The Savage Detectives

by Roberto Bolaño

“No, you’re wrong. Then they give the books to Ulises and Belano, who read them and tell what they’re about so the others can go around bragging about having read Queneau, for example, when all they’ve really done is steal a book by Queneau, not read it.”

(her fingers were the fucking dwarfs!)

I drank too much. Visceral realists were swarming everywhere, although more than half of them were just university students in disguise.

I woke up at Catalina O’Hara’s house. As I was having breakfast, very early, with Catalina and her son, Davy, who had to be taken to nursery school (María wasn’t there, everyone else was asleep), I remembered that the night before, when there were just a few of us left, Ernesto San Epifanio had said that all literature could be classified as heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. Novels, in general, were heterosexual, whereas poetry was completely homosexual; I guess short stories were bisexual, although he didn’t say so.

Then I started to think about the abyss that separates the poet from the reader and the next thing I knew I was deeply depressed.

Before, I didn’t have time for anything, and now I have time for everything.

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

Then I told him that I thought poets were hermaphrodites and that they could only be understood by each other.

And friendship, treasure though it may be, destroys your critical sense. Once, said Don Pancracio, Monteforte Toledo dropped this riddle in my lap: a poet is lost in a city on the verge of collapse, with no money, or friends, or anyone to turn to. And of course, he neither wants nor plans to turn to anyone. For several days he roams the city and the country, eating nothing, or eating scraps. He’s even stopped writing. Or he writes in his head: in other words, he hallucinates. All signs point to an imminent death. His drastic disappearance foreshadows it. And yet the poet doesn’t die.

Do you plan to make revolution with clichés? And Jacinto answered that frankly there was no way he was planning to make revolution anymore, but that if some night he happened to be in the mood, then making it with clichés and the lyrics of sappy love songs wouldn’t be such a bad idea,