The Savage Detectives

by Roberto Bolaño

I slept with women and made them happy (the gifts I had once lavished on young poets I began to give to wayward girls) and their happiness pushed back the onset of my unhappiness, which came when it was time to sleep and dream, or dream that I was dreaming, about the cries that came from the maw of a chasm in a Galicia that was itself like the maw of a savage beast, a gigantic green mouth open painfully wide under a sky in flames, the sky of a scorched world, a world charred by a World War III that never was or at least never was in my lifetime, and sometimes the wolf was maimed in Galicia, but other times the backdrop of its martyrdom was the Basque country, Asturias, Aragon, even Andalusia! and in my dream, I remember, I would take refuge in Barcelona, a civilized city, but even in Barcelona the wolf howled and writhed in madness and the sky was rent and nothing could be put right.