The Savage Detectives

by Roberto Bolaño

The Rebeca Nodier bookstore is tended by Rebeca Nodier herself, an old woman in her eighties who is completely blind and wears unruly white dresses that match her dentures; armed with a cane and alerted by the creaky wooden floor, she hops up and introduces herself to everyone who walks into her store, I’m Rebeca Nodier, etc., finally asking in turn the name of the “lover of literature” she has the “pleasure of meeting” and inquires what kind of literature he or she is looking for. I told her that I was interested in poetry, and to my surprise, Mrs. Nodier said all poets were bums but they weren’t bad in bed. Especially if they don’t have any money, she went on. Then she asked me how old I was. Seventeen, I said. Oh, you’re still a pipsqueak, she exclaimed. And then: you’re not planning to steal any of my books, are you? I promised her that I would rather die. We chatted for a while, and then I left.

Instead of the book by Montes I would have preferred the autobiography of the ex–featherweight world champion Adalberto Redondo, but one of the inconveniences of stealing books—especially for a novice like myself—is that sometimes you have to take what you can get.

This afternoon, as I arranged my books in the room, I thought about Reyes. Reyes could be my little refuge. A person could be immensely happy reading only him or the writers he loved. But that would be too easy.

Literature isn’t innocent. I’ve known that since I was fifteen. And I remember thinking that then, but I can’t remember whether I said it or not, and if I did, what the context was.

You won’t believe this, but he used to shower with a book. I swear. He read in the shower. How do I know? Easy. Almost all his books were wet. At first I thought it was the rain. Ulises was a big walker. He hardly ever took the metro. He walked back and forth across Paris and when it rained he got soaked because he never stopped to wait for it to clear up. So his books, at least the ones he read most often, were always a little warped, sort of stiff, and I thought it was from the rain. But one day I noticed that he went into the bathroom with a dry book and when he came out the book was wet. That day my curiosity got the better of me. I went up to him and pulled the book away from him. Not only was the cover wet, some of the pages were too, and so were the notes in the margins, some maybe even written under the spray, the water making the ink run, and then I said, for God’s sake, I can’t believe it, you read in the shower! have you gone crazy? and he said he couldn’t help it but at least he only read poetry (and I didn’t understand why he said he only read poetry, not at the time, but now I do: he meant that he only read two or three pages, not a whole book), and then I started to laugh, I threw myself on the sofa, writhing in laughter, and he started to laugh too, both of us laughed for I don’t know how long.

This cracked me up when I read it, in public!

One afternoon, when we were in a bookshop, I asked him what he wanted and bought it for him. It was the only present I gave him. He chose a collection by a Spanish poet named De Ory; that name I do remember.

And it was after Marguerite read us the poem by Desnos—in that moment of silence after you hear something truly beautiful, the kind of moment that can last a second or two or your whole life, because there’s something for everyone on this cruel earth—

What thou lovest well remains, said someone who was standing nearby and had overheard us, a light-skinned guy in a double-breasted suit and red tie who was the official poet of San Luis Potosí, and right there, as if his words had been the starting pistol shot, or in this case the departing shot, major chaos broke out, with Mexican and Nicaraguan writers autographing books for each other, and there was more chaos in the van, which was too small for all of us who were leaving and those who were seeing us off, so that we had to call three taxis to provide additional

"major chaos broke out, with Mexican and Nicaraguan writers autographing books for each other"--ha ha!

Manuel and mi general Diego Carvajal got to talking about Paris and the bread and cheese that people ate in Paris, and the tequila that people drank in Paris and how you could hardly believe how well people drank, how well the goddamn Parisians around the Marché aux Puces could drink, as if in Paris, or so I thought, everything happened around some street or place and never on a specific street or in a specific place, and this was because, as I later discovered, Manuel had never been to the City of Light, and neither had mi general, although both of them, I don’t know why, professed a fondness or passion for that faraway and presumably intoxicating metropolis that struck me as worthy of better objects. And

Aurelio Baca, Feria del Libro, Madrid, July 1994. Not only to myself or before the mirror or at the hour of my death, which I hope will be long in coming, but in the presence of my children and my wife and in the face of the peaceful life I’m building, I must acknowledge: (1) That under Stalin I wouldn’t have wasted my youth in the gulag or ended up with a bullet in the back of my head. (2) That in the McCarthy era I wouldn’t have lost my job or had to pump gas at a gas station. (3) That under Hitler, however, I would have been one of those who chose the path of exile, and that under Franco I wouldn’t have composed sonnets to the caudillo or the Holy Virgin like so many lifelong democrats.

I’m an educated man: the prisons I know are subtle ones. And of course poetry and prison have always been neighbors. And yet it’s melancholia that’s the source of my attraction.

A writer, we’ve established, shouldn’t look like a writer. He should look like a banker, a rich kid who grows up without a care in the world, a mathematics professor, a prison official. Dendriform. Thus, paradoxically, we wander. Our arborescence × the balcony’s pallor

A writer must resemble a censor, our elders told us, and we’ve followed that marvelous thought to its penultimate consequence. A writer must resemble a newspaper columnist. A writer must resemble a dwarf and MUST survive. If we didn’t have to read too, our work would be a point suspended in nothingness, a mandala pared down to a minimum of meaning, our silence, our certainty of standing with one foot dangling on the far side of death. Fantasies. Fantasies. In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we’re no more than castrated cats. Castrated cats wedded to cats with slit throats. Everything that begins as comedy ends as a cryptographic exercise.

listened patiently and then I told him that life was long and there were many women in the world. That was where we had our first important difference of opinion. He said no, that for him there weren’t lots, and then he quoted a poem that I begged him to write down on a page in my order pad so I could learn it by heart. The poem was by some French guy. It said more or less that the flesh was sad and that he, the poet who was writing the poem, had already read all the books. I don’t know what to think, I said to him, I haven’t read much, but it still seems impossible to me that anyone, no matter how much he read, could’ve read every book in the world. There must be so many of them, and I don’t mean every single book, good and bad, just the good ones. There must be stacks of them! Enough so you could spend twenty-four hours a day reading! And that’s not to mention the bad ones, since there must be more bad ones than good ones, and at least a few of those, like anything,