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

by Roberto Bolaño

  It was the twentieth century when humor timidly assumed a place in our literature. Its practitioners, of course, are a minority. Most writers turn out lyric or epic verse or revel in imagining the superman or the ideal leader of the proletariat or in plucking the petals from the little flowers of the Holy Mother Church. Those who laugh (and their laughter is often bitter) can be counted on the fingers of two hands. There’s no question that Borges and Bioy wrote the best humorous fiction, in the guise of H. Bustos Domecq, a pseudonymous creation often more real, if that makes sense, than the pseudonymous creations of Pessoa, and whose stories, from the Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi to the Chronicles of Bustos Domecq should be part of any anthology that isn’t just trash, as Don Honorio himself might put it. Or not.

  Few writers follow the same course as Borges and Bioy. Cortázar, of course, but not Arlt, who, like Onetti, opts for the parched and silent abyss. Vargas Llosa in two books and Manuel Puig in two, but not Sábato or Reinaldo Arenas, who contemplate spellbound our collective fate. In poetry, once a refuge for laughter, the situation is much worse: one might say that all Latin American poets, whether naïve or flat-out idiots, vacillate between Shelley and Byron, between Darío’s impossible fluency and Nerudian career aspirations. Intoxicated with lyricism, intoxicated with otherness, Latin American poetry is marching rapidly toward destruction. The camp of what in Chile is very fittingly called serious fools grows ever larger. If we reread Paz or Huidobro we notice the absence of humor, an absence that in the end is a comfortable mask, a mask of stone. Thank goodness we have Nicanor Parra. Thank goodness Parra’s tribe has yet to lay down arms.

  ¶[Yes, my little hypocrite, that’s Putins as in Vladimir, not some Mexican slang version of putas (or putos).] [hookers (or pimps) — tr.]

  4.

  Scenes

  Town Crier of Blanes

  First of all I have to thank the mayor, Ramón Ramos, and all those who had the foolish idea of asking me to deliver the holiday address for the new year, 1999, which as far as I’m concerned is the last year of the millennium, no matter what people who know something about mathematics say. Whether we’ve changed centuries or millennia or not, the coming year will be something new. It’ll be the year 2000 and it will be different. A year is like a coat or a cape, sometimes a shirt, even a handkerchief. In fact: sometimes a year is like a Kleenex. And when we wrap ourselves in the year 2000 or blow our noses into the year 2000, our perception of time will somehow have changed. So I’m very happy to be bringing in the year 1999, a year that I’ve come to know very well and that I don’t see as a handkerchief (much less a Kleenex), or even a coat, but rather a T-shirt, a big old T-shirt in which I feel completely comfortable. But I was saying something else. I was saying that I’m grateful for the mayor’s invitation. Of course I’m grateful. I’ll try to say it without self-dramatizing: I’m grateful. It’s an honor for me. An undeserved honor, as it happens, because I’m sure there are better qualified people to call in the new year. A few years ago, Àngel Planells, the most modest of the Catalan surrealist painters, spoke these words in his Blanes holiday address: “També vull demanar perdó a tots vosaltres perquè aquí han vingut persones de molta memòria, de molta categoria y de molt valer, i jo sóc un nouvingut només.”** The Planells who said what you’ve just heard me say in my atrocious Catalan was eighty-six-years old and he was without a doubt someone who did honor to the post of town crier. And even so, wise old Planells said: “sóc un nouvingut només.” And he also said: “Us adverteixo que no vull fer cap conferència, sinó només una petita xerrameca el més informal possible. Encara que, tractant-se de mi, ja se sap que ha de ser una cosa informal, perquè de formalitat jo només en vaig tenir el dia que em vaig casar.”†† And two years later he died in Barcelona as quietly as he had lived. I hope that my address will be worthy of such an illustrious predecessor. I hope my petita xerrameca won’t be too formal and that if Àngel Planells could hear it he would say “no està mal, jove.”

  I came to this town by chance, many years ago now. I came one summer to open a store in Los Pinos and I stayed. Of course, I knew nothing about stores. And my time as a salesman was brief and in a way it brought an end to the cycle of all my countless extra-literary jobs. But I had heard of Blanes before. In fact, the first time I read its name was in Mexico, in the early 1970s, in a novel by Juan Marsé. I even remember the color of the Mexican sky during the two days it took me to read the novel. In it, a migrant laborer from Murcia, an interloper called Pijoaparte, who makes a living in part by stealing motorcycles, falls in love with a rich girl from Barcelona (she’s stunningly beautiful too) whose name is Teresa. Teresa’s parents have a house in Blanes, where the family spends the summers. The novel is called Ultimas tardes con Teresa [Last Afternoons with Teresa] and I advise those who haven’t read it to go to the bookstore right now and buy it. It’s Blanes in there. Not a real Blanes, but the spirit of Blanes or one of the spirits of Blanes, the paradise unattainable by the Murcian transplant Pijoaparte and the paradise attained by the Chilean transplant Bolaño. A paradise that doesn’t call too much attention to itself, with a magnificent slice of sea, the sea that I discovered the first season I spent here, when I wasn’t married yet, “perquè de formalitat jo només en vaig tenir el dia que em vaig casar,” as Àngel Planells says, and I walked along the Paseo Marítimo looking for the house of Teresa’s parents, from the mouth of the Tordera to the coves near Lloret, and of course I couldn’t find it, because the urban geography of Blanes as described in Ultimas tardes con Teresa is the urban geography of the soul, the geography of an exceptional writer like Marsé, and maps like those are made so that the heart doesn’t get lost, but they’re not much use if you’re trying to find a real house in a real town. All of this I knew beforehand, of course, but I still went out walking when I had a break at the store, and since walking is tiring I stopped for beers at different bars and I talked to people and in the process I didn’t find Marsé’s house but I did make some friends. My first friends in Blanes were almost all drug addicts. That sounds like an exaggeration, but it’s true. Today most of them are dead. Some died of overdoses, others of AIDS. When I met them they were young, good-looking kids. They weren’t good students, none of them went to college, but they lived their lives — short lives, as it turned out — as if they were part of a vast Greek tragedy. As if they had read Euripides or Sophocles. As if they had read Aristophanes and laughed, though his name meant nothing to them. They weren’t good students. They worked as waiters in the summer, or as construction workers. But they were generous with me and they didn’t ask me where I was from or what I was doing or anything. They were the ghostly children of Pijoaparte. The children that Pijoaparte never had in Blanes with Teresa. Now they’re dead, and almost no one remembers them, naïve kids who thought they were dangerous but who were a danger only to themselves. They welcomed me, gave me my official welcome to the town, you could say, and then I was welcomed by their mothers and fathers, who’d come to Blanes seeking a future for their children, and the tourists who each summer brightened my store, and some wonderful botiguers, straight out of Lazarillo de Tormes or the wildest chapters of Anselm Turmeda, and other kids, like Sebastián, who were princes, but not the reckless kind, because they didn’t shoot up hard drugs, though Sebastian, who really was a prince, could have been killed any number of times in a car or a motorcycle accident and wasn’t killed, and today Sebastián, Sebas, is a king and is married to a queen and has a little prince who I hope will grow up in a tolerant and open-minded Blanes, which is the greatest happiness to which a man can aspire. And I also met
many other people in Blanes, by which I mean people who haven’t died, like my friend Waldo, who’s a policeman now and would surely win every shooting competition he entered if he had a decent gun, but who doesn’t win because his gun isn’t a precision instrument like his competitors’ guns. Anyway, Waldo doesn’t care, and he participates, and always places respectably. I hope these words won’t be taken as a tribute to the police but as a tribute to my friend who is a policeman and also the best marksman in Blanes and the surrounding area. And then there’s Narcís Serra, who ran and still runs a video rental store in Los Pinos and who was and I imagine still is one of the funniest people in town and also a good person, with whom I spent whole afternoons discussing the films of Woody Allen (whom Narcís recently spotted in New York, but that’s another story) or talking about thrillers that only he and I and sometimes Dimas Luna, who back then was just a kid doing his military service and who now runs a bar, had seen. And to think of them all at once, Sebastián, Waldo, and Narcís, all three of them married now, all three of them fathers, is a little bit frightening because it means that the years have gone by, it means that all of us, but especially me, are leaving our youth behind, and it brings to mind yet again the word tolerance, which for me is the word that defines Catalonia but especially the word that defines Blanes, a town or small city that despite its problems, despite its defects, is tolerant, is lively and civilized, because without tolerance there is no civilization, without tolerance there are repressive-cities, robot-cities, cities that resemble the mechanical orange of our late lamented Kubrick and our late lamented Burgess, but that will never in any way be cities where we can live. And that’s what Catalonia has taught me and what Blanes has taught me among many other things that I’ve learned here, the most important of which is to take care of my son, who is a citizen of Blanes and a Catalan by birth and not by adoption, like me: a tolerance that can sometimes be mistaken for timidity, but that knows how to be forceful when necessary. And I’ve learned many other things in Blanes, things I might have learned elsewhere but that I had the good fortune of learning here, like eating shrimp, for example, the best in the Mediterranean, according to my friend Jordi, who is a fisherman; and I’ve also learned, or learned again, because one can never let down one’s guard in this respect, not to be embarrassed about being poor (which is something that’s unfortunately common in Latin America where there are so many poor people), and this is important, because in Catalonia one is ashamed of not working, not of being poor. For a writer like me, who hasn’t accumulated wealth or possessions, and who as Àngel Planells says “vaig passar unes dificultats tremendes, vaig haver de fer una mica de tot,”‡‡ it’s very important. But back to the festa major. To be honest, I have no idea what saint we’re celebrating. I’ve lived in Blanes for more than fifteen years and I still don’t know. Nor do I want to know. It might be Sant Bonosi or Sant Maximià. It might be Sant Pere. Or Santa Anna. Or Sant Joan. Who knows. Or Eolus, the lord of the winds. Or Vulcan, who is a smith but who if necessary could also be the god of fireworks. As far as I’m concerned, we’re celebrating Blanes itself, which is older than New York. And we’re celebrating all of those who were born here, all of those who at some point came here, all of those who passed through, even if it was only for a day, or a fleeting night, to watch the fireworks, for example. The festa major is no more than that. A symbol that unites us all: Blanenses and Barcelonans, Basques and Andalusians, Gambians and South Americans. A symbol that reminds us that we’re alive and that every day is a treasure. A symbol that reminds us of our individuality, because when it comes down to it all symbols remind us of our individuality and our solitude, but that also reminds us of our need for others: because for there to be a festa there must be friends, family, neighbors, foreigners, strangers in whom we can see ourselves reflected and recognize ourselves or recognize a part of the mystery. And since I began by remembering the dead, I think I should end by remembering the living, the people I see every day or once a week, like the magnificent Mr. Ponsdomènech, the bard of Blanes, who knows how to enjoy people and enjoy each day as it passes, or like Rosa de Trallero, who just lost her husband, my friend Santiago Trallero, or like Santi, who works at Joker Jocs and is a minimalist philosopher, or like the girls at the Bitlloch stationery store, all of them pretty and nice without exception, or like the clerks at the Oms pharmacy, who have a kind word for everyone, and so many other friends that it would be hopeless to try to name them, and to whom I’d like to say that in three days I’m going to South America, but a month from now I hope to be back in Blanes and I also hope that by then no one will remember this clumsy New Year’s speech. And if anyone does remember it, then I hope he’ll be polite enough not to remind me of it. Bones festes a tothom!!

  ** “And I’d like to beg everyone’s pardon because there are people here with long memories, people of high standing, people of great worth, and I’m just a novice.” —tr.

  †† “I warn you that instead of a lecture this will be a little chat, nothing formal. This being me, it couldn’t be anything else, since the only formal occasion in my life will be the day I get married.” —tr.

  ‡‡ “Will experience all kinds of hardship, will have to do a bit of everything.” —tr.

  The Maritime Jungle

  The name evokes a giant aquarium. But it isn’t an aquarium, it’s the home of the brave. Sometimes: the winter headquarters where the brave go to wait — and despair. More often: the dormitory city where the brave sleep and dream. A strip of land along the sea, and three towns or small cities — the first three cities of the Costa Brava, to the right of the main road from Barcelona — that couldn’t be more different from one another: Blanes, which is older than New York and sometimes seems like a rabid mix of Tyre, Pompeii, and Brooklyn; Lloret de Mar, which resembles nothing but itself, or in other words Flaubert’s Carthage; and Tossa, where there’s a Chagall and the statue of a woman that on foggy days wanders off in search of a nice man. For those coming from elsewhere, it’s hard to reach, that is, there’s a semblance of difficulty about the approaches to the Maritime Jungle, especially if one doesn’t have a car, but the traveler, once he’s here or nearby, realizes with a feeling close to astonishment that this difficulty is basically an illusion. The train only stops in Blanes and the Blanes station isn’t even close to Blanes, properly speaking. The Blanes station is near a factory. Years ago it was explained to me what the factory makes, but by now I’ve managed to forget. All I know is that the factory brought many immigrants to Blanes, and that most of those immigrants went to live in Los Pinos, which was nothing but a pine forest back then and is now a neighborhood of white single-story houses by the sea. Beyond Los Pinos there are campgrounds, a hotel or two, apartment buildings, all kinds of new construction, and beyond that is the Tordera River, and on the other side of the river is the province of Barcelona. But when one reaches Blanes by train all one finds is the station, surrounded by fields, and a bit further on, the barracks of the Guardia Civil, empty most of the time, and the factory that is now a very modern factory and where workers are almost never seen, as if the factory were an office full of clerks and all the hard work was done by machines, though I know that’s not true, because if there aren’t any workers then where did the people come from who settled and built Los Pinos and later La Plantera? But the sense one gets from the factory is of isolation. And that’s what you find when you arrive by train, which is the cheapest way to get to the Maritime Jun
gle: an empty space, the space of childhood hula-hooping, the timeless space of the Mediterranean, which means fields, trees, and a proud and inscrutable silence. At the Blanes station (which doesn’t resemble a church, like the Toledo station, or a surrealist puzzle, like the Perpignan station, but rather a doorway hidden in the shrubs), the travelers, a single unit until a minute before, go their separate ways, and some catch the bus to Blanes and others the bus to Lloret. If you want to go to Tossa you have to get off in Lloret and take a taxi or ask for directions to the place where the buses leave for Tossa. The three towns of the Maritime Jungle are like three sisters who stopped talking to one another long ago. Let’s start with the one in the middle.

  Lloret, and this is one of its main virtues, resembles nothing but Lloret. There is no town on the Costa Brava, no town on the Catalan seaboard, no town or city on the Spanish coast that is anything like it. Lloret built itself and then burned the plans (or burned the architects, which amounts to the same thing). Of course, for lovers of antiquities there are still the second-century Roman ruins of Avellaners, as well as Iberian remains that date back to 250 BC at the Puig Castellet, a settlement of warriors whose function was probably to keep watch over the land. But Lloret is something else: it’s the dream of the European proletariat, it’s alcohol and sex and an architectural mish-mash that will delight the archeologists of the year 4500 (A.D.). Lloret is like Delphos. Lloret is like Alexandria without the library. Lloret is the song of summer translated into cement and bricks and streets that look like a blend of all the streets of Europe, democratic and rapturous streets where young blue-collar Germans meet young blue-collar Dutch girls, where sad English divorcés meet sad French divorcées, where hooligans chant melancholy songs at five in the morning like the Vienna choirboys they never were and always wanted to be, because life is beautiful, yes, but also terrible, and terribly short, and that (too) is Lloret: the mirror of our brevity, our fragility, our well-bred or ferocious happiness. Do I have to say that I think Lloret de Mar is wonderful? There, the last surviving waiters of Spain work their hardest. And the prettiest Spanish girls let themselves be seduced by the most insistent Italian men. Lloret is full of altars, and it doesn’t look like any other city (except perhaps Flaubert’s Carthage), though other cities run the risk of looking like Lloret. Months ago, as I was riding along one of the great boulevards of Berlin, a section of it — some fifteen yards at most — was suddenly transformed into a section of a street in Lloret de Mar. When I told this to the friend of mine who was driving, she replied, with German imperturbability, that it was impossible. We turned around and went looking for that slice of Lloret along the austere avenue. We couldn’t find it. It was just a vision. Or maybe it was the postcards, the flowers, the café tables, the sparkle in the eyes and on the skin of some passersby who were no longer there. To watch day break in Lloret is an exhausting privilege.