2666

by Roberto Bolaño

Benno von Archimboldi

It didn’t take him long, for example, to discover that the group of Jüngerians wasn’t as Jüngerian as he had thought, being instead, like all literary groups, in thrall to the changing seasons.

Pelletier’s words (spoken as if from inside an old castle or a dungeon dug under the moat of an old castle) sounded like a threat

Napoleon at Jena,

Bombastus von Hohenheim,

and the four of them laughed at the little animals of Bremen, which watched them or watched their shadows on the pavement while mounted harmoniously, innocently, on each other’s backs.

Such a German scene

frugal and exquisite dinner,

in short, a generally soporific or at best listless phone conversation, but

Il Manifesto,

Then they went back to talking about Archimboldi and Mrs. Bubis showed them a very odd review that had appeared in a Berlin newspaper after the publication of Lüdicke,

“How is he?” asked Espinoza. “Fine,” said Norton. “I told him about us.” Espinoza got nervous and concentrated on the road. “So what did he think?” he asked. “That it’s my business,” said Norton, “but sooner or later I’ll have to choose.” Though he made no comment, Espinoza admired Pelletier’s attitude. There’s a man who knows how to play fair, he thought.

“Leave it all in the hands of fate,” answered Pelletier.

Archimboldians (united this time), who, rather than being disheartened by the poor treatment that Archimboldi continued to receive, redoubled their efforts, galvanized in their frustration and spurred on by the injustice with which a civilized state was treating not only—in their opinion—the best living writer in Germany, but the best living writer in Europe, and this triggered an avalanche of literary and even biographical studies of Archimboldi

University Lit Politics

Dieter Hellfeld, the latest acquisition of the Schwarz, Borchmeyer, and Pohl group),

this, the lady laughed. She had once been very beautiful, said the Swabian. Even then, in the dim light of the tavern, she looked beautiful, although when she laughed her false teeth slipped and she had to adjust them with her hand.

they were civilized beings,

Living in their heads not their bodies, not their hearts.

no, that night Pelletier and Espinoza discovered that they were generous, so generous that if they’d been together they’d have felt the need to go out and celebrate, dazzled by the shine of their own virtue, a shine that might not last (since virtue, once recognized in a flash, has no shine and makes its home in a dark cave amid cave dwellers, some dangerous indeed), and for lack of celebration or revelry they hailed this virtue with an unspoken promise of eternal friendship, and sealed the vow, after they hung up their respective phones in their respective apartments crammed with books, by sipping whiskey with supreme slowness and watching the night outside their windows, maybe seeking unconsciously what the Swabian had sought outside the widow’s window in vain.

Morini was the first of the four to read an article about the killings in Sonora,

express her thoughts as precisely as possible and that was why she’d decided to write.

Il libro di cucina di Juana Inés de la Cruz,

By the time he got to dolce di mamey, the stranger seemed to have fallen asleep and Morini left the Italian Gardens.

that he didn’t set off, like any of the thousands of old men, German bachelors, who each day cross the skies alone heading for any of the countries of North Africa.

? Like Australian to Philippines

Old and alone, thought Pelletier. Just one of thousands of old men on their own.

I don’t know why I’m thinking this, thought Pelletier. Spots on the wall and spots on the skin, thought Pelletier, looking at his hands. Fuck the Serb.

Aging? Old men aging?

There had to be research, literary criticism, interpretive essays, even informational pamphlets if required, but not this hybrid between science fiction and half-finished roman noir, said Espinoza, and Pelletier was in complete agreement.

misanthropic

He saw a man with a beard dressed in cheap clothes. He saw a group of blacks walking along a dirt track. He saw two men in suits and ties talking slowly and deliberately, both with their legs crossed, both glancing every so often at a map that appeared and disappeared behind their backs. He saw a chubby woman saying: daughter … factory … meeting … doctors … inevitable, and then smiling a little and lowering her gaze. He saw the face of a Belgian minister. He saw the smoldering remains of a plane next to a runway, surrounded by ambulances and fire trucks. He shouted for Norton. She was still talking on the phone.

Bob Dylan song

From the sidewalk, after they paid the driver, they looked up at the lighted windows. Then, as the cab drove off, they saw Liz’s silhouette, the beloved silhouette, and then, as if a breath of foul air had wafted into a commercial for sanitary pads, the silhouette of a man that made them freeze, Espinoza with a bouquet of flowers in his hand, Pelletier with a Jacob Epstein book wrapped in the finest paper.

said he thought German literature was a scam. Norton laughed, as if someone had told a joke. Pelletier asked him what he, Pritchard, knew about German literature. “Not much, really,” he said. “Then you’re a cretin,” said Espinoza. “Or an ignoramus, at least,” said Pelletier. “In any case, a badulaque,” said Espinoza. Espinoza had said badulaque in Spanish, and Pritchard didn’t know what it meant. Norton didn’t understand it either and wanted to know what it was. “A badulaque,” said Espinoza, “is someone of no consequence. It’s a word that can also be applied to fools, but there are fools of consequence, and badulaque applies only to fools of no consequence.”

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

It hadn’t been Pelletier’s or Espinoza’s idea to visit such a place. It was Morini’s idea, because Morini had somehow learned that a man he considered to be one of the most disturbing painters of the twentieth century was living there. Or not. Maybe Morini hadn’t said that. Either way, the name of this painter was Edwin Johns and he had cut off his right hand, the hand he painted with, then had it embalmed, and attached it to a kind of multiple self-portrait.

Then, at Norton’s pleading, Espinoza had to resume his tale. But he didn’t want to. “You tell it,” he said to Pelletier, “you were there, too.” Pelletier’s story then began with the three Archimboldians contemplating the iron gate that rose in welcome to the Auguste Demarre lunatic asylum,

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.

An ASYLUM gave this impression ?

In Norton’s room there were two mirrors instead of one. The first mirror was by the door, as it was in the other rooms. The second was on the opposite wall, next to the window overlooking the street, hung in such a way that if one stood in a certain spot, the two mirrors reflected each other.

the bird in Azuela’s Mangy Parrot, gutted and plucked to the last feather.

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.

Surreal state: intellectuals and academics in Mexico

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.

Then Espinoza remembered that the night before, one of the boys had told them the story of the women who were being killed.

She said it was Rebeca, and Espinoza smiled, because the name, he thought, suited her perfectly. He stood there for three hours, talking to Rebeca,

couldn’t focus clearly or precisely on any single memory, but when I finally could it was worse, I saw myself saying Jimmy, I saw my smile, Jimmy Crawford’s serious face, the flock of children,

She is having a crisis. They all are.

But in England at least, women who live on the streets are often subjected to terrible humiliations, I just read an article about it in some magazine or other. In England these street women are gang-raped, beaten, and it isn’t unusual for them to be found dead outside hospitals.

Parallel: Mexico & UK

portrait.

Loop. Edwin Johns. Sensless violence

Amalfitano explained that it had been a long time since he swam.

Then I saw the poster for the show, across the room from where I was standing, a poster that showed the painting with the severed hand, Johns’s masterpiece, and in white numerals gave his dates of birth and death.

As they drank Cuba libres, Rebeca told him that two of the girls who later showed up dead had been kidnapped on their way out of the club. Their bodies were dumped in the desert.

resurgence of fascism in Europe,

That night he brought Rebeca to the hotel and after they had showered together he dressed her in a thong and garters and black tights and a black teddy and black spike-heeled shoes and fucked her until she was no more than a tremor in his arms.

He spotted her, he groomed her, he used his economic advantage, he groomed the family, he dressed her up and fucked her like a whore. Is this a type of fascism? Is it like the murder of the girls no one talks about?

“The strangest part of the dream,” said Pelletier, “was that the water was alive.” •

The prevalence of dreams.

The first few hours of my first night in Turin, said Norton in her letter,

Keep coming back to Noton's letter

“How could it have taken me so long to realize I loved you?” “It’s my fault,” said Morini in the dark, “I’m hopeless at these things.”