by Rob Doyle
Besides, the last couple of weeks had seen an emissary of light enter my Paris life: a cat. My landlord and his wife were going on holiday and, for a modest deduction in rent, I had agreed to mind their cat while they were away. I had grown up with a mother who was afraid of cats (technically, ailurophobic), and so this was to be the first time I had ever lived with a cat. His name was Bobu. I spent hours with him each day, frolicking, observing his ways, courting his affection. The cat was mysterious to me. His habit was to leap up and plunge his fangs into my wrist, clawing me violently. After a few days with him, my arms were latticed with cuts. I wondered if this was the cat’s way of ‘playing’, but it seemed likelier that he just hated me. I gazed into his eyes and comprehended nothing. I thought of how the ancient Egyptians worshipped cats as inscrutable gods sojourning on the earth. Despite his inexplicable rage, I relished frolicking with my Bobu, stroking him, holding his paws, taunting him when he ignored me so he would bite and scratch me again (being mauled was preferable to his indifference). I felt I was getting more out of all this than he was. He probably just wanted me to fuck off. But I had nowhere to go and nothing to do, so I would curl up next to him, making plaintive meowing sounds which he imperiously ignored. Like a wretched lover, I was scorned and humiliated by the object of my affections, pitiably colluding in my own abasement.
I wheeled my suitcase to the Plaça de Catalunya, from where my next train headed north out of Barcelona and along the Mediterranean towards France. I was enthusiastic about seeing this part of Europe, and the adopted home of one of the writers who inspired me most. At the same time, I was a touch apprehensive. By all accounts, Blanes was black with Bolaño pilgrims. I was conscious of the indignity of being one of many who travelled to Blanes for no other reason than that a writer they admired – a man possessed of prodigious literary gifts, but otherwise a man like any other – had once lived and worked there. It was true that peak Bolaño had passed. There had been a point, about five years earlier, when Bolaño was omnivisible in the literary culture. But even now, post-peak, devotees still reputedly flocked to the streets where their idol had once rambled, the bars where he’d hung out, the bookshops he’d browsed in. Often these devotees then went and wrote about their trips to Blanes. If all the accounts of awed Bolañoites who had journeyed to Blanes were compiled in a book, it would be thicker than even Bolaño’s own brick-like masterworks The Savage Detectives and 2666. A Belgian writer, Hedwige Jeanmart, had even written a novel called Blanes, about a woman who travels to the town and discovers that it has been overrun by enthusiasts, the most hardcore obsessives competing for nightwatchman jobs at the campsites where Bolaño once worked. During my brief, excruciating stint as editor of an online literary magazine, I myself had commissioned my then flatmate to write about the trip to Blanes she had undertaken. The same woman had a Bolaño tattoo on her forearm, comprehension of which required a knowledge of his oeuvre.
Here I was, then, another sucker rolling into Blanes, afflicted by a geeky strain of the deluded backpacker’s complaint when he rocks up to whatever beach, cathedral or sacred valley and says: Too many tourists.
The train reached Blanes in early evening. Most of the passengers had disembarked at earlier points along the coast, a string of hotel-fronted towns looking on to the Mediterranean. Conveniently, the first stage of the Ruta Bolaño was right outside the railway station. There was an awkward moment: I had to ask two lady proselytisers to step aside so I could read the plaque, but they thought I wanted some of their Jesus flyers, one of which promised to reveal ‘God’s view on smoking’ (I assumed He wasn’t into it). The plaque was a red-and-black affair with an illustration of the author, and text in Catalan, Spanish, English and French. It also had a black-and-white photograph of the location, in this case with the same dark, dramatic clouds billowing around the station building as were currently gathering in real life. Along with a brief description of the location’s significance to Bolaño’s life in Blanes, there was a quotation from the author, with a shaky English translation:
I do not know when I got here. All I know was, that it was by train and many years ago.
An unlikely claim, and typical of Bolaño in its self-mythologising. In point of fact, Bolaño moved to Blanes in 1985, when he was thirty-two years old and had already met his wife, Carolina López. He would remain with López for the rest of his life, and they would have two children in Blanes, though in his final years he spent a lot of time with his mistress, Carmen Pérez de Vega. Previously Bolaño had lived for a spell in Barcelona, and before that in Gerona, his first home after he had exiled himself from Latin America. He lived in Blanes until his death in 2003 of liver disease. (His sickness fuelled the groundless rumour that in his youth Bolaño had been a heroin addict – part of the lucrative myth of Bolaño as the reckless Latino literary renegade.)
My hotel, where I’d got a bargain deal, was located a couple of kilometres outside the town centre, looking on to a motorway intersection. Stepping out of my taxi and into the reception area, I was startled by the beauty of the young olive-skinned woman who checked me in and photocopied my passport. She had one of those marvellous smiles that have nothing guarded or cynical in them. I showered, then put back on the same clothes and checked my emails. Half an hour later I waved to the girl on reception as I headed out for dinner. She beamed at me.
The seafront of Blanes is lined with hotels, bars and restaurants, but by the time I got there everything was closed. It was late September, the beginning of the off season, and the proprietors evidently saw no point in staying open past sunset. The beach was attractively floodlit but there was nobody on the promenade. I walked in the low roar of the surf, preoccupied by hunger. Towards the edge of town I was met with a remarkable sight: out in the liminal dark, where the wet sand sloped into the surf, a magnificent and glamorous woman was fishing, entirely alone. She was immensely tall, about six foot five unless this was some trick of perspective, with thigh-high leather boots and a sumptuous, moonlike ass. She drew back her rod and cast with great assurance far out into the dark sea. All the time I was watching her she did not glance to either side, nor behind her, but remained focused on the black horizon, immersed in her actions like a Zen archer.
The following morning, I was surprised at the liveliness of Blanes: it didn’t seem like the off-season after all. It was a gorgeous day with the temperature already in the mid-twenties, and the outdoor cafes were thronged with locals and tourists. The occasional bulging, crew-cut, fifty-something British male swaggered by, trailing an immense wife – reliable fixtures in any Spanish resort town. You could gaze at such a man and peer through the centuries: at whip-wielders in the colonies and plantations, overseers of vicious regimes, imperialist bullies and cruel enforcers. Ruddy-faced, swilled up, stranded in peacetime with no skulls to crack or natives to humiliate, they washed up on the Costa Brava and other sun-warmed coastlines, draped in Union Jacks, guzzling lager, vexed at having been born too late, in the hangover of Empire.
After breakfast I found the tourist office by a roundabout on the seafront. There, I picked up a Ruta Bolaño leaflet with a map indicating the locations of the seventeen stages. The blonde-haired lady at the desk mentioned that another Irish writer had been in just the other day, also enquiring about the Bolaño walk, and seeking a translator to accompany him to the botanical gardens further up the coast. I was intrigued by this writer who was one step ahead of me: for a moment I entertained a Philip K. Dickian – or indeed Bolañoesque – fancy that the writer was really myself, a double, flickering in some eerie glitch in the space–time continuum; or maybe it was an emissary from the future, seeking to warn me of danger; or myself in an alternate reality where I had an interest in botanical gardens. More prosaically, perhaps the elusive author stalking up the Costa Brava was just John Banville, Anne Enright or Roddy Doyle, fleeing whatever demons tormented them. The lady checked her computer: the writer who preceded me was not my doppelgänger, nor Banville nor Enright, but a perso
n with the fantastical name of Turtle Bunbury.
Before setting off for the remaining sixteen stages, I walked out on to the rocky promontory. From there I viewed the town, the coast and the hilltop Castell de Sant Joan, which stood sentry in the distance. There were some people out swimming, mostly elderly, and I regretted that I had forgotten my trunks, as I do every time I travel to the sea. The Mediterranean shimmered brilliantly under a high sun. The very word ‘Mediterranean’ had always been potent for me: I knew that when I wrote up this trip for my article, I would exploit every possible opportunity to use it. (‘In Blanes I have the Mediterranean, the sea I prefer to all others,’ Bolaño once said in an interview.) Back on the shore, I followed the beach away from the holidaymakers and covered restaurants. The second plaque was on the wall of what was now a fruit and veg shop, but which had once housed the jeweller’s that Bolaño and Carolina López opened upon arriving in Blanes. In the photo, a goofy Bolaño grinned and made a peace sign outside his new business. López stood beside him, tall and attractive. She bore some resemblance to Patti Smith, herself a Bolaño aficionado. (Smith attended the 2011 inauguration ceremony of the Carrer de Roberto Bolaño, a street in Gerona. A video on the internet shows her stepping on to a windblown stage, daring a few words in touchingly awful Spanish, then singing a song in Bolaño’s honour.)
The next point marked the site of a former beachfront bar reputedly frequented by junkies, fishermen and lowlifes, where Bolaño, a non-drinker, liked to pass the time and strike up conversations. The fourth plaque adorned the wall outside the Videoclub Serra, where he would talk movies with the owner, Narcís Serra. Film and dream are twin media of entrancement in Bolaño’s fiction. ‘Tell a dream, lose a reader,’ said Henry James, but Bolaño had a singular ability to get away with it. A poet who turned to fiction (he liked to claim it was only for money that he resorted to ‘the vulgarity of telling stories’, but this is more myth-making), his novels and stories teem with recounted dreams. It is as if Bolaño the storyteller frequently wearied of the demands of narrative and compelled one of his characters to sleep, thereby permitting himself to exercise the inexhaustible resources of his imagination, generating pure imagery undiluted by the requirements of plot or realism. Flick through any of his books and you will encounter beautifully described dreams: burning chairs fall from the sky; a crazy man in the woods translates the Marquis de Sade with axe blows; rival gangs fight for a distant supermarket. There are dreamers who dream they are dreaming, while even a waking character might suddenly glimpse his author, ‘as if he were in a kaleidoscope and caught sight of the eye watching him’. Or take this grandly superfluous dream from Tres, the posthumously published minor work I happened to be rereading:
Giorgio Fox, a comic-book character, seventeen-year-old art critic, dines at a 30th-floor restaurant in Rome. That’s it.
In Bolaño, characters dream, or they watch films, and the descriptions, which add little by way of plot or character development, are often indistinguishable: films are dream-like and dreams are cinematic. (Bolaño admired the Chilean film-maker Alejandro Jodorowksy, a surrealist who ignored the conventions of narrative cinema in favour of dream logic and the primacy of image.) In the Maristain biography, one friend remembers Bolaño doing nothing at all except read, write and watch TV, taking in late-night films as ravenously as the books he read.
Surprisingly, even in this era of streams and torrents, the plaque-bearing premises still housed the Videoclub Serra; a shabby, unlit neon sign outside read Videos. The outlet was now entirely automated. An old man was returning some DVDs through a hole in the wall with a furtive, suspicious air; I wondered if he’d been watching dirty movies.
Off a main road, on Carrer Aurora, was the site of one of the apartments where Bolaño had lived with his family. I dutifully read the plaque and took a photo. As I was walking away, a short man in his sixties gestured to me. It was Bolaño’s one-time landlord, still the proprietario and happy to talk to me about the writer.
Was Bolaño simpático? I asked, unable on the spot to come up with a less inane question.
The landlord shook his head. ‘No, no.’ He insisted that Bolaño was locked in his head, unwilling to take other people’s ideas on board.
‘Obstinado?’ I offered.
‘Sí, sí. Muy obstinado.’ A vigorous nodding.
I thanked the man, took a picture of him by the home of his bullheaded tenant, then walked across the road to the library, thinking that nobody ever got on with their landlord. The library too had a plaque outside and, inside, a conference room, the Sala Roberto Bolaño. In here, rows of silver plastic chairs faced a stage. A video showed residents of Blanes line dancing on a plaza, while John Denver’s ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’ played on a tinny loop. There was a stand displaying Bolaño’s books (in Spanish), all published by Anagrama in artful covers. There were copies of a novel I had heard about but never seen before: Advice from a Disciple of Morrison to a Fanatic of Joyce, co-written with one A. G. Porta. It was Bolaño’s first novel, not yet translated into English. The conference room was empty. Glancing about me, I fleetingly considered stealing the volume in criminal tribute to the author who had been a prolific book-thief in his penniless, poetry-drunk youth. On the wall was yet another plaque, with a quotation in Spanish:
I just hope to be considered a more or less decent South American writer who lived in Blanes, and loved this town.
I sat and rested for a spell, watching the line dancers. I was enjoying the walking tour, pleased by the town with its sea and sunshine. But what I was really looking forward to was getting back to my hotel and watching telly. I loved watching telly, could spend hours immersed in it. I did not own a television, hadn’t done so in years, and whenever I had a chance to watch one – whenever I was staying in a hotel, essentially – I seized it. It was so much fun, sitting up in bed, hopping from channel to channel, drinking in everything from political discussions to music videos, to classic films, to women rubbing their groins while leering at the camera, to sports chat, to Islamic State gossip, to celebrity intrigue. You learned so much about the world: a night of TV was worth ten novels. When I was younger, I had automatically rejected television because it was what my parents did. Now that I had matured, a lifetime spent watching TV seemed about the most exotic and experimental kind I could imagine. As the rest of humankind migrated on to the internet, my return to TV took on the quality of a revolt against the spirit of the age: I would be the last couch potato, a brother in arms to that Japanese soldier who held out for decades in the jungle of some Pacific island, refusing to concede that the war was lost.
I needed to earn my TV binge, though, so I headed out to find the rest of the stages. Within an hour and a half I had ticked them all off. There were the promenades where Bolaño liked to sit, read, smoke and stroll; the cake shop owned by a bookish acquaintance with whom he enjoyed shooting the breeze; the bookshop where the staff always managed to get hold of the titles he requested; the gaming shop where Bolaño, a war-games geek, could meet fellow aficionados and buy accessories. It was all fairly interesting to anyone who had immersed themselves in the universe of Bolaño’s fractal, allusive and often autobiographical fiction; but some of the texts on the plaques really were of a formidable banality: ‘In this newsagent’s situated near his home, he would go and buy the newspaper. He would often start up conversations with the shop assistants for the pleasure of debating current topics.’
Several of the tour stages were clustered in the old part of town, which was easier on the eye than the sprawl of high-rise blocks beyond the centre. Here, for instance, was the home where Bolaño lived after leaving Carrer Aurora and, on the same street, the studio where he wrote from the mid-nineties on. The studio had no telephone, which probably abetted Bolaño’s astounding productivity. Even now, with the author twelve years dead, new titles kept on appearing, plucked from the seemingly bottomless well of manuscripts and computer files he’d left behind. Some of these posthumous publicat
ions, such as Woes of the True Policeman, are worthy additions to his oeuvre, while even the more mediocre works have been received gratefully by Bolaño addicts. Being one such myself, I had even read The Third Reich, a weird and interminable novel I finished in the same spirit in which it had clearly been written: sheer perversity.
Bolaño’s prolific output troubled me because it was at odds with my personal ethic of writing. Over the past few years, I had come to believe that there were simply too many books in the world. The situation, I sometimes imagined, had become so critical that it ought now to be regarded as a criminal act to publish a book that did not absolutely need – in a sense I could not precisely define but which had something to do with urgency and perhaps suffering – to exist. Obviously, this was a demented, reactionary position, and most of the time I was able to recognise it as such while getting on with my own reading and writing. Still, the underlying point felt valid: one would do better to publish strictly when animated by urgency and conviction. (‘One should speak only where one cannot remain silent,’ wrote harsh old Nietzsche; ‘… the rest is all chatter, “literature”, bad breeding.’) Experimenting with the practical implications of all this, I had made it a point of pride to write only when I felt like it. The problem was, I almost never felt like it. What I did feel like doing was watching telly or pornography; sitting in bars in the eleventh arrondissement; going to the canal with a beer and a book; loitering in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont; listening to music while lying on the couch; playing with my cat; texting friends; or doing nothing at all.
