The Insufferable Gaucho

by Roberto Bolaño

The poem, then, begins with a child. Naturally the poem of adventure and horror begins with the pure gaze of a child. Then it goes on:

  One morning we set out. Our heart is full,

  our mind ablaze with rancor and disgust,

  we yield it all to the rhythm of the waves,

  our infinite self awash on the finite sea:

  some are escaping from their country’s shame,

  some from the horror of life at home, and some

  —astrologers blinded by a woman’s stare—

  are fugitives from Circe’s tyranny;

  rather than be turned to swine they drug

  themselves on wind and sea and glowing skies;

  rain and snow and incinerating suns

  gradually erase her kisses’ scars.

  But only those who leave for leaving’s sake

  are travelers; hearts tugging like balloons,

  they never balk at what they call their fate

  and, not knowing why, keep muttering “away” . . .

  In a way, the voyage undertaken by the crew in Baudelaire’s poem is similar to the voyage of a convict ship. I shall set off, I shall venture into unknown territory, and see what I find, see what happens. But first I shall give up everything. Or to put it another way: genuine travel requires travelers who have nothing to lose. The voyage, this long and hazardous nineteenth-century voyage, resembles the patient’s voyage on a gurney, from his room to the operating theater, where masked men and women await him, like bandits from the sect of the Hashishin. It’s true that the early stages of the voyage are not devoid of paradisiacal visions, which owe more to the travelers’ desires or cultural background than to reality:

  Awesome travelers! What noble chronicles

  we read in your unfathomable eyes!

  Open the sea-chests of your memories

  The poem also says: Tell us what you’ve seen! And the traveler, or the ghost that represents the traveler and his companions, replies by listing the circles of Hell. Baudelaire’s traveler clearly isn’t saying that the flesh is sad or that he has read all the books, although he just as clearly knows that entropy’s gem and trophy, the flesh, is more than merely sad, and that once a single book has been read, all the others have been read as well. Baudelaire’s traveler has a full heart and a mind ablaze with rancor and disgust, which means that he’s probably a radical, modern traveler, although of course he’s someone who, understandably, wants to come through; he wants to see, but he also wants to come through it alive. The voyage, as it unfolds in the poem, is like a ship or an unruly caravan heading straight for the abyss, but the traveler, to judge from his disgust, desperation, and scorn, wants to come through it alive. And what he finds in the end, like Ulysses or the patient traveling on his gurney who confuses the ceiling with the abyss, is his own image:

  It is a bitter truth our travels teach!

  Tiny and monotonous, the world

  has shown—will always show us—what we are:

  oases of fear in the wasteland of ennui!

  In that line alone there is more than enough. In the middle of a desert of ennui, an oasis of fear, or horror. There is no more lucid diagnosis of the illness of modern humanity. To break out of ennui, to escape from boredom, all we have at our disposal—and it’s not even automatically at our disposal, again we have to make an effort—is horror, in other words, evil. Either we live like zombies, like slaves fed on soma, or we become slave drivers, malignant individuals, like that guy who, after killing his wife and three children, said, as the sweat poured off him, that he felt strange, possessed by something he’d never known: freedom, and then he said that the victims had deserved it, although a few hours later, when he’d calmed down a bit, he also said that no one deserved to die so horribly, and added that he’d probably gone crazy and told the police not to listen to him. An oasis is always an oasis, especially if you come to it from a desert of boredom. In an oasis you can drink, eat, tend to your wounds, and rest, but if it’s an oasis of horror, if that’s the only sort there is, the traveler will be able to confirm, and this time irrefutably, that the flesh is sad, that a day comes when all the books have indeed been read, and that travel is the pursuit of a mirage. All the indications are that every oasis in existence has either attained or is drifting toward the condition of horror.

  Illness and the Documentary

  One of the most vivid images of illness I can recall is of a guy whose name I’ve forgotten, a New York artist who worked in the space between begging and the avant-garde, between the adepts of fist-fucking and the modern-day mendicants. One night, years ago, very late, when the TV audience had dwindled to me, I saw him in a documentary. He was an extreme masochist, and extracted the raw materials of his art from his proclivity or fate or incurable vice. Half actor, half painter. As I remember, he wasn’t very tall and he was going bald. He filmed his experiments: scenes or dramatizations of pain. Pain that grew more and more intense, and sometimes brought the artist to the brink of death. One day, after a routine visit to the hospital, they tell him he has a fatal illness. At first he is surprised. But the surprise doesn’t last long. Almost straightaway, the guy begins to film his final performance, which, as opposed to the earlier ones, turns out to be admirably restrained, at least at the start. He seems calm and, above all, subdued, as if he had ceased to believe in the effectiveness of wild gestures and overacting. We see him, for example, on a bicycle, pedaling along a kind of seaside boulevard—it must be Coney Island—then sitting on a breakwater, reminiscing about unrelated scenes from his childhood and adolescence while he looks at the ocean and occasionally throws a sidelong glance at the camera. His voice and expression are neither cold nor warm. He doesn’t sound like an alien, or a man desperately hiding under his bed with his eyes shut tight. Perhaps he has the voice, and the expression, of a blind man, but if so, it is clearly the voice of a blind man addressing himself to the blind. I wouldn’t say that he has serenely accepted his fate or resolved to resist it with all his strength, what I would say is that he is a man who is utterly indifferent to his fate. The final scenes take place in the hospital. The guy knows he won’t be getting out of there alive; he knows that death is the only thing left, but he still looks at the camera, whose function is to document this final performance. And only at this point does the sleepless viewer realize that there are in fact two cameras, and two films: the documentary that he is watching on television, a French or German production, and the documentary recording the performance, which will follow the artist whose name I’ve forgotten or never knew right up to the moment of his death, the documentary that he is directing, with an iron hand or an iron gaze, from his procrustean bed. That’s how it is. A voice, the voice of the French or German narrator, says goodbye to the New Yorker, and then, when the screen has faded to black, pronounces the date of his death, a few weeks later. The pain artist’s documentary, however, follows the dying step by step, but we don’t see that, we can only imagine it, or let the image fade to black and read the clinical date of his death, because if we watched, if we saw, it would be unbearable.

  Illness and Poetry

  Between the vast deserts of boredom and the not-so-scarce oases of horror, there is, however, a third option, or perhaps a delusion, which Baudelaire indicates in the following lines:

  Once we have burned our brains out, we can plunge

  to Hell or Heaven—any abyss will do—

  deep in the Unknown to find the new!

  That final line, deep i
n the Unknown to find the new, is art’s paltry flag pitting itself against the horror that adds to horror without making a substantial difference, just as one infinity added to another produces an infinite sum. A losing battle from the start, like all the battles poets fight. This is something that Lautréamont seems to contradict, because his voyage takes him from the periphery to the metropolis, and his way of traveling and seeing remains cloaked in the most impenetrable mystery, so that we can’t tell if we’re dealing with a militant nihilist or an outrageous optimist or the secret mastermind of the imminent Commune; and it’s something that Rimbaud clearly understood, since he plunged with equal fervor into reading, sex, and travel, only to discover and accept, with a diamond-like lucidity, that writing doesn’t matter at all (writing is obviously the same as reading, and sometimes it’s quite similar to traveling, and it can even, on special occasions, resemble sex, but all that, Rimbaud tells us, is a mirage: there is only the desert and from time to time the remote, degrading lights of an oasis). And then along comes Mallarmé, the least innocent of all the great poets, who says that we must travel, we must set off traveling again. At this point, even the most naïve reader has to wonder: What’s got into Mallarmé? Why is he so enthusiastic? Is he trying to sell us a trip or sending us to our deaths with our hands and feet tied? Is this an elaborate joke or simply a pattern of sounds? It would be utterly absurd to suppose that Mallarmé had not read Baudelaire. So what is he trying to do? The answer, I think, is perfectly simple. Mallarmé wants to start all over again, even though he knows that the voyage and the voyagers are doomed. In other words, for the author of Igitur, the illness afflicts not only our actions, but also language itself. But while we are looking for the antidote or the medicine to cure us, that is, the new, which can only be found by plunging deep into the Unknown, we have to go on exploring sex, books, and travel, although we know that they lead us to the abyss, which, as it happens, is the only place where the antidote can be found.

  Illness and Tests

  And now it is time to return to that enormous elevator, the biggest I’ve ever seen, an elevator in which there was space enough for a shepherd to pen a smallish flock of sheep, or a farmer to stable two mad cows, or a nurse to fit two empty gurneys, and in which I was torn between asking the tiny doctor—almost as small as a Japanese doll—if she would make love with me, or at least give it a try, and (this was the likelier option) bursting into tears, like Alice in Wonderland, and flooding the elevator not with blood, as in Kubrick’s The Shining, but with salt water. This was one of those situations in which good manners, which are never redundant, and rarely a hindrance, did in fact hinder me, and soon the Japanese doctor and I were shut in a cubicle, with a window from which you could see the back part of the hospital, doing some very odd tests, which seemed to me exactly like the tests you find on the puzzle page of the Sunday paper. I was careful to do them as well as I could, as if I wanted to prove to her that my specialist was mistaken—a futile enterprise, because however perfectly I did the tests, the little Japanese doctor remained impassive: not even a tiny smile of encouragement. Between tests, while she was getting the next one ready, we talked. I asked her about the chances of success with a liver transplant. Vely good, she said. What percent? I asked. Sixty per cent, she said. Jesus, I said, that’s not much. In politics it’s absolute majolity, she said. One of the tests, maybe the simplest, made a big impression on me. It consisted of holding my hands out in a vertical position for a few seconds, that is, with the fingers pointing up, the palms facing her and the backs to me. I asked her what the hell that test was about. Her reply was that at a more advanced stage of my illness, I wouldn’t be able to hold my fingers in that position. They would, inevitably, curve toward her. I think I said: Christ almighty. Maybe I laughed. In any case, every day since then, wherever I happen to be, I take that test. I hold my hands out, palms facing away, and for a few seconds I examine my knuckles, my nails, the wrinkles that form on each phalange. The day when my fingers can’t hold themselves up straight, I don’t really know what I’ll do, although I do know what I won’t do. Mallarmé wrote that a roll of the dice will never abolish chance. And yet every day the dice have to be rolled, just as the vertical-fingers test has to be taken every day.

  Illness and Kafka

  Elias Canetti, in his book on the twentieth century’s greatest writer, says that Kafka understood that the dice had been rolled and that nothing could come between him and writing the day he spat blood for the first time. What do I mean when I say that nothing could come between him and his writing? To be honest, I don’t really know. I guess I mean that Kafka understood that travel, sex, and books are paths that lead nowhere except to the loss of the self, and yet they must be followed and the self must be lost, in order to find it again, or to find something, whatever it may be—a book, an expression, a misplaced object—in order to find anything at all, a method, perhaps, and, with a bit of luck, the new, which has been there all along.

  The Myths of Cthulhu

  for Alan Pauls

  These are dark times we live in, but let me begin with a buoyant declaration. Literature in Spanish is in excellent condition! Magnificent, superlative condition!

  In fact, if it was any better I’d be worried.

  But let’s not get too carried away. It’s good, but it’s not going to give anyone a heart attack. There’s nothing to suggest any kind of great leap forward.

  According to a critic by the name of Conte, Pérez Reverte is Spain’s perfect novelist. I don’t have a copy of the article in which he makes that claim, so I can’t cite it exactly. As I recall, he said that Pérez Reverte was the most perfect novelist in contemporary Spanish literature, as if it were possible to go on perfecting oneself after having achieved perfection. His principal quality, but I don’t know if it was Conte who said this or the novelist Juan Marsé, is readability. A readability that makes him not only the most perfect novelist but also the most read. That is: the one who sells the most books.

  But if we adopt that point of view, Spanish fiction’s perfect novelist could just as well be Vázquez Figueroa, who spends his spare time inventing desalination machines or desalination plants: contraptions that will soon be turning sea water into fresh water, suitable for irrigation, showers, and probably even for drinking. Vázquez Figueroa might not be the most perfect, but he certainly is perfect in his way. He’s readable. He’s enjoyable. He sells a lot. His stories, like those of Pérez Reverte, are full of adventures.

  I really wish I had a copy of Conte’s review. It’s a pity I don’t collect press clippings, like that character in Cela’s The Beehive, who keeps an article that he wrote for a provincial newspaper, probably one of the Workers’ Movement papers, in the pocket of his shabby jacket—a likable character, by the way; in the movie, he was played by José Sacristán, and that’s how I always see him in my mind’s eye, with that pale helpless face, the incongruous face of a beaten dog, carrying that crumpled clipping around in his pocket as he wanders over the impossible tablelands of Spain. At this point I hope you’ll allow me to indulge in a pair of elucidatory digressions or sighs: José Sacristán, what a fine actor! His performances are so enjoyable, so readable. And Camilo José Cela, what an odd phenomenon! More and more he reminds me of a Chilean estate-holder or a Mexican rancher; his illegitimate children (as Latin Americans would politely say) or his bastards keep springing up like weeds: vulgar, reluctant, but tenacious and gruff, like candid
lilacs out of the dead land, as the candid Eliot put it.

  By attaching Cela’s incredibly fat corpse to a horse, we could produce the new El Cid of Spanish letters, and we have!

  Statement of principles:

  In principle, I have nothing against clear, enjoyable writing. In practice, it depends.

  It’s always a good idea to state this principle when venturing into the world of literature: a sort of Club Med cunningly disguised as a swamp, a desert, a working-class suburb, or a novel-as-mirror reflecting itself.

  Here’s a rhetorical question that I’d like someone to answer for me: Why does Pérez Reverte or Vázquez Figueroa or any other bestselling author, for example Muñoz Molina or that young man who goes by the resonant name of De Prada, sell so much? Is it just because their books are enjoyable and easy to follow? Is it just because they tell stories that keep the reader in suspense? Won’t anyone give me an answer? Where is the man who will dare to answer? It’s all right, you can keep quiet. I hate to see people lose their friends. I’ll answer the question myself. The answer is no. It’s not just that. They sell and they are popular because their stories can be understood. That is, because the readers, who are never wrong—I don’t mean as readers, obviously, but as consumers, of books in this case—understand their novels or stories perfectly. This is something that the critic Conte knows, or perhaps, given his youth, intuits. It’s something that the novelist Marsé, who is old, has learned from experience. The public, the public, as García Lorca said to a hustler while they hid in an entrance hall, is never, never, never wrong. And why is the public never wrong? Because the public understands.