2666

by Roberto Bolaño

I need company. This morning I drove past the Santa Teresa prison and I almost had a panic attack.” “Is it that bad?” “It’s like a dream,” said Guadalupe Roncal. “It looks like something alive.” “Alive?” “I don’t know how to explain it. More alive than an apartment building, for example. Much more alive. Don’t be shocked by what I’m about to say, but it looks like a woman who’s been hacked to pieces. Who’s been hacked to pieces but is still alive. And the prisoners are living inside this woman.” “I understand,” said Fate.

He thought about his mother and what she must have thought about at night in Harlem, not looking out the window to see the few stars shining in the sky, sitting in front of the TV or washing dishes in the kitchen with laughter coming from the TV, black people and white people laughing, telling jokes that she might have thought were funny, although probably she didn’t even pay much attention to what was being said, busy washing the dishes she had just used and the pot she had just used and the fork and spoon she had just used, peaceful in a way that seemed to go beyond simple peacefulness, thought Fate, or maybe not, maybe her peacefulness was just peacefulness and a hint of weariness, peacefulness and banked embers, peacefulness and tranquillity and sleepiness, which is ultimately (sleepiness, that is) the wellspring and also the last refuge of peacefulness. But then peacefulness isn’t just peacefulness, thought Fate. Or what we think of as peacefulness is wrong and peacefulness or the realms of peacefulness are really no more than a gauge of movement, an accelerator or a brake, depending.

he saw a man hit a woman in a corner of the room. The first blow made the woman’s head snap violently and the second blow knocked her down. Without thinking, Fate tried to move toward them, but someone grabbed his arm. When he turned to see who it was, no one was there. In the opposite corner of the club the man who had hit the woman stepped next to where she was huddled on the ground and kicked her in the stomach. A few feet away from him he saw Rosa Méndez smiling happily. Next to her was Corona, who was looking in a different direction with the usual serious expression on his face. Corona’s arm was around Rosa Méndez’s shoulders. Every so often she would lift Corona’s hand to her mouth and bite his finger. Sometimes Rosa Méndez’s teeth bit too hard and then Corona’s brow furrowed slightly.

No reaction from anyone but Fate

The Virgin had her arms spread wide, as if offering all of these riches in exchange for nothing. But despite being drunk, Fate noticed right away there was something wrong about her face. One of the Virgin’s eyes was open and the other eye was closed.

Rosa Amalfitano looked at Corona’s gun as if it were a sex-shop contraption.

Then Rosa focused her attention on the TV show, a Mexican talk show that was essentially just an old woman talking. She had long white hair. Sometimes she smiled and you could tell she was a nice, harmless little old lady, but most of the time she had a grave expression on her face, as if she were addressing matters of great importance. Of course, he didn’t understand a thing she said.

The reader will understand

One day Rosa Méndez told Rosa Amalfitano what it felt like to make love with a policeman. “It’s the best,” she said. “Why, what difference does it make?” her friend wanted to know. “It’s hard to explain, mana,” said Rosa Méndez, “but it’s like fucking a man who isn’t exactly a man. It’s like becoming a little girl again, if that makes sense. It’s like being fucked by a rock. A mountain. You know you’ll be there, on your knees, until the mountain says it’s over. And that in the end you’ll be full.”

“So,” concluded Rosa Amalfitano, “if a policeman fucks you it’s like being fucked by a mountain inside the mountain itself, and if a narco fucks you it’s like being fucked by the desert air.” “That’s right, mana, if a narco fucks you it’s always out in the open.”

Charly began to take on sharper outlines, as if time, in the classic embodiment of an old man, were blowing incessantly on a flat gray stone covered in dust, until the black grooves of the letters carved into the stone were perfectly legible.

For a few seconds, remembered Rosa, Charly Cruz’s gaze altered, as if he were trying to see where her father was going with all this. Charly Cruz, as we’ve already said, was a relaxed man, and for those few seconds, although his poise and natural calm were unshaken, something did happen behind his face, as if the lens through which he was observing her father, Rosa remembered, had stopped working and he was proceeding, calmly, to change it, an operation that took less than a fraction of a second, but during which his gaze was necessarily left naked or empty, vacant, in any case, since one lens was being removed and another inserted, and both operations couldn’t be carried out simultaneously, and for that fraction of a second, which Rosa remembered as if she had invented it herself, Charly Cruz’s face was empty or it emptied, and the speed at which this happened was startling, say the speed of light, to put it in exaggerated but nevertheless roughly accurate terms, and the emptying of the face was complete, hair and teeth included, although to say hair and teeth in the presence of that blankness was like saying nothing, all of Charly Cruz’s features emptied, his wrinkles, his veins, his pores, everything left defenseless, everything acquiring a dimension to which the only response, remembered Rosa, could be vertigo and nausea, although it wasn’t.

The clerk shrugged and said that all of Mexico was a collage of diverse and wide-ranging homages. “Every single thing in this country is an homage to everything in the world, even the things that haven’t happened yet,” he said.

They drove around the block to see whether anyone was lying in wait for them, but everything was calm (the calm of quicksilver or the calm that heralds border dawns), and the second time around they parked the car under a tree in front of a neighbor’s house.

“Does it have to do with the killings?” he asked. “Do you think this Chucho Flores is mixed up in that?” “They’re all mixed up in it,” said Amalfitano.

After they crossed the border, the few tourists they saw on the streets of El Adobe seemed to be sleepwalking. A woman in her seventies, in a flowered dress and Nike sneakers, was kneeling down to examine some Indian rugs. She looked like an athlete from the 1940s.

Three children holding hands watched some objects displayed in a shop window. The objects were moving almost imperceptibly, and Fate couldn’t tell whether they were animals or machines. Outside a bar some men in cowboy hats who looked like Chicanos were gesticulating and pointing in opposite directions. At the end of the street there were some wooden sheds and metal containers on the pavement and beyond them was the desert. All of this is like somebody else’s dream, thought Fate.

You have to listen to women. You should never ignore a woman’s fears. It was something like that, remembered Fate, that his mother or her neighbor, the deceased Miss Holly, used to say when both of them were young and he was a boy.

No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them.

Enigmatic and sad

This happened in 1993. January 1993. From then on, the killings of women began to be counted. But it’s likely there had been other deaths before. The name of the first victim was Esperanza Gómez Saldaña and she was thirteen. Maybe for the sake of convenience, maybe because she was the first to be killed in 1993, she heads the list. Although surely there were other girls and women who died in 1992. Other girls and women who didn’t make it onto the list or were never found, who were buried in unmarked graves in the desert or whose ashes were scattered in the middle of the night, when not even the person scattering them knew where he was, what place he had come to.

Romero, rather than being sent to prison, remained locked up at Precinct #2, where the interrogations continued, their object this time not to clear up any lingering questions regarding the murder of Luisa Celina but to incriminate Romero in the murder of Esperanza Gómez Saldaña, whose body had by now been identified. Despite what the police expected, deceived as they were by the speed with which they had obtained the first confession, Romero stood firm and refused to implicate himself in the earlier crime.

There was no autopsy, in deference to the family, and the ballistic analysis, which was never made public, was later lost for good somewhere in transit between the courts of Santa Teresa and Hermosillo.

The policemen who came to get her found three executives from the maquiladora waiting for them by the dump. Two were Mexican and the other was American. One of the Mexicans said they hoped the body would be removed as soon as possible.

The ambulance is taking a long time, said one of them. It’ll be here in a second, said the policeman. Well, said one of the executives, you’ll take care of everything, won’t you? The policeman said yes, of course, and tucked the money the other man handed him into the pocket of his regulation pants.

It began to get dark. To the west he saw houses with zinc and cardboard roofs, the streets winding through an anarchic sprawl. To the east he saw the highway that led to the mountains and the desert, the lights of the trucks, the first stars, real stars, stars that crept in with the night from the far side of the mountains. To the north he didn’t see anything, just a vast monotonous plain, as if life ended beyond Santa Teresa, despite what he hoped and believed.

The attacks on San Rafael and San Tadeo got more attention in the local press than the women killed in the preceding months.

Connection to the earlier passage on who gets considered as part of society.

Two days later, the stranger got into the church of Santa Catalina, in Colonia Lomas del Toro, late at night when the building was closed, and he urinated and defecated on the altar, as well as decapitating almost all the statues in his path. This time, the story made the national news and a reporter from La Voz de Sonora dubbed the attacker the Demon Penitent.

That night, Juan de Dios Martínez thought to himself that he was beginning to like the Penitent. The first attack was violent and the sexton was almost killed, but as the days went by he was perfecting his technique. With the second attack he had only frightened some churchgoers, and with the third no one saw him and he was able to work in peace.

Detective empathizing and admiring a criminal who stabbed a man and going around desecrating churches

He watched two patrolmen come down the stairs with their arms around each other and he followed them. In the hallway he saw several cops talking, in groups of two, three, four. Every so often one group laughed loudly. A man dressed in white, but wearing jeans, pushed a stretcher. On the stretcher, covered in a gray plastic sheet, lay the body of Emilia Mena Mena. Nobody noticed.

The night residents of El Chile were few. Their life expectancy was short. They died after seven months, at most, of picking their way through the dump. Their feeding habits and their sex lives were a mystery. It was likely they had forgotten how to eat or fuck. Or that food and sex were beyond their reach by then, unattainable, indescribable, beyond action and expression. All, without exception, were sick. To strip the clothes from a body in El Chile was to skin it. The population was stable: never fewer than three, never more than twenty.

He managed to talk to two priests, at San Tadeo and Santa Catalina, who had little new to add, although the priest at Santa Catalina suggested he take a good look around, because in his opinion the church-desecrator-turned-killer wasn’t the worst scourge of Santa Teresa.

According to the inspector, although he asked that this be off the record, the Penitent was sick. What kind of sickness does he have? whispered González, realizing as they spoke that Juan de Dios Martínez didn’t want his colleagues to hear. Sacraphobia, said the inspector. And what’s that? asked González. Fear and hatred of sacred objects, said the inspector. According to him, the Penitent didn’t desecrate churches with the premeditated intent to kill. The deaths were accidental. The Penitent just wanted to vent his rage on the images of the saints.

The violinist was taller than the accordionist and she was wearing a black blouse and black leggings. She had long straight hair down to her waist and sometimes she closed her eyes, especially when the accordionist sang and played. The saddest thing, thought Juan de Dios Martínez, was that the narco, or the suited back of the man he thought was a narco, was hardly paying any attention to them, busy as he was talking to a man with the face of a mongoose and a hooker with the face of a cat.

Or gynophobia, which is fear of women, and naturally afflicts only men. Very widespread in Mexico, although it manifests itself in different ways. Isn’t that a slight exaggeration? Not a bit: almost all Mexican men are afraid of women. I don’t know what to say to that, said Juan de Dios Martínez.

the worst phobias, in my opinion, are pantophobia, which is fear of everything, and phobophobia, fear of fear itself. If you had to suffer from one of the two, which would you choose? Phobophobia, said Juan de Dios Martínez. Think carefully, it has its drawbacks, said the director. Between being afraid of everything and being afraid of my own fear, I’d take the latter. Don’t forget I’m a policeman and if I was scared of everything I couldn’t work. But if you’re afraid of your own fears, you’re forced to live in constant contemplation of them, and if they materialize, what you have is a system that feeds on itself, a vicious cycle, said the director.

The boy sat beside him, in the back. Epifanio was at the wheel. When they had left the dirt streets of Villaviciosa behind and were driving through the desert, the police chief asked what his name was. Olegario Cura Expósito, said the boy. Olegario Cura Expósito, said Negrete, staring up at the stars, strange name.

Olegario Cura Expósito, he said. Yes, sir, said the boy. So what do your friends call you? Lalo, said the boy. Lalo? Yes, sir. Did you hear that, Epifanio? I heard, said Epifanio, still thinking about the coyote. Lalo Cura? asked the police chief. Yes, sir, said the boy. You’re kidding, right? No sir, that’s what my friends call me, said the boy. Did you hear that, Epifanio? asked the police chief. Sure, I heard, said Epifanio. His name is Lalo Cura, said the police chief, and he started to laugh. La locura, lunacy, get it? Of course I get it, said Epifanio, and he started to laugh too. Soon the three of them were laughing.

an arrest order was also issued by the proper American authorities, in case the suspect, his dream come true, had made it to the United States, although oddly enough no coyote or pollero who might have helped him cross over was questioned. To all intents and purposes, the case was closed.

A Salvadorean immigrant found the body behind the Francisco I School, on Madero, near Colonia Álamos. It was fully dressed, and the clothes, except for the shirt, which was missing several buttons, were intact. The Salvadorean was accused of the homicide and spent two weeks in the cells of Police Precinct #3, at the end of which he was released. When he got out he was a broken man. A little later he crossed the border with a pollero. In Arizona he got lost in the desert and after walking for three days, he made it to Patagonia, badly dehydrated, where a rancher beat him up for vomiting on his land. He was picked up by the sheriff and spent a day in jail and then he was sent to a hospital, where the only thing left for him to do was die in peace, which he did.

Before the ambulances came, more policemen arrived and several recognized the professional, who was lying dead on the sidewalk, as a state judicial police inspector.

More corruption

Shortly after they left the ranch they passed an enormous black stone. On the stone Lalo thought he saw a Gila monster, motionless, staring into the endless west. They say that stone is really a meteorite, said Pedro Negrete. In a gully, farther to the north, the Río Paredes curved, and from the road the tops of trees were visible like a green-black carpet with a cloud of dust hanging over them where Pedro Rengifo’s cattle came to drink each afternoon. But if it was a meteorite, said Pedro Negrete, it would’ve left a crater, and where’s the crater?

In the other cells policemen were raping the whores from La Riviera. How’s it rolling, Lalito? said Epifanio, going to get in on the action? No, said Lalo Cura, you? Me neither, said Epifanio. When they’d seen enough they went out for some fresh air. What did those whores do? asked Lalo. It looks like they bumped off another girl, said Epifanio. Lalo Cura was quiet. The early morning breeze along the streets of Santa Teresa really was fresh and cool. The scarred moon still shone in the sky.

The next day Penélope’s brother talked to some of her classmates. One said she thought Penélope had gotten into a car with tinted windows and hadn’t gotten out again. By the description it sounded like a Peregrino or a MasterRoad.

Black peregrino keeps making an appearance. Why do the girls get into the car? Who is this?

In the subsequent investigation, some friends said they had seen Mónica get into a black car with tinted windows, maybe a Peregrino or a MasterRoad or a Silencioso. It didn’t look as if she was taken by force. She had time to scream, but she didn’t scream. When she saw one of her friends, she even waved goodbye. She didn’t seem to be afraid.

Rebeca was dead. Then he asked her where she’d found the body and she said in the bathroom. Well, let’s put her back in the bathroom, you don’t want trouble with the cops, said the man, motioning to the boy to take the dead woman by the feet as he lifted her by the shoulders, returning her to the original scene of death. Then the medic asked her what position she had found her friend in: sitting on the toilet, propped against it, on the floor, huddled in a corner? She turned off the TV and came to the door of the bathroom and gave instructions until the two men had left Rebeca just as she’d found her.

The little house, despite what a person might expect, was always clean, but its cleanliness, its neatness, lacked any feminine touch: it was a stoic cleanliness, utterly graceless, like the cleanliness of a prison or monastery cell, a cleanliness that tended toward sparseness, not abundance.

I think nothing ever disappears, said the Mexican. There are people, and animals, too, and even objects, that for one reason or another sometimes seem to want to disappear, to vanish. Whether you believe it or not, Harry, sometimes a stone wants to vanish, I’ve seen it. But God won’t let it happen. He won’t let it happen because He can’t. Do you believe in God, Harry? Yes, Señor Demetrio, said Harry Magaña. Well, then, trust in God, He won’t let anything disappear.

Inspector Juan de Dios Martínez was surprised how well Elvira Campos could fuck and how inexhaustible she was in bed. She fucks like someone on the brink of death, he thought. More than once he would have liked to tell her it wasn’t necessary, she didn’t need to work so hard, that just feeling her nearby, brushing against him, was enough, but when it came to sex the director was practical and businesslike. Darling, Juan de Dios Martínez would say to her sometimes, sweetheart, love, and in the darkness she would tell him to be quiet and then suck every last drop from him—of semen? of his soul? of the little life he felt, at the time, remained to him?

She thought botanomancy, or the art of predicting the future through plants, was trickery. Still, she knew how it worked, and once she explained to a third-rate healer the different branches of the divinatory art of botanomancy, namely: floromancy, or the study of the shapes, movements, and reactions of plants, subdivided in turn into cromniomancy and fructomancy, the reading of sprouting onions or fruits, and also dendromancy, the interpretation of trees, and phyllomancy, the study of leaves, and xylomancy, or divination using wood and tree branches, which, she said, is lovely, poetic, but has more to do with laying the past to rest and nurturing and pacifying the present than with predicting the future. Then came cleromantic botanomancy, subdivided into favomancy, practiced with several white beans and a black bean, as well as the disciplines of rhabdomancy and belomancy, in which wooden rods were used. She had nothing against any of these arts and hence nothing to say about them. Then came plant pharmacology, or the use of hallucinogenic and alkaloid plants, which she had nothing against either. Everyone was free to mess with their own heads. It worked well for some people and not for others, especially lazy youths with regrettable habits. She’d rather not rule in favor or against. Then came meteorological botanomancy, which really was interesting but which very few people had mastered, no more than could be counted on the fingers of one hand, and which was based on obs...

Every hundred feet the world changes, said Florita Almada. The idea that some places are the same as others is a lie. The world is a kind of tremor.

The other room was even darker. But it didn’t smell of death. Strange, thought Harry. It smelled of life. Maybe life suspended, fleeting visits, cruel laughter, but life.