2666

by Roberto Bolaño

A few times he tried to say something, but he couldn’t. Her silence wasn’t unpleasant, nor did it imply resentment or sadness. It was transparent, not dense. It took up almost no space. A person could even get used to silence like this, thought Espinoza, and be happy. But he would never get used to it, he knew that too.

“I’m sure Archimboldi is here, in Santa Teresa.”

I’m sure he is investigating the deaths of the 200 women

don’t know how long we’ll last together, said Norton in her letter. It doesn’t matter to me or to Morini either (I think). We love each other and we’re happy. I know the two of you will understand.

And now, coming back to the letter. Norton is a woman, Rebeca is a woman, and it’s women that are being murdered. Although Archimboldi is the subject matter, Just as the letter ties the plot together, so does Norton tie these are men together. Archimboldi must be poking around the murders

Another time he found her sitting on a seafront bench at La Concha, at an hour when the only people out walking were two opposite types: those running out of time and those with time to burn.

and just one, discreetly located, converted into an improvised morgue for the bodies of those whose strength hadn’t been equal to the accelerated wear and tear of the train trip.

So, thought Amalfitano, his face running with sweat to which microscopic particles of dust adhered, Dieste’s passion for geometry wasn’t something new. And his patrons, in this new light, were no longer friends who got together every night at the club to drink and talk politics or football or mistresses. Instead, in a flash, they became distinguished university colleagues, some doubtless retired but others fully active, and all well-to-do or relatively well-to-do,

Then he went into the hut as if he were short of oxygen, and from a plastic bag with the logo of the supermarket where he went with his daughter to do the weekly shopping, he took out three clothespins, which he persisted in calling perritos, as they were called in Chile, and with them he clamped the book and hung it from one of the cords and then he went back into the house, feeling much calmer.

The book hanging from the line in Part 1

As Calvin Tomkins writes: As a wedding present for his sister Suzanne and his close friend Jean Crotti, who were married in Paris on April 14, 1919, Duchamp instructed the couple by letter to hang a geometry book by strings on the balcony of their apartment so that the wind could “go through the book, choose its own problems, turn and tear out the pages.”

The next day, searching in the university library, he found more information on Dieste.

In Search o Lost Authors

Amalfitano came in sooner than usual or put off going into the backyard, he would say goodbye, remind her to take care of herself, or give her a kiss.

strong wind from the west hurled itself against the slope of the mountains to the east, raising dust and a litter of newspaper and cardboard on its way through Santa Teresa,

until they breathed their last. • That

Proof number 2,

There are 17? Wearily.

The Metamorphosis, Bartleby,

Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers.

Quincy Williams

Switch

Rosa Amalfitano.

Sometimes he thought about his mother’s apartment and he remembered concrete courtyards where children shouted and played. If he closed his eyes he could see a white dress lifted by the wind on the streets of Harlem as invincible laughter spilled down the walls, running along the sidewalks, cool and warm as the white dress. He felt sleep trickling in his ears or rising from his chest. But he didn’t want to close his eyes and instead he kept scanning the lot, the two streetlights in front of the motel, the shadows dispersed by the flashes of car lights like comet tails in the dark.

For a moment the two of them looked at each other, wordless, as if they were asleep and their dreams had converged on common ground, a place where sound was alien.

He added milk and sugar to his coffee and asked his daughter to explain everything.

said Rosa Amalfitano as they crossed the border into the United States.

They saw a Mexican flag flying in the desert, on the other side of the fence. One of the border police on the American side scrutinized Fate and Rosa. He wondered what a white girl, and a pretty white girl at that, was doing with a black man. Fate held his gaze. Reporter? asked the officer. Fate nodded. A big fish, thought the officer. Every night he must knock her around. Spanish? Rosa smiled at the officer. A shadow of frustration crossed the officer’s face. When they pulled away the flag disappeared and all they could see was the fence and warehouses surrounded by walls. “The problem is bad luck,” said Rosa. Fate didn’t hear her.

Definitely in the US

As they were waiting in a windowless room,

Prior to the above, at the prison

Santa Teresa police chief, Pedro Negrete,

stabbed the sexton. • The case was entrusted to Inspector Juan de Dios Martínez,

The penitent first incident

At five, after eating lunch at a coffee shop where cops never went, Juan de Dios Martínez parked his metallic gray Cougar in the asylum parking lot. He was received by the director, a woman of about fifty, with her hair dyed blond, who had coffee brought in for him.

That night the stranger from San Rafael found his way to the church of San Tadeo, in Colonia Kino,

Second incident

From the drawer of the night table he took his gun and the sketch, which he had folded in four, and went down the steps to the garage where his red Chevy Astra was parked.

Two days later, the stranger got into the church of Santa Catalina, in Colonia Lomas del Toro, late

Third incident

Three days after the desecration of the church of Santa Catalina, in the early morning hours, the Penitent slipped into the church of Nuestro Señor Jesucristo, in Colonia Reforma,

Fourth incident

This time the Penitent went berserk, said Inspector José Márquez as he knelt to look at the bodies of Father Carrasco and the caretaker. Juan de Dios Martínez examined the window the Penitent had come in through and then he went outside and spent a while walking along Calle Soler and then Calle Ortiz Rubio and through a plaza the residents used as free parking at night. When he got back to the church, Pedro Negrete and Epifanio were there, and as soon as he came in the police chief motioned for him to join them.

The main suspect in the killing of Emilia Mena Mena was her boyfriend.

The next morning, Sergio González took the bus to Hermosillo and then, after a four-hour wait, flew back to Mexico City. Two days later he filed his story on the Penitent with the Sunday magazine editor and promptly forgot the whole business.

There are odder things than sacraphobia,

The start of the section on phobias

Pedro Negrete

Police chief of Saint Teresa

old friend

Pedro Re...

Friend of Santa Theresa police chief

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. • That night the Santa Teresa police chief slept soundly. He dreamed about his twin brother. They were fifteen and they were poor and they had gone out to roam the scrub hills where many years later Colonia Lindavista would rise. They crossed a gully where boys sometimes went in the rainy season to hunt toads, which were poisonous and had to be killed with stones, although he and his brother were interested in lizards, not toads. At dusk they returned to Santa Teresa, children scattering through the countryside like defeated soldiers.

Pedro Rengifo’s

He said his job would be to watch out for Mrs. Rengifo, the boss’s wife, and he would be working with the two men he’d just met.

According to the medical examiner’s report, she had been vaginally and anally raped and then strangled. She wasn’t carrying any identification. The case was assigned to Inspector Ernesto Ortiz Rebolledo,

Second policeman assigned to the murders

In the same month, two weeks after the discovery of the dead woman in the Buenavista subdivision, another body turned up. The victim was Gabriela Morón, eighteen, shot by her boyfriend, Feliciano José Sandoval,

Subsequent questioning at Hipermercado Del Norte yielded the following results: none of the cashiers or saleswomen had gone missing recently; Elsa Luz Pintado had been on the payroll, yes, but it had been a year and a half since she lent her services to that branch or any other branch of the superstore chain

The officer in charge of the case was Inspector Ángel Fernández.

The cause of death was multiple stab wounds, more than sixty as counted by the medical examiner, delivered by her son, Ernesto Luis Castillo Jiménez, with whom she lived. The boy, according to the testimony of some of the neighbors,

Teach her what? asked the policemen, among whom were Pedro Negrete, Epifanio Galindo, Ángel Fernández, Juan de Dios Martínez, and José Márquez. To take him seriously. Then he lapsed into incoherence and was transferred to

Lalo thought about his boss’s wife’s outfit just as the other two bodyguards took off down the street.

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.

While they were waiting, Pedro Negrete asked about Pedro Rengifo’s wife and children. About the livestock. About Pedro Rengifo’s grocery businesses in Santa Teresa and other northern cities. The wife spends all her time in Cuernavaca, said Pedro Rengifo, and we sent the children away to the United States for school (he was careful not to say where), the livestock is more a worry than a business, and the superstores have their ups and downs.

One of the murdered girls worked at the super store

The first dead woman of 1994 was found by some

The first killings were in 1993