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by Roberto Bolaño

“But what makes you think one girl came up with the idea, and not a few at once?” Reiter asked her. “What makes you think a girl came up with it at all, and a country girl at that? Couldn’t it have been some fasttalker, wanting to get sucked off for free?”

Reiter warned her that nice people weren’t to be trusted. Most of them, he said, were war criminals who deserved to be strung up in the main square, an image that gave Ingeborg the shivers. How could a person who bought a flower every day to wear in his buttonhole be a war criminal?

They talked about books, about poetry (Ingeborg asked Reiter why he didn’t write poetry and he answered that all poetry, of any style, was contained or could be contained in fiction), about sex (they had made love in every possible way, or so they believed, and they theorized about new ways but came up only with death), and death. When the old crone made her appearance, they had usually finished eating and the conversation was languishing, as Reiter, drawing himself up like a great Prussian lord, lit a cigarette, and Ingeborg peeled an apple with a short-bladed, wooden-handled knife.

Ingeborg laughed too. Then she began to talk about the way some women were attracted to men who killed women. About the high regard in which woman-killers were held by whores, for example, or by women who chose to love without reservations. In Reiter’s opinion these women were hysterics. But Ingeborg, who claimed to know women of the sort, believed they were just gamblers, like cardplayers, more or less, who end up killing themselves late at night, or like the habitués of racetracks who commit suicide in cheap rented rooms or hotels tucked away on backstreets frequented by gangsters or Chinamen. “Sometimes,” said Ingeborg, “when we’re making love and you grab me by the neck, I’ve thought you might be a woman-killer.” “I’ve never killed a woman,” said Reiter. “Such a thing never even occurred to me.”

Reiter told her it was possible that the American police and the German police, too, were looking for him, or that his name was on a list of suspects. The man he had done away with, he said, was called Sammer and he was a killer of Jews. Then you’ve committed no crime, she tried to say, but Reiter wouldn’t let her.

I wasn’t released. A comrade told me the guards were only for show. The black soldiers had other things on their minds and they didn’t pay us much attention. One morning, during a transfer of prisoners, I slipped out and got away as easy as that.

“ ‘It’s written here that during the war you were almost killed many times, but you didn’t kill anyone, which is worth something,’ said the old woman. “Is it so obvious? I wondered. Is it just as obvious that I’m a murderer? Of course, I didn’t feel like a murderer. “ ‘I suggest you change your name,’ said the old woman, ‘and you should listen to me. I was the fortune-teller for many of the big SS bosses and I know what I’m talking about. Don’t make the classic English whodunit mistake.’

I asked her to sell me Judith and the works of Novalis. “ ‘You can keep them,’ she said. ‘Every time you come to see me you can take two books, but now pay attention to something much more important than literature. You must change your name. You must never return to the scene of the crime. You must break the chain. Do you understand?’ “ ‘A little,’ I said, although all I’d really understood, with great pleasure, was the offer of the books.

“And then she asked me to come with her to a room, the one full of clothes, like a ragpicker’s room, and she dug in the mountains of clothes until she reemerged, victorious, with a black leather coat and she said: “ ‘This coat is for you, it’s been waiting for you all this time, since its previous owner died.’ “And I took the coat and tried it on and in fact it fit as if it had been made for me.”

Ingeborg’s health took a turn for the worse and an English doctor told Reiter that the girl, that lovely, delightful girl, probably had no more than two or three months to live and then he just looked at Reiter, who began to weep without a word, but the English doctor wasn’t really looking at Reiter, he was staring at his handsome black leather coat, assessing it with the eye of a furrier or a leatherworker, and finally, as Reiter continued to weep, he asked where he’d bought it,

Ingeborg’s body had begun to sweat and he began to sweat too and he thought this was good for the fever, and he closed his eyes and kept caressing Ingeborg’s sex with his left hand and when he opened his eyes he saw five pairs of cat eyes floating in the dark, and that did strike him as an unequivocal sign that he was dreaming, because three pairs of eyes, belonging to Ingeborg’s sisters and mother, made some sense, but five pairs of eyes lacked spatiotemporal coherence, unless each of the sisters had brought home a lover that night, which was outside the realm of possibility, neither feasible nor credible.

The next day he returned and showed the old man the money, but then the man took an accounting book out of his desk and wanted to know his name. Reiter said the first thing that came into his head. “My name is Benno von Archimboldi.” The old man looked him in the eye and said don’t play games with me, what’s your real name? “My name is Benno von Archimboldi, sir,” said Reiter, “and if you think I’m joking I’d better go.”

For a few seconds both were silent. The old man’s eyes were dark brown, although in the dim light of his study they looked black. Archimboldi’s eyes were blue and to the old man they looked like the eyes of a young poet, tired, strained, reddened, but young and in a certain sense pure, although it had been a long time since the old man stopped believing in purity.

“This country,” he said to Reiter, who that afternoon, perhaps, became Archimboldi, “has tried to topple any number of countries into the abyss in the name of purity and will. As far as I’m concerned, you understand, purity and will are utter tripe. Thanks to purity and will we’ve all, every one of us, hear me you, become cowards and thugs, which in the end are one and the same. Now we sob and moan and say we didn’t know! we had no idea! it was the Nazis! we never would have done such a thing! We know how to whimper. We know how to drum up sympathy. We don’t care whether we’re mocked so long as they pity us and forgive us. There’...

My poor father. He believed in progress and of course he believed in the intrinsic goodness of human beings. I too believe in the intrinsic goodness of human beings, but it means nothing. In their hearts, killers are good, as we Germans have reason to know. So what? I might spend a night drinking with a killer, and as the two of us watch the sun come up, perhaps we’ll burst into song or hum some Beethoven. So what? The killer might weep on my shoulder. Naturally. Being a killer isn’t easy, as you and I well know. It isn’t easy at all. It requires purity and will, will and purity. Crystalline purity and steel-hard will. And I myself might even weep on the killer’s shoulder and whisper sweet words to him, words like ‘brother,’ ‘friend,’ ‘comrade in misfortune.’ At this moment the killer is good, because he’s intrinsically good, and I’m an idiot, because I’m intrinsically an idiot, and we’re both sentimental, because our culture tends inexorably toward sentimentality. But when the performance is over and I’m alone, the killer will open the window of my room and come tiptoeing in like a nurse and slit my throat, bleed me dry.

I was a writer, I was a writer, but my indolent, voracious brain gnawed at my own entrails. Vulture of my Prometheus self or Prometheus of my vulture self, one day I understood that I might go so far as to publish excellent articles in magazines and newspapers, and even books that weren’t unworthy of the paper on which they were printed. But I also understood that I would never manage to create anything like a masterpiece. You may say that literature doesn’t consist solely of masterpieces, but rather is populated by so-called minor works. I believed that, too. Literature is a vast forest and the masterpieces are the lakes, the towering trees or strange trees, the lovely, eloquent flowers, the hidden caves, but a forest is also made up of ordinary trees, patches of grass, puddles, clinging vines, mushrooms, and little wildflowers. I was wrong. There’s actually no such thing as a minor work.

“Our good craftsman writes. He’s absorbed in what takes shape well or badly on the page. His wife, though he doesn’t know it, is watching him. It really is he who’s writing. But if his wife had X-ray vision she would see that instead of being present at an exercise of literary creation, she’s witnessing a session of hypnosis. There’s nothing inside the man who sits there writing. Nothing of himself, I mean. How much better off the poor man would be if he devoted himself to reading. Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it’s knowledge and questions. Writing, meanwhile, is almost always empty. There’s nothing in the guts of the man who sits there writing. Nothing, I mean to say, that his wife, at a given moment, might recognize. He writes like someone taking dictation. His novel or book of poems, decent, adequate, arises not from an exercise of style or will, as the poor unfortunate believes, but as the result of an exercise of concealment. There must be many books, many lovely pines, to shield from hungry eyes the book that really matters, the wretched cave of our misfortune, the magic flower of winter!

I knew it was pointless to write. Or that it was worth it only if one was prepared to write a masterpiece. Most writers are deluded or playing. Perhaps delusion and play are the same thing, two sides of the same coin. The truth is we never stop being children, terrible children covered in sores and knotty veins and tumors and age spots, but ultimately children, in other words we never stop clinging to life because we are life. One might also say: we’re theater, we’re music. By the same token, few are the writers who give up. We play at believing ourselves immortal. We delude ourselves in the appraisal of our own works and in our perpetual misappraisal of the works of others. See you at the Nobel, writers say, as one might say: see you in hell.

“Play and delusion are the blindfold and spur of minor writers. Also: the promise of their future happiness. A forest that grows at a vertiginous rate, a forest no one can fence in, not even the academies, in fact, the academies make sure it flourishes unhindered, as do boosters and universities (breeding grounds for the shameless) and government institutions and patrons and cultural associations and declaimers of poetry—all aid the forest to grow and hide what must be hidden, all aid the forest to reproduce what must be reproduced, since the process is inevitable, though no one ever sees what exactly is being reproduced, what is being tamely mirrored back.

Before Archimboldi left, after they’d had a cup of tea, the man who rented him the typewriter said: “Jesus is the masterpiece. The thieves are minor works. Why are they there? Not to frame the crucifixion, as some innocent souls believe, but to hide it.”

The original he dropped off in person at a publishing house in Cologne. The advantage of this was that if it was rejected Archimboldi could go pick up the manuscript himself and send it out straightaway again. The carbon copy he sent to a house in Hamburg that had published books of the German Left until 1933, when the Nazi government not only shut down the business but also tried to send its editor, Mr. Jacob Bubis, to a prison camp, which it would have done if Mr. Bubis hadn’t been a step ahead of them and taken the path of exile.

“I don’t know whether you get the idea, Benno,” he said, fixing his gaze on Archimboldi. “I get the idea perfectly, Mickey,” said Archimboldi, thinking all the while that this man was not only irritating but ridiculous, with the particular ridiculousness of self-dramatizers and poor fools convinced they’ve been present at a decisive moment in history, when it’s common knowledge, thought Archimboldi, that history, which is a simple whore, has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness.

The paratroopers themselves had always fought in the west, in Italy, France, one of them in Crete, and they had that cosmopolitan air of veterans of the western front, an air of roulette players, late-night revelers, sippers of fine wines, men who visited brothels and greeted the whores by name, an air unlike that of most veterans of the eastern front, who looked more like the living dead, zombies, cemetery dwellers, soldiers without eyes or mouths, but with penises, thought Archimboldi, because the penis, sexual desire, is unfortunately the last thing man loses, when it should be the first, but no, human beings keep fucking, fucking or fucking themselves, which amounts to the same thing, until their last breaths, like the soldier who was trapped under a pile of corpses and there, beneath the corpses and the snow, he dug a little cave with his regulation shovel, and to pass the time he jerked off, more boldly each time, because once the fear and surprise of the first few instants had vanished, all that was left was the fear of death and boredom, and to stave off boredom he began to masturbate, first timidly, as if he were seducing a peasant girl or a little shepherdess, then with increasing determination, until he managed to bring himself off to his full satisfaction, and he went on like that for fifteen days, in his little cave of corpses and snow, rationing his food and indulging his urges, which didn’t make him weaker but rather seemed to retronourish him, as if he had ...

Archimboldi listened in horror, because if there was anything he was sure about it was that the war provided more than sufficient reason to commit suicide, but the tittle-tattle of scum like Göring clearly didn’t qualify. “So this Udet killed himself because of Göring’s salon intrigues?” he asked. “So he didn’t kill himself because of the death camps or the slaughter on the front lines or the cities in flames, but because Göring called him an incompetent?”

That night, as he was working the door at the bar, he amused himself by thinking about a time with two speeds, one very slow, in which the movement of people and objects was almost imperceptible, and the other very fast, in which everything, even inert objects, glittered with speed. The first was called Paradise, the second Hell, and Archimboldi’s only wish was never to inhabit either.

One morning he received a letter from Hamburg. The letter was signed by Mr. Bubis, the great editor, and in it he said flattering things, or at least flattering things could be read between the lines, about Lüdicke, a work he would like to publish, that is, of course, if Mr. Benno von Archimboldi didn’t already have a publisher, in which case he would be very sorry, because the novel wasn’t lacking in merit and was, in a certain sense, rather original, in any case, it was a book that he, Mr. Bubis, had read with great interest, a book he felt he could take a gamble on, although such was the state of publishing in Germany just now that the most he could offer as an advance was such and such, a ridiculous sum, he knew, a sum that fifteen years ago he would never have proposed, but at the same time he guaranteed that the book would receive the finest treatment and be carried in all the best bookshops, not just in Germany but also in Austria and Switzerland, where the Bubis name was remembered and respected by democratic bookshop owners, a symbol of independent and high-quality publishing.

When Archimboldi showed Ingeborg the letter she was surprised because she didn’t know who Benno von Archimboldi was. “It’s me, of course,” said Archimboldi. “Why did you change your name?” she wanted to know. After thinking about it for a moment, Archimboldi answered that it was for his safety. “The Americans might be looking for me,” he said. “It’s possible the American and German police have put two and two together.” “For the sake of a war criminal?” asked Ingeborg. “Justice is blind,” Archimboldi reminded her.

Archimboldi had never thought about fame. Hitler was famous. Göring was famous. The people he loved or remembered fondly weren’t famous, they just satisfied certain needs. Döblin was his consolation. Ansky was his strength. Ingeborg was his joy. The disappeared Hugo Halder was lightheartedness and fun. His sister, about whom he had no news, was his own innocence. Of course, they were other things too. Sometimes they were even everything all together, but not fame, which was rooted in delusion and lies, if not ambition. Also, fame was reductive. Everything that ended in fame and everything that issued from fame was inevitably diminished. Fame’s message was unadorned. Fame and literature were irreconcilable enemies.

All that day he thought about why he had changed his name. At the bar everyone knew he was Hans Reiter. His acquaintances in Cologne knew he was Hans Reiter. If the police finally did decide to come after him for Sammer’s murder, there would be plenty of clues. So why adopt a nom de plume? Maybe Ingeborg is right, thought Archimboldi, maybe deep down I’m sure I’ll be famous and with the change of name I’m making the first arrangements for my future protection. But maybe this all means something else. Maybe, maybe, maybe …

Often, when he was asked why he had returned, he quoted Tacitus: Then, besides the dangers of a boisterous and unknown sea, who would relinquish Asia, Africa, or Italy, for Germany, a land rude in its surface, rigorous in its climate, cheerless to every beholder and cultivator, except a native? Those who heard him nodded and smiled and commented among themselves: Bubis is one of us. Bubis hasn’t forgotten us. Bubis bears us no grudge. Some patted him on the back and understood nothing. Others assumed stricken expressions and said what truth there was in the Roman’s words. A great man, Tacitus, as is our dear Bubis, on a different level, of course!

And yet he had chosen Germany, cheerless to every beholder and cultivator. Why? Certainly not out of any loyalty to his homeland, because although Mr. Bubis felt himself to be German, he despised national pride, which to his mind was one of the causes of the death of more than fifty million people, but because Germany was home to his publishing house or to the idea he had of a publishing house, a German publishing house, a publishing house with its headquarters in Hamburg, and its networks, in the form of book orders, linking old bookshops all over Germany, some of whose owners he knew personally and with whom, when he traveled for business, he drank tea or coffee, sitting in a corner of the bookshop, always complaining about hard times, bemoaning the public’s indifference, sighing over the middlemen and paper salesmen, grieving for the future of a country that didn’t read, in a word, utterly enjoying himself as they nibbled biscuits or little slices of kuchen until at last Mr. Bubis rose and shook hands with the elderly owner of, say, Iserlohn, and then went off to Bochum, to visit the elderly owner of Bochum, who kept certain books with the Bubis logo like relics (relics for sale, of course), books published in 1930 or 1927, that by law, Schwarzwald law, naturally, he should have burned in 1935 at the latest, but that the old bookseller had chosen to hide, out of pure love, which was something Bubis understood (and few others could understand, not excluding the book’s au...

So it was no real surprise that Mr. Bubis soon tired of politics and decided to reopen his publishing house, because deep down all he really cared about was the adventure of printing books and selling them.

The woman wasn’t Jewish but one hundred percent Aryan, nor was she forty but just over thirty, although she looked twenty-seven at most, and two months later, Bubis’s prank or little joke became a fait accompli when he got married, with every honor and flanked by a municipal who’s who, at the venerable city hall in the midst of reconstruction, in an unforgettable civil ceremony presided over by the very mayor of Hamburg, who seized the occasion to shower Bubis with flattery, declaring him a prodigal son and model citizen.

Mr. Bubis, after making him wait ten minutes, ushered him into his office, an office Archimboldi would never forget, because with every shelf crammed full, books and manuscripts collected on the floor in stacks and towers, some so precarious that they in turn spilled over, a chaos that was a reflection of the world, rich and magnificent despite war and injustice, a library of glorious books that Archimboldi would have given anything to read, first editions of the works of great writers with handwritten dedications to Mr. Bubis, books of degenerate art that other publishing houses were once again issuing in Germany, books published in France and England, paperbacks from New York and Boston and San Francisco, as well as American magazines with mythical names that for an impecunious young writer were a treasure trove, the ultimate display of wealth, and turned Bubis’s office into something like Ali Baba’s cave.

Mrs. Anna Bubis was sitting behind a desk that was nearly empty (especially in contrast to Mr. Bubis’s), on which there sat just an ashtray, a pack of English cigarettes, a gold lighter, and a book in French. Archimboldi, despite the years that had gone by, recognized her immediately. It was the Baroness Von Zumpe.

“I’m tired,” she said. “Would you like to step out for a walk, perhaps for a cup of coffee?” “All right,” said Archimboldi. As they descended the building’s dark stairs, the baroness said that she had recognized him and was sure that he had recognized her too. “Instantly, Baroness,” said Archimboldi.

The baroness, meanwhile, as if to counterbalance Archimboldi’s forced travels, told him about her own journeys, all planned and desired and therefore happy, exotic trips to Bulgaria and Turkey and Montenegro and receptions at the German embassies of Italy, Spain, and Portugal, and she confessed that sometimes she tried to repent of the good times she’d had, but no matter how strongly she rejected her hedonistic behavior on an intellectual or perhaps more accurately a moral level, the truth was that when she thought back on those days she still felt a shiver of pleasure.

Archimboldi fell silent, and the baroness remarked that such a death would not have displeased the bold general. And she added that Entrescu, despite the successes attributed to him on the battlefield, was always a disaster as a tactician and strategist. As a lover, however, he was the best she’d ever had. “Not because of the size of his cock,” the baroness explained, to clear up any misunderstandings that Archimboldi, next to her in bed, might entertain, “but because of a kind of shape-shifting quality: he was cleverer than a crow when he talked and in bed he turned into a devil ray.”

incidentally the notion of destiny wasn’t something that could be separated from the destiny of an individual (a wretched individual), but that the two things were essentially the same: destiny, ungraspable until it became inevitable, was each person’s notion of his own destiny.

In collaboration with the recently established and somewhat muddled cultural councils of Lower Saxony, the Cologne Cultural Center also organized a series of lectures and readings that began with some pomp and circumstance in Oldenburg and continued on to various towns and villages, each smaller and more godforsaken than the previous one, places no writer had agreed to visit before. The tour ended in the fishing hamlets of Frisia, where Archimboldi unexpectedly found the largest crowds, and where very few people left before an event was over.

Sisyphus betrayed Zeus, who, in a blind rage, sent him ipso facto to Thanatos, or death, but Sisyphus was too much for Thanatos, and in a masterstroke perfectly in keeping with his craftiness and sense of humor he captured Thanatos and threw him in chains, a feat within reach of very few, truly very few, and for a long time he kept Thanatos in chains and during all that time not a single human being died on the face of the earth, a golden age in which men, though still men, lived free of the anxiety of death, in other words, free of the anxiety of time, because now they had more than enough time, which is perhaps what distinguishes a democracy, spare time, surplus time, time to read and time to think, until Zeus had to intervene personally and Thanatos was freed and then Sisyphus died.

a sum, he thought when he was alone again, is always approximate, there is no such thing as a correct sum, only the Nazis and teachers of elementary mathematics believed in correct sums, only sectarians, madmen, tax collectors (God rot them), numerologists who read one’s fortune for next to nothing believed in correct sums. Scientists, meanwhile, knew that all numbers were only approximate. Great physicists, great mathematicians, great chemists, and publishers knew that one was always feeling one’s way in the dark.

At that instant, said Ingeborg to Archimboldi, I understood that there could be music in anything. Mrs. Dorothea’s typing was so quick, so particular, there was so much of Mrs. Dorothea in her typing, that despite the noise or the clamor or the rhythmic beat of more than sixty typists working at once, the music that flowed from the oldest secretary’s typewriter rose far above the collective composition of her office mates, without imposing itself on them, but rather adjusting to them, shepherding them, frolicking with them. Sometimes it seemed to reach the skylights, other times it wound along at floor level, brushing the ankles of the visitors and the boys in shorts. Sometimes it even allowed itself the luxury of slowing down and then Mrs. Dorothea’s typewriter was like a heart, a giant heart beating in the middle of the fog and chaos. But these moments were scarce. Mrs. Dorothea liked speed and her typing was usually ahead of the other typing, as if she were blazing a path in the middle of a dark jungle, said Ingeborg, dark, dark …

“And yet,” said Leube, “they’ve had time to inform you about my life.” “Very superficially,” said Ingeborg, and then she gave a loud and bitter laugh that made her cough once more. As he listened to her cough Leube closed his eyes. When she took the handkerchief away from her mouth the stain of blood was like a giant rose in full bloom.

“All this light is dead,” said Ingeborg. “All this light was emitted thousands and millions of years ago. It’s the past, do you see? When these stars cast their light, we didn’t exist, life on Earth didn’t exist, even Earth didn’t exist. This light was cast a long time ago. It’s the past, we’re surrounded by the past, everything that no longer exists or exists only in memory or guesswork is there now, above us, shining on the mountains and the snow and we can’t do anything to stop it.”

“An old book is the past, too,” said Archimboldi, “a book written and published in 1789 is the past, its author no longer exists, neither does its printer or the ones who read it first or the time when it was written, but the book, the first edition of that book, is still here. Like the pyramids of the Aztecs,” said Archimboldi. “I hate first editions and pyramids and I hate those bloodthirsty Aztecs,” said Ingeborg. “But the light of the stars makes me dizzy. It makes me want to cry,” said Ingeborg, her eyes damp with madness.

“I just wanted to tell you,” he said, “that the young lady was right. I killed my wife. I pushed her into a ravine. The Virgin’s ravine. Actually, I don’t remember anymore. It might have been the Flower ravine. But I pushed her into a ravine and I watched her body fall, battered against the outcroppings of rock. Then I opened my eyes and searched for her. There she was down below. A spot of color on the stone slabs. For a long time I stared. Then I went down and slung her over my shoulder and climbed up with her, but she didn’t weigh a thing anymore, it was like climbing up with a bundle of sticks. I brought her into the house through the back door. No one saw me. I washed her carefully, I dressed her in clean clothes, I laid her out on the bed. How did no one notice all her bones were broken? I said she had died. What did she die of? they asked. Of sorrow, I said. When you die of sorrow it’s as if you’ve broken all the bones in your body, bruised yourself all over, cracked your skull. That’s sorrow.

What did they live on? Probably Archimboldi, who had learned many things working at the bar on the Spenglerstrasse, turned to petty theft. Robbing American tourists was easy. Robbing Italians was only a little more difficult. Archimboldi might have asked for another advance from the publishing house and he might have received it by mail, or perhaps it was the Baroness Von Zumpe herself who delivered it by hand, curious to meet her former servant’s companion. But the meeting was in a public place, and only Archimboldi came. He had a beer, took the money, thanked her, and left.

The beginning of September found them in Rome, both dressed in shorts, dune- or desert-yellow colored, as if they were ghosts of the Afrika Korps lost in the catacombs of the early Christians, lonely catacombs where all that could be heard was the erratic drip of some nearby gutter and Ingeborg’s cough.

The trip was a threnody or an epicede, depending on the countryside through which they were passing, recited in an increasingly exaggerated and infectious Italian.