Cowboy Graves

by Roberto Bolaño

  Blessed vision! Her winged presence produced something akin to astonishment, of the sort usually elicited only by poems, whether on canvas or on the page. Abstracted traveler of imaginary lands, from the very start she dazzled her dear parents and the select circle to which they belonged with her intellect and beauty. I can say without hesitation that it was from Eliseo Arancibia that she inherited her open, unwavering intelligence, and from Elena Múgica Echevarría the beauty and grace that were hers until the final dusk.

  As evidence of her cleverness, let me say that by the age of ten she could already hold forth on the vagaries of criollo and French surrealism. She valued the work of our dear Juan Miguel Marot, of blessed memory, and she dispelled any confusion about the overvalued paintbrush of Roberto Antonio Matta. Spellbound, the grown-ups—our fun-loving Here and Abroad gang, who back then were just skimming the edge of their forties (oh, happy age!)—heard her say in her deep, confident little voice, her body leaning like a Harlequin on her beloved father’s knee, that Leonora Carrington’s main defect was her dreadful thinness.

  As I’ve said, she was blessed with her father’s talent and the beauty of the woman who bore her, but there was something else, something visible only to the artist’s discerning eye, if I may say so: a quality of character (and character, as everyone knows, is the seat of talent, its palace and its lair), a quality of character, as I was saying, that was singular, unique, incommutable. Chiseled in fire. It was a Chilean quality, but English too, something to astound the shrewdest psychologist.

  She had it all (or all that anyone can have by the age of twenty-one), but she wasn’t spoiled. A good daughter, a good student, a good friend, steadfast in everything that she undertook, free as a bird; sometimes my tired eyes seemed to see a human being with a lifetime of experiences and vicissitudes, not a person—an exquisite person—born in 1952. Such was her kindness and her sweetness, her understanding and her grace.

  I saw her for the last time eight or nine months before her death, at her father’s opening at the Círculo Francés of Santiago. It goes without saying that she was a grown woman by then. As always, she exuded life and talent from every pore. We exchanged a few words. I learned that she was studying literature at the University of Concepción, that she wrote poems (I begged her to recite one on the spot, but she modestly declined, judging it unseemly), that she was planning to travel to Europe at the end of the year, that she lived alone or rather with her old Mapuche nurse at her enchanted and enchanting house in Nacimiento, that it had been a while since she gave up drawing. I thought this was a shame, and she graced me with one of her frank, crystalline laughs, ripe with health.

  After the opening, we threw a party for Eliseo at the home of the Ortega Basauris. Some among us will still remember the event with fondness and nostalgia. Present were new and old members of the group of Here and Abroad painters, joined in fruitful camaraderie. The times were tumultuous, but we were undaunted. Patricia turned up too, though just for a moment, with her parents and a friend with whom she planned to leave for Viña del Mar. Surrounded as I was by reporters and strangers asking my opinion on a wide range of topics, it was impossible for us to approach each other. After a while, she and her friend were gone and Eliseo himself conveyed her goodbyes.

  Did I suspect, perhaps, that it would be the last time?

  Who knows!

  All I know is that I cried like a child when, months later, Eliseo called to give me the news. And in my cathartic weeping, I was accompanied by my wife and my son, Juan Carlos.

  She’s gone. She has flown far from our woes and tribulations. She is no longer with us. God has deprived us of her laughter and her gaze. We’ve all lost. The whole of Chile has lost. Her death might seem the best argument for discouragement.

  And yet it’s necessary to carry on. Carry on, we must! Now more than ever.

  I’ll conclude by saying that Patricia loved the night. She loved it for the gift and consolation of the stars, she confessed to me and her father one distant (pure and distant) day, on the sprawling veranda of La Refalosa, sipping a cold tea after a tiring excursion. In the vast night, the same night in which all of us will be lost, the stars twinkle. That’s our Southern Cross. Beyond it, the firmament extends its mantle of orbs and lights. That’s where Patricia lives. She’s waiting for us there.

  The Biggest. The Border-Maker. The Prettiest River at the Ass End of the Earth.

  These aren’t the roads of the counterrevolution, said Patricia Arancibia, as I quaked. These are the roads of Los Ángeles, Nacimiento, the province of Bío-Bío. We’re on our way to my house.

  The Messerschmitt

  In December, a few lucky people saw the old plane flying over Concepción. It was the time of day when the sun sinks into the Pacific, rolling toward the islands, the happy places, toward Japan and the Philippines. The plane appeared from the north, as if approaching from Tomé. It came in over Talcahuano and spent a long time circling over Concepción. I was in the police station gymnasium, now a holding pen for political prisoners, recovering from my last beating, and I don’t know where I got the strength to come to the window; where I got the idea that it was important to see that plane.

  It was Gaspar Yáñez who said that a Messerschmitt was flying over the city. A what? A Messerschmitt, comrades, a Third Reich fighter plane, let me get a good look at it, a 109, the crown jewel of the Luftwaffe, two 15-mm machine guns and a 30-mm cannon. What’s it doing? the prisoners asked. For a few seconds, Gaspar Yáñez studied the red rectangle in silence . . . Aerobatics! Spins! Loops! Rolls! The pilot must be ecstatic!

  I remember that the light inside the gymnasium was a dusky yellow and every face was turned toward Gaspar Yáñez, who was peering out the window like a pirate. Christ almighty, what a pilot, what a plane, what a sight! Sitting on the floor, the men and women listened in silence: Gaspar’s thin, bony face, his broad nose and full lips, seemed to smolder in the red of the sunset. They were the fighter planes in the Battle of England, he said as if in prayer. Wait until a Hawker Hunter turns up and see what happens to your fighter, spat someone from a dark corner. Never was so much owed by so many to so few, added the dean of the Law School, who was dozing on a filthy mattress between two miners from Lota.

  But this one seems to be retrofitted, said Gaspar. Look, there’s smoke coming from it! The beauty of it, gentlemen! The elegance, the grace! Don’t bad-mouth German technology to me! Does the smoke mean it’s going down, Gasparcito? asked a woman of about fifty, also from Lota. Going down? No! It’s writing something in the sky. Holy mother, what can it be, what can it be, cried Gaspar in agony. It must be an advertisement, said one of the prisoners. Then I leaped over the blankets, the mattresses, and the bodies and I looked out the window.

  Through the bars, I saw the plane, the silent propellers, the square-tipped wings, just like in Spitfire magazine, the steel-blue enemy fighter plane, strangely lovely. And then I saw the words: the bold script swiftly whittled away by the wind, the dark text written in the sky as if by someone with the secret wish to be read only in a mirror. And the lines of poetry, words that I had heard before, stolen—like so much else—from Patricia Arancibia’s house.

  It’s advertising a volcanic drink! cried Gaspar Yáñez, who was raving by now. It’s announcing the birth of Fascist literature, comrades!

  Shut up, you crazy bastard, called a chorus of protesters, irritable miners.

  Across the city, two helicopters appeared, painted camouflage green. They were flying low, just over the rooftops, and they were approaching the edge of the area where the plane was performing its maneuvers. I felt the air vibrate. Dogfight! shouted Gaspar. No one paid any attention to him. Behind us the silence was startling. I turned around: the prisoners were talking, eating, sleeping, playing checkers with scraps of paper, thinking. The Chilean Air Force versus the Luftwaffe! Helicopters of Quiriquina Island! Onward, boys! shouted Gaspar. He began to foam at the mouth, his
body shaking with spasms that grew more and more violent. It took four men to get him away from the window. I didn’t move. The helicopters were just below the Messerschmitt. This kid needs a doctor, said someone, or at least a painkiller. The voice was cool as could be. A woman from the Lota group pulled a little box of pills from her bra and handed one to the person tending to Gaspar. Now Gaspar’s moans sounded like the thunder before a storm. But not a Chilean storm: an African storm. With deep sadness, I watched the flurry of blankets, the hands grasping Gaspar’s jaw, the contradictory opinions flying back and forth, the shadows of the gymnasium: we truly seemed more like lunatics than prisoners.

  When I looked out the window again, the helicopters were heading back to their bases. In Concepción’s inflamed sky, the plane made a last pirouette and then it rose proudly and was lost in the clouds . . . Gaspar began to pull out clumps of hair. The gray words were left behind in the red sky, dissolving in the air.

  The Crown Jewel of the Luftwaffe

  It was the best plane in the world, in the darkness of the world, said Gaspar Yáñez, on all fours like a mythological beast at death’s door; his voice, the succession of syllables in my ear, woke me with a start. Everyone is asleep, said Gaspar Yáñez. The vowels fell petrified from his lips by the dark and by fear. A perpendicular movement made him rock from knees to wrists. It’s strange, don’t you think? Muted voices and laughter reached us; the sound of water flowing from a hose. What’s strange? I whispered even more softly than the madman, so softly that I was afraid he wouldn’t hear me, but he heard. The plane, he said. The fighter circling over our heads. I repeated what others had explained already, that the FACh kept a German plane as a museum piece, that it had been in Chile since approximately 1939, but as I was talking I realized that I didn’t believe the explanation either. Gaspar smiled (on the second day of his detention, they had broken most of his teeth) as if he could guess what I was thinking. I heard the laughter and the gush of water again, I imagined the snaking of the hose in the prison yard. They’re having fun, said Gaspar, as if he wanted to lay the subject to rest and move on to what was really important. Who? The cops. They never sleep, it must be their consciences, or a sixth sense warning them of Solitude. Those thugs have no conscience, I said. Gaspar sighed. His lungs made a very strange sound. I think the world is full of holes, he said, and that’s how the fighter planes get in. Have you heard me talk about Solitude? (Strange question.) Another hole, that’s all. I don’t believe in that kind of thing, I whispered. You don’t have to believe, said Gaspar, I’ve seen the planes flying at dawn and it’s not a matter of believing or not. When you see the silhouettes in the cabins, the face of Hans Marseille like a crumb of white bread, you realize that it’s the only consolation. Consolation for what? I stammered. My vocal cords were turning to stone too. It’s hard to admit, but consolation for everything, said Gaspar. Nothing but the crown jewel of the Luftwaffe up in the sky. The 109, and then all the prototypes, planes even better than the 109, I must confess, though it’s the number that makes all the difference. What? What? I whispered. The number of crewmen. Each of the others flies two, my friend, and that’s no good. The 109 has room for just one and you really do need balls for that. Take off from France, climb above the clouds, and reach England in time to fight for five minutes in a wind made of dreams. What are you talking about, man? I whispered. Weren’t you a radio host? Weren’t you on that show Bring in the Kids? Are you so crazy that you’ve turned into a Nazi? Gaspar gave me a horrible smile, shaking his head. Then he raised one hand and patted me on the shoulder. Without getting up, he vanished on all fours into the darkness toward his mat. For a long time I lay awake. The next day, they brought me out into the courtyard, gave me a beating, and tossed me into the street.

  Family Plot

  Effects of the coup on the family unit. My mother lost her job as a math teacher at Liceo number 3 in Concepción. My father and my mother were on speaking terms again. My brother David was arrested and beaten: for fifteen days my parents searched for him at police stations and hospitals. He came home a month later and for the next thirty days he refused to say a word. My mother wept and cried out, asking what they’d done to her son. My father watched him, touched him, stared into his face, and declared that whatever it was, it wouldn’t kill him. My sister Elisenda was angry all of the time. Meals were scanty, but now at least the whole family sat down to eat together. My father came over from across the street and we all ate together at my mother’s house. Or my mother and the three of us crossed the street and we all ate together at my father’s house. My sister Elisenda stopped watching so much TV. My brother David started to train every morning in the yard. He was taking a martial arts correspondence course: karate, kung fu, judo. When my father was at my mother’s house, he spied on my brother through the kitchen window and smiled. In front of my mother, my sister, and me, my brother David said that he could drop my father with a single karate kick. Frankly, everyone in the family was on edge. More and more, my mother wondered why we still lived in this country. My father, who used to criticize the Allende government for its sports policies, stopped talking about sports for a while. My brother David became a Trotskyite. My sister Elisenda burned her childhood books and then cried bitterly. My father tried to make love to my mother five or six times, and the results, to judge by their faces, were not satisfactory. My mother got out her songbook and played the guitar. My father closed the soda fountain and sold it soon after to a retired navy sergeant. When my brother David was arrested for the second time and my sister saw her chances of enrolling in the university vanishing, my mother said that enough was enough. She sold the house and the furniture and bought tickets to Lima. She would have liked to get tickets to Madrid, but she didn’t have enough money. She cried when I refused to go with them. My brother David called me a faggot and a eunuch. I replied that I might be a faggot, you never know, but I definitely wasn’t a eunuch. Maliciously I added that, according to my father, it was people who practiced martial arts imported from the East who were eunuchs. My brother David tried to hit me. Don’t hit him in the head, my mother cried. The days before the departure were like the rosary of the dawn. My brother David made up with me. David, Elisenda, and I hugged. I promised my mother that I would save some money and come join them. I promised that I’d stay out of trouble. My father and I accompanied my mother and siblings to Santiago. As the plane took off, my father muttered to himself and bit his knuckles. I understood how he felt. I imagined my mother and my brother and sister in their seats, with their seat belts on, sad but full of energy, defying the future and what it held in store for them, no matter what. My father, however, seemed to be on the verge of death, his face shrunken, as if he had inner wrinkles now in addition to his outer ones. Never had he looked more like a famous boxer than he did then. We took the train back to Concepción. For the trip, my father bought a roast chicken and a bottle of wine. We ate and drank in fits and starts, I don’t know why. My father didn’t sleep a wink. Sometimes I was woken by the sound of him sucking on a wing. A very strange noise. He picked up the wing in his hand and sucked on it slowly, his gaze lost in the darkness of the car. I’ll never see them again, my father said. Two weeks later, the first postcards arrived. My mother’s postcard was fairly optimistic. My brother’s was more like a riddle or a puzzle. I could never figure out the clues, if there were any. My sister’s was the most idiotic, but at the same time I liked it best, maybe because it was so innocent. Basically, it described the trip from Santiago to Lima. The part she liked best was the movie she saw on the plane: Hitchcock’s Family Plot.

  The Dream

  It was years after Patricia Arancibia’s death that I began to dream about the dark city . . . A kid, seventeen, walked the empty streets, flanked by tall buildings . . . His strides were long, almost feline . . . I can’t say why, but I’m sure he was seventeen . . . I’m also sure of his bravery . . . He was wearing a white shirt and loose black pants that flapped in the wind like a flag
. . . He was wearing sneakers that had once been white but in the dream were an indeterminate color . . . He had long hair and though his face remained in shadow I glimpsed dark wolf or coyote eyes . . . The streets were vast, some paved, some cobbled, but vast and empty . . . The kid loped along, happy to be alive, happy that the warm wind was rippling his clothes . . . Then four or five people appeared . . . They all knew one another and they walked together for a while . . . Next the kid and his companions stopped at an overlook . . . Beneath them was a ravine, and, in the distance, the silhouettes of other buildings . . . Among the buildings rose the movie theater, imposing as four cathedrals and four soccer fields . . . The Diorama . . . The kid and his companions admired the dark landscape and produced bottles of beer and drugs from somewhere . . . Little by little their gestures became more disturbing . . . They gesticulated, argued . . . One of the guys, fat and wearing tight pants, grabbed the kid by the neck and hurled him into the middle of the street . . . The others laughed . . . Then a knife appeared in the kid’s hand and he stepped toward the fat guy . . . No one saw anything, but the laughter froze . . . The fat guy took the blow in the stomach . . . He could feel the tension in the kid’s arm . . . The kid’s determination, edged with disgust . . . Disgust conquered by the driving force of his arm . . . Then the storm began . . .