The Secret of Evil

by Roberto Bolaño

  For a moment I was tempted to tell her about what had happened the night before, but I decided that it was better to keep my mouth shut.

  That night, when I got home, Enric, Florencio and Tomé were already in the living room watching TV. I made a coffee and sat as far away from them as I could, at the end of the table, near the window, where my father used to sit. Enric and Tomé were sprawled on the sofa and Florencio was in the armchair, which is where I normally sit to watch TV. There were containers of high-calorie, high-protein food scattered over the table, the kind my brother eats, but these were new. I also saw a baguette, ham, cheese, and several bottles of beer.

  “The guys brought some supplies,” said my brother.

  I didn’t respond. The containers of food, the pills, the Fuel Tank and the Super Egg (vanilla and chocolate flavored, respectively) were expensive, more than five thousand pesetas a tub, and I couldn’t imagine that scruffy pair having so much money. It would have cost them more than fifty thousand pesetas all together.

  “Where did you steal it from?”

  “I like your sister,” said Florencio.

  My brother looked at me and then at them with a half-amused, half-incredulous expression on his face.

  “We went to get some stuff from our place,” said Florencio. “And we decided to pick up some food on the way.”

  “I brought my tarot cards as well,” said Tomé.

  “If you have a place of your own, why do you want to move in here?”

  “That was just a manner of speaking,” said Florencio. “Actually, it’s a boarding house. When you don’t have a place of your own, you end up calling any place home, even a shithole like that boarding house. Enric invited us to stay here for a few days, till we see how things work out.”

  “In other words, you’re broke.”

  “You could say our finances are tight.”

  At that moment, for some reason, they looked handsome to me. Both of them had just taken a shower. Tomé’s hair was still wet, and his manner was unassuming but self-assured. Everything seemed to be much simpler and clearer for them than it was for my brother and me.

  “So you stole that food.”

  “Well, yeah, that’s right, we did,” said Florencio.

  “We thought it would be rude to turn up empty-handed, and Enric likes that stuff; he spends a fortune on it.”

  “It isn’t cheap, that’s for sure,” said my brother.

  “We went to a store on Avenida Roma, near the Modelo Prison, a store that specializes in bodybuilding supplements, and we took whatever we could.”

  “You shouldn’t have done that, guys,” my brother said.

  “Hey, it was the least we could do,” said Tomé.

  My brother smiled happily: “Now I have supplies for like five months.”

  “What if you’d been caught?” I said.

  “We never get caught,” said Florencio.

  “We bought a packet of soy cookies,” said Tomé.

  Suddenly I ran out of arguments. I would have liked to ask them how many days they were planning to stay at our place, but I didn’t want to go too far. It’s one thing to be frank and another to be rude. It’s one thing to be aggressive and another to be hospitable. So I kept quiet, sitting on my father’s chair, staring at the bottom of my coffee cup and occasionally glancing up at the game show they were watching on TV (Florencio and Tomé knew all the answers) until it was time to eat.

  “The guys made dinner tonight,” said my brother.

  Poor fool, I thought, without getting up. That night we ate rice and vegetables. My brother, who always eats meat, didn’t complain; on the contrary, he praised the flavor of the meal and went back for seconds and thirds. Florencio set the table, and Tomé served the food. They opened a bottle of expensive wine (“You stole this too?” I asked — “Naturally,” replied Florencio) and we all had some.

  “Let’s drink a toast to Marta and Enric,” said Tomé. “Two very special people. There’s no else like you two.”

  I could feel myself blushing. I’m not used to drinking wine (my parents were teetotalers, my brother too, until yesterday, anyway) and I’m even less used to public compliments.

  Translator’s note: The quotations from Diogenes of Apollonia and Xenophanes of Colophon in “Muscles” are given in Jonathan Barnes’s translation, from Early Greek Philosophy (London: Penguin, 1987).

  THE TOUR

  My idea was to interview John Malone, the musician who’d disappeared. Five years earlier, Malone had already slipped out of the dark zone where the legends live, and he wasn’t really newsworthy any more, although the fans hadn’t forgotten his name. In the seventh decade of the twentieth century, along with Jacob Morley and Dan Endycott, he’d been a founding member of Broken Zoo, one of the most successful rock groups of the time. Broken Zoo recorded their first LP in 1966. It was a magnificent record, up there with the best stuff coming out of England — and this is the mid-sixties I’m talking about, with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in top form. The second LP came out soon after and, to everyone’s surprise, it was even better than the first. Broken Zoo did a tour of Europe and then a tour of the States. The North American tour went on for months. As they traveled from city to city, the record climbed up the charts and finally reached number one. When they got back to London, they took a few days off to rest. Morley shut himself up in a house that he’d recently bought on the outskirts of London, where he had a private recording studio. Endycott kept himself busy getting off with all the pretty groupies who came swarming around the band, till one of them got off with him, and they bought a house in Belgravia and got married. As for Malone, he seemed more lethargic. According to some of the books about Broken Zoo, he attended “weird parties,” though what the authors meant by weird is not exactly clear. I’m guessing it’s what they said back then to indicate a mix of sex and drugs. Shortly afterward, Malone disappeared. And after sensibly allowing a month or two to elapse, Broken Zoo’s manager called a press conference, at which he admitted what everyone already knew: John Malone had quit the group without a word of explanation. Not long after that, Morley and Endycott, along with the drummer Ronnie Palmer, and another band member called Corrigan, came out with their own versions of the events. Malone hadn’t been in touch with anyone except Palmer. He called him three weeks after his disappearance, just to say that he was fine, and to tell them not to wait for him because he wasn’t planning to come back. Many people thought that this would be the end of the group. Malone was the best of the lot, and it was hard to imagine Broken Zoo going on without him. But then Morley shut himself up for a month or so in his mansion, and Endycott went there too and worked ten hours a day, and they put together the group’s third LP. Contrary to the expectations of the critics, Broken Zoo’s third record was better than the first and the second. Seventy percent of the material on the first record was written by Malone: lyrics as well as music. On the second record, it was seventy-five percent. The rest was provided by Morley and Endycott, except for one track, which is something of an anomaly, with lyrics co-written by Morley and Palmer. For the third record, however, Morley and Endycott wrote ninety percent of the material, and the remaining ten percent was contributed by Palmer, Morley, Endycott and a new member, Venable, who’d joined the group when it was clear that Malone wouldn’t be coming back. One of the songs is dedicated to Malone. There’s no bitterness in it. Just friendship and admiration. The title is “When are You Going to Come Back?” It was released
as a single and in less than two weeks it went to the top of the charts in London. Malone, of course, didn’t come back, and although, at the time, various journalists went searching for him, all their efforts were fruitless. There was even a rumor that he had died in a city in France and been buried in a pauper’s grave. Broken Zoo’s third album was followed by a fourth, which was greeted with unanimous praise, and after the fourth came a fifth and then a sixth, a flawless double album, the group’s apotheosis, and after that they didn’t play for while, but then they brought out a seventh LP, which was pretty good, and then an eighth, and in the middle of the eighties they made their ninth album, another double, and Morley and Endycott must have signed a pact with the devil, because this record swept the world, from Japan to Holland, from New Zealand to Canada, tearing through Thailand like a tornado, which is really saying something. Then the group broke up, though every now and then, on a special occasion, they’d get back together to play their old songs at a select venue. In 1995 a journalist from Rolling Stone found out where Malone was living. His article stunned the die-hard fans of Broken Zoo, who cherished the group’s first vinyl LPs. But most of the magazine’s readers didn’t really care what had happened to a guy who was widely assumed to be dead. In a way, Malone’s life during all those years had been a living death. When he left London, he had simply gone back to his parents’ house. That was all. He stayed there for two years, doing nothing, while the members of his old band set out to take the universe by storm.

  DANIELA

  My name is Daniela de Montecristo and I am a citizen of the universe, although I was born in Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, in the year 1915, the youngest of three sisters. Later my father remarried and had a little son, but the child died before his first birthday, and Papa had to be happy with what he had, that is, with my sisters and me. I don’t know why I’m explaining all this. It’s ancient history, or children’s stories if you like, of no interest to anyone now. I lost my virginity at the age of thirteen. That might interest someone. I was deflowered by one of the ranch hands. I can’t remember his name, all I know is that he was a ranch hand and must have been somewhere between twenty-five and forty-five. He didn’t rape me, I do remember that. At least I never thought of it as rape, afterward I mean, when it was over, and I was getting dressed behind an ombu tree, and the ranch hand, around the other side, was pensively rolling a cigarette, which he then lit and gave me for a couple of puffs on it, my first ever puffs of smoke. I remember that vividly. The bitter taste of the tobacco and the plains stretching away endlessly and my legs trembling. What was really trembling, though, were my thoughts. I could have gone and told on him. All that night I kept turning the idea over in my mind, and the next two nights as well. But I didn’t do it. Partly because I wanted to repeat the experience. Partly because it wasn’t my father’s ranch; it belonged to one of his friends, so the punishment wouldn’t have been administered by my blood relations, it would have fallen outside what I took to be the ambit of real justice, the justice of the blood. My father never had a ranch. My older sister married a lawyer, a pathetic shyster who never tired of declaring his inordinate love for my father. My other sister married the son of a ranch owner, a crazy kid who within a few years managed to gamble away a small fortune and get himself cut out of the will. To sum up: my family was always middle class, and whatever efforts we made, from our various starting points, in our various and often contradictory ways, to climb up a rung and enter the rigid, immutable upper crust, official guardian of justice and morality, the fact is we never moved out of our social compartment, which, although comfortable, condemned the livelier minds in the clan (myself, for example) to a restlessness that even then, at the age of thirteen, on that ranch, which wasn’t our property, I could glimpse like a dizzying mirage, a space in time where time itself was cancelled, time as we know it, and that was why I began by saying that I am a citizen of the universe and not, as the saying goes, of the world, because I may be old but it should be quite clear that I’m not stupid, and the world cannot contain a dizzying mirage like that, although perhaps the universe can. But I was talking about restlessness. I was talking about the night when I thought about telling on the ranch hand who had deflowered me. I didn’t, and I didn’t have sex with him again. Restlessness, my first apprehension of restlessness, declared itself as a fever, so my father sent me back to Buenos Aires, where I was entrusted to the care of a physician, Dr. Guarini.

  SUNTAN

  The previous summer I’d been a temporary foster parent to a child from the Third World. It was a terrible experience. When I took her to the airport I was a wreck, and Olga (that was her name), she was a wreck as well. We cried all the way, we didn’t stop for a minute. She kept sobbing that she wanted to stay with me, the poor thing. Just as well there were no photographers. Even so, I stayed in the car for a while, fixing my makeup, before we got out. The man from the NGO who was there to take the children back was waiting by the information counter. He looked at me and realized right away that I was taking it hard. It’s normal, the first time, he said. There was another girl there with her foster family. In spite of the dark glasses, they recognized me immediately. The mother came over and said: It gives us such a boost to know that you’re taking part in the program too, Lucía. I had no idea what she meant, but I smiled and said I was just another volunteer. Half an hour later the children and the man from the NGO boarded the plane and disappeared, leaving the foster parents in the departure lounge. One of them suggested that we go for a drink. I declined. I shook hands with all of them (no kisses) and left. In the car I cried all the way back to my apartment, but two days later I had to go to Milan, for work, and I spent August in Marbella and Mallorca. Eventually the summer came to an end and work began again in earnest.

  And all sorts of things happened after that.

  Eight months later the same NGO wrote to me to see if I wanted to foster a child again in July. I thought about it all that day, carrying the letter around in my handbag, and eventually decided to repeat the experience. I called them and said I’d participate again, as long as they did whatever they could to make sure it was Olga. They said they’d try, but the organization had a rule, or something — I didn’t understand. Call me, I said. A month later they called and said they were doing their best to get Olga. At that time I was acting in a play, a wonderful English production, a musical about the poor people of London, or maybe it was Manchester, set at the beginning of the century, a play in which I had to sing and dance as well as act. For some reason, talking with the people from the NGO helped me with my work. It was just after the première and the reviews hadn’t been very good. Especially the comments about me. Well, not just me; some of the other actors came off badly too. After that phone call my performances improved; they were stronger, more convincing, and the others were inspired by my energy on stage.

  Then I was offered a television show. I said yes without a second thought.

  Then I met a doctor in Madrid called Gorka (his family came from the Basque country) and we fell in love.

  To be completely honest, for a while I forgot all about the girl and the NGO. I was living at a frantic pace: interviews, TV appearances, a small but gratifying part in a film, and my own talk show with celebrity guests (actresses, models, athletes, heartthrobs).

  One morning they called and said that Olga wouldn’t be able to spend her vacation month with me. Why not? I asked, although for a moment I had no idea who Olga was, what vacation month they were talking
about, or who had called to tell me this and was now replying to my question in a condescending tone of voice that I didn’t like at all, explaining something about regulations, which left me even more confused. When I finally realized what it was about, I said I didn’t have time to talk right then and told them to call me back the following night, insisting that I wanted Olga. We completely understand, said the voice: It’s human, it’s normal.

  Having reached this point in my story, there’s something I think I should clarify. There are show-business personalities who’ll stop at nothing to appear on TV and in the magazines. Generalizing broadly, they belong to one of two kinds: those who are working and those who aren’t. Those who are working might go to a leper colony in India to promote their new record or TV show. The others can’t afford to fly to India, but they might visit an orphanage in Tangiers or a prison in Rabat to keep themselves visible and boost their chances of getting some work soon. Not that either kind of personality necessarily goes to India or Morocco — those are just examples I’m using to make a general point: fame is measured in exclusives, calibrated by the size of the splash you can make with a scandal or a spectacular act of charity. But there was no such design behind my decision to foster a child for the month of July. No one knew anything about it, I mean no one who works for the glossy magazines. Olga’s stay at my apartment was a secret, and during the days we spent on Mallorca with my family we kept well out of the public eye. I play the bimbo sometimes, if it’s in the script, but I went to college and I earned my degree in art history.