Cowboy Graves

by Roberto Bolaño

  There, as usual, he poured us each a shot of rum, which we downed in a single gulp, and then, also as usual, we piled our hands over Bolamba’s outstretched hands and shouted:

  “To victory!”

  Then we left and let our teacher rest.

  But that night, a kind of melancholy shone weakly in my comrades’ eyes, as if the Bolambaesque cheer wasn’t enough, or as if we were getting older. Alcides La Mouette put it plainly.

  “Where will we be fifteen years from now? Where will we be thirty years from now, when the next eclipse comes to Port Hope? We’ll be working in pharmacies, as clerks, or we’ll have left for the provinces to lead miserable lives. We’ll have children and aches and pains. No one will write. And this shit country will be just the same as it is now.”

  “Not the same,” said David Alan. “Probably worse. Much worse, even.”

  “Then we won’t be alive,” I said, “because if the country gets any worse we’ll have no choice but to head for the rain forest.”

  “Maybe so,” said David Alan.

  We had reached the center of the city and the neon signs shaded my friends’ faces yellow, then blue, then red. We shook hands formally and parted ways. I started for the Coves, which was where my mother had a stand selling fried fish, yucca, and beans. Alan and La Mouette headed to New Town, which was a workers’ housing complex that a Belgian architect had built ten years ago on the edge of the city, next to two mills; it was already falling down. As I walked, I started to whistle a popular song. Then I passed some white kids, who must have been tourists though they didn’t look like it, and I composed a poem in my head about human solidarity, more powerful than race or nationality. The white kids, one girl among them, got into a Cadillac convertible and peeled off, making the tires squeal. I stood there watching the trail of exhaust they left until they disappeared down avenue de l’Indépendance. When I got to the stop, my bus was long gone and I decided to save the money and walk.

  I don’t know why, but I resolved to take a shortcut (or what I thought was a shortcut) through the hills. I had never gone that way before. Whenever I was on foot, I walked along rue du Commerce, where the thronging masses were up and about until late. Maybe that particular night I wasn’t in the mood for thronging masses; maybe I wanted to try a new route; maybe I wanted to breathe the fresher air of the upper reaches of Port Hope.

  All I know for sure is that instead of turning right toward the sea, I turned left onto a fairly wide street running uphill, almost imperceptibly at first. I can’t remember what it was called. After a while, the palm trees to either side of the street vanished, replaced by pines, big royal pines that towered in the night. The sounds of the city vanished too and all that was left was the muted rumble of a few cars and the chorus of night birds calling to one another. I recognized the heehee bird, which seems to be laughing at everyone, and I thought I also made out the call of the radiator bird, whose song or cry is full of ennui.

  Then I passed a gas station that still had all its lights on but where I didn’t see a single person. I noticed this immediately and was a little alarmed, since in those days gas station robberies were a common occurrence, according to the papers. I walked faster and, when I had left the gas station behind, I realized that the road was getting steeper and there were fences on either side now instead of houses, as if the land had only just been parceled out. Each lot had a different fence. The side streets weren’t paved.

  When I got to the top of the hill I saw the sea and the lights of the port and the traffic along the promenade. I didn’t see the lights of the Coves, which was on the other side of the bay, on the banks of the Coconut River. For a second, I thought that my sense of direction had abandoned me. But I was sure that if I kept walking and got over the second hill I’d soon be in the Old Hospital neighborhood, which I knew like the palm of my hand, and from there it was steps to the beach.

  So I kept walking until I reached a lush plaza, full of trees and big dark plants that made strange sounds in the breeze. As if they were talking. As if they were all mulling over the same story. As if the eclipse, which wouldn’t come again for another thirty years, had settled permanently in their leaves. And I heard the heehee bird again. It was calling to another bird, or so I guessed, but there was no answer. Hee hee, hee hee, hee hee, from the top of a pine. And then the silent wait. No answer. Then the bird called again and waited again, and again the same result. It was still in good humor despite the fruitlessness of its call, I mused. It must be laughing at itself, not at anyone listening to it. Then, without thinking, I answered it.

  “Hee hee,” I said, under my breath at first, like a shy heehee bird, then louder, until I hit the right pitch.

  The silence that fell suddenly over the plaza gave me goose bumps. It wasn’t just that the heehee bird didn’t answer, it was as if all the plants were turning to look at me. Feeling watched didn’t discourage me and I called to the bird again in its own tongue, which consisted of just two syllables, meaning that any verbal nuance must come from the tone in which they were uttered. Maybe, I said to myself, the heehee bird’s hee hee meant I’m alone, I want a girl bird, or I’m ready and waiting, I want a girl bird, and my answering hee hee might mean I’m going to kill you, I’m going to rip you to pieces, I want your feathers, say, or I want your guts.

  As might have been expected, there was no answer. I imagined the heehee bird hidden on some branch, watching me with a sardonic smile on its beak, the smile of an old joker with the words trickery and blood hanging from it like worms. On the other side of the plaza, the street split in two. Mentally I asked the bird to forgive me for the joke I had just played on it and I turned down the street to the right, which was possibly better lit than the street on the left.

  At first the street went downhill, but after a while it leveled off. The houses were big and each had a yard and a garage, though some late-model cars were parked along the curb. The street smelled like freshly watered plants. The grass in the yards looked neatly cut—unlike, say, the grass at De Gaulle Park. Every few feet there was a streetlight and, as if that weren’t light enough, almost every house had a little porch lamp wreathed in mosquitoes and moths. Through a few windows, I caught glimpses of people up late talking, or watching the late shows on TV, though my general sense was that most of the street’s residents were asleep already.

  I walked faster. Across the street, next to a streetlight and an enormous pine, there was a telephone booth. I remember I thought it was strange, even ludicrous, to see a telephone booth in a neighborhood where everybody surely had phones at home. The public telephone nearest to us was more than three blocks away and most of the time it didn’t work, so when my mother or I needed to make a phone call we had to walk at least six blocks to the next phone, which was on rue du Vélodrome, by the seafood stands. Just then, as I was walking along the opposite sidewalk, the phone rang.

  I slowed down but didn’t stop. I heard the first ring clearly, then the second. I imagined that a boy or a girl would come running across one of those verdant yards to answer it. The third ring sent a shiver through me, then came the fourth and the fifth and I stopped. For an instant, I thought that the noise would wake up the neighbors and they would see me walking down their street, a stranger whom they would probably take for a thief. The phone rang for the sixth time, then the seventh. I ran across the street. When I got to the other side, I stopped and imagined that it would stop ringing, but then came the eighth and the ninth ring, magnified. Before the phone could ring for the tenth time, I slid into the booth and picked up the receiver.

  “Who is it?” asked a voice that didn’t sound south Guianan or central Guianan, much less north Guianan.

  “Me,” I said, stupidly.

  “Good, very good. What’s your name?” The voice didn’t have a French accent either. We were speaking in French, of course, but it didn’t sound like the voice of someone from France. It might have b
een the voice of a Pole speaking French, say, or a Serb speaking French.

  “Diodorus Pilon.”

  “Diodorus of Sicily? Nice name, very original,” said the voice. “Wait a minute, I’m going to write it down.” I heard a kind of laugh and I guessed it was a joke. “All right, Diodorus, you’re young and you’re a poet, am I right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me how old you are, if you don’t mind.”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Do you have a book out yet? Have you published poems in a literary magazine? Newspapers, broadsheets, bulletins, literary supplements, church newsletters?”

  “Actually, no. None of my poems have ever been published.”

  “Do you have a book in the works? Do you have plans to publish something—anything—soon?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, okay. Wait a minute, Diodorus, don’t hang up . . .”

  I heard a crunch. As if someone had split a slender plank of wood with one blow. I heard static. Muffled curses and grumbling. Then silence. Outside of the booth, in the street, everything seemed normal. I imagined the neighbors and their children sleeping. I imagined kids who lived on that street I had never seen before. I saw them coming out in the morning on their way to school or college, dressed in miniskirts or prestigious uniforms. I thought about my mother, who was waiting for me at the Coves.

  “Do you have any idea who I am, Diodorus?” asked the voice all of a sudden.

  “No.”

  “Not the slightest idea?”

  “Maybe this is a joke,” I ventured.

  “Not even close. This isn’t a joke. You really don’t have the slightest idea why we’ve called you?”

  “You didn’t actually call me. I was just passing by, and I happened to pick up the phone.”

  “No, Diodorus. We were calling you. We knew that if you were walking by a phone and it rang, you would answer it. We’ve called lots of public phones, of course. All of the phones on the four or five routes you might have taken tonight.”

  “This is the first time I’ve been on this street.”

  “It’s called Elm Street. Though I don’t think there are any elms on it.”

  “You’re right, there are only pines.”

  “But it’s a pretty street. Anyway. Let me ask you the same question again. Do you have any idea who we are?”

  “No,” I confessed.

  “Would you like to know? Do you want to hear our proposal?”

  “I’m dying to hear it,” I said.

  “We belong . . . No, ‘belong’ isn’t the right word, because we don’t belong to anyone or anything . . . We really only belong to ourselves. And sometimes, Diodorus, even that isn’t certain. Do I sound a trifle moralistic?” he asked, after a moment of reflection.

  “Not at all. I agree completely with everything you’ve said. Man belongs only to himself.”

  “Well, that’s not quite it, but close. I think we’ve gotten a little off track.”

  “You were going to tell me the name of your organization,” I said, helpfully.

  “Oh yes. We’re the Clandestine Surrealist Group.”

  “The Clandestine Surrealist Group.”

  “Or the Surrealist Group in Clandestinity. The CSG, for short.”

  “Do you belong to the CSG?” I shouted in excitement.

  “Let’s say that I serve in the CSG. Have you ever heard of us?”

  “Honestly, no.”

  “Not many people have, Diodorus, that’s part of our strategy. I know you’ve heard of surrealism, haven’t you?”

  “Of course. My mentor, Roger Bolamba, was a friend of the great south Guianan poet Régis Saint-Clair, about whom Breton said: ‘His horse is the night.’”

  “Is that true?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Wait a minute, Diodorus, don’t hang up.”

  I heard a voice cursing in a language that definitely wasn’t French. It had to be some Slavic or Balkan language.

  “Régis Saint-Clair . . . Saint-Clair, Saint-Clair, Saint-Clair . . . I’ve got it. South Guianan poet, member of the surrealists from 1946 to 1950. Born at Shark Point, lived many years in Africa. Author of some twenty books celebrating negritude, Creole food, the mental landscape of exile . . . The mental landscape of exile—who wrote that, I’d like to know . . . At the end of his career he returns to south Guiana, where he’s head of the National Library . . . Dies of natural causes at his Shark Point home. Is that the man?”

  “Yes, sir. Régis Saint-Clair.”

  “And you say he was a friend of your mentor, what was his name, Bolamba?”

  “Roger Bolamba. They were as close as dirt and fingernail. Pardon the expression.”

  “Bury your mentors, Diodorus. Now that you’re seventeen, I’d say that the moment has come.”

  “I’ll think about it, sir,” I said, very excited for some reason.

  “Now, where were we? You were saying that you’re familiar with surrealism, is that right?”

  “The best poets in the world,” I said with conviction.

  “Not just poets, Diodorus, painters and filmmakers too.”

  “I love Buñuel.”

  “But especially revolutionaries, Diodorus. Now listen up. There are prophets, seers, sages, sorcerers, necromancers, mediums. But those are really only disguises. Sometimes good disguises and sometimes clumsy disguises. But disguises all the same, do you follow me?”

  “I follow you,” I said, uncertainly.

  “And what do these disguises hide? They hide revolutionaries. Because that’s what it’s all about, do you see?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Revolutionaries hide to make revolution.”

  “No,” said the voice. “The revolution is made without disguises. Revolutionaries hide to prepare for revolution.”

  “I understand.”

  “And broadly speaking, that’s what the Clandestine Surrealist Group is. A surrealist group that nobody knows anything about. We need publicity,” he said, and he started to laugh. He didn’t laugh like a Frenchman but like a Pole or a Russian who has been living in Paris for a long time. “And that explains this sort-of proselytism, though that’s not quite the right word for it, this sort-of selection process, shall we say, that we conduct through phone calls.”

  “So what about surrealism? The . . . official surrealism? Why doesn’t it take charge of the selection process?” I asked.

  “Official surrealism is a whorehouse, Diodorus. The stories I could tell you . . . Since Breton died, there’s no enduring that crowd. Don’t get me wrong. A few of them are good people, especially some of the widows, the surrealist widows tend to be exceptional people, but the vast majority are absolute twits. If it were up to me I’d hang them all from the lampposts of the Champs-Elysées.”

  “I agree,” I said.

  “In fact,” said the voice, dreamily, “official surrealism, the usual worthy exceptions aside, is unaware of the existence of the CSG. To give you an idea, imagine a flesh-and-blood person like you or me living in a room, and living in the same room—though I don’t know whether ‘living’ is quite the word—is a ghost. Sharing the same scenery or surroundings. But they don’t see each other. It’s sad. It wasn’t like that at first, I guess. The surrealists and the clandestine surrealists knew one another. Sometimes they were friends. A few played on both teams: surrealists by day and clandestine surrealists by night. They had their in-jokes, the atmosphere was relaxed. Breton himself dropped a hint about the project, in an interview that’s fortunately forgotten today. He said maybe, maybe, maybe the time was coming for surrealism to return to the catacombs. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Luckily no one took him seriously. What were we talking about?”

  “About the telephone selection process, I think.”

  “It’s our way of recruiting people. We
can call anywhere in the world. We have a method for fooling the phone companies and not spending anything on the calls. There are CSG associates who are technology whizzes, Diodorus, and this is only the beginning. Then we mark the phone with certain symbols so it can be used for free by immigrants who want to talk to their families in Senegal or Petit Guiana. We never use that phone again. We’ve got our security measures. Like the urban guerrillas of São Paulo, to give you an idea.”

  “I think the urban guerrillas of São Paulo are being killed left and right,” I said.

  “What’s killing us, meanwhile, is the heat in summer and the cold in winter. And sometimes boredom, because we’re getting old, and boredom is one of the afflictions of old age. I’m going to tell you a story, Diodorus, listen up. At the end of the fifties or the beginning of the sixties, André Breton invited five young surrealists to his house. Four of these surrealists had just arrived in Paris. The fifth was a Parisian and something of an introvert. In other words, he had hardly any friends, or no friends at all. The young men came to Breton’s house. There was a Russian, an Italian, a German, and a Spaniard. All of them spoke French, of course. In fact, the German spoke better French than the young Frenchman, who, in addition to being an introvert, stuttered and was dyslexic. So there they are at Breton’s house, these five young men, the oldest twenty-two and the youngest eighteen. They’re a little bit surprised because Breton’s wife and his daughter aren’t there, nor are any of the famous surrealists. Famous to the enthusiastic young men, at least, maybe for having published a poem in some magazine that only bibliophiles remember today, or some so-called surrealist collection since fallen into oblivion. You know, the court of mediocrities that kings must suffer.”

  “But Breton wasn’t a king,” I protested.

  “You’re right, he wasn’t. A chancellor, then. Or Minister of Foreign Affairs, agreed?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Listen up. Here we have these five young men and all of a sudden Breton appears. He greets each of them by name. He acts as if he knows them very well. He asks them questions. He nods. The young men are just as he had imagined. They spend the afternoon together. Then they go out to eat. They wander the streets of Paris. A Paris that is dying, Diodorus, a Paris whose scepter shines on the other side of the ocean, in New York. But they walk the streets of Paris and talk about everything. The young men feel urgency in Breton’s words, the radiance of a plan that has yet to be revealed to them. Finally, they go into a café, any old café, where Breton asks whether they’re willing to go down into the sewers and live there for ten years. The young men think Breton is speaking figuratively. He repeats the question. The young men reply with other questions. What kind of sewers? The sewers of Paris? The sewers of the mind? The sewers of art? Breton doesn’t answer. They drink. They talk about other things. Then they pay and go out. They’re lost again in the maze of a bustling old neighborhood. Suddenly, in a side street full of the graffiti of minor political groups, Breton indicates a wooden door and they go into a room. It looks like a toy maker’s warehouse. The room has a door that leads to another room, which in turn has a door that leads to another room. And so on. The young men even spot fishing gear along the way. Breton has a bundle of keys that he uses to open all the doors. Finally, they reach the last room. Here the only door is the one they’ve come through. But then Breton leads them into a corner and opens a trapdoor. They climb down. First Breton, who picks up a flashlight hanging by the top steps, and then the five young men. They reach an octagonal room. Surprised, they hear the rush of water, confirming that they’re inside the Paris sewer system. On the walls of the room, a painter or mongoloid child has drawn some chalk figures half-blotted out by the damp. Breton asks again whether they’re prepared to live for ten years in the sewers. The young men listen, their eyes on his, and then they look again at the chalk drawings. They all say yes. They leave the room with Breton in the lead once more. When they reach the first room—or the last, depending how you look at it; the one that looks like a toy maker’s warehouse—he takes four sets of keys out of a box and presents them to four of the young men, giving his own set to the fifth. Then he shakes each of their hands and says goodbye. The young men are left alone. For a few seconds, they stand there motionless, staring at each other. Then the Russian locks the door and they return to the sewers.”