The Savage Detectives

by Roberto Bolaño

  Suddenly, I was overflowing with energy. I felt rejuvenated: I stopped smoking, I went running every morning, I participated diligently in three law conferences, two of them held in old European capitals. My magazine didn't go under; on the contrary, the poets who drew sustenance from my largesse closed ranks in manifest sympathy. Verae amicitiae sempieternae sunt, I thought, along with the learned Cicero. Then, in a clear instance of overconfidence, I decided to publish a book of my poetry. The printing was expensive and of the four reviews it received, all but one were negative. I blamed everything on Spain and my optimism and the unchanging laws of envy. Invidia ceu fulmine summa vaporant.

  When summer came I got in the roulotte and set out to roam the lands of my elders, or in other words verdant, primeval Galicia. I left in good spirits, at four in the morning, muttering sonnets by the immortal and prickly Quevedo. Once in Galicia I traveled its rías and tried its mostos and talked to its sailors, since natura maxime miranda in minimis. Then I headed for the mountains, for the land of meigas, my soul fortified and my senses alert. I slept at campgrounds, because a Guardia Civil sergeant warned me that it was dangerous to camp along back roads or country highways, especially in the summer, because of lowlifes, traveling singers, and partygoers who wandered from one club to another along the foggy night roads. Qui amat periculum in illo peribit. The campgrounds weren't bad either, and I was soon calculating the wealth of emotions and passions that I might discover and observe and even catalog in such places, with an eye to my map.

  So it was while I was at one of these establishments that what I now regard as the central part of my story took place. Or at least the only part that still preserves intact the happiness and mystery of my whole sad, futile tale. Mortalium nemo est felix, says Pliny. And also: felicitas cui praecipua fuerit homini, non est humani iudici. But to get to the point. I was at a campground, as I've said, near Castroverde, in the province of Lugo, in a mountainous spot abounding in thickets and shrubs of every sort. I was reading and taking notes and amassing knowledge. Otium sine litteris mors est et homini vivi sepultura. Although that may be an exaggeration. In short (and to be honest): I was dying of boredom.

  One afternoon, as I was walking in an area that would doubtless be of interest to a paleontologist, the misfortune that I'm about to describe took place. I saw a group of campers coming down the mountain. From the looks of shock on their faces, one didn't need to be a genius to realize that something bad had happened. Gesturing for them to stop, I made them tell me their news. It turned out that the grandson of one of them had fallen down a shaft or pit or chasm up the mountain. My experience as a criminal lawyer told me that we had to act fast, facta, non verba, so while half the party continued on its way to the campground, I scaled the steep hill with the others and came to where they claimed the misfortune had occurred.

  The chasm was deep, bottomless. One of the campers said that it was called Devil's Mouth. Another said that the locals claimed it was really the dwelling place of the devil or one of his earthly incarnations. I asked what the disappeared child's name was and one of the campers answered: Elifaz. The situation was already strange, but with his answer it became frankly ominous, because it isn't every day that a chasm swallows up a boy with such an unusual name. So it's Elifaz, is it? I said or whispered. That's his name, said the one who'd spoken. The others, uncultured office workers and government clerks from Lugo, looked at me and didn't say anything. I'm a man of thought and reflection, but I'm also a man of action. Non progredi est regredi, I remembered. So I went up to the rim of the chasm and shouted the boy's name. A menacing echo was the only answer I got: a shout, my shout, returned to me from the depths of the earth, turned into its blood-chilling echo. A shiver ran up my spine, but to hide it I think I laughed, telling my companions that the hole was certainly deep, and suggesting that if we tied all of our belts together we could create a makeshift rope so that one of us, the thinnest, of course, could go down and explore the first few feet of the pit. We conferred. We smoked. No one seconded my proposal. After a while, the people who had continued on to the campground returned with the first reinforcements and the necessary equipment to make the descent. Homo fervidus et diligens ad omnia est paratus, I thought.

  We roped up a sturdy young man from Castroverde as well as we could, and with five strong men at the other end of the rope, he began his descent, equipped with a flashlight. He soon disappeared from sight. From above, we shouted: what can you see? and from the depths came his ever-fainter reply: nothing! Patientia vincit omnia, I advised, and we kept calling. We couldn't see anything, not even the light of the flashlight, although the walls of the cave closest to the surface were sporadically lit with a brief splash of light, as if the boy were pointing the flashlight over his head to check how many feet deep he was. It was then, as we were remarking on the light, that we heard a superhuman howl and we all moved to the edge of the shaft. What happened? we shouted. There was another howl. What happened? What did you see? Did you find him? No one answered from below. A few women started to pray. I wasn't sure whether to be appalled or to let myself be swept up in the phenomenon. Stultorum plena sunt omnia, as Cicero points out. A relative of our explorer asked us to haul him up. The five men who were holding the rope couldn't do it and we had to help them. The shout from down below was repeated several times. Finally, after tireless efforts, we managed to get him to the surface.

  The young man was alive, and except for tattered jeans and a few scrapes on his arms, he seemed to be all right. To make sure, the women felt his legs. He hadn't broken any bones. What did you see? his relative asked him. He wouldn't answer and covered his face with his hands. That was when I should have taken charge and stepped in, but my position as spectator kept me, how shall I say, bewitched by the play of shadows and useless gestures. Others repeated the question, with slight variations. I may have recalled aloud that occasiones namque hominem fragilem non faciunt, sed qualis sit ostendunt. This young fellow was clearly a weak character. Given a swallow of cognac, he offered no resistance and drank as if his life depended on it. What did you see? the group repeated. Then he spoke and only his relative could hear him. The relative asked him the same question again, as if he couldn't believe what he'd heard. The young man replied: I saw the devil.

  From that moment on, the rescue group was seized by confusion and anarchy. Quot capita, tot sententiae: some said that they had called the Guardia Civil from the campground and the best thing we could do was wait. Others asked about the boy, whether the youth had gotten a glimpse of him or heard him on the way down, and the reply was negative. Most asked what the devil was like, whether the youth had seen all of him or just his face, what he looked like, what color he was, etc. Rumores fuge, I said to myself and gazed out at the surrounding countryside. Then the camp watchman and the bulk of the women appeared with another group from the campground, among them the mother of the vanished boy, who hadn't heard what was happening because she'd been watching a game show, as she announced to anyone who would listen. Who's down there? asked the watchman. In silence, someone pointed out the youth, who was still lying in the grass. The mother, helpless, went up to the mouth of the cave and shouted her son's name. No one answered. She shouted again. Then the cave howled, and it was as if it were answering back.

  Some people turned pale. Most backed away from the hole, afraid that a foggy hand might suddenly shoot out and drag them down into the depths. More than one person said that a wolf must be living down there. Or a wild dog. Meanwhile, it had gotten dark, and the gas lanterns and flashlights competed in a macabre dance, with that open wound in the mountainside for its magnetic center. People were laughing or speaking in Galician, a language that, uprooted as I was from my origins, I no longer remembered. They kept pointing with trembling hands toward the mouth of the pit. The Guardia Civil hadn't shown up. It was imperative that a decision be made, although everything was in utter confusion. Then I saw the camp watchman tie the rope around his waist and I realized that he wa
s preparing to go down. His behavior, I confess, struck me as admirable, and I went over to congratulate him. Xosé Lendoiro, lawyer and poet, I said as I shook his hand effusively. He looked at me and smiled as if we'd met before. Then, amid general expectation, he started down into that terrible pit.

  To be honest, I and many of those gathered there feared the worst. The watchman went down as far as the rope reached. At that point we all thought he would come back up, and for a moment, I think, he pulled from below and we pulled from above and the search stalled in an ignoble series of misunderstandings and shouts. I tried to make peace, addito salis grano. If I hadn't had courtroom experience, those angry people would have thrown me down the pit headfirst. Finally, however, I seized control. With no little effort, we managed to communicate with the watchman and decipher what he was shouting. He was asking us to let go of the rope. So we did. More than one of us felt our hearts stop to see the remaining length of rope disappear into the chasm like a rat's tail into a snake's jaws. We told each other that the watchman must know what he was doing.

  Suddenly, the night got darker, and the black hole got blacker, if that was possible, and those who minutes before were making brief forays around the edge of the hole, carried away by impatience, stopped, since the possibility of tripping and being swallowed up by the chasm was manifested as sins are sometimes manifested. Fainter and fainter howls escaped from within, as if the devil were retreating into the depths of the earth with his two freshly caught prey. It goes without saying that the wildest hypotheses were making the rounds of our group on the surface. Vita brevis, ars longa, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile. There were those who couldn't stop checking their watches, as if time played a crucial role in this adventure. There were those who were chain-smoking, and others who were attending to the fainting fits of the lost boy's female relatives. There were those who cursed the Guardia Civil for taking so long. Suddenly, as I was watching the stars, it occurred to me that all of this bore an extraordinary resemblance to a story by Don Pío Baroja that I'd read in my years as a law student at the University of Salamanca. The story was called "The Chasm," and in it a little shepherd boy is lost deep inside a mountain. A lad with a rope tied securely around him is lowered in search of the boy, but the howls of the devil scare him away and he comes back up without the boy, whom he hasn't seen but whose moans of pain are clearly audible from outside. The story ends with a scene of complete powerlessness, in which fear vanquishes love, duty, and even the bonds of family. No one in the rescue group (made up, it must be said, of uncouth and superstitious Basque shepherds) dares to go down after hearing the stammered story that the first would-be rescuer tells, in which he claims to have seen the devil, or to have felt or sensed or heard him, I forget. In se semper armatus Furor. In the last scene, the shepherds go home, including the boy's terrified grandfather, and the whole night long (a windy night, I suppose) they can hear the boy's cries from the chasm. That's Don Pío's story. A youthful effort, I think, in which his glorious prose hasn't quite taken wing. A good story, nevertheless. And that was what I thought as behind me human passions roiled and my eyes counted the stars: that the story I was living was just like Baroja's story and that Spain was still Baroja's Spain, in other words a Spain where chasms weren't barricaded and children were still careless and fell into them, where people smoked and fainted in a rather excessive way, and where the Guardia Civil never showed up when it was needed.

  And then we heard a shout, not an inarticulate howl but words, something like hey, you up there, hey, you bastards, and although a few fantasists said that it must be the devil, who, still unsated, wanted to carry off someone else, the rest of us crowded around the edge of the pit and saw the light of the watchman's flashlight, a beam like a firefly lost in the darkness of the mind of Polyphemus, and we asked the light whether it was all right but all the voice behind the light said was I'm fine, I'm going to toss the rope up to you, and we heard a scarcely perceptible noise against the walls of the pit, and after several failed attempts the voice said throw me another rope, and a little later we pulled up the boy who had disappeared, roped around the waist and under the armpits. His unexpected appearance was celebrated with tears and laughter, and when we had untied the boy we threw the rope down and the watchman came up, and the rest of that night, I remember this now that I have nothing to look forward to, was one long party, O quantum caliginis mentibus nostris obicit magna felicitas, a Galician party in the mountains, since the campers were Galician civil servants or office workers, and I hailed from those lands too, and the watchman, whom they called the Chilean, since that was his nationality, was also descended from hardworking Galicians, as indicated by his last name, Belano.

  In the two further days that I spent there, the watchman and I had long conversations, and above all I was able to share my literary qualms and adventures with him. Then I returned to Barcelona and that was the last I heard of him until he showed up at my office two years later. As is always the way in these cases, he was short of money and out of work, so after taking a good look at him and wondering to myself whether I should kick him out, supremum vale, or toss him a line, I settled on the latter option, and told him that for now I could assign him a few reviews for the law school journal, whose literary pages I edited, and later we would see. Then I gave him a copy of my most recent book of poetry and let him know that he should limit himself to reviewing verse, since the fiction reviews were penned by my colleague Jaume Josep, a divorce expert and homosexual of long standing, known by the hordes of ass peddlers in the dives off the Ramblas as the Little Martyr, in reference to his shortness and his weakness for rough trade.

  I think it's fair to say that I detected some disappointment in his face, possibly because he was hoping to publish in my literary magazine, which was more than I could offer him just then, since the caliber of the writers was incredibly high. Time hadn't passed for nothing. The elite of the Barcelona literary world, the crème de la crème of the poetry world, were making appearances in my magazine, and there could be no question of me turning soft overnight simply because of two summer days of friendship and an essentially superficial exchange of ideas. Discat servire glorians ad alta venire.

  That was the beginning, one might say, of the second stage of my relationship with Arturo Belano. I saw him once a month, at my office, where I tended to my literary obligations while dealing with various legal cases, and where (these were different times) the most cultivated and renowned writers and poets of Spain and even Latin America would turn up, the latter stopping by to pay their respects on their way through town. On one occasion or another, I remember that Belano ran into some contributors to the magazine and a guest or two of mine, and that those encounters were less satisfactory than I might have liked. But distracted as I was by work and pleasure, I never bothered to take this up with him, nor did I heed the background noise engendered by such encounters, a noise like a convoy of cars, a swarm of motorcycles, the traffic in hotel parking lots, a noise that was saying be careful, Xosé, live your life, take care of your body, time is short, glory fleeting. In my ignorance I failed to decipher the message or assumed it was meant for him, not me, that noise of impending doom, of something lost in the vastness of Barcelona. These words didn't concern me, I thought they had nothing to do with me but with him, when in reality they were written expressly for me. Fortuna rerum humanarum domina.

  In some ways, Belano's encounters with the contributors to my magazine weren't devoid of a certain appeal. Once, one of my boys (who later gave up writing and is now quite successfully involved in politics) wanted to hit him. He wasn't serious, of course, although one never knows for sure, but the point is that Belano pretended not to notice: I think he asked something like whether my contributor knew karate (he was a black belt) and then claimed to have a migraine and refused to fight. On such occasions I thoroughly enjoyed myself. I would say: come on, Belano, defend your opinions, argue, stand up to the literary elite, sine dolo, and
he would say that he had a headache, laugh, ask me to pay him for his monthly law journal assignment, and leave with his tail between his legs.

  I should have mistrusted that tail between the legs. I should have thought: what does that tail between the legs mean, sine ira et studio. I should have asked myself which animals have tails. I should have consulted books and guides and I should have correctly identified the bushy tail that bristled between the legs of the ex-watchman of the Castroverde campground.

  But I didn't, and I kept living. Errare humanum est, perseverare autem diabolicum. One day I was at my older daughter's apartment and I heard noises. I have a key, of course: as a matter of fact, it's the apartment where the four of us (my wife, my two daughters, and I) lived before the divorce. After the divorce I bought myself a house in Sarriá, my wife bought herself a penthouse in Plaza Molina where she went to live with my younger daughter, and I decided to give our former apartment to my older daughter, who is herself a poet like me and the main contributor to my magazine. As I was saying, I had a key, although I didn't visit very often, basically just to pick up a book or because the magazine's board meetings were held there. So I went in and I heard noises. Discreetly, as befits a father and a modern man, I peeked into the living room. I didn't see anyone there. The noises were coming from down the hallway. Non vis esse iracundus? Ne fueris curiosus, I repeated to myself a few times. And yet I kept creeping around my old apartment. I passed my daughter's room and looked in: nobody was there. I kept walking on tiptoe. Though it was late morning, the apartment was dark. I didn't turn on the light. The noises, I realized then, were coming from the room that used to be mine, a room that also happens to be just as my wife and I left it. I opened the door partway and saw my older daughter in Belano's arms. What he was doing to her struck me as indescribable, at first glance at least. He was dragging her back and forth across the huge expanse of my bed, riding her, rolling her over and over, all in the midst of a hideous series of moans, bellows, brayings, cooings, and obscene noises that gave me goose bumps. Mille modi Veneris, I recalled with Ovid, but this was too much. Still, I didn't cross the threshold, standing there frozen, silent, spellbound, as if I were suddenly back at the Castroverde campground and the neo-Galician watchman had gone down into the chasm again and the office workers and I were once more at the mouth of hell. Magna res est vocis et silentii tempora nosse. I said nothing. Keeping quiet, I left the way I'd come in. And yet I wasn't able to go far from my old apartment, my daughter's apartment, and my steps led me to a neighborhood café that someone, almost certainly its new owner, had turned into a much more modern place, with shiny plastic chairs and tables. There I ordered a coffee and sat to contemplate the situation. Visions of my daughter behaving like a dog kept coming to me in waves, and each wave left me drenched in sweat, as if I had a fever, so after I finished my coffee I ordered a cognac to see whether something stronger would settle me down. Finally, by the third cognac, I pulled myself together. Post vinum verba, post imbrem nascitur herba.