The Savage Detectives

by Roberto Bolaño

In that second of clarity I realized that publishing a book by this kid would bring me bad luck, that having this kid sitting across from me in my office, looking at me with those vacant eyes, close to sleep, would bring me bad luck, that bad luck was probably already gliding over the roof of my publishing house like a vulture or an Aerolíneas Mexicanas plane

that bastard Vargas Pardo winked at me and brought his face close to mine (I thought he was going to kiss me, the big undercover faggot!) and I couldn’t back away, didn’t know how to back away, but all Vargas Pardo wanted was to say something in my ear, complicitly whisper a few words.

answered me in his usual voice, his booming Amazonian voice, as he himself, in an unbelievable display of narcissism, called it.

And then he looked at me and fell into a chair, as if he’d suddenly realized that he was dead tired. 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. When I could react, I made a fist with my right hand and hit him in the face. He hardly moved. But his arm was fast enough to hit me again. Bastard, I said, faggot, coward, and I launched a clumsy attack, punching, scratching, and kicking. He didn’t even try to dodge my blows. Fucking masochist! I screamed at him and I kept hitting him and crying, harder and harder, until through my tears I could only see light and shadows but not a clear picture of the body I was battering. Afterward I sat on the floor, still crying. When I looked up Arturo was beside me. His nose was bleeding, I remember, a little thread of blood running down to his upper lip and from there to the corner of his mouth and down his chin. You hurt me, he said, this hurts. I looked at him and blinked several times. This hurts, he said, and he sighed. And what do you think you did to me? I said. Then he got up and tried to touch my cheek. I jumped back. Don’t touch me,

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.

Go away, Laura Damián. And then at last her face grows dim and my room isn’t Laura Damián’s face anymore but a room in a modern asylum, with every modern convenience, and the eyes watching me are the nurses’ eyes again and not Laura Damián’s (she has eyes in the back of her head!), and if no moonface of a watch glows on my wrist it’s not because Laura has taken it, not because Laura has made me swallow it, but because it’s been stolen by the lunatics you see running around here, these poor Mexican lunatics of ours, these ignoramuses who strike out or cry but who don’t know a thing.

That’s also where he says “my madness never figured in any budget,” ah, the life of leisure, “my madness never figured in any budget.”

“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.

Ciriquiain Caitarro. Another clunker.

I told Bulteau that I planned to translate him and I planned to publish my translation (publish is the key word) in a nonexistent Peruvian magazine (I made up the name), a magazine that counted Westphalen among its contributors, that’s what I told him, and he was happy to agree, although I think he had no idea who Westphalen was, I might as well have said that the magazine published Huamán Poma, or Salazar Bondy. Anyway, I set to work. I don’t remember whether Ulises had already left or was still around. “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. So in the end I decided not to go through with it and when Ulises Lima left (I can’t remember exactly when), that was the end of my dealings with the French poets.

Once he told me that he’d found a five-thousand-franc note in the street. After that, he said, he walked with his eyes on the ground. After a while he found another bill.

everyone knows living in Paris wears you down and erodes your vocation if it isn’t ironclad. It coarsens you, it pushes you into oblivion. At least that happens to a lot of the Latin Americans I know. I’m not trying to say it was true of Ulises, but it was definitely true of the Peruvians.

I said: where are you? but he misunderstood me, and said: I’m Mexican.

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. But never mind his hand.

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

her way to some little job in one of the stores downtown, a woman modestly dressed in cheap but pretty clothes, her hair jet-black, her back straight, her legs not very long but unutterably graceful like all young women’s legs, whether they be skinny, fat, or shapely—sweet, determined little legs, and feet clad in shoes with no heel or the lowest possible heel, cheap but pretty and most of all comfortable, as if they were made for walking fast, for meeting someone or getting to work, although I know she isn’t meeting anyone, nor is she expected at any job. So where is she going? Or is she going nowhere at all, and is this the way she always walks? By now the woman has crossed the Zócalo and she’s walking along Monte Piedad to Tacuba, where the crowds are thicker and she can’t walk as fast anymore, and she turns down Tacuba, slowing, and for an instant the throngs hide her from sight, but then she appears again, there she is, walking toward the Alameda, or maybe she’s stopping somewhere nearer by, maybe she’s headed to the post office, because now I can clearly see papers in her hands, they could be letters, but she doesn’t go into the post office, she crosses the street to the Alameda and stops, as if she’s trying to catch her breath, and then she keeps walking, at the same pace, through the gardens, under the trees, and just as there are women who see the future, I see the past, Mexico’s past, and I see the back of this woman walking out of my dream, and I say to her: whe...

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.

watching a cartoon short in which a cat or a dog or maybe a little mouse, you know how clever those gringos are at animated pictures,

Disney

he smiled but his eyes were still sad, as if he were seeing everything from the vantage point of a great sorrow.

Luscious Skin had no qualms about introducing me to friends of his, male and female, who would show up in the most unexpected places and whose looks spoke more of a penitentiary Mexico than of otherness, although otherness, as I tried to explain to him, could take many forms. (Like the Holy Spirit, said Luscious Skin, that noble savage.) 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.

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...

Amadeo stop being an ass and make your way toward the voices, part the mists of this river with your rust-eaten prow and return to your friends, and that’s what I did, and I made it to the front room, my arms overflowing with snacks, and the boys were in the front room, sitting there waiting for me, and one of them had bought two bottles of tequila. Ah, what a relief to come into the light, even when it’s a shadowy half-light, what a relief to come where it’s clear.

Being alone makes us stronger. So said Nietzsche (I published a paperback edition of his selected quotes in 1969, when the terrible crime of Tlatelolco was still smoldering, and incidentally, it was a huge success) or maybe Flores Magón. We published a small militant biography of him by a law student that didn’t do too badly.

Álvaro Damián shot himself in the head. And I said: how could Álvarito do such a terrible thing? And she said: business was going badly for him, he was ruined, he’d already lost practically everything he had. And I said: but he could have come to live at the asylum with me. And my daughter laughed and said things weren’t that easy. And when she left I began to think about Álvaro Damián and the Laura Damián prize, which was finished, and the madmen of El Reposo, where no one has a place to lay his head, and about the month of April, not so much cruel as disastrous, and that’s when I knew beyond a doubt that everything was about to go from bad to worse.

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. When I woke up the sun hadn’t risen yet. I looked for the scorpions before they could hide under the rocks. I couldn’t find a single one! All the more reason to stay awake and worry. And that’s what I did. But then I had to go because I needed to eat and drink. So I got up, I’d been on my knees, and headed for the desert café, but the waiter wouldn’t bring me anything.

What do I do now, Blessed Virgin? From far away came the muffled sound of the machines the Jews used to make their atomic bombs. When I woke up, I was unbearably hungry. The Beersheba Jews were still working in their secret installations, but I couldn’t keep spying on them without so much as a crust of bread. My whole body ached. My neck and my arms were sunburned. It had been I don’t know how many days since I took a shit. But I could still walk! I could still jump and move my arms like windmills! So I got up and my shadow got up with me (the two of us had been kneeling, praying) and I set off toward the desert café. I think I started to sing. That’s how I am. I walk. I sing. When I woke up, I was in a jail cell. Someone had brought my backpack and tossed it beside my cot. One of my eyes hurt, my chin hurt, my burns stung. Someone had kicked me in the gut, I think, but my gut didn’t hurt. Water, I said. It was dark in the cell. I listened for the sound of the Jews’ machines, but I couldn’t hear anything. Water, I said, I’m thirsty. Something moved in the dark. A scorpion? I thought. A giant scorpion? I thought. A hand gripped me by the back of the neck. It tugged. Then I felt the rim of a cup on my lips and then the water. Then I slept and I dreamed of Franz-Josefs-Kai and the Aspern Bridge. When I opened my eyes I saw Ulises in the other cot.

I got in bed and started to think. I thought about the underground factories where the Jews built their atomic bombs. I thought about a soccer match. I thought about a mountain. It was cold and snowing. I thought about the scorpions. I thought about a plate full of sausages. I thought about the church in the Alpen Garten, near the Jacquingasse. I fell asleep. I woke up. I fell asleep again. I slept until I heard my good friend Ulises’s voice. Then I woke up again. A guard pushed us along the corridor. We came out into the yard. I think the sun recognized me immediately. My bones hurt. But not the burns, so I walked and did some exercise. My good friend Ulises sat against the wall quietly, not moving, as I swung my arms and raised my knees. I heard laughter. A few Arabs, sitting on the ground in the corner, were laughing. I ignored them. One two, one two, one two. I worked the stiffness out of my joints. When I glanced at the shady corner again, the Arabs were gone. I got down on the ground. I kneeled. For a second I thought about staying like that. On my knees. But then I got down on the ground and did five push-ups.

Julius the policeman talked to us about dignity, evolution, the great Darwin and the great Nietzsche. I translated so that my good friend Ulises could understand what he was saying, although I didn’t understand any of it. The prayer of the bones, said Julius. The yearning for health. The virtue of danger. The tenacity of the forgotten. Bravo, said my good friend Ulises. Bravo, said everyone else. The limits of memory. The wisdom of plants. The eye of parasites. The agility of the earth. The merit of the soldier. The cunning of the giant. The hole of the will. Magnificent, said my good friend Ulises in German.

My good friend Ulises sang a few lines in Spanish and my friends watched him like wolves and laughed. But they didn’t understand what my good friend Ulises was singing!

That night I dreamed about a white rock and the sky of Beersheba, dazzling as a crystal goblet.

Two Dennis Hoppers walking the streets of Mexico

realized it was their way of playing politics, a way that isn’t my way anymore and that at the time I didn’t understand. Their way might have been good or bad, right or wrong, but it was their way of playing politics, of politically influencing reality. I’m sorry if what I’m saying doesn’t make sense. Lately I’ve been feeling a little bit confused.

me even more seriously, his eyes seeming to say sweetheart, if we were in Moscow you’d end up in a mental ward, but at the same time (I noticed this too) as if he were thinking, well, what does it matter, madness is madness is madness, and sadness too, and at the end of the day the three of us are Americans, children of Caliban, lost in the great American wilderness, and I think that touched me, to see a spark of understanding, a spark of tolerance in the eyes of that powerful man, as if he were saying don’t take it to heart, Barbara, I know how these things are, and then, like an idiot, I smiled,

Children of caliban

Frankly, it took me a little while to grasp the situation in front of me, the array of dire and not so dire possibilities that suddenly ranged themselves before me with a dull thud.

Sandinistas

Managua, the perfect city to lose yourself in, literally, I mean, a city that only its mailmen could find their way around,

Moreno-Rizzo’s brand of chilly fakery.

whether it was the alcohol or the night outside the windows,

Julio Labarca, the Marxist theoretician of the peasant poets, who took charge of the situation with a vigor that I was far from feeling myself.

the profession was as diverse as humanity itself,

humanity, as we well knew, was a conglomeration of weaknesses.

These are stronger, he said with a clear hint of irony. It was as if he were saying: we revolutionaries smoke strong tobacco, real men smoke strong tobacco, those of us with a stake in objective reality smoke real tobacco. Stronger than a Delicados? said Labarca. Black tobacco, comrades, genuine tobacco. Álamo laughed under his breath and said: it’s hard to believe we’ve lost a poet, but what he really meant was: what do you know about tobacco, you stupid son of a bitch? You can kiss my ass with your Cuban tobacco, said Labarca almost without batting an eye.

we heard the calls and shouts of the members of our delegation who were roaming the adjoining rooms like stray dogs or wounded parrots. Do you know what the worst thing about literature is? said Don Pancracio. I knew, but I pretended I didn’t. What? I said. That you end up being friends with writers. And friendship, treasure though it may be, destroys your critical sense.

then 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.

the story of so many men who fought and made a name for themselves in our revolution, men who went naked into the whirlwind of history and came out dressed in the most glittering and terrible rags,

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. And according to List, the killers stationed themselves in the hallway leading to the main rooms,

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

I realized that black clouds had begun to cover the sky again, that above Mexico’s white clouds the black clouds drifted, impossibly heavy and terrifyingly imperious, and that I had to be careful and take refuge in pretense and silence.