The Savage Detectives

by Roberto Bolaño

  Who was torturing me?

  I asked myself this question more than once.

  Who was making the wolf howl morning and night, when I fell exhausted into bed or some unfamiliar armchair?

  Insperata accidunt magis saepe quam quae spes, I said to myself.

  I thought it was the giant.

  For a while, I tried to sleep without sleeping. Close just one eye. Sneak down the backstreets of sleep. But great efforts only brought me to the lip of the chasm, nemo in sese tentat descendere, and there I would stop and listen: my own snoring in restless sleep, the far-off noises drifting in on the breeze from the street, muffled sounds from the past, the senseless words of the terrified campers, the sound of the footsteps of those who circled the chasm not knowing what to do, the voices announcing the arrival of reinforcements from the campground, a mother weeping (sometimes it was my own mother!), my daughter's garbled words, the sound of the rocks that fell like little guillotine blades when the watchman went down after the boy.

  One day I decided to look for Belano. I did it for my own sake, for the sake of my health. The eighties, which had been such a disastrous decade for his continent, seemed to have swallowed him up without a trace. From time to time poets of the right age or nationality, poets who might have known where he lived or what he was doing, would come by the magazine's offices, but the truth is that as time went by his name was blotted out. Nihil est annis velocius. When I brought him up with my daughter, I got an address in Ampurdán and a reproachful look. The address belonged to a house where no one had lived for a long time. One particularly desperate night I even called the Castroverde campground. It had closed.

  After a while I thought I might get used to living with the demented giant and the howls that came from the chasm night after night. I sought peace, or if not peace, then distraction, in my social life (which I had let go a little, thanks to the wayward girls), in the growth of the magazine, in some official honor that the Generalitat had always begrudged me because I was a Galician immigrant. Ingrata patria, ne ossa quidem mea habes. I sought peace in my dealings with poets and the recognition of my peers. I didn't find it. Instead, I found desolation and opposition. I found brittle women who wanted the velvet-glove treatment (and who were all on the far side of fifty!), I found clerks from the Castroverde campground who looked at me like what they were, Galicians frightened in the face of the irremediable, and who only made me feel more like weeping, I found new magazines joining the fray, their existence putting my magazine's existence in constant jeopardy. I sought peace and I didn't find it.

  By then I think I could recite Don Pío's story by heart, periturae parcere chartae, and still I understood nothing. My life seemed to be progressing through the same realms of mediocrity as usual, but I knew that I was walking in the land of destruction.

  At last I contracted a fatal illness and stopped working. In a final effort to regain my lost identity, I tried to secure the City of Barcelona Award for myself. Contemptu famae contemni virtutes. Those who knew the state of my health thought I was trying to achieve some kind of posthumous recognition while I was still alive and took me bitterly to task. I was just trying to die as myself, not as an ear on the edge of a chasm. Catalans only understand what suits them.

  I made a will. I divided up my worldly goods, which were less plentiful than I'd thought, among the women of my family and two wayward girls of whom I'd grown fond. I hate to imagine the look on my daughters' faces when they find out that they have to share my money with two street lovelies. Venenum in auro bibitur. Then I sat in my dark office and I saw the weak flesh and the strong mind passing before me, as if in a diorama, like a husband and wife who hate each other, and I also saw the strong flesh and the weak mind pass by arm in arm, another model couple, and I saw them stroll around a park like the Parque de la Ciudadela (although sometimes it was more like the Gianicolo near the Piazzale Giuseppe Garibaldi), weary yet unwearying, at the pace of cancer patients or prostate sufferers, well dressed, haloed in a kind of horrible dignity, and the strong flesh and the weak mind went from right to left and the weak flesh and the strong mind went from left to right, and each time they crossed paths they acknowledged each other but didn't stop, out of politeness or because they knew each other from other walks, if only slightly, and I thought: my God, talk, talk, speak to each other, dialogue is the key to any door, ex abundantia cordis os loquitur, but the weak mind and the strong mind only nodded, and perhaps their consorts did no more than bow their eyelids (eyelids don't bow, Toni Melilla told me one day, but how wrong he was! of course they bow, eyelids can even kneel), proud as bitches, the weak flesh and the strong flesh, steeped together in the crucible of fate, if you'll permit me the expression, an expression that means nothing but is as sweet as a bitch lost on the mountainside.

  Then I checked into a clinic in Barcelona, then a clinic in New York, and then one night all my Galician orneriness rose up in me and I pulled off my tubes and got dressed and traveled to Rome, where I was admitted to the Ospedale Britannico, where my friend Dr. Claudio Palermo Rizzi works (he's a poet in the little free time he has), and after submitting to countless tests and indignities (the same ones to which I'd submitted in Barcelona and New York) the diagnosis was that I had only a few days left to live. Qui fodit foveam, incidet in eam.

  And here I am, without the strength to return to Barcelona, or the courage to leave the hospital for good, although each night I get dressed and go out for a walk under the Roman moon, the moon I first came to know and admire long ago, in a distant past that I naïvely thought was happy and would never be lost and that today I can only call up with a spasm of incredulity. And my steps lead me, unfailingly, along Via Claudia to the Colosseum and then along Viale Domus Aurea to Via Mece-nate and then I turn left, past Via Botta, along Via Terme di Traiano, at which point I'm in hell. Etiam periere ruinae. And then I listen to the howls that issue like gusts of wind from the mouth of the chasm and by God I make an effort to understand their language but I can't, no matter how I try. The other day I told Claudio about it. Doctor, I said, every night I go out for a walk and I have hallucinations. What do you see? said the poet-physician. I don't see anything, they're auditory hallucinations. So what do you hear? asked the noble Sicilian scion, visibly relieved. Howls, I said. Well, considering your health and sensitivity, it's nothing serious; one could even say it's normal. Cold comfort.

  In any case, I don't tell the ineffable Claudio everything that happens to me. Imperitia confidentiam, eruditio timorem creat. For example: I haven't told him that my family is unaware of the state of my health. For example: I haven't told him that I've strictly forbidden them to come and visit me. For example: I haven't told him that I know with absolute certainty that I won't die in his Ospedale Britannico but one night in the middle of the Parco di Traiano, hidden in the shrubs. Will I drag myself, will I be brought by my own powers to my last leafy hiding place or will it be others, Roman hoods, Roman hustlers, Roman psychopaths, who hide my body, their corpus delicti, under the burning bush? In any case, I know I'll die in the baths or the park. I know that the giant or the shadow of the giant will shrink as the howls are unbottled from the Domus Aurea and spread all over Rome, a black and ominous cloud, and I know that the giant will say or whisper: save the boy, and I know that no one will hear his plea.

  So much for poetry, the Jezebel that kept me treacherous company all these years. Olet lucernam. Now it would be nice to tell a joke or two, but I can only think of one on the spot like this, just one. What's more, it's a Galician joke. Maybe you've heard it before. A man goes walking in the forest. Like me, for example, walking in a forest like the Parco di Traiano or the Terme di Traiano, but a hundred times bigger and more unspoiled. And the man goes walking, I go walking, through the forest and I run into five hundred thousand Galicians who're walking and crying. And then I stop (a kindly giant, an interested giant for the last time) and I ask them why they're crying. And one of the Galicians stops and says: because we're all alo
ne and we're lost.

  21

  Daniel Grossman, sitting on a bench in the Alameda, Mexico City DF, February 1993. It had been years since I'd seen him and when I got back to Mexico the first thing I did was ask about him, about Norman Bolzman, where he was, what he was doing. His parents told me that he was teaching at UNAM and that he spent long stretches at a place he'd rented near Puerto Ángel, a place without a telephone where he holed up to write and think. Then I called other friends. I asked questions. I went out to dinner. That was how I learned that things had ended with Claudia, and Norman was living alone now. One day I saw Claudia at the house of a painter whom the three of us, Claudia, Norman, and I, had known in our teens. In those days, by my calculations, the painter must have been sixteen, at the oldest, and we'd all talked about how great he was going to be. The dinner was delicious, a very Mexican meal, in honor of me, I guess, and my return to Mexico after what had been a pretty long time away, and then Claudia and I went out on the terrace and we were bitching about our host, making fun of him. Claudia was adorable. Remember, she said, how the dipstick used to swear he'd be better than Paalen? Well, he turned out worse than Cuevas! I don't know whether she was serious or not, Claudia never liked Cuevas, but she saw a lot of the painter, Abraham Manzur, Abraham had made a name for himself in the Mexican art world and his paintings sold in the United States, but he certainly wasn't the promising kid he used to be, the kid Claudia and Norman and I had known in Mexico City in the seventies and whom we thought of, a little condescendingly, since he was two or three years younger than us at the age when a few years make a difference, as the incarnation of the artist or the artist's drive. Anyway, Claudia didn't see him that way anymore. And neither did I. What I mean is, we didn't expect anything of him. He was just a short little Mexican Jew, on the chubby side, with lots of friends and lots of money. Like me, in fact, a tall, thin, unemployed Mexican Jew, and like Claudia, a gorgeous Argentinian-Mexican Jew handling PR for the one of the biggest galleries in Mexico City. All of us with our eyes open, all of us locked in a dark passageway, motionless, waiting. But maybe that overstates it.

  That night, at least, I didn't overstate or criticize or make fun of the painter, who'd been kind enough to invite me to dinner, even if he had me over only to show off and talk about shows he'd had in Dallas or San Diego, cities that, to hear people tell it, are almost part of Mexico by now. And then I left with Claudia and Claudia's date, a lawyer maybe ten or even fifteen years older than her, a divorced guy with kids in college, the head of the Mexican affiliate of a German company, worried about everything. At this point I can't even remember Claudia's pet name for him, they broke up a little later. Claudia was like that, she still is, none of her boyfriends lasted longer than a year. We didn't really get to talk. We didn't say anything serious, we didn't ask each other the questions we should have asked. All I remember about that night is the meal, which I ate with relish, the works by the painter and some of the painter's friends that were scattered around the painter's cavernous living room, Claudia's smiling face, the dark streets of Mexico City, and the trip, not as short as I thought it would be, back to my parents' house, where I was staying until I started to get things straightened out.

  Not long afterward, I left for Puerto Ángel. I made the trip by bus, from Mexico City to Oaxaca and from Oaxaca, on another bus line, to Puerto Ángel, and when I finally got there I was tired, my body ached, and all I wanted was to fall into bed and go to sleep. Norman's place was on the edge of town, in a neighborhood called La Loma. It was a two-story house, the bottom built of cement blocks and the top of wood, with a tiled roof and a small, overgrown yard full of bougainvillea. Norman wasn't expecting me, of course, but when we saw each other I got the feeling that he was the only person who was happy I was back. The feeling of alienation that I'd been trying to shake since I set foot in the Mexico City airport began to fade imperceptibly as the bus headed deeper into Oaxaca, and I relaxed into the certainty that I was in Mexico again and that things could change. Not that I knew whether these changes, if they did come, would be for better or worse, but that's almost always the way with changes, almost always the way it is in Mexico. And Norman's welcome was magnificent, and for five days we swam at the beach, read in the shade on the porch in hammocks that hung from nails and gave way little by little until our backsides touched the floor, drank beer, and took long walks around a part of La Loma where there were lots of cliffs, and also locked fishermen's huts, there on the edge of the woods by the beach, which a thief could have broken into with an expedient kick to one of the walls, a kick that we were sure would knock a hole or make the whole thing collapse.

  The fragility of those shacks, though this only occurs to me now, gave me a funny feeling more than once, not of precariousness or poverty but of obscure tenderness and foreboding; I'm probably not making much sense. Norman called the spot the "resort," although during my stay I never saw anyone swimming at the beaches in that part of Puerto Ángel. The water was pretty rough. The rest of the day we spent talking, especially about politics and the state of the country, which we saw from different perspectives but which seemed equally grim to both of us, and then Norman would shut himself in his office and work on an essay on Nietzsche that he was planning to publish in the Revista del Colegio de México. Thinking about it now, I realize we actually didn't talk very much. That is, we didn't talk much about ourselves. I might have talked about myself some night. I must have told him about my adventures, my life in Israel and Europe, but we never talked.

  On my sixth day there, it was a Sunday morning, we left for Mexico City. Norman had to teach at the university on Monday and I had to look for work. We left Puerto Ángel in Norman's white Renault, which he only used when he came to Oaxaca, because in Mexico City he preferred to get around on public transportation. We talked about Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, how every time Norman reread it he found (to his dismay) more and more points in common between the philosopher and the Nazis who would soon take over Germany. We talked about the weather, about the seasons, which I claimed I was going to miss and which Norman assured me I would soon forget, about the people I'd left behind but with whom I meant to keep in touch by postcard from time to time. I don't remember when we started to talk about Claudia. All I know is that somehow I became aware of it because then I stopped talking and started to listen. He said things had ended between them soon after he started working at the university, which I already knew, and that the breakup wasn't as painful as everybody assumed. You know how she is, he said, and I said yes, I know. Then he said that since then his relationships with women had been relatively cool. Then he laughed. I remember his laugh with utter clarity. There wasn't a car to be seen on the road, just trees, mountains, and sky, and the sound of the Renault cutting through the air. He said that he slept with women, or that he still liked to sleep with women, but that in some way he couldn't understand he was having more and more problems in that regard. What kind of problems? I asked. Problems, problems, said Norman. You can't get it up? I said. Norman laughed. Is that it, you can't get a hard-on? I said. That's a symptom, he said, not a problem. That answers my question, I said, you can't get it up. Norman laughed again. He had the window down and the wind was whipping his hair. He was very tan. He seemed happy. The two of us laughed. Sometimes I can't get a hard-on, he said, but what kind of word is that, hard-on? No, sometimes it won't get hard, but that's just a symptom, and sometimes not even a symptom. Sometimes it's just a joke, he said. I asked him whether he hadn't found anyone in all this time, a question that seemed to answer itself, and Norman said yes, that he'd found someone in a way, but that both he and she, a divorced philosophy professor with two children who for some reason I imagined as ugly, or at least not as beautiful as Claudia, wanted to wait, not take things too fast, a relationship on ice.

  Then he talked about children, children in general and the children of Puerto Ángel in particular, asking me what I thought about the children of Puerto Ángel, and the truth
is I didn't think anything about the children of the town we were leaving behind, I mean I hadn't even noticed them! and then Norman looked at me and said: each time I think about them it centers me. Just like that. It centers me. And I thought: it would be better if he watched the highway instead of me, and I also thought: something's up. But I didn't say anything. I didn't say: drive more carefully, I didn't say: Norman, what's going on? Instead I started to watch the scenery: trees and clouds, mountains, rolling hills, the tropics, with Norman already talking about something else, a dream Claudia had had, when? not long ago, she called him early one morning and told him about it. Evidently they were still close friends. And do you know what the dream was about? he said. Why, mano, I asked, do you want me to interpret it for you? A dream about colors, with a battle in the background, a battle drifting away, carrying all interpretations with it as it went. But Norman said: she dreamed about the children we hadn't had. Fuck off, I said. That was the meaning of the dream. So according to you, the battle drifting away is the children you didn't have? More or less, said Norman, that was the shadows fighting. And the colors? They're what's left, said Norman, a shitty abstraction of what's left.