Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998-2003

by Roberto Bolaño

  PEZOA VÉLIZ

  Pezoa Véliz is without a doubt the quintessential minor poet of the Chilean Parnassus and also one of the most mysterious, to begin with because of his last name, which some spell with a z and others with an s. Armando Donoso, one of the first experts on his work, although here the word expert is clearly an overstatement, introduces him by saying that he wasn’t much of a poet, author of only three decent poems. Then he calls him a layabout, a more or less conscious plagiarist, a social climber, and an opportunist, although at the same time he spends more than two pages challenging the claim that he was a bastard or born out of wedlock, a charge that weighed heavily on the poet and that Armando Donoso relies on letters to clear up with more vigor than objectivity.

  In the Chile of 1927, date of the publication of Poesías y prosas completas [Complete Poems and Prose] by Carlos Pezoa Vélis (Nascimiento, compiled and with an introduction by Armando Donoso, who, one gathers, was a somebody back then and today is a nobody) and nineteen years after the poet’s death at the age of twenty-eight, whether he was or was not a bastard wasn’t a trivial matter. And Donoso tackles the affair with an energy that today looks neurotic. Given historians of this caliber, it’s almost better to be forgotten.

  Nevertheless — and here Donoso doesn’t err — certain facts are inescapable. Pezoa was poor all his life. He had a mother who was less a mother than a gypsy curse. His education was lacking. His poetry suffers from almost all the tics of modernism and possesses few of its virtues. His relationships with women were complicated. His relationship with society was impossible: in the end, Pezoa, like so many writers, simply wanted to get ahead, although to reach this point he had to go through stages as contradictory as anarchism, which seduced him, and bureaucracy, where he found peace of mind, a salary, basic sustenance, and some time to write. The stories that survive him are the kind that bring a person to tears: a Chile in black and white, as if the country had never existed. But he wrote more than three good poems (maybe six or seven), and one really good one, “Tarde en el hospital” [Afternoon in the Hospital], perhaps shortly before he died. And there he remains, in his hospital bed, melancholy Pezoa Véliz.

  UNA CASA PARA SIEMPRE

  When Enrique Vila-Matas’s Una casa para siempre [A Home Forever] (Anagrama, 1988) was published, two critics blasted it. The first said it was a terrible novel. The second said it was the kind of book that should never have been written. By all indications, readers took the critics at their word, and the fate of the novel was sealed. Some years later, however, it was translated into French and was chosen, along with a novel by Javier Marías, as one of France’s books of the year.

  Today, when so much water has passed under the bridges of Spain and France, and when Vila-Matas’s excellence is an undisputed fact, the fate of Una casa para siempre remains unchanged, though it’s a book praised by writers like Rodrigo Fresán and Juan Villoro. The first edition, which has yet to sell out, is still on the shelves of some bookstores; the book, which is about ventriloquists and daily acts of subversion, still lives in the proud limbo of books marked by a fate not theirs, though they, the books, accept it with a courage some national heroes might envy.

  What is Una casa para siempre? A tragedy and a comedy. An epiphany and a call to the guillotine. A Vila-Matas novel in its purest and most gracious state. The drama of a ventriloquist with a voice of his own, for some writers a virtue to be constantly yearned for and sought, but for the ventriloquist a curse, for obvious reasons. Style is a fraud, said De Kooning, and Vila-Matas agrees. To have a voice of one’s own is a blessing, whether one is a writer, painter, or ventriloquist, but it can lead or perhaps in fact inevitably leads to conformism, flatness, monotony. Every work, Vila-Matas tells us, peering out at us from the pages of this book, should be a fresh leap into the void. Whether anyone is watching or not.

  GRASS'S CENTURY

  From a writer like Günter Grass, one expects a masterpiece even on his deathbed, though by all indications My Century (Alfaguara) will be only the second-to-last of his great books. It’s a collection of short stories, one for each year of the century now behind us, in which the great German writer examines the frequently tortured fate of his country. From the first soccer teams to World War I, from the economic crisis of the twenties to the rise of Nazism, from World War II and the concentration camps to the German Miracle, from the post-war period to the fall of the Berlin Wall, everything has a place in this book, which manages to seem short though it’s more than four hundred pages long, perhaps because the succession of horrors, the succession of disasters, and the human instinct for survival despite everything make it feel that way: the century has exhaled.

  The Grass of this book, of course, isn’t the Grass of The Tin Drum or of Dog Years or The Flounder, to mention just three of his great and all-encompassing works. Here we have before us a crepuscular and fragmentary Grass, as merited by the occasion, and also a seemingly (though only seemingly) weary Grass, who embarks on the review of his German century, which is also the European century, with the conviction of having traversed an enduring piece of hell and also with the certainty, the old and maligned and magnificent certainty of the Enlightenment, that human beings deserve to be saved, even though often they aren’t saved. We’re exiting the twentieth century marked by fire. That’s what Grass tells us. And he tells it in some wonderful stories, alive with humor and pain, written as if by a young man of thirty, full of energy and with a long life ahead of him.

  THE RHAPSODE OF BLANES

  Don Josep Ponsdomènech is eighty-eight and sometimes I see him sunning himself in the square next to the Joaquim Ruyra School, at noon, when I come to pick up my son. It’s just a wayside stop for him, because Don Josep Ponsdomènech is tall and lean and he’s always on the move, from the Plaza de Cataluña to the port, from the Avinguda de Dintre to the narrow streets of the town center, where the sun rarely shines. By trade he’s a poet, a rhapsode, he says, and he’s comfortable in the role, at peace with it. His pockets are full of paper on which he writes his daily poems in elegant copperplate. Some he writes just because, inspired by the muses; other times he writes to alleviate suffering or to quiet memories. But always he writes in a spirit of hope, convinced that poetry possesses healing powers. If a woman has lost her husband, for example, Don Josep Ponsdomènech writes her a poem that lauds the deceased while at the same time reminding the widow of the need to keep living. Even those who die utterly alone have their poems.

  The rhapsode remembers everyone. No one pays him. His art is free. At some point Don Josep Ponsdomènech told me the story of his life: full of pleasures of every sort, he stresses, as well as misfortunes, intrinsic to existence, he sighs, and from all of it he’s emerged unscathed and cooler than a cucumber. His favorite authors are definitely the modernists, Rubén Darío first among them, but I’ve also heard him express his admiration for Salvat-Papasseit, that brave young man, and so modern. Don Josep Ponsdomènech is brave too, of course, and, in his own way he was once modern, but his principal virtue, among the many with which he’s graced, is the most human of all: happiness.

  It’s nice to live in Blanes and to know that on sunny days our rhapsode, well bundled up, is strolling the Paseo Marítimo and the heart of the town.

  A SOUL SOLD TO THE DEVIL

  Norberto Fuentes, the author of Condenados de Condado [The Condemned of Condado], in a number of ways a memorable book, has sold his soul to the devil. Norberto Fuentes is Cuban. He lives in the United States now, but not so long ago he lived in Havana, where one can imagine he walked the streets with a lordly air. His most recent book, Dulces guerreros cubanos [Sweet Cuban Warriors], is just out from Seix Barral, and in it he appears to tell the story of his friendship with General Ochoa and the De la Guardia brothers, that is, the men who were shot or locked up by the Cuban regime in 1989. Ochoa and the De la Guardias were men of the Cuban revolution, and Norberto Fuentes, in syncopated style, describes some of their adventures, as well as the adventures
of many other characters with roles in the regime’s military and political apparatus: from Fidel Castro to the countless bureaucrats who taped conversations.

  Norberto Fuentes — and this is one of the oddities of the book — doesn’t hide that he was a favored son of the revolution. He struts the streets of Havana wearing a Rolex, and tells us about the curious penchant of the top commanders for owning duplicates of everything: two Rolexes, two houses, two wives. He also discusses the prisons and wars of the regime, a regime that he defended with bellicose ardor until things turned ugly. It’s as if Raúl Castro were to go into exile in Miami today and write a book lamenting the injustices committed by his brother during forty years of dictatorship. But Norberto Fuentes was once a writer of some talent, and his talent persists, barely a shadow of what it was or could have been, but it’s still there. And it can be felt. He doesn’t ask for forgiveness. He tries to justify himself. He adopts a cynical and nihilistic stance, but he doesn’t ask for forgiveness. The Cuban revolution appears in his book as what it is: a gangster movie shot in the tropics. And in that movie Norberto Fuentes thinks he played an important role, when really he was just one of the big man’s jesters, nothing more. In his American exile, Cuba’s official Hemingway expert tries to write like Hemingway, but he doesn’t manage it. The book is about indignity and shame and Fuentes’s writing oozes indignity and shame. Parties and power are a distant memory. The drives around Havana in his tricked-out Lada are a distant memory.

  Norberto Fuentes is no longer a writer, he’s a lost soul.

  THE ANCESTOR

  We all have some idiot ancestor. All of us, at some point in our lives, discover the trace, the flickering vestige of our dimmest ancestor, and upon gazing at the elusive visage we realize, with astonishment, incredulity, horror, that we’re staring at our own face winking and grinning at us from the bottom of a pit. This exercise tends to be depressing and wounding to our self-esteem, but it can also be extremely salutary. My idiot ancestor was called Bolano (Bolanus) and he appears in the first book of Horace’s Satires, IX, in which Bolano accosts the poet as he walks along the Via Sacra. Says Horace: “Suddenly a fellow whom I knew only by name dashed up and seized me by the hand. ‘My dear chap,’ he said ‘how are things?’ ‘Quite nicely at the moment thanks,’ I said. ‘Well, all the best!’ He remained in pursuit, so I nipped in quickly: ‘Was there something else?’ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You should get to know me. I’m an intellectual.’ ‘Good for you!’ I said.” What follows is a tiresome stroll for Horace, since he can’t shake Bolano, who ceaselessly offers advice, praising his own work and even his talent for singing. When Horace asks if he has a mother or family to care for him, Bolano answers that he’s buried them all and he’s alone in the world. Lucky for them, thinks Horace. And he says: “That leaves me. So finish me off! A sinister doom is approaching which an old Sabine fortune-teller foresaw when I was a boy.” The walk, nevertheless, continues. Bolano then confesses that’s he’s out on bail and must appear in court, and he asks Horace to lend him a hand. Horace, of course, refuses. Then a third person appears and Horace tries in vain to slip away. It must be added, in Bolano’s defense, that this new character, Aristius Fuscus, a dandy of the era, is just as much an idiot as Bolano and actually is Horace’s friend. In the end, it’s Aristius Fuscus who accompanies Bolano to his appointment with the law.

  There’s no moral to this story. We all have an idiot ancestor. He’s a specter, but he’s also our brother, and he lives deep inside each of us under different names that express our degree of implication in the crime: fear, ridicule, indifference, blindness, cruelty.

  THE NOVEL AS PUZZLE

  For Antoine Bello, French author born in Boston in 1970, every novel is, among other things, a puzzle. I’ve just read his first novel, The Missing Piece (Anagrama), which really is a puzzle: that is, it’s a crime novel complete with a serial killer, professional puzzle players, even puzzle championships, and it’s structured like a puzzle whose pieces the reader must put together to find the killer — for one thing — but also and above all for the sake of pleasure, since pleasure, pure and simple, is the ultimate goal of any novel. By this, of course, I mean pleasure or enjoyment that isn’t at odds with horror or with the greatest rigor or with the writer’s responsibility to his story (which, incidentally, is often his own story).

  In the tradition of Georges Perec, Bello’s outstanding novel is conceived as a machine, structured in three parts. The first part is called “The Enigma,” and in it summaries are given not just of the murders but of some of the most important aspects of the world of puzzles and its most competitive and public manifestation, the professional puzzle championship circuit. The third part is called “The Solution.” In it, obviously, we’re told the name of the killer and the reason for his abominable deeds. In between is the second part, consisting of 48 chapters, each of which represents a piece of a 48-part puzzle, with the added detail that the 48th piece, in other words the last, is blank. It’s on this “missing piece” that the novel turns, and as we follow its trail we’re told the curious tale of the Bantamolians, the Central African tribe whose existence is closely bound to the puzzle, functioning as construction and also as deconstruction, or as a device that parses and dictates fate; and also the tale of a craftsman who makes crime-scene puzzles, many of which are missing a piece, an absence that contains presences or that is the key to interpreting and deciphering an enigma.

  Then, too, Antoine Bello’s novel is narrated from different points of view and through the lens of various genres, among them the epistolary novel, the detective novel, the satire, the adventure novel, the ethnographic novel, the populist novel, the symbolist novel, and the naturalist novel, not to exclude chapters in which the storytelling is based on mathematics, logic, or religion. In sum, we have before us a great novel, and above all a great novelist, scarcely thirty years old, whose future work undoubtedly has great surprises in store for us.

  A PERFECT STORY

  A while ago, at a lunch with Nicanor Parra, the poet made mention of the stories of Saki, especially one of them, “The Open Window,” which is part of the book Beasts and Super-Beasts. The great Saki’s real name was Hector Hugh Munro and he was born in 1870 in Burma, which in those days was a British colony. His stories, heavily seasoned with black humor, generally belong to the genre of horror and supernatural fiction, so popular among the British. When World War I broke out, Saki enlisted as a volunteer, a fate he could surely have avoided by virtue of his age (he was over forty), and he died fighting at Beaumont-Hamel in 1916.

  During that long postprandial conversation, which lasted until nightfall, I thought about a writer of the same generation as Munro, though stylistically he was very different: the great Max Beerbohm, who was born in London in 1872 and died in Rapallo, Italy, in 1956, and who, in addition to stories, wrote novels, newspaper pieces, and essays, without ever giving up two of his first loves: drawing and caricature. Max Beerbohm may be the paradigm of the minor writer and the happy man. In other words: Max Beerbohm was a good and gracious soul.

  When we finally took our leave of Nicanor Parra and the Caleuche and returned to Santiago, I thought about the story that I believe is Beerbohm’s best, “Enoch Soames,” which was included by Silvina Ocampo, Borges, and Adolfo Bioy Casares in the magnificent and often hard to find Antologia de la literatura fantastica [Anthology of Fantastic Literature]. Months later I reread it. The story is about a mediocre and pedantic poet whom Beerbohm meets in his youth. The poet, who has written only two books, one worse than the next, befriends the young Beerbohm, who in turn becomes an involuntary witness to his misfortunes. The story thus becomes not just a testament to the life of all poor fools who in a moment of madness choose literature, but to late nineteenth-century London. Thus far, of course, it’s a comic tale, vacillating between naturalism and reportage (Beerbohm appears under his real name, as does Aubrey Beardsley), between satire and the broad brushstrokes of costumbrismo. But suddenly everything ch
anges, absolutely changes. The critical moment comes when Enoch Soames, lost in thought, glimpses his mediocrity. He’s seized by despair and apathy. One afternoon Beerbohm runs into him at a restaurant. They talk, and the young narrator tries to cheer up the poet. He points out that Soames’s financial situation is all right, he can live on his income for the rest of his life, maybe he just needs a holiday. The bad poet confesses that all he wants to do is kill himself and that he would give anything to know whether his name will live on. Then someone at the next table, a man with the look of a scoundrel or miscreant, asks permission to join them. He introduces himself as the Devil and he promises that if Soames sells him his soul he’ll send him into the future, say one hundred years, to 1997, to the British Library Reading Room where Soames often goes to work, so he can see for himself, in situ, whether his name has stood the test of time. Despite Beerbohm’s pleas, Soames accepts. Before he leaves he agrees to meet Beerbohm again at the same restaurant. The next few hours are described like something out of a dream — a nightmare — in a Borges story. When at last they meet again, Soames is as pale as death. He really has traveled to the future. He couldn’t find his name in any encyclopedia, any index of English literature. But he did find the Beerbohm story called “Enoch Soames,” in which, among other things, he’s mocked. Then the Devil comes and takes him away to hell, despite Beerbohm’s efforts to stop him.

  In the last lines there’s still a final surprise, having to do with the people Soames claims to have seen in the future. And there’s yet another surprise, this one much smaller, concerning paradoxes. But these two final surprises I’ll leave to the reader who buys the Antología de la literatura fantástica or who rifles through libraries in search of it. Personally, if I had to choose the fifteen best stories I’ve read in my life, “Enoch Soames” would be among them, and not in last place.