2666

by Roberto Bolaño

Once, his one-legged father, who sometimes watched as his one-eyed mother bathed him, told her not to lift him out, to see what he would do.

Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region

Laminaria digitata,

All I see is you, your head in the waves as they wash back and forth, and then I have a seat on a rock and for a long time I don’t move, watching you, as if I’ve become another rock, and even though sometimes I lose sight of you, or your head comes up far away from where you went under, I’m never afraid, because I know you’ll come up again, there’s no danger in the water for you.

How could he have mistaken a boy for seaweed?

A father, he said, is a passageway immersed in the deepest darkness, where we stumble blindly seeking a way out.

“Voids can’t be filled,”

Wolfram, Hans discovered, said of himself: I fled the pursuit of letters. Wolfram, Hans discovered, broke with the archetype of the courtly knight and was denied (or denied himself) all training, all clerical schooling. Wolfram, Hans discovered, unlike the troubadours and the minnesingers, declined to serve a lady. Wolfram, Hans discovered, declared that he was untutored in the arts, not to boast of a lack of education, but as a way of saying he was free from the burden of Latin learning and that he was a lay and independent knight. Lay and independent.

(I fled the pursuit of letters, I was untutored in the arts),

And what he liked most, what made him cry and roll laughing in the grass, was that Parzival sometimes rode (my hereditary office is the shield) wearing his madman’s garb under his suit of armor.

Healthy people flee contact with the diseased. This rule applies to almost everyone. Hans Reiter was an exception. He feared neither the healthy nor the diseased.

The diseased, anyway, are more interesting than the healthy. The words of the diseased, even those who can manage only a murmur, carry more weight than those of the healthy. Then, too, all healthy people will in the future know disease. That sense of time, ah, the diseased man’s sense of time, what treasure hidden in a desert cave. Then, too, the diseased truly bite, whereas the healthy pretend to bite but really only snap at the air.

Zen was a mountain that bites its own tail.

He said that samurais were like fish in a waterfall but the best samurai in history was a woman.

and their wails are birds that come flying every so often across the double lakeside landscape, so calmly, like luxurious excrescences or heartbeats.

The fourth dimension, he said, was expressible only through music. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven.

Hans asked or wondered aloud (it was the first time he had spoken) what those who inhabited or visited the fifth dimension must think.

what would those who had ready access to the sixth dimension think of those who were settled in the fifth or fourth dimension? What would those who lived in the tenth dimension, that is, those who perceived ten dimensions, think of music, for example? What would Beethoven mean to them? What would Mozart mean to them? What would Bach mean to them? Probably, the young Reiter answered himself, music would just be noise, noise like crumpled pages, noise like burned books.

“Everything is a burned book, my dear maestro. Music, the tenth dimension, the fourth dimension, cradles, the production of bullets and rifles, Westerns: all burned books.”

Halder’s young friend was a time bomb, no question about it: an untrained, powerful mind, irrational, illogical, capable of exploding at the moment least expected.

that, Reiter, he said, was different, but actually he was the same person as always, the person everyone knew, what happened was that he had gone into combat as if he wasn’t going into combat, as if he wasn’t there or the quarrel wasn’t with him, which didn’t mean he failed to follow orders or disobeyed orders, it wasn’t that at all, nor was he in a trance, some soldiers, paralyzed by fear, go into a trance, but it isn’t a trance, it’s just fear, anyway, he, the sergeant, wasn’t sure what it was, but Reiter had something evident even to the enemy, who shot at him several times and never hit him, to their increasing dismay.

Sometimes, alone or with his companions, he pretended he was a diver, strolling along the bottom of the sea again.

how is it that in the ranks of our army we find young men addicted to morphine, heroin, perhaps all sorts of drugs? What do they represent? Are they a symptom or a new social illness? Are they the mirror of our fate or the hammer that will shatter mirror and fate together?

One was General Von Berenberg, the division commander. With him came Herman Hoensch, a writer of the Reich, and two officers of the 79th’s general staff. In the other car came the Romanian general Eugen Entrescu, thirty-five at the time and the rising star of his country’s armed forces,

Paul Popescu, twenty-three, and the Baroness Von Zumpe, whom the Romanians had met only the night before

yet again the sword of fate severs the head from the hydra of chance.

death.

that death itself was only an illusion under permanent construction, that in reality it didn’t exist.

that death, in the Eastern tradition, was only a passage.

General Entrescu was of the opinion that this hardly mattered, the important thing was to keep moving, the dynamic of motion, which made men and all living beings, including cockroaches, equal to the great stars.

that death was a bore.

murder.

murder was an ambiguous, confusing, imprecise, vague, ill-defined word, easily misused.

leave the laws to the judges and the criminal courts and if a judge said a certain act was murder, then it was murder, and if the judge and th...

Popescu reminded the guests that murderers and heroes resembled each other in their solitariness, and, at least initially, in the public’s lack of understanding of their actions.

then came the most surprising thing of all, especially if we take into account the reputation of the man, the pretender to the hand of my father’s sister, who, far from shooting at my father, chose a part of his own anatomy, I think it was his left arm, and shot himself point-blank.

that culture was a chain of links composed of heroic art and superstitious interpretations.

culture was a symbol in the shape of a life buoy.

said culture was essentially pleasure, anything that provided or bestowed pleasure, and the...

culture was the call of the blood, a call better heard by night than by day, and also, h...

culture w...

culture was...

culture was ...

The life of a man is comparable only to the life of another man. The life of a man, he said, is only long enough to ful...

culture was life, not the life of a single man or the work of a single man, but life in general, any manifestation of it, even the most vulgar,

“I steal into their dreams,” he said. “I steal into their most shameful thoughts, I’m in every shiver, every spasm of their souls, I steal into their hearts, I scrutinize their most fundamental beliefs, I scan their irrational impulses, their unspeakable emotions, I sleep in their lungs during the summer and their muscles during the winter, and all of this I do without the least effort, without intending to, without asking or seeking it out, without constraints, driven only by love and devotion.”

that a hero should be transformed into a monster or the worst sort of villain or that he should unintentionally succumb to invisibility, in the same way that a villain or an ordinary person or a good-hearted mediocrity should become, with the passage of the centuries, a beacon of wisdom, a magnetic beacon capable of casting a spell over millions of human beings, without having done anything to justify such adoration, in fact without even having aspired to it or desired it (although all men, including the worst kind of ruffians, at some moment in their lives dream of reigning over man and time).

When the mathematician talked about deciphering, explained Popescu, he really meant understanding, and when he talked about seeing, explained Popescu, he really meant applying, or so Popescu believed.

“The first is storms,”

“The Aztecs,”