The Savage Detectives

by Roberto Bolaño

Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I’d rather not talk about it, because I didn’t understand it.

Lately I’ve noticed a disturbing tendency in myself to accept things the way they are.

At the end of 1977 Ernesto San Epifanio was admitted to the hospital to have a hole drilled in his skull so that he could be operated on for a brain aneurysm. A week later, they had to go back in because apparently they’d left something inside his head.

Of all the islands he’d visited, two stood out. The island of the past, he said, where the only time was past time and the inhabitants were bored and more or less happy, but where the weight of illusion was so great that the island sank a little deeper into the river every day. And the island of the future, where the only time was the future, and the inhabitants were planners and strivers, such strivers, said Ulises, that they were likely to end up devouring one another.