The Savage Detectives

by Roberto Bolaño

“Poetry is more than enough for me, although sooner or later I’m bound to commit the vulgarity of writing stories.”

after an ordeal too long and nerve-racking to describe in detail (plus I hate details),

Then everything turned into a succession of concrete acts and proper nouns and verbs, or pages from an anatomy manual scattered like flower petals, chaotically linked.

The whole visceral realism thing was a love letter, the demented strutting of a dumb bird in the moonlight, something essentially cheap and meaningless.

Literature isn’t innocent.

One can’t live one’s whole life in desperation. In the end the body rebels, the pain becomes unbearable, lucidity gushes out in great cold spurts.

everyone knows living in Paris wears you down and erodes your vocation if it isn’t ironclad. It coarsens you, it pushes you into oblivion.

But I didn’t see his face, just his shadow as it crossed the bar. A shadow empty of metaphor, evoking nothing, a shadow that was only a shadow with no wish to be anything else.

In the morning, El Borrado was like a commuter town. Especially in the summer. Every cave had people in it, sometimes four or more, and around ten o’clock everyone would start to come out, saying good morning, Juliette, good morning, Pierrot, and if you stayed in your cave, tucked away in your sleeping bag, you could hear them talking about the sea, the brightness of the sea, and then a noise like the clanking of pans, like somebody boiling water on a camp stove, and you could even hear the click of lighters and a wrinkled pack of Gauloises being passed from hand to hand, and you could hear the ah-ahs and the oh-ohs and the oh-la-las, and of course there was always some idiot talking about the weather. But over it all what you really heard was the noise of the sea, the sound of the waves breaking against the rocks of El Borrado.

Claudia asked what was wrong with me. Nothing’s wrong, I said, why do you ask? Because you’re as silent as the dead, she said. And that was how I felt, not like the dead but like a reluctant guest in the world of the dead.

like he was mocking Ulises, getting his kicks there in front of the Mexican poets who, I have to say, laughed as if they were in on the joke, even Álamo laughed, in part because it was funny and in part to observe the protocols of hell, unlike the Nicas, who mostly laughed because everybody else was laughing or because they felt they had to. It takes all kinds, especially in this business.

Stop moping, said Don Pancracio, all poets get lost at some point or another. Just report his disappearance to the police.

you’d fall in love with her. Oh, Don Joaquín, he says. But I persist: if you saw her you’d drop at her feet like a wounded bird, José Manuel, and you’d suddenly understand all kinds of things that you don’t understand right now. Like what, for example? he says, trying to sound as if he’s not paying attention, as if he’s politely indifferent, but I know deep down he’s very interested. Like what, for example? Then I opt for silence. Sometimes silence is best. Descending into the catacombs of Mexico City again to pray in silence. The courtyards of this jail are perfect for silence.

we became real friends, because before that we hadn’t been real friends, I guess, and our friendship was based on other people, not ourselves.

taken a shine to him. One day I asked him where he’d been. He told me that he’d traveled along a river that connects Mexico and Central America. As far as I know, there is no such river. But he told me he’d traveled along this river and that now he could say he knew its twists and tributaries. A river of trees or a river of sand or a river of trees that in certain stretches became a river of sand. A constant flow of people without work, of the poor and starving, drugs and suffering. A river of clouds he’d sailed on for twelve months, where he’d found countless islands and outposts, although not all the islands were settled, and sometimes he thought he’d stay and live on one of them forever or that he’d die there. 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.

Silently, I waited in that empty house for the hours to go by until one of my children would come back from work and we could exchange a few words.

At night he would give me a ride home and as we crossed a Mexico City like a fading nightmare, I would sometimes think that Juan Arenas was my happier reincarnation.

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.

There were those who couldn’t stop checking their watches, as if time played a crucial role in this adventure.

The next few weeks I lived as if in a dream. I did everything correctly, as I always had, but I was no longer living in my own skin. Instead I was watching myself from the outside, facies tua computat annos, pitying myself, criticizing myself in the harshest terms, mocking my ridiculous propriety, the manners and empty phrases that I knew wouldn’t get me anywhere. I soon understood how vain all my ambitions had been, the ambitions that trundled the golden labyrinth of the law as well as those I set spinning along the edge of the edge of the cliff of literature. Interdum lacrimae pondera vocis habent. I realized what Arturo Belano had known from the moment he saw me: I was a terrible poet.

Catalans only understand what suits them.

Youth is a scam.

But then I thought that life (or the specter of life) is constantly challenging us for acts we’ve never committed, and sometimes for acts we never even thought of committing.

In a brief moment of lucidity, I was sure that we’d all gone crazy. But then that moment of lucidity was displaced by a supersecond of superlucidity (if I can put it that way), in which I realized that this scene was the logical outcome of our ridiculous lives. It wasn’t a punishment but a new wrinkle. It gave us a glimpse of ourselves in our common humanity. It wasn’t proof of our idle guilt but a sign of our miraculous and pointless innocence. But that’s not it. That’s not it. We were still and they were in motion and the sand on the beach was moving, not because of the wind but because of what they were doing and what we were doing, which was nothing, which was watching, and all of that together was the wrinkle, the moment of superlucidity.

And of course poetry and prison have always been neighbors.

As I said before: I’m sociable, I’m a person who likes to be happy, and where do you find happiness if not in people?

I’ve always been a sociable person, I like to talk and get to know other people, and I’m not a bad listener, although sometimes when I seem to be listening I’m actually thinking my own thoughts.

which is the kind of thing you say when you’re very drunk and the night is not just foreign but also big, very big, so big that if you don’t look out it’ll swallow you up, you and everyone around you, but that’s something you wouldn’t know anything about, you people who’ve never been to Africa.

In Paris, it’s different. People drift away, people dwindle, and you have time to say goodbye, even if you’d rather not. Not in Africa. People talk there, people tell you their problems, and then they vanish in a cloud of smoke,