The Savage Detectives

by Roberto Bolaño

lately I’ve been noticing that time can expand or contract at will),

For a minute I thought something might have happened at the university, that maybe there’d been a campus shooting I hadn’t heard about, or a surprise strike, or that the dean had been assassinated, or they’d kidnapped one of the philosophy professors.

pedantic (one of them called me an academicist);

(every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me).

“Backward, gazing at a point in the distance, but moving away from it, walking straight toward the unknown.”

now I’m reading the dead Mexican poets, my future colleagues.

you, thirsting, as I agonize, assume the form of an implacable black vampire battening on my burning blood.

I’ve decided to go back to the Encrucijada Veracruzana, not because I expect to find the visceral realists there, but to see Rosario. I’ve written a few lines for her. I talk about her eyes and the endless Mexican horizon, about abandoned churches and mirages over the roads that lead to the border. I don’t know why, but somehow I got the idea that Rosario is from Veracruz or Tabasco, possibly even Yucatán.

Two pairs of bright eyes were watching me, like the eyes of wolves in a gale (poetic license: I’ve never seen a wolf; I have seen gales, though, and they didn’t really go with the mantle of smoke that enveloped the two strangers). I heard them laugh. Hee hee hee. There was a smell of marijuana. I relaxed.

We were all in complete agreement that Mexican poetry must be transformed. Our situation (as far as I could understand) is unsustainable, trapped as we are between the reign of Octavio Paz and the reign of Pablo Neruda. In other words, between a rock and a hard place.

María is tall and dark, with very straight black hair, a straight (absolutely straight) nose, and thin lips. She looks like a nice person, though it’s not hard to see that her rages might be long and terrible. We found her standing in the middle of the room, practicing dance steps, reading Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, listening to a Billie Holiday record, and absentmindedly painting a watercolor of two women holding hands at the foot of a volcano, surrounded by streams of lava. She received us coldly at first,

The girls with Lupe were still leaning on the hood of the Cadillac and their eyes rested on María, scrutinizing her calmly. They hardly looked at me. “I thought you died,” said María all of a sudden. The callousness of the remark stunned me. María’s tact has these gaping holes. “I’m plenty alive. But I almost died. Didn’t I, Carmencita?” “That’s right,” said the girl called Carmencita, and she continued to study María. “It was Gloria who bit it. You met her, didn’t you? Mana, what a fucking mess, but no one could stand that cunt.” “I never met her,” said María with a smile on her lips. “The cops are the ones who nailed her,” said Carmencita. “And has anyone done anything about it?” said María. “Nelson,” said Carmencita. “Do what? The bitch knew too much, she was in way over her head, there was nothing anyone could do.” “Well, how sad,” said María. “Say, how’s school?” said Lupe. “So-so,” said María. “You still got that hot stud running after you?” María laughed and shot me a glance.

“How big is Alberto?” said María. “As big as his knife.” “And how big is his knife?” said María. “Like this.” “That’s ridiculous,” I said, although I should have changed the subject. Trying to fix the unfixable, I said: “There aren’t any knives that big.” I felt worse. “Ay, mana, how are you so sure about the knife thing?” said María. “He’s had the knife since he was fifteen, a hooker from La Bondojo gave it to him, some girl who died.” “But have you measured his thing with the knife or are you just guessing?” “A knife that big gets in the way,” I persisted. “He measures it. I don’t need to measure it, what do I care? He measures it himself and he measures it all the time, once a day at least, to make sure it hasn’t gotten any smaller, he says.” “Is he afraid his weenie will shrink?” said María. “Alberto isn’t afraid of anything. I’m telling you, he’s bad.” “Then why the knife? Honestly, I don’t understand it,” said María. “Plus, hasn’t he ever cut himself?” “A few times, always on purpose. He’s good with the knife.” “Are you telling me that your pimp cuts himself on the penis sometimes for fun?” said María. “That’s right.” “I can’t believe it.” “It’s the truth. Just every once in a while, it’s not like he does it every day. Only when he’s nervous. Or fucked up. But the measuring thing he does all the time. He’s says it’s good for his manhood. He says it’s a habit he learned inside.” “He sounds like a fucking psychopath,” said María. “You’re just too high class, mana. You ...

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. I explored María’s naked body, María’s glorious naked body, in a contained silence, although I could have shouted, rejoicing in each corner, each smooth and interminable space I discovered.

the maid were wandering around the big library of the main house like the last survivors of a terrible shipwreck, so to stay out of their way and in a faint desire for symmetry, I crossed the courtyard for the millionth time and made myself comfortable in the sisters’ little house,

butches like León de Greiff, butch nymphs like Pablo de Rokha (with bursts of freakishness that would’ve driven Lacan crazy),

“Don’t be gloomy, darling,” said Rosario. And I also imagined María making love with Alberto. And Alberto smacking María on the buttocks. And Angélica making love with Pancho Rodríguez (ex–visceral realist, thank God!). And María making love with Luscious Skin. And Alberto making love with Angélica and María. And Alberto making love with Catalina O’Hara. And Alberto making love with Quim Font. And in the final instance, as the poet says, I imagined Alberto advancing over a carpet of bodies splattered with semen (a semen of deceptive consistency and color, because it looked like blood and shit) toward the hill where I stood, still as a statue, although everything in me wanted to flee, go running down the other side and lose myself in the desert.

he’d made a few observations like “realism is never visceral,” “the visceral belongs to the oneiric world,” etc., which I found rather disconcerting, he theorized that we underprivileged youth were left with no alternative but the literary avant-garde. I asked him what exactly he meant by underprivileged. I’m hardly underprivileged.

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

The anonymous artist had painted an Indian scribe writing on paper or parchment, lost in thought. Clearly, he was the Amanuense Azteca. Behind the scribe stretched hot springs, where Indians and conquistadors, bathing in pools set three in a row, were joined by Mexicans from colonial times, El Cura Hidalgo and Morelos, Emperor Maximilian and Empress Carlota, Benito Juárez surrounded by friends and enemies, President Madero, Carranza, Zapata, Obregón, soldiers in different uniforms or out of uniform, peasants, Mexico City workers, and movie actors: Cantinflas, Dolores del Río, Pedro Armendáriz, Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete, Javier Solís, Aceves Mejía, María Félix, Tin Tan, Resortes, Calambres, Irma Serrano, and others I didn’t recognize because they were in the farthest pools, and those really were tiny. “Cool, huh?” I stood there with my arms at my sides. Ecstatic. Rosario’s voice made me jump. Before we turned down the hallway with our little towels and soap, I discovered that at each end of the mural there was a stone wall surrounding the springs. And on the other side of the wall, on a kind of plain or frozen sea, I saw shadowy animals, maybe the ghosts of animals (or the ghosts of plants) lying in wait, multiplying in a seething but silent siege.

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

the Mexican says bastards, but he says it sweetly, he really does, not bitterly at all, as if deep down he understood everything the Cubans had been through before they mutilated my book, as if deep down he couldn’t be bothered to despise me or our comrades in Havana. Literature isn’t innocent.

(I swear I’ll kill Julita Moore if she drags me to another dive like Priapo’s), disjointed scenes in which brooding young delinquents danced with desperate young cleaning girls or desperate young whores in a whirl of contrasts that, I confess, heightened my drunkenness, if such a thing is possible. Then there was a fight somewhere. I didn’t see anything, I just heard shouts. A pair of thugs emerged from the shadows dragging a guy with blood all over his face. I remember I told Alberto that we should go, that things could take a turn for the worse, but Alberto was listening to Ulises Lima’s story and he ignored me. I remember that I watched Julita dancing with one of Ulises’s friends, then I remember dancing a bolero myself with Luscious Skin, as if it were a dream, but still, it might have been the first time I’d felt good all night, in fact, it was definitely the first time I’d felt good all night. Next, like someone waking up, I remember whispering into my (dance) partner’s ear that what we were doing would probably offend the other dancers and spectators.

It was essentially as if, having been betrayed in battle (what battles, what wars, was Ulises Lima talking about?), I was begging the angels of justice or the angels of the apocalypse for a great wave to appear, a great miraculous wave, that would sweep both of us away, that would sweep us all away, that would put an end to the ridicule and injustice. But then, through the icy lakes of my eyes (the wrong metaphor, since it was sweltering inside Priapo’s, but I can’t think of any better way to say that I was about to cry

Not for long, really, which goes to show how relative memory is, like a language we think we know but we don’t, that can stretch things or shrink them at will. That’s what I used to tell him, but he hardly listened to me. Once I went home with him when he still lived near the school, and I met his sister.

He said: I don’t give a shit about Neruda’s poetry or Parra’s poetry. So why the big argument, then, why the fight? I managed to ask, and he didn’t answer. Then I made a mistake. I came a little closer, sitting down beside him on the bed, and I took a book out of my pocket, a book of poetry, and I read him a few lines. He listened in silence. It was a poem about Narcissus and a nearly endless forest inhabited by hermaphrodites. When I finished he didn’t say anything. What do you think? I asked. I don’t know, he said, what do you think? Then I told him that I thought poets were hermaphrodites and that they could only be understood by each other. Poets, I said. What I would have liked to say was: we poets. But he looked at me as if the flesh had been stripped from my face and it was just a skull, he looked at me with a smile and said: don’t be corny, Perla. That was all. I turned pale and flinched, only managing to move a little bit away, and I tried to get up but I couldn’t, and all that time he sat there motionless, looking at me and smiling, as if all the skin, muscles, fat, and blood had slid off my face, leaving only the yellow or white bone. At first I was unable to speak.

Then I said or whispered that it was late and I had to go.

Aww

a stupid, conceited peacock. And visceral realism was his exhausting dance of love for me. The thing was, I didn’t love him anymore. You can woo a girl with a poem, but you can’t hold on to her with a poem. Not even with a poetry movement.

he wanted to have five children (like the fingers of a hand, he said, and he raised the palm of his hand, almost brushing my face),

No, more like the lights of an office building eager to blend into the anonymity of night. It’s a contrived image, but it’s what Pancho would’ve chosen. A contrived image with two or three dirty words tacked on.

That Germán, I said and I poured myself another shot of Los Suicidas. At the rate we were going the bottle wouldn’t last until dark. Drink up, boys, drink up and don’t worry, if we finish this bottle we’ll go down and buy another one. Of course, it won’t be the same as the one we’ve got now, but it’ll be better than nothing. 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.

although as time went by, I don’t know how long I was there, the tables around me emptied and were filled again, the man in white never took off his hat and his plate of enchiladas seemed eternal, everything began to tangle in my head, as if the words I had to say were plants and all of a sudden they’d begun to wither, fade, and die. And it did me no good to think of my father shut up in the asylum, suicidally depressed, or my mother brandishing the threat or refrain of the police like a UNAM cheerleader (which she actually had been in her student days, poor Mom), because suddenly I began to wither too, to fall apart, to think (or rather repeat to myself, like a tom-tom) that nothing had any meaning, that I could sit at that table at Café Quito until the end of the world

(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) or until Ulises, Artur...

His laugh was like a gob of spit. As

if I undress them and they undress me, everything will be all right, my father’s madness, the lost car, the sadness and energy I felt and that at moments seemed about to choke me. But I didn’t say a word.

And they would say to me in that odd Spanish accent of theirs, the way it circles around the z and the c and leaves the s more orphaned and libidinous than ever: Auxilio, stop fussing around the apartment, Auxilio, leave those papers alone, woman. Dust and literature have always gone hand in hand.

(isn’t that funny! I used tú with the older one, the more venerable one, and yet the younger one intimidated me in some way and I couldn’t drop the usted!),

from the neatly cut grass that frames the faculty like a green sea wreathing an island, an island where there’s always time for whispered confidences and love. And then the bubble of Pedro Garfias’s poetry went pop and I closed the book and got up, pulled the chain, opened the door, said something out loud.

A peaceful shit

then I washed my hands and looked at myself in the mirror, and I saw a tall, thin, blond figure, a face with a few wrinkles already, too many wrinkles, the female version of Don Quixote, as Pedro Garfias once said to me,

a special silence fell, as if time had fractured and were running in several directions at once, a pure time, not verbal or made up of gestures or actions, and then I saw myself and I saw the soldier who was staring entranced into the mirror, the two of us still as statues in the women’s bathroom on the fourth floor of the Faculty of Literature, and that was all, then I heard his footsteps fading away in the distance, I heard the door close, and my raised legs returned to their former position as if of their own accord.

his faraway Chile Salvador Allende had won the elections.

Arturito had done his duty, and his conscience, the terrible conscience of a young Latin American male, had nothing with which to reproach itself. He had presented himself as a volunteer on September 11. He had mounted absurd guard in a deserted street.

Ulises Lima (a bad influence, I thought so from the first time I saw him), he started to make fun of all his old friends, look down on them, see everything as if he were Dante and he’d just returned from hell, or not Dante, I mean, but Virgil himself, such a sensitive boy, and he started to smoke marijuana, that vulgar weed, and deal substances I’d rather not even think about.

I slept for the first few hours sitting on the toilet, the same toilet I’d been on when everything began, and that, vulnerable as I was, I believed brought me luck, but sleeping sitting on a toilet stool is extremely uncomfortable and I ended up huddled on the tiles. I had dreams. Not nightmares. Musical dreams, dreams of transparent questions, of sleek, safe airplanes crossing Latin America from end to end in a cold, bright blue sky. I woke up frozen stiff and I was starving. I looked out the window, out the little bathroom window, and in pieces of campus like puzzle pieces,

I cried for lost time,

Proust

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. And the boys got up from their seats too and I felt their breath on the back of my neck,

Duckberg

other words, about Pound things that none of us knew anything about,

To each his own. I don’t have anything against queers. There are more of them every day, though. In the forties, the number of queers in Mexican literature was at an all-time high, and I thought that was as far as things could go. But today there are more of them than ever. I suppose the fault lies with the education system, the increasingly common tendency of Mexicans to make a spectacle of themselves, the movies, music, who knows

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. And afterward, after the laugh, 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