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

by Roberto Bolaño

  After this it’s best to hop on the first bus out of Trelew, and also Rawson. But here the indefatigable traveler is presented with another dilemma. Either he must take the road west, toward the mountains, toward Trevelín and Esquel, and visit Leleque and El Maitén, mountain towns of the province of Chubut, with stops at Los Alerces National Park or Lago Puelo National Park or even, if the traveler is unusually curious, the Cochamo Pass, where he can look over into Chile without knowing exactly why or what for, or he must take the road south, toward Comodoro Rivadavia and the Petrified Forest. South of the Petrified Forest anything can happen. Between the road that runs along the foot of the mountains and the road that runs along the Atlantic, there lies a vast expanse of land, the last place, the land toward which the hitchhiking Patagons are headed, crossed every so often by secondary roads or dirt tracks that first demoralize the traveler and then make him lose his way and finally plunge him into a kind of mystical delirium that hunger and good breeding manage to allay. The two roads meet in Río Gallegos, the last city in Patagonia. Beyond it, across the Straits of Magellan, is the Argentine and Chilean Tierra del Fuego, but that’s another story.

  Fateful Characters

  What is clarity in photography? Is it seeing what needs to be seen and not what doesn’t? Is it keeping one’s eyes always open and seeing everything? Is it choosing what to see, making what one sees speak? Is it seeking, amid an avalanche of empty images, the thing the eye perceives as beauty? Is it the vain search for beauty?

  The killer sleeps as the victim photographs him. This sentence, spoken with weary calm in a near whisper, has been haunting me or my shadow for years. The killer sleeps. The victim takes pictures. In images: a cheap single bed in a room neither bright nor dark, an unsuspecting man on the bed, asleep on his stomach or his side, wearing undershorts and a T-shirt, dark socks, no sheet to cover him, in the sleeper’s customary state of abandon, and a shadow, neither man nor woman, just a shadow, an androgynous silhouette at the foot of the bed, pitched toward the left, toward the center of the room, who holds aloft a little camera and peers through the lens, as intently focused as the sleeping man, but (and this is another sign of horror and normality) in a different way. The camera that the shadow holds — it’s important to emphasize this — appears to be fixed on a tripod, an imaginary tripod in the middle of a slightly messy room, a room that may or may not be a hotel room. Either way, it seems to be the sleeper’s (or killer’s) room, not the photographer’s (or victim’s) room, though the latter moves around it with a kind of familiarity, a growing familiarity, in which one senses equal degrees of perseverance and pain, rebellion and resignation, as if reality had curved, and time, if only for an instant, were gazing backward.

  The person taking the picture wins, but victory can lead to a death without hope of appeal. The person with open eyes wins, but whom does he beat? And what good does it do to win when we know that in the end everybody loses, that we all lose?

  The vagabond children of Santiago and the ghosts of London. The wet and the dry in the work of Larraín.

  I’d like to say that I’ve lived in one of his photographs. Maybe I have. What I know for certain is that I’ve strolled through one: I’ve walked the streets that Larraín photographed, I’ve seen those floors like mirrors (mirrors in which only the most unstable objects or nothing at all is reflected), I’ve been gazed at by the same people who were gazed at by Larraín.

  He’s the accidental photographer, or so it seems; the playful photographer, the Chilean kid let loose. He appears to be many things that he isn’t. At times I think he seeks harmony or a simulacrum of harmony: the instant at which everything stops and men come to resemble objects. Nothing moves. The rain freezes in the air. The man with the umbrella grows to look like the equestrian statue in the background. The eye opens until it’s the size of a mouth.

  I have the feeling that Larraín is the perfect tourist, the Medusa tourist who, as the result of years buried in the only corridor-country in the world and of generations of misspent, squandered, or forgotten Chilean lives, has been granted a gaze that is also a way of moving. Swift, agile, young, and vulnerable, Larraín scans a labyrinthine city and as he does so he scans us. The gaze of Larraín: an arborescent mirror.

  Larraín photographs a line of people — waiting for the bus. This is in London but it might as well be on the fringes of hell. A perfectly orderly line, perfectly normal. When the bus comes everyone will get on and then the bus will go and the space where the people stood will remain empty for an instant. The sequence can be infinitely repeated. Incidentally, the people who get on the bus aren’t going to hell. Fate has determined that they’ll wander forever in the margins of the photograph.

  Larraín photographs people walking in Hyde Park. The photograph seems very English and ordinary: it captures the same fragile harmony as the photograph of the queue. And yet, if I examine it carefully, on the right side I spot a parochial native of Santiago de Chile, a government or bank official, clerk or bureaucrat, a good man who has never left Chile, his little hat says as much, startled as he walks through Hyde Park with a stern look on his face (though his sternness is of the most helpless variety), as if he were thinking abstruse thoughts. On the left side of the picture a girl, possibly a nanny, pushes a baby carriage that isn’t seen: only the handle appears in the frame. This girl is English: her eyes gaze at the carriage that I can’t see and the child who I can’t see, but by the expression on her face it’s clear that she’s elsewhere, a much warmer place, the tropic of geometric forms, the tropic of geometric exiles. The photograph doesn’t end with these two figures, who actually only frame it and thereby give it a twist; between the Luciferian nanny and the parochial Chilean from Santiago, but further in the distance, a couple stroll arm in arm toward the photographer and the foreground, which thus becomes a promise of the future, as if the fate of that ideal (and eminently British) couple were the peripatetic Chilean and the baby we can’t see and the baby’s questionable caretaker. But even here the photograph doesn’t end (because this photograph and maybe all photographs have a beginning and an end, though as a general rule we never know for sure what they are), or the staging of the scene doesn’t end: in the background there are three tiny silhouettes, this time in the exact center of the lens, three silhouettes poised at the point where the placid Hyde Park path merges with the horizon, silhouettes that may either be approaching Larraín’s camera or moving away from it, probably approaching, three silhouettes that are like three black holes or like three tiny scratches in the fateful serenity (and clarity) of this photograph.

  Larraín photographs a man who has just come down the stairs of the Baker Street tube station. The composition is like a commentary on a painting by the Belgian Delville. In the painting, people rise from hell or descend into it and their naked bodies glisten like a whirlwind. In Larraín’s photograph, people go up and down the stairs into the tube with the same pomp and circumstance, with the same remoteness, with the same half-thoughtful, half-sad expressions on their faces.

  From this perspective, London Bridge, complete with doubledecker bus and monstrous columns that plunge into the cold dark water, assumes the guise of hell-bridge: a bridge along which shadows scurry and beneath which water flows (water is almost always disturbing when photographed by an artist) with the majesty and arrogance of death. I say monstrous, hell, shadows, majesty, death, though none of these words should be read with emphasis, but instead in a casual tone, just as Larraín photographs them.

  Anyway, disquie
ting chance flits across the photograph more than once, as if to allow us to discover it, to glimpse its face composed of air, its smile composed of air, the sovereign robes in which it’s wrapped, and in which, magnificent and cold, it wraps us. As if chance were a synonym of hell. Or worse yet: as if chance were the essence of hell, its inner workings, its walls, its holes that swell like eyes.

  Sometimes one has the sense that Larraín operates in the midst of indifference, feigning indifference, though he’s positively disposed toward any accident. Sometimes one has the sense that his strength (a youthful strength) is close to failing. But his strength never fails because it stems from grace. The gracefulness of chance.

  Larraín photographs seven men walking along a sidewalk. Some are wearing bowler hats. They probably work in the City. The one in the middle of the photograph vaguely resembles or reminds one of Winston Churchill. Six of the men are in focus. The seventh, the one on the far right, is out of focus, and one might say he stepped into the frame at the last minute. But that’s impossible. The other six are walking at a good clip, so if someone suddenly stepped into the picture it couldn’t have been any of them. The seventh, though I can’t say for sure, looks like a doorman or a maintenance man. The seventh looks like ectoplasm gone astray, gazing at Larraín’s photograph from behind the photograph. On the opposite sidewalk, other men (whom we don’t see head on) are walking toward their banks or offices. The seventh man is therefore a kind of mirror. A living (and empty) mirror able to appear at any point in the story and comment on chance from the vantage point of chance itself.

  But the men in bowler hats, and even those without bowler hats, also know how to be alone. To be alone is essentially to travel and Larraín shows them on their urban journeys: fearsome beings who make their way through the fog, men in coats, bowlers, and umbrellas who stride, majestic and stolid, through places where few venture to go, much less tourists, unless that tourist is Larraín. And here we can even conjecture wildly: those sad men, reasonably well-dressed, miraculous incarnations of an utter absence of doubt, are they accidental characters or has the young Chilean Larraín followed them, stealing along like a spy or haranguing them, from crowded streets to lonely streets, from the farthest and blackest corners of the river or the suburbs, with the intention, when the moment comes, of photographing them? Are they strangers to Larraín? Maybe. Most are seen from behind. All are absorbed in the contemplation of a scene that may be either exterior or interior: the immaculate room of a despondent I. And yet one of them, I think, is looking straight at Larraín at the moment he takes the photograph: this man, wearing bowler hat, coat, and tie, walks with the gravity of an astronaut. For an instant one has the sense of having arrived, years earlier, on a distant planet in our solar system, a distant and elusive planet. Hidden behind his dark glasses are probably reddened, sleepless eyes. It’s likely that in Larraín this space traveler has recognized his equal.

  In some photographs there seems to be no air. The atmospheric pressure is fierce. People move like sleepwalkers, hearts and lungs each going their own way, unbound. In some photographs I can imagine the young Chilean photographer in a polychromed aluminum wheelchair, navigating the streets of a dream that resembles a city called London but is less a city then an array of speeds. I can imagine Larraín, his face covered in tiny scars as if he had cut himself that morning shaving or as if he didn’t know how to shave. In some photographs it’s Larraín who seems to be inside a fishbowl photographing a vast and vaguely familiar planet.

  This is off the subject, but when I was a boy and even an adolescent, people said that Chile was the England of South America (in the same way that Uruguay was the Switzerland, Buenos Aires, Chicago, etc.). Those who claimed this, of course, were Chilean. After 1973 the joke stopped being funny, or became what it had always been: sarcastic. But comparisons are never innocent and after a while they return or their ghosts return: in new trappings, with new frills, with new meaning. They return as doubts. They return as answers. In October 1998 the smug joke of our adolescence, that tedious joke, turned up again. Now England, in its leisure moments, dresses up as Chile and in those images of England, in that English hospitality, we Chileans seek our perfect adolescence (our laughter, in other words, and our carefree existence), but we find nothing. Or maybe we do find something: ugly shadows that belong to us, impossible images from the late 1950s or the mid-1960s, when we could still see things in a different way.

  Larraín photographs a parked car and it seems to be going more than sixty miles an hour.

  Larraín photographs deserted streets and those streets seem to be emerging from being or nothingness, noiselessly, as if in outer space.

  The speeding parked car and the silent streets are simply metaphors of our own loneliness, a loneliness in motion. The mirror of our efforts and our endurance.

  Larraín photographs the legs, the shoes, of a woman and a man. They’ve stopped, they’re waiting, but the observer knows they’ll keep walking, move apart, come together, move apart again in a series of irretrievable instants that eventually we’ll call life, chance, nothingness.

  One could say that in London the young Larraín found not a city but a universe.

  5.

  The Brave Librarian

  Our Guide to the Abyss

  All American novelists, including those who write in Spanish, at some point get a glimpse of two books looming on the horizon. These books represent two paths, two structures, and above all two plots. Even sometimes: two fates. One is Moby-Dick and the other is the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

  The first is the key to those realms that by convention or for the sake of convenience we call the realms of evil, those places where man struggles with himself and with the unknown and is generally defeated in the end; the second is the key to adventure and happiness, a lesser-known land, modest and unassuming, in which the character or characters set the quotidian in motion, start it rolling, and the results are unpredictable and at the same time recognizable and close at hand.

  We know that not just anyone can be Ishmael and only one in fifty million can be Captain Ahab. We know it and it doesn’t trouble us, although if we think about it, it should. But we delegate. Huckleberry Finn, however, could be anyone, and though that should make him more lovable, if possible, it fills us with the kind of horror that strikes when we remember passages from our adolescence, an adolescence — Huck’s and our own — full of strength, of curiosity, of ignorance and determination, when lying wasn’t a habit more or less forbidden by some tenuous moral code, but the best way to survive, one way or another, on the Mississippi or on the turbulent and portable river of our inchoate lives, that is of our young lives, when like Huck we were still poor and free.

  All American writers drink of these two galloping streams. All of us search these two forests, each looking for his own lost face. Courage, daring, the bliss of he who has nothing to lose or he who has much to lose but whose generosity or madness impels him to risk everything with an elegance that has nothing to do with European elegance (that is, with European perspectives or European literary forms): these are the attributes of men who are now American through and through, an impossiblity, no matter how you look at it, an act of the will, an entelechy that neither Melville nor Twain consciously constructs (at least not the latter), but that is automatically set up by the hunting of the whale from that terrible ship full of men of every stripe, and by that meandering voyage down the Mississippi. Here we have the founding fathers. From Homer to Whitman and from W
hitman to the plight of a slave and the madness of a whaling captain. No transition, no method, in the manner of this new and untamed world.

  What was Melville trying to tell us? This is an enigma that has yet to be solved because Melville is an enigma and also a writer of greater depth than Twain. What was Twain trying to tell us? Many things, all of them more or less plain: that life is only worth living in adolescence and that adolescence, the territory of immaturity, can extend as far as the freedom of the individual. At first glance it doesn’t seem like much for a founding father. But it’s plenty if the message (which is the message of Thoreau and Rousseau, who was a terrible father) is delivered with energy and humor, and here no one can beat Mark Twain, whose energy, fueled by dialogue and popular turns of phrase, is unique, as is his very black humor.

  No one escapes when Twain takes up his pen, when Twain consigns his son Huck to a vagabond life, sending him down the Mississippi River that Twain loved so much in search of freedom for himself and for Jim, a black man who seeks to escape slavery, and the journey of these two characters, along with the voyage of Ishmael on the Pequod, is the quintessence of all trips, an absurd voyage, because instead of traveling upstream or turning at the mouth of the Ohio and heading for the free states, they travel downstream, straight toward the heart of the slave states, and though this would plunge anyone into despair or trigger a nervous breakdown, Huck, who is fleeing his father, and Jim, who is fleeing society, find their lives scarcely disrupted at all as they drift into adventure and meet incredible characters and are shipwrecked and rescued.