2666

by Roberto Bolaño

That night a green, sickly light seeped from under the hospital doors, a transparent green swimming pool light, and an orderly smoked a cigarette, standing on the curb, and among the parked cars there was one with its light on, a yellow light as in a nest, though not just any nest but a post-nuclear nest, a nest with no room for any certainties but cold, despair, and apathy.

“I don’t know,” said the person on the phone, “maybe it isn’t as simple as that.”

"person on the phone": are Pelletier and Espinoza interchangeable to Norton?

“Do you want some advice?” he asked. Pelletier gazed at him in alarm. “I know you don’t, old man, but here it is. Be careful,” said Pritchard. “Careful of what?” Pelletier managed to ask. “Of the Medusa,” said Pritchard. “Beware of the Medusa.” And then, before he continued down the stairs, he added: “When you’ve got her in your hands she’ll blow you to pieces.” For a while Pelletier stood there motionless, listening to Pritchard’s footsteps on the stairs, then the noise of the street door opening and closing. Only when the silence became unbearable did he continue upstairs, thoughtful and in the dark.

“I’d say Pritchard is alerting me, alerting us, to a danger we can’t see. Or rather, he was trying to tell me that only after Norton’s death would I, or we, find true love.” “After Norton’s death?” said Espinoza. “Of course, don’t you understand? Pritchard sees himself as Perseus, Medusa’s assassin.”

For a while, Espinoza and Pelletier wandered around as if possessed. Archimboldi, who was again rumored to stand a clear chance for the Nobel, left them cold. They resented their work at the university, their periodic contributions to the journals of German departments around the world, their classes, and even the conferences they attended like sleepwalkers or drugged detectives.

“A bastard may have no imagination and then do one imaginative thing when you least expect it,”

In the end, when they requested his opinion on the romantic imbroglio, real or imaginary, in which they found themselves, Morini only asked if either of them, or both, had asked Norton whether she loved Pritchard or was attracted to him. They had to confess that out of delicacy, tact, and good taste—out of consideration for Norton, essentially—they hadn’t asked. “Well, that’s where you should have begun,” said Morini, who, although he felt ill, and dizzy, too, after taking so many turns, breathed not a sigh of complaint.

Norton's own agency as a woman is less important than Pritchard's involvement with her, and him being all but a stranger

the latest litter of Archimboldians, recent graduates, boys and girls, their doctorates tucked still warm under their arms, who planned, by any means necessary, to impose their particular readings of Archimboldi, like missionaries ready to instill faith in God, even if to do so meant signing a pact with the devil, for most were what you might call rationalists, not in the philosophical sense but in the pejorative literal sense, denoting people less interested in literature than in literary criticism, the one field, according to them—some of them, anyway—where revolution was still possible, and in some way they behaved not like youths but like nouveaux youths, in the sense that there are the rich and the nouveaux riches, all of them generally rational thinkers, let us repeat, although often incapable of telling their asses from their elbows,

although they noticed a there and a not-there, an absence-presence in the fleeting passage of Pelletier and Espinoza through Bologna, they were incapable of seeing what was really important: Pelletier’s and Espinoza’s absolute boredom regarding everything said there about Archimboldi or their negligent disregard for the gaze of others, as if the two were so much cannibal fodder, a disregard lost on the young conferencegoers, those eager and insatiable cannibals, their thirtysomething faces bloated with success, their expressions shifting from boredom to madness, their coded stutterings speaking only two words: love me, or maybe two words and a phrase: love me, let me love you, though obviously no one understood.)

And Pelletier and Espinoza said, almost on the verge of tears, if not now, when?

Combined identity.

he confessed that London was such a labyrinth,

Greek allusions keep emerging

When they stopped kicking him they were sunk for a few seconds in the strangest calm of their lives. It was as if they’d finally had the ménage à trois they’d so often dreamed of. Pelletier felt as if he had come. Espinoza felt the same, to a slightly different degree. Norton, who was staring at them without seeing them in the dark, seemed to have experienced multiple orgasms.

Chilling linking of sex and violence

Others might have slept with students. They, afraid of falling in love, or of falling out of love with Norton, turned to whores.

Whores as objects

When Pelletier asked whether the Arab knew she worked as a prostitute, Vanessa said he did, that he knew but didn’t care, because he believed in the freedom of individuals. “Then he’s your pimp,” said Pelletier.

Her disdain for culture, especially book culture, was schoolgirlish somehow, a combination of innocence and elegance so thoroughly immaculate, or so Pelletier believed, that Vanessa could make the most idiotic remarks without provoking the slightest annoyance.

Archimboldi was by now a part of him, the author belonged to him insofar as Pelletier had, along with a few others, instituted a new reading of the German, a reading that would endure, a reading as ambitious as Archimboldi’s writing, and this reading would keep pace with Archimboldi’s writing for a long time, until the reading was exhausted or until Archimboldi’s writing—the capacity of the Archimboldian oeuvre to spark emotion and revelations—was exhausted

though in another way it wasn’t true, because sometimes, especially since he and Espinoza had given up their trips to London and stopped seeing Norton, Archimboldi’s work, his novels and stories, that is, seemed completely foreign, a shapeless and mysterious verbal mass, something that appeared and disappeared capriciously, literally a pretext, a false door, a murderer’s alias, a hotel bathtub full of amniotic liquid in which he, Jean-Claude Pelletier, would end up committing suicide for no reason, gratuitously, in bewilderment, just because.

“Whores are there to be fucked,” Espinoza said the night Pelletier talked to him about Vanessa, “not psychoanalyzed.”

For a while, smiling like squirrels, the three of them turned to their margaritas, but the quiet became more and more unbearable, as if within it, in the interregnum of silence, cutting words and cutting ideas were slowly being formed, never a performance or dance to be observed with indifference.

Then the three turned to face the bulk of the asylum, which could just be seen at the end of the road, like a fifteenth-century fortress, not in its architecture but in the effect of its inertness. And what was this effect? An odd conviction. The certainty that the American continent, for example, had never been discovered, or in other words had never existed, and that this had in no way impeded the sustained economic growth or normal demographic growth or democratic advancement of the Helvetian republic. Just one of those strange and pointless ideas, said Pelletier, that people exchange on trips, especially if the trip is manifestly pointless, as this one was shaping up to be.

far as coincidence is concerned, it’s never a question of believing in it or not. The whole world is a coincidence. I had a friend who told me I was wrong to think that way. My friend said the world isn’t a coincidence for someone traveling by rail, even if the train should cross foreign lands, places the traveler will never see again in his life. And it isn’t a coincidence for the person who gets up at six in the morning, exhausted, to go to work; for the person who has no choice but to get up and pile more suffering on the suffering he’s already accumulated. Suffering is accumulated, said my friend, that’s a fact, and the greater the suffering, the smaller the coincidence.” “As if coincidence were a luxury?” asked Morini.

And the window ledge and the roses outside and beyond them the grass and the trees and the evening advancing across ridges and ravines and lonely crags. The shadows that crept imperceptibly across the inside of the cottage, creating angles where none had existed before, vague sketches that suddenly appeared on the walls, circles that faded like mute explosions.

Coincidence, on the other hand, is total freedom, our natural destiny. Coincidence obeys no laws and if it does we don’t know what they are. Coincidence, if you’ll permit me the simile, is like the manifestation of God at every moment on our planet. A senseless God making senseless gestures at his senseless creatures. In that hurricane, in that osseous implosion, we find communion. The communion of coincidence and effect and the communion of effect with us.”

The nurse’s shoes were white. Pelletier’s and Espinoza’s shoes were black. Morini’s shoes were brown. Johns’s shoes were white and made for running long distance, on the paved streets of a city or cross-country. That was the last thing Pelletier saw, the color of the shoes and their shape and stillness, before night plunged them into the cold nothingness of the Alps.

Espinoza heard someone, the student himself, whispering Morini … Morini … Morini, in a voice that didn’t sound like his but rather like the voice of a sorcerer, or more specifically, a sorceress, a soothsayer from the times of the Roman Empire, a voice that reached Espinoza like the dripping of a basalt fountain but that soon swelled and overflowed with a deafening roar, with the sound of thousands of voices, the thunder of a great river in flood comprising the shared fate of every voice.

One of these Mexico City friends, said Alatorre, and he said it innocently, with that slight hint of clumsy boasting typical of minor writers, had met Archimboldi just the other day.

He was attracted by the idea of living in Italy or near Italy and spending long periods in Tuscany and Rome writing an essay on Piranesi and his imaginary prisons, which he saw extrapolated not exactly in Mexican prisons but in the imaginary and iconographic versions of some Mexican prisons.

One of the cons, no question about it, was the physical separation from power. Distancing oneself from power is never good, he’d discovered that early on, before he’d been granted real power, when he was head of the house that tried to publish Archimboldi.

El Cerdo was with the German until five in the morning. After they ate (the old man was hungry and ordered more tacos and more tequila, while El Cerdo buried his head like an ostrich in reflections on melancholy and power),

they went for a walk around the Zócalo, visiting the plaza and the Aztec ruins springing like lilacs from wasteland, as El Cerdo put it, stone flowers among other stone flowers, a chaos that would surely lead nowhere, only to further chaos,

Archimboldi had come up again as a possible Nobel candidate this year. His name had been in the prize pool the year before, too. False hopes. According to Dieter Hellfeld, a member of the Swedish Academy or the secretary of a member of the academy had been in touch with Archimboldi’s publisher to get an idea how the writer would respond if he were awarded the prize. What could a man past eighty have to say? What could the Nobel mean to such a man, with no family, no heirs, no public face?

The baroness was nearing ninety, and warehouses were of no interest to her. She traveled a lot, Milan, Paris, Frankfurt. Sometimes she could be seen talking to Signora Sellerio at the Bubis stand in Frankfurt. Or at the German embassy in Moscow, in a Chanel suit, with two Russian poets in her retinue, declaiming on Bulgakov and the (incomparable) beauty of Russian rivers in the fall, before the winter frosts.

Sometimes, said Pelletier, it’s as if Mrs. Bubis has forgotten that Archimboldi even exists. That’s the way it always is in Mexico,

Forgotten people?

A person who didn’t pretend to reconcile the irreconcilable, as was the fashion these days.

When he got to Samoa, after many hardships, he didn’t visit Stevenson’s grave. Partly because he was too sick, and partly because what’s the point of visiting the grave of someone who hasn’t died? Stevenson—and Schwob owed this simple revelation to his trip—lived inside him.

a car stopped in front of the hotel and Norton watched as Espinoza and Pelletier climbed out, followed by the Mexican. From up above she wasn’t entirely sure they were her friends. In any case, if they were, they seemed different, they were walking differently, in a more virile way, if such a thing were possible, although the word virile, especially applied to a form of walking, sounded grotesque to Norton, completely absurd.

As they left the airport, the three of them noticed how bright it was in Sonora. It was as if the light were buried in the Pacific Ocean, producing an enormous curvature of space. It made a person hungry to travel in that light, although also, and maybe more insistently, thought Norton, it made you want to bear your hunger until the end.

On the ride back to the hotel, they lost the sense of being in a hostile environment, although hostile wasn’t the word, an environment whose language they refused to recognize, an environment that existed on some parallel plane where they couldn’t make their presence felt, imprint themselves, unless they raised their voices, unless they argued, something they had no intention of doing.

Dear Colleagues, he had written without a hint of irony. This made them laugh even more, although then they were immediately sad, since the ridiculousness of “colleague” somehow erected bridges of reinforced concrete between Europe and this drifters’ retreat. It’s like hearing a child cry, said Norton.

Amalfitano could only be considered a castaway, a carelessly dressed man, a nonexistent professor at a nonexistent university, the unknown soldier in a doomed battle against barbarism, or, less melodramatically, as what he ultimately was, a melancholy literature professor put out to pasture in his own field, on the back of a capricious and childish beast that would have swallowed Heidegger in a single gulp if Heidegger had had the bad luck to be born on the Mexican-U.S. border.

then there were the voices. Espinoza listened to them. Barely audible voices, at first only syllables, brief moans shooting like meteorites over the desert and the framed space of the hotel room and the dream. He recognized a few stray words. Quickness, urgency, speed, agility. The words tunneled through the rarefied air of the room like virulent roots through dead flesh. Our culture, said a voice. Our freedom. The word freedom sounded to Espinoza like the crack of a whip in an empty classroom. He woke up in a sweat.

he apologized for expressing himself so grandiloquently. Everything becomes a habit, he said, but none of the critics paid much attention to this last remark.

“Exile must be a terrible thing,” said Norton sympathetically. “Actually,” said Amalfitano, “now I see it as a natural movement, something that, in its way, helps to abolish fate, or what is generally thought of as fate.” “But exile,” said Pelletier, “is full of inconveniences, of skips and breaks that essentially keep recurring and interfere with anything you try to do that’s important.” “That’s just what I mean by abolishing fate,” said Amalfitano.

Amalfitano learned that no one had ever seen Archimboldi in person. The story struck him as amusing, though he couldn’t say exactly why, and he asked why they wanted to find him when it was clear Archimboldi didn’t want to be seen. Because we’re studying his work, said the critics. Because he’s dying and it isn’t right that the greatest German writer of the twentieth century should die without being offered the chance to speak to the readers who know his novels best. Because, they said, we want to convince him to come back to Europe.

“Have you read Peter Handke?” Amalfitano asked them. “And what about Thomas Bernhard?” Ugh, said the critics, and until breakfast was over Amalfitano was attacked until he resembled the bird in Azuela’s Mangy Parrot, gutted and plucked to the last feather.

it appeared that Guerra and the critics were on such excellent terms, or that Guerra felt a respect for them bordering on reverence and even fear, a fear, in turn, not without its element of vanity or coquetry, although cunning, to be fair, crouched behind the coquetry and fear, since even if Guerra’s cooperation came down to the wishes of Rector Negrete, it was no secret to Amalfitano that Guerra planned to get something out of the visit of the distinguished European professors, for as we all know the future is a mystery and we never know when we may come to a bend in the road or what unexpected places our steps may lead us.

The intellectual himself may be a passionate defender of the state or a critic of the state. The state doesn’t care. The state feeds him and watches over him in silence. And it puts this giant cohort of essentially useless writers to use. How? It exorcises demons, it alters the national climate or at least tries to sway it. It adds layers of lime to a pit that may or may not exist, no one knows for sure.

Literature in Mexico is like a nursery school, a kindergarten, a playground, a kiddie club, if you follow me. The weather is good, it’s sunny, you can go out and sit in the park and open a book by Valéry, possibly the writer most read by Mexican writers, and then you go over to a friend’s house and talk. And yet your shadow isn’t following you anymore. At some point your shadow has quietly slipped away. You pretend you don’t notice, but you have, you’re missing your fucking shadow, though there are plenty of ways to explain it, the angle of the sun, the degree of oblivion induced by the sun beating down on hatless heads, the quantity of alcohol ingested, the movement of something like subterranean tanks of pain, the fear of more contingent things, a disease that begins to become apparent, wounded vanity, the desire just for once in your life to be on time.

Their work, it goes without saying, is of a very low standard. They employ rhetoric where they sense a hurricane, they try to be eloquent where they sense fury unleashed, they strive to maintain the discipline of meter where there’s only a deafening and hopeless silence. They say cheep cheep, bowwow, meow meow, because they’re incapable of imagining an animal of colossal proportions, or the absence of such an animal. Meanwhile, the stage on which they work is very pretty, very well designed, very charming, but it grows smaller and smaller with the passage of time. This shrinking of the stage doesn’t spoil it in any way. It simply gets smaller and smaller and the hall gets smaller too, and naturally there are fewer and fewer people watching.

The moon is fat and the night air is so pure it seems edible.