Amulet

by Roberto Bolaño

  But don't think they were making fun of me! They listened to what I said. But I didn't speak Gliglish and they simply couldn't stop using their private slang, poor kids. Poor forsaken kids. Because that's what they were: no one loved them. Or no one took them seriously. Or only they did; too much, I sometimes felt.

  And one day someone told me that Arturito Belano had left Mexico. Then added: This time, let's hope he doesn't come back. And that made me furious, because I had always liked Arturito and I think I probably insulted that person (mentally, at least), but first I had the presence of mind to ask where Arturito had gone. The person didn't know: Australia, Europe, Canada, somewhere like that. Afterward I kept thinking about him, and about his mother, who was so generous, and his sister, and the afternoons we spent together at their apartment making empanadas, and the time I made noodles and we hung them up to dry all over the place, in the kitchen, the dining room and the little living room they had in that apartment on the Calle Abraham González.

  I can't forget anything. That's my problem, or so I've been told.

  I am the mother of Mexico's poets. I am the only one who held out in the university in 1968, when the riot police and the army came in. I stayed there on my own in the Faculty, shut up in a bathroom, with no food, for more than ten days, for more than fifteen days, from the eighteenth to the thirtieth of September, I think, I'm not sure any more.

  I stayed there with a book by Pedro Garfias and my satchel, wearing a little white blouse and a pleated sky-blue skirt, and I had more than enough time to think things over. But I couldn't think about Arturo Belano, because I hadn't met him yet.

  I said to myself: Hang in there, Auxilio Lacouture. If you go out they'll arrest you (and probably deport you to Montevideo, because, naturally, your immigration papers aren't in order, you silly girl), they'll spit on you and beat you up. I prepared myself to endure. To endure hunger and solitude. For the first few hours I slept sitting in the stall, the one I was in when it all began, because in my destitution I believed that it would bring me luck, but sleeping on a throne is extremely uncomfortable, and in the end I curled up on the tiles. I had dreams, not nightmares but musical dreams, dreams about transparent questions, dreams of slender, safe airplanes flying the length and breadth of Latin America through skies of brilliant, cold blue. I woke up frozen stiff and ravenous. I looked out of the window, the little round window over the sinks, and saw the new day dawning in pieces of the campus like pieces of a puzzle. I spent that first morning crying and thanking the angels in Heaven that they hadn't cut off the water. Don't get sick, Auxilio, I told myself, drink all the water you like, but don't get sick. I leaned against the wall and let myself slide to the ground, and once again I opened that book by Pedro Garfias. My eyes closed. I must have fallen asleep. Then I heard steps and hid in my stall (it was the nun's cell I never had, my trench and my Duino Palace, my Mexican epiphany). I read Pedro Garfias. Then I fell asleep. Then I looked out of the bull's-eye window and saw very high clouds and thought of Dr. Atl's pictures and the most transparent region. Then I started thinking pleasant thoughts.

  How many lines of poetry did I know by heart? I started reciting, murmuring the lines I could remember, and I would have liked to write them down, but although I had a ball-point pen, I didn't have any paper. Then I thought: Silly, you have all the paper you need. So I ripped off squares of toilet paper and began to write. Then I fell asleep and dreamed, and this is really funny, I dreamed of Juana de Ibarbourou and her book La rosa de los vientos (The Compass Rose), published in 1930, and her first book too, Las lenguas de diamante (Diamond Tongues), such a pretty title, exquisite, it could be the title of an avant-garde book published last year in French, but Juana de America published it in 1919, at the age of twenty-seven. What a fascinating woman she must have been then, with the world at her feet and all those gentlemen gallantly prepared to do her bidding (they are all gone now, although Juana remains), all those modernist poets prepared to give their lives for poetry, so many glances and compliments, so much love.

  Then I woke up. I thought: I am the memory.

  That's what I thought. Then I went back to sleep. Then I woke up, and for hours, maybe days, I cried for times gone by, for my childhood in Montevideo, for faces that disturb me (even now, more than ever, in fact), faces of which I prefer not to speak.

  Then I lost count of the days I'd spent shut up in there. From my little window I saw birds, segments of tree trunks or branches growing from somewhere invisible, shrubs, grass, clouds, walls, but I couldn't see people or hear noises, and I lost track of the time I had been shut up in there. Then, maybe remembering Charlie Chaplin, I ate toilet paper, but only a little, I couldn't stomach more. Then I realized that I was no longer hungry. Then I picked up all the pieces of toilet paper on which I had written, threw them in the toilet and pulled the chain. The sound of the water gave me a start, and I thought I was finished.

  I thought, In spite of all my cunning and self-sacrifice, I'm finished. I thought, How poetic, to destroy my writings like that. I thought, It would have been better to swallow them, now I'm finished. I thought, The vanity of writing, the vanity of destruction. I thought, Because I wrote, I endured. I thought, Because I destroyed what I had written, they will find me, they will hit me, they will rape me, they will kill me. I thought, The two things are connected, writing and destroying, hiding and being found. Then I sat down on the throne and shut my eyes. I fell asleep. Then I woke up again.

  My whole body was stiff. I moved slowly across the bathroom, looked at myself in the mirror, combed my hair, washed my face. My face looked terrible! Like it does now, to give you some idea.

  Then I heard voices. I don't think I'd heard any sound at all for a long time. I felt like Robinson Crusoe when he finds the footprint in the sand. But my footprint was a voice and a door slamming, my footprint was an avalanche of pebbles or marbles suddenly hurtling down the corridor. Then Lupita, Professor Fombona's secretary, opened the door and we stood there staring at each other, gaping, speechless. I think it was the emotional shock that made me pass out.

  When I opened my eyes again, I was in Professor Rius's office (what a brave, handsome man he was, and is), among friends and familiar faces, university people, not soldiers, which was so wonderful that I began to cry, and couldn't tell my story coherently, although the professor kept enjoining me to do so, appalled by what I had endured, but equally grateful for it, I think.

  And that is all, my friends. The legend was borne on the winds of Mexico City, the winds of 1968; it went among the dead and the survivors, and now everyone knows that when the university was occupied in that beautiful, ill-fated year, a woman remained on the campus. I went on living (although something—what I had seen—was missing), and often I would hear my story told by others, who said that the woman who had gone without food for thirteen days, shut up in the bathroom, was a medical student, or a secretary from the administration building, not an illegal alien from Uruguay, with no job and no place of her own to lay her head. Sometimes it wasn't even a woman but a man, a Maoist student or a professor with gastrointestinal problems. And when I heard those stories, those versions of my story, usually (if I wasn't drunk) I held my peace. And if I was drunk, I played the whole thing down. What does it matter, I would say, that's just university folklore, another of Mexico's City's urban legends, and they would look at me (but who were they?) and say: Auxilio, you're the mother of Mexican poetry. And I would say (or shout, if I was drunk), No, I'm nobody's mother, but I did know them all, all the young poets, whether they were natives of Mexico City, or came from the provinces, or other parts of Latin America and washed up here, and I loved them all.

  Then they would look at me in silence.

  And I would allow a judicious period to elapse before letting my gaze return to them, pretending not to understand and wondering why they weren't saying anything. And although I tried to look elsewhere, at the traffic passing in the street, the leisurely movement of the waitresses, or the
smoke emerging from somewhere behind the bar, it was them I really wanted to watch, sitting there steeped in an endless silence, and it struck me as unnatural that they should be quiet for so long.

  And at that point the anxiety returned, along with the wild speculation, the sleepiness, and the cold that lacerates your extremities before numbing them. But I didn't stop moving. I moved my arms and legs. I breathed. I oxygenated my blood. If I don't want to die, I'm not going to die, I told myself. So I moved, and at the same time, although there were no eagles to be seen, I had an eagle's eye view of my body moving through snowy passes, drifts and endless white esplanades like the back of a fossilized Moby Dick. Still I kept walking. I walked and walked. And from time to time I stopped and said to myself: Wake up, Auxilio. Nobody can endure this. And yet I knew I could endure it. So I baptized my right leg Willpower and my left leg Necessity. And I endured.

  I endured, and one afternoon I left the immense regions of snow behind and saw a valley before me. I sat down and surveyed it. It was vast. It was like the background of some Renaissance painting, blown up enormously. The air was cold on my face, but not biting. I stopped on the slope above the valley and sat down. I was tired. I wanted to catch my breath. I didn't know what would become of me. Maybe, I speculated, someone would find me a job at the university. I breathed. The air tasted good. The light was fading. The sun was setting far away, over other valleys, each one unique, and smaller perhaps than the vast valley I had discovered. There was still a reasonable ambient brightness. As soon as I've regained some strength, I'll begin the descent, I thought, and before night falls I'll be in the valley.

  I stood up. My legs trembled. I sat down again. There was a patch of snow a few yards from where I was. I went over to it and washed my face. I sat down again. A little farther down the slope was a tree. I saw a sparrow on one of its branches. Then there was a green streak in the air. I saw a quetzal. I saw a sparrow and a quetzal. The two birds perched on the same branch. My parted lips whispered, The same branch. I heard my voice. Only then was I aware of the enormous silence hanging over the valley.

  I stood up and approached the tree. Carefully, because I didn't want to frighten the birds. From there, the view was better. But I had to walk gingerly, looking down, because there were loose stones and the chances of slipping and falling were high. When I reached the tree, the birds had flown away. Then I saw that at its far end, to the west, the valley opened into a bottomless abyss.

  Am I going crazy? I wondered. Is this the madness and the fear of Arthur Gordon Pym? Or am I recovering my sanity so quickly it's making me dizzy? The words exploded in my head, as if a giant were shouting inside me, but outside the silence was total. To the west, the sun was setting; the shadows down in the valley were lengthening. What had been green before was now dark green, and what had been brown was dark gray or black.

  Then, at the eastern end of the valley, I saw a different shadow, like that of a cloud sweeping across a broad field, but no cloud was throwing this shadow. What is it? I wondered. I looked at the sky. Then I looked at the tree and saw that the quetzal and the sparrow had returned and, sitting still on the same branch, were enjoying the quietness of the valley. Then I looked at the abyss. My heart clenched. The valley led straight into the abyss. I couldn't remember having seen a landform like that before. In fact, at that moment, I felt as if I were on a plateau rather than in a valley. But no. It wasn't a plateau. Plateaus, by their very nature, are not enclosed by natural walls. Valleys, on the other hand, I thought, do not plunge into bottomless abysses. Although perhaps some do. Then I looked at the shadow that was spreading and advancing the other. Flouting the laws of physics, the mountain peaks seemed to form a kind of mirror, with two sides: I had come out one side and they had come out the other.

  They were walking toward the abyss. I think I realized that as soon as I saw them. A shadow or a mass of children, walking unstoppably toward the abyss.

  Then I heard a murmur that rose through the cold air of evening in the valley toward the mountainsides and crags, and I was astonished.

  They were singing.

  The children, the young people, were singing and heading for the abyss. I raised a hand to my mouth, as if to stifle a shout, and held the other hand out in front of me, fingers extended and trembling, as if trying to touch them. My mind endeavored to remember a text about children intoning canticles as they marched to war. But it was no use. My mind was inside out. The journey through the snow had turned me into skin. Perhaps that is how I had always been. Intelligence has never been my strength.

  I held out both hands, as if imploring the sky to let me embrace them, and I shouted, but my shout was lost among the heights and did not reach down into the valley. Thin, wrinkled, gravely wounded, my mind bleeding and my eyes full of tears, I looked for the birds as if those poor creatures could be of any help to me when the whole world was facing extinction.

  They were not on the branch.

  I presumed that the birds were a symbol or an emblem and that everything in that part of the story was simple and straightforward. I presumed that the birds stood for the children. I don't know what else I presumed.

  And I heard them sing. I hear them singing still, faintly, even now that I am no longer in the valley, a barely audible murmur, the prettiest children of Latin America, the ill-fed and the well-fed children, those who had everything and those who had nothing, such a beautiful song it is, issuing from their lips, and how beautiful they were, such beauty, although they were marching deathward, shoulder to shoulder. I heard them sing and I went mad; I heard them sing and there was nothing I could do to make them stop, I was too far away and I didn't have the strength to go down into the valley, to stand in the middle of that field and tell them to stop, tell them they were marching toward certain death. The only thing I could do was to stand up, trembling, and listen to their song, go on listening to their song right up to the last breath, because, although they were swallowed by the abyss, the song remained in the air of the valley, in the mist of the valley rising toward the mountainsides and the crags as evening drew on.

  So the ghost-children marched down the valley and fell into the abyss. Their passage was brief. And their ghost-song or its echo, which is almost to say the echo of nothingness, went on marching, I could hear it marching on at the same pace, the pace of courage and generosity. A barely audible song, a song of war and love, because although the children were clearly marching to war, the way they marched recalled the superb, theatrical attitudes of love.

  But what kind of love could they have known, I wondered when they were gone from the valley, leaving only their song resonating in my ears. The love of their parents, the love of their dogs and cats, the love of their toys, but above all the love, the desire and the pleasure they shared with one another.

  And although the song that I heard was about war, about the heroic deeds of a whole generation of young Latin Americans led to sacrifice, I knew that above and beyond all, it was about courage and mirrors, desire and pleasure.

  And that song is our amulet.

  Roberto Bolaño

  Bolaño was born in Santiago, the son of a truck driver (who was also a boxer) and a teacher. He and his sister spent their early years in southern and coastal Chile. By his own account he was a skinny, nearsighted and bookish but unpromising child. He was dyslexic, and was often bullied at school, where he felt an outsider.

  In 1968 he moved with his family to Mexico City, dropped out of school, worked as a journalist and became active in left-wing political causes.

  A key episode in Bolaño's life, mentioned in different forms in several of his works, occurred in 1973, when he left Mexico for Chile to "help build the revolution" by supporting the socialist regime of Salvador Allende. After Augusto Pinochet's coup against Allende, Bolaño was arrested on suspicion of being a terrorist and spent eight days in custody. He was rescued by two former classmates who had become prison guards. Bolaño describes his experience in the story "Dance Car
d." According to the version of events he provides in this story, he was neither tortured nor killed, as he had expected, but "in the small hours I could hear them torturing others; I couldn't sleep and there was nothing to read except a magazine in English that someone had left behind. The only interesting article in it was about a house that had once belonged to Dylan Thomas… I got out of that hole thanks to a pair of detectives who had been at high school with me in Los Ángeles."

  For most of his early adulthood, Bolaño was a vagabond, living at one time or another in Chile, Mexico, El Salvador, France and Spain.

  In the 1970s, Bolaño became a Trotskyist and a founding member of infrarrealismo, a minor poetic movement. He affectionately parodied aspects of the movement in The Savage Detectives.

  After an interlude in El Salvador, spent in the company of the poet Roque Dalton and the guerrillas of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, he returned to Mexico, living as a bohemian poet and literary enfant terrible – "a professional provocateur feared at all the publishing houses even though he was a nobody, bursting into literary presentations and readings", his editor, Jorge Herralde, recalled. His erratic behaviour had as much to do with his leftist ideology as with his chaotic (and, possibly, heroin-addicted) lifestyle.