The Savage Detectives

by Roberto Bolaño

  "You see, García Madero," he said, "I'm always hard at work, always paying attention."

  Then he asked me whether I'd been by his house.

  "Not today," I said, and I thought about María again and everything seemed unbearably sordid and sad.

  The three of us sat on the bed, Quim and I on the edge and Lupe under the covers.

  Really, the situation was untenable!

  Quim smiled, Lupe smiled, and I smiled, and none of us could bring ourselves to say anything. A stranger would have assumed that we were there to make love. The idea was gruesome. Just thinking about it made my stomach lurch. Lupe and Quim were still smiling. To say something, I started to talk about Arturo Belano's purge of the ranks of visceral realism.

  "It was about time," said Quim. "All the freeloaders and incompetents should be tossed out. The movement only needs the pure of heart, like you, García Madero."

  "True," I said, "but the more of us, the better, it seems to me."

  "No, numbers are an illusion, García Madero. For our purposes, five is as good as fifty. That's what I told Arturo. Make heads roll. Shrink the inner circle until it's a microscopic dot."

  I thought he was going off the rails, and I kept quiet.

  "Where were we going to get with an idiot like Pancho Rodríguez, tell me that?"

  "I don't know."

  "Do you actually think he's a good poet? Does he strike you as a model member of the Mexican avant-garde?"

  Lupe didn't say a thing. She just watched us and smiled. I asked Quim whether there was any news of Alberto.

  "We're few and soon we'll be fewer," said Quim enigmatically. I didn't know whether he was referring to Alberto or the visceral realists.

  "They've expelled Angélica too," I said.

  "My daughter Angélica? Good Lord, that is news, man. I had no idea. When was this?"

  "I don't know," I said, "Jacinto Requena told me."

  "A poet who's won the Laura Damián prize! That takes some nerve, it really does! And I don't say so because she's my daughter!"

  "Why don't we go for a walk?" said Lupe.

  "Quiet, Lupita, I'm thinking."

  "Don't be a pain in the ass, Joaquín, you can't tell me to be quiet. I'm not your daughter, remember?"

  Quim laughed softly. It was a rabbity laugh that hardly disturbed the muscles of his face.

  "Of course you're not my daughter. You can't write three words without making a spelling mistake."

  "What? You think I'm illiterate, you asshole? Of course I can."

  "No, you can't," said Quim, making a disproportionate effort to think. A scowl of pain etched itself on his face, reminding me of the expression on Pancho Rodríguez's face at Café Amarillo.

  "Come on, test me."

  "They shouldn't have done that to Angélica. It disgusts me the way those bastards are toying with people's feelings. We should eat something. I feel sick to my stomach," said Quim.

  "Don't be a prick. Test me," said Lupe.

  "Maybe Requena was exaggerating, maybe Angélica asked to be let go voluntarily. Since they'd expelled Pancho…"

  "Pancho, Pancho, Pancho. That son of a bitch is nothing. He's nobody. Angélica doesn't give a damn whether they expel him, kill him, or give him a prize. He's a kind of Alberto," he added in an undertone, nodding toward Lupe.

  "Don't get so upset, Quim, I only said it because they were together, weren't they?"

  "What are you saying, Quim?" said Lupe.

  "Nothing that's any of your business."

  "Test me then, man. What do you think I am?"

  "Root," said Quim.

  "That's easy, give me paper and pencil."

  I tore a sheet out of my notebook and handed it to her with my Bic.

  "I've shed so many tears," said Quim as Lupe sat up in bed, her knees raised, the paper resting on her knees, "so many and what for?"

  "Everything will be all right," I said.

  "Have you ever read Laura Damián?" he asked me absently.

  "No, never."

  "Here it is, see what you think," said Lupe, showing him the paper. Quim frowned and said: fine. "Give me another word, but this time make it really hard."

  "Anguish," said Quim.

  "Anguish? That's easy."

  "I have to talk to my daughters," said Quim, "I have to talk to my wife, my colleagues, my friends. I have to do something, García Madero."

  "Relax, Quim, you have time."

  "Listen, not a word of this to María, all right?"

  "It's between the two of us, Quim."

  "How does that look?" said Lupe.

  "Excellent, García Madero, that's what I like to hear. I'll give you Laura Damián's book one of these days."

  "How's that?" Lupe showed me the paper. She had spelled the word anguish perfectly.

  "Couldn't be better," I said.

  "Ragamuffin," said Quim.

  "Excuse me?"

  "Write the word ragamuffin," said Quim.

  "Yikes, that really is hard," said Lupe, and she set to work immediately.

  "Not a word about this to my daughters, then. To either of them. I'm counting on you, García Madero."

  "Of course," I said.

  "Now you'd better go. I'm going to spend a little while longer giving this dunce Spanish lessons, and then I'll be moving along too."

  "All right, Quim, see you around."

  When I got up the mattress bounced back and Lupe murmured something but didn't lift her eyes from the paper she was writing on. I saw a few scratched-out words. She was trying hard.

  "If you see Arturo or Ulises, tell them it isn't right what they've done."

  "If I see them," I said, shrugging my shoulders.

  "It isn't a good way to make friends. Or to keep them."

  I made a noise like laughter.

  "Do you need money, García Madero?"

  "No, Quim, not at all, thank you."

  "You know you can always count on me. I was young and reckless once too. Now go. We'll get dressed in a little while and then head out for something to eat."

  "My pen," I said.

  "What?" said Quim.

  "I'm going. I'd like my pen."

  "Let her finish," said Quim, glancing at Lupe over his shoulder.

  "Here, how does that look?" said Lupe.

  "You got it wrong," said Quim. "I ought to give you a spanking."

  I thought about the word ragamuffin. I'm not sure I'd have spelled it right the first time either. Quim got up and went to the bathroom. When he came out he had a black-and-gold mechanical pencil in his hand. He winked at me.

  "Give him back the pen and write with this," he said.

  Lupe returned my Bic. Goodbye, I said. She didn't answer.

  DECEMBER 13

  I called María. I talked to the maid. Miss María isn't in. When will she be home? No idea, may I ask who's calling? I didn't want to give my name and I hung up. I sat at Café Quito for a while, waiting to see whether anyone else would come, but it was hopeless. I called María again. No one answered the phone. I went walking to Montes, where Jacinto lives. Nobody was home. I ate a sandwich in the street and finished two poems I'd started the day before. Another call to the Font house. This time the voice of an unidentifiable woman answered. I asked whether it was Mrs. Font.

  "No, it isn't," said the voice in a tone that made my scalp tingle.

  It clearly wasn't María's voice. Nor was it that of the maid I had just spoken to. The only alternatives were Angélica or a stranger, maybe one of the sisters' friends.

  "Who is this, please?"

  "To whom do you wish to speak?"

  "To María or Angélica," I said, feeling stupid and scared at the same time.

  "This is Angélica," said the voice. "To whom am I speaking?"

  "It's Juan," I said.

  "Hello, Juan. How are you?"

  It can't be Angélica, I thought, it simply can't be. But then I thought that everyone living in that house was crazy, so maybe it was p
ossible after all.

  "I'm fine," I said, shaking. "Is María there?"

  "No," said the voice.

  "All right, I'll call again," I said.

  "Do you want to leave her a message?"

  "No!" I said and I hung up.

  I felt my forehead with my hand, thinking I must have a fever. At that moment, all I wanted was to be home with my aunt and uncle, studying or watching TV, but I knew that there was no turning back, that all I had was Rosario and Rosario's tenement room.

  Without realizing it, I must have started to cry. I wandered aimlessly for a while, and when I tried to get my bearings I was in the middle of a bleak stretch of Colonia Anáhuac, surrounded by dying trees and peeling walls. I went into a place on Calle Texcoco and asked for a coffee. When it came, it was lukewarm. I don't know how long I spent there.

  When I left it was night.

  I called the Fonts again from another pay phone. The same woman's voice answered.

  "Hello, Angélica, it's Juan García Madero," I said.

  "Hello," said the voice.

  I felt sick. Some kids were playing soccer in the street.

  "I saw your father," I said. "He was with Lupe."

  "What?"

  "At the hotel where we have Lupe. Your father was there."

  "What was he doing there?" The voice was uninflected; it was like talking to a brick wall, I thought.

  "He was keeping her company," I said.

  "Is Lupe all right?"

  "Lupe's fine," I said. "It was your father who didn't seem to be doing very well. I thought he'd been crying, even if he was better by the time I got there."

  "Hmm," said the voice. "And why was he crying?"

  "I don't know," I said. "Maybe it was regret. Or maybe shame. He asked me not to tell you."

  "Not to tell me what?"

  "That I'd seen him there."

  "Hmm," said the voice.

  "When will María be home? Do you know where she is?"

  "At the dance school," said the voice. "And I was just leaving."

  "Where are you going?"

  "To the university."

  "All right, then, goodbye."

  "Goodbye," said the voice.

  I went walking back to Sullivan. When I crossed Reforma, near the statue of Cuauhtémoc, I heard someone call my name.

  "Hands up, poet García Madero."

  When I turned, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima were there, and I fainted.

  When I woke up I was in Rosario's room, in bed, with Ulises and Arturo on either side of me trying and failing to get me to drink some herbal tea they'd just made. I asked what had happened, and they told me I'd fainted, that I'd thrown up and then I'd started to ramble incoherently. I told them about calling the Fonts' house. I said it was the call that had made me sick. At first they didn't believe me. Then they listened carefully to a detailed account of my latest adventures and delivered their verdict.

  According to them, the problem was that I hadn't been talking to Angélica at all.

  "And you knew it too, García Madero, and that's why you got sick," said Arturo, "from the fucking shock."

  "What did I know?"

  "That it was somebody else, not Angélica," said Ulises.

  "No I didn't," I said.

  "Unconsciously you did," said Arturo.

  "But who was it, then?"

  Arturo and Ulises laughed.

  "There's actually a simple answer, and it's funny too."

  "Stop torturing me, then, and tell me what it is," I said.

  "Think a little," said Arturo. "Come on, use your head. Was it Angélica? Clearly not. Was it María? Even less likely. Who's left? The maid, but she isn't there at the time of day you called, and anyway you'd already talked to her and you would've recognized her voice, right?"

  "Right," I said. "It definitely wasn't the maid."

  "Who's left?" said Ulises.

  "María's mother and Jorgito."

  "I don't think it was Jorgito, was it?"

  "No, it couldn't have been Jorgito," I admitted.

  "And can you see María Cristina putting on an act like that?"

  "Is María's mother called María Cristina?"

  "That's her name," said Ulises.

  "No, I really can't, but who was it, then? There's no one left."

  "Someone crazy enough to imitate Angélica's voice," said Arturo, and he looked at me. "The only person in the house who would pull a weird stunt like that."

  I looked from one to the other as gradually the answer began to take shape in my mind.

  "Warm, warmer…" said Ulises.

  "Quim," I said.

  "Who else," said Arturo.

  "That son of a bitch!"

  Later I remembered the story about the deaf-mute that Quim had told me and I thought about child abusers who had themselves once been abused as children. Although now that I write it, the cause-and-effect relationship between the deaf-mute and Quim's personality shift doesn't seem so clear. Then I went storming out into the street and wasted coin after coin on futile calls to María's house. I talked to her mother, the maid, Jorgito, and, very late that night, Angélica (this time it was the real Angélica), but María was never there and Quim would never come to the phone.

  For a while, Belano and Ulises Lima kept me company. I gave them my poems to read while I made the first phone calls. They said the poems weren't bad. The purge of visceral realism is just a joke, said Ulises. But do the people who were purged know it's a joke? Of course not, it wouldn't be funny if they did, said Arturo. So no one is expelled? Of course not. And what have you two been doing all this time? Nothing, said Ulises.

  "There's some asshole who wants to beat us up," they admitted later.

  "But there are two of you and only one of him."

  "But we aren't violent, García Madero," said Ulises. "At least, I'm not, and neither is Arturo, anymore."

  Between phone calls to the Fonts', I spent the evening with Jacinto Requena and Rafael Barrios at Café Quito. I told them what Belano and Ulises had told me. They must be finding things out about Cesárea Tinajero, they said.

  DECEMBER 14

  No one gives the visceral realists ANYTHING. Not scholarships or space in their magazines or invitations to book parties or readings.

  Belano and Lima are like two ghosts.

  If simón is slang for yes and nel means no, then what does simonel mean?

  I don't feel very good today.

  DECEMBER 15

  Don Crispín Zamora doesn't like to talk about the Spanish Civil War. So I asked him why he'd given his bookstore a military-sounding name. He confessed that he hadn't come up with the name himself. It was the previous owner, a Republican colonel who had covered himself in glory in the battle in question. I detected a hint of irony in Don Crispín's words. At his request, I talked to him about visceral realism. After he'd made a few observations like "realism is never visceral," "the visceral belongs to the oneiric world," etc., which I found rather disconcerting, he theorized that we underprivileged youth were left with no alternative but the literary avant-garde. I asked him what exactly he meant by underprivileged. I'm hardly underprivileged. At least not by Mexico City standards. But then I thought about the tenement room Rosario was sharing with me and I wasn't so sure he was wrong. The problem with literature, like life, said Don Crispín, is that in the end people always turn into bastards. By now, I had the impression that Don Crispín was talking just for the sake of talking. The whole time I was sitting in a chair while he kept scurrying around moving books from one place to another or dusting stacks of magazines. At a certain moment, however, he turned around and asked how much it would cost him to sleep with me. I've noticed you're short on cash, which is the only reason I'd venture to propose such a thing. I was stunned.

  "You're making a mistake, Don Crispín," I said.

  "Don't take it the wrong way, my boy. I know I'm old and that's why I'm suggesting a transaction. Call it a reward."

  "Are yo
u homosexual, Don Crispín?"

  The word was scarcely out of my mouth before I realized how stupid it was and I blushed. I didn't wait for him to answer. Did you think I was homosexual? Aren't you? asked Don Crispín.

  "Ay, ay, ay, I've really put my foot in it. Forgive me, my boy, for heaven's sake," said Don Crispín, and he started to laugh.

  I stopped wanting to go running out of the Batalla del Ebro, which had been my first reaction. Don Crispín asked me to give up my chair because he was laughing so hard he was afraid he might have a heart attack. When he had calmed down, still apologizing profusely, he asked me to understand that he was a timid homosexual (never mind my age, Juanito!) and that he was out of practice in the art of hooking up, always difficult even when it wasn't downright mysterious. You must think I'm an ass, and rightly so, he said. Then he confessed that it had been at least five years since he'd slept with anyone. Before I left, he insisted on giving me the Porrúa edition of the complete works of Sophocles and Aeschylus to make up for bothering me. I told him that I hadn't been bothered at all, but it would have seemed rude not to accept his gift. Life is shit.

  DECEMBER 16

  I'm sick for real. Rosario is making me stay in bed. Before she left for work she went out to borrow a thermos from a neighbor and she left me half a liter of coffee. Also four aspirin. I have a fever. I've started and finished two poems.

  DECEMBER 17

  Today a doctor came to see me. He looked at the room, looked at my books, and then took my blood pressure and felt different parts of my body. Afterward he went to talk to Rosario in a corner, in whispers, stressing his words with the emphatic motion of his shoulders. When he left I asked Rosario how she could have called a doctor without consulting me first. How much did you spend? I said. That doesn't matter, papacito. You're the only thing that matters.

  DECEMBER 18

  This afternoon I was shivering with fever when the door opened and my aunt and then my uncle came in, followed by Rosario. I thought I was hallucinating. My aunt threw herself on the bed, covering me with kisses. My uncle stood stoically by, waiting until my aunt had unburdened herself, and then he clapped me on the shoulder. The threats, scolding, and advice followed soon after. Basically, they wanted me to come straight home, or if not, then go to the hospital, where they intended to have me undergo a thorough examination. I refused. In the end there were threats and when they left I was laughing hysterically and Rosario was sobbing.