The Savage Detectives

by Roberto Bolaño

swear on my honor or whatever, it was completely unintelligible. The sole fact that it reached us is proof of the excellence of the Israeli postal service, no question about it. It was addressed to Claudia, but the apartment number wasn’t right and the street name contained three misspellings, which was a kind of record. That was on the outside. Inside, it was worse. The letter, as I said, was impossible to read, although it was written in Spanish, or at least that was the conclusion Daniel and I came to. But it might just as well have been written in Aramaic. About that, about Aramaic, I remember something strange. That night, as Daniel and I tried to decipher the letter, Claudia, who after glancing at it showed not the slightest interest in knowing what it said, told us a story that Ulises had told her a long time ago, when both of them lived in Mexico City. According to Ulises, said Claudia, that famous parable about Jesus, the one about the rich man, the camel, and the eye of the needle, might have been the result of an error. In Greek, Claudia said that Ulises had said (but since when did Ulises know Greek?) there existed the word káundos, camel, in which the n (eta) read almost just like an i, and the word káuidos, cable, cord, heavy rope, in which the i (iota) is read i. Which led him to wonder, since Matthew and Luke were based on Mark, whether the possible error or misprint might not have had its origin in Mark or in the work of a scribe immediately posterior to M...