The Savage Detectives

by Roberto Bolaño

  The first night I slept in the living room. I put a blanket on the sofa, lay down, and closed my eyes. The noises were the same as ever. But no, I was wrong. There was something that made them different and prevented me from sleeping, so I spent my nights sitting on the sofa with the television on and my eyes half shut. Then I moved into my son's old room and that cheered me up. I suppose it was because the room still retained a certain air of happy, carefree adolescence. I don't know. In any case, after three days the room only smelled like me, in other words, like old age and madness, and everything went back to the way it was before. I got depressed and didn't know what to do. Silently, I waited in that empty house for the hours to go by until one of my children would come back from work and we could exchange a few words. Sometimes someone would call and I would answer. Hello? Who is this? No one knew me and I didn't know anyone.

  A week after I came home I started to take walks around the neighborhood. At first they were short walks: once around the block and that was it. Little by little, though, I grew more daring, and my outings, at first tentative, took me farther and farther afield. The neighborhood had changed. I was mugged two different times. The first time, it was kids with kitchen knives, and the second time, some older guys who beat me up when they didn't find any money in my pockets. But I don't feel pain anymore and I didn't care. That's one of the things I learned at La Fortaleza. That night, Lola, my son's girlfriend, put iodine on my cuts and scrapes and warned me that there were certain places I shouldn't go. I told her that I didn't care whether I got beaten up every so often. Do you like it? she said. I don't, I said. If I were beaten up every day I wouldn't like it.

  One night the theater director said that the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes was going to give him a grant. We celebrated. My son and his girlfriend went out to buy a bottle of tequila and my daughter and the director made a gala dinner, although the truth is neither of them knew how to cook. I don't remember what they made. Food. I ate everything. But it wasn't very good. The person who did that kind of thing well was my wife, but she was living somewhere else now and she wasn't interested in impromptu dinners like this. I sat at the table and started to shake. I remember that my daughter looked at me and asked whether I felt sick. I'm just cold, I said, and it was true. With the years I've become the kind of person who's always cold. A little glass of tequila would have helped, but I can't drink tequila or any kind of alcohol. So I shivered and ate and listened to what they were saying. They were talking about a better future. They were talking about silly things, but what they were really talking about was a better future, and although that future didn't include my son and his girlfriend or me, we smiled too and talked and made our plans.

  A week later the department that was supposed to award the grant was closed because of budget cuts and the theater director ended up with nothing.

  I realized that it was time for me to take action. I took action. I called a few old friends. At first no one remembered me. Where have you been? they said. Where have you come from? What kind of life have you been leading? I told them that I'd just returned from abroad. I've been traveling around the Mediterranean, I've lived in Italy and in Istanbul. I've been looking at buildings in Cairo, so suggestive architecturally. Suggestive? Yes, of hell. Like the Tlatelolco towers, but with less green space. Like Ciudad Satélite, but without running water. Like Netzahualcóyotl. All of us architects deserve to be shot. I've been in Tunis and Marrakech. In Marseille. In Venice. In Florence. In Naples. Lucky you, Quim, but why did you come back? Mexico is going straight to hell. You've probably been following the news. Yes, I've been keeping up, I told them. There's been no shortage of reports. My daughters sent Mexican newspapers to the hotels where I was living. But Mexico is my country, and I missed it. There's no place like this. Don't fuck with me, Quim, you can't be serious. I'm completely serious. Completely serious? I swear, completely serious. Some mornings, as I ate my breakfast watching the Mediterranean and those little sailboats that Europeans like to sail, I'd get tears in my eyes thinking of Mexico City, thinking about breakfast in Mexico City, and I knew that sooner or later I'd have to return. And one of my friends might say: but wait, weren't you in a mental hospital? And I would say yes, but that was years ago. In fact, it was when I left the mental hospital that I went abroad. Doctor's orders. And my friends would laugh at this or at other quips, since I told the story differently each time and they would say oh, Quim, and then I would seize my chance and ask them whether they knew of any work for me, a little job at some architecture firm, anything at all, a part-time job, to help me get used to the idea that I had to find something full-time, and then they would answer that the employment situation was terrible, that firms were closing one after another, that Andrés del Toro had left town for Miami and that Refugio Ortiz de Montesinos had set up shop in Houston, just to give me some idea, they said, and I got the idea, but I kept calling and abusing their patience and telling the story of my adventures in happier parts of the world.

  All of this persistence finally landed me a job as a draftsman in the studio of an architect I didn't know. He was a kid who was just starting out, and when he discovered that I was an architect, not a draftsman, he took a liking to me. At night, when we closed the little office, we would go to a bar in Ampliación Popocatépetl, near Calle Cabrera. The bar was called El Destino and we would sit there talking about architecture and politics (the kid was a Trotskyite) and travel and women. His name was Juan Arenas. He had a partner I hardly ever saw, a fat guy in his forties who was an architect too but he looked more like he belonged to the secret police and hardly ever showed up at the studio. So the firm essentially consisted of Juan Arenas and me, and since we had hardly anything to do and we liked to talk, we spent most of the day talking. At night he would give me a ride home and as we crossed a Mexico City like a fading nightmare, I would sometimes think that Juan Arenas was my happier reincarnation.

  One day I invited him to the house for lunch. It was a Sunday. No one was home and I made him soup and an omelet. We ate in the kitchen. It was nice to be there, listening to the birds that came to peck in the garden and watching Juan Arenas, a simple, unpretentious boy who ate with a hearty appetite. He lived alone. He wasn't from Mexico City but Ciudad Madero, and sometimes he felt lost in the capital. Later my daughter and her partner came home and found us watching TV and playing cards. I think that Juan Arenas liked my daughter from the start, and after that he visited often. Sometimes I would dream that we were all living together in the house on Calle Colima, my two daughters, my son, the theater director, Lola, and Juan Arenas. Not my wife. I didn't see her living with us. But things never turn out the way you see them in dreams, and one day Juan Arenas and his partner closed the office and vanished without saying where they were going.

  Once again I had to call my old friends and ask for favors. I'd learned from experience that it was better to look for a job as a draftsman than as an architect, and so I soon found myself working hard again. This time it was at a firm in Coyoacán. One night, my bosses invited me to a party. The alternative was to head for the nearest metro stop and return to what would surely be an empty house, so I accepted and went. The party was at a house not far from mine. For a few minutes it seemed familiar to me and I thought I'd been there before, but then I realized I hadn't, that it was just that all houses of a certain period in a certain neighborhood were as alike as two peas in a pod, and then I relaxed and went straight into the kitchen to find something to eat because I hadn't had a bite since breakfast. I don't know what came over me, but all of a sudden I felt very hungry, which was unusual for me. Very hungry and very much like crying and very happy.

  And then I rushed into the kitchen and in the kitchen were two men and a woman, who were talking animatedly about someone who had died. And I took a ham sandwich and ate it and then I had two gulps of Coca-Cola to wash it down. The bread was somehow dry. But the sandwich was delicious, so I took another one, this time a cheese sandwich, and I ate it littl
e by little, not all at once, chewing carefully and smiling the way I used to smile so many years ago. And the trio who were talking, the two men and the woman, looked at me and saw my smile and smiled at me, and then I moved a little closer to them and I heard what they were saying: they were talking about a corpse and a burial, about a friend of mine, an architect, who had died, and at that moment it seemed appropriate for me to say that I'd known him. That was all. They were talking about a dead man whom I'd known, and then they started to talk about other things, I guess, because I didn't stay but went out into the garden, a garden of rosebushes and fir trees, and I went over to the wrought-iron gate and began to watch the traffic. And then I saw my old '74 Impala go by, looking worse for the wear, its paint peeling and with dents on the fender and doors, moving very slowly, at a crawl, as if it were looking for me along the night streets of Mexico City, and it had such an effect on me that then I did start to shake, grabbing the rails of the gate so I wouldn't fall, and sure enough, I didn't fall, but my glasses fell off, my glasses slipped off my nose and dropped onto a shrub or a plant or a rosebush, I don't know, I just heard the noise and I knew they hadn't broken, and then I thought that if I bent down to get them, by the time I got up the Impala would be gone, but if I didn't I wouldn't be able to see who was driving that ghost car, the car I'd lost in the final hours of 1975, the early hours of 1976. And if I couldn't see who was driving it, what good would it do to have seen it? And then something even more surprising occurred to me. I thought: my glasses have fallen off. I thought: until a moment ago I didn't know I wore glasses. I thought: now I can perceive change. And knowing that now I knew I needed glasses to see, I was afraid, and I bent down and found my glasses (what a difference between having them on and not having them on!) and I stood up and the Impala was still there, which makes me think that I must have moved as fast as only certain madmen can, and I saw the Impala, and with my glasses, the glasses that until just then I hadn't known I possessed, I peered into the darkness, searching for the driver's face, half eager and half afraid, because I thought that I would see Cesárea Tinajero, the lost poet, at the wheel of my lost Impala, I thought that Cesárea Tinajero was emerging from the past to bring me back the car I'd loved most in my life, the car that had meant the most to me and that I'd had the least time to enjoy. But it wasn't Cesárea who was driving it. In fact, no one was driving my ghost Impala! Or so I thought. But then I realized that cars don't drive themselves and that some poor, short, severely depressed little man was probably driving that beat-up Impala, and I returned to the party bowed down by an enormous weight.

  When I was halfway there, though, I had an idea and I turned around, but the Impala was no longer in the street, visible or invisible, now you see it, now you don't. The street had become a jigsaw of shadows with several pieces missing, and one of the pieces missing, oddly enough, was me. My Impala was gone. And in some sense that I couldn't quite understand, I was gone too. My Impala was back inside my head again. I was back inside my head again.

  Then, humbled and confused and in a burst of utter Mexicanness, I knew that we were ruled by fate and that we would all drown in the storm, and I knew that only the cleverest, myself certainly not included, would stay afloat much longer.

  Andrés Ramírez, Bar El Cuerno de Oro, Calle Avenir, Barcelona, December 1988. I was destined to be a failure, Belano, take my word for it. I left Chile on a long-ago day of 1975, on March 5 at eight p.m., to be precise, hidden in the hold of the cargo ship Napoli. In other words, as a common stowaway, with no idea of my final destination. I'll spare you the variously unpleasant details of the crossing. Put it this way: I was thirteen years younger than I am now and in my neighborhood in Santiago (La Cisterna, that is), my friends knew me as Mighty Mouse, after the funny, crime-fighting little animal that did so much to brighten the afternoons when we were children. In short, the man you see before you was prepared to put up with every hardship of such a voyage. At least physically, as they say. Never mind the hunger, the fear, the seasickness, the uncertainty of what lay ahead, alternately dim or terrifying. There was always some charitable soul who would venture down to the bilge with a piece of bread, a bottle of wine, a little bowl of spaghetti Bolognese. Besides, I had all the time in the world to think, something nearly impossible in my previous life, since as we all know, in modern cities it doesn't pay to be idle. And so I was able to examine my childhood (when you're stuck in the bottom of a boat it's best to do these things in an organized way) in more or less the time it took us to reach the Panama Canal. From then on, or in other words as long as it took us to cross the Atlantic (ay, already so far from my beloved country and even my continent, not that I'd seen much of it, but I felt a deep affection for it all the same), I set out to dissect what had become of my youth. And I concluded that everything had to change, even if I wasn't sure just then how to go about it or what path to take. Really, though, I was only killing time, keeping up my strength and my spirits, since I was already near the end of my rope after so many days in that damp, echoing darkness, which I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. Then one morning we docked in Lisbon and my thoughts took a new tack. Naturally, my first impulse was to disembark then and there, but one of the Italian sailors who sometimes fed me explained that a person in my position would have trouble at the Portuguese borders, by sea or by land. So I had to sit tight, and for two days that seemed like two weeks, all I could do was listen to the voices in the ship's hold, which hung open like the jaws of a whale. There, in my barrel, I got sicker and more impatient with each passing moment, shaking with chills that struck at random intervals. Then finally one night we set sail and left behind the industrious Portuguese capital that I envisioned, in my fever dreams, as a black city, with people dressed in black and houses built of mahogany or black marble or stone, maybe because while I was crouched there, burning up and half asleep, I thought of Eusebio, the Black Panther of the team that fought so valiantly in the England World Cup of ' 66, in which we Chileans were treated so unfairly.

  Back on the open seas, we rounded the Iberian peninsula, and I was still sick, so sick that one night two Italians brought me up on deck so that I could get some air and I saw lights in the distance and I asked what they were, what part of the world those lights belonged to (the world that seemed so unfriendly), and the Italians said Africa-the way you might say beak, or the way you might say apple-and then I really started to shake, my fever felt like an epileptic seizure, but it was only a fever, and then the Italians left me sitting on the deck and moved to one side, like people leaving a sickroom to smoke a cigarette, and I heard one Italian say to the other: if he dies on us we'd better throw him overboard, and the other Italian answered: all right, all right, but he won't die. And although I didn't speak Italian I understood that clearly, since both of our languages were Romance languages, as a scholar would say. I know you've been in similar situations, Belano, so I won't go on too long. Fear or the will to live, the survival instinct, gave me strength that I didn't know I had, and I said to the Italians I'm all right, I'm not going to die, what's the next port? Then I dragged myself back down into the hold, curled up in my corner, and slept.

  By the time we got to Barcelona I was better. On our second night in port I snuck off the ship and went walking out of the harbor like any night-shift worker. I had the clothes on my back, plus ten dollars I'd brought with me from Santiago hidden in one of my socks. Life has many wonderful moments, and they come in all shapes and sizes, but I'll never forget Barcelona's Ramblas or the side streets opening up to me that night like the arms of a girl you've never seen before but who you know is the love of your life. In three hours, I swear, I had a job. If a Chilean has strong arms and isn't lazy, he can make a living anywhere, my father told me when I went to say goodbye. I would have liked to punch the old son of a bitch in the face, but that's another story, so why dwell on it? The point is, on that unforgettable night I was already washing dishes by the time I lost the rocking sensation of the long crossing. This was at
a place called La Tía Joaquina, on Calle Escudillers. Around five in the morning, tired but happy, I left the bar and headed for the Pensión Conchi (what a name!), which had been recommended by one of the waiters at La Tía Joaquina, a kid from Murcia who was also staying at that dump.

  I spent two days at the Pensión Conchi, then they made me leave in a hurry when I refused to show papers so I could be registered with the police, and I spent a week at La Tía Joaquina, just long enough for the real dishwasher to recover from a bad case of the flu. Over the next few days I made the rounds of other boardinghouses, on Calle Hospital, Calle Pintor Fortuny, Calle Boquería, until I found one on Junta de Comercio, the Pensión Amelia, such a nice, pretty name, where they didn't ask me for papers as long as I shared my room with two others and whenever the police came by I hid myself in a wardrobe with a false back and didn't complain.

  As you can imagine, my first weeks in Europe were spent looking for work and working, because I had to pay for my lodging each week. Also because on solid ground my appetite, which had been hibernating during the crossing, was back and much more voracious than I remembered. But as I walked from place to place, say from the boardinghouse to work or from the restaurant to the boardinghouse, something began to happen to me that had never happened before. It didn't take me long to realize. Modesty aside, I've always been alert if nothing else, and I notice what's happening to me. It was a simple thing, anyway, although at first I admit it worried me. It would've worried you too. To give you an idea: I would be walking along the Ramblas, say, happy as can be, thinking the normal thoughts of a normal man and all of a sudden numbers would start to dance in my head. First 1, for example, then 0, then 1, then 1 again, then 0, then another 0, then back to 1, and so on. At first I chalked it up to all the time I'd spent trapped in the belly of the Napoli. But the truth is I felt fine, I was eating fine, I had normal bowel movements, I slept my six or seven hours like a baby, and my head didn't hurt at all, so it couldn't be that. Then I wondered whether it might be the change of scenery, which in this case was a change of country, continent, hemisphere, customs, everything. Then, of course, I blamed it on nerves. There have been some cases of insanity in my family, and of delirium tremens too, nobody's perfect. But none of these explanations were convincing, and little by little I adapted. I got used to the numbers. I didn't have much time to dwell on the matter, because the solution wasn't long in coming, and it came all of a sudden. One afternoon, another guy in the kitchen gave me an extra ticket he had for the soccer pools. I don't know why, but I didn't feel like filling it out at work and I took it with me to the boardinghouse. That night, as I was heading home along the half-deserted Ramblas, the numbers started to come, and right off the bat, I connected them with the ticket. I went into a bar on the Rambla Santa Mónica and asked for coffee and a pencil. But then the numbers stopped. My mind was blank! When I went out they started up again. I saw an open newsstand, 0, I saw a tree, 1, I saw two drunks, 2, and so on, until the fourteen scores were filled in. But I didn't have a pen to write them down in the street, so instead of heading to my boardinghouse, I walked down to the end of the Rambla and then back up again, as if I'd just gotten out of bed and I had the whole night ahead of me. A newsstand man near the Mercado de San José sold me a pen. When I paused to buy it the numbers stopped and I felt like I was teetering on the edge of a cliff. Then I walked back up the Rambla and my mind was blank. Moments like that are rough, let me tell you. Suddenly, the numbers returned and I pulled out my ticket and started to write them down. 0 was X, you didn't have to be a genius to figure that out, 1 was 1, and 2, which hardly appeared anyway or flickered in my head, was 2. Easy, right? By the time I got to the Plaza Catalonia metro stop my ticket was complete. Then the devil tempted me and I went slowly back down toward the Rambla Santa Mónica again, like a sleepwalker or a lunatic, with the ticket a fraction of an inch from my face, checking to see whether the numbers that kept appearing matched the ones written on my lucky little piece of paper. Not one bit! The same way you see the night sky, I saw the 0, the 1, and the 2, but the sequence was different, the figures came faster, and when I passed the Liceo, a number appeared that I had never seen before: 3. I stopped agonizing over it and went to bed. That night, as I was undressing in the dark room, listening to the snoring of the two bastards I had for roommates, it occurred to me that I was going crazy, which struck me as so funny that I had to sit down on the bed and cover my mouth to keep from laughing out loud.