The Savage Detectives

by Roberto Bolaño

  "I wasn't the last to come in," said María.

  "Yes you were." Angélica's voice was assured, almost autocratic, and for a minute I thought that she seemed like the older sister, not the younger one. "Bolt the door and sit down somewhere," she ordered me.

  I did as she said. The curtains of the little house were drawn and the light that came in was green, shot through with yellow. I sat in a wooden chair, beside one of the bookcases, and asked them what they were looking at. Ernesto San Epifanio raised his head and scrutinized me for a few seconds.

  "Weren't you the one taking notes on the books I was carrying the other day?"

  "Yes. Brian Patten, Adrian Henri, and another one I can't remember now."

  "The Lost Fire Brigade, by Spike Hawkins."

  "Exactly."

  "And have you bought them yet?" His tone was mildly sarcastic.

  "Not yet, but I plan to."

  "You have to go to a bookstore that specializes in English literature. You won't find them in the regular bookstores."

  "I know that. Ulises told me about a bookstore where you all go."

  "Oh, Ulises Lima," said San Epifanio, stressing the i's. "He'll probably send you to the Librería Baudelaire, where there's lots of French poetry, but not much English poetry… And who exactly are 'you all'?"

  " 'You all'?" I said, surprised. The Font sisters kept looking at objects I couldn't see and passing them back and forth. Sometimes they laughed. Angélica's laugh was like a bubbling brook.

  "The people who go to bookstores."

  "Oh, the visceral realists, of course."

  "The visceral realists? Please. The only ones who read are Ulises and his little Chilean friend. The rest are a bunch of functional illiterates. As far as I can tell, the only thing they do in bookstores is steal books."

  "But then they read them, don't they?" I said, slightly annoyed.

  "No, you're wrong. Then they give the books to Ulises and Belano, who read them and tell what they're about so the others can go around bragging about having read Queneau, for example, when all they've really done is steal a book by Queneau, not read it."

  "Belano is Chilean?" I asked, trying to steer the conversation in a different direction, and also because I honestly didn't know.

  "Couldn't you tell?" said María without lifting her eyes from whatever it was she was looking at.

  "Well, I did notice that he had a slightly different accent, but I thought he might be from Tamaulipas or from Yucatán, I don't know…"

  "You thought he was from Yucatán? Oh, García Madero, you poor innocent child. He thought Belano was from Yucatán," San Epifanio said to the Font sisters, and the three of them laughed.

  I laughed too.

  "He doesn't look like he's from Yucatán," I said, "but he could be. Anyway, I'm not a specialist in Yucatecans."

  "Well, he isn't from Yucatán. He's from Chile."

  "So how long has he lived in Mexico?" I said to say something.

  "Since the Pinochet putsch," said María without lifting her head.

  "Since long before the coup," said San Epifanio. "I met him in 1971. What happened was, he went back to Chile and after the coup he came back to Mexico."

  "But we didn't know either of you back then," said Angélica.

  "Belano and I were very close in those days," said San Epifanio. "We were both eighteen and we were the youngest poets on Calle Bucareli."

  "Will you please tell me what you're looking at?" I said.

  "Pictures of mine. You might not like them, but you can look at them too if you want."

  "Are you a photographer?" I said, getting up and going over to the bed.

  "No, I'm just a poet," said San Epifanio, making room for me. "Poetry is more than enough for me, although sooner or later I'm bound to commit the vulgarity of writing stories."

  "Here." Angélica passed me a little pile of pictures that they had finished with. "You have to look at them in chronological order."

  There must have been fifty or sixty photos. All of them were taken with flash. All were of a room, probably a hotel room, except for two, which were of a dimly lit street at night and a red Mustang with a few people in it. The faces of the people in the Mustang were blurry. The rest of the pictures showed a blond, short-haired boy, sixteen or seventeen, although he might only have been fifteen, and a girl maybe two or three years older, and Ernesto San Epifanio. There must have been a fourth person, the one taking the pictures, but he or she was never seen. The first pictures were of the blond boy, dressed, and then with progressively fewer clothes on. In picture number fifteen or so, San Epifanio and the girl showed up. San Epifanio was wearing a purple blazer. The girl had on a fancy party dress.

  "Who is he?" I said.

  "Be quiet and look at the pictures, then ask," said Angélica.

  "He's my love," said San Epifanio.

  "Oh. And who's she?"

  "His older sister."

  By about picture number twenty, the blond boy had begun to dress in his sister's clothes. The girl, who was darker and a little chubby, was making obscene gestures at the unknown person who was photographing them. San Epifanio, meanwhile, remained in control of himself, at least in the first pictures, which showed him smiling but serious, sitting in a leatherette armchair or on the edge of the bed. All of this, however, was only an illusion, because by picture number thirty or thirty-five, San Epifanio had taken off his clothes too (his body, with its long legs and long arms, seemed excessively thin and bony, much thinner than in real life). The next pictures showed San Epifanio kissing the blond boy's neck, his lips, his eyes, his back, his cock at half-mast, his erect cock (a remarkable cock too, for such a delicate-looking boy), under the always vigilant gaze of the sister, who sometimes appeared in full and sometimes in part (an arm and a half, her hand, some fingers, one side of her face), and sometimes just as a shadow on the wall. I have to confess that I'd never seen anything like it in my life. Naturally, no one had warned me that San Epifanio was gay. (Only Lupe, but Lupe also said that I was gay.) So I tried not to show my feelings (which were confused, to say the least) and kept looking. As I feared, the next pictures showed the Brian Patten reader fucking the blond boy. I felt myself turn red and I suddenly realized that I didn't know how I was going to face the Fonts and San Epifanio when I had finished looking through the pictures. The face of the boy being fucked was twisted in a grimace that I assumed was an expression of mingled pain and pleasure. (Or fake emotion, but that only occurred to me later.) San Epifanio's face seemed to sharpen at moments, like an intensely lit razor blade or knife. And every possible expression crossed the watching sister's face, from violent joy to deepest melancholy. The last pictures showed the three of them in bed, in different poses, pretending to sleep or smiling at the photographer.

  "Poor kid, it looks like someone was forcing him to be there," I said to annoy San Epifanio.

  "Forcing him to be there? It was his idea. He's a little pervert."

  "But you love him with all your heart," said Angélica.

  "I love him with all my heart, but there are too many things that come between us."

  "Like what?" said Angélica.

  "Money, for example. I'm poor and he's a spoiled rich kid, used to luxury and travel and having everything he wants."

  "Well, he doesn't look rich or spoiled here. Some of these pictures are really brutal," I said in a burst of sincerity.

  "His family has lots of money," said San Epifanio.

  "Then you could have gone to a nicer hotel. The lighting looks like something from a Santo movie."

  "He's the son of the Honduran ambassador," said San Epifanio, shooting me a gloomy look. "But don't tell anybody that," he added, regretting having confessed his secret to me.

  I returned the stack of pictures, which San Epifanio put in his pocket. Less than an inch from my left arm was Angélica's bare arm. I gathered up my courage and looked her in the face. She was looking at me too, and I think I blushed a little. I felt happy. T
hen right away I ruined it.

  "Pancho hasn't come today?" I asked, like an idiot.

  "Not yet," said Angélica. "What do you think of the pictures?"

  "Hard-core," I said.

  "Hard-core? That's all?" San Epifanio got up and sat in the wooden chair where I had been. From there he watched me with one of his knife-blade smiles.

  "Well, there's a kind of poetry to them. But if I told you that they only struck me as poetic, I'd be lying. They're strange pictures. I'd call them pornographic. Not in a negative sense, but definitely pornographic."

  "Everybody tends to pigeonhole things they don't understand," said San Epifanio. "Did the pictures turn you on?"

  "No," I said emphatically, although the truth is I wasn't sure. "They didn't turn me on, but they didn't disgust me either."

  "Then it isn't pornography. Not for you, at least."

  "But I liked them," I admitted.

  "Then just say that: you liked them and you don't know why you liked them, which doesn't matter much anyway, period."

  "Who's the photographer?" said María.

  San Epifanio looked at Angélica and laughed.

  "That really is a secret. The person made me swear I wouldn't tell anybody."

  "But if it was Billy's idea, who cares who the photographer was?" said Angélica.

  So the name of the Honduran ambassador's son was Billy; very appropriate, I thought.

  And then, don't ask me why, I got the idea that it was Ulises Lima who had taken the pictures. And next I immediately thought about the interesting (to me) news that Belano was from Chile. And then I watched Angélica. Not in an obvious way, mostly when she wasn't looking at me, her head in a book of poetry (Les Lieux de la douleur, by Eugène Savitzkaya) from which she looked up every now and then to contribute to the conversation that María and San Epifanio were having about erotic art. And all over again I started thinking about the possibility that Ulises Lima had taken the pictures, and I also remembered what I'd heard at Café Quito, that Lima was a drug dealer, and if he was a drug dealer, I thought, then he almost definitely dealt in other things. And that was as far as I'd gotten when Barrios showed up arm in arm with a very nice American girl (she was always smiling) whose name was Barbara Patterson and a poetess I didn't know, called Silvia Moreno, and then we all started to smoke marijuana.

  My memory is vague (though not because of the pot, which had practically no effect on me), but later someone brought up the subject of Belano's nationality again-maybe it was me, I don't know-and everybody started to talk about him. More accurately, everyone started to run him down, except María and me, who at some point more or less separated ourselves from the group, physically and spiritually, but even from a distance (maybe because of the pot) I could still hear what they were saying. They were talking about Lima too, about his trips to Guerrero state and Pinochet's Chile to get the marijuana he sold to the writers and painters of Mexico City. But how could Lima go all the way to the other end of the continent to buy marijuana? People were laughing. I think I was laughing too. I think I laughed a lot. I had my eyes closed. They said: Arturo makes Ulises work much harder, it's riskier now, and their words were stamped on my brain. Poor Belano, I thought. Then María took my hand and we left the little house, like when Pancho and Angélica kicked us out, except that this time Pancho wasn't there and no one had kicked us out.

  Then I think I slept.

  I woke up at three in the morning, stretched out beside Jorgito Font.

  I jumped up. Someone had taken off my shoes, my pants, and my shirt. I felt around for them, trying not to wake Jorgito. The first thing I found was my backpack with my books and poems in it, on the floor at the foot of the bed. A little farther away, I found my pants, shirt, and jacket laid out on a chair. I couldn't find my shoes anywhere. I looked for them under the bed and all I found were several pairs of Jorgito's sneakers. I got dressed and thought about whether I should turn on the light or go out with no shoes on. Unable to make up my mind, I went over to the window. When I parted the curtains, I saw that I was on the second floor. I looked out at the dark courtyard and the girls' house, hidden behind some trees and faintly lit by the moon. Before long, I realized that it wasn't the moon that was lighting up the house but a lamp that was on just below my window, slightly to the left, hanging outside the kitchen. The light was very dim. I tried to make out the Fonts' window. I couldn't see anything, just branches and shadows. For a few minutes I weighed the possibility of going back to bed and sleeping until morning, but I came up with several reasons not to. First: I had never slept away from home before without letting my aunt and uncle know; second: I knew I wouldn't be able to go back to sleep; third: I had to see Angélica. Why? I've forgotten, but at the time I felt an urgent need to see her, watch her sleep, curl up at the foot of her bed like a dog or a child (a horrible image, but true). So I slipped toward the door, silently thanking Jorgito for giving me a place to sleep. So long, cuñado! I thought (from the Latin cognatus, cognati: brother-in-law), and steeling myself with the word, I slid catlike out of the room down a hallway as dark as the blackest night, or like a movie theater full of staring eyes, where everything had gone pop, and felt my way along the wall until, after an ordeal too long and nerve-racking to describe in detail (plus I hate details), I found the sturdy staircase that led from the second floor to the first. As I stood there like a statue (i.e., extremely pale and with my hands frozen in a position somewhere between energized and tentative), two alternatives presented themselves to me. Either I could go looking for the living room and the telephone and call my aunt and uncle right away, since by then they had probably already dragged more than one tired policeman out of bed, or I could go looking for the kitchen, which I remembered as being to the left, next to a kind of family dining room. I weighed the pros and cons of each plan and opted for the quieter one, which involved getting out of the Fonts' big house as quickly as possible. My decision was aided in no small part by a sudden image or vision of Quim Font sitting in a wing chair in the dark, enveloped in a cloud of sulfurous reddish smoke. With a great effort I managed to calm myself. Everyone in the house was asleep, although I couldn't hear anyone snoring like at home. Once a few seconds had passed, enough to convince me that no danger was hovering over me, or at least no imminent danger, I set off. In this wing of the house, the glow from the courtyard faintly lit my way and before long I was in the kitchen. There, abandoning my extreme caution, I closed the door, turned on the light, and dropped into a chair, as exhausted as if I'd run a mile uphill. Then I opened the refrigerator, poured myself a tall glass of milk, and made myself a ham and cheese sandwich with oyster sauce and Dijon mustard. When I finished I was still hungry, so I made myself a second sandwich, this time with cheese, lettuce, and pickles bottled with two or three kinds of chilies. This second sandwich didn't fill me up, so I decided to go in search of something more substantial. In a plastic container on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator, I found the remains of a chicken mole; in another container I found rice-I guess they were leftovers from that day's dinner-and then I went looking for real bread, not sandwich bread, and I started to make myself dinner. To drink I chose a bottle of strawberry Lulú, which really tastes more like hibiscus. I ate sitting in the kitchen in silence, thinking about the future. I saw tornadoes, hurricanes, tidal waves, fire. Then I washed the frying pan, plate, and silverware, brushed away the crumbs, and unbolted the door to the courtyard. Before I left, I turned out the light.

  The girls' house was locked. I knocked once and whispered Angélica's name. No one answered. I looked back, and the shadows in the courtyard and the spout of the fountain rising up like an angry animal kept me from returning to Jorgito Font's room. I knocked again, this time a little harder. Waiting a few seconds, I decided to change tactics. I stepped a few feet to the left and tapped with my fingertips on the cold window-pane. María? I said, Angélica? María, let me in, it's me. Then I was silent, waiting for something to happen, but nobody moved inside the lit
tle house. In exasperation, although it would be more accurate to say in exasperated resignation, I dragged myself back to the door and slumped against it, sliding to the ground, staring into nothing. I sensed that I would end up there, asleep at the Font sisters' feet one way or another, like a dog (a wet dog in the inclement night!), just as I had foolishly and intrepidly wished a few hours ago. I could have burst into tears. To clear away the clouds on my immediate horizons, I started to go over all the books I should read, all the poems I should write. Then it occurred to me that if I fell asleep, the Fonts' servant would probably find me there and wake me, saving me from the embarrassment of being found by Mrs. Font or one of her daughters or Quim Font himself. Although if it was the latter who found me, I argued hopefully, he would probably think that I'd sacrificed a night of peaceful slumbers to keep faithful watch over his daughters. If they wake me up and ask me in for a cup of coffee, I concluded, nothing will be lost; if they kick me awake and throw me out without further ado, there'll be no hope left for me. Besides, how will I explain to my uncle that I crossed the whole city barefoot? I think it was this line of reasoning that roused me, or maybe it was desperation that made me unconsciously pound the door with the back of my head. In any case, I suddenly heard steps inside the little house. A few seconds later, the door opened and a voice asked me in a sleepy whisper what I was doing there.

  It was María.

  "My shoes are gone. If I could find them, I'd go home right now," I said.

  "Come in," said María. "Don't make a sound."

  I followed her with my arms outstretched, like a blind man. All at once I ran into something. It was María's bed. I heard her order me to get in, then I watched her retrace her steps (the girls' house is actually pretty big) and silently close the door, which had been left ajar. I didn't hear her return. The darkness was total now, although after a few seconds-I was sitting on the edge of the bed, not lying down as she had commanded-I could make out the outline of the window through the enormous linen drapes. Then I felt someone get into bed and lie down, and then, how much later I don't know, I felt that person just barely sit up, probably leaning on an elbow, and pull me close. By the feel of her breath I realized that I was only fractions of an inch from María's face. Her fingers ran over my face, from my chin to my eyes, closing my eyes as if inviting me to sleep; her hand, a bony hand, unzipped my pants and felt for my cock. Why I don't know, maybe because I was so nervous, but I said I wasn't sleepy. I know, said María, me neither. Then everything turned into a succession of concrete acts and proper nouns and verbs, or pages from an anatomy manual scattered like flower petals, chaotically linked. I explored María's naked body, María's glorious naked body, in a contained silence, although I could have shouted, rejoicing in each corner, each smooth and interminable space I discovered. María was less reserved. Soon she began to moan, and her maneuvers, at first timid or restrained, became more open (I can't think of another word for it just now), as she guided my hand to places it hadn't reached, whether out of ignorance or negligence. So that was how I learned, in fewer than ten minutes, where a woman's clitoris is and how to massage or fondle or press it, always within the bounds of gentleness, of course, bounds that María, on the other hand, was constantly transgressing, since my cock, treated well in the first forays, soon began to suffer torments in her hands, hands that in the dark and the tangle of the sheets sometimes seemed to me like the talons of a falcon or a falconess, tugging on me so hard that I was afraid they were trying to pull me right off, and at other times like Chinese dwarfs (her fingers were the fucking dwarfs!) investigating and measuring the spaces and ducts that connected my testicles to my cock and each other. Then (but first I had pushed my pants down to my knees) I got on top of her and entered her.