2666

by Roberto Bolaño

She said she had seen dead women and dead girls. A desert. An oasis. Like in films about the French Foreign Legion and the Arabs. A city. She said that in this city they killed little girls.

Mexican declines, meaning a decline stitched together here and there with a muted laugh, a muted shot, a muted whimper.

out. It’s like a noise you hear in a dream. The dream, like everything dreamed in enclosed spaces, is contagious. Suddenly someone dreams it and after a while half the prisoners dream it. But the noise you hear isn’t part of the dream, it’s real. The noise belongs to a separate order of things.

First someone and then everyone hears a noise in a dream, but the noise is from real life, not the dream. The noise is real.

but wrath doesn’t recognize differences of magnitude,

There were Cessna planes flying low over the desert like the spirits of Catholic Indians ready to slit everyone’s throats.

They moved like commandos lost on a toxic island on another planet.

The reporters too? asked Haas. They’re the most discreet of all, said the lawyer. For them, discretion equals money. Discretion is money? asked Haas. Now you’re getting it,

Those animals killed the daughter of a man with money. Everything else is beside the point. Just babble, said the lawyer.

Modern Criminal Investigation by the late chief director of Sweden’s National Institute of Technical Police, Mr. Harry Söderman,

Well, be careful, champ, that’s the first and only rule,

and for a while the four of them experienced what it was like to be in purgatory, a long, helpless wait, a wait that begins and ends in neglect, a very Latin American experience, as it happened, and all too familiar, something that once you thought about it you realized you experienced daily, minus the despair, minus the shadow of death sweeping over the neighborhood like a flock of vultures and casting its pall, upsetting all routines, leaving everything overturned.

the policemen, moving wearily, like soldiers trapped in a time warp who march over and over again to the same defeat,

It isn’t like the smell of decomposing flesh, which you never get used to and which worms its way into your head, even into your thoughts, and no matter whether you shower and change your clothes three times a day you keep smelling it for days, sometimes weeks, sometimes whole months.

The bodies are there and you shake. Then they take the bodies away and you stop shaking.

Not reading, it might be said, was the highest expression of atheism or at least of atheism as he conceived of it. If you don’t believe in God, how do you believe in a fucking book?

and the streets swallowed it up like a commonplace lament.

A great blanket of laughter rose over the long room, as if death were being tossed in it.

They ate, it might be said, hunched over in anguish and doubt. Hunched over in contemplation of essential questions, which doesn’t get you anywhere. Numb with sleep: in other words with their backs turned to the laughter that invited a different kind of sleep.

Against the wishes of the family, who wanted to baptize the boy Rafael, María Expósito called him Olegario, the patron saint of hunters and a Catalan monk in the twelfth century, bishop of Barcelona and archbishop of Tarragona,

Olegario Cura Expósito,

But what are good times? Sergio González asked himself. Maybe they’re what separate certain people from the rest of us, who live in a state of perpetual sadness. The will to live, the will to fight, as his father used to say, but fight what? The inevitable? Fight who? And what for? More time, certain knowledge, the glimpse of something essential? As if there were anything essential in this shitty country, he thought, anything essential on this whole self-sucking motherfucker of a planet.

Sitting stiffly next to Haas and looking straight ahead, as if images of a rape were passing through her head,

I’m a man whose only god is Truth,

Being a criminologist in this country is like being a cryptographer at the North Pole. It’s like being a child in a cell block of pedophiles. It’s like being a beggar in the country of the deaf. It’s like being a condom in the realm of the Amazons, said Professor García Correa. If you’re mistreated, you get used to it. If you’re snubbed, you get used to it. If your life savings vanish, the money you were putting aside for retirement, you get used to it. If your son swindles you, you get used to it. If you have to keep working when by law you should be doing whatever you please, you get used to it. If on top of that your salary is cut, you get used to it. If you have to work for crooked lawyers and corrupt detectives to supplement your pay, you get used to it.

As I understand it, he works with computers. Interesting work.

He knew her, of course he did, it was just that sometimes reality, the same little reality that served to anchor reality, seemed to fade around the edges, as if the passage of time had a porous effect on things, and blurred and made more insubstantial what was itself already, by its very nature, insubstantial and satisfactory and real.

Isn’t reality an insatiable AIDS-riddled whore?

If it had been up to her, everyone around her, the shadowy figures on the edges of the photograph, would have disappeared instantly, and so would the room, the prison, jailers and jailed, the hundred-year-old walls of the Santa Teresa penitentiary, and all that was left would be a crater, and in the crater there would be only silence and the vague presence of the lawyer and Haas, chained in the depths.

In this country we’ve always confused clarity with stubbornness, don’t you think?

Well, because mine had class and hers only had style, do you see the difference? Kelly’s house was pretty, much more comfortable than mine, with more amenities, I mean, a light-filled house, with a big, pleasant main room, perfect for receiving guests or throwing parties, and a modern yard, with a lawn and lawn mower, a rational house, as they were called back then. Mine, you can see for yourself, was this very house, although of course not as well kept as it is now, a big, rambling house that smelled of mummies and candles, more like a giant chapel than a house, but with all the attributes of Mexican wealth and permanence.

And do you know what it means to have class? To be, in the final instance, a sovereign entity. Not to owe anything to anyone. Not to have to make explanations to anyone.

All names are ordinary, they’re all vulgar. Whether your name is Kelly or Luz María, it makes no difference in the end. All names disappear.

Crafted of hollow words.

observing her with scientific rigor, not from that prison room but from the sulphurous vapors of another planet.

When you make mistakes from inside, the mistakes stop mattering. Mistakes stop being mistakes. Making a mistake, butting your head against the wall, becomes a political virtue, a political tactic, gives you political presence, gets you media attention. At the moment of truth—which is every moment, or at least every moment from eight a.m. to five p.m.—it makes just as much sense to be present and to err as to hunker down and wait. You can do nothing, you can fuck things up—it doesn’t matter, so long as you’re there.

The truth is like a strung-out pimp.

The police combed the streambed for clues but they failed to find anything or didn’t know how to go about it.

The truth is like a strung-out pimp in the middle of a storm,

I had a shiver of foreboding. It had to be foreboding. I’m not the kind of woman who shivers at just anything.

I couldn’t help thinking my friend hadn’t told me the whole story, because since when is private business incompatible with public employment in Mexico?

Mexico a person can be more or less dead, he answered very seriously.

As I learned about other cases, however, as I heard other voices, my rage began to assume what you might call mass stature, my rage became collective or the expression of something collective, my rage, when it allowed itself to show, saw itself as the instrument of vengeance of thousands of victims.

Each scar was a little story that I tried and failed to recall.

the simurgh, the mythical giant flying creature of the desert.

even the dogs were gone.

Maybe because of my years as a reporter, I’ve kept my faith in some of you. Also, the system may be full of flaws, but at least we have freedom of expression,

Even on the poorest streets people could be heard laughing. Some of these streets were completely dark, like black holes, and the laughter that came from who knows where was the only sign, the only beacon that kept residents and strangers from getting lost.

In 1920 Hans Reiter was born. He seemed less like a child than like a strand of seaweed.

Canetti, and Borges, too, I think—two very different men—said that just as the sea was the symbol or mirror of the English, the forest was the metaphor the Germans inhabited.