The Savage Detectives

by Roberto Bolaño

  Amadeo Salvatierra, Calle República de Venezuela, near the Palacio de la Inquisición, Mexico City DF, January 1976. So what did Manuel, Germán, and Arqueles say? I asked them. What did they say about what? one of them said. About Cesárea, of course, I said. Very little. Maples Arce hardly remembered her. Neither did Arqueles Vela. List said he'd only heard of her. When Cesárea Tinajero was in Mexico, he lived in Puebla. According to Maples she was a very young girl, very quiet. And that was all they told you? That was all. And what about Arqueles? More of the same, nothing. And how did you find me? Through List, they said, he told us that you, Amadeo, must have more information about her. And what did Germán say about me? That you really had known her, that before you joined the stridentists you were part of Cesárea's group, the visceral realists. He also told us about a magazine, a magazine that he said Cesárea published back then, Caborca he said it was called. That Germán, I said and I poured myself another shot of Los Suicidas. At the rate we were going the bottle wouldn't last until dark. Drink up, boys, drink up and don't worry, if we finish this bottle we'll go down and buy another one. Of course, it won't be the same as the one we've got now, but it'll be better than nothing. Ah, what a shame they don't make Los Suicidas mezcal anymore, what a shame that time passes, don't you think? what a shame that we die, and get old, and everything good goes galloping away from us.

  Joaquín Font, Calle Colima, Colonia Condesa, Mexico City DF, October 1976. Now that the days are going by, coldly, in the cold way that days go by, I can say without the slightest resentment that Belano was a romantic, often pretentious, a good friend to his friends, I hope and trust, although no one really knew what he was thinking, probably not even Belano himself. Ulises Lima, on the other hand, was much friendlier and more radical. Sometimes he seemed like Vaché's younger brother. Other times he seemed like an extraterrestrial. He smelled strange. This I know, this I can say, this I can attest to because on two unforgettable occasions he showered at my house. More precisely: he didn't smell bad, he had a strange smell, as if he'd just emerged from a swamp and a desert at the same time. Extreme wetness and extreme dryness, the primordial soup and the barren plain. At the same time, gentlemen! A truly unnerving smell! It bothered me, for reasons that aren't worth getting into here. His smell, I mean. Characterologically, Belano was extroverted and Ulises was introverted. In other words, I had more in common with Belano. Belano knew how to swim with the sharks much better than Lima did, no doubt about that. Much better than I did. He came across better, he knew how to handle things, he was more disciplined, he could pretend more convincingly. Good old Ulises was a ticking bomb, and what was worse, socially speaking, was that everyone knew or could sense that he was a ticking bomb and no one wanted him to get too close, for obvious and understandable reasons. Ah, Ulises Lima… He wrote constantly, that's what I remember most about him, in the margins of books that he stole and on pieces of scrap paper that he was always losing. And he never wrote poems, he wrote stray lines that he'd assemble into long, strange poems later on if he was lucky… Belano, on the other hand, wrote in notebooks… They both still owe me money…

  Jacinto Requena, Café Quito, Calle Bucareli, Mexico City DF, November 1976. Sometimes they disappeared, but never for more than two or three days. When you asked them where they were going, they said in search of provisions. That was all. They never talked too much about that. Some of us, of course, those of us who were closest to them, knew what they were doing while they were gone, even if we didn't know where they were going. Some of us didn't care. Others thought it was wrong, saying that it was lumpen behavior. Lumpenism: the childhood syndrome of intellectuals. And others actually thought it was a good thing, mostly because Lima and Belano were generous with their ill-gotten gains. I was one of those. Things weren't going well for me. Xóchitl, my partner, was three months pregnant. I didn't have a job. We were living in a hotel that her father paid for, near the Monumento a la Revolución, on Calle Montes. We had one room with a bathroom and a tiny kitchen but at least we could make our meals there, which was much cheaper than going out to eat every day. Xóchitl's father had already had the room, which was actually more like a little apartment, long before she got pregnant, when he turned it over to us. He must have used it as a place to bring women or something. He let us have it, but first he made us promise to get married. I said yes right away, I think I even swore that we would. Xóchitl said nothing, just staring her father in the eyes. An interesting man. He was so old he could easily have passed for her grandfather, but he also had a look about him that gave you the shivers, the first time you saw him, anyway. I definitely got the shivers. He was big and hulking, huge, which is funny because Xóchitl is short and fine-boned. But her father was big and dark (in that sense, Xóchitl does take after him), with very wrinkled skin, and every time I saw him he was wearing a suit and tie, sometimes a navy suit, sometimes a brown one. Two nice suits, though they weren't new. Sometimes, especially at night, he wore a trench coat over the suit. When Xóchitl introduced me to him, the time we went to ask him for help, the old man looked at me and then he said come with me, I want to talk to you alone. Now we're in trouble, I thought, but what could I do? I followed him, prepared for the worst. But all the old man did was tell me to open my mouth. What? I said. Open your mouth, he said. So I opened my mouth and the old man looked at me and asked me how I'd lost the three teeth I'm missing. In a fight in school, I said. And my daughter met you like this? he said. Yes, I said, I already looked like this when she met me. Goddamn, he said, she must really love you. (The old man had stopped living with my partner's family when she was six, but she and her sisters would go see him once a month.) Then he said: if you leave her I'll kill you. He stared me in the eyes as he said it, his ratlike little eyes-even the pupils looked wrinkled in that face-fixed on mine, but without raising his voice, like a fucking gangster in an Orol movie, which was ultimately probably what he was. I, of course, swore that I would never leave her, especially now that she was going to be the mother of my child, and that was the end of our private talk. We went back to Xóchitl and the old man gave us the key to his place, promising us that we wouldn't have to worry about the rent, that he would take care of it, and handing us a wad of cash to keep us going.

  It was a relief when he left, and it was a relief to know that we would have a roof over our heads. But soon we discovered that the old man's money was barely enough for us to live on. What I mean is, Xóchitl and I had some extra expenses, extra needs the paternal allowance didn't cover. It wasn't hard for us to get used to wearing the same old clothes, so we didn't spend money on that, but we spent it on movies, plays, buses, and the subway (although the truth is that living downtown we could walk almost everywhere), which we mostly took to get to the poetry workshops at the Casa del Lago or the university. We weren't actually in school, in the formal sense of being in school, but there was no workshop that we didn't check out at least once. We had a kind of obsession with workshops. We would make ourselves a couple of sandwiches and we'd just show up, as happy as could be. We'd listen to poetry, listen to the critiques, sometimes offer critiques of our own, Xóchitl more often than me, and then we would leave, and by that time it would already be dark, and as we headed to the bus or the subway or went walking home, we would eat our sandwiches, enjoying the Mexico City night, which I've always thought is gorgeous, the nights here are mostly cool and bright but not cold, nights made for walking or fucking, nights made for talking, which was what Xóchitl and I did, talk about the child we were going to have, the poets we'd heard, the books we were reading.

  It was actually at a poetry workshop that we met Ulises Lima and Rafael Barrios and Luscious Skin. It was the first or second time we'd been there and the first time Ulises had showed up, and when the workshop was over we made friends and walked out together and then we took the bus together, and while Luscious Skin flirted with Xóchitl I listened to Ulises Lima and he listened to me, and Rafael nodded in agreement at what Ulises was saying and wh
at I was saying, and it was honestly as if I'd found a soul mate, a real poet, a poet through and through, who could explain clearly what I'd only sensed and wished and dreamed, and that was one of the best nights of my life, and when we got home we couldn't sleep, Xóchitl and I, and we talked until four in the morning. Later I met Arturo Belano, Felipe Müller, María Font, Ernesto San Epifanio, and all the others, but none of them impressed me as much as Ulises. Of course, Luscious Skin wasn't the only one who tried to get Xóchitl into bed. Pancho and Moctezuma Rodríguez did their best too, and even Rafael Barrios. Sometimes I would say to Xóchitl: why don't you tell them you're pregnant? Maybe they'll give up and leave you alone. But she laughed and said she didn't mind being wooed. Fine, I said, it's up to you. I'm not the jealous type. But one night, I remember it clearly, it was Arturo Belano who tried to come on to Xóchitl, and that really did make me sad. I knew she wasn't going to sleep with anyone, but their attitude bothered me. It was basically as if they'd written me off because of the way I looked. It was as if they thought: this girl can't like that poor loser with the missing teeth. As if teeth have anything to do with love. But it was different with Arturo Belano. It amused Xóchitl to be courted, but this time it was different, it was much more than a diversion for her. We hadn't met Arturo Belano yet. This was the first time. We'd heard a lot about him before, but for one reason or another we still hadn't been introduced. And that night he was there and the whole group got on an empty bus in the early hours of the morning (a bus full of visceral realists!), heading to a party or a play or somebody's reading, I've forgotten now, and Belano sat next to Xóchitl on the bus and they spent the whole ride talking, and I could tell, I was sitting a few seats back, shaky, with Ulises Lima and the kid Bustamante, I could tell that Xóchitl's face looked different, that this time she really was enjoying herself, how to explain, that she was delighted that Belano was sitting there next to her, giving her one hundred percent of his attention, while everybody else, but especially everybody who'd already tried to get her into bed, watched what was going on out of the corners of their eyes, like me, still talking, still watching the semideserted streets and the door of the bus shut tight, like the door of a crematorium oven, still doing the things they'd been doing, I mean, but with every sense alert to what was happening in the seats where my Xóchitl and Arturo Belano were sitting. And at a certain moment the atmosphere became so fraught, everything on pins and needles, that I thought to myself these assholes must know something I don't, something strange is going on here, it isn't normal for the fucking bus to be circling the city like a ghost, it isn't normal that no one's getting on it, it isn't normal for me to start hallucinating for no reason. But I got a hold on myself, the way I always do, and in the end nothing happened. Then Rafael Barrios, the nerve of him, told me that Belano didn't know that Xóchitl was my partner. I answered that nothing had happened and that if anything had happened it was Xóchitl's business, Xóchitl lives with me, she's not my slave, I said. But now comes the strange part: after that night, the night Belano was all over Xóchitl on that lonely nocturnal journey (the only thing he didn't do was kiss her on the mouth), no one ever bothered her again. Absolutely nobody. As if the bastards had seen themselves reflected in their fucking leader and they didn't like what they saw. And something else I should add: Belano's flirtation only lasted the length of that interminable bus ride, in other words it was an innocent thing, so maybe he really didn't know that the gap-toothed guy a few seats back was the partner of the girl he was coming on to, but Xóchitl did, and the way she accepted the Chilean's flattery was different from the way she endured the flattery of Luscious Skin or Pancho Rodríguez, for example, by which I mean that with them you could see she was enjoying herself, having a good time, laughing, but with Belano her face, the angle of her face that I was able to see that night, betrayed very different emotions. And that night, at the hotel, it seemed to me that Xóchitl looked more pensive and distant than usual. But I didn't say anything. I thought I understood why. So I started to talk about other things: our child, the poems she and I would write; the future, essentially. And I didn't talk about Arturo Belano or any of the real problems in store for us, like me finding work or the two of us having enough money to rent a place and be able to support ourselves and our child. No, I talked about poetry, just as I did every night, about the creative act and about visceral realism, a literary movement that was a perfect match for my inner self and my sense of reality.

  After that somehow disastrous night we started to see them almost every day. Wherever they went, we went. It was only a week later, I think, that they invited me to participate in one of the group's poetry readings. We didn't miss a single meeting. And the relationship between Belano and Xóchitl was frozen in polite ritual, not devoid of a certain mystery (a mystery that nevertheless cast no shadow over the steady growth of my partner's belly), but not going any farther. The truth is, Arturo never really saw Xóchitl. What happened that night, in the bus carrying only us along the vacant streets, the howling streets, of Mexico City? I don't know. Probably a girl whose pregnancy wasn't visible yet fell in love for a few hours with a sleepwalker. And that was all.

  The rest of the story is fairly ordinary. Sometimes Ulises and Belano disappeared from Mexico City. Some people didn't like it. Others didn't care. I thought it was a good thing. Sometimes Ulises loaned me money. They had piles of money, more than enough, and I always needed it. I don't know where they got it from and I don't care. Belano never loaned me money. When they left for Sonora I had the sense that the group was about to fall apart. Kind of as if the joke had stopped being funny. It didn't seem like such a terrible thing to me. My son was about to be born and I'd finally found a job. One night Rafael called me and told me they were back, but that they were leaving again. Fine, I said, the money's theirs, let them do what they want with it. This time they're going to Europe, Rafael told me. Perfect, I said, that's what we should all do. But what about the movement? said Rafael. What movement? I said, watching Xóchitl as she slept. The room was dark and the hotel sign flickered through the window like something in a gangster movie. It was in these shadows that my son's grandfather had done his dirty business. What do you mean "what movement"? Visceral realism, said Rafael. What about visceral realism? I said. That's what I mean, said Rafael, what will happen to visceral realism? What will happen to the magazine we were going to publish, to all our projects? He sounded so pitiful that if Xóchitl hadn't been asleep I would've burst out laughing. We'll publish the magazine ourselves, I said, and we'll do the projects with them or without them. For a while, Rafael didn't say anything. We can't get off track, he murmured. Then he was quiet again. Thinking, I guess. I was quiet too. But I wasn't thinking. I knew perfectly well where I stood and what I wanted to do. And just as I knew what I wanted to do, what I planned to do from then on, I also knew that Rafael would end up finding his way. There's no point getting all upset, I told him when I got tired of standing there in the dark with the phone to my ear. I'm not upset, said Rafael. I think we should go too. I'm not leaving Mexico, I said.