The Savage Detectives

by Roberto Bolaño

my library, my dusty library—how long had it been since I gave those shelves a cleaning!—not because I didn’t care about books anymore, certainly not, but because life makes us so fragile and anesthetizes us too (almost without our noticing it, gentlemen), and some people, though this hasn’t happened to me, are even hypnotized or end up with the left hemisphere of their brains split down the middle, which is a figurative way of describing the problem of memory, if you follow me.

There are books for when you’re bored. Plenty of them. There are books for when you’re calm. The best kind, in my opinion. There are also books for when you’re sad. And there are books for when you’re happy. There are books for when you’re thirsty for knowledge. And there are books for when you’re desperate. The latter are the kind of books Ulises Lima and Belano wanted to write. A serious mistake, as we’ll soon see.

desperate readers are like the California gold mines. Sooner or later they’re exhausted! Why? It’s obvious! 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. The desperate reader (and especially the desperate poetry reader, who is insufferable, believe me) ends up by turning away from books. Inevitably he ends up becoming just plain desperate. Or he’s cured! And then, as part of the regenerative process, he returns slowly—as if wrapped in swaddling cloths, as if under a rain of dissolved sedatives—he returns, as I was saying, to a literature written for cool, serene readers, with their heads set firmly on their shoulders. This is what’s called (by me, if nobody else) the passage from adolescence to adulthood.

I don’t mean that once someone has become a cool-headed reader he no longer reads books written for desperate readers. Of course he reads them! Especially if they’re good or decent or recommended by a friend. But ultimately, they bore him! Ultimately, that literature of resentment, full of sharp instruments and lynched messiahs, doesn’t pierce his heart the way a calm page, a carefully thought-out page, a technically perfect page does.

I said kids, when I go out for drinks or Coca-Colas (ha ha) with my students I never let them pay, and I delivered my little speech very affectionately (I love my students and I assume they return the sentiment), but then they said: don’t even think about it, maestro, and that was all: don’t even think about it, maestro, and at that moment, as I decoded that very polysemous (if I may) sentence, I was watching their faces, seven boys and two beautiful girls, and I thought: no, they would never be my students. I don’t know why I thought it when really, they’d been so polite, so nice, but I thought it.

And a moment came when there were just five of us aimlessly wandering the streets of Mexico City, possibly in the deepest silence, a Poundian silence, although the maestro is the furthest thing from silent, isn’t he? His words are the words of a tribe that never stops delving into things, investigating, telling every story. And yet they’re words circumscribed by silence, eroded minute by minute by silence, aren’t they?

He laughed. Or rather, let me explain, he twisted his mouth or curled his lip and showed a few yellowish teeth and made a sound. I swear that his laugh made the hair rise on the back of my neck. How to describe it? An otherworldly laugh? The kind of laugh you hear when you’re walking down the deserted corridors of a hospital? Something along those lines.

we seemed about to sink back into silence, into one of those embarrassing silences between people who’ve just met, or between a publisher and a zombie

I remember too that I looked at Arturo Belano and that he didn’t get up from his seat when the Ecuadorean came in, and not only did he not get up, he didn’t even pay attention to us, didn’t even look at us, would you believe, and I saw the hairy back of his neck and for a second I thought that what I was seeing wasn’t a person, not a living, breathing human being with blood in his veins like you or me, but a scarecrow, a bundle of ragged clothes on a body of straw and plastic, something like that.

He whispered that he loved me, that he would never be able to forget me. Then he got up (twenty seconds after he’d spoken, at most) and slapped my face. The sound echoed through the house. We were on the first floor, but I heard the sound of his hand (when his palm left my cheek) rise up the stairs and enter each of the rooms on the second floor, dropping down through the climbing vines and rolling like glass marbles in the yard.

He asked me whether I’d calmed down. I’ll never be calm around you, I said. Then he turned around, dropped the bloody piece of toilet paper—like the sanitary pad of a drug-addicted whore—and left.

Sometimes I think about Laura Damián. Not often. Four or five times a day. Eight or sixteen times if I can’t sleep, which makes sense since there’s room for a lot of memories in a twenty-four-hour day. But usually I only think of her four or five times, and each memory, each memory capsule, is approximately two minutes long, although I can’t say for sure because a little while ago someone stole my watch, and keeping time on one’s own is risky.

“I exert all the young poets, painters, and sculptors of Mexico, those who have yet to be tainted by the coffered gold of government sinecures, those who have yet to be corrupted by the crooked praise of official criticism and the applause of a crass and concupiscent public, those who have yet to lick the plates at the culinary celebrations of Enrique González Martínez, I exert all of them to make art with the steady drip of their intellectual menses. All those of good faith, all those who haven’t yet crumbled in the sad, mephitic efflorescence of our nationalist media with its stink of pulquerías and the dying embers of fried food, all are exerted in the name of the Mexican actualist avant-garde to come and fight alongside us in the resplendent ranks of the decouvert…”

I said: boys, this was what Manuel Maples Arce’s prose was like, hurtling and incendiary, full of words that got us hot and bothered, prose that might not mean anything to you now, but that in its day captivated generals of the Revolution, stalwart men who had seen death and who had killed and who when they read or heard Manuel’s words were stopped in their tracks, stopped cold, as if to say what the hell is this, prose that promised poetry like the sea, the sea in the skies of Mexico.

Kurt Schwitters, said one of the boys, the Mexican, as if he’d just found his twin brother lost in linotype hell.

We were lovers for a while. Three months, to be exact, the time I had left before I went back to Paris. We didn’t make love every night. We didn’t see each other every night. But we did it every way possible. He tied me up, hit me, sodomized me. He never left a mark, except a reddened ass, which says something about how gentle he was. A little bit longer and I would have ended up getting used to him. Needing him, in other words, and he would’ve ended up getting used to me. But we didn’t give ourselves time. We were just friends.

I’ve got a poet here with me who I want you to meet, a buddy from Mexico. Only then did I realize that there was someone beside him. A dark, strong, Indian-looking guy. A guy with eyes that seemed sort of liquefied and blurry at the same time, and a doctor’s smile, an unusual smile at the Passy Commune, where we all tended to have the smiles of folk musicians or lawyers.

“Sang de satin.” From the start I had trouble with that shitty poem. How to translate the title? “Satin Blood” or “Blood of Satin”? I thought about it for more than a week. And it was then that I was suddenly overcome by the full horror of Paris, the full horror of the French language, the poetry scene, our state as unwanted guests, the sad, hopeless state of South Americans lost in Europe, lost in the world, and then I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to finish translating “Satin Blood” or “Blood of Satin,” I knew that if I did I would end up murdering Bulteau in his study on the Rue de Téhéran and then fleeing Paris like an outlaw.

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.

He came up and offered me his hand. His grip was peculiar. As if, as we shook, he threw in Masonic code and signals from the Mexican underworld. A tickling and morphologically peculiar handshake, in any case, as if the hand shaking mine had no skin or were only a sheath, a tattooed sheath.

the Mexican reeled off a story that I had trouble following, a story of lost poets and lost magazines and works no one had ever heard of, in the middle of a landscape that might have been California or Arizona or some Mexican region bordering those states, a real or imaginary place, bleached by the sun and lost in the past, forgotten, or at least no longer of the slightest importance here, in Paris, in the 1970s. A story from the edge of civilization,

I went on listening to Hans’s endless talk, his plans to change the world. I think I’ve never met a stranger who was so generous to me and yet whom I disliked so much.

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

I said, let’s see, where’s that tequila? And then one of them opened the bottle and poured forth the nectar of the gods into our respective glasses, the same ones we’d been drinking from before, which some consider a sign of slovenliness and others the ultimate refinement, since when the glass is, shall we say, glazed with mezcal, the tequila is more at ease, like a naked woman in a fur coat.

It was as if I’d returned to life, as if night had stopped in its tracks, peeked through the blinds, and said: Señor Salvatierra, Amadeo, you have my permission, get out there and declaim until you’re hoarse—I mean, what I’m trying to say is that I didn’t feel sleepy at all anymore, it was as if the tequila I’d just swallowed had met up with the Los Suicidas in my guts, in my obsidian liver, and was bowing down to it, as well it should, since certain class distinctions still exist.

Luscious Skin would call me at my parents’ house and since I was almost never home he would leave a message, calling himself Estéfano. The name, I swear, was not something I suggested. According to him it was an homage to Stéphane Mallarmé, an author he had only heard of (like almost everything, incidentally) but whom he thought of as one of my tutelary spirits, by who knows what kind of strange mental association. Essentially, the name under which he left his messages was a kind of tribute to what he believed I held most dear. In other words, the false name concealed an attraction, a desire, a real need (I don’t dare call it love) for me or of me, which, as the months went by and after endless contemplation, I realized filled me with rejoicing.

When night came, we took shelter like two pilgrims in cheap rooms or the lowliest hotels, though there was a certain splendor to them (at the risk of waxing romantic, I’d even say a certain hope), places in La Bondojito or on the edges of Talismán. Our relationship was spectral. I don’t want to talk about love, and I’m reluctant to talk about desire. We had only a few things in common: some films, some folkloric figurines, the way he liked to tell tales of desperation, the way I liked to listen to them.

As it happened, I was right: recently Ernesto’s neighborhood had been going downhill. As if the aftereffects of his operation were visible in the streets, in the people without work, the petty thieves who would come out at seven in the evening to sit in the sun, like zombies (or messengers with no message or an untranslatable message) automatically primed to kill another evening in Mexico City.

I thought about the old days and how late it was, that time when night sinks into night, though never all of a sudden, the white-footed Mexico City night, a night that endlessly announces her arrival, I’m coming, I’m coming, but is a long time coming, as if she too, the devil, had stayed behind to watch the sunset, the incomparable sunsets of Mexico, the peacock sunsets, as Cesárea would say when Cesárea lived here and was our friend.

One day I drank five Coca-Colas and suddenly I felt sick, as if the sun had filtered down into my Cokes and I’d drunk it without realizing. I had a fever. I couldn’t stand it, but I did stand it. I hid behind a yellow rock and waited for the sun to go down and then I curled up in a ball and fell asleep. I kept having dreams all night. I thought they were touching me with their fingers. But dreams don’t have fingers, they have fists, so it must have been scorpions. My burns still stung.

I went downstairs. There was Ulises. I wasn’t especially thrilled to see him. Everything he and Belano had meant to me was too remote now. He talked about his travels. I thought there was too much literature in his telling of them.

we would invite them in, pour them drinks, ask them to tell us more about where exactly the stuff that we were about to ingest or smoke came from, that kind of thing, innocent questions, in no way meant to be offensive, and they drank our liquor and ate our food, but—how to put it?—in an absent way, maybe, or a cold way, as if they were there but not there, or as if we were insects or cows that they bled each night and that it made sense to keep comfortably alive but without the slightest hint of closeness, warmth, or affection.

He wanted to know whether Ulises had any “peculiarity” or “weakness.” Álamo said that one never knew, the profession was as diverse as humanity itself, and humanity, as we well knew, was a conglomeration of weaknesses.

what you don’t know can’t hurt you, living in ignorance is almost like living in bliss.

I heard the last coin fall into the bowels of the public phone, the sound of leaves, the wind whipping dead leaves, a sound like cables tangling and untangling and then slipping apart in the void. Poetic misery.

One night, when he was inside of me, I asked him whether he had ever killed anyone. I didn’t mean to ask the question, I didn’t want to hear his answer, whether it was true or a lie, and I bit my lips. He said that he had and thrust even harder, and I cried when I came.

he would reshuffle the pieces of his story and talk to me about those shadowy figures, his occasional brothers-in-arms, the ghosts populating his vast freedom, his vast desolation.

There’s no such thing as purity, boys, don’t fool yourselves, life is shit,

He had the look of an intense, serious, distrustful, violent person, which is to say, nobody you would associate with poetry, although I know perfectly well that there’ve been poets who were intense and serious and distrustful and even violent, take Díaz Mirón, for example, but don’t get me started, because sometimes I can’t help thinking that poets and politicians, especially in Mexico, are one and the same, or at least I’d say that they drink from the same trough.

mi general liked to screw in the most out-of-the-way room, which wasn’t very big but had the advantage of being at the back of the house, far from the noise, near this courtyard where there was a fountain. And after screwing, mi general liked to go out into the courtyard to smoke a cigarette and think about postcoital sadness, that vexing sadness of the flesh, and about all the books he hadn’t read.

I saw our struggles and dreams all tangled up in the same failure, and that failure was called joy.

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.

I emerged from the swamp of mi general Diego Carvajal’s death or the boiling soup of his memory, an inedible, mysterious soup that’s poised above our fates, it seems to me, like Damocles’ sword or an advertisement for tequila,

I told him I was a dancer. He thought I danced in clubs or was a stripper. That struck me as really funny. No, I said, I wish I could dance like that, but modern dance is my thing. Actually, I’d never even imagined myself dancing in a club, doing one of those pathetic little numbers and living with shady people, in unsavory places, but when Arturo got the wrong idea and said that, for the first time in my life I thought about it and the (imaginary) vistas of the life of a professional dancer seemed attractive to me, even painfully attractive, although then I stopped thinking about it because my life was already complicated enough.

I gave him a copy of my most recent book of poetry and let him know that he should limit himself to reviewing verse, since the fiction reviews were penned by my colleague Jaume Josep, a divorce expert and homosexual of long standing, known by the hordes of ass peddlers in the dives off the Ramblas as the Little Martyr, in reference to his shortness and his weakness for rough trade.

I began to notice a clear change in my daily dealings with clients at the firm: the giant wasn’t afraid of anything, he was bold, he came up instantly with the most unexpected strategies, he could fearlessly navigate legal twists and turns with his eyes shut and without the least hesitation. And that’s not to mention his dealings with the literary types. There the giant, I realized with true pleasure, was sublime, majestic, a towering mass of sounds and pronouncements, constant affirmation and negation, a fount of life.

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.

the sound of the rocks that fell like little guillotine blades when the watchman went down after the boy.

Those who knew the state of my health thought I was trying to achieve some kind of posthumous recognition while I was still alive and took me bitterly to task. I was just trying to die as myself, not as an ear on the edge of a chasm.

Claudia and I, who back then thought we were going to be writers and would have given anything to belong to that essentially pathetic group, the visceral realists. Youth is a scam.