A Little Lumpen Novelita

by Roberto Bolaño

  Once I was tempted to ask Maciste how he lost his sight. The Bolognan and the Libyan had warned me never to raise the subject. According to them, the last person to show any curiosity about Maciste’s blindness had ended up with a couple of broken ribs. It wasn’t their warning that gave me pause. I knew Maciste would never lift a hand against me. But there was something that stopped me, something else.

  Sometimes I thought it was a good thing that he had gone blind, because that way he would never see me, never see my face, never see the look on my face when I was with him, which wasn’t the look of a prostitute or a thief or a spy, but an expectant look, the look of someone hoping for anything and everything, from a kind word to a life-changing declaration.

  There weren’t many kind words, because Maciste didn’t talk much, but there were kind gestures. And there were no life-changing declarations, or at least none I recognized at the time, though since then I’ve come to remember each of Maciste’s words as a key or a dark bridge that surely could have led me elsewhere, as if he were a fortune-telling machine designed exclusively for me, which I know isn’t true, though sometimes I like to think so, not often, because I don’t lie to myself the way I used to, but every once in a while.

  XIII

  The rest of the time I spent looking for the safe.

  It was a safe that began to seem more and more like an invention of my brother’s friends, a safe that existed only in their criminal minds and in their overwrought imaginations — because back then, even if I had a criminal mind too, that didn’t mean I let my imagination run wild after something nonexistent.

  I wasn’t overwrought. In fact, what I felt was a strange stillness, as if before arriving at Maciste’s big old house on Via Germanico I had been on the run for months and even years, but from the moment I stepped into his house, from the moment I saw him naked and hulking and white, like a broken refrigerator, everything stopped (or I stopped) and now things were happening at a different speed, an imperceptible speed that was the same as stillness.

  Sometimes I looked at them, at my brother and his friends, I looked into their innocent eyes and I was tempted to say:

  “The safe exists in only one place — in your fucked-up heads.”

  But I think I was afraid of convincing them. I was afraid that they would believe me and then there wouldn’t be any reason, money aside, for my weekly visit to Maciste’s house. Not that anyone would stop me. And the extra money came in handy. But I knew that to keep visiting him with no ulterior motive would destroy me.

  Maciste’s eyes — unlike my brother’s eyes and his friends’ eyes — weren’t innocent. He almost always wore sunglasses. But sometimes he would take them off and look at me or pretend to look at me. Then I would shiver and close my eyes and hug him or try to hug him, which was always hard considering his size. One day the Bolognan said to me:

  “That bastard is messing with your head. Find the safe and let’s get this over with.”

  He wasn’t as dumb as he seemed. And in a way, he was right. The problem was that I couldn’t listen to reason anymore. But he was right.

  And another time he said:

  “Think of the future, think of all the things we have to look forward to in the future.”

  But there he was wrong. Deep down I was always thinking about the future. I thought about it so much that the present had become part of the future, the strangest part. To visit Maciste was to think about the future. To sweat, to venture into pitch-black rooms, was to think about the future, a future that resembled a room in Maciste’s house, but in sharper focus, the furniture covered in old sheets and blankets, as if the owners of the house (a house in the future) had gone away on a trip and didn’t want dust to collect on their things. And that was my future and that was how I thought about it, if you can call it thinking (and if you can call it a future).

  But most of the time I preferred not to think about anything. I let my mind wander and I spent a long time at one of the windows that overlooked the back garden, naked, my skin still lubricated, watching the night and the stars, the walls of the neighboring houses.

  Sometimes I heard a strange sound that split the darkness like a ray of chalk, and Maciste said it was the cry of a hawk that lived in an abandoned house nearby, though I had never heard of a hawk living in a big city, but these things happen in Rome, strange things that were at the time beyond my comprehension and that I easily accepted in a way that today surprises and even repels me: with a shuddering ease, as if leading a life of crime meant always quivering inside, as if leading a life of crime brought with it mingled sensations of immense guilt and pleasure that made me laugh, for example, for no apparent reason at the least appropriate moments, or that plunged me briefly into sadness, a portable sadness that lasted no longer than five minutes and luckily was easy to hide.

  At home, meanwhile, everything was the same.

  Sometimes, on the nights that I didn’t visit Maciste, I left the door open for one of my brothers’ friends, with the lights off and my eyes closed, since under no circumstances did I want to know which one of them it was, and I made love mechanically, and sometimes I came many times, which caused me to erupt in fierce, unexpected bursts of rage and to cry bitterly.

  Then my brother’s friend would ask me whether something was wrong, whether I was upset, whether I was hurt, and before he could go on, which would have given away his identity, I would tell him to be quiet or say shhh, and he would stop talking and keep fucking without a word, such was the force of conviction or persuasion or dissuasion that my acts had acquired.

  It was an almost supernatural power, I sometimes came to think (though immediately I mocked the idea), making normally talkative people like the Bolognan fall silent, or silent people like the Libyan turn entirely mute, a force that wrested every last question from the mouths of the eternally curious, that created a space of artificial silence and darkness where I could cry and writhe in pain because I didn’t like what I was doing, but where I could also come as many times as I wanted and where I could walk (or probe the surface of reality with my fingertips) without false hope, without illusion, not knowing the meaning of it all but knowing the end result, knowing why things are where they are, with a degree of clarity that I haven’t had since, though sometimes I sense that it’s there, curled up inside of me, shrunken and dismembered — luckily for me — but still there.

  XIV

  Still, I kept looking for the safe.

  I wandered around the house, peering into corners and behind paintings, as my brother and his friends had instructed me, and the safe never turned up.

  Only grime, dust, spiders’ nests, patches of crumbling wall, patches of old wallpaper protected from the passage of time, lighter, closer to their original color, though upon close examination I was left with the thought that these rectangles were actually more damaged, as if their pallor or their newness was a rare and degenerative disease.

  During my forays in search of the safe, the whole house seemed alive. Alive in decay, alive in neglect. But alive.

  Let me explain: my own apartment was just an apartment to me. Smaller every day, if anything, with the echoes of thousands of hours of television, sometimes the echo of my father’s and mother’s voices, but just an apartment. It was dead.

  Not Maciste’s house. Maciste’s house was a promise and a disease, and I spun from promise to disease, feeling on my skin when my body — or the speed impressed on my body — passed from one state to another, the iridescent promise, the disease, an oblique falling or gliding, wandering, touching everything with my fingertips, until I heard Maciste’s voice calling me, asking where I was.

  Sometimes I didn’t answer. I covered my mouth with one hand and breathed through my nose, shallowly, since I knew that, even more silent than me, he would come looking for me, gliding along the dark hallways of the house until he found me by my breathing or the heat of my body, I never knew which, and then everything would start over again.

  He gre
w more generous, and the money that he gave me after each visit gradually increased. Sometimes I followed him, since I imagined he got it directly from the safe, but actually he took it from a drawer in the kitchen, and the amount there was always more or less the same, one hundred and fifty euros, enough to pay me and the woman or teenager (I never saw her, since she came during the day and I came at night) who bought provisions for him at a nearby store and sometimes left him plastic containers of food.

  I’m ashamed of this now, but one night I told him that I was in love with him and asked him what his feelings were for me.

  He didn’t answer. He made me cry out in his gym, but he didn’t answer me. Before I left at five that morning, feeling hurt, I told him that things would probably end soon. I told him this in the foyer, with one hand on the doorknob. When I opened the door and let in the light from a streetlamp on Via Germanico, I realized that I was alone.

  For days I could only think of him with hatred. To make him angry, during our next meeting, I asked how he had been left blind.

  “It was an accident.”

  “What kind of accident?” I asked.

  “A car accident. I was with some friends. Two of them didn’t live to tell the story.”

  “And who was driving?”

  Then Maciste focused his blind eyes on my eyes, as if he were really seeing me, and he said that he didn’t feel like discussing the subject any further.

  I watched him get up with some difficulty and head without hesitation for the open door. I was alone for a long time, lying on the wooden bench, my body smeared with liniment, waiting for him and thinking my own thoughts, about the future that was opening up like a mirror of the present or a mirror of the past, but opening up regardless, until I got bored and fell asleep.

  Back then I dreamed a lot and almost all my dreams were quickly forgotten. My life itself was like a dream. Sometimes I stared out a window in Maciste’s house and thought about dreams and life, which meant thinking about my own dreams, so quickly forgotten, and my own life, which was like a dream, and I got nowhere, nothing cleared inside my head, but just by doing this, by thinking about dreams and life, a vague weight was lifted from my heart or what I thought of as my heart, the heart of a criminal, of a person without scruples or with scruples so warped that it was hard for me to recognize them as my own.

  Then a sigh of relief would escape my throat. I would gasp and smile as if I had just risen from deep waters, out of air, oxygen tanks empty. And immediately I would feel an urge to leave the window and go running in search of a mirror to look at my own face, a face that I knew was smiling and that I also knew I wouldn’t like, a fierce and happy face, but my face in the end, my own face, the best among many other distorted faces, a face that emerged from the death of my parents, from my neighborhood where it was always day, and from Maciste’s house where I was gambling with my fate, but where my fate for the first time was entirely my own.

  None of these certainties — none of these sensations — lasted very long. Thank God, because if they had I would have died or lost my mind.

  I was flying high, I was hallucinating, but sometimes my feet were planted firmly on the ground. And then I thought about the safe and the money or the jewels that Maciste had hidden away and the life that awaited us, my brother and me (and also in some way his no-good friends), when we at last got our hands on the treasure, a treasure that was useless to Maciste, since as we saw it all his needs were taken care of and anyway he wasn’t young anymore, whereas we had our whole lives ahead of us and we were as poor as rats.

  And at moments like these, instead of imagining money, for some reason I imagined gold coins. A safe like Maciste’s intestines, black and fathomless, with the gold coins that he had amassed making gladiator movies shining in their depths. It was an exhausting vision. And a pointless one.

  One night, as we were making love, Maciste asked me what color his semen was. I was thinking about the gold coins, and for some reason the question seemed pertinent. I told him to pull out. Then I took off the condom and masturbated him for a few seconds. I ended up with a handful of semen.

  “It’s golden,” I said. “Like molten gold.”

  Maciste laughed.

  “I don’t think you can see in the dark,” he said.

  “I can,” I said.

  “I think my semen is getting blacker by the day,” he said.

  For a while I pondered what he meant by that.

  “Don’t worry so much,” I told him.

  Then I went to shower and when I got back Maciste wasn’t in his room. Without turning on the lights, I went looking for him in the gym. He wasn’t there either. So I went to the porch room and spent a while there looking out at the garden and the shadow of the neighboring walls.

  Maciste’s semen wasn’t really golden.

  I can’t remember the exact moment when I realized that I would never see the money, that I would never spend Maciste’s treasure on pretty, frivolous things. All I know is that soon after I realized it I closed my eyes and went looking around the rest of the house for Maciste. I found him in the bookless library, sitting under the icon of St. Pietrino of the Seychelles and I climbed astride my lover or my master, it was the same to me, and let him make love to me without saying or feeling a thing.

  Before dawn, on my way home in a taxi, I thought I was going to die.

  XV

  A week without seeing Maciste was like an eternity. But when I tried to imagine an entire life with him I saw nothing: a blank image, the wall of an empty room, amnesia, a lobotomy, my body broken and split into pieces.

  At home, meanwhile, things weren’t good. My brother seemed dazed, scattered, too thin, and all his friends talked about was the safe.

  One morning I said to my brother:

  “You’re looking more and more messed up.”

  “Look who’s talking,” was his answer.

  Another day I examined his arms, looking for needle tracks or whatever, just as my boss at the salon had done to me, and all I got was his laugh, a hollow laugh, as if the laughter of our dead parents on that forgotten southern highway was issuing from his throat.

  Then I started to be afraid.

  “Don’t laugh,” I said.

  “Then don’t be ridiculous,” he said.

  I think we didn’t even have the strength to fight anymore.

  I asked him another day: “What are you afraid of?”

  He didn’t answer, but his face said that he was scared of everything, of his friends, of them living with us, of a future that seemed to hold little, of his sad life as an orphan and a kid without a job.

  Another time I heard him crying, locked in the bathroom, as the Bolognan and the Libyan watched TV and made fun of people. Applause, laughter, the Bolognan’s sarcastic commentary, and my brother crying quietly in the bathroom, like a humiliated animal seized by cold and fear, which (cold and fear) for him were essentially the same thing. When he came out I asked him discreetly what was wrong. He said nothing, but that night he locked himself in the bathroom again and though this time I didn’t hear him crying I sensed that he was on the verge of a breakdown.

  But it was hard for me to feel sorry for him, caught as I was between Maciste and the scheming of my brother’s friends, who could think of nothing but the safe in the house on Via Germanico. So I can’t say I was sorry for him. And that’s what I told Maciste, not thinking about what I was saying. I told him that I had found my brother crying and I hadn’t felt anything. We had just made love and when I finished saying what I had to say, Maciste turned his huge white face toward me and once again I had the impression that he was looking at me.

  “You’re going crazy,” he said.

  I asked him whether he thought that was good or bad. He said it was always bad, except in extreme cases, when going crazy was a way of escaping unbearable pain. And then I told him that maybe I was in unbearable pain, but before he could answer I took it back.

  “I’m fine. There’s
no such thing as unbearable pain. I haven’t gone crazy.”

  One afternoon Maciste got sick and I spent the night taking care of him. He had a fever, but he didn’t want the doctor to come. He ordered me to make him a liter of chamomile tea with lemon, which he drank with big spoonfuls of honey, and he went to bed to sweat it out.

  When he fell asleep I realized that I would never have another chance like this to look for the safe. So I went in search of it again, room by room. I can’t remember when I got the idea that the safe was behind the paintings of Maciste or behind the painting of St. Pietrino of the Seychelles. I took them down one by one, my heart racing. Behind the paintings there was nothing, just the wall in varying stages of deterioration. I also looked in the gym and the bathroom of the gym, checking the tiles (to see if there were any that could be pried up), in the kitchen, under the rugs in the living room and the foyer, behind some useless curtains.

  The rest of the night I spent in the living room, sitting in an armchair next to one of the few working lamps in the house, reading magazines and dozing off.

  At four in the morning I was woken by the sound of a voice. I went into Maciste’s room. He was talking in his sleep. He said something about a street. He said the word trapeze. Then he was quiet again. I felt his forehead. He was sweating. That seemed to be a good sign.

  For a while I stood there by the door looking at him, deciding whether to go back to the living room. It was then that I knew for sure that I wasn’t in love with him. Everything seemed as clear as could be and as entertaining as a TV show and still I was close to tears.

  I didn’t go back to the living room, but to the gym, where I smoked and stared into the darkness. Then I got up (I was sitting on the floor of the gym) and walked all around the house, room by room, armed with a flashlight, searching in every corner.