The Secret of Evil

by Roberto Bolaño

  So let me make it perfectly clear that I didn’t want the girl for self-promotion. I have nothing against publicity as such, but there’s a line between vulgar and sophisticated publicity. And that line should never be crossed, or so I was taught as a child, because there’s no going back.

  The next day I got a call from the NGO. They said they’d done everything humanly possible, but it wasn’t going to be Olga. Instead they talked to me about Mariam, or María, a twelve-year-old Saharan girl who had lost her father in the war, a lovely girl, they said, and very clever for her age. Olga was twelve as well, I thought, and then I remembered her birthday and realized that I hadn’t even sent her a card, and before I knew it I was crying, while the guy from the NGO went on giving me information about Mariam; she’d seen all sorts of atrocities, he said, and yet had somehow preserved her innocence. What do you mean? I asked. That’s she’s still a girl, in spite of everything she’s been through. But she’s twelve, I said. You haven’t seen what I’ve seen, Lucía, he said in a velvety voice. The guy was trying to hit on me! He started telling me stories, not about the children, but about things that had happened to him. You have to travel a lot in this job. I travel a lot too, I said. I know, he said. For a while we talked about our respective travels. Then I agreed to foster Mariam and we said good-bye and hung up.

  The only people I told were my parents and my sister. I didn’t say anything to Gorka. Partly because he wasn’t in Madrid (he’d gone to Mallorca for a sailing regatta), partly because I’m an independent woman and it was my decision and mine alone. Naturally, Gorka had plans for the summer, vague plans to go to an island in the Caribbean, and then to find a place in Mallorca, near his sailing friends, where we could stay till the beginning of September. I adore the sea. And I enjoy the regattas. I’m actually a better sailor than Gorka, who took it up quite recently (I’ve been sailing since I was a child), but like the rest of us, he’s entitled to waste his time however he sees fit.

  DEATH OF ULISES

  Belano, our dear Arturo Belano, returns to Mexico City. More than twenty years have passed since the last time he was there. The plane is flying over the city, and he wakes with a start. The uneasiness he has felt throughout the trip intensifies. At the airport in Mexico City he has to catch a connecting flight to Guadalajara, for the Book Fair, to which he’s been invited. Belano is now a fairly well-known author and is often invited to international events, although he doesn’t travel much. This is his first trip to Mexico in more than twenty years. Last year he had two invitations and he pulled out at the last minute. The year before last he had four and he pulled out at the last minute. I can’t remember how many invitations he had three years ago, but he pulled out at the last minute. Still, here he is in Mexico, in the Mexico City airport, following a group of perfect strangers who are heading toward the transit zone to catch the plane to Guadalajara. The corridor leads through a labyrinth of glass. Belano is the last in line. His steps are increasingly slow and hesitant. In a waiting room he spots a young Argentine writer who is also going to Guadalajara. Belano immediately takes cover behind a pillar. The Argentine is reading the paper, whose cultural supplement — maybe that’s what he’s reading — is entirely devoted to the Book Fair. After a few moments, he looks up and glances around, as if he knew he was being observed, but he doesn’t see Belano, and his gaze returns to the paper. After a while a very beautiful woman approaches the Argentine and kisses him from behind. Belano knows her. She’s a Mexican, born in Guadalajara. The Argentine man and the Mexican woman both live in Barcelona, together, and Belano is a friend of theirs. The Mexican woman and the Argentine man exchange a few words. Somehow both of them have sensed that they are being watched. Belano tries to read their lips, but he can’t work out what they’re saying. He doesn’t leave his hiding place until their backs are turned. By the time he can finally escape from that corridor, the line of passengers heading for the connecting flight to Guadalajara has disappeared, and Belano realizes, with a deepening sense of relief, that he has no desire to go to Guadalajara and take part in the Book Fair; what he wants to do is to stay in Mexico City. And that is what he does. He heads for the exit. His passport is examined, and soon he’s outside, looking for a taxi.

  Back in Mexico, he thinks.

  The taxi driver looks at him as if he were an old acquaintance. Belano has heard stories about the taxi drivers of Mexico City and muggings in the vicinity of the airport. But all those stories vanish now. Where are we going, young man? asks the driver, who is younger than Belano. Belano gives him the most recent address that he has for Ulises Lima. OK, says the driver, and the taxi pulls away and plunges into the city. Belano shuts his eyes, the way he used to when he lived there, but now he’s so tired that he opens them almost immediately, and his old city, the city of his adolescence, displays itself to him for free. Nothing has changed, he thinks, although he knows that everything has changed.

  It’s a cemetery morning. The sky’s a dirty yellow. The clouds, moving slowly from south to north, look like graveyards adrift; sometimes they part to reveal scraps of gray sky, sometimes they come together with a dry, earthy grinding that no one, not even Belano, can hear, but it gives him a headache, the way it did when he was an adolescent and lived in Colonia Lindavista or Colonia Guadalupe-Tepeyac.

  The people walking on the sidewalks, however, are the same; they’re younger, they probably hadn’t even been born when he left, but basically these are the faces he saw in 1968, in 1974, in 1976. The taxi driver tries to engage him in conversation, but Belano doesn’t feel like talking. When he can finally close his eyes again, he sees his taxi driving at full speed down a busy avenue, while robbers hold up other taxis and the passengers die with terrified expressions on their faces. Vaguely familiar gestures and words. Fear. Then he sees nothing and falls asleep the way a stone falls down a well.

  Here we are, says the taxi driver.

  Belano looks out of the window. They’re in the street where Ulises Lima used to live. He pays and gets out. Is this your first time in Mexico? asks the driver. No, I used to live here. Are you Mexican? the driver asks as he gives him the change. More or less, says Belano.

  Then he’s standing alone on the sidewalk, looking at the façade of the building.

  Belano’s hair is short. A bald patch like a tonsure reveals the top of his scalp. He’s no longer the long-haired youth who once roamed these streets. Now he’s wearing a black leather jacket and gray trousers and a white shirt and a pair of Martinelli shoes. He’s been invited to Mexico to participate in a conference that will gather a group of Latin American writers. At least two of his friends have also been invited. His books are read (a bit) in Spain and Latin America, and all of them have been translated into various languages. What am I doing here? he wonders.

  He walks toward the entrance of the building. He takes out his address book. He presses the buzzer of the apartment where Ulises Lima used to live. Three long buzzes. No one answers. He buzzes another apartment. A woman’s voice asks who it is. I’m a friend of Ulises Lima, says Belano. She hangs up abruptly. He buzzes another apartment. A man’s voice shouts, Who is it? A friend of Ulises Lima, says Belano, feeling more and more ridiculous. The door opens with an electric click, and Belano starts climbing the stairs to the third floor. By the time he reaches the landing, the effort is making him sweat. There are three doors and a long, dimly lit corridor. This is where Ulises Lima spent the last days of his life, he thinks, but when he rings the doorbell he finds himself irra
tionally hoping to hear his friend’s approaching steps and then to see his smiling face appear at the crack in the door.

  Nobody answers.

  Belano goes back down the stairs. He finds a hotel nearby, without having to leave Colonia Cuauhtémoc. He sits on the bed for a long time, watching Mexican television and letting his mind go blank. Not a single show is familiar, but somehow the old shows infiltrate the new ones, and Belano has the impression that he can see the face of El Loco Valdés on the screen or hear his voice. Later, channel surfing, he comes across a Tin-Tan movie and watches to the end. Tin-Tan was El Loco’s elder brother. He was already dead when Belano came to live in Mexico. El Loco Valdés might be dead now too.

  When the movie’s over, Belano takes a shower and then, without even drying himself, he calls a friend. No one’s home. Just the answering machine, but Belano doesn’t want to leave a message.

  He hangs up. He gets dressed. He goes to the window and looks out at Calle Río Panuco. He doesn’t see people or cars or trees, only the gray pavement and a calm that has something timeless about it. Then a boy appears, walking down the opposite sidewalk with a young woman who might be his big sister or his mother. Belano shuts his eyes.

  He isn’t hungry, he isn’t sleepy, he doesn’t feel like going out. So he sits down on the bed again and goes on watching television, smoking one cigarette after another, until he finishes the pack. Then he puts on his black leather jacket and goes out into the street.

  Irresistibly, the way a hit song keeps playing in your head, he finds himself returning to Ulises Lima’s apartment.

  The sun is beginning to set over Mexico City when, after a series of fruitless attempts, Belano succeeds in getting someone in the building to buzz him through the street door. I must be going crazy, he thinks, as he climbs the stairs two by two. Nothing’s affecting me: the altitude, not having eaten, being alone in Mexico City. For a few interminable and, in their way, happy seconds, he stands in front of Ulises’s door without ringing. Then he presses the button three times. As he is turning to go, about to leave the building (though not for the last time, he knows that), the door of the adjacent apartment opens and an enormous, hairless, coppery head, on which slashes of red can be dimly made out (as if the possessor of the head had been painting a wall or a ceiling), emerges and asks him who he’s looking for.

  At first, Belano doesn’t know what to say. There’s no point saying he’s looking for Ulises Lima, and he can’t be bothered making something up, so he keeps quiet and looks at his interlocutor: the head belongs to a young man, he wouldn’t be more than twenty-five, and from his expression Belano guesses that he’s annoyed or lives in a permanent state of annoyance. It’s empty, that place, says the young man. I know, says Belano. So what are you ringing for, idiot? says the young man. Belano looks him in the eye and says nothing. The door opens and the hairless young man comes out into the corridor. He’s fat, and all he’s wearing is a pair of baggy jeans held up by an old belt. The buckle, partly hidden by the young man’s belly, is large and made of metal. Is he coming out to hit me? wonders Belano. For a moment they examine each other. Our hero Arturo Belano, dear readers, is forty-six by this stage, and as you all know, or should know, his liver, his pancreas and even his colon are in a bad way, but he still knows how to box, and he’s sizing up the voluminous figure in front of him. When he lived in Mexico he got into plenty of fights and never lost, though it’s hard to credit now. Schoolyard scraps and barroom brawls. Belano looks at the fat guy, trying to figure out when to attack, when to hit him and where. But the fat guy just stares at Belano and looks back into his apartment, and then another young man appears, wearing a brown sweatshirt with a transfer on it that shows three men striking defiant poses in the middle of a street full of trash, and “Los Amos del Barrio” written in red letters at the top.

  Belano is momentarily hypnotized by the design. Those pathetic-looking guys on the sweatshirt seem familiar. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s the street that seems familiar. I’ve been there, years ago, he thinks, years ago I walked down that street, with time on my hands, just looking around.

  The guy in the sweatshirt, who’s almost as fat as the other one, asks Belano something in a voice that sounds like water boiling. Belano doesn’t understand. But it wasn’t an aggressive question, he’s sure of that. What? he asks. Are you a fan of Los Amos del Barrio? repeats the fat guy in the sweatshirt.

  Belano smiles. No, I’m not from here, he says.

  Then the second fat guy is pushed aside and a third fat guy appears; he’s very dark, an Aztec kind of fat guy with a little moustache, and he asks his roommates what’s going on. Three against one, thinks Belano, time to go. The fat guy with the little moustache looks at him and asks what he wants. This jerk was ringing the bell at Ulises Lima’s place, says the first fat guy. Did you know Ulises Lima? asks the fat guy with the little moustache. Yes, says Belano, I was a friend of his. And what’s your name, jerk? asks the fat guy in the sweatshirt. Arturo Belano says his name and then adds that he’ll be on his way, he’s sorry to have bothered them, but now the three fat guys are looking at him with real interest, as if they were seeing him from a different point of view, and the fat guy in the sweatshirt smiles and says, Cut the bullshit, your name can’t be Arturo Belano, though from the way he says it, Belano can tell that although he’s unconvinced, he’d like to believe it’s true.

  Then he sees himself — and it’s as if he’s watching a movie, a movie so sad he’d never go to see it — in the fat guys’ apartment, and they’re offering their guest a beer. No thanks, I don’t drink any more, he says, sitting in a rickety armchair, its cloth cover printed with wilting flowers, holding a glass of water he can’t bring himself to drink from, because the water in Mexico City, so he’s been warned, though in fact he’s always known this, can give you gastroenteritis, while the fat guys settle down in the surrounding armchairs, except for the one without a shirt, who sits on the floor, as if he’s afraid the other chair might break under his weight or afraid of how his friends might react if it did.

  The fat guy without a shirt is behaving a bit like a slave, Belano thinks.

  What happens next is chaotic and sentimental: the fat guys inform him that they were the last disciples of Ulises Lima (that’s the word they use: disciples). They tell Belano about his death, how he was run down by a mysterious car, a black Impala, and they talk about his life, a succession of legendary drinking bouts, as if the bars and rooms where Ulises Lima got sick and threw up were the successive volumes of his complete works. But mainly they talk about themselves: they have a rock group called El Ojete de Morelos and they perform in discos in the suburbs of Mexico City. They’ve made a record, which the official radio stations won’t touch because of the lyrics. But the little stations play their songs all day long. We’re getting famous, they say, but we’re still rebels. The way of Ulises Lima, they say, Ulises Lima’s tracer fire, the poetry of Mexico’s greatest poet.

  As good as their word, they put on a CD of their songs, and Belano sits there motionless, listening, with his hand clamped around the glass of water he still hasn’t sipped from, looking at the dirty floor and the walls covered with posters for Los Amos del Barrio and El Ojete de Morelos and other bands he’s never heard of, maybe they’re earlier groups, whose members went on to form Los Amos and El Ojete: Mexican kids staring out at him from photos or from hell, holding their electric guitars as if they were brandishing weapons or freezing to death.

  THE TROUBLEMAKER


  Some of his works were shown in 2003, during the European protests against the war in Iraq, at an exhibition organized by the poet Ponç Altés: mere sketches, as the artist pointed out himself, trials, private exercises done in some anonymous and dingy room. About Vallirana, there is little to be said: he was young, just twenty-one, unemployed, and he came from a family that was relatively poor (but loving: they supported him). His literary tastes were still developing, although he had, by then, read the complete works of Alfred Jarry, his favorite writer, whose radiance the passing days could do nothing to dim. As to Vallirana’s personality at that time, the accounts diverge. Generally speaking, it could be said that he was a somewhat (though not excessively) reserved young man and somewhat shy (although his shyness was not excessive either). He believed only in art and science. For him, the union of art and science was a matter of work. In that sense it could be said that he was deeply Catalonian. God and chance belonged to art, eternity and labyrinths to science. When the protests against the war in Iraq began, he spent three days shut up in his room, like those young men in Japan who retreat to a tiny bedroom in the family home and refuse to come out again to look for work or go shopping or see a movie or take a walk in the park. Being an only child and living in El Masnou, not Tokyo, Vallirana had a larger bedroom, and he spent only three days in there, watching television almost nonstop (there was a set at the foot of his bed), barely sleeping, following the protests, and thinking. When the three days were over, he went up onto the roof and made a little sign. The sign said: “NO WAR — LONG LIVE SADDAM HUSSEIN.” He wrote it in Roman square capitals — the result was rather stylish — on a modest-sized sheet of white cardboard, which he stapled onto a wooden stick about four feet long. In a moment of malicious inspiration, he illustrated both sides of the sign with little flowers that looked more like four-leafed clovers. The next day he took the train to Barcelona and participated in an anti-war demonstration in Hospitalet, which was poorly attended, but that night he joined the crowd banging pots and pans in Plaza San Jaume, and held his sign up high. No one said anything to him in Hospitalet. Or in Plaza San Jaume, where Vallirana contributed powerfully to the racket with an umpire’s whistle. He missed the last train back to El Masnou and slept on a bench in the subway along with the homeless. The next day he took part in a march with students from the Universidad Autónoma, who chanted antiwar and anti-US slogans as they walked from the campus to Sarrià, stopping the traffic on numerous occasions. A girl who was studying journalism came up to him as they crossed one of the ring roads and said that she was against the war but that didn’t mean she supported Saddam Hussein. The girl was called Dolors, and Vallirana told her that his name was Enric de Montherlant. When the demonstration was over, they went to have coffee on Plaza de Sarrià, and agreed to meet the following day and join the big march from the Rambla de Catalunya to Plaza Catalunya. Then Vallirana went back to El Masnou, where he took a shower and changed his clothes, vaguely suspecting that he had picked up fleas the previous night. His whole body was, as it turned out, covered with tiny, bright red bites. Before going to sleep, Vallirana made a great many notes. He asked himself questions. And he didn’t choose the lazy solution of leaving them all unanswered. When he’d finished writing, he went up to the rooftop terrace and made another sign. This one said: “NO WAR — LONG LIVE THE IRAQI PEOPLE — DEATH TO THE JEWS.” The first phrase, NO WAR, was written in big letters, the second in smaller ones, and the third in letters that were smaller again. The characters had curves and twists that were vaguely reminiscent of Arabic script. Comic-book Arabic script. On both sides of the sign he drew peace symbols. When he had finished he said to himself: Now let’s see what happens. Then he dined on a ham sandwich and tomato bread, and shut himself in his room and masturbated, thinking about Dolors, until he fell asleep, the TV on with the volume turned down so as not to bother his parents. First thing the next morning he caught a train. In his carriage there were laborers and students, but mainly commuters on the way to the office, men wearing ties and women in respectable, ugly suits, although, here and there, he could see a few people dressed with a little more taste, who didn’t seem completely resigned to leading failed lives. These individuals seemed to have staked everything on sex and seduction, on attracting and being attracted, which wasn’t much, thought Vallirana, but at least it was something. The others made a pitiful showing: women with glasses and too much fat on their hips and thighs, men who could only inspire disgust if they stripped off in a bedroom. As for the laborers, who were easily identifiable by their blue or yellow overalls and their lunch boxes or foil-wrapped sandwiches, they seemed to be in another world; and to a large extent they were, since most of them were immigrants from Africa or South America, who didn’t care what the Spanish were doing. The students were dozing or going over their notes. When the train went into the tunnel in Barcelona, before reaching the Arco del Triunfo station, Vallirana shouted, “No war!” Some of the passengers, it seemed, were woken by the shout, and others were scared, but after the initial moment of surprise, almost everyone in the carriage responded by taking up the cry: “No war!”