The Savage Detectives

by Roberto Bolaño

  At midnight, Requena came home. He asked me what I was doing there and where Xóchitl was. I told him she had gone to a meeting of visceral realists at the Rodríguez brothers' house. After he checked on his son, Requena asked me whether I'd eaten. I told him I hadn't. I'd forgotten to eat. But I gave the boy his supper, I said.

  Requena opened the refrigerator and took out a small pot that he put on the stove. It was rice soup. He asked me whether I wanted any. What I really wanted was not to go back to my lonely room, so I said I'd have a little. We spoke in lowered voices so as not to wake up little Franz. How are your dance classes going? he said. How are your painting classes going? Requena had only been in my room once, the night of the dinner, and he'd liked my paintings. Everything's fine, I said. And your poetry? I haven't written for a long time, I said. Me neither, he said. The rice soup was very spicy. I asked him whether Xóchitl always cooked like that. Always, he said, it must be a family tradition.

  For a while we looked at each other without saying anything, and we looked out the window too, and at Franz's bed and the unevenly painted walls. Then Requena started to talk about Ulises and his return to Mexico. My mouth and my stomach were burning, and then I realized that my face was burning too. I thought he would stay in Europe forever, I heard Requena saying. I don't know why I started to think about Xóchitl's father just then, whom I had only seen once, as he was leaving the room. When I saw him I took a step backward, because I thought he was a frightening-looking man. He's my father, said Xóchitl when she saw the expression of alarm on my face. He nodded to me, and left. Visceral realism is dead, said Requena, we should forget about it and make something new. A Mexican section of surrealism, I murmured. I need something to drink, I said. I watched Requena get up and open the refrigerator, the yellow light streaking across the floor to the legs of little Franz's bed. I saw a ball and some tiny slippers, though they were too big to belong to the boy, and I thought about Xóchitl's feet, much smaller than mine. Did you notice anything new about Ulises? said Requena. I drank some cold water. I didn't notice anything, I said. Requena got up and opened the window to clear the cigarette smoke. He acts crazy, said Requena, like he's out of his head. I heard a noise from little Franz's bed. Does he talk in his sleep? I asked. No, it's from outside, said Requena. I went over to the window and looked up toward my room. The light was off. Then I felt Requena's hands on my waist and I didn't move. He didn't move either. After a while he pulled down my pants and I felt his penis between my buttocks. We didn't say anything to each other. When we were done we sat down at the table again and lit cigarettes. Will you tell Xóchitl? said Requena. Do you want me to tell her? I said. I'd rather you didn't, he said.

  I left at two in the morning and Xóchitl still hadn't come home. The next day, when I got back from my painting classes, Xóchitl came to my room to get me. I went with her to the supermarket. As we were shopping she told me that Ulises Lima and Pancho Rodríguez had fought. Visceral realism is dead, said Xóchitl, if only you'd been there… I told her that I didn't write poetry anymore, and I didn't want to have anything to do with poets either. When we got back, Xóchitl asked me in. She hadn't made the bed, and the dishes from the night before, the dishes Requena and I had used, were piled unwashed in the sink along with Xóchitl and Franz's lunch dishes.

  That night the math teacher didn't come either. I called my sister from a public phone. I didn't have anything to say but I needed to talk to someone and I didn't feel like being in Xóchitl's room again. I caught her on her way out. She was going to the theater. What do you want? she said. Do you need money? We made conversation for a while, then before we hung up I asked her whether she knew that Ulises Lima was back in Mexico. She hadn't heard. She didn't care. We said goodbye and hung up. Then I called the math teacher's house. His wife answered the phone. Hello? she said. I was silent. Answer, you goddamn fucking bitch, she said. I hung up gently and went home. Two days later Xóchitl told me that Catalina O'Hara was having a party where all the visceral realists might get together and see whether it was possible to start the group up again, put out a magazine, plan new activities. She asked me whether I planned to go. I said no, but that if she wanted to go I would watch Franz. That night Requena and I made love again, for a long time, from the moment the boy fell asleep until three in the morning, approximately, and for a moment I thought that he was the one I loved, not the stupid math teacher.

  The next day Xóchitl told me how the meeting had gone. Like a zombie movie. In her opinion, visceral realism was finished, which was too bad because the poems she was writing now, she said, were really visceral realist poems. I listened to her without saying anything. Then I asked about Ulises. He's the boss, said Xóchitl, but he's on his own. After that, there were no more visceral realist meetings, and Xóchitl didn't ask me to watch her son at night again. My relationship with the math teacher was over, but we still slept together every once in a while and I still kept calling his house, out of masochism, I guess, or worse, because I was bored. One day, though, we talked about everything that was or wasn't happening between us, and after that we stopped seeing each other. When he left he seemed relieved. I thought about moving out of the room on Calle Montes and going back to live at my mother's house. In the end I decided not to leave, to stay there for good.

  13

  Rafael Barrios, sitting in his living room, Jackson Street, San Diego, California, March 1981. Have you seen Easy Rider? That's right, the movie with Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, and Jack Nicholson. That was basically what we were like back then. But especially Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, before they left for Europe. Like Dennis Hopper and his doppelgänger: two dark figures, moving fast and full of energy. And it's not that I have anything against Peter Fonda but neither of them looked like him. Müller looked like Peter Fonda. Those two, on the other hand, looked just like Dennis Hopper and that was creepy and seductive, creepy and seductive to those of us who knew them, I mean, those of us who were their friends. And this isn't a judgment of Peter Fonda. I like Peter Fonda. Whenever that movie he made with Frank Sinatra's daughter and Bruce Dern is on TV I watch it, even if I have to stay up till four in the morning. But neither of them looked like him. And they really did look like Dennis Hopper. It was as if they were consciously imitating him. Two Dennis Hoppers walking the streets of Mexico City. A Mr. Hopper spiraling from east to west, like a double black cloud, until (inevitably) they vanished without a trace on the other side of the city, the side where there was no way out. And sometimes I'd look at them and even though I liked them a lot I'd think, what kind of act is this? what kind of scam or collective suicide is this? And one night, a little before New Year's Day 1976, before they left for Sonora, I realized it was their way of playing politics, a way that isn't my way anymore and that at the time I didn't understand. Their way might have been good or bad, right or wrong, but it was their way of playing politics, of politically influencing reality. I'm sorry if what I'm saying doesn't make sense. Lately I've been feeling a little bit confused.

  Barbara Patterson, in her kitchen, Jackson Street, San Diego, California, March 1981. Dennis Hopper? Politics? That son of a bitch! That piece of butt-hair-crusted shit! What does that dumbfuck know about politics? I was the one who said: take up politics, Rafael, take up some noble cause, goddamn it, you're a freaking man of the people, and the bastard would look at me like I was shit, some piece of trash, like he was looking down from some imaginary height, and he would say: cool it, Barbarita, it's not so easy, and then he'd go to sleep and I'd have to go out to work and then school, I was busy all day, basically, I'm still busy all day, back and forth from the university to work (I waitress at a burger place on Reston Avenue), and when I came home Rafael would be asleep, the dishes in the sink, the floor dirty, crumbs in the kitchen (but no food for me, the deadbeat!), the house a pit, like a pack of baboons had been through, and then I'd have to start to clean, sweep, cook, then go out shopping to stock the refrigerator, and when Rafael woke up I'd ask him: have you wr
itten, Rafael? have you started your novel about Chicano life in San Diego? and Rafael would look at me like he was watching me on TV and say: I wrote a poem, Barbarita, and then I would give up and say all right, asshole, read it to me, and Rafael would open a couple of beers and hand me one (the bastard knows I shouldn't drink beer), then read me the goddamn poem. And it must be because deep down I still love him that the poem would make me cry almost without me realizing it (only if it was good), and when Rafael was done reading my face would be wet and shiny and he would come closer to me and I could smell him, he smelled like a Mexican, the bastard, and we would hold each other very gently, and then, but maybe half an hour later, we would start to make love, and then Rafael would say to me: what are we going to eat, baby? and I would get up, without getting dressed, and go into the kitchen and make him his eggs with ham and bacon, and as I cooked I would think about literature and politics and I would remember the time when Rafael and I were still living in Mexico and we went to see a Cuban poet, let's go see him, Rafael, I said, you're a man of the people and that faggot will have to recognize how talented you are whether he wants to or not, and Rafael said: but I'm a visceral realist, Barbarita, and I said don't be a dumb shit, your goddamn balls are visceral realist, will you face the fucking truth for once in your life, darling? so Rafael and I went to see the great lyric poet of the Revolution, and all the Mexican poets Rafael hated most (the poets Belano and Lima hated most, that is) had been there, it was funny because both of us could tell it by the smell, the Cuban's hotel room smelled like the peasant poets, like the poets from the magazine El Delfín Proletario, like Huerta's wife, like the Mexican Stalinists, like the shitty revolutionaries who cash a government check every two weeks, but anyway, what I said to myself and what I tried to tell Rafael telepathically was: don't blow it now, don't fuck this up, and the Havana guy was nice to us, a little tired, a little sad, but basically nice, and Rafael talked about the young Mexican poets but not about the visceral realists (before we went in I told him I'd kill him if he did) and I even came up on the spot with a plan for a magazine that, I said, the University of San Diego was going to fund, and the Cuban was interested in that, interested in Rafael's poems, interested in my fucking nonexistent magazine, and suddenly, when our visit was almost over, the Cuban, who at this point seemed more asleep than awake, suddenly asked us about visceral realism. I don't know how to explain it. The room in that fucking hotel. The silence and the distant elevators. The smell of the previous visitors. The Cuban's eyes, closing from sleep or boredom or liquor. His unexpected words, as if spoken by a man under hypnosis, a man mesmerized. It made me give a little scream, just a little scream but it sounded like a shot. It must have been nerves, that's what I told them. Then the three of us were silent for a while, the Cuban surely wondering who this hysterical gringa must be, Rafael wondering whether or not to talk about the group, and me saying over and over to myself you stupid fucking bitch, one of these days you're going to have to sew your fucking mouth shut. And then, as I imagined myself sitting in my closet at home, with a giant scab for a mouth, reading the stories of El llano en llamas over and over again, I heard Rafael talking about the visceral realists, I heard the fucking Cuban asking question after question, I heard Rafael saying yes, saying maybe, talking about the birth pangs of communism, I heard the Cuban proposing manifestos, proclamations, repostulations, greater ideological clarity, and then I couldn't restrain myself anymore and I opened my mouth and said that those days were over now, now Rafael was only speaking for himself, like the good poet he was, and then Rafael said be quiet, Barbarita, and I said don't tell me to be quiet, you bum, and the Cuban said oh, women, and tried to step in with his rotten, revolting macho bullshit, and I said shit, shit, shit, we just want to be published by the Casa de las Américas on our own merits, and then the Cuban looked at me very seriously and said of course, the Casa de las Américas always publishes people on their merits. As long as it suits them, I said, and Rafael said Jesus, Barbarita, the maestro will get the wrong idea, and I said the fucking maestro can think whatever he fucking wants, but the past is the past, Rafael, and your future is your future, right? and then the Cuban looked at me even more seriously, his eyes seeming to say sweetheart, if we were in Moscow you'd end up in a mental ward, but at the same time (I noticed this too) as if he were thinking, well, what does it matter, madness is madness is madness, and sadness too, and at the end of the day the three of us are Americans, children of Caliban, lost in the great American wilderness, and I think that touched me, to see a spark of understanding, a spark of tolerance in the eyes of that powerful man, as if he were saying don't take it to heart, Barbara, I know how these things are, and then, like an idiot, I smiled, and Rafael took out his poems, some fifty loose-leaf pages, and said here are my poems, friend, and the Cuban took his poems and thanked him, and then right away he and Rafael got up, as if in slow motion, like a flash of lightning, or twin flashes, or a flash and its shadow, but in slow motion, and in that fraction of a second I thought: everything is all right, I hope everything will be all right, and I saw myself swimming on a Havana beach and I saw Rafael by my side, a little distance away, talking to some American journalists, people from New York, from San Francisco, talking about LITERATURE, talking about POLITICS, at the gates of paradise.

  José "Zopilote" Colina, Café Quito, Avenida Bucareli, Mexico City DF, March 1981. This was the closest those deadbeats got to politics. Once when I was at El Nacional, in 1975 or thereabouts, Arturo Belano, Ulises Lima, and Felipe Müller were there waiting for Don Juan Rejano to see them. Suddenly in walks this blonde, not bad looking either (and I'm an expert), and she cuts right in front of all the lousy poets who're sitting there crowded together like flies in the little room where Don Juan Rejano worked. No one complained, of course (they might have been poor but they were gentlemen, the dipshits, and anyway, what the fuck could they say?), so the blonde goes up to Don Juan's desk and gives him a bunch of paper, some translations, I think I heard her say (I have excellent hearing), and Don Juan, God bless him, men like him are few and far between, gives her a big smile and says how are you, Verónica (the oily Spanish son of a bitch, he treated the rest of us like dirt), what good wind brings you here? and this Verónica gives him the translations and they talk for a while, or actually Verónica talks to the old man and Don Juan nods, like he's hypnotized, and then the blond girl takes her check, puts it in her purse, turns on her heel, and vanishes down the filthy rotten hallway, and then, as the rest of us are drooling, Don Giovanni sits there for a minute sort of dazed and lost in thought, and Arturo Belano, who was somebody he always trusted and who was sitting closest to him, says: what is it, Don Juan, what's the matter? and Don Rejas, as if emerging from a fucking dream or a fucking nightmare looks him in the eye and says: do you know who that girl was? speaking with a Spanish-from-Spain accent too, which was a bad sign, since not only did Rejano have a rotten temper, he usually spoke with a Mexican accent, as none of you would have any reason to know, poor old guy, the shitty luck he had at the end, but anyway, he says do you know who that girl was, Arturo? and Belano says no sir, but she looked nice. Who was she? Trotsky's great-granddaughter! says Don Rejas, none other than Lev Davidovich's great-granddaughter Verónica Volkow (or was it granddaughter? no, great-granddaughter, I think), and then, sorry I keep losing my place, Belano said far out and went running after Verónica Volkow, and Lima hurried after Belano, and the kid Müller stayed for a minute to pick up their checks and then he was off like a shot too, and Rejano watched them disappear down the Hall of Filth and he smiled as if to himself, as if to say lousy little fuckers, and I think he must have been thinking about the Spanish Civil War, his dead friends, his long years of exile, maybe he was even thinking of his years as a Communist Party militant, although that was an odd fit with Trotsky's great-granddaughter, but that was Don Rejas, basically a sentimental guy, a good guy, and then he came back down to planet Earth, to the lousy editorial department of the Revista Mexicana de Cultu
ra, El Nacional's cultural supplement, and everyone who was crowded into the stuffy room and languishing in the dark hallway snapped back to reality with him and we all got our checks.

  Later, after I'd come to terms with Don Giovanni over a piece about a painter buddy of mine and gone out with two guys from the paper, all ready to start drinking early, I saw them through the windows of a café, I think it was La Estrella Errante, but I can't remember. Verónica Volkow was with them. They'd caught up with her and asked her out for a drink. I watched them for a while, standing on the sidewalk while the guys I was with decided where to go. They seemed happy: Belano, Lima, Müller, and Trotsky's great-granddaughter. Through the windows I watched them laugh, watched them fall all over the place laughing. They were probably never going to see her again. The Volkow girl was clearly a society type and those guys were going to end up at Lecumberri or Alcatraz, it was written all over them. I don't know what was wrong with me, I swear. I felt tenderhearted and Zopilote Colina never goes soft like that. The bastards were laughing with Verónica Volkow, but they were laughing with Leon Trotsky too. It was the closest they would ever get to the Bolsheviks. It was probably the closest they would ever want to get. I thought about Don Ivan Rejanovich, and I felt my chest swell with sadness. But with happiness too, goddamn it. The strangest things happened at La Nacional on payday.

  Verónica Volkow, with a female friend and two male friends, International Departures, Mexico City DF airport, April 1981. Mr. José Colinas was mistaken when he said that I would never see the Chilean citizens Arturo Belano and Felipe Müller and their friend, my fellow Mexican citizen Ulises Lima, again. If the incidents he describes, with scant regard for the truth, occurred in 1975, it was probably a year later that I saw the young men in question again. If I'm not mistaken, it was in May or June 1976, on what must have been a clear night, even a bright night, the kind of night that year after year makes Mexicans and bewildered foreign visitors move slowly, with great caution, and that I personally find stimulating but decidedly sad.