away. At least the filing system was simple: we sorted them by nationality, and when a writer's nationality wasn't clear (this was often the case with letters written in Spanish, English, or French), we sorted them by language. Sometimes, while I was going through the mail, I would start to think about the workdays of the secretaries of pop singers or rock stars, and I would wonder whether they had to deal with as many letters as I did. Maybe so, but I'm sure they didn't get letters in as many languages. Sometimes Don Octavio would even receive letters in Chinese, which says it all. When that happened, I had to put the letters aside in a separate little pile that we called marginalia excentricorum, which Don Octavio would go through once a week. Then, but this only happened very occasionally, he would say Clarita, take the car and go see my friend Nagahiro. All right, Don Octavio, I would say, but it wasn't as simple as he made it sound. First I would spend all morning calling this Nagahiro and when I reached him at last, I would say Don Nagahiro, I have a few little things for you to translate, and we would make a date for some day that week. Sometimes I would send the papers to him by mail or messenger, but when it was important, which I could tell by the expression on Don Octavio's face, I would go in person and not leave Señor Nagahiro's side until he had at least given me a brief summary of what the papers or letter said, a summary that I would take down in shorthand in my little notebook and then type out later, print, and leave on Don Octavio's desk, on the left side, so that if he wanted he could take a look at it and satisfy his curiosity.

  And then there were the letters that Don Octavio sent. That really was exasperating work, because he would write quite a number each week, say sixteen more or less, to the unlikeliest places in the world, which was an astounding thing to see, because one had to ask how the man had made so many friends in so many different places, even mismatched places like Trieste and Sydney, Cordoba and Helsinki, Naples and Bocas del Toro (Panama), Limoges and New Delhi, Glasgow and Monterrey. And he had words of encouragement for everyone, or one of those thoughts that he would mutter to himself and that I suppose gave the recipient something to think about and mull over. It would be wrong to reveal what he said in his letters, so all I'll say is that he talked about more or less the same things he talks abo
ut in his essays and poems: pretty things, somber things, and otherness, which is something I've thought about a lot, like many Mexican intellectuals, I suppose, and have never quite been able to figure out. Another thing I did, and willingly, was act as nurse, since I happened to have taken a few first aid courses. By then, Don Octavio wasn't what you might call healthy and he had to take pills every day, and since he always had other things on his mind, he would forget when he had to take them, and then it would all be a muddle, did I take this one at noon, didn't I take that one at eight this morning, anyway, a confusion that I'm proud to say I put an end to, since I even made sure he took what he was supposed to take when I wasn't there, like clockwork. In order to do that, I would call him from my apartment or wherever I happened to be and ask the maid: has Don Octavio taken his eight o'clock pills yet? and the maid would go and see, and if the pills that I'd left ready in a plastic container were still there, then I would tell her: give them to him and make him take them. Sometimes I would speak to the señora instead of the maid, but just the same, I'd say: has Don Octavio taken his medicine? and Señora María José would laugh and say oh Clarisa, she called me Clarisa sometimes, I don't know why, one of these days you'll make me jealous, and when Señora María José said that I would blush a little and somehow be afraid that she would see me blushing, can you imagine? as if she could see anything when we were talking on the phone! but I still kept calling and insisting that he take his pills on time, because otherwise how were they supposed to do him any good?