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

by Roberto Bolaño

  Bayly’s words. In the same way that there is sassy behavior in Bayly’s novel, there are also lots of patas. This word has always seemed mysterious to me. A pata is a friend. Where does the word pata come from? It’s crisp, easy to pronounce, and the only word that measures up to it is the Mexican cuate, which also means friend and of whose etymology I’m equally ignorant, though everything indicates that cuate means “twin.”

  Bayly’s patas aren’t like Rulfo’s cuates, clearly, or like the patas of Salvador Bondy, who I don’t think ever used the term, though they share the same shadowy provenance, because patas and cuates can both come to seem like creatures straight out of hell, but they’re all we’ve got, all we can trust.

  Bayly’s characters. In Yo amo a mi mami, there’s a return appearance of the character I think is his most lovable, El Papapa, who previously appeared in Los últimos días de La Prensa [The Last Days of The Press]. One of El Papapa’s traits is that when he goes to the bathroom to defecate he says “I’m going to feed the Chileans.” Extremely offensive and at the same time playful. I think he said the same thing in Los últimos días de La Prensa. As a Chilean, I find it a charming expression. His son-in-law, Jimmy’s father, meanwhile, is an admirer of Pinochet. This means that when Jimmy’s father goes to the bathroom he isn’t feeding the Chileans, at least not consciously.

  There are those who reproach Bayly for his neglect of form. On rare occasions, I’ve been one of them. But actually I don’t think that Bayly neglects the formal aspect so much as it might seem at first glance. Especially beginning with his third novel, I think he tries to seek a form that suits his narrative strength, his inexhaustible verbal flow. Because let’s be clear: Bayly’s strength as a storyteller, his strength as a writer of dialogue, his ability to escape from any predicament, is extraordinary. Enough to satisfy any writer. No one asks Balzac to be Stendhal. All anyone asks of Balzac is that he be God. What we should demand of Bayly isn’t formal perfection but worlds, crowds, soap operas of real life, torrents of humor, what we should demand of Bayly is what he’s already giving us: the most wonderful ear in new Spanish fiction, an often poignant gaze that turns inward without complacency and that is turned on others with humor and irony and also tenderness, the tenderness of a survivor of a time that’s already past and that probably only existed in the narrator’s dreams, a Peru in its death throes or a Peru that is now only a glimmer of what it once was.

  What a relief to read Bayly after so many inscrutable or pathetic figures who confuse realism with dogmatism, information with proclamation. What a relief Bayly’s writing is after the interminable lineup of talentless Latin American chest-thumpers, of snobs with their corseted prose, of pontificating bureaucratic heroes of the proletariat. What a relief to read someone who has the narrative will not to avoid almost anything.

  Machiavellian Bayly, or naïve Bayly. These words were written a few hours ago, after reading in today’s El País, Thursday March 25, what Bayly said the day before yesterday to the Madrid press, which is that Yo amo a mi mami was a gift for his mother. With gifts like this, one can be assured of making enemies for life. Thank goodness it’s for his mother, although if fifteen years from now my son were to give me a gift like this, I think we’d have a problem. Anyway, it could also be argued that Bayly presents his mother with a portrait of his grandfather, which really is a splendid gift. And ultimately, yes, it can be said that this is a genuine gift for his mother: a true if terrible mirror, a mirror in which the lady from Lima circles, across which she bumps and bounces, all in a frighteningly coherent way, a mirror in which the lady from Lima trembles, lost in limbo but still alive, somehow alive, with all her contradictions and obsessions, her vices and her small virtues, and all thanks to her son, the son, the family idiot.

  Bayly’s prose, which I wouldn’t hesitate to call luminous (luminous and brave, though not luminous like the desert or the forest, but luminous like urban afternoons, and not recklessly brave or somberly brave but brave like someone who has to struggle with himself and not lose his happiness), isn’t an isolated phenomenon in Spanish-language literature. Bayly must be read in this context, too: that of a literature in which for the first time novels produced on opposite sides of the Atlantic are, in a certain sense, walking hand in hand. Unlike the group of Boom writers, made up solely of Latin Americans, in the still undefined sphere of the end-of-the-millennium novel there’s room for Spaniards and Latin Americans alike, for example, the work of Enrique Vila-Matas, César Aira, and Javier Marías, a Catalan, an Argentine, and a writer from Madrid, probably the three authors farthest out ahead in the new territory to explore. What is this new territory? The same as it always is, but different, which is a way of saying that I don’t know. Anyway, it’s the territory where the bones of Cervantes and Valle-Inclán lie buried, and it’s the undiscovered territory, the territory of the dead and the territory of adventure. And advancing toward it, I think, are at least ten writers whose books can be called alive, and one of them is Jaime Bayly.

  §§ Disforzados — tr.

  ¶¶ Engreído — tr.

  A Stroll Through the Abyss

  Of the many novels that have been written about Mexico, the best are probably the English novels and the odd American one. D. H. Lawrence takes a stab at the agonist novel, Graham Greene the moral novel, and Malcolm Lowry the total novel, by which I mean the novel that plunges into chaos (which is itself the subject of the ideal novel) and tries to order it and make it legible. Few contemporary Mexican writers, with the possible exception of Carlos Fuentes and Fernando del Paso, have embarked on such an undertaking, as if they were barred from it from the outset or as if what we call Mexico, which is also a jungle or a desert or a faceless crowd, were a territory reserved solely for foreigners.

  Rodrigo Fresán more than fulfills this and other requirements for writing about Mexico. Mantra is a kaleidoscopic novel, shot through with fierce, occasionally over-the-top humor, written in a prose of rare precision that allows itself to oscillate between anthropological document and the delirium of late nights in a city — Mexico City — that superimposes itself on the subterranean cities beneath it like a snake swallowing itself.

  The novel, or so it appears (and I say appears because everything in this novel can come to seem only apparent, though its parts are assembled with mathematical exactitude), is divided into three long chapters. The first is narrated by an Argentine boy and takes place in Argentina, upon the arrival at school of a new student, a Mexican boy who goes from potential victim to leader of the group in less than a minute by the clever (and dangerous) trick of playing Russian roulette with a real gun in front of the other students when the teacher leaves them alone. The boy, Martín Mantra, is the ultimate incarnation of the enfant terrible: son of two soap opera actors, he comes to school accompanied by his Mexican bodyguard, a former masked wrestler, and he plans to revolutionize the world of film and television. The novel’s vision of Mexico, the place where this incredible boy comes from, is projected through the boy and the Argentine narrator’s memories of his own childhood, and through something that is never clearly stated but that at times resembles an illness or societal collapse and that may just be the irremediable end of childhood.

  The symbolic figure who presides over this first section is a hero of the past, the (post-mortem) General Gervasio Vicario Cabrera, a mixed-up Mexican who fought in Argentina’s war of independence and was executed by firing squad, by all accounts too hastily, jus
t as the symbolic figure who presides over the novel’s third part is a robot whose shadow seems to mingle with the first words of Pedro Páramo.

  The second chapter — the best, in my opinion — is organized alphabetically, like a dictionary of Mexico City or a dictionary of the abyss. It’s also the longest section of the novel, beginning on page 144 and ending on page 509. It’s open-ended: it can be read linearly or the reader can begin with any letter he wants. The narrator this time is a French man, a man who knows Martín Mantra only by reputation, and who travels to Mexico to kill and be killed. And even to continue killing after death. Among the multiple plotlines that criss-cross like lightning bolts is the story of Joan Vollmer, killed in Mexico City while playing William Tell with her husband, William Burroughs; and the story of the Mexican masked wrestlers and the nouvelle vague film that one of them wants to make in France; and the story of LIM, the international language of the dead; and the story of Mexican monsters and Mexican pornography; and the story of the female rock group Anorexia & The Skinny Chicks; and the story of Martín Mantra as a millenarian and media-savvy guerrilla; and even the love story (though it’s set in Paris) of the French narrator and a Mexican girl.

  Words from Mantra selected at random. From the section “Soap Operas,” for example: “Soap operas are like mutant newscasts.” And the section “Television Sets”: “You ask what brand those dead television sets are, the kind the dead watch, and I say [. . .] those zombie boxes where zombies feed their eyes to other zombies are Sonbys.” From the section “Vomit”: “That’s how Joan Vollmer talks, and here’s what she says as she chain-smokes invisible cigarettes. She tells me that her cigarettes are a strange brand: some make her speak in the first person and others in the third person, in that choked and spasmodically seismic language that is the International Language of the Dead.”

  So the dead speak a language of tremor-like cadences. And Mantra, or so we discover as we progress through the different superimposed layers of the novel, gradually fills up with the dead, all the dead of Mexico, from the eminent to the anonymous. And the tremor that the reader feels is the tremor of LIM, a language that can also be used to write novels so long as they’re organized alphabetically.

  The third and last part of the novel is a futurist fable. Mexico City no longer exists, destroyed by perpetual earthquakes, and amid the ruins rises a new city called New Tenochtitlán of the Tremor. A robot returns to the heart of that strange city to search for his creator-father, Mantrax, thus keeping a promise made to his computer mother. Clearly, we have here a new version of Pedro Páramo or the perilous encounter of Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo and Kubrick’s 2001 at the foot of a sacrificial altar, with a surprise ending.

  Mantra is one of the most exciting books I’ve read in recent years. It made me laugh more than any other book, and it seemed more virtuous and at the same time more roguish; it’s steeped in melancholy, but always to some aesthetic end, never lapsing into the preciousness or sentimentality always in vogue in Spanish-language literature. It’s a novel about Mexico, but like all great novels it’s really about the passage of time, about the possibility and impossibility of dreams. And on an almost secret level it’s about the art of making literature, though very few may realize it.

  Sevilla Kills Me

  1. The title. In theory, and with no input from me whatsoever, the title of my talk was supposed to be “Where does the new Latin American novel come from?” If I stay on topic, my answer will be about three minutes long. We come from the middle classes or from a more or less settled proletariat or from families of low-level drug traffickers who’re tired of gunshots and want respectability instead. As Pere Gimferrer says: in the old days, writers came from the upper classes or the aristocracy, and by choosing literature they chose — at least for a certain period that might be a lifetime or four or five years — social censure, the destruction of learned values, mockery and constant criticism. Now, on the other hand, especially in Latin America, writers come from the lower middle classes or from the ranks of the proletariat and what they want, at the end of the day, is a light veneer of respectability. That is, writers today seek recognition, though not the recognition of their peers but of what are often called “political authorities,” the usurpers of power, whatever century it is (the young writers don’t care!), and thereby the recognition of the public, or book sales, which makes publishers happy but makes writers even happier, because these are writers who, as children at home, saw how hard it is to work eight hours a day, or nine or ten, which was how long their parents worked, and this was when there was work, because the only thing worse than working ten hours a day is not being able to work at all and having to drag oneself around looking for a job (paid, of course) in the labyrinth, or worse, in the hideous crossword puzzle of Latin America. So young writers have been burned, as they say, and they devote themselves body and soul to selling. Some rely more on their bodies, others on their souls, but in the end it’s all about selling. What doesn’t sell? Ah, that’s an important consideration. Disruption doesn’t sell. Writing that plumbs the depths with open eyes doesn’t sell. For example: Macedonio Fernández doesn’t sell. Macedonio may have been one of Borges’s three great teachers (and Borges is or should be at the center of our canon) but never mind that. Everything says that we should read him, but Macedonio doesn’t sell, so forget him. If Lamborghini doesn’t sell, so much for Lamborghini. Wilcock is only known in Argentina and only by a few lucky readers. Forget Wilcock, then. Where does the new Latin American literature come from? The answer is very simple. It comes from fear. It comes from the terrible (and in a certain way fairly understandable) fear of working in an office and selling cheap trash on the Paseo Ahumada. It comes from the desire for respectability, which is simply a cover for fear. To those who don’t know any better, we might seem like extras from a New York gangster movie, always talking about respect. Frankly, at first glance we’re a pitiful group of writers in our thirties and forties, along with the occasional fifty-year-old, waiting for Godot, which in this case is the Nobel, the Rulfo, the Cervantes, the Príncipe de Asturias, the Rómulo Gallegos.

  2. The lecture must go on. I hope no one takes what I just said the wrong way. I was kidding. I didn’t mean what I wrote, or what I said. At this stage in my life I don’t want to make any more unnecessary enemies. I’m here because I want to teach you to be men. Not true. Just kidding. Actually, it makes me insanely envious to look at you. Not just you but all young Latin American writers. You have a future, I promise you. Sorry. Kidding again. Your future is as a gray as the dictatorship of Castro, of Stroessner, of Pinochet, as the countless corrupt governments that follow one after the other on our continent. I hope no one tries to challenge me to a fight. I can’t fight without medical authorization. In fact, when this talk is over I plan to lock myself in my room to watch pornography. You want me to visit the Cartuja? Fuck that. You want me to go see some flamenco? Wrong again. The only thing I’ll see is a rodeo, Mexican or Chilean or Argentine. And once I’m there, amid the smell of fresh horse shit and flowering Chile-bells, I’ll fall asleep and dream.

  3. The lecture must plant its feet firmly on the ground. That’s right. Let’s plant our feet firmly on the ground. Some of the writers here are people I call friends. From them I expect nothing but perfect consideration. The rest of you I don’t know, but I’ve read some of you and heard excellent things about others. Of course, certain writers are missing, writers without whom there’s no understanding this entelechy that we call new
Latin American literature. It’s only fair to list them. I’ll begin with the most difficult, a radical writer if there ever was one: Daniel Sada. And then I should mention César Aira, Juan Villoro, Alan Pauls, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Ibsen Martínez, Carmen Boullosa, the very young Antonio Ungar, the Chileans Gonzalo Contreras, Pedro Lemebel, Jaime Collyer, Alberto Fuguet, and María Moreno, and Mario Bellatin, who has the fortune or misfortune of being considered Mexican by the Mexicans and Peruvian by the Peruvians, and I could go on like this for at least another minute. It’s a promising scene, especially if viewed from a bridge. The river is wide and mighty and its surface is broken by the heads of at least twenty-five writers under fifty, under forty, under thirty. How many will drown? I’d say all of them.

  4. The inheritance. The treasure left to us by our parents, or by those we thought were our putative parents, is pitiful. In fact, we’re like children trapped in the mansion of a pedophile. Some of you will say that it’s better to be at the mercy of a pedophile than a killer. You’re right. But our pedophiles are also killers.