The Savage Detectives

by Roberto Bolaño

My head was bent and my vision was blurred and the Chilean boy moved silently around my library and all I heard was the sound of his index finger or his little finger, such a need that boy had to touch everything, skimming like lightning along the spines of my massive tomes, his finger a buzz of flesh and leather, of skin and pasteboard, a sound pleasing to the ear and sleep inducing, and I must really have fallen asleep because suddenly I closed my eyes (or maybe they’d been closed for a while) and I saw the Plaza de Santo Domingo with its archways, Calle Venezuela, the Palacio de la Inquisición, the Cantina Las Dos Estrellas on Calle Loreto, the Cafetería La Sevillana on Justo Sierra, the Cantina Mi Oficina on Misionero near Pino Suárez, where men in uniform and dogs and women weren’t allowed in, with the exception of one woman, the only woman who ever went there, and I saw that woman walking those streets again, down Loreto, down Soledad, down Correo Mayor, down Moneda, I saw her hurry across the Zócalo, ah, what a sight, a woman in her twenties in the 1920s crossing the Zócalo as fast as if she were late to meet a lover