The Savage Detectives

by Roberto Bolaño

  Pablo del Valle, Feria del Libro, Madrid, July 1994. I'm going to tell you something about the honor of poets. There was a time when I didn't have money or the name I have now: I was out of work and my name was Pedro García Fernandez. But I was talented and I was friendly. I met a woman. I met many women, but I met one woman especially. This woman, best left unnamed, fell in love with me. She worked for the post office. She was a postal official, I would say when my friends asked me what my girlfriend did. But it was really a euphemism so I wouldn't have to say that she was a mailwoman. We lived together for a while. My girlfriend left for work in the morning and didn't come home until five. I would get up when I heard the soft noise the door made as it closed (she was considerate of my sleep) and start to write. I wrote about lofty things. Gardens, lost castles, that kind of thing. Then, when I got tired, I would read. Pío Baroja, Unamuno, Antonio and Manuel Machado, Azorín. At lunchtime I would go out, to a restaurant where they knew me. In the afternoon, I revised. When she got back from work we would talk for a while, but what did a man of letters and a mailwoman have to say to each other? I would talk about what I'd written, what I was planning to write: a commentary on Manuel Machado, a poem on the Holy Spirit, an essay taking its first sentence from Unamuno: Spain hurts me too. She would talk about the streets she'd been on and the letters she'd delivered. She talked about stamps, some of them very rare, and the faces she'd seen in her long morning carrying letters. Then, when I couldn't take it anymore, I would say goodbye and head out to hit the bars of Madrid. Sometimes I would go to book parties, more for the free drinks and hors d'oeuvres than anything else. I would go to the Casa de América and listen to the smug Latin American writers. I would go to the Ateneo and listen to the contented Spanish writers. Later I would meet up with friends and we would talk about our work or go together to visit the maestro. But over the literary chatter I kept hearing the sound of my girlfriend's sensible shoes as she quietly made her rounds, toting her yellow bag or pulling her yellow cart after her, depending on how much mail she had to deliver that day, and then I'd lose my concentration, and my tongue, which seconds before had been sharp and clever, would turn clumsy, and I'd fall into a sullen, helpless silence that the others, including our maestro, would luckily take as evidence of my pensive, introspective, philosophical nature. Sometimes, on my way home late at night, I would stop in the neighborhood where she worked and retrace her route, I'd mimic her, I'd ape her, marching with a step that was at once soldierly and ghostly. In the end I'd find myself throwing up, in tears, leaning against a tree, asking myself how I could possibly live with a woman like her. I never came up with any answers, at least the ones I came up with never felt true, but in fact I didn't leave her. We lived together for a long time. Sometimes, when I took a break from my writing, I'd console myself that it would be worse if she were a butcher. I would have been happier if she were a policewoman, mostly because it would've been more fashionable. A policewoman was better than a mailwoman. Then I'd keep writing and writing, in a rage or near collapse, and little by little I mastered the rudiments of the trade. And so the years went by and the entire time I lived off my girlfriend. Finally I won the New Voices of the Council of Madrid Prize and overnight I found myself in possession of three million pesetas and an offer to work for one of the capital's most distinguished papers. Hernando García León wrote a rave review of my book. The first and second printings sold out in less than three months. I've been on two television shows, even though I think one of them brought me on to make fun of me. I'm writing my second novel. And I left my girlfriend. I told her we weren't right for each other and that I didn't want to hurt her and that I wished her the best and that she knew she could always count on me if she ever needed anything. Then I packed my books in cardboard boxes, I put my clothes in a suitcase, and I left. I can't remember which great writer said it, but love smiles on a winner. It wasn't long before I was living with another woman and renting an apartment in Lavapiés, an apartment that I pay for myself, where I'm happy and productive. My current girlfriend is studying English literature and writes poetry. We spend a lot of time talking about books. And sometimes she has great ideas. I think we make a wonderful couple: people look at us and nod their heads. We embody optimism and the future in a certain way, a way that's pragmatic and thoughtful too. Some nights, though, when I'm in my office putting the final touches on my column or revising a few pages of my novel, I hear footsteps in the street, and I think, I could almost swear, that it's the mailwoman out delivering mail at the wrong time of day. I go out onto the balcony and I don't see anyone there or maybe I see some drunk on his way home, vanishing around a corner. Nothing's wrong. There's no one there. But when I go back to my desk, I hear the steps again, and then I know that the mail-woman is working, that even though I can't see her she's making her rounds and she couldn't have picked a worse time. And then I stop working on my column or my chapter and I try to write a poem or spend the rest of the evening writing in my diary, but I can't. The sound of her sensible shoes keeps echoing in my head. You can hardly hear it, and I know how to make it go away: I get up, walk to the bedroom, take off my clothes, and get into bed, where I find my girlfriend's sweet-smelling body. I make love to her, sometimes with great tenderness, sometimes violently, and then I sleep and dream that I'm being inducted into the Academy. Or not. It's just a manner of speaking. Actually, sometimes I dream I'm being inducted into Hell. Or I don't dream anything at all. Or I dream that I've been castrated, and that with the passage of time two tiny testicles, like colorless olives, sprout back between my legs, and I fondle them with a mixture of love and fear and keep them secret. Day chases away the ghosts. Of course, I don't talk to anybody about this. I pay for my relationship with the mailwoman with a few nightmares, a few auditory hallucinations. It could be worse. I can handle it. If I were less sensitive, I'm sure I wouldn't even remember her anymore. Sometimes I actually have the urge to call her, to follow her on her route and watch her at work, for the first time. Sometimes I feel like meeting her at some bar in her neighborhood, which isn't my neighborhood anymore, and asking about her life: whether she has a new lover, whether she's delivered any letters from Malaysia or Tanzania, whether she still gets the same Christmas bonus. But I don't do it. I settle for hearing her footsteps, fainter and fainter. I settle for thinking about the hugeness of the Universe. Everything that begins as comedy ends as a horror movie.

  Marco Antonio Palacios, Feria del Libro, Madrid, July 1994. Here's something about the honor of poets. I was seventeen and I had a burning desire to be a writer. I prepared myself. But I didn't sit around and wait while I was preparing myself, because I realized that I'd never get ahead by sitting around. Discipline and a kind of ingratiating charm, those are the keys to getting where you want to go. Discipline: writing every morning for at least six hours. Writing every morning and revising in the afternoons and reading like a fiend at night. Charm, or ingratiation: visiting writers at home or going up to them at book parties and telling them exactly what they want to hear. What they desperately want to hear. And being patient, because it doesn't always work. There are assholes who'll give you a pat on the back and then act like they've never seen you before in their lives. There are some hard, cruel, vicious bastards out there. But they aren't all like that. You have to be patient and keep looking. The best are the homosexuals, but be careful: you have to know when to stop and exactly what you want, or you'll end up taking it up the ass for nothing from some random old leftist faggot. Three times out of four it's the same thing with women: the Spanish women writers who might be able to lend you a hand are usually old and ugly. Sometimes it just isn't worth it. The best are the heterosexual men over fifty or approaching old age. Whatever it takes, you must get close to them. You must cultivate a garden in the shadow of their grudges and resentments. You have to study their complete works. That goes without saying. You have to quote them two or three times in every conversation. You have to quote them constantly! You want some advice? Nev
er criticize your mentor's friends. Your mentor's friends are sacred, and a thoughtless remark can throw an entire future off course. You want some advice? Hate foreign novelists with a passion. Rant against them with all your might, especially if they're American, French, or English. Spanish writers hate their contemporaries working in other languages. A negative review of one of them will always make you friends. And keep your mouth shut and your eyes open. And set yourself a clear schedule. Write in the morning, revise in the afternoon, read at night, and spend the rest of your time exercising your diplomacy, stealth, and charm. At seventeen I wanted to be a writer. At twenty I published my first book. Now I'm twenty-four, and sometimes it gives me vertigo, looking back. I've come so far. I've published four books and I make a comfortable living (although to be honest, I've never needed much, just a table, a computer, and books). I write a weekly column for a right-wing Madrid newspaper. Now I preach and curse and castigate various politicians (within limits, of course). Young people who want to make a career in writing see me as an example to follow. Some say I'm an improved version of Aurelio Baca. I don't know. (Spain hurts us both, although at the moment I think it happens to hurt him more.) They might be sincere, but they might also be trying to make me lower my guard and lose my grip. If that's the case, I won't give them the satisfaction: I'm still working as doggedly as ever, still producing, still nurturing my friendships. I'm not even thirty yet and the future is unfolding like a rose, a perfect rose, perfumed and unique. What begins as comedy ends as a triumphal march, wouldn't you say?

  Hernando García León, Feria del Libro, Madrid, July 1994. Like everything big, it all began with a dream. A little less than a year ago, I took a walk over to one of our most venerable literary cafés and had a conversation with various writers about the plight of our beloved Spain. Amid the usual hubbub, everyone I spoke to declared (and here unanimity isn't suspect) that although my last book may not have sold as well as some of the others, it was one of the most read. That may be so. I don't concern myself with marketing. And yet, behind the curtain of praise, I glimpsed a shadow. I had the praise of my peers, and the youngest even saw me as a great man-and congratulated themselves for it-but behind the curtain of flattery I sensed the breath, the imminence, of something unknown. What was it? I didn't know. A month later, when I found myself in one of the departure lounges at the airport, about to take my leave for a few days from our rancorous Spain, three young men came up to me, tall, slender, and cerulean, and told me in no uncertain terms that my last book had changed their lives. Strange, although they were by no means the first to address me in such a manner. I proceeded on my journey. There was a layover in Rome. In the duty-free shop, an interesting-looking man kept staring at me. His name was Hermann Künst and he was an Austrian traveling on business (I didn't ask what he did) who had been captivated by my last book, which he must have read in Spanish, since as far as I know it hasn't yet been translated into German. He wanted my autograph. His kind words left me speechless. When I got to Nepal, a boy at the hotel who couldn't have been more than fifteen asked me whether I was Hernando García León. I said yes and was about to give him a tip when the lad declared himself a fervent admirer of my work and a little later, almost before I realized it, I found myself signing a worn copy of Between Bulls and Angels, in the eighth Spanish printing, to be precise, dated 1986. Regrettably, a mishap occurred just then that has no place in this story but that prevented me from questioning the young reader about the turns or twists of fate that had caused my book to reach his hands. That night I dreamed about Saint John the Baptist. The headless figure drew near the hotel bed and said: go to Nepal, Hernando, and a magnificent book will open its pages to you. But I'm already in Nepal, I replied in the half speech of the sleeping. But Saint John repeated: go to Nepal, Hernando, etc., etc., as if he were my literary agent. The next morning I forgot the dream. On a trip into the mountains of Kathmandu, I ran unexpectedly into a group of tourists from our beleaguered Spain. I was recognized (I was alone, needless to say, meditating behind a rock) and subjected to the usual question-and-answer session, as if we were on a television show. My fellow countrymen's thirst for knowledge is great, obsessive, unquenchable. I signed two books. That night, back at the hotel, I had another dream about Saint John the Baptist, except this time, in a notable variation, he was accompanied by a shadow, a shrouded being who remained at a distance as the headless figure spoke. His message was essentially the same as it had been the night before. He urged me to visit Nepal and promised me the sweet reward of a magnificent book, worthy of the boldest scribe. These dreams recurred night after night for nearly as long as I stayed in the East. I returned to Madrid and after subjecting myself reluctantly to the obligatory interviews, I removed myself to Orejuela de Arganda, a village in the mountains, with the firm intention of embarking on a creative project. I dreamed again of Saint John the Baptist. Hernando, my man, this is too much, I said to myself in the middle of the dream, and with a mental effort that only those who have honed their nerves in the most adverse circumstances can muster, I managed to wake up abruptly. The room was submerged in the fertile silence of the Castilian night. I opened the windows and breathed the pure mountain air, with no nostalgia for that distant past when I smoked two packs a day, although for a tiny fraction of a second I thought to myself that I wouldn't have minded a cigarette. Like a man with no time to lose, I spent my hours of wakefulness sorting through papers, finishing letters, preparing drafts of articles and lectures, the scut work of a successful author, something that those envious, resentful types who don't sell more than a thousand copies of a book will never understand. Then I went back to bed and fell asleep instantly, as usual. Out of a blackness like something painted by Zurbarán, Saint John the Baptist appeared again and fixed me with his gaze. He nodded, and then he said: I'm going now, Hernando, but you won't be left alone. I watched as the landscape brightened little by little, as if a breeze or angelic breath were dissolving the fog and gloom, while still preserving, shall we say, dawn's proper mourning attire. In the background, beside a rocky outcropping some ten feet from my bed, the veiled shadow waited patiently. Who are you? I said. My voice was trembling. I'm about to cry, I thought, overcome with emotion in the midst of my slumbers and on such a somber morning. And yet, steeling myself, I managed to repeat the question: who are you? Then the shadow quivered or shook off the morning dew with an economical movement of its body, or it was simply that my staring eyes made me perceive as a quiver something that wasn't, and after the quiver it began to walk toward my bed on feet that seemed not to touch the ground, and yet I could hear the sound of the stones, the singing of the stones as they rejoiced to feel the soles of those feet on their spines, a rustle and a tinkling all at once, a murmur and a whisper, as if the stones were the grass of the fields and the feet were air or water, and then, with an enormous effort, I raised myself from the bed, and, leaning on an elbow, asked who are you, shadow, what do you want from me, what's hidden under that shawl? and the shadow kept advancing over the field of stones and ash-gray pebbles until it reached my bed, and then it halted and the stones stopped singing or sighing or cooing, and an enormous silence fell over my room and the valley and the mountainside, and I closed my eyes and said to myself courage, Hernando, you've had worse dreams, and I opened my eyes again. And then the shadow removed its shawl or maybe it was only a scarf and there before me stood the Virgin Mary and her light wasn't blinding, as my friend Patricia Fernández-García Errázuriz says, having had various experiences of this kind, but a light pleasing to the eye, a light in harmony with the morning light. And before I was struck dumb I said: what do you wish from your humble servant, Lady? And she said: Hernando, my son, I want you to write a book. The rest of our conversation I can't reveal. But I wrote. I set myself to the task, prepared to sweat blood, and after three months I had three hundred and fifty manuscript pages that I deposited on my editor's desk. The title: The New Age and the Iberian Ladder. Today, they tell me, it's sold more than a
thousand copies. I haven't signed them all, of course, because I'm not Superman. Everything that begins as comedy inevitably ends as mystery.