Monsieur Pain

by Roberto Bolaño

  He did not answer me.

  “However, be my guest,” I added.

  By way of a reply, he reached out with both hands, gripped the lapels of my coat and lifted me off the ground.

  “Mouthy Jew,” he said, thoughtfully. “I saw it first.”

  Then, having apparently changed his mind, he let me drop and got calmly into the taxi.

  “Wait,” I shouted, as I lay on the ground.

  I didn’t feel humiliation or rage or any of the emotions that are normally provoked by an incident of this nature. I felt an irrational desire to make him stay and talk to me, to scrutinize his glowering face, to ask him where he came from, what he did, whether he had ever been inside the Clinique Arago, even as a visitor, whether he knew something, anything that could qualify as a certitude. Suddenly I felt more tired and alone than ever.

  Then I got up as best I could, stirred by belated indignation, with the unavowed aim of returning the blow. I opened the back door of the taxi before it pulled away and managed to glimpse my attacker’s impassive mug, in profile, just as the tire rolled unhurriedly over my foot.

  “Shit!” I cried, embarrassed, as the taxi drove away down the street.

  With one knee on the ground, I felt my toes through the shoe leather, trying, absurdly, to make the gesture look casual. Then I tried walking; it didn’t hurt.

  At ten-thirty, in a café full of smoke and serious drinkers, I found a telephone from which to call Madame Reynaud. I should have guessed that nobody would answer, but I kept trying every fifteen minutes, without any success, until one in the morning.

  Clearly Madame Reynaud was not going to return home that night. It was also clear that she had to sleep somewhere. Where? With whom? The question was painful, not to mention futile, and made me feel ludicrous and pitiful, in the eyes of my casual drinking partners as well as in my own. I don’t remember how it started, but between phone calls I had fallen into conversation with three young men determined to finish the night as drunk as lords. They worked at a printer’s and were talking about women and politics. We’re philosophizing, they declared. I couldn’t say why they accepted my presence at their table—or did I invite them to sit at mine?—since I hardly opened my mouth, and when I did it was only to reply with monosyllables to their stock remarks about love and women, sports, and crooks both great and small; and yet, when the café closed, staying with them seemed the natural thing to do.

  I don’t know how much time we spent together, or how many places we went to. I remember a woman’s face, a redhead, she was crying in a dance hall, an old guy in a dinner suit with a smile full of new teeth, the roof of a bar made of wooden laths, cats and trash cans, the shadow of a child or a monkey, fragments of sentences about fascism and the war, and a hand-written sign that read:

  Lulu

  Unavoidable

  Solitude

  Horns

  Sex

  True

  “Horns? Bull’s horns! But that’s Spain!” said one of the boys.

  “Lulu gets them all horny,” said his companion, yawning.

  At some point—we were all fairly drunk—someone suggested we try our luck at a dubious gaming house. I vaguely remember an alley, I think it was in Montmartre, although I couldn’t swear to it, and a series of doors promptly opened by someone who remained hidden. I considered asking the time, checking my wallet, and leaving, but I didn’t. Suddenly I found myself sitting with my back to a circle of gamblers in a stuffy, malodorous room, barely illuminated by a flickering light globe hanging from the ceiling. I heard shouts and cries; I made no attempt to find out what they were playing. I went back the way I had come and the same shadow opened the doors for me. Before reaching the last one, I stopped. My guide, I noticed then, was holding a cigarette. The glowing cigarette end and the buttons of his doorman’s jacket shone like unreachable stars.

  “Can you tell me your name?”

  “Me?” replied a high-pitched voice; the shadow trembled.

  “Yes.”

  “Mohammed . . .”

  “Tell me, Mohammed, what are they doing now in that room?” I pointed roughly in the direction of the place I had just left.

  “They’re playing a game,” he said, sounding relieved, as if he were talking to a child. “They’re playing The Lady and the Butchers. Pornography.”

  “Pornography?”

  “Why didn’t you stay? I’ve never seen the whole show, I always have something to do. Opening the door, shutting the door, letting the gentlemen in, showing them out. But I think they disembowel a chicken. And they take photographs of the lady . . . A very effective atmosphere, I assure you . . . She is naked and surrounded by small dead animals . . . I’m the one who cleans it all up in the morning . . . With soap and water . . .”

  I had seen nothing of the sort. I had a premonition. I told him to wait and retraced my steps. When I opened the door of the room, all I could see was a poorly illuminated stage on which a black man was tapping at the keys of an old piano with one finger. The tables were unoccupied—as if the clients or players had suddenly vanished, leaving a chaos of plates and glasses—except for one, in the middle of the room, where various men and a girl who can’t have been more than twenty were huddled, following the fortunes of a card game. Among them I recognized one of the printers, his hair a mess and his eyes open very wide, as if an invisible hand were strangling him. I shut the door without making a sound. Mohammed was behind me. I gave a start.

  “Are you afraid of something, Monsieur? If I can assist you in any way . . .”

  “Afraid of something? What do you mean?”

  The Arab’s teeth shone in the darkness.

  “I don’t know . . . The world is full of threats . . .”

  “Threats, yes, but not dangers,” I said.

  “Excuse me, my mistake . . .”

  “Show me the way out.”

  “But Monsieur, you went to the wrong door, the show is not in there . . .”

  “It doesn’t matter, I’m leaving.”

  “This way, Monsieur, you won’t regret it . . . It’s subtle, very delicate, the Lady of the Chickens will make you scream inside . . .”

  “I said I’m going.”

  He looked at me and smiled again. I noticed that he was ill.

  “The Lady is well worth seeing . . . A man of the world like yourself . . . You’ll be able to appreciate . . .”

  I didn’t reply. A bell rang somewhere. The Arab raised his nose and sniffed something in the passage. He seemed to wake up.

  “All right. Follow me,” he said. Now his expression was mean and bitter.

  We went back through an endless succession of doors. I heard the muffled cries of what I supposed were excited clients, applauding something that I could only vaguely imagine. Walking beside me, the Arab was once again an obliging, faceless shadow. When we arrived at the last door, I handed him some coins. He hastily spat out a few words of thanks and shut the door behind me. Then I realized that I was not in an alley but a kind of industrial warehouse, an enormous, antiquated edifice, with a large gap in the roof through which the stars were visible.

  I retreated, feeling my way back through the darkness, but was unable to find the door again. Where the devil had I ended up? I had no idea.

  The warehouse seemed to be frozen in a moment of its own destruction. When I struck a match, the only thing it illuminated clearly was my own hand, too pale and definite for my liking. There was something in the air, something that didn’t bode well. I took a few wary steps, testing the lie of the land. There had to be an exit somewhere.

  The match went out and I lit another. At the back of the warehouse, I could make out an iron machine that resembled a windmill, about nine feet high and equipped with improbable blades; around it reared other metal contraptions, rusted and immoveable. It was clearly a warehouse full of useless junk, but at first I couldn’t determine the nature of the objects or the uses they might once have had. Peering around, I thought I could recog
nize a number of household items, although they were completely deformed by the passage of time. Gradually my steps became less hesitant. In spite of the general neglect, there was some kind of order to the way the junk was piled, and it was possible to move along narrow aisles between rows of old camping stoves and metal ironing boards, big bronze vases and rotting wooden chests. After a while I discovered that all the passages led to the centre, where the objects were not piled high but scattered haphazardly, leaving a large space from which, with better lighting, one would have been able to survey the rest of the warehouse.

  I shouted.

  Unsurprisingly, my shout was absorbed by the towering piles of junk, like a stone dropping into the void, without producing the slightest echo. If I had been hoping that a hypothetical guard or night watchman would respond to my call, I gave up on the idea straight away. I resigned myself to looking for a sheltered place in which to spend the rest of the night. Near the windmill that presided over that singular cemetery I found a kind of bathtub or vat and, after lining the inside with sacks, I tested it out and found that it was not altogether uncomfortable. In any case, I guessed that it would not be long till dawn.

  Before falling asleep I lit two more matches; a few yards from my makeshift bed I noticed farm tools: dark shovels covered with a crust of tarry earth, sickles, pickaxes, pitchforks, blue and gold harnesses, oil lamps with broken glass bulbs, axes, and a collection of pokers of various sizes leaning against a board in perfect order. The implements of an ideal farmer.

  I know I had begun to fall asleep, because I had already discerned certain faces that recur in my dreams (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say the weight of those faces) when the sound woke me up. A drip of water, that was all, but right in the center of my consciousness. I opened my eyes; I wasn’t afraid; I waited.

  The noise repeated itself, an imperfect duplicate, coming from somewhere between the rows of dark masses in front of me and to the right, as if it were being made by something creeping along against the wall. Careful not to make the slightest sound, I felt in my pockets for the matchbox, extracted a match and held it between my fingers, without lighting it, like a weapon or a talisman, waiting for my curiosity to ferment.

  I should say that if I was still afraid, my fear (though the term is hardly exact) was swallowed at that point by the fatalistic calm that resulted from knowing without a doubt what was producing the sound and from the resigned decision not to make any attempt to find out why. One thing at least was clear: the sound was moving intermittently in my direction. I thought: Now it is following the wall, but in a while it is bound to veer toward the center, toward me. It would probably turn when it drew level with my position, but it might also continue on its way so as to approach from behind—in fact, it was bound to do that.

  I admit that for a moment I did weaken; unable to bear the situation any longer, I wanted to strike the match, to illuminate the scene that I sensed was being set up around me. The darkness was so sheer, the drip was moving at such a regular pace, the bath was becoming so cold and was so reminiscent of a coffin, that an act of any kind would have sufficed to fracture the desolate coherence, the twisted lucidity distilled by that sound and the warehouse. Yet I made no movement.

  I feared that cramp would seize my legs if I remained in that position much longer. I could feel a burning at the base of my esophagus. My eyes were aching.

  Suddenly the noise moved away from the wall and began to thread its way through the junk. Which meant that its source would appear on my right. With the back of my neck resting against the curved edge of the bath and my legs drawn up, I leaned sideways as far as I could, staring in that direction. Curiously, all my senses were sharpened not by fear or the imminence of combat or revelation, but in a more artistic way by the perfectly delimited space in which the anticipated silhouette would soon materialize.

  The steps slowed down, skirted a piece of furniture, a wardrobe, perhaps; I heard a rustle of clothing, then silence.

  I intuited a tremulous presence in the darkness. I knew that I was being observed. I counted to three, then tried to strike the match only to find that my fingers were no longer holding it. I tried to get up; my arms slipped on the sides of the bath without making a sound. Huddled in the bottom of the tub, like an archetypical victim, I tried to take out another match. The box was in one of my coat pockets, but at first I couldn’t find it. Finally, I held my meager torch aloft and looked out: I couldn’t see anyone.

  Whoever it was had stopped about ten yards from the bathtub, out of my field of vision.

  Although I could not see him, I could hear his hiccups. The sound was perfectly clear. Spasmodic and irritating.

  “Vallejo?” I stammered, in a voice that failed even as it emerged from my lips.

  There was no reply.

  The shadow hiccupped again, and I understood, as if I had put my head into a whirlpool, that the sound was not natural but simulated: someone was imitating Vallejo’s hiccups. But why? To frighten me? To warn me? To make fun of me? Or simply moved by some unfathomable sense of humor and disgrace?

  Come on, I thought, keep coming.

  I don’t know how long I waited.

  After a while I realized that he would not take another step.

  Little by little, the stillness, which had been tense at first, lapsed into ordinariness.

  Twice I tried to get up, and slipped both times, as if my destiny were forbidding me to run the slightest risk. The light began to change in the sector of sky visible through the gap in the roof; soon it would be dawn. At some point, perhaps while making my final attempt to get out of the bath, I uttered Uh or Ah, my sole protest, more a cry of desperation than a bid for help.

  I woke with stiff limbs, an unrelenting ache in my neck, and a frightful hangover. It was eleven in the morning and a glassy dust was falling, or rising, through the gap in the roof. The warehouse was quiet; the junk was stubbornly guarded by an aura of neglect: objects banished from the realm of human concern—even the light seemed to shun them. It was not hard to find the door; it had no handle and opened onto a gravel-strewn courtyard with abandoned flowerbeds on either side. The morning, the sky’s crown, seemed to be falling apart. Which was comforting, in a sense, since I was in a similar condition. To the left I noticed a metal door, which was shut. Beside it was a little wooden box, which seemed to have been waiting there for centuries; I sat down on it. I took a deep breath. Images of the previous hours—escape and disappointment, dreams and delirium—tumbled through me. It’s finished, I thought aloud, the carriages bound for nowhere are finished. The sky over Paris, though clearer than the day before, seemed more sinister than ever. Like a mirror hanging over the hole, I thought. But we could never know for sure. An indecipherable tongue. I urinated against a wall, profusely. I was tired; I felt wretched, alone, and confused in the midst of a labyrinth that was far too big for me. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t tell whether the sky was shaking or I was.

  Before long I was out in the street, looking for a taxi that would take me to the Boulevard de Courcelles.

  Conscious of my unkempt appearance, rumpled clothing, and bristly face, I rang the bell. While waiting I smoothed down my hair again. The toes of my right foot were hurting; maybe the taxi had cracked a bone and I was just beginning to feel it, maybe it was the result of my cramped position in the bath.

  The door opened slowly, without a sound, and from within (the curtains must have been drawn) there emerged the hooked nose and then the deathly pale face of a woman who must have been about seventy. Either she had slept as badly as I had or she had recently been crying. She looked at me bewildered, murmured something that sounded like an excuse, and gently shut the door. I rang the bell again.

  The old woman reappeared almost immediately:

  “Madame Reynaud is not here. I’m Madame Reynaud senior. Who are you?”

  She had blue eyes and her voice was unsteady. She must have been beautiful many years ago. Now she only seemed a
fraid.

  “My name is Pierre Pain, I am a friend of Madame Reynaud’s.” Madame Reynaud junior, I thought, and almost burst into hysterical laughter. “It’s extremely important that I see her.”

  My words made her smile almost imperceptibly and perhaps feel nostalgic for the world, with its gallantry and boating.

  “Well, it won’t be possible for a week.”

  I must have reacted with an alarming grimace, because the old woman stepped back in fright.

  “She has gone to Lille, to her aunt’s house,” she exclaimed from the darkness of the entrance hall.

  Then, remaining in the dark, she added in a murmur, as if to ensure that I was fully informed:

  “I am her late husband’s mother.”

  At one in the afternoon I returned to my lodgings. I filled a basin with water and washed my head and torso, briskly rubbing my forearms, armpits, neck and chest until they were red. Then I changed my clothes and went out again. Something, a sense of solidarity more than a premonition, was telling me that there was no time to lose.

  I returned to the Boulevard de Courcelles, to Madame Reynaud’s apartment. The old lady seemed more animated and listened with philosophical resignation to the puerile excuse I had invented. No, Madame Reynaud junior had not left that day, but the previous night. Her mother-in-law could not confirm (or deny) that she had been nervous, since she had, as usual, seemed rather distant. Although she’s young, you have to understand that she’s a widow, already well acquainted with misfortune, Madame Reynaud senior informed me from the threshold, with the door just slightly ajar. Her daughter-in-law had packed her bag in haste shortly after receiving a telegram from Lille. Yes, she took the telegram with her. A raised eyebrow: had I been intending to pry into private correspondence?

  The conversation lasted no more than a few seconds. I went to the public telephone in the first café I could find and dialed Madame Reynaud’s number. There was no answer. While drinking a glass of wine, I reflected that there were two possibilities: either the old lady was in the habit of not answering the telephone, or Madame Reynaud had given me a different number. For some reason I found myself accepting the second hypothesis unreservedly (opening it, in other words, to the wildest conjectures). There was no telephone in Madame Reynaud’s apartment, therefore the number she had given me and which I had called on numerous occasions, reaching Madame Reynaud herself each time, didn’t belong to her telephone. And yet she called it “my home number.” For anyone else this problem would have been a triviality, or at most a kind of riddle, but for me it was like a nail hammered into my patience, and the problem was compounded by the singular and unexpected journey my friend had undertaken, a journey that seemed unthinkable, given her concern for the health of Madame Vallejo’s husband, but also because she had not left even a brief message to inform me of her departure.