Cowboy Graves

by Roberto Bolaño

  Bibiano Macaduck’s Lecture at the Cortapalos Club of Concepción

  When the war was over, Cherniakovski left the country. I guess he was looking for adventure or a break or he was trying to wipe the visions of delirium from his head. The fact is that he went to one of those Latin American cities that do their best to simulate hell. It had it all: gunmen, beggars, whores, child exploitation, everything you could ask for. Cherniakovski moved in with a reporter. In those days, of course, his name wasn’t Cherniakovski. Let’s say he went by Víctor Díaz. At first he lived a relatively quiet life. Maybe that was because he never went out. Víctor Díaz was a homebody. He got up late, past noon, brewed himself some coffee, and took his time drinking it. According to the reporter, Víctor Díaz wrote poems, short ones and not many of them, but all very polished, as was the norm among his old friends from Concepción. If you were born in the forties, you wrote short poems. If you were born in the fifties, you wrote epics. If you were born in the sixties, you wrote flatlined electroencephalograms. Ha ha, that’s a joke. Anyway: Víctor Díaz went back to writing little poems and he left the reporter’s house only to buy food and the like. Until one night he agreed to go out partying with some friends (the reporter’s friends) and he was introduced to the red-light district. Bad news. His eyes, which had seemed to soften in the peace and quiet, grew sharp again. His whole body was on fire after that first night. The next week, he ventured out again, but this time alone. And every night after that. According to the reporter, Víctor Díaz was asking to be stabbed or shot, but you and I know how tough Cherniakovski was. The lucky bastard! End result: he took a prostitute as a lover. She was fifteen or sixteen, and she had a twelve-year-old brother. The pimps of the red-light district wanted to sell the kid. Whether as a rent boy or as fresh meat for organ transplants, it’s not clear. Both were lucrative prospects. Víctor Díaz inhaled all the information he got from his lover like an addict going through withdrawal. There are men, I swear, who have some mysterious—even supernatural—ability to get their hands on any kind of weapon in any situation. Víctor Díaz was one of them. One night, he turned up with a Spanish Luger and he shot two pimps and three bodyguards. The sight of blood went to his head. Though according to other versions, he only killed one person. And I have a strong hunch of my own: the dead man was the prostitute’s father (though not the little brother’s). Either way, a crime was committed. There was blood. And it would all have turned into your typical tropical catastrophe were it not for the woman in this story. We can thank our lucky stars that the teenage prostitute had more sense and smarts than anyone could have imagined, because otherwise Víctor Díaz would be dead. Though we have our doubts about that. Anyway: the girl hid him, and we can guess that sooner or later they left the country. The prostitute, her little brother, and Víctor Díaz. The latter had contacts, and it seems that his companions came along for the ride. The three of them set off for some European country. Did Víctor Díaz marry his teen lover? Did the little brother go to school, did he make a place for himself in that strange and extraordinary culture? Did he learn to speak French, English, German? What was Víctor Díaz’s victory, exactly? Was it finding them a home in a suburb of Development? We’ll never be able to answer these questions with full confidence. Víctor Díaz got them settled, and after a while he left again. International terrorism was summoning our compatriot to other tasks . . .

  Bibiano Macaduck’s Lecture at the Cortapalos Club of Concepción (2)

  I’ve spoken about a child and a sacrifice. Sacrifice in the commercial sense of the word. Now I think I should add a thing or two. Traffic in children’s organs spread across Latin America at more or less the same time as Juan Cherniakovski (or Víctor Díaz) was wandering the Bolivarian stage with bloodshot eyes. And you’re right, the image isn’t mine—I stole it from some tabloid. The story, I think, unfolds like a performance at one of those so-called art house theaters: in the artificial dark of night, Víctor Díaz, one of legions of shuddering, sleepy Latin American macho men, arrives by chance at the heart of the slaughterhouse. The scenery is red and children roam a refrigerated corral awaiting their fate, which is to fly legally or clandestinely to private clinics in the United States or Canada—in some cases, clinics in Mexico, Guatemala, Puerto Rico—where they will undergo an operation. Everybody knows (since now and then El Mercurio makes it their business to inform us) that the waiting lists for those who need a kidney, a pancreas, or a heart can be long. So if you can pay for it (and in Real Democracies there is money), it’s more comfortable—and above all, safer—to go under the knife at one of these private clinics. The network is run by professionals and it’s efficient. There’s always material. This is important if you’re an engineer from San Francisco and you need a liver right away or the party’s over. It’s important if you’re a good parent and you know that unless your six-year-old gets a heart transplant in two weeks, he’ll die in your arms. Love—as everybody knows—moves mountains and spares no cost. Self-love or brotherly love. Need drives the market. And the market grows and fine-tunes itself. In the performance we were talking about, children wander bleak streets under palm trees. Other equally bloody stories unspool in the same place, but fate, which is like the devil and unites alpha and omega, led Víctor Díaz—who once upon a time wasn’t Víctor Díaz and relished the poetry of Gabriela Mistral—to immerse himself in this particular horror. The scenery is red, and gang bosses and bands of lowlifes stroll under the palm trees. Hideous crones, like the witch from “Hansel and Gretel,” play the part of health inspectors. Beggar children, homeless children, are the most common source of raw material. They’re relatively easy to catch and their absence goes mostly unnoticed, but they have one drawback, energetically decried by the medical teams of various clinics: they aren’t always healthy, their organs weak or ruined. The gang leaders deliberate in the land of Bolívar and San Martín, and after these parleys, commands fly across the theater at a speed achievable only by serious operators. Under the palm trees, when a sun of glossy paper—perfect imitation of a Siqueiros sun—sets over the saddest roofs on Earth, janissaries set out to steal children who’ve been better cared for. Speaking cinematographically, we move from Buñuel’s Los olvidados to some random Joselito movie. These aren’t middle-class children, obviously, but the children of workers. In fact, let’s call them the children of working mothers, so that Víctor Díaz’s eyes explode like neutron bombs. Seamstresses, shoe factory workers, waitresses, teachers, the occasional prostitute with a heart of gold. The business advances by leaps and bounds. In the land of palm trees and beyond, everyone has heard of it and it is occasionally discussed in hushed voices. Publicly, nobody will touch it or go near it. The criollo authorities respond in time-honored fashion by covering their ears. Like the three little monkeys, like Harman and Ising’s cartoon version of the three little monkeys. Worse, if possible. The bosses are efficient and keep a low profile. The press lavishes well-informed citizens with details of the drug trade and the arms trade, which carry on like something in the foreground of a Flemish painting, while in the background a long line of children are carted off to the slaughterhouse. (For further information, I recommend Auden, the poem that begins: “About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position; how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along . . .” etcetera, etcetera, though I suppose you’ve never heard of Auden, like good Chileans.) The silence, as I was saying, is almost total. Every so often there’s a bit of news, not in the papers or on television, but in magazines, like stories about flying saucers. We know it exists, but the reality is so awful that we’d rather pretend we don’t. That’s human progress. Assaults on a deserted street are awful at first, and break-ins are even worse, but we end up coming to terms with both. We’ve progressed from the perfect execution to the concentration camp and the atomic bomb. We seem to have stomachs of steel, but we’re not ready to digest child-killing cannibalism
, despite the counsel of Swift and Dupleix. We’ll accept it eventually, but not yet. Meanwhile business prospers under the palm trees, and the Siqueiros sun rises and falls like a mad mandrill. The witches touch up their warts with French makeup. The child hunters play cards and fondle their privates like degenerate Narcissuses, fathers and brothers of us all. Víctor Díaz (a man who really preferred the love of men) falls in love with an adolescent prostitute and embraces the Terror. His formula is expressed as the curtain falls: if Paradise, in order to be Paradise, is fertile soil for a vast Hell, the duty of the Poet is to turn Paradise into Hell. Víctor Díaz and Jesus Christ set fire to the palm trees.

  Regarding Events at Perpignan Station in the Early Morning Hours of December 13, 1988

  Monsieur Benoît Hernández, forty-three, married and a native of Avignon, who on the dates of this deposition was in Perpignan for the purpose of performing his professional duties, has provided documents confirming that he is a wine sales representative for the house of Peyrade, in Marseille, with no criminal record.

  On the night of December 12, M. Hernández dined with M. Patrick Monardes, with whom he planned to finalize the sale of one hundred and forty cases of Grand Reserve XXX from the Viticulture Cooperative of Port-Vendres. Attached is a statement from M. Monardes corroborating this fact. It is noted that the house of Peyrade has had business dealings with the Cooperative of Port-Vendres for the past five years. M. Hernández and M. Monardes dined at Restaurant Coelho, where M. Monardes is a regular, known to the owner and employees. Attached are statements from M. Coelho; from the waiter who served M. Monardes and M. Hernández; and from the cook, who was twice visited by Monardes and Hernández (they stepped into the kitchen, in other words). The two men were delighted by the quality and originality of the food and also somewhat inebriated by the wine they had consumed.

  When dinner was over, they proceeded to the Leather Clock, a fashionable dance club located in the center of our town. Here M. Monardes and M. Hernández remained until approximately five in the morning, though neither of the two is able to say exactly what time it was. Attached is a statement from Jean-Marc Rivette, waiter at the Leather Clock, who confirms that he served alcoholic beverages to M. Monardes, known to him before the date of this deposition, and to a male companion of M. Monardes’s, in all likelihood M. Hernández. In his statement, Jean-Marc Rivette mentions that he saw Monardes and Hernández dancing on the main floor of the Leather Clock in the company of two women. Interrogated on this point, Monardes and Hernández deny having danced at all, which leads to the assumption that Rivette was mistaken or that Monardes and Hernández were dancing in such a state of intoxication that they are incapable of remembering it.

  From the Leather Clock, M. Hernández and M. Monardes took a taxi to the latter’s residence, having made the prudent choice not to drive M. Monardes’s car, parked two blocks from the dance club. Ahmed Filali, the taxi driver, confirms that he picked up a fare at the Leather Clock, but he was reluctant to give a precise time, estimating that it was between four and five in the morning. Attached is his statement, and let it be noted that the aforementioned driver neglected to record the time and location of the fare request, as required . . .

  Regarding Events at Perpignan Station in the Early Morning Hours of December 13, 1988 (2)

  After they were dropped off at M. Monardes’s residence, M. Hernández paid the taxi driver and dismissed him. M. Monardes’s wife and daughter didn’t hear M. Monardes arrive. M. Monardes confirms that M. Hernández accompanied him to the elevator (M. Monardes lives in a third-floor apartment) and refused to come up, despite repeated entreaties. At seven a.m., M. Monardes’s wife found her husband asleep in the guest room when she got up to make breakfast. M. Monardes, a man of rather intemperate nocturnal habits, often slept in the guest room when he came home under the influence.

  After leaving M. Monardes safe and sound, M. Hernández decided to take a walk through town rather than catching a taxi back to his hotel. Here we should note that M. Hernández’s hotel was less than one hundred yards from the station. It’s no surprise, then, that Mr. Hernández’s walk concluded in the general vicinity of the station.

  At this point, M. Hernández’s statement becomes less precise, full of gaps and question marks. As someone accustomed to drinking, M. Hernández knew that a night walk would help to clear his head, especially when little sleep was likely to be forthcoming. According to M. Hernández’s schedule, he was supposed to leave Perpignan at eleven a.m., en route to Bordeaux, where he hoped to close another deal with local winemakers. As usual, he planned to make the trip in the same vehicle in which he had arrived in Perpignan, in other words, his own car. So far, so good.

  What caused him to set foot in the station itself? M. Hernández hypothesizes that he wasn’t tired yet and that the morning chill made a cup of hot coffee sound appealing. Thinking that the only place open so early would be the station restaurant, he turned in that direction.

  The main entrances to the station were closed. But not the side entrances, one of which leads to the post office and other agencies, and one to the platforms. M. Hernández doesn’t remember which he took, though it’s possible to deduce that it was the one leading to the post office. M. Hernández remembers seeing two sacks of mail in the hallway, but no employees. The post office manager, André Lebel, confirms this. At that hour, the employees—Lebel himself and Pascal Lebrun—were busy sorting the mail in the back room and it’s possible that an empty sack or two had been left in the hall. Sacks aside, all that can be said for certain is that no one saw or was seen by M. Hernández as he entered the station.

  M. Hernández’s walk along the platforms was brief. He went in search of the restaurant and discovered that it was closed. It was at this point, M. Hernández confessed, that he began to feel a growing sense of unease. Was it something in the restaurant or on the platforms that sparked his unease? Did M. Hernández fear being the only person in the station, perhaps, and therefore the likely victim of some assault or other aggression? When questioned about this, M. Hernández responded that it never occurred to him that he might be assaulted, much less that he might be the only person in the station. According to M. Hernández, everybody knows that stations are never completely empty. The greater likelihood, given the early hour and the cold, was that the employees were all hidden away in their respective cubicles. So what did trigger M. Hernández’s stated unease? The only possible explanation is his discovery that the restaurant was closed.

  Except that the restaurant wasn’t closed. When he didn’t see lights on inside, this was the conclusion that M. Hernández reached, but if he had pushed the door open he would have realized his error. (M. Hernández can’t remember whether the door was open or closed or whether he tried to open it, and he admits that it’s possible he assumed that the restaurant was closed just because the lights were off and there wasn’t a soul sitting at the counter, behind the counter, or at the tables.)

  At the moment in question, the restaurant manager, M. Jean-Marcel Vilar, was in the kitchen with the cleaning girl and one of the station’s watchmen. None of them remembers hearing or seeing anything. The kitchen door was closed due to the morning cold, according to M. Vilar. The kitchen is a long, windowless room with two vents, isolated from the rest of the restaurant. And yet, if the light was on in the kitchen, which seems beyond dispute, M. Hernández would have seen it through the glass. (In his statement, M. Hernández says that he didn’t see any lights on inside the restaurant.) The cleaning girl, Aline Darcy, eighteen, arrested twice for drug dealing and an addict herself, currently in recovery, has her own explanation for why M. Hernández didn’t see light coming from the kitchen. According to her, they were working by candlelight, at the express request of M. Vilar, who was trying to save on electricity. Questioned about this, M. Vilar and the watchman emphatically denied the truth of this statement. In a side note to the main investigation, we note that two days after the date of the depo
sition, Aline Darcy exhibited contusions and bruises to her arms and back. The bruises weren’t the result of clumsy needle punctures but rather seemed to be caused by pinches or blows . . .

  From Lola Fontfreda to Rigoberto Belano

  I’m Catalan. I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in ghosts. But yesterday Fernando came to me in a dream. He stood beside my bed and asked me to take care of the child. He asked me to forgive him for leaving me nothing. He asked me to forgive him for not loving me. No. He asked me to forgive him for loving me less than he loved books. But the child made up for all that, he said, because he loved him more than anything. Both of them: Didac and Eric. Actually, the children is what he said, which could have been a reference to all the children in the world, not just his own children. Then he got up and went into another room. I followed him. It was a hospital room. Fernando undressed and got into one of the beds. The other beds were empty, though the sheets were rumpled and in some cases shockingly dirty. I went to Fernando’s bed and took his hand. We smiled at each other. I’m burning up, he said, feel my forehead, how high is my fever? One hundred and seven, I answered. I don’t know why, since there was no way to take his temperature. You’re so precise it’s scary, he said, but now you should go. I thought he had mistaken me for the Swedish woman. When I went out, I started to cry. I think Fernando was crying too. From here a person can go back anywhere, he said, please don’t come in. I went out and sat on a chair in the hall. There were no nurses or doctors or family members anywhere. Soon I heard Fernando screaming. His screams were terrible, followed by whistles, and I couldn’t stand it but I didn’t move. Fernando was screaming from the depths of his soul, sometimes piercingly and sometimes hoarsely, as if his throat was scorched. He seemed to be asking for water. He seemed to be calling cattle. He seemed to be whistling a song . . . Then I woke up. I was shaking and soaked in sweat. It took me a while to realize that I was crying too. Since I couldn’t sleep anymore, I decided to write this. Now I think I should send it to you.