2666

by Roberto Bolaño

The villagers, surly and hard at work mending their nets and caulking their boats, told them that a German couple had in fact arrived a few days before and shortly afterward the man had left alone because the woman had drowned. Where had the man gone? They didn’t know. The baroness and the editor asked the village priest, but he didn’t know anything either. They also asked the gravedigger and he repeated like a litany what they had already heard: the German had left a little while ago and the German woman wasn’t buried in the cemetery, because she had drowned and her body was never found.

For a long time there was no news of Archimboldi. Despite expectations, Rivers of Europe kept selling and a second edition was printed. Soon afterward the same thing happened with The Leather Mask. Archimboldi’s name appeared in two essays on new German fiction, though he was mentioned in passing each time, as if the authors of the essays were never entirely sure that some joke wasn’t being played on them. A few young people read him. His books were cult objects, a caprice of university students.

she also thought how different those two men were, Moravia and Archimboldi, the former bourgeois and practical and worldly, though not above paving the way for certain subtle and timeless jokes (not for his own sake but for the sake of his audience), whereas the latter, especially by comparison, was essentially a man of the lower orders, a Germanic barbarian, an artist in a state of permanent incandescence, as Bubis said, someone who would never see the view from Moravia’s terrace, the ruins cloaked in light, and would never hear Moravia’s records or go for night strolls around Rome with friends, poets and filmmakers, translators and students, aristocrats and Marxists, as Moravia did, always ready with a kind word, a clever remark, a judicious comment, while Archimboldi addressed long soliloquies to himself,

In those days he ate grapes and olives, big dry olives which in taste and consistency were like clods of dirt. He ate white cheese and cured goat cheese that was sold wrapped in grape leaves and could be smelled from one thousand feet away. He ate very hard black bread that had to be softened with wine. He ate fish and tomatoes. Figs. Water. The water came from a well. He had a bucket and a jerry can like the kind they used in the army that he filled with water. He swam, but the seaweed boy was dead. Still, he was a strong swimmer. Sometimes he dove. Other times he sat alone on the slopes of the hills covered in scrub, until dusk fell or dawn came, thinking, or so he claimed, but really he wasn’t thinking anything at all.

“That apple has a scent at night,” said the essayist. “When I turn out the light. It smells as strongly as Rimbaud’s ‘Voyelles.’ But everything collapses in the end,” said the essayist. “Everything collapses in pain. All eloquence springs from pain.”

Walking aimlessly, but enjoying the night and the country smells, he came to the front entrance, a big wooden door that didn’t latch tightly and that anyone could force. To one side he discovered a sign he hadn’t seen when he arrived with the essayist. In small, dark letters, the sign said MERCIER CLINIC. REST HOME — NEUROLOGICAL CENTER. Without surprise he understood at once that the essayist had brought him to a mental asylum. After a while he returned to the house and went up the stairs to his room, where he retrieved his suitcase and laptop. Before he left he wanted to see the essayist. After he knocked and received no reply, he entered the room. The essayist was fast asleep, with all the lights off, although light from the front door came in the window, through the parted curtains. The bedclothes were hardly rumpled. The essayist looked like a cigarette covered with a handkerchief. He’s so old, thought Archimboldi. Then he left without a sound and as he crossed the garden again he thought he saw a man in white running full speed along one side of the property and ducking behind tree trunks on the edge of the forest.

At this point it must be said that upon Bubis’s death very few believed the baroness would remain at the head of the publishing house. They expected she would sell the business and devote herself to her lovers and her travels, which were her most famous interests. But the baroness took the reins of the publishing house and there wasn’t the slightest dip in quality, because she knew how to surround herself with good readers and also because in purely business matters she showed an aptitude that no one had glimpsed before. In a word: Bubis’s business continued to grow. Sometimes, half in jest and half seriously, the baroness told Archimboldi that if he were younger she would name him her heir.

“I’ll never die,” the baroness said once to Archimboldi. “Or I’ll die at ninety-five, which is the same as never dying.” The last time they saw each other was in a ghostly Italian city. The Baroness Von Zumpe wore a white hat and used a cane. She talked about the Nobel Prize and she also complained bitterly about vanished writers, a custom or habit or joke that she believed to be more American than European. Archimboldi was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and he listened to her carefully, because he was going deaf, and he laughed.

Lotte knew her brother hadn’t died, because giants never die, she thought, or they die only when they’re very old, so old one doesn’t even notice they’ve died, they just sit at the door to their houses or under a tree and fall asleep and then they’re dead.

Lotte’s answer was vague: she told him that his uncle was ten years older than she was, more or less, and that the way he made a living wasn’t exactly a model for young people, more or less, and that it had been a long time since the family had news of him, because he had disappeared from the face of the earth, more or less. Later she told Klaus that when she was little she thought her brother was a giant, but that this was the sort of thing little girls often imagined.

Her suffering was like the screech of chalk on a blackboard. As if a boy were dragging a piece of chalk across a blackboard on purpose to make it screech. Or maybe it wasn’t chalk but the boy’s fingernails, or maybe it wasn’t his fingernails but his teeth. As time went by, this nightmare, the Klaus nightmare, as she called it, became a recurring dream. Sometimes, in the morning, as she helped Werner with breakfast, she would say: “I had a nightmare.”

In 1995 she received a telegram from Mexico, from a place called Santa Teresa, in which she was informed that Klaus was in prison. The sender was Isabel Santolaya, Klaus’s lawyer. Lotte suffered such a shock that she had to leave her office, go upstairs, and get into bed, although of course she couldn’t sleep. Klaus was alive. That was all that mattered to her.

Lotte asked point-blank whether there was something else between her and Klaus. “There is,” said the lawyer. “And isn’t it too hard for you to bear?” asked Lotte. “No harder than it is for you,” said Isabel Santolaya. “I don’t understand,” said Lotte, “I’m his mother but you’re free to choose.” “No one’s free to choose in love,” said Isabel Santolaya. “And does Klaus feel the same way?” asked Lotte. “I’m the one who sleeps with him,” said Isabel Santolaya curtly.

she remembered that in Mexico, as in Germany, all prisoners had the right to conjugal visits or visits with their partners. She had seen a TV show about it. The rooms where the prisoners stayed with their wives were unbearably sad, she remembered. The women tried to make them nice but all they managed to do with their flowers and scarves was turn the sad, impersonal rooms into sad, cheap, whorehouse rooms. And that was in nice German prisons, thought Lotte, prisons that weren’t overcrowded, that were clean, functional. She didn’t want to imagine what a conjugal visit would be like in the Santa Teresa prison.

When the year 2001 came she was ready to embark on another trip to Mexico, although her health, despite all her efforts, wasn’t what it used to be. Nor were her nerves as steady, as shall be seen.

Lotte wasn’t a good reader, whatever that means, and if every once in a while she bought a book it was usually the kind written by actors when they retire or when it’s been a long time since they’ve made a movie, or biographies of famous people, or those books by TV personalities, supposedly full of interesting stories but in fact with no stories at all. This time, however, by mistake or because she was in a hurry not to miss her flight, she bought a book called The King of the Forest, by someone called Benno von Archimboldi. The book, no more than one hundred and fifty pages long, was about a one-legged father and a one-eyed mother and their two children, a boy who liked to swim and a girl who followed her brother to the cliffs. As the plane crossed the Atlantic, Lotte realized in astonishment that she was reading a part of her childhood.