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

by Roberto Bolaño

  From this point on, the conversation turns philosophical. Paracelsus asks if he believes anyone is capable of destroying a rose. No one is incapable, says the aspiring disciple. Paracelsus argues that nothing that exists can be destroyed. Everything is mortal, answers the stranger. “If you cast this rose into the embers,” says Paracelsus, “you would believe that it has been consumed, and that its ashes are real. I tell you that the rose is eternal, and that only its appearances may change. At a word from me, you would see it again.” The stranger is puzzled by this response. He insists that Paracelsus burn the rose and make it rise from the ashes, whether with alembics or with the Word. Paracelsus resists: he talks about semblances that sooner or later lead to disenchantment, he talks about faith and credulity, he talks about the search. The stranger takes the rose and throws it on the fire. It burns to ashes. The stranger, says Borges “for one infinite moment awaited the words and the miracle.” But Paracelsus doesn’t do anything, he just sits there sadly and is reminded of the physicians and pharmacists of Basilea who believe he’s a fraud. The stranger thinks he understands and tries not to humiliate him any further. He ceases his demands, takes back his gold coins, and politely leaves. Despite the love and admiration he feels for Paracelsus, vilified by all, he understands that under the mask there is nothing. And he asks himself: who am I to judge and expose Paracelsus? A little while later they bid each other farewell. Paracelsus accompanies the stranger to the door, telling him he’ll always be welcome in his house. The stranger promises to return. They both know they’ll never see each other again. Alone now, and before he puts out the lamp, Paracelsus scoops up the ashes and utters a single word in a low voice. And in his hands the rose springs back to life.

  JAVIER CERCAS'S NEW NOVEL

  It’s called Soldiers of Salamis (Tusquets, 2001) and the narrator is someone by the name of Javier Cercas, who clearly isn’t the Javier Cercas I know and with whom I often have long conversations on the most unusual subjects. The man I know is married, has a child, his father is still living. Meanwhile, the narrator of Soldiers of Salamis introduces himself like this, at the very start of the novel: “Three things had just happened: first my father had died; then my wife had left me; finally, I’d given up my literary career.” These three statements are false, or rather, in this combination of possibilities that we call reality, they’re false, although in some other configuration of reality, or of nightmare logic, they’re probably true. The hypothetical Cercas is preparing a piece on the writer Sánchez Mazas, an entirely real character who was one of the founding fathers of Spanish fascism.

  Everything we’re told about Sánchez Mazas in the novel cleaves strictly (although with Cercas nothing is strict) to historical fact: Sánchez Mazas’s early years, his books, his friends, his political activities, his misfortunes. Then comes the Civil War and the writer is imprisoned in the Republican zone. The incident that sparks the novel comes at the end of the war and today it may strike us as an unusual story (or not), but in those days it was a common and brutal practice: Sánchez Mazas and a group of nationalist prisoners are taken to a small Catalan town and shot. They’re all killed, except for Sánchez Mazas, who escapes and is pursued without much enthusiasm. At some point, one of the soldiers who’s giving chase finds him hidden in the bushes. The leader of the group asks whether the soldier sees anything. The Republican soldier looks at Sánchez Mazas, looks him in the eye, and says there’s no one here. Then he turns around and goes.

  The second part of the novel tells the story of Sánchez Mazas (whose only positive quality, in my view, is that he fathered Sánchez Ferlosio, one of the best Spanish prose writers of the twentieth-century) and the endless intellectual disillusionment of the Spanish Falangists, which never translated into productive discontent.

  The third part centers on the unknown Republican soldier who saved Sánchez Mazas’s life, and here there appears a new character, someone by the name of Bolaño, who is a writer and Chilean and lives in Blanes, but who isn’t me, in the same way that the narrator Cercas isn’t Cercas, although both characters are possible and even probable. Through this Bolaño the reader learns the story of Miralles, a soldier, who, as he retreated, passed the place where the Falangists were killed and Sánchez Mira was nearly killed, and who later crossed the border into France and spent a while in a concentration camp on the outskirts of Argèles, and who, to escape the camp, enlisted in the French Foreign Legion, and who, after the fall of France in 1940, followed General Leclerc on his great march from the Maghreb to Chad, and who took part in several battles against the Italians and the Afrika Korps, and who then, assigned to the French 2nd Armored Division, fought in the battle of Normandy and entered Paris and then fought near Strasbourg until a mine, in German territory, put an end to his war, if not his life. The search for this Miralles, whom Bolaño got to know over the course of three summers at a campground near Barcelona, becomes the key to the novel. Of course, Cercas doesn’t know (nor does his friend) whether Miralles is alive or not. All he knows is that he lived in Dijon, that he had acquired French citizenship, and that now he must be past eighty or dead. The third part of the novel is the search for Miralles. If he really is the soldier who chose not to kill Sánchez Mazas, Cercas has just one question for him: Why not?

  With this novel, published to critical acclaim and appearing in French and Italian translations a few days before it even landed in Spanish bookstores, Javier Cercas joins the small group at the leading edge of Spanish fiction. His novel flirts with hybridization, with the “relato real,” or “true fiction” (which Cercas himself invented), with historical fiction, and with hyper-objective fiction, though whenever he feels so inclined he has no qualms about betraying these generic categories to slip toward poetry, toward the epic without the slightest blush: in any direction, so long as it’s forward.

  BRAQUE: ILLUSTRATED NOTEBOOKS

  Braque was seventy years old in 1952, when Illustrated Notebooks was published by Gallimard, a book scarcely one hundred pages long that is now being issued in Spanish by the publishing house El Acantilado. The least that can be said of it is that it’s a precious book, in the literal sense of the word, composed of notes, reflections, and aphorisms that the painter tossed off between 1917 and 1952 — obviously they are anything but his principal occupation, which is precisely what makes them so interesting, what gives the book the aura of a secret project, never exclusionary but always exacting.

  Braque, along with Juan Gris and Picasso, made up the holy trinity of cubism, in which the role of God the Father belonged wholly to Picasso and the role of the Son to the surprising and still misunderstood Juan Gris — who in a different production could easily have played a Cyclops — whereas fate reserved for Braque, the only Frenchman of the trio, the role of the Holy Spirit, which as we know is the most difficult of all and the one that gets the least applause from the audience. The Illustrated Notebooks seem to testify to this, with notes like the following: “In art no effect can be achieved without straining the truth.” “The artist is not misunderstood; he’s unrecognized. People exploit him without knowing it.” “We will never have repose. The present is perpetual.”

  Some of his aperçus, like Duchamp’s or Satie’s, are infinitely superior to those of many writers of his day, even some writers whose main occupation was to think and reflect: “Every age limits its own aspirations. This is what gives rise, not without complicity, to the illusion of progress.” “When all is said and done, I prefer those who exploit me to those who follow me. The former have something to teach me.” “Action is a series of desperate acts that allow one to maintain hope.” “It’s a mistake to wall off the unconscious on the fringes of reason.” “You must choose: a thing cannot be true and likely at the same time.”

  At once a humorist and a pessimist (in the same way that he’s simultaneously a man of faith and a materialist, or that he seems to move too fast when he’s really as motionless as a mountain or a turtle), Braque offers us these gems: “Memory of
1914: Joffre’s only concern was to recreate Vernet’s battle paintings.” “Whatever is not taken from us remains with us. It is the best part of ourselves.” “As you grow older, art and life become one and the same.” “Only the one who knows what he wants is wrong.”

  The book closes with an appendix of no little interest, the near-manifesto “Thoughts and Reflections on Painting,” published in Nord-Sud Number 10, in 1917. But I’d rather bid farewell to this magnificent book with one of its many triumphs: “Be wary: talent is prestigious.”

  IL SODOMA

  Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, called Il Sodoma, was born in 1477 and died in 1549. I first heard of him from Pere Gimferrer, who not only is a great poet but has read practically everything. We were talking about a story called “Sodoma” and Gimferrer asked me whether it was about the Biblical city or the painter. The city, of course, I answered. I had never heard of a painter called Sodoma. For a moment I thought Gimferrer was joking, but no, Il Sodoma really existed, and even Giorgio Vasari devoted a few pages to him in his canonical tome, Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. His name, Il Sodoma, alludes clearly to his sexual preferences.

  It’s said that children chased him, shouting “Sodoma,” when Il Sodoma was on his way back to his studio, and then it was the women, the laundresses of Siena, who took up the name-calling, amid laughter — Sodoma, Sodoma — and soon everybody knew him by that name: a violent, brutal name that in some way matched Il Sodoma’s painting, to the point that one day Bazzi began to sign his canvases with the nickname, which he assumed with pride and in the carnivalesque spirit that would never abandon him.

  His house, which was also his studio, looked more like a zoo than like the house or studio of a Renaissance painter. Through the door there was a dark passageway, wide enough to fit a horse cart, and then there was a talking raven that announced the visitors who crossed the house’s threshhold. The raven called “Sodoma, Sodoma, Sodoma,” and also “Someone’s here, someone’s here, someone’s here.” Sometimes it was shut up in a cage and other times it flew free. There was also a monkey, which roamed the inner courtyard and climbed in and out of the windows, and which Il Sodoma had surely bought from some African traveler. And there was a donkey (a theological donkey, said its owner) and a horse and a multitude of cats and dogs, and birds of many species hanging in cages on the walls inside and outside of the house. It was said that he had a tiger or a tigrillo, but this is doubtful. Most extraordinary, however, was the raven, which every visitor wanted to hear talk. For days on end it might lapse into an obstinate silence, but at other times it was capable of reciting the verse of Cavalcanti. Never, so far as anyone knows, did it relinquish its duties as gatekeeper, and this was how the neighbors were informed of Sodoma’s late night visitors, by the shrieks of the raven that startled them awake in the early morning hours, croaking in ironic and anguished tones the word Sodoma.

  Il Sodoma was a humorist and his work, scattered through the galleries of Siena, London, Paris, New York, has the bold colors of the start of a carnival, before they’re faded by drunkenness, excess, and exhaustion. I’ve only seen one of his paintings. It was in Florence, at the Uffizi. Vasari was right, there’s something brutal about him, but there’s also something noble-hearted that we’ve lost. At the Villa Farnesina in Rome there are frescoes of his that I’ve never seen but that the critics say are excellent.

  WRITERS LOST IN THE DISTANCE

  A few days ago, Juan Villoro and I were remembering the writers who were important to us in our youth and who today have fallen into a kind of oblivion, the writers who at the peak of their fame had many readers and who today suffer the ingratitude of those same readers and who — to make matters worse — haven’t managed to spark the interest of a new generation of readers.

  We thought, of course, of Henry Miller, who in his day was read all over Spain, and whose name was on everyone’s lips, but whose fame was perhaps due to a misunderstanding: probably more than half the people who bought his books did so expecting to find a pornographer, which in some sense was justified, and also understandable in the Spain that emerged after almost forty years of censure under Franco and the church.

  At the other extreme we remembered Artaud, the very spirit of asceticism, who in his day also sold well and had not a few Spanish and Mexican admirers, and if today one makes the mistake of mentioning his name to someone under the age of thirty, the response will surely be devastating. These days, even film buffs have never heard of Antonin Artaud.

  The same is true of Macedonio Fernández: his books — except in Argentina, I imagine — are impossible to find in bookstores. And it’s true of Felisberto Hernández, who had a small resurgence in the 1970s, but whose stories today can only be found after much searching in second-hand bookstores. Felisberto’s fate, I presume, is different in Uruguay and Argentina, which brings us to a problem even worse than being forgotten: the provincialism of the book market, which corrals and locks away Spanish-language literature, which, simply put, means that Chilean authors are only of interest in Chile, Mexican authors in Mexico, and Colombians in Colombia, as if each Latin American country spoke a different language or as if the aesthetic taste of each Latin American reader were determined first and foremost by national — that is, provincial — imperatives, which wasn’t the case in the 1960s, for example, when the Boom exploded, or in the 1950s or 1940s, despite poor distribution.

  But anyway, that’s not what Villoro and I talked about. We talked about other writers, like Henry Miller or Artaud or B. Traven or Tristan Tzara, writers who contributed to our sentimental education and who are now impossible to find in the depths of bookstores for the simple reason that they have hardly any new readers. And also about the youngest ones, writers of our generation, like Sophie Podolski or Mathieu Messagier, who were simply incredible and highly talented and who not only can no longer be found in bookstores but can’t even be found on the Internet, which is saying a lot, as if they’d never existed or as if we’d imagined them. The explanation for this ebb of writers, however, is very simple. Just as love moves according to a mechanism like the sea’s, as the Nicaraguan poet Martínez Rivas puts it, so too do writers move, and one day they appear and then they disappear and then maybe they appear again. And if they don’t, it doesn’t really matter so much, because in some secret way, they’re us now.

  PHILIP K. DICK

  In my long conversations with Rodrigo Fresán about Philip K. Dick in bars and restaurants around Barcelona or at each other’s houses we’ve never run out of things to say.

  These are some of the conclusions we’ve reached: Dick was a schizophrenic. Dick was a paranoiac. Dick is one of the ten best American writers of the twentieth century, which is saying a lot. Dick was a kind of Kafka steeped in LSD and rage. Dick talks to us, in The Man in the High Castle, in what would become his trademark way, about how mutable reality can be and therefore how mutable history can be. Dick is Thoreau plus the death of the American dream. Dick writes, at times, like a prisoner, because ethically and aesthetically he really is a prisoner. Dick is the one who, in Ubik, comes closest to capturing the human consciousness or fragments of consciousness in the context of their setting; the correspondence between the story he tells and its structure is more brilliant than similar experiments conducted by Pynchon or DeLillo. Dick is the first, literarily speaking, to write eloquently about virtual consciousness. Dick is the first, or if not the first then the best, to write about the perception of speed, the perception of entropy, the perception of the clamor of the universe in Martian Time-Slip, in which an autistic boy, like a silent Jesus Christ of the future, devotes himself to feeling and suffering the paradox of time and space, the death toward which we’re all heading. Dick, despite everything, never loses his sense of humor, which means that he owes more to Twain than to Melville, although Fresán, who knows more about Dick than me, raises some objections. For Dick all art is political. Don’t forget that. Dick is possibly one of the most plagiarized
authors of the twentieth century. In Fresán’s opinion, Time’s Arrow, by Martin Amis, is a shameless ripoff of Counter-Clock World. I prefer to believe that Amis is paying tribute to Dick or to some precursor of Dick (let’s not forget that Amis’s father, the poet Kingsley Amis, also championed science fiction and was a great reader of it). Dick is the American writer who in recent years has most influenced non-American poets, novelists, and essayists. Dick is good even when he’s bad and I ask myself, though I already know the answer, whether the same could be said of any Latin American writer. Dick portrays suffering as forcefully as Carson McCullers. And VALIS is more disturbing than any novel by McCullers. Dick seems, at moments, like the king of beggars, and at others like a mysterious millionaire in hiding, and by this he may have meant to explain that the two roles are really one. Dick wrote Dr. Bloodmoney, which is a masterpiece, and he revolutionized the contemporary American novel in 1962, with The Man in the High Castle, but he also wrote novels that have nothing to do with science fiction, like Confessions of a Crap Artist, written in 1959 and published in 1975, which shows how well-loved he was by the American publishing industry.

  There are three images of the real Dick that I’ll carry with me always, along with my memories of his countless books. First: Dick and all his wives — the incessant expense of California divorces. Second: Dick receiving a visit from the Black Panthers, an FBI car parked outside his house. Third: Dick and his sick son, and the voices Dick hears in his head advising him to go back to the doctor again to inquire about a different illness, very rare, very serious, which Dick does, and the doctors realize their mistake and they perform emergency surgery and save the boy’s life.