Last Evenings on Earth

by Roberto Bolaño

If I’d seen you then, I would have fallen in love with you, I told Anne many years later. Who knows, said Anne. Then she added: If I’d been a teenage boy, I wouldn’t have fallen in love with me.

Tony never got angry, never argued, as if he could see absolutely no point in trying to make someone else agree with him, as if, for him, everyone was lost, so how could one lost person presume to show another the way. Especially since the way, as well as being hidden from everyone, probably didn’t even exist.

From then on it only got worse.

There are things you can tell people and things you just can’t,

Once again reality has proven that no particular group has a monopoly over demagogy, dogmatism, and ignorance.

something odd about her, a woman who is absent, elsewhere, who says hello (as she said hello to B at that party) from elsewhere;

impelled by a somewhat self-destructive urge,

This is where the story should end, but life is not as kind as literature.

A world without noises, she says, in which even death is silent.

The dead are at peace, thinks B stretching out in the bed. As if she had read his mind, the girl says that no one who has passed through this world is at peace. Not anymore, not ever, she says with total conviction.

And then he said: You know when you

really are alone? In a crowd, I said, thinking I was following his train of thought, but no, it wasn’t in a crowd. I should have been able to guess the answer: When you die.

we both, in different ways, tried to distract ourselves from the gradual devastation of our lives,

We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain.

There she lived, but each day she grew sadder, until one day the sadness killed her.

morbus melancholicus.