The Third Reich

by Roberto Bolaño

  Suddenly I came upon a pottery shop. So this was the road that led to the nameless club. I parked the car in the lot and got out. From a hut an old man stared at me in silence. Everything was different: there were no spotlights or dogs, no otherworldly glow emanating from the plaster statues on which the rain pattered.

  I picked out a few pots and went over to the old man’s lair.

  “Eight hundred pesetas,” he said without emerging.

  I felt for the money and handed it to him.

  “Bad weather,” I said as I waited for the change and the rain fell on my face.

  “Yes,” said the old man.

  I put the pots in the trunk and left.

  I ate at a chapel on top of a mountain with a view of the whole bay. Centuries ago a stone fortress stood here as a defense against pirates. Maybe the town didn’t exist yet when the fortress was built. I don’t know. In any case, all that’s left of the fortress are a few stones scrawled with names, hearts, obscene drawings. Next to the ruins rises the chapel, of more recent construction. The view is incredible: the port, the yacht club, the old town, the new town, the campgrounds, the beachfront hotels. In good weather it’s possible to make out some of the other towns along the coast and, peeking over the skeleton of the fortress, a web of back roads and an infinity of small towns and hamlets inland. In a building adjoining the chapel there’s a kind of restaurant. I don’t know whether the people who run it belong to a religious order or whether they got the license in the usual way. They’re good cooks, which is what matters. The locals, especially couples, are in the habit of driving up to the chapel, though not exactly to admire the landscape. When I got here I found several cars parked under the trees. Some drivers remained inside their vehicles. Others were sitting at tables in the restaurant. The silence was almost total. I took a stroll around a kind of lookout point with a guardrail; at both ends there were telescopes, the coin-operated kind. I went up to one and put in fifty pesetas. I couldn’t see anything. Utter darkness. I whacked it a few times and then gave up. At the restaurant I ordered rabbit and a bottle of wine.

  What else did I see?

  1. A tree dangling over the precipice. Its crazed-looking roots were snarled around the stones and in the air. (But this isn’t a sight unique to Spain; I’ve seen trees like it in Germany.)

  2. An adolescent vomiting by the side of the road. His parents, in a car with British license plates, waited with the radio turned all the way up.

  3. A dark-eyed girl in the kitchen at the chapel restaurant. We made eye contact for only a second but something about me made her smile.

  4. The bronze bust of a bald man in a small, out-of-the-way square. On the pedestal, a poem written in Spanish of which I could make out only the words: “land,” “man,” “death.”

  5. A group of young people shrimping on the rocks north of town. For no apparent reason, they erupted every so often in cheers and vivas. Their shouts echoed off the rocks like the clamor of drums.

  6. A dark red cloud—the color of dirty blood—taking shape in the east, which, among the dark clouds that covered the sky, was like the promise of an end to the rain.

  After eating, I went back to the hotel. I showered, changed clothes, and went out again. There was a letter for me at the reception desk. It was from Conrad. For a moment I vacillated between reading it immediately or putting offthe pleasure for later. I decided that I’d save it until after I saw El Quemado. So I put the letter in my pocket and headed for the pedal boats.

  The sand was wet though it wasn’t raining anymore; here and there on the beach one could make out the vague shapes of people walking along the shore, gazing down as if they were searching for bottles with messages inside or jewels washed up by the sea. Twice I almost went back to the hotel. And yet the sense that I was making a fool of myself was less powerful than my curiosity.

  Long before I reached the pedal boats I heard the sound made by the tarp as it slapped against the floaters. Some rope must have come undone. With cautious steps I circled the pedal boats. In fact, there was a loose rope, and the tarp flapped ever more violently in the wind. I remember that the rope seethed like a snake. A river snake. The tarp was wet and heavy from the rain. Without thinking, I grabbed the rope and tied it as best I could.

  “What are you doing?” asked El Quemado from the pedal boats.

  I jumped backward. As I did, the knot came undone and the tarp made a sound like a plant ripped out by the roots, like something wet and alive.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  Immediately it occurred to me that I should have added: “Where are you?” Now El Quemado would be able to deduce that I knew his secret, since I wasn’t surprised to hear his voice, which clearly came from within. Too late.

  “What do you mean, nothing?”

  “Nothing,” I shouted. “I was taking a walk and I saw that the wind was about to rip the tarp off. Didn’t you notice?”

  Silence.

  I took a step forward and decisively retied the confounded rope.

  “There you go,” I said. “The pedal boats are protected. Now you just need the sun to come out!”

  An unintelligible grunt came from inside.

  “Can I come in?”

  El Quemado didn’t answer. For an instant I was afraid that he would come out and curse at me in the middle of the beach, demanding to know what the hell I wanted. I wouldn’t have known what to say. (Was I killing time? Confirming a suspicion? Conducting a small behavioral study?)

  “Can you hear me?” I shouted. “Can I come in or not?”

  “Yes.” El Quemado’s voice was barely audible.

  Politely, I sought the entrance; of course there was no hole dug in the sand. The pedal boats, propped against each other in an unlikely fashion, seemed to leave no gap through which a person could fit. I looked up: between the tarp and a floater there was a space through which a body could slip. I climbed up carefully.

  “Through here?” I asked.

  El Quemado grunted something that I took as a yes. From up above, the hole looked bigger. I closed my eyes and let myself drop.

  A smell of rotting wood and salt assaulted my senses. At last I was inside the fortress.

  El Quemado was sitting on a tarp like the one that covered the pedal boats. Next to him was a bag almost as big as a suitcase. On a sheet of newspaper he had some bread and a can of tuna. Despite what I had expected, there was enough light to see by, especially considering that it was a cloudy day. Along with the light, air came in through any number of openings. The sand was dry, or so it seemed, but it was cold in there. I said: It’s cold. El Quemado took a bottle out of a bag and handed it to me. I took a swig. It was wine.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  El Quemado took the bottle and drank in turn; then he cut a chunk of bread, split it open, stuffed it with some shreds of tuna, drenched it in olive oil, and proceeded to eat it. The space under the pedal boats was six feet long and just over three feet high. Soon I discovered other objects: a towel of indeterminate color, the ropesoled shoes (El Quemado was barefoot), another can of tuna (empty), a plastic bag printed with a supermarket logo . . . In general, order reigned in the fortress.

  “Aren’t you surprised that I knew where you were?”

  “No,” said El Quemado.

  “Sometimes I help Ingeborg solve mysteries . . . When she reads crime novels . . . I can figure out who the killers are before Florian Linden . . .” My voice had dwindled to almost a whisper.

  After gulping down the bread, he scrupulously deposited both cans in the plastic bag. His huge hands moved swiftly and silently. The hands of a criminal, I thought. In a second there was no trace of food left, only the bottle of wine between us.

  “The rain . . . Did it bother you? . . . But you’re fine in here, I see . . . You must be happy to see it rain every once in a while: today you’re just another tourist, like everybody else.”

  El Quemado stared at me in silence. In the jumble of his features I thou
ght I detected a sarcastic expression. Are you taking time offtoo? he asked. I’m alone today, I explained, Ingeborg, Hanna, and Charly went to Barcelona. What was he trying to insinuate by asking me whether I was taking time offtoo? That I would never finish my article? That I wasn’t hunkered down at the hotel?

  “How did you decide on the idea of living out here?”

  El Quemado shrugged his shoulders and sighed.

  “I can understand that it must be beautiful to sleep under the stars, out in the open, though from here I doubt you see many stars.” I smiled and slapped myself on the forehead, an unusual gesture for me. “No matter what, you sleep closer to the water than any tourist. Some people would pay to be in your place!”

  El Quemado dug for something in the sand. His toes burrowed slowly up and down; they were disproportionately large and surprisingly (though there was no reason to expect otherwise) unmarred by a single burn, smooth, the skin intact, without even a callus, which daily contact with the sea must have endeavored to smooth away.

  “I’d like to know how you decided to set up house here, how it occurred to you to arrange the pedal boats like this for shelter. It’s a good idea, but why? Was it so you wouldn’t have to pay rent? Is it really so expensive to rent a place? I apologize if it’s none of my business. I’m just curious, you know? Shall we go get coffee?”

  El Quemado picked up the bottle, and after raising it to his lips he handed it to me.

  “It’s cheap. It’s free,” he murmured when I set the bottle back down between us.

  “But is it legal? Besides me, does anyone know you sleep here? Say, the owner of the pedal boats, does he know you spend the nights here?”

  “I’m the owner,” said El Quemado.

  A strip of light fell directly on his forehead: the charred flesh, in the light, seemed to grow paler, stir.

  “They’re not worth much,” he added. “Any pedal boat in town is newer than mine. But they still float and people like them.”

  “I think they’re wonderful,” I said in a burst of enthusiasm. “I would never get on a pedal boat built to look like a swan or a Viking ship. They’re hideous. Yours, on the other hand, seem . . . I don’t know, more classic. More trustworthy.”

  I felt stupid.

  “That’s where you’re wrong. The new pedal boats are faster.”

  In a scattered way, he explained that with all the speedboat, ferry, and windsurfing traffic, the beach could sometimes be as busy as a highway. So the speed that the pedal boats were able to attain in order to avoid other craft became an important consideration. He had no accidents to complain of yet, just a few bumps to swimmers’ heads, but even in this regard the new pedal boats were better: a collision with the floater of one of his old pedal boats could crack someone’s head open.

  “They’re heavy,” he said.

  “Yes, like tanks.”

  El Quemado smiled for the first time that afternoon.

  “You’ve got a single-track mind,” he said.

  “True.”

  Still smiling, he traced a picture in the sand that he immediately erased. Even his infrequent gestures were enigmatic.

  “How is your game going?”

  “Perfect. Full sail ahead. I’ll destroy all the schemes.”

  “All the schemes?”

  “That’s right. All the old ways of playing. Under my system, the game will have to be reinvented.”

  When we emerged, the sky was a metallic gray, auguring new showers. I told El Quemado that a few hours ago I had spotted a red cloud in the east; I thought that was a sign of good weather. At the bar, reading the sports news at the same table where I’d left him, was the Lamb. When he saw us he beckoned us over to sit with him. The conversation then proceeded into territory that Charly would have loved but that frankly bored me. Bayern Münich, Schuster, Hamburg, Rummenigge, were the subjects. Naturally, the Lamb knew more about the teams and personalities than I did. To my surprise, El Quemado took part in the conversation (which was in my honor, since there was no talk about Spanish sports stars, only German ones, which I did fully appreciate and which at the same time made me uncomfortable) and he revealed an acceptable knowledge of German soccer. For example, the Lamb asked: Who’s your favorite player? and after my response (Schumacher, for the sake of saying something) and the Lamb’s (Klaus Allofs), El Quemado said “Uwe Seeler,” whom neither the Lamb nor I had heard of. Seeler and Tilkowski are the names El Quemado holds in highest esteem. The Lamb and I didn’t know what he was talking about. When we asked him to tell us more, he said that as a boy he saw both of them on the soccer field. Just as I thought that El Quemado was about to reflect on his childhood, he suddenly fell silent. The hours passed and despite the grayness of the day, night was long in coming. At eight I said good-bye and returned to the hotel. Sitting in an armchair on the first floor, next to a window through which I could see the Paseo Marítimo and a slice of the parking lot, I settled down to read Conrad’s letter. This is what it said:

  Dear Udo:

  I got your postcard. I hope swimming and Ingeborg are leaving you enough time to finish the article as planned. Yesterday we finished a round of Third Reich at Wolfgang’s house. Walter and Wolfgang (Axis) against Franz (Allies) and me (Russia). It was a three-way game, and the final result was: W & W, 4 Objective hexes; Franz, 18; me, 19, including Berlin and Stockholm (you can imagine the condition in which W & W left the Kriegsmarine!). Surprises in the diplomatic module: in autumn of ’41 Spain goes over to the Axis. Turkey wooed away from the Allies thanks to the DP that Franz and I spent prodigally. Alexandria and Suez, untouchable; Malta pounded but still standing. W & W did their best to test parts of your Mediterranean Strategy. And Rex Douglas’s Mediterranean Strategy. But it was too much for them. Down they went. David Hablanian’s Spanish Gambit might work one time out of twenty. Franz lost France in the summer of ’40 and weathered an invasion of England in spring ’41! Almost all of his army corps were in the Mediterranean and W & W couldn’t resist the temptation. We applied the Beyma variant. In ’41 I was saved by the snow and by W & W’s insistence on opening fronts, at a huge cost of BRP; they were always bankrupt by the last turn of the year. Regarding your strategy: Franz says it isn’t much different from Anchors’s. I told him that you were corresponding with Anchors and that his strategy had nothing to do with yours. W & W are ready to mount a giant TR as soon as you get back. First they suggested the GDW Europe series, but I convinced them otherwise. I doubt you’d want to play for more than a month straight. We’ve agreed that W & W and Franz and Otto Wolf will take the Allies and the Russians, respectively, and that you and I will take Germany, what do you say? We also talked about the Paris conference, December 23–28. It’s confirmed that Rex Douglas will be there in person. I know he’d like to meet you. A picture of you came out in Waterloo: it’s the one where you’re playing Randy Wilson, and there’s an article about our Stuttgart group. I got a letter from Mars, do you remember them? They want an article from you (there’ll be another by Mathias Müller, can you believe it?) for a special issue about players who specialize in WWII. Most of the participants are French and Swiss. And there’s more news, which I’d rather wait to give you when you get back from vacation. So what do you think the Objective hexes were that stymied W & W? Leipzig, Oslo, Genoa, and Milan. Franz wanted to hit me. In fact, he chased me around the table. We’ve set up a Case White. We’ll get started tomorrow night. The kids at Fire and Steel have discovered Boots & Saddles and Bundeswehr, from the Assault Series. Now they plan to sell their old Squad Leaders and they’re talking about putting out a fanzine and calling it Assault or Radioactive Combat or something like that. They make me laugh. Get lots of sun. Say hello to Ingeborg.

  Fondly,

  Conrad

  After the rain, evening at the Del Mar is tinted a dark blue shot through with gold. For a long time all I do is sit in the restaurant watching people come back to the hotel looking tired and hungry. Frau Else is nowhere to be seen. I discover
that I’m cold: I’m in shirtsleeves. Also, Conrad’s letter leaves me with a trace of sadness. Wolfgang is an idiot: I can picture his slowness, his hesitation at each move, his lack of imagination. If you can’t control Turkey with DP, invade it, you moron. Nicky Palmer has said so a thousand times. I’ve said so a thousand times. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, I felt alone. Conrad and Rex Douglas (whom I know solely through letters) are my only friends. The rest is emptiness and darkness. Unanswered calls. Snubs. “Alone in a ravaged land,” I remembered. In an amnesiac Europe, with no sense of the epic or heroic. (It doesn’t surprise me that adolescents spend their time playing Dungeons & Dragons and other role-playing games.)

  How did El Quemado buy his pedal boats? Yes, he told me how. With what he had saved from picking grapes. But how could he buy the whole lot, six or seven at once, with the money from just one harvest season? That was the down payment. The rest he paid little by little. The former owner was old and tired. It’s hard enough to make money in the summer, and if on top of that you have to pay an employee salary . . . so he decided to sell them and El Quemado bought them. Did he have any experience renting out pedal boats? No. It isn’t hard to learn, said the Lamb, mockingly. Could I do it? (Silly question.) Of course, said the Lamb and El Quemado in unison. Anyone could. Really, it was a job that required nothing but patience and a sharp eye for runaway pedal boats. You didn’t even have to know how to swim.

  El Quemado came to the hotel. We went upstairs without being seen by anyone. I showed him the game. The questions he asked were intelligent. Suddenly the street filled with the noise of sirens. El Quemado went out on the balcony and said the accident was in the tourist district. How stupid to die on vacation, I remarked. El Quemado shrugged. He was wearing a clean white T-shirt. From where he stood he could keep an eye on the shapeless mass of his pedal boats. I came over and asked what he was looking at. The beach, he said. I think he’d be a quick study.