Cowboy Graves

by Roberto Bolaño

  Suddenly the man who was talking on the other end of the line, the man calling from Paris, was silent, as if describing this scene (or remembering it, maybe) had exhausted him. I could hear him breathing. I thought he was having some kind of asthma attack, or heart attack.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “Perfectly fine . . . Perfectly fine . . .”

  Then he coughed or cleared his throat noisily and was silent again. After a few seconds, he began to hum a tune, some French pop song that had yet to reach Guiana, where music arrived from the United States before it arrived from France or Italy or Germany, if music even existed in those countries.

  “Where were we?” he asked suddenly.

  “With the young men who decided to stay in the sewers.”

  “Of course. Listen up. Those young men stay in the sewers and form the nucleus of the Clandestine Surrealist Group. Of course, they can come out whenever they want. Did I tell you that each of them has a set of keys that will let them exit at any time?”

  “Yes.”

  “In other words, they aren’t prisoners. No one is in charge. They realize this immediately. Not even Breton, who gives away his own set of keys before he leaves. They’re free to leave, go back to their garrets, take a train and lose themselves forever in the stations of Europe. In fact, some nights they do go out. They’re young. They’re more or less able-bodied. They have needs that can’t be satisfied in the sewers. Sometimes they attend gatherings with the surrealists and they shake Breton’s hand. He’s cordial with them, as attentive as ever, but they never talk about the CSG. Breton sees them but doesn’t see them. Breton remembers them but doesn’t remember them. They meet people, of course. They meet Nora Mitrani, who sees them but doesn’t see them. They meet Alain Jouffroy, who sees them but doesn’t see them. They talk to Joyce Mansour. Joyce Mansour sees them but doesn’t see them. Not that it matters to her. Well, she fucks one of them. You have no idea, Diodorus, how beautiful Joyce Mansour was. They talk to José Pierre, Roberto Matta, Jean Schuster, sometimes they get to be friendly with them, the point is, they have a social life, they go to the movies, they join a gym and learn how to box, they sleep with girls, one of them sleeps with boys, sometimes in summer they take trips to the Adriatic or the Norwegian fjords. Don’t get the wrong impression: they don’t do all of this together, certainly not, each of them has his own set of keys, they go out on their own, sometimes they might go months without seeing one another, because the sewers are as big as Paris, an inside-out Paris, except that in this private Paris, instead of citizens there are the waste products of citizens, their excreta, their urine, their tears, their sweat, their semen, their vomit, their fetuses, their blood, in other words, the shadow of those citizens, their tenacious shadow, one might add, and the only risk that our five young men run in their investigations—and it’s a small risk—is coming across groups of municipal employees, sewer inspectors, drain decloggers who regularly venture down into the labyrinthine city and who are very easy to detect, because the decloggers are afraid of the methane gases that accumulate in blind galleries and they take great precautions. Their shouts, Diodorus, can be heard miles away. The shouts of the decloggers. Their laughter, their jokes, their eagerness to finish the work and get out. Our young men, meanwhile, are in no hurry at all. They know that their work will never be finished. That’s why in the summer they run off without a peep. There is one rule that they agree to follow, though they don’t always stick to it. Like in hospitals, one person must always be on guard. Four go out, one stays behind. No big deal. The one who stays behind keeps working. And so do those who go out, in some sense. And so the work, the project, begins to take shape, branches, grows, though not in linear fashion. It’s like a novel, to give you some sense, a novel that doesn’t begin at the beginning. In fact, Diodorus, it’s a novel (like all novels, really) that doesn’t begin in the novel, in the book-object that contains it, understand? Its first pages are in some other book, or in a back alley where a crime has been committed, or in a bird that watches a group of children playing, unseen.”

  “Clear as day,” I said.

  “Which means that our young men discover that they can be away from the sewers as much as they like. The work travels with them. They can be tourists, go to Greece or the Philippines, they can spend weeks paddling the Amazon, what a delight to paddle the Amazon with eyes half-shut, life sighing and creaking around you; to sleep in hammocks, listening to women talking to little girls in Portuguese. In fact, Diodorus, listen up, the five young men soon discover that it isn’t necessary to live in the sewers of Paris. It’s enough to visit one day a month. And yet the sewer system has become a well-furnished metaphor for them. They have their workshops there, their studies, their libraries. They discuss the possibility of leaving, of course. Each of them proposes a different place. But in the end, they stay. Oh, woe is me, in the end, they stay.”

  For a while I didn’t hear anything. I got the sense that the man on the other end of the line had begun to cry or that he was sighing one sigh after another.

  “Where do you think they get the money to lead this life, to live like pashas and bums?” he asked suddenly with renewed vigor.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted.

  “The same question was on their minds back then. Because they had money, I can promise you that. Once a month, in one of the rooms on the way to their lair, they would find an envelope containing a not insignificant sum that they divided among the five of them. At first, the logical thing—because logic, Diodorus, is like a madhouse—was to think that Breton was financing them. The work in which they were immersed was absorbing and soon they stopped thinking about it. All they knew for certain was that they had more than enough money to support themselves and to indulge in some Oriental luxuries, though at this point in the story two of them were living practically like clochards. But in 1966, Breton dies and for the first few months they speculate about the possibility that their funding will dry up. The money, however, continues to arrive punctually. So they raise the question again. Who is paying? Who is financing them? Who has an interest in seeing their work continue? Naturally, their thoughts turn to the CIA, the KGB, the French Ministry of Culture. After a quick examination of these possibilities, they rule them out as absurd. The group is clearly opposed to the KGB and the CIA. For several nights after dinner, as they smoke and drink cognac or whiskey, they speculate that the Minister of Culture has gone mad. Try to imagine: these young men spend the day alone, apart, working in the mysterious boulevards and streets of the sewers, and when night falls they turn on their flashlights and walk, maybe whistling as they go, to the first room they glimpsed, the room that Breton showed them. Here they shower, or not; they change clothes, or not; and they sit down at the table. One of them serves as cook. Usually it’s the Frenchman, the Italian, or the Spaniard. Sometimes—rarely—it’s the Russian. Never the German. Also, it isn’t a regular occurrence. It only happens when they have something urgent to discuss, a nightmare to explain, for example, or the last piece of a puzzle to find. Someone is financing them. That someone isn’t Breton, since he’s dead. Nor is it an American or Soviet spy agency. But someone is in on their secret and possesses a set of keys, since the money isn’t found under the door of the toy warehouse but in an inner room, which can only be reached by going through two or three locked doors. For days they ponder the mystery. They lie in wait for the visitor, they set traps for him, they hide inside a wardrobe waiting for him to come. But their capitalist partner, who seems to have a special sense for detecting their presence, doesn’t fall into any of the traps. They build a curious system of mirrors by which they intend to get a glimpse of him, and which essentially involves bouncing a reflection from one mirror to another through a keyhole. Finally, after all their attempts fail, they watch a detective movie and realize that the solution is as simple as installing a movie camera in a hidden spot. And they obtain satisfactory results,
Diodorus.”

  “What are the results? Who is bringing them the money?” I asked.

  “A woman. An older woman. The picture is a little out of focus. After they develop the film, all they see is a door opening and a woman dressed in black, her face covered with a silk veil, taking two small steps and removing an envelope from a bag. Then the woman retreats, and that’s all. The next month, they install two cameras. Same scene, but longer and with one fundamental difference. The woman who enters is dressed in black, her face covered with a veil, but it isn’t the woman from the month before. It’s a different person. Shorter, maybe; heavier and less quick. Suddenly, our five young men realize that everything, the female backers included, are part of the same project. They keep filming. The woman who turns up in the third month is extremely tall, wearing black pants and a black turtleneck sweater. Instead of a hat, she has on a beret. There is a black satin handkerchief over her face, not a veil. In the fourth month, it’s a little old lady who can barely stand upright, though she carries herself with pride and a certain style—call it the smoldering embers of style. Her dress is black, her face is covered with black tulle, her parchment-like wrists display bracelets of incalculable value. In the fifth month, the woman is young, though by the way she walks—the young men watch over and over again, like children spellbound by a western—her experience with love and maybe crime too, is plain. This woman is wearing dark glasses instead of a veil and this permits them to divine the deadly iciness of her gaze. Her gaze, we might add, is her cheekbones and lips. In the sixth month, the woman is wearing dark glasses too and the rest of her face and head are covered with a turban. She is tall and her movements are precise, though there is something shy about her. When she leaves the envelope of money, the young men notice her hands and realize that she is black. In the seventh month, the woman arrives singing. She interrupts her ditty only to bring a handkerchief to her nose and blow. The veil is pushed to one side, and she fixes it with the clumsiness of someone who’s had too much to drink. Her black dress is wrinkled and her hat looks as if it’s made of paper. She might very well have slept in her clothes. Her eyes, which the veil can’t conceal, shine with the determination of someone punching and scratching her way down a long corridor of dreams. And so on, until a year has gone by. Then the first woman appears again, followed by the second, and the third, and so on consecutively. At this point, the young men decide to follow them. The project of pursuit is complicated and involves leaving a trail of bread crumbs or pebbles, except that they can’t drop the bread crumbs or pebbles themselves, since the women seem to possess a sixth sense that alerts them to their proximity, so it’s the women who must drop them. After a while this flurry of activity bears fruit. The three women whom they’ve followed turn out to be surrealist widows. Two of them are the widows of painters whose work is rising in value on the international market. The third is the widow of a poet possessing a large family fortune. When they follow the fourth, it turns out that she too is the widow of a painter. They find the others by means of a much simpler system: they track down the surrealists who left lots of money when they died and then they go in search of the widows. The next step is to turn up at the house of one of these widows and interrogate her about why the women are covering their expenses, but they decide not to take this step, because somehow they feel the time is not yet right. Once this problem has been solved, they immerse themselves in their work again. In their masterwork. Do you know what that masterwork is, Diodorus?”

  “I have a vague idea, sir. Preparing the revolution? Laying the foundation for the literature of the future?” These must be the right questions to ask, I thought. I didn’t want to look like an idiot. I didn’t want this man who had called me from Paris to decide all of a sudden that I wasn’t a viable contender and hang up on me.

  “Cold, cold, but also hot, hot.” The voice seemed to recede, as if all of a sudden doors were beginning to close between my interlocutor and me, one after the other, blown shut by a hurricane wind that not only made him shrink but also literally made my hearing dwindle, so that I put a hand up to my ear pressed to the telephone and felt it: it was still the same size, only much hotter than usual.

  “I’ll tell you about our masterwork and what we expect you to do in the Clandestine Surrealist Group when you come to join us.”

  “When will that be?” I gasped.

  My interlocutor’s voice rasped. I heard him spit. I imagined him in an underground gallery, talking on a pirated phone line, his gaze fixed on the river flowing through the gallery toward an enormous treatment system resembling a mill with silver blades.

  “In three months. We expect you on July 28, at precisely eight p.m., on the rue de la Réunion, at Père Lachaise Cemetery. Do you have paper and pencil?”

  “I have a pen,” I said.

  “Well, write this down. July 28. Eight p.m. Rue de la Réunion, Père Lachaise Cemetery. If anything goes wrong, head to the rue du Louvre. Walk from rue Saint-Honoré to rue d’Aboukir. A hunchbacked man will approach you and ask how to get to La Promenade de Vénus. Do you know what La Promenade de Vénus is?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a café. All right. Listen up. The man with the hunchback will come up to you and ask you where La Promenade de Vénus is. You don’t say anything, you raise a finger to your head and touch it, as if to say that the location of the café is a mental thing. Do you understand? Have you written it all down?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very well, Diodorus Pilon, that’s all for now.”

  “But how will I get to Paris?” I asked.

  “By plane or by ship, of course.”

  “I don’t have any money,” I almost shouted.

  For a few seconds, I couldn’t hear anything. I worried that the sharpness of my cry might have seemed rude.

  “Are you still there, sir?” I asked.

  “I’m thinking, Diodorus, and I don’t know what to tell you. We can’t send you the ticket from here. We can’t send you money, either. It would be a violation of our security measures. You’ll have to handle getting the ticket. When you’re in Paris, we can cover your costs, but you’ll have to pay for the trip yourself.”

  “Don’t worry, sir, I’ll be at Père Lachaise Cemetery on July 28,” I said, somewhat recovered and without a clue where I would get money for the ticket.

  “Not at the cemetery, Diodorus, on rue de la Réunion, on rue de la Réunion, for Christ’s sake, get it into your head.”

  “On rue de la Réunion, no problem.”

  “All right, you have a good life, goodbye.”

  And he hung up.

  I stood there without moving, not knowing whether to laugh or pinch myself, with the phone in my hand as day began to dawn around me. The light that came in through the glass walls of the phone booth had a tentative pallor, conjuring up the green of the hills and the pearly color of the sea first thing in the morning. It was as if I were inside a transparent submarine, a little submarine that had been down to the bottom of an ocean trench. Now, back on the surface again, I was afraid to open the door and emerge.

  A man came out of one of the nearby houses. He was wearing a light-colored suit and carrying his jacket in one hand, in a jaunty yet fastidious way, with a leather briefcase in his other hand. He was wearing a short-sleeved white shirt. His arms were long and strong, like a professional swimmer’s. Maybe he was a college professor or a government official. He looked at me as if trying to place me and then he got in his car and started it. As he passed the phone booth, he turned to stare at me and I returned his gaze. When the car was gone I came out of the booth and set off for the Coves. By now my poor mother would be gone, but I felt like taking a walk before I went home.