The Savage Detectives

by Roberto Bolaño

The problem with literature, like life, said Don Crispín, is that in the end people always turn into bastards.

Literature isn’t innocent.

Ah, what a shame they don’t make Los Suicidas mezcal anymore, what a shame that time passes, don’t you think? what a shame that we die, and get old, and everything good goes galloping away from us.

(when I was in high school we had a teacher who claimed to know exactly what he would do if World War III broke out: go back to his hometown, because nothing ever happened there, probably a joke, I don’t know, but in a way he was right, when the whole civilized world disappears Mexico will keep existing, when the planet vaporizes or disintegrates, Mexico will still be Mexico)

May I digress for a moment? I think that life is full of marvelous and mysterious things.

Fuck, suddenly I was talking, hearing myself talk, like my voice wasn’t mine and the bitch had taken off rambling on its own.

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.

Then I said what had been going around in my head. Belano, I said, the heart of the matter is knowing whether evil (or sin or crime or whatever you want to call it) is random or purposeful. If it’s purposeful, we can fight it, it’s hard to defeat, but we have a chance, like two boxers in the same weight class, more or less. If it’s random, on the other hand, we’re fucked, and we’ll just have to hope that God, if He exists, has mercy on us. And that’s what it all comes down to.

Life left us all where we were meant to be or where it was convenient to leave us and then forgot us, which is as it should be.

Problems. Life is full of problems, although life was wonderful in Barcelona in those days, and problems were called surprises.