2666

by Roberto Bolaño

I spent a while looking out the window at the city’s dark buildings, the yards, and the streets, empty except for the occasional newlooking car. I paced the room. I noticed there were two mirrors. One at one end and the other by the door, and they didn’t reflect each other. But if you stood in a certain place, you could see one mirror in the other. What you couldn’t see was me. Strange, I said to myself, and for a while, as sleep began to overtake me, I made calculations and experimented with positions. That was where I was when five o’clock struck. The more I studied the mirrors, the more uneasy I felt.

Liz Norton’s mirror comes back

He recommended Luis Miguel Loya, who had worked for the federal attorney general. Why did he leave? I asked. Because he could make more in the private sector, said my friend. I couldn’t help thinking my friend hadn’t told me the whole story, because since when is private business incompatible with public employment in Mexico?

Loya’s report was ten pages long. His work had consisted of compiling a detailed account of Kelly’s professional activities. There were names, people from Mexico City, parties in Acapulco, Mazatlán, Oaxaca. According to Loya, most of Kelly’s jobs could simply be considered veiled prostitution. High-level prostitution. Her models were whores, the parties she organized were for men only, even her percentage of the take was that of a high-class madam.

Kelly had worked for this Conrado Padilla on three occasions, according to Loya. I asked who Conrado Padilla was. Loya shrugged his shoulders and said he was a man with lots of money, in other words somebody exposed to every kind of threat, every kind of unpleasantness. I asked Loya if he’d gone to Santa Teresa. No, he said. I asked if he’d sent someone there. No, he said. I told him to go to Santa Teresa, I wanted to see him there, at the heart of things, and he should keep investigating. For a while he seemed to consider my proposal, or rather search for the right words for what he had to say. Then he said he didn’t want to see me waste my money or my time. Do you mean you think Kelly is dead? I shouted. More or less, he said without losing his composure in the slightest. What do you mean, more or less? I shouted. For fuck’s sake, you’re either dead or you’re not! In Mexico a person can be more or less dead, he answered very seriously.

One night Mary-Sue Bravo dreamed that a woman was sitting at the foot of her bed. She felt the weight of a body on the mattress, but when she stretched her legs she didn’t touch anything. That night, before she went to bed, she had read a few online news stories about the Uribes. In one of them, by a reporter from a well-known Mexico City daily, it said that Antonio Uribe really had disappeared. His cousin Daniel Uribe was in Tucson, it seemed. The reporter had talked to him on the phone. According to Daniel Uribe, all the information provided by Haas was a pack of lies, easily disproved.

the police had found the body of a man (whose clothing and physical description matched those of Esther’s killer) on the old Pemex sports fields, with a Smith & Wesson just like the one Esther’s killer had been carrying and a bullet in his right temple. His name was Francisco López Ríos and he had a long record of auto theft. But he wasn’t a natural killer and shooting someone, even if it was accidental, must have upset him considerably. The man committed suicide, said Ortiz Rebolledo. Case closed. Later Lalo Cura would comment to Epifanio that it was strange there hadn’t been a lineup to identify the body. And it was strange, too, that the killer’s companions hadn’t come forward.

Evil is its own precious commodity/protected entity

I had time to craft an image that little by little began filtering into the media: of a woman sensitive to violence, a woman who represented change in the heart of the party, not just generational change but a change in attitude, with a view of Mexican reality that was open-minded, not dogmatic. Really, I was just burning with rage at Kelly’s disappearance, at the macabre joke made at her expense. I cared less and less about the opinion of what we call the public, my constituents, whom I didn’t truly see or if I did see, accidentally or sporadically, I despised.

As I learned about other cases, however, as I heard other voices, my rage began to assume what you might call mass stature, my rage became collective or the expression of something collective, my rage, when it allowed itself to show, saw itself as the instrument of vengeance of thousands of victims. Honestly, I think I was losing my mind. Those voices I heard (voices, never faces or shapes) came from the desert. In the desert, I roamed with a knife in my hand. My face was reflected in the blade. I had white hair and sunken cheeks covered with tiny scars. Each scar was a little story that I tried and failed to recall. I ended up taking pills for my nerves.

In the north they call them narcorranchos, because lots of drug traffickers own similar estates, less like ranches than garrisons in the middle of the desert, some even with watchtowers where they post their best marksmen. Sometimes these narcorranchos sit empty for long stretches of time. One employee might be left there, without keys to the main house, with orders to do little, to wander the barren, stony grounds, to watch so that packs of wild dogs don’t take up residence. All these poor men are given is a cell phone and some vague instructions that they gradually forget. According to Loya, it isn’t unusual for one of them to die with no one the wiser, or simply to disappear, drawn by the simurgh, the mythical giant flying creature of the desert.

Then, all at once, the narcorrancho stirs to life. First to arrive are some of the peons, say three or four, in a Combi, and they spend a day getting the big house ready. Then come the bodyguards, the muscle, in their black Suburbans or Spirits or Peregrinos, and the first thing they do when they show up, besides strut around, is set a security perimeter. Finally the boss and his right-hand men make their appearance. Armored Mercedes-Benzes or Porsches snaking through the desert. At night the lights never go out. You see all kinds of cars, even Lincoln Continentals and vintage Cadillacs, ferrying people to and from the ranch. Trackers loaded with meat, baked goods in Chevy Astras. And music and shouting all night long.

These were the parties, as Loya told me, that Kelly would help to plan on her trips north. According to Loya, at first Kelly took along models who wanted to make good money fast. The girl who lived in San Diego had told him there were never more than three. At the parties there were other women, women Kelly in theory didn’t know, young girls, younger than the mode...

Sometimes, in a bedroom, the guests would watch porn, the model had walked in once by mistake and she saw the familiar sight, stony-faced men, their profiles lit by the glow of the screen. It’s always that way. I mean: stony-faced, as if watching a film where people fuck turns the viewers into statues. But no one, according to the model, ever shot a film like that at the narcorranchos. Sometimes, a few guests would sing rancheras and corridos. Sometimes, those same guests would go out into the courtyard and parade around the ranch, singing at the top of their lungs. And once they went out naked, maybe one or two covered their private parts, wore a thong or leopard- or tiger-print briefs, braving the cold, which was intense at four in the morning, singing and laughing, from one caper to the next, like Satan’s helpers.

Kelly stopped relying on the models and didn’t call them anymore. According to Loya, the decision was probably Kelly’s, because the models’ rates were high and the little whores of Santa Teresa didn’t charge much and Kelly’s finances weren’t in very good shape. She made her first trips for Salazar Crespo, but through him she met important people in the area and it was possible that she had also organized parties for Sigfrido Catalán, who owned a fleet of garbage trucks and was said to have an exclusive contract with most of the maquiladoras in Santa Teresa, and for Conrado Padilla, a businessman with interests in Sonora, Sinaloa, and Jalisco. Salazar Crespo, Sigfrido Catalán, and Padilla, according to Loya, all had connections to the Santa Teresa cartel, which meant Estanislao Campuzano, who occasionally, though not often, in truth, had attended these parties.

Whatever the case, there were plenty of narcos at Kelly’s orgies, especially two of them, considered Campuzano’s lieutenants, one by the name of Muñoz Otero, Sergio Muñoz Otero, the boss of the Nogales narcos, and Fabio Izquierdo, who for a while was the boss of the Hermosillo narcos and later worked creating routes for the transport of drugs from Sinaloa to Santa Teresa or from Oaxaca or Michoacán or even Tamaulipas, which was the territory of the Ciudad Juárez cartel.

So there was Kelly, without models, working with girls of humble origin or simply with whores, at narcorranchos in the middle of nowhere, and at her parties we have a banker, Salazar Crespo, a businessman, Catalán, a millionaire, Padilla, and, if not Campuzano, at least two of his most notorious men, Fabio Izquierdo and Muñoz Otero, as well as other personages from the worlds of society, crime, and politics. A collection of worthies. And one morning or night my friend vanishes into thin air.

There was no news about Josué Hernández Mercado, the vanished reporter from La Raza. One night Mary-Sue searched through her file on the Haas case until she came up with the story Hernández Mercado had written after the poorly attended press conference at the Santa Teresa penitentiary. Hernández Mercado’s style wavered between sensationalism and flatness. The story was riddled with clichés, inaccuracies, sweeping statements, exaggerations, and flagrant lies. Sometimes Hernández Mercado painted Haas as the scapegoat of a conspiracy of rich Sonorans and sometimes Haas appeared as an avenging angel or a detective locked in a cell but by no means defeated, gradually cornering his tormentors solely by dint of intelligence.

I want you to write about this, keep writing about this. I’ve read your articles. They’re good, but too often you pull your punches. I want you to strike hard, strike human flesh, unassailable flesh, not shadows. I want you to go to Santa Teresa and sniff around. I want you to sink in your teeth. At first I didn’t know much about Santa Teresa. I had some general ideas, like anybody, but I think it was after my fourth visit that I began to understand the city and the desert. Now I can’t get them out of my head. I know everybody’s names, or almost everybody’s. I know of some illicit activities. But I can’t go to the Mexican police. At the attorney general’s office they would think I was crazy. And I can’t hand over my information to the gringo police. Out of patriotism, ultimately, because no matter whom it disturbs (myself first of all), I’m a Mexican. And also a Mexican congresswoman. We’ll fight it out among ourselves, as always, or we’ll go down together.

books aren’t censored or read here, but the press is another story. Newspapers are read. At least the headlines.

He was a strange man. I visited him only once, he lived alone in an apartment in Colonia Nápoles. From the outside it was an ordinary middle-class place, but inside it was something else, I don’t know how to describe it, like a mirror image of Loya or a self-portrait, but an unfinished self-portrait.

The Christmas holidays in Santa Teresa were celebrated in the usual fashion. There were posadas, piñatas were smashed, tequila and beer were drunk. Even on the poorest streets people could be heard laughing. Some of these streets were completely dark, like black holes, and the laughter that came from who knows where was the only sign, the only beacon that kept residents and strangers from getting lost.

Smoke came out of the mummy’s ears, his throat, his forehead, his eyes, which remained fixed on the man with one leg, until the man plucked the cigarette from the mummy’s lips and blew, and kept blowing for a while on the mummy’s bandaged head until the smoke had disappeared. Then he stubbed the cigarette out on the floor and fell asleep. When he woke, the mummy was no longer there. Where’s the mummy? he asked. He died this morning, said someone from a different bed.

According to the sergeant, everything was about to change. The war was coming to an end and a new era was about to begin. He answered, as he ate, that nothing would ever change. Not even the two of them had changed, and each had lost a leg.

When the girl saw him standing at the door to her house, she recognized him instantly. The one-legged man saw her too, looking out the window, and he raised a hand in a formal salute, even a stiff salute, though it could also have been interpreted as a way of saying such is life. From that moment on he told whoever would listen that in his town everyone was blind and the one-eyed girl was a queen.

In 1920 Hans Reiter was born. He seemed less like a child than like a strand of seaweed. Canetti, and Borges, too, I think—two very different men—said that just as the sea was the symbol or mirror of the English, the forest was the metaphor the Germans inhabited. Hans Reiter defied this rule from the moment he was born. He didn’t like the earth, much less forests. He didn’t like the sea either, or what ordinary mortals call the sea, which is really only the surface of the sea, waves kicked up by the wind that have gradually become the metaphor for defeat and madness. What he liked was the seabed, that other earth, with its plains that weren’t plains and valleys that weren’t valleys and cliffs that weren’t cliffs.

When his one-eyed mother bathed him in a washtub, the child Hans Reiter always slipped from her soapy hands and sank to the bottom, with his eyes open, and if her hands hadn’t lifted him back up to the surface he would have stayed there, contemplating the black wood and the black water where little particles of his own filth floated, tiny bits of skin that traveled like submarines toward an inlet the size of an eye, a calm, dark cove, although there was no calm, and all that existed was movement, which is the mask of many things, calm among them.

At three Hans Reiter was taller than all the other three-year-olds in his town. He was also taller than any four-year-old, and not all the five-year-olds were taller than he was. At first he was unsteady on his feet and the town doctor said it was because of his height and advised that he be given more milk to strengthen his bones. But the doctor was wrong. Hans Reiter was unsteady on his feet because he moved across the surface of the earth like a novice diver along the seafloor. He actually lived and ate and slept and played at the bottom of the sea. Milk wasn’t a problem. His mother kept three cows and hens and the boy was given plenty to eat.

Before Hans Reiter’s father went off to war, he was five foot five. When he came back, perhaps because he was missing a leg, he was only five foot four. A regiment of giants is madness, he thought.

Laminaria digitata is native to cold waters like the Baltic, the North Sea, and the Atlantic. It’s found in large masses, at low tide, and off rocky shores. The tide often uncovers forests of this seaweed. When Hans Reiter saw a seaweed forest for the first time he was so moved that he began to cry underwater. It may be hard to believe that a human being could cry while diving with his eyes open, but let us not forget that Hans was only six at the time and in a sense he was a singular child.

“The Welsh are swine,” said the one-legged man in reply to a question from his son. “Absolute swine. The English are swine, too, but not as bad as the Welsh. Though really they’re the same, but they make an effort not to seem it, and since they know how to pretend, they succeed. The Scots are bigger swine than the English and only a little better than the Welsh. The French are as bad as the Scots. The Italians are little swine. Little swine ready and willing to gobble up their own swine mother. The same can be said of the Austrians: swine, swine, swine. Never trust a Hungarian. Never trust a Bohemian. They’ll lick your hand while they devour your little finger. Never trust a Jew: he’ll eat your thumb and leave your hand covered in slobber.

The Bavarians are also swine. When you talk to a Bavarian, son, make sure you keep your belt fastened tight. Better not to talk to Rhinelanders at all: before the cock crows they’ll try to saw off your leg. The Poles look like chickens, but pluck four feathers and you’ll see they’ve got the skin of swine. Same with the Russians. They look like starving dogs but they’re really starving swine, swine that’ll eat anyone, without a second thought, without the slightest remorse. The Serbs are the same as the Russians, but miniature. They’re like swine disguised as Chihuahuas. Chihuahuas are tiny dogs, the size of a sparrow, that live in the north of Mexico and are seen in some American movies.

Americans are swine, of course. And Canadians are big ruthless swine, although the worst swine from Canada are the French-Canadians, just as the worst swine from America are the Irish-American swine. The Turks are no better. They’re sodomite swine, like the Saxons and the Westphalians. All I can say about the Greeks is that they’re the same as the Turks: bald, sodomitic swine. The only people who...

Where are the Prussians, then? I climb up on the rocks and search for them on the gray horizon. A churning gray like pus. And I don’t mean once a year. Once a month! Every two weeks! But I never see them, I can never guess what point on the horizon they set sail to. 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.

And farther on was the Town of Chattering Girls, girls who went to parties and dances in even bigger towns whose names the young Hans Reiter heard and immediately forgot, girls who smoked in the streets and talked about sailors at a big port who served on this or that ship, the names of which the young Hans Reiter immediately forgot, girls who went to the movies and saw the most thrilling films, with actors who were the handsomest men on the planet and actresses who, if one wanted to be fashionable, one had to imitate, and whose names the young Hans Reiter immediately forgot. When he got home, like a night diver, his mother asked him where he’d spent the day and the young Hans Reiter told her the first thing that came to mind, anything but the truth.

If one was on anything like intimate terms with Vogel, his presence soon became unbearable. He believed in the intrinsic goodness of humankind, he claimed that a person who was pure of heart could walk from Moscow to Madrid without being accosted by anyone, whether beast or police officer, to say nothing of a customs official, because the traveler would take the necessary precautions, among them leaving the road from time to time and striking off across country.

Sometimes he talked, not caring who might be listening, about the healing properties of masturbation (he cited Kant as an example), to be practiced from the earliest years to the most advanced age, which mostly tended to provoke laughter in the girls from the Town of Chattering Girls who happened to hear him, and which exceedingly bored and disgusted his acquaintances in Berlin, who were already overfamiliar with this theory and who thought that Vogel, in explaining it with such stubborn zeal, was really masturbating in front of them or using them as masturbation aids.

One further thing must be noted, which is that Vogel’s blunder (mistaking a boy with brown skin and blond hair for a tangle of seaweed) tormented him that night, after it was all over. In bed, in the dark, Vogel relived the day’s occurrences just as he always did, that is, with great satisfaction, until suddenly he saw the drowning boy again and himself watching, not sure whether it was a human being or seaweed. Sleep deserted him. How could he have mistaken a boy for seaweed? he asked himself. And then: in what sense can a boy resemble seaweed? And then: can a boy and seaweed have anything in common?

Vogel thought that possibly his doctor in Berlin was right and he was going mad, or perhaps not mad in the usual sense, but he was approaching the path of madness, so to speak, because a boy, he thought, has nothing in common with seaweed, and an observer from the rocks who mistakes a boy for seaweed is a person with a half-loosened screw, not a madman, exactly, with a screw altogether loose, but a man whose screw is loosening, and who, as a result, must tread more carefully in all matters regarding his mental health.

“Nut,” repeated the boy. And Vogel understood that nut meant: nothing, nothing happened. And so it was with the rest of his vocabulary, which struck Vogel as highly picturesque and amusing, so he began to ask all kinds of pointless questions, just for the pleasure of listening to the boy, who answered everything in the most natural manner, for example, what do you call this wood, Vogel asked, and the boy answered Stavs, which meant Gustav’s wood, and: what’s the name of that wood over there, and the boy answered Retas, which meant Greta’s wood, and: what’s the name of that dark wood, to the right of Greta’s wood, and the boy answered annaname, which meant the wood that has no name, until they got to the top of the rocks where Vogel had left his jacket with the important papers in the pocket, and at the urging of Vogel, who wouldn’t let him get back in the water, the boy retrieved his clothes from a cave a little farther down the shore, a kind of resting place for gulls, and then they said goodbye, not without first introducing themselves: “My name is Heinz Vogel,” Vogel said as if he were addressing an idiot, “what is your name?” The boy told him it was Hans Reiter, pronouncing the name clearly, and then they shook hands and each went his separate way.

it was shining lichens, lichens that shone only once a month, as if in a single night they gave off all the light it had taken them thirty days to build up. Another said it was a kind of anemone particular to that coast, and the female anemones lit up to attract the male anemones, although everywhere else in the world anemones were hermaphrodites, neither male nor female, but male and female in a single body, as if the mind lapsed into sleep and when it woke, a part of the anemone had fucked the other part, as if inside each of us there were a woman and a man, or a faggot and a man in the cases where the anemone was sterile.

When Hans Reiter was ten, his one-eyed mother and one-legged father had their second child. It was a girl and they called her Lotte. She was a beautiful child and she might have been the first person on the surface of the earth who interested (or moved) Hans Reiter.

As far as Hans was concerned, his sister was the best thing that had ever happened to him, and many times he tried to draw her in the same notebook where he’d drawn different kinds of seaweed, but the results were always unsatisfactory: sometimes the baby looked like a bag of rubbish left on a pebbly beach, other times like Petrobius maritimus, a marine insect that lives in crevices and rocks and feeds on scraps, or Lipura maritima, another insect, very small and dark slate or gray, its habitat the puddles among rocks.

In time, by stretching his imagination or his tastes or his own artistic nature, he managed to draw her as a little mermaid, more fish than girl, closer to fat than thin, but always smiling, always with an enviable tendency to smile and see the positive side of things, which was a faithful reflection of his sister’s character.

he didn’t like it there, and he dawdled on his way, finding the path neither flat nor flat with hills nor flat with switchbacks, but vertical, a prolonged fall toward the bottom of the sea where everything, trees, grass, swamps, animals, fences, was transformed into marine insects or crustaceans, into suspended and remote forms of life, into starfish and sea spiders, whose bodies, the young Reiter knew, were so tiny that the animal’s stomach didn’t fit inside and extended into its legs, which were themselves enormous and mysterious, or in other words contained an enigma (or at least for him they did), because the sea spider has eight legs, four on each side, plus another pair, much smaller, in fact infinitely smaller and useless, at the end nearest its head, and those legs or tiny appendages struck Reiter not as legs but as hands, as if the sea spider, over a long process of evolution, had finally developed two arms and therefore two hands but didn’t know yet that it had them. How long would the sea spider be unaware that it had hands?

in a vain effort to find common ground he told the one-legged man that he had been a pilot during the war and shot down twelve French planes and eight English planes and he knew very well the suffering one experienced at the front, to which the one-legged man replied that his worst suffering hadn’t come at the front but at the cursed military hospital near Düren, where his comrades stole not only cigarettes but whatever they could lay their hands on, they even stole men’s souls to sell, since there were a disproportionate number of satanists in German military hospitals, which, after all, said the one-legged man, was understandable, because a long stay in a military hospital drove people to become satanists, a claim that exasperated the selfavowed aviator, who had also spent three weeks in a military hospital,

suddenly both of them, the former pilot who put on lordly airs and the old soldier, witnessed the arrival of young Hans Reiter, who, without a word, lifted his sister from her cot and carried her into the yard. “And who is that?” asked the former pilot. “My son,” said the one-legged man. “He looks like a giraffe fish,” said the former pilot, and he laughed.

there was also dusting to be done of the books in the huge library, books the baron hardly ever read, old tomes his father had tended and that had been handed down by the baron’s grandfather, seemingly the only member of that vast family who read books and who had inculcated the love of books in his descendants, a love that translated not into reading but into the preservation of the library, which was exactly as the baron’s grandfather had left it, no bigger and no smaller.

With the arrival of his cousin, the baron’s nephew, already timid, was thrown into a state of such stiffness and awkwardness that the servants, when they discussed the day’s events, were unanimous in their verdict: he loved her or desired her or yearned for her or was pining away for her, opinions that the young Hans Reiter listened to, sitting cross-legged and eating bread and butter, without saying a word or adding any commentary of his own, although the truth is he knew the baron’s nephew, whose name was Hugo Halder, much better than the other servants, who seemed blind to reality and saw only what they wanted to see, which was a young orphan in love and distress and a young orphan girl (although the baron’s daughter had a father and mother, as everyone well knew), headstrong and awaiting a vague, dense redemption.

A redemption that smelled of peat smoke, of cabbage soup, of the wind tangled in the forest undergrowth. A redemption that smelled of mirror, thought young Reiter, nearly choking on his bread.

Sometimes, when Halder was in the library reading or pretending to read his history books, he sent for Reiter, with whom he held longer and longer conversations. At first he asked about the other servants. He wanted to know what they thought of him, whether they were inconvenienced by his presence, whether they minded having him, whether anyone bore him a grudge. Next came the monologues. Halder talked about his life, his dead mother, his uncle the baron, his only cousin (that unattainable and headstrong girl), about the temptations of Berlin, a city he loved but that also caused him untold suffering, at times unbearably fierce, about the state of his nerves, always near the breaking point.

Hans said he didn’t know anything about his father. “True,” said Halder, “one never knows anything about one’s father.” A father, he said, is a passageway immersed in the deepest darkness, where we stumble blindly seeking a way out. Still, he insisted that the boy at least tell him what his father looked like, but the young Hans Reiter replied that he sincerely didn’t know. At this point Halder wanted to know whether he lived with his father or not. I’ve always lived with him, answered Hans Reiter. “So what does he look like? Can’t you describe him?” “I can’t because I don’t know,” answered Hans Reiter.