The Secret of Evil

by Roberto Bolaño

  In the dream I understood that when Lautaro peed in the pool, he was dreaming too, and I understood that although I would never be able to approach his dream, I would always be there beside him. And when I woke up I remembered that one night, when I was a boy, I got out of bed and urinated abundantly in my sister’s closet. But I was a sleepwalker, and Lautaro, fortunately, is not.

  During that trip, which took up almost all of November 1998, I didn’t see Andrea. Well, I did, but without really seeing her.

  I met Alexandra and Alexandra’s partner, Marcial, both of whom became friends, and whatever I say about them will be conditioned by the friendship that binds us, so perhaps it’s better that I don’t say too much.

  But I didn’t see Andrea. If I think back, all I can remember is a smile, like the smile of the Cheshire Cat, in the corridor of Alexandra and Marcial’s apartment, a voice emerging from the shadows, a pair of dark and very deep eyes that were laughing as Alexandra’s eyes had laughed when I made my first speech, just after arriving in Chile, but with a significant difference: Andrea, unlike Alexandra, was an invisible woman. I mean, she was invisible for me; at some point I saw her without really seeing her; I heard her, but I couldn’t tell where her voice was coming from.

  One of the things that Lautaro did around that time was to invent a method for approaching automatic doors without making them open. So in a way — I don’t know if it was before or after our first trip to Chile (shortly before, I think) — he too began to play at being invisible, and quite successfully too.

  The first time I saw him demonstrate this skill was in Blanes, at a bakery in Blanes, before that trip to Chile. I can’t remember which writer said that if God was omnipresent, automatic doors should always be open. And since they’re not, God doesn’t exist. As well as being remarkable in itself, my son’s method put paid to that argument. Lautaro didn’t approach from the sides. Sometimes the sensors are placed in such a way that they don’t register a sidelong approach and the doors remain closed. That’s the easy or tricky way (though there’s really not much of a trick to it), but my son chose the hard way; that is, he confronted the doors head on, refusing to stack the odds in his favor, adopting a direct approach, which the sensors are bound to detect and react to, opening the doors to let you in or out.

  The originality of his technique lay in the movements that he made as he came toward the automatic doors. He would start off slowly, as if measuring the sensor’s range, tapping his feet intermittently, as if the sensor could pick up vibrations in the ground, and moving his arms like the slowly turning sails of a windmill. Then the door would open, allowing him to gauge the critical distance. He would step back immediately and the door would close again, and then the real approach would begin. Each movement was slowed down as far as possible. His feet, for instance, didn’t leave the ground; he slid them imperceptibly. His arms, held away from his torso, moved very slightly, like insects or auxiliary craft, as if unattached, as if this approach were being made not by a single body but by a shadow and two phantom shadows, two pilot shadows, and even his face was transformed; it seemed to blur but also to be concentrating on invisibility, on stasis and movement, on insubstantiality and paradox.

  Once, in a big department store in Barcelona, I tried, in vain, to imitate him; the sensor kept detecting me, the doors opened every time. Lautaro, however, could go right up and touch the glass, reinforced or not, with the tip of his nose, unnoticed by the electronic eye, and this couldn’t be explained, as I thought at first, by his height, because at eight my son was relatively tall, or by his slimness, since he’s quite solidly built, but only by his aptitude, determination and skill.

  Something else that I remember vividly from our first trip to Chile, and which enters unexpectedly into this story, is a bird. This bird was not invisible, but when it appeared one afternoon, I’m sure that I was the only one to see it.

  We were staying in a serviced apartment in Providencia, on the eighth or the ninth story, and one afternoon when I had nothing to do I noticed a bird perched on one of the balconies of a neighboring building. For a while the bird sat still and seemed to be surveying the city as I was from the balcony of my apartment, except that the bird was looking at the city and I was looking at it. I’m myopic, my distance vision is poor, but at some point I reached the conclusion that this strange and solitary bird was a raptor, a falcon or something like that (I’m an ornithological ignoramus, except when it comes to parrots). Very soon after that, the falcon or whatever it was went plummeting down, which dispelled any doubts I might have still had. But then came the really surprising part: the bird began to fly toward my balcony. I was afraid but I didn’t move. It came to rest on the flat roof of a building right next to ours, and for a while we examined each other. Until I couldn’t bear it any longer and went back inside.

  The day this happened was also the day when Lautaro showed Pascual his knack of approaching automatic doors without making them open, and Pascual gave Lautaro an airplane. Lautaro loved the airplane; it had been one of Pascual’s favorite toys, and maybe it was because of that gift that Lautaro showed him how to make like the invisible man, or, in Pascual’s low-tech version, like an Indian.

  I saw the boys from a café terrace where I was sitting with Alexandra, Carolina and Marcial. The others didn’t see. I can’t remember what we were talking about; all I remember is that Pascual and Lautaro approached a clothing store, unsuccessfully at first, because the door kept opening, and a woman with dyed blonde hair, wearing gray trousers and a black jacket, came out and said something to them, something I couldn’t hear, partly because I was listening to what my wife and friends were saying, and partly because the store was a fair way off, on the far side of that covered square, and I remember Lautaro and Pascual running away at first, then I remember them standing, looking up, listening to that slim bottle blonde, who was probably telling them off, but then, when the woman disappeared back into the store, Lautaro resumed the operation while Pascual observed him from a predetermined spot, and at some point — I wasn’t watching them all the time — my son succeeded in touching the glass of the closed door with his nose, and it was only then, two days before our flight back to Europe, that I knew I’d arrived in Chile and that everything would be all right. It was an apocalyptic thought.

  In 1999, the following year, I went back to Chile at the invitation of the Book Fair. Almost all the Chilean writers decided to attack me en patota, as they say in Chile: that is, in a gang. I guess it was their way of congratulating me for winning the Rómulo Gallegos Prize. I counterattacked. A woman of a certain age, who all her life had relied on the alms distributed to artists by a charitable state, called me a toady. Since I’ve never been a cultural attaché or held a sinecure, I was surprised by this accusation. I was also called a patero, which is not the same as a patota. A patero doesn’t necessarily belong to a patota, as you might be forgiven for supposing, although there are always pateros in a patota. A patero is a sycophant, a flatterer, a brownnose, an asslicker. The amazing thing about these accusations is that they were made by left- as well as right-wing Chileans who were busy licking ass nonstop to hang onto their scraps of fame, while everything that I’d accomplished (not that it amounts to much) was down to me and no one else. What was it that they didn’t like about me? Well, someone said it was my teeth. Fair enough; I can’t argue with that.

  BEACH

  I gave up heroin and went home and began the methadone treatment administered at the outpatient
clinic and I didn’t have much else to do except get up each morning and watch TV and try to sleep at night, but I couldn’t, something made me unable to close my eyes and rest, and that was my routine until one day I couldn’t stand it anymore and I bought myself a pair of black swim trunks at a store in the center of town and I went to the beach, wearing the trunks and with a towel and a magazine, and I spread my towel not too far from the sea and then I lay down and spent a while trying to decide whether to go into the sea or not, I could think of lots of reasons to go in but also some not to (the children playing at the water’s edge, for example), until at last it was too late and I went home, and the next morning I bought some sunscreen and I went to the beach again, and at around twelve I headed to the clinic and got my dose of methadone and said hello to some familiar faces, no friends, just familiar faces from the methadone line who were surprised to see me in swim trunks, but I acted as if there was nothing strange about it, and then I walked back to the beach and this time I went for a dip and tried to swim, though I couldn’t, and that was enough for me, and the next day I went back to the beach and put on sunscreen all over and then I fell asleep on the sand, and when I woke up I felt very well-rested, and I hadn’t burned my back or anything, and this went on for a week or maybe two, I can’t remember, the only thing I’m sure of is that each day I got more tan and though I didn’t talk to anyone each day I felt better, or different, which isn’t the same thing but in my case it seemed like it, and one day an old couple turned up on the beach, I remember it clearly, it looked like they’d been together for a long time, she was fat, or round, and must have been about seventy, and he was thin, or more than thin, a walking skeleton, I think that was why I noticed him, because usually I didn’t take much notice of the people on the beach, but I did notice them, and it was because the guy was so skinny, I saw him and got scared, fuck, it’s death coming for me, I thought, but nothing was coming for me, it was just two old people, the man maybe seventy-five and the woman about seventy, or the other way around, and she seemed to be in good health, but he looked as if he were going to breathe his last breath any time now or as if this were his last summer, and at first, once I was over my initial fright, it was hard for me to look away from the old man’s face, from his skull barely covered by a thin layer of skin, but then I got used to watching the two of them surreptitiously, lying on the sand, on my stomach, with my face hidden in my arms, or from the boardwalk, sitting on a bench facing the beach, as I pretended to brush sand off myself, and I remember that the old woman always came to the beach with an umbrella, under which she quickly ducked, and she didn’t wear a swimsuit, although sometimes I saw her in a swimsuit, but usually she was in a very loose summer dress that made her look fatter than she was, and under that umbrella the old woman sat reading, she had a very thick book, while the skeleton that was her husband lay on the sand in nothing but a tiny swimsuit, almost a thong, and drank in the sun with a voracity that brought me distant memories of junkies frozen in blissful immobility, of junkies focused on what they were doing, on the only thing they could do, and then my head ached and I left the beach, I had something to eat on the Paseo Marítimo, a little dish of anchovies and a beer, and then I smoked a cigarette and watched the beach through the window of the bar, and then I went back and the old man and the old woman were still there, she under her umbrella, he exposed to the sun’s rays, and then, suddenly, for no reason, I felt like crying and I got in the water and swam and when I was a long way from the shore I looked at the sun and it seemed strange to me that it was there, that big thing so unlike us, and then I started to swim toward the beach (twice I almost drowned) and when I got back I dropped down next to my towel and sat there panting for quite a while, but without losing sight of the old couple, and then I may have fallen asleep on the sand, and when I woke up the beach was beginning to empty, but the old man and the old woman were still there, she with her novel under the umbrella and he on his back in the sun with his eyes closed and a strange expression on his skull-like face, as if he could feel each second passing and he was savoring it, though the sun’s rays were weak, though the sun had already dipped behind the buildings along the beach, behind the hills, but that didn’t seem to bother him, and then I watched him and I watched the sun, and sometimes my back stung a little, as if that afternoon I’d burned myself, and I looked at them and then I got up, I slung my towel over my shoulders like a cape and went to sit on one of the benches of the Paseo Marítimo, where I pretended to brush nonexistent sand off my legs, and from up there I had a different vision of the couple, and I said to myself that maybe he wasn’t about to die, I said to myself that maybe time didn’t exist in the way I’d always thought it existed, I reflected on time as the sun’s distance lengthened the shadows of the buildings, and then I went home and took a shower and examined my red back, a back that didn’t seem to belong to me but to someone else, someone I wouldn’t get to know for years and then I turned on the TV and watched shows that I didn’t understand at all, until I fell asleep in my chair, and the next day it was back to the same old thing, the beach, the clinic, the beach again, a routine that was sometimes interrupted by new people on the beach, a woman, for example, who was always standing, who never lay down in the sand, who wore a bikini bottom and a blue T-shirt, and who only went into the water up to the knees, and who was reading a book, like the old woman, but this woman read it standing up, and sometimes she knelt down, though in a very odd way, and picked up a big bottle of Pepsi and drank, standing up, of course, and then put the bottle back down on the towel, which I don’t know why she’d brought since she never lay down on it or went swimming, and sometimes this woman scared me, she seemed too strange, but most of the time I just felt sorry for her, and I saw other strange things too, all kinds of things happen at the beach, maybe because it’s the only place where we’re all half-naked, though nothing too important ever happened, once as I was walking along the shore I thought I saw an ex-junkie like me, sitting on a mound of sand with a baby on his lap, and another time I saw some Russian girls, three Russian girls, who were probably hookers and who were talking on cell phones and laughing, all three of them, but what really interested me most was the old couple, partly because I had the feeling that the old man might die at any moment, and when I thought this, or when I realized I was thinking this, crazy ideas would come into my head, like the thought that after the old man’s death there would be a tsunami and the town would be destroyed by a giant wave, or that the earth would begin to shake and a massive earthquake would swallow up the whole town in a wave of dust, and when I thought about all this, I hid my head in my hands and began to weep, and while I was weeping I dreamed (or imagined) that it was nighttime, say three in the morning, and I’d left my house and gone to the beach, and on the beach I found the old man lying on the sand, and in the sky, up near the stars, but closer to Earth than the other stars, there shone a black sun, an enormous sun, silent and black, and I went down to the beach and lay on the sand too, the only two people on the beach were the old man and me, and when I opened my eyes again I realized that the Russian hookers and the girl who was always standing and the ex-junkie with the baby were watching me curiously, maybe wondering who that weird guy was, the guy with the sunburned shoulders and back, and even the old woman was gazing at me from under her umbrella, interrupting the reading of her interminable book for a few seconds, maybe wondering who that young man was, that man with silent tears running down his face, a man of thirty-five who had nothing at all but who was recoveri
ng his will and his courage and who knew that he would live a while longer.

  Natasha Wimmer

  MUSCLES

  I.

  I don’t know if my brother was a cultured or civilized person, though some nights I think that he probably was and that being civilized is probably what saved him from suicide.

  His favorite books were Kabyle Customs by John Hodge and all the volumes of Professor Ramiro Lira’s Works of the Pre-Socratic Philosophers (which are more like pamphlets, really, but my brother explained that this was because the works of those poor philosophers had been swallowed by the black hole of time, which is what will happen to all of us). And others.

  “No hole’s going to swallow me,” I’d say to him.

  “It’s going to happen to both of us, Marta, there’s no avoiding it,” he’d say, without a hint of sadness.

  But I think it’s a very sad thought.

  It was usually over breakfast that we talked about the Pre-Socratic philosophers. The one he liked best was Empedocles. That Empedocles, he used to say, he’s like Spiderman. My favorite was Heraclitus. We almost never talked about the philosophers at night, I don’t know why. It must have been because at night we had much more to talk about, or because sometimes we were both too tired when we got back from work — you need to be sharp if you’re going to talk about philosophy — though little by little, and especially after the death of our parents, that began to change as well, and our nighttime conversations gradually became more grown-up; we started talking more seriously, as if our words were venturing into much more open and hazardous territory, now that our parents were no longer there to anchor them. But in the mornings, both before their death and after, our favorite topic was the Pre-Socratics, as if the start of a new day (though, if you think about it, the day begins long before that, at midnight) had restored the energy we had as kids and made everything different, better, refreshed. I remember our breakfasts: a cup of coffee with milk, bread with tomato and olive oil, a steak, a bowl of cereal or two tubs of yogurt with honey and muesli, Super Egg (100% egg protein), Fuel Tank (with megacalorie protein: 3000 calories per dose), Super Mega Mass, Victory Mega Aminos (in capsules), Fat Burner (lipotropes to help dissolve fat), and an orange, a banana or an apple, depending on the season. That was for Enric. I don’t eat much: I’d have maybe half a biscuit, the kind my brother used to buy, made with whole wheat flour and enriched with some kind of vitamins, and a cup of black coffee.