Monsieur Pain

by Roberto Bolaño

  I thought that if I kept still I might escape from illusion and discern the presence I could sense nearby, sending me signals from an untouchable space.

  “I’m going to tell you what happened to Terzeff. And this really is an interesting story. Think of it as a way of honoring our former friendship. The friendship that once bound the three of us. And by the way, there’s no need to call me Monsieur.”

  “There was never any friendship between us. It was simply that, for a time, you and Terzeff were visiting Monsieur Rivette and so was I.”

  “All right, all right, but we were at least on first-name terms back then, weren’t we?” Looking injured, he ordered another rum punch.

  “What are you going to tell me? The story of Terzeff’s suicide? His thwarted love for Irène Joliot-Curie? Frankly I can’t imagine that luminary of French science going by the name of Irène Terzeff-Curie, or our friend helping her to discover artificial radioactivity, much less winning a Nobel prize. We must be getting old and losing our perspective!”

  “You’re speaking for yourself there. Now listen. The first part is wrong. Terzeff never even knew Irène Joliot-Curie, an ugly creature if ever there was one. Nor did he try to refute her mother’s theories, as some claimed at the time. The real story is entirely different, and I’m the only one who knows it. As Monsieur Rivette will have told you, and if he didn’t, you have since found out, Terzeff joined Madame Curie’s circle in 1920. He wasn’t yet twenty-three years old: one of the youngest, and clearly the brightest. At the end of 1924, for no apparent reason, he broke away and gave up the research he had been doing in that group. He would never explain what had moved him to throw away his career, or a part of it. And shortly afterwards he committed suicide. His acquaintances (as for friends, true friends, he had only one, and that was me) were puzzled by the absence of an obvious motive for his disappearance. The only way they could make sense of it was to presume that he had argued and fallen out with Madame Curie herself, a plausible enough explanation, given Terzeff’s willful, independent, impassioned character; he must have tried, they said, to challenge some of the eminent lady’s theoretical postulates. Nothing could have been further from the truth, since apart from the fact that it would have been difficult for a young researcher like Terzeff even to approach such an authority, he showed little interest in the work Madame Curie was doing at the time. His attention was focused on the other side of the marital bed, so to speak. He was interested in Pierre Curie and his last project. Do you know how Pierre Curie died?

  “No . . .”

  “He was run over by a carriage. On the 19th of April 1906, in the morning, as he crossed Rue Dauphine. At the time he and another scientist by the name of D’Arsonval were investigating the psychic forces manifested in mediumistic trances. The project was left unfinished, and shelved. It was never mentioned again; setting aside the circumstances, it was rather unorthodox, and bore no relation to Curie’s earlier work. Or perhaps it did, but that only made it more preposterous. His partner D’Arsonval vanished like a puff of smoke, never to be heard of again. After the absurd accident that cost Curie his life, D’Arsonval disappeared, just like that. Perhaps that was what piqued our friend’s curiosity. You have to bear in mind that at the time, like us, Terzeff was an enthusiastic if not entirely convinced mesmerist, and it must have struck him as significant that Curie was working, as it were, on the medium’s plane. I don’t know what Terzeff got up to, but after digging around here and there for a number of years, from 1920 to 1924, he came to the conclusion—brace yourself now—that Curie had been assassinated. I was the only person to whom he confided his suspicions, which were in any case unsupported by any firm documentary evidence, and now you are the second person to be informed of them. He always refused to reveal his reasons for making such a claim. If I told you, he said to me one night, you’d think I’d gone crazy. On another occasion he insinuated that he was keeping quiet to protect me. But to protect me from what? From madness, or what he took to be madness, I suppose. All I could piece together was that Curie had not been killed because of his research, although in a sense the work he had been doing was a good pretext for eliminating him; no, his death fulfilled some ritual function, don’t ask me how. I do also recall, however, that for Terzeff every death had a ritual function; death, indeed, was the only genuine rite left in the world.”

  “And why did Terzeff commit suicide?”

  “That was never clear.”

  “It’s crazy. Everything you have told me is crazy. If it happened the way you say, why not suppose that Terzeff was assassinated too?”

  “I don’t know. Terzeff was my friend, possibly the only friend I’ve ever had, and when he confided in me, a few months before his death, I believed him. Perhaps it was an act of faith. But what seems to me beyond doubt is that, whether or not Curie was assassinated, my friend must have discovered something terrible that led to his own destruction.”

  I looked around: the café had emptied and the cold was creeping in among the tables and the chairs, the dirty glasses and the cigarette butts crushed on the floor.

  “Something terrible . . . in the papers, in the notes . . . something everyone had overlooked . . . Except for Terzeff of course, with his clinical eye . . .”

  Pleumeur-Bodou was gazing off into a nightmare from 1924. His expression was bloated and abject, as if he had glimpsed a light in the depths of the nightmare and was afraid.

  “How does the film end?” I asked.

  He looked at me in surprise.

  “The film . . . ” I said. “Actualité . . . you’ve seen it before, haven’t you?”

  “Countless times.”

  “How does it end?”

  With a sad smile Pleumeur-Bodou said:

  “Crudely. Michel kills his parents. Then he tries to kill his wife. He fails. He commits suicide. But first he sets fire to the mansion: a magnificent blaze, total destruction . . .”

  “And the valet?”

  “Ah, yes, the valet, that nosy smartass, he dies in the fire, and whether or not it’s an accident is never clear. Or perhaps he ups and runs. Yes, that’s it, he gets away. He disappears. He is swallowed by the night. It’s quite a strange film . . . I don’t know what to think of it. To be honest, I don’t entirely understand it.”

  “But you’ve seen it so many times.”

  “Yes, but there are sequences, fragments, that I still don’t understand. And maybe I never will, but what does it matter . . .”

  “What will you do now? Will you go back to Spain?”

  “Possibly. I have a number of political commitments to attend to.” He seemed to wake up. “And what about you? How is life treating you? Still as much of a loner as ever?”

  I considered insulting him, but it wasn’t worth the effort. Pleumeur-Bodou had spoken the truth, I sensed, although it was a truth composed of shadows on the wall of a cave. Terzeff’s version would have been different. April and the circle expanding to the point of nausea. Geometry, everything was geometry and shit. I stood up.

  “Are you going?” he asked in a plaintive-sounding voice.

  “Yes, thanks for everything.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I don’t think I really have a choice . . . I don’t know . . . We’ll see . . .”

  When Pleumeur-Bodou smiled, I saw the line of his lips sum up all my useless, fruitless years. I felt that unless I did something straight away, I would collapse right there, at the feet of my onetime fellow-student.

  “I hope you won’t be running any unnecessary risks when you return to Spain,” I said, feigning concern.

  “I doubt it. The Republic is doomed. No need to worry, in any case, I work behind the lines. I’m an Intelligence Officer, did I tell you? I apply my knowledge of mesmerism to the interrogation of prisoners and spies.” He burst out laughing. “It’s extremely effective, I assure you.”

  Nakedness at last, and misery.

  Suddenly I felt well again. No, not well, just a littl
e better. I felt unburdened. I realized that I was going to face something infinitely more dangerous than Pleumeur-Bodou, and that, in the end, none of this mattered much at all. I picked up his glass of rum punch and threw it in his face.

  “What?!” He looked more surprised than indignant.

  But after an instant of inaction, he leaped to his feet and picked up a chair, with a clearly hostile intention. I took a step back.

  “Sit down,” I said. “Let’s not turn this parting into a hooligans’ brawl.”

  “I’m going to break your back.”

  “I have a gun in my pocket,” I lied. “Come any closer and I’ll fire.”

  “Fire then, you dog.”

  The barman and two clients were watching us from the bar.

  “Call the police!” I shouted. In apparent response, one of the clients ran out the door.

  “You’re a child, Pierre, go on, get out.”

  He took out a handkerchief and began to dab at his face.

  “I feel sorry for you,” he said, without looking at me. “You’re as old as I am and you don’t even know what side you’re on. You should kneel down and kiss my hands. Poor fool. You have a gun, do you? You? How ridiculous! Just get the hell out of here! What are you standing there staring at me for? I feel sorry for you, I really do, I really do, you’re pitiful, you really are, you really are, I feel sorry for you . . .”

  I left. The rain was still falling on the streets.

  At seven in the evening I ordered a coffee in a café near the Clinique Arago. I was prepared to wait for Madame Vallejo to come out, or, failing that, to hatch some kind of plot to get in.

  At seven-thirty, while students at a nearby table were talking excitedly and all at once about the Spanish Civil War (one was arguing that instead of sitting around chattering in Paris they should go and join the ambulance corps in Spain), I decided that I had no choice but to slip into the hospital however I could.

  I paid and went out into the street, with my head down, my shoulders hunched, and the sketchy beginnings of a plan.

  Hidden behind a tree, I waited for the propitious moment; I must admit that the prospect of another confrontation with the receptionist and the aide from Brittany did not appeal to me.

  After a while the students who had been talking in the bar came out and headed toward the clinic. I joined them discreetly, and by the time we reached the opposite sidewalk I had worked my way to a safe position in the middle of the group and taken the arm of a student, perhaps the one who wanted to go to Spain.

  “Fine ideas, young man,” I said. “Fine ideas. Fascism must be stopped.”

  He looked at me somewhat surprised; then he smiled—almost all his teeth were decaying—and said:

  “I’m afraid you’re mistaken, sir. My vocation is obstetrics.”

  “No matter, my friend,” I said. “We all have to help however we can.”

  He was a pleasant lively boy, and seemed very sure of himself.

  We burst into the lobby noisily, as if into a dance hall. Within a few seconds I had managed to scurry away down a corridor. Young voices echoed behind me, fading away:

  “Good-bye, Hélène.”

  “Good-bye, Paul.”

  “Good-bye, Lisa.”

  “Good-bye, Robert.”

  Like a deserter, like the deserter I might have been if the gas hadn’t got me first, I disappeared into the hospital, frequently changing my course, avoiding the nurses and the tearful or smiling visitors who kept suddenly emerging from doors located in the most unexpected crannies.

  As a result of this strategy for passing unnoticed, within a few minutes I was lost. To make things worse, there were no signs to guide visitors and the rooms were not numbered consecutively, which made it extremely difficult to orient oneself; similarly, the combined effect of the erratic stairways, each unlike the others but all burdened with superfluous landings, and the circular and semi-circular corridors, was such that even the canniest visitor would sooner or later have been unable to say what floor he was on. And my predicament was exacerbated by a determination not to ask any questions.

  Soon there was no one to ask. The corridor in which I had ended up was dark and damp, with unplastered cement walls and a room on either side: a half-finished bathroom and an unlit storeroom in which mattresses and bundles of moth-eaten blankets were piled. The corridor was sealed at its far end by a wall which bore an illegible but no doubt pornographic inscription framed by a large heart, scrawled when the cement was still wet. The whole place smelled of urine, or rot, of human and animal feces mingled, as if the entire floor were coated with a thin hard crust of filth.

  I decided I would take refuge in the bathroom until nine and then set off in search of Vallejo.

  When I emerged, there was considerably less activity. The visitors had left, and the white corridors went past like the pages of a book written in a foreign language, barely animated by the sound of peaceful distant voices, the clinking of trolleys distributing medications or collecting the patients’ dinner plates, the gurgling of tanks, and the faint rumble of the water heaters.

  I only encountered two other people; the first was a nurse, who greeted me with a nod, thinking I was someone else or mistaking me for a doctor; the second was an old man inching his way along a side corridor, who didn’t even look at me.

  I went down and up stairs. I remember staring in fascination at a three-story house across the street as if it were a chimerical planet; I tried to avoid what I thought were the busier corridors, and, when I had no choice, spent as little time in them as possible, just enough to orient myself; I opened doors, saw the weary face of a fat man, sleeping with his bedside lamp left on; an old woman with her head sunken in a pillow and a contented expression on her face, while a somewhat younger man, her son perhaps or her lover, slept beside her in an armchair; I saw the round face of a little girl who looked back at me without fear or surprise.

  The galleries stretched on and on as the minutes went by. I felt increasingly cold; my steps seemed to resonate through all the wings. I knew I would never find Vallejo’s room.

  It was then, as I was trying to find my way out of a section of the building in which my search had proved fruitless, that I saw it at the end of the corridor, as if it had been there waiting for me all along. It was barely more than a blurred silhouette, an armless body, a nightmare catapulted straight from infancy. It was more pitiful than frightening, but its presence was unbearable. Embrace it, I told myself, but did not entertain that thought for long. My hands were trembling. I sensed that the silhouette was trembling too. I turned and ran.

  The labyrinth, the fascination of the labyrinth possessed me: each new hallway that appeared as I walked in a daze along those unevenly illuminated galleries, each stairway and elevator baited my febrile hesitation. I realized I was dripping with sweat; I leaned against a door; it opened.

  There were two beds in the room, both empty. I shut the door and let my eyes grow accustomed to the dimness. The shimmering silence of a snowy landscape reigned once more in the corridor outside. I lay down on one of the beds. Branches protruded into the space framed by the window, as in a Japanese print. I thought of Madame Reynaud, the threadlike simplicity of life, the necessity of seeing her. It was cold; it occurred to me that there must have been a heater somewhere in the room. Approaching the window, I looked down and saw three people in a cement rectangle that was meant to be an interior courtyard. A lamp threw shadows that stretched to the columns of a grey arcade and beyond.

  There were two men and a woman; they were talking; every now and then the woman stamped her heel; she was wearing a black skirt and jacket and carrying a handbag and a gray trench coat hung over one arm. One of the men was wearing a doctor’s white coat, and the other, who was short and fat, had his hat pulled down to his ears. The man in the hat looked as if he were listening skeptically, impatiently, while keeping a wary sidelong eye on his own shadow stretching away to the base of the columns.

  I
would not be able to say exactly what it was that caught my attention, but having walked around the room in search of the heater, which I knew I would not find—and even if I had, my apprehensive circumspection would have prevented me from switching it on—I rushed to the window, as if I were suffocating, and pressed my nose and mouth to the glass, misting it with my breath.

  I was just in time to see the fat man cross the courtyard and disappear down a corridor in which I could dimly make out enormous black earthenware tubs. The woman and the other man were still standing there expectantly, the man’s face tilted forward, as if he were examining the hem of his companion’s skirt, while she let her gaze wander idly over the opaque windows to her right. At one point the man produced a pack of cigarettes and held it out to her. She shook her head, barely intimating thanks, and turned her face to the left, looking doubtful, as if she were counting the windows on the other side of the courtyard now, in one of which, had she sharpened her gaze, she might have noticed my silhouette, and taken fright, seeing me there, watching them, frightened myself, exposed. Suddenly the fat man who had gone away reappeared, and the other two turned to watch him approach.

  I could see well enough to notice his resemblance to Lemière (the man who had stayed resembled Lejard, but the woman was not, of course, Madame Vallejo). He waddled hurriedly over the cement, like a nervous duck. He had come straight from the arcade and seemed anxious to return to the others. The woman placed her hand delicately on his shoulder and let it linger there and the fat man (it wasn’t Lemière) moved his head without looking at her, in a way that puzzled me at first. The doctor took the woman’s hands; the fat man took off his hat, waited for the others to finish consoling each other, and then moved his head again. It was a simple no, a horizontal shake: right, left, right . . . Then, with an inner stiffening that gave the gesture an added poignancy, the fat man’s chin fell and struck his collarbone like a bell’s clapper, as if the denial had utterly drained him of freedom. The woman took her hand from the doctor’s grasp and lifted it to her eyes, but then it slid down to her cheek of its own accord, like a spider, the fingers spread over her mouth. The fat man shrugged his shoulders. The doctor bobbed his head abruptly, in a falsely optimistic manner, and put his arm around the woman’s waist. Offering no resistance, she let herself be led away from the arcade and disappeared directly beneath my observation post (the doctor had a perfectly round bald spot and the woman’s hair had a soft look, falling in waves that glowed in the lamp’s yellow light). The fat man stood there for a moment in the middle of the courtyard with his chin on his chest and his hands in his pockets, then walked away, following the other two.