The Spirit of Science Fiction

by Roberto Bolaño

  “Fine. How was it here?”

  “A scene. I don’t think I’ll ask them up again. They’re too belligerent when they drink: César got into a fistfight with José Arco. Luckily, he didn’t pick me as scapegoat.”

  “Scapegoats have nothing to do with it, Jan. Anyway, I can stand up for myself. . . . Who won?”

  “Our friend, of course, but with a little help.”

  “Don’t tell me you ganged up on poor César.”

  “It would be more correct to say that we held him down. José Arco was the only one who hit him.”

  “What a bunch of cowards. Really, I can’t believe it.”

  “Heh-heh-heh.”

  “I’m not surprised that you dreamed of Belyaev, then. It must be your guilty conscience gnawing at you.”

  “Call it self-defense. Your rival is one tough nut. Anyway, if it were me, I would tread carefully. Before he left, he swore that he would make you pay—multiple times over, naturally—for every punch that José Arco got in. Though there weren’t many, to be honest.”

  “What will Laura think?”

  “He said something about Laura, too, but I’ll keep it to myself. I don’t know what you were thinking, leaving with Laura just then. César was desperate. He spent a long time looking for the two of you on the roof. Maybe he thought you were hiding in one of the toilets, which is pretty standard practice, I can tell you from experience. When he came back to the room without you, he blew up. By the way, where did you go?”

  “We walked to Chapultepec, talking all the way. Then we had breakfast together, and I took her to the Metro.”

  “See? César imagined you were at a sleazy hotel.”

  “What an ass.”

  “Fortunately, our José Arco turns out to be good with his fists, though I can tell you he’s no stylist; he’s more of a slugger. But listen to this: during the fight, your rival did his best to break as many objects as possible in this, your humble abode. Whereas José Arco worried more about the glasses, books, and fingers scattered around on the floor than his own face.”

  “One of these days, his gallantry will get him killed.”

  “Knock on wood. . . . In any case, the thing ended well. Between us, Angélica and I kicked out the thwarted suitor. Not a drop of blood was spilled. Estrellita’s sleep was only disturbed when it was time to leave. I turned down Colina and Mendoza’s invitation to come with the group in search of a restaurant that was open for breakfast. Once I had said I wasn’t coming, Mendoza seized the opportunity to make an exit with his arm around Angélica’s waist. A well-intentioned gesture if you consider that it must have been seven in the morning or something. An angelic gesture, even, but that’s really not my main concern right now. Lola and Héctor left before the fight. José Arco stayed for a while, and the two of us cleaned up the mess a little. Mostly what we did was fall around laughing at your César and everybody else. Finally he left, too, and I lay down on the mattress. But I didn’t sleep: I wrote a letter to Ursula Le Guin. Could you mail it for me today?”

  “Of course. What do you say in the letter?”

  “I talk about dreams and the Revolution.”

  “Nothing about the Unknown University?”

  “No . . .”

  “Why don’t you ask her if she knows where to find it?”

  The days (or hours) that followed were exceedingly sweet, in many people’s opinions. Up until then, I had been an onlooker in Mexico City, a fairly pretentious recent arrival and a clumsy twenty-one-year-old poet. The city, I mean, took no notice of me, and my dreams never escaped the confines of pedantry and deadly artifice. (Oh, if nothing had happened or at least if Jan and José Arco had kept their mouths shut, instead of being where I am now, I’d be in the Paradise of Latin American Men of Letters—in other words, teaching at an American university or at worst correcting galleys at a second-rate publishing house, peaceful haven, infinite promise.) Still, the days were sweet. Very sweet. Jan and José Arco immersed themselves in calculations and conjectures that we could never have imagined. My status as onlooker persisted, but with a new twist: the seeing eye was able to transmute itself into the streets and objects that it observed, which is what someone (Chateaubriand? the Prophet of the Crossroads?) once called a dry orgasm. At the call of the Aztec Princess, projects, poems, the cult of pocketbook and prudence were abandoned—everything, except for Mexico City (which adopted me overnight) and Lewis Carroll. Our everyday existence was suddenly upset: romantic rendezvous blossomed on one side and the pleasures of the labyrinth and the tangled web on the other. José Arco landed a meeting with Dr. Ireneo Carvajal. Pepe Colina, when we told him about the existence of the Conasupo Weekly, gave us the address of someone by the name of Leonardo Díaz, a poet devoted body and soul to literary paradoxes. Jan’s letters to the United States multiplied. In my dreams, Laura actually said onward! set out in search of the Hurricane, against a backdrop of alpine scenery, her hair bright and electrified. In real life, Laura said I love you, we’re going to be very happy. And very good! I added. We have to be good and generous, Laura! We have to be compassionate and selfless! Laura laughed, but I was serious. One afternoon, I’ll never forget it, as we were going up the escalator in the Metro, I did a tap dance. That was all. I had never tried anything like it, and it came out perfect. Laura said, you do that so well. You’re the spitting image of Fred Astaire. I was surprised. I shrugged, and my eyes filled with tears.

  “Why are you sad?”

  “I don’t know, but I feel like I’ve been torn apart,” I said.

  “All because you did a tap dance? Poor thing, come here and let me give you a hug.”

  “Let’s stay like this with our arms around each other, okay?”

  “But then we’ll be in the way of people getting off.”

  “Well, then we’ll get off, too, but slowly.”

  And the echo: we have to be good and generous, Laura! We have to be compassionate and selfless, because otherwise terror will turn its gaze on us! And Laura laughed, of course, and I did, too, but my laughter wasn’t as confident.

  As for Jan, his letters multiplied, as I’ve said. In fact, he spent most of the day writing letters and reading science fiction books that José Arco and I brought him by the cartload. The books were almost all stolen, which was easy enough with the assistance of José Arco, who was untiring in such pursuits. It was no simple thing to deliver the list of titles and authors that Jan required. Many of them hadn’t been translated into Spanish yet and needed to be lifted from specialty English bookstores, which were few and far between in Mexico City and, what’s worse, equipped with private security more suited to the library at Alcatraz. Still, after some near misses, Jan had all the books he wanted at his disposal. These books, underlined, scribbled on, and underlined again, piled up so chaotically in every corner of the room that it could be hard to get around; going out to pee in the middle of the night when you weren’t quite awake, without turning on the light, could be dangerous: pests like E. E. Smith—the little rat—or Olaf Stapledon, or the near-complete works of Philip K. Dick posing as a boulder could trip you when you least expected it. It wasn’t unusual to wake up from a nightmare with a book by Brian Aldiss or the brothers Strugatsky wrapping itself around your feet, and it was useless, of course, to conjecture how the book in question had ended up in that precise spot, though I have to admit that we didn’t make our beds too frequently. (I don’t think I can be accused of being dramatic when I say that I was once woken by my own cries: not only was I kicking at a book, but I had gripped its pages between my toes like a monkey, and to make matters worse, one of my feet had fallen asleep and my toes, against all logic, curled around the pages and refused to let go.) Until finally Jan decided to tidy up that galactic trash heap. One early afternoon, all the books turned up stacked against the wall, but in such a way that instead of a pile of books it looked like a bench in the town square. The on
ly things missing were the trees and pigeons, but the feel of a bench in a plaza, the aura of it, radiated from the pile of stolen volumes. Almost immediately I realized that this was precisely the intent.

  “How did you do it?” I exclaimed in surprise.

  “With patience.” Jan looked strange, overexcited, his skin almost transparent.

  “It reminds me of . . . the benches in the Plaza de Armas in Los Ángeles.”

  “Moral of the story: never underestimate the paperback.”

  The next day the bench disappeared, or rather it metamorphosed into a modernist table about fifteen inches tall, a solid mass of books with a couple of tunnels that opened on two of its five sides, then met at the center and came out together on the far side, the side full of edges. To drive home the joke, Jan had set a glass of water with a flower in it in the middle of the table, on the cover of a book by John Varley.

  “Señora Estela’s daughter gave me the carnation.”

  “Very pretty, Jan, very pretty . . .”

  “Hmm, yeah, not bad . . . We can even eat on it, if you want; it’s sturdy, but we’ll have to find something to use as a tablecloth, okay? I don’t want you getting food on any of the books.”

  “No, man, you’ve got to be kidding. Let’s eat at the real table.”

  “Why? Look, touch it, it’s strong, well made.”

  We had lunch there, on the books covered by a light blanket, and dinner, too—José Arco was with us, and at first he didn’t believe it, so we had to lift the blanket so he could see that the table was made of books. That night, before he went to sleep, Jan actually suggested that I could write at the table if I wanted to. I flatly refused.

  After a while, I asked him, “Did you sit?”

  Jan’s eyes were closed, and he looked asleep, but he answered in a clear voice.

  “No.”

  “Did you think the bench wouldn’t hold you?”

  “No, it wasn’t that.”

  “Why didn’t you sit, then? Or why didn’t you ask me to sit?”

  “I was . . . afraid. . . . No, not afraid . . . It made me feel sad. Sad deep inside. Shit, that sounds like a corrido.”

  “No, like a bolero . . . Heh-heh-heh . . . Good night, Jan, sweet dreams.”

  “Good night, Remo, write good things.”

  Then I was the one who was scared. It wasn’t sadness or uneasiness. It was fear. There, with a cigarette hanging from my lips, the room lit only by the glow of the lamp, my friend about to start snoring and fall asleep for real (God willing), and the city spinning outside.

  But sunrise came, and the fear went away. It was a sunrise that said hello, hello, little cowards, hello, hello. Do you know who I am? as it pushed on the windowpane and pressed our shadows against the wall. Of course, I said. Five minutes later, half asleep and pulling the sheet over his head, Jan said: of course, you’re the incredible sunrise that promised to show up every three days. Exactly, exactly, said the sunrise, and we yawned, made tea—kind of a pain in the ass, this sunrise, don’t you think?—we smoked, we told each other our dreams. Hello, hello, yippee! I’m the Mexican sunrise that always beats death.

  “Of course,” Jan said mockingly.

  “Sure, why not,” I murmured.

  The earthly abode of Dr. Ireneo Carvajal was on the fourth floor of a 1950s apartment building in a working-class neighborhood with lots of kids—there was a day care on the fifth floor, to judge by the noise—and a notable lack of the silence and mystery in which José Arco and I had wreathed the director of the Poetry Bulletin of Mexico City. The doctor received us in a tobacco-colored robe that fell to his shins and seemed excessive considering the heat of the day; he was a thin man of indeterminate age, between forty and sixty, his angular face scored by precise and symmetrical wrinkles. His bearing was that of someone sad and well bred. In contrast to the living-room furnishings, which were tidy and petit bourgeois, the collar of his shirt showed signs of neglect or poverty. He avoided our eyes, listening to us in silence with his gaze fixed on the floor or the foot of an armchair, and as José Arco explained why we had come, he began to bite his lips more and more furiously, as if our presence was suddenly a strain. When at last he spoke, I thought it would be to show us out. I was wrong.

  “Boys,” he said, “I fail to understand why you’re so interested in a perfectly ordinary phenomenon.”

  “Don’t you think it’s odd, to say the least, that there are more than six hundred literary magazines in Mexico City?”

  Dr. Carvajal smiled benevolently.

  “Let’s not exaggerate. My esteemed friend Ubaldo, always so seismic, has gotten himself all worked up about nothing. Six hundred literary magazines? It depends on what you call a magazine and how you define literature. More than a quarter of these magazines are really a few sheets of paper, photocopied and stapled in runs of twenty at best, sometimes fewer. Literature? According to me, yes; according to Octavio Paz, for example, no; scribbles, shadows, diary entries, sentences as mysterious as a telephone directory; from a professor’s perspective, they’re a distant jet trail, the faint echo of a nameless failure; from a policeman’s perspective, they’re not even anything subversive. No matter who you ask, they’re essentially texts outside the realm of literary history. Of course, heh-heh, I’m not talking about government publications.”

  “It still seems incredible to me—excuse me, I mean disturbing. Don Ubaldo told us that he didn’t think there were more than two hundred magazines published in Mexico City last year.”

  “In My Enchanted Garden,” I added, “you say that by the end of the year there may be more than a thousand, enough to make The Guinness Book of World Records.”

  “Maybe,” said Dr. Carvajal, shrugging his shoulders. “But even so, I fail to see why it matters to you. . . . Do you want to prove that a record was set? Compile an anthology of rare texts? Let me disabuse you of that notion: There are no rare texts. Wretched ones, to be sure, and luminous ones, but none of them rare.”

  “They interest us as a symptom.”

  “A symptom of what?”

  José Arco didn’t answer. I guessed that my friend was thinking about the Hurricane. Dr. Carvajal got up with an enigmatic smile and left the room. He came back with a few of the magazines.

  “Photocopied sheets, mimeographed sheets, even handwritten sheets, the output of poetry workshops for self-proclaimed orphans, modern-music fanzines, song lyrics, a drama in verse on the death of Cuauhtémoc, all with the occasional spelling mistake, all humbly situated in the very center of the world . . . Ay, Mexico . . .”

  The magazines, scattered on the table that separated our armchairs from our host’s wooden chair, seemed as skeletal as the prisoners of Nazi concentration camps. Like those emaciated figures, or like the photographs we see of them, I mean, they were black and white and had big, hollow eyes. I thought: they have eyes, they’re looking at us. Then, feigning a calm that I suddenly didn’t feel, I said, “They do look pretty pathetic,” and right away I felt like an idiot.

  “A symptom of the Revolution.” José Arco’s voice, unlike mine, sounded firm and confident, though I could tell that he was bluffing.

  “Such arrogance!” exclaimed the doctor. “Though the producers of these sheets would be thrilled to hear you say so. To me, the magazines are the symptom of a certain kind of unhappiness. Let me tell you another story that will surely be a lesson to us; it comes from the book Ten Years in Africa by the Chiapas priest Sabino Gutiérrez. The events narrated by Father Gutiérrez take place in a village near Kindu, in what was then the Belgian Congo. This was at some point in the 1920s, though Father Gutiérrez was in the village only twice, the first time to visit his friend Pierre Leclerc, a French missionary, and the second time to lay flowers on Leclerc’s grave. Both visits were brief. In between, Gutiérrez traveled across southeast Congo to Lake Mweru, reaping no great evangelical rewards but fin
ding delight as an incorrigible tourist, finally settling in Angola for eight months at least. This is when the events that I’m about to describe took place, and I believe that they are in some way related to what I fear you glimpse behind the small-magazine phenomenon, though they have little to do with the phenomenon itself. Before I continue, I must warn you that after years spent in Africa, mostly on trips and expeditions that for some reason are never fully explained, Father Gutiérrez wasn’t easily surprised. And yet something about this village near Kindu awakened his curiosity: the natives displayed unusual manual dexterity, a talent for woodworking that he had never seen before. Or possibly it wasn’t their skill that impressed him but their enthusiasm, the atmosphere. In a moving passage, he recalls his one stroll through the village with Leclerc, whom he had met in Rome and to whom he seems bound by true and deep friendship, though they have little in common. (Sabino Gutiérrez was worldly, learned, brilliant, the kind of man who would spend his time in Katanga revising his own translation of Pindar; Leclerc is described as kindhearted, cheerful, a stranger to pomp and vanity.) As they walk, Gutiérrez peers into the huts and marvels at the wooden objects created by the collective exercise of the art of carpentry. Leclerc, peppered with questions by Gutiérrez, doesn’t share his friend’s astonishment: it was he who introduced many of the tools that the natives are using; he believes that what they’re doing is good and healthy; he can’t see what’s so strange about it. Gutiérrez lets it go, but that night, the only night he spends in the town, he dreams of chairs, stools, cupboards, dressers, tables of all sizes (mostly small), benches, doghouses or dollhouses, and an infinite number of objects that can be separated into three categories: furniture in the strict sense; toys or imitations of European progress, like trains, cars, guns, et cetera; and unidentifiable or artistic objects, like irons with holes in them, toothed disks, enormous cylinders. The next day, before he leaves, Leclerc presents him with one of the wooden objects that he finds so discomfiting: a crucifix, three inches tall, carved from a soft, almost juicy wood, black with yellow streaks. Our traveler is delighted to accept it; it is certainly an excellent piece. The visit ends with effusive displays of affection on both sides and promises to meet up again before too long. Months later, once he’s settled in Luanda, Sabino Gutiérrez receives a letter from his friend, who returns to the topic of woodworking in a lengthy postscript. It has become even more widespread now, says Leclerc, to the point that it occupies the whole town, with few exceptions. The villagers work their fields in a daze; the shepherds have lost interest in their flocks. Leclerc and the two nuns who work as nurses are beginning to worry. But the matter hardly merits grave concern; in fact, the Frenchman treats it as a joke. He even makes inquiries—ultimately fruitless—about selling the pieces in Léopoldville. After this, every time that Sabino Gutiérrez writes to his friend, he asks about the village woodworkers. The situation remains stable for six months. Then a new letter from Leclerc sounds the alarm. Woodworking fever has taken over the village and seems contagious: in some neighboring villages, men, women, and children are sawing with the only communal saw, hammering with the two communal hammers, sanding, assembling, gluing. The villagers make up for the lack of tools with imagination and indigenous craft. The finished objects pile up in huts and yards, overflowing the frenzied village. Leclerc speaks to the elders. The only reply he gets is the witch doctors’ diagnosis: a virus of sadness and exaltation has seized the town. Despite himself, he is surprised to recognize a little sadness and exaltation in his own soul, like a tiny, twisted reflection of the emotions that have taken root in his village. The next and final letter is brief; according to Sabino, it is written with the simplicity of a de Vigny and the desperation and religiosity of a Verlaine. (Ha-ha, as you can see, his critical methods aren’t far removed from those of our contemporary reviewers.) One imagines that all this mattered not a whit to Leclerc by now. The narrow streets of the village are littered with wooden tools that no one has used or will use. The woodworkers gather in secret with delegations of woodworkers from elsewhere. Almost no one attends Mass. As a precaution, the priest has ordered the nuns to retreat to Kindu. He spends the tense, idle days whittling a crucifix—at this point, he asks Gutiérrez to throw away the crucifix that he gave him on his previous visit ‘because compulsion perverts the figure of Christ’ and promises that he will replace it with the ‘carving that I’m working on now’ or an ‘Andalusian Christ worked in silver.’ He laments the situation in the village. He wonders about the future of the children. He mourns his lost efforts. But he doesn’t specify what he fears or where the threat lies. He does speak of the dead: white colonists killed, a strike attempt at a tin mine, but nothing else. You could say that all he cares about is his village and that nothing that happens outside its boundaries is real to him. On some level, he feels responsible; let us not forget that he was the woodworker-in-chief, in a sense. Now he can’t even muster horror at the sight of the strange wooden tub that a group of teenagers has left in his vegetable patch. The end comes quickly. The nuns flee, presumably carrying the letter with them. Leclerc is left alone. Months later Gutiérrez learns of his death. Once the shock subsides, and after attempting in vain to make inquiries from Luanda, our priest pulls every string he can in order to return to the Congo, to the place where his friend was laid to rest. At last he succeeds. The problem now is the Belgian authorities who are reluctant to consent to the visit. The events at Village X are considered classified. Upon persisting, Gutiérrez discovers that Leclerc’s death wasn’t accidental. His friend was killed during a native uprising. Beyond that the official explanation is vague: perhaps there was a battle between two neighboring tribes, or maybe the witch doctors incited the slaughter. Based in Kindu, Gutiérrez leads an absolutely unorthodox life. Finally he obtains authorization to visit the village with a colonial official and a doctor. When they arrive, there is something ominous about the few huts left standing, the new dispensary, the living souls glimpsed through dark doorways, and the very air they breathe. The cemetery, exquisitely laid out, boasts an enormous number of new crosses. When Gutiérrez asks, he is informed that the nuns who worked here have returned to Europe. Of course everyone is reluctant to recall the woodworking that once went on in the village; there is no trace of the former craftspeople. Exasperated, our priest decides to visit his friend’s grave on his own. Then he realizes that the crucifix that Leclerc asked him to get rid of is in his pocket. He takes it out and gives it one last look. The Jesus figure is strange, strong, serene; it even seems to smile when looked at from a certain angle. He hurls it into the underbrush. Instantly he realizes that he isn’t alone; he first hears and then sees an old man creep out from behind a tree and feel around in the spot where the crucifix fell. Gutiérrez, frozen in fear, doesn’t move. After searching for a moment, the old man gets up, and, without coming toward him—in fact, keeping his distance—he speaks. His name is Matala Mukadi, and he is going to tell Gutiérrez the truth. Leclerc was killed by the white men. Three hundred natives suffered the same fate, and bullets from the white men’s guns surely rest in the bones of those who weren’t burned to death. But why? asks Gutiérrez. Because of the revolt. The whole village rebelled. The miners rebelled. Everything happened all at once, like a miracle. And the whites crushed the rebellion thoroughly and completely: Women, children, and old people died. Those who sought refuge with the French priest were killed in the mission house itself, then half of the village was burned to the ground and the area was cordoned off. The whites had firearms; the natives had only wooden rifles, wooden pistols. Why did they kill Leclerc? asks Gutiérrez, and he expects that the black man will say that it was because he took up the cause of the woodworkers, but the old man is unequivocal: it was by chance. The slaughter was quick, of course. The black man holds up the little wooden figure. Magic? asks Gutiérrez before the other turns and leaves. No, says the black man: the clothes it wears, village clothes. Our priest understands that when he says ‘village,’ he means rage or
sleep. They part without another word. From the moment that Gutiérrez gives more credence to the black man’s account than to the white man’s, there’s little to be done. Two years later, he leaves Africa—and then Europe—forever. He returns to Chiapas, where he devotes himself to writing his memoirs and religious essays until the day he dies. His final years, if his editor (another priest) is to be believed, are placid and anonymous. And that’s all . . .”