The Savage Detectives

by Roberto Bolaño

like an American football player gone mad, withering under the gaze of the myriad eyes spinning like unmoored planets.

they wandered the hell of my house, or the hell of memories my house had become,

That was all there was left of Cesárea, I thought, a boat on a calm sea, a boat on a choppy sea, and a boat in a storm. For a moment, I can tell you, my head was like a stormy sea and I couldn’t hear what the boys were saying, although I did catch some phrases, some stray words, the predictable ones, I suppose: Quetzalcoatl’s ship, the nighttime fever of some boy or girl, Captain Ahab’s encephalogram or the whale’s, the surface of the sea that for sharks is the enormous mouth of hell, the ship without a sail that might also be a coffin, the paradox of the rectangle, the rectangle of consciousness, Einstein’s impossible rectangle (in a universe where rectangles are unthinkable), a page by Alfonso Reyes, the desolation of poetry. And then, after I’d drunk my tequila, I filled my cup again and filled theirs, and I said that we should drink to Cesárea, and I saw their eyes, those damn boys were so happy, and the three of us raised our glasses as our little ship was tossed by the gale.

Deep down I didn’t want to hurt him. It was like sleeping, it was like dreaming, it was like rediscovering my true self: I was a giant. When I woke up I walked to my daughter’s apartment ready to have a long father-daughter talk. It had probably been some time since I’d spoken with her, listened to her fears, her concerns, her doubts. Pro peccato magno paulum supplicii satis est patri. That night we had dinner at a nice restaurant on Calle Provenza and although we only talked about literature, the giant in me behaved just as I expected it to behave: it was elegant, agreeable, understanding, full of plans, in love with life.

Fascist giant; antiquity as weapon

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.

Who was making the wolf howl morning and night, when I fell exhausted into bed or some unfamiliar armchair?

I thought it was the giant.

realized that Norman seemed to be in Mexican heaven, not Jewish heaven, let alone philosophy heaven or Marxist heaven. But what was goddamned Mexican heaven? A pretense of happiness? or what lay behind it? empty gestures? or what was hidden (for reasons of survival) behind them? A little later I started to work at an advertising agency.

You’re a stridentist, body and soul. You’ll help us build Stridentopolis, Cesárea, I said. And then she smiled, as if I was telling her a good joke but one she already knew, and she said that she had quit her job a week ago and that anyway she’d always been a visceral realist, not a stridentist. And so am I, I said or shouted, all of us Mexicans are more visceral realists than stridentists, but what does it matter? Stridentism and visceral realism are just two masks to get us to where we really want to go.

tried to imagine Cesárea in Sonora, I tried to imagine her in Sonora and I couldn’t. I saw the desert or what I imagined the desert to be like back then, because I’ve never been there, boys, I said, I’ve seen it over the years in movies or on television, but I’ve never been there, thanks be to God, and in the desert I saw a spot moving along an endless ribbon and the spot was Cesárea and the ribbon was the road that led to a nameless city or town and then, like a melancholy buzzard, I swooped down and landed my ailing imagination on a rock and I saw Cesárea walking, although it wasn’t the same Cesárea I’d known anymore but a different woman, a fat Indian dressed in black under the sun of the Sonora desert, and I said or tried to say goodbye, Cesárea Tinajero, mother of the visceral realists, but only a pitiful croak came out, best regards, dear Cesárea, I tried to say,

Or I dream that I’ve been castrated, and that with the passage of time two tiny testicles, like colorless olives, sprout back between my legs, and I fondle them with a mixture of love and fear and keep them secret. Day chases away the ghosts. Of course, I don’t talk to anybody about this. I pay for my relationship with the mailwoman with a few nightmares, a few auditory hallucinations. It could be worse. I can handle it. If

I realized that I’d never get ahead by sitting around. Discipline and a kind of ingratiating charm, those are the keys to getting where you want to go. Discipline: writing every morning for at least six hours. Writing every morning and revising in the afternoons and reading like a fiend at night. Charm, or ingratiation: visiting writers at home or going up to them at book parties and telling them exactly what they want to hear. What they desperately want to hear. And being patient, because it doesn’t always work. There are assholes who’ll give you a pat on the back and then act like they’ve never seen you before in their lives. There are some hard, cruel, vicious bastards out there. But they aren’t all like that. You have to be patient and keep looking.

You must cultivate a garden in the shadow of their grudges and resentments. You have to study their complete works. That goes without saying. You have to quote them two or three times in every conversation. You have to quote them constantly! You want some advice? Never criticize your mentor’s friends.

even I have my share of readers too, the burnouts, the whipped, the people with little lithium bombs in their heads, rivers of Prozac, lakes of Epaminol, dead seas of Rohypnol, stoppered wells of Tranquimazín, my brothers and sisters, those who feed on my madness to nourish their madness. And here I am with my nurse, although instead of a nurse she might be a social worker, a special education teacher, maybe even a lawyer.

brief), it wasn’t long before he was dragged through the shit and madness that passes for a revolution.

the Southern Cone, him from Chile and me from Argentina,

So I pretended not to have heard him, although mentally I wished him a monkey fucking,

and I kept talking to Luigi, explaining things that until that moment I thought I’d forgotten, I don’t know, the names of the trees,

A convoy of five freight trucks passed in the left lane heading toward Mexico City. Each truck looked like a burned arm. For an instant there was only the noise of the trucks and the smell of charred flesh. Then the road was plunged into darkness again.

The two officers watch Lupe, who has walked a few yards away from the road, into a stony yellow landscape with darker patches, minuscule plants colored a nauseating brownish-purple-green. The brown, green, and purple of permanent exposure to an eclipse.

measuring time is as meaningless as measuring eternity.

And Cesárea named a date, sometime around the year 2600. Two thousand six hundred and something. And then, when the teacher couldn’t help but laugh at such a random date, a smothered little laugh that could scarcely be heard, Cesárea laughed again, although this time the thunder of her laughter remained within the confines of her own room.

Cesárea’s eyes were black and they seemed to absorb all the sun in the yard.