The Savage Detectives

by Roberto Bolaño

  Traces of Cesárea Tinajero keep appearing and disappearing. The sky in Hermosillo is bloodred. Belano was asked for papers, his papers, when he requested the old registers of rural teachers, which had to contain a record of Cesárea's destination after she left El Cubo. Belano's papers weren't in order. A secretary at the university told him that at the very least he could be deported. Where? shouted Belano. Back to your country, young man, said the secretary. Are you illiterate? said Belano, didn't you read here that I'm Chilean? You might as well shoot me in the head! They called the police and we went running. I had no idea that Belano was here illegally.

  JANUARY 24

  Belano is more nervous every day and Lima is more withdrawn. Today we saw Alberto and his policeman friend. Belano didn't see him or didn't want to see him. Lima did see him, but he doesn't care. Only Lupe and I are worried (very worried) about the inevitable showdown with her former pimp. It's no big deal, said Belano, to put an end to the discussion. After all, there are twice as many of us as there are of them. I was such a nervous wreck that I started to laugh. I'm not a coward, but I'm not suicidal either. They're armed, said Lupe. So am I, said Belano. In the afternoon they sent me to the Records Office. I said that I was writing an article for a Mexico City magazine about the rural schools in Sonora in the 1930s. Such a young reporter, said the secretaries, who were painting their nails. I found the following clue: Cesárea Tinajero had been a teacher from 1930 to 1936. Her first posting was El Cubo. Then she taught in Hermosillo, Pitiquito, Bábaco, and Santa Teresa. After that she was no longer part of the teaching force of the state of Sonora.

  JANUARY 25

  According to Lupe, Alberto already knows where we are, what boarding-house we're staying at, and what car we're driving. He's just waiting for the right moment to launch a surprise attack. We went to see the Hermosillo school where Cesárea had worked. We asked about old teachers from the 1930s. They gave us the former principal's address. His house was next door to what was once the state penitentiary. It's a three-story stone building with a tower that rises above the other guard towers and inspires a feeling of dread. A work of architecture built to last, said the principal.

  JANUARY 26

  We drove to Pitiquito. Today Belano said that it might be best to go back to Mexico City. Lima doesn't care one way or the other. He says that at first he got tired of driving so much, but now he's gotten to like it. Even when he's asleep he dreams about driving Quim's Impala along these roads. Lupe doesn't talk about going back to Mexico City but she says that the best thing would be to hide. I don't want to be separated from her. I don't have plans either. Onward, then, says Belano. His hands, I notice when I lean over the front seat to ask him for a cigarette, are shaking.

  JANUARY 27

  We didn't find anything in Pitiquito. For a while we were stopped in the car on the road to Caborca that leads to the turnoff for El Cubo, trying to decide whether we should visit the teacher again or not. Belano had the final say and we waited patiently, watching the road, the few cars that passed every so often, the very white clouds blown over on the wind from the Pacific. Until Belano said let's go to Bábaco and Lima started the car without saying a word and turned right and we drove off.

  The trip was long and took us places we'd never been, although I, at least, still had the constant feeling of having seen it all before. From Pitiquito we drove to Santa Ana and turned onto the highway. We took the highway to Hermosillo. From Hermosillo we took the road east to Mazatán, and from Mazatán to La Estrella. That was where the paved road ended, and we continued along dirt roads to Bacanora, Sahuaripa, and Bábaco. From the Bábaco school they sent us back to Sahuaripa, which was the municipal seat and supposedly the place where we could find the record books. But it was as if the Bábaco school, the school from the 1930s, had been swept away by a hurricane. We slept in the car again, like in the beginning. Night noises: wolf spiders, scorpions, centipedes, tarantulas, black widows, desert toads. All poisonous, all deadly. At moments the presence (or the imminence, I should say) of Alberto is as real as the night noises. Outside of Bábaco, where we've returned for no particular reason, we talk before we go to sleep about anything but Alberto. We keep the headlights on. We talk about Mexico City, about French poetry. Then Lima turns out the lights. Bábaco is dark too.

  JANUARY 28

  What if we find Alberto in Santa Teresa?

  JANUARY 29

  This is what we find: a teacher who's still working tells us that she knew Cesárea. They met in 1936, when our interlocutor was twenty. She had just been given the job and Cesárea had only been working at the school for a few months, so it was natural that they became friends. She didn't know the story of the bullfighter, or any other man. When Cesárea quit her job it took the teacher a while to understand it, but she accepted it as one of her friend's peculiarities.

  For a while Cesárea disappeared: for months, maybe a year. But one morning the teacher saw her outside the school and they resumed their friendship. Back then Cesárea was thirty-five or thirty-six and the teacher considered her a spinster, although she regrets it now. Cesárea found work at the first canning factory in Santa Teresa. She lived in a room on Calle Rubén Darío, which at the time was in a remote neighborhood, dangerous or at least unsuitable for a woman. Did she know that Cesárea was a poet? She didn't. When both of them were working at the school, she often saw Cesárea write, sitting in her empty classroom, in a thick notebook with black covers that she always carried with her. She imagined it was a diary. During the time Cesárea worked at the canning factory, when they met in the center of Santa Teresa to go to the movies or to go shopping, when she was late she often found Cesárea writing in a notebook with black covers, like the previous one, but smaller, a notebook that looked like a prayer book and in which her friend's tiny handwriting flowed like a stampede of insects. Cesárea never read anything to her. Once she asked her what she was writing about and Cesárea said a Greek woman. The Greek woman's name was Hypatia. Sometime later the teacher looked up the name in the encyclopedia and learned that Hypatia was an Alexandrian philosopher killed by Christians in 415. The thought occured to her, maybe impulsively, that Cesárea identified with Hypatia. She didn't ask Cesárea anything else, or if she did, she had forgotten by now.

  We wanted to know whether Cesárea read and whether the teacher remembered the names of any books. In fact, she did read a lot, but the teacher couldn't remember a single one of the books that Cesárea borrowed from the library and carried around with her. She worked at the canning factory from eight in the morning until six at night, so it wasn't as if she had much time to read, but the teacher imagined that she stole hours from sleep to spend reading. Then the canning factory had to close and for a while Cesárea was out of work. This was around 1945. One night, after the movies, the teacher went with her to her room. By then the teacher was married and saw Cesárea less often. She'd only been to her room on Calle Rubén Darío once before. Her husband, although he was a saint, wasn't happy about her friendship with Cesárea. In those days Calle Rubén Darío was like a sewer where all the dregs of Santa Teresa washed up. There were a couple of bars where at least once a week there was a fight that ended in bloodshed; the tenement rooms were occupied by out-of-work laborers or peasants who had just immigrated to the city; few of the children had any schooling. The teacher knew that because Cesárea herself had brought a few of them to the school to be enrolled. Some prostitutes and their pimps lived there too. It wasn't a proper street for a decent woman (maybe it was Cesárea's living there that had prejudiced the teacher's husband against her), and if the teacher hadn't realized it before, it was because the first time she went there was before she was married, when she was, in her own words, innocent and heedless.

  But this second visit was different. The poverty and neglect of Calle Rubén Darío tumbled down on her like a death threat. The room where Cesárea lived was clean and neat, as one would expect of the room of a former teacher, but something emanated from it
that weighed on her heart. The room was painful proof of the nearly impossible distance between her and her friend. It wasn't that it was untidy or smelled bad (as Belano wondered), or that Cesárea's poverty had surpassed the limits of gentility, or that the filth of Calle Rubén Darío extended into every corner, but something subtler, as if reality were skewed inside that lost room, or even worse, as if over time someone (who but Cesárea?) had imperceptibly turned her back on reality. Or, worst of all, had twisted it on purpose.

  What did the teacher see? She saw a wrought-iron bed, a table strewn with papers holding more than twenty notebooks with black covers stacked in two piles, she saw Cesárea's few dresses hanging from a cord that stretched from one side of the room to the other, an Indian rug, a little paraffin burner sitting on a night table, three library books (she couldn't remember their titles), a pair of flat-heeled shoes, black stockings peeking out from under the bed, a leather suitcase in the corner, a black straw hat hanging from a tiny rack nailed behind the door, and food: she saw a chunk of bread, she saw a jar of coffee and another of sugar, she saw a half-eaten chocolate bar that Cesárea offered her and she refused, and she saw the weapon: a switchblade with a horn handle and the word Caborca engraved on the blade. And when she asked Cesárea why she needed a knife, Cesárea answered that she was under threat of death and then she laughed, a laugh, the teacher remembers, that echoed past the walls of the room and the stairs until it reached the street, where it died. At that moment it seemed to the teacher as if a sudden, perfectly orchestrated silence fell over Calle Rubén Darío: radios were turned down, the chatter of the living was suddenly muted, and only Cesárea's voice was left. And then the teacher saw or thought she saw a plan of the canning factory pinned to the wall. And as she was listening to what Cesárea had to tell her, in words that were neither faltering nor rushed, words that the teacher would rather have forgotten, but that she remembers perfectly well and even understands, understands now anyway, her eyes were drawn to the plan of the factory, a plan that Cesárea had drawn with great attention to certain details, leaving other parts shadowy or vague, complete with notations in the margins, although sometimes what was written was illegible and other times it was all in capital letters and even followed by exclamation marks, as if Cesárea were seeing herself in her hand-drawn map, or seeing facets of herself that she had until then overlooked. And then the teacher had to sit down on the edge of the bed, although she didn't want to, and close her eyes and listen to what Cesárea was saying. And even though she was feeling worse and worse, she had the courage to ask Cesárea why she had drawn the plan. And Cesárea said something about days to come, although the teacher imagined that if Cesárea had spent time on that senseless plan it was simply because she lived such a lonely life. But Cesárea spoke of times to come and the teacher, to change the subject, asked her what times she meant and when they would be. And Cesárea named a date, sometime around the year 2600. Two thousand six hundred and something. And then, when the teacher couldn't help but laugh at such a random date, a smothered little laugh that could scarcely be heard, Cesárea laughed again, although this time the thunder of her laughter remained within the confines of her own room.

  From that moment on, the teacher recalled, the tension in the air of Cesárea's room, or the tension that she imagined in the air, faded until it went away. Then she left and didn't see Cesárea again until two weeks later. That was when Cesárea told her that she was leaving Santa Teresa. She had brought the teacher a going-away present, one of the notebooks with black covers, possibly the thinnest of them all. Do you still have it? asked Belano. No, she didn't have it anymore. Her husband had read it and thrown it away. Or it had simply gotten lost. The house she lived in now wasn't the same one she'd been living in then, and small things often get lost in moves. But did you read the notebook? said Belano. Yes, she'd read it. It was mostly notes on the Mexican educational system, some very sensible and others completely inappropriate. Cesárea hated Secretary of Education Vasconcelos, although sometimes her hatred seemed more like love. There was a plan for general literacy, which the teacher could hardly make out because it was so chaotic, followed by reading lists for childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, lists that were contradictory when they weren't plainly opposed. For example: two of the books on the first children's reading list were La Fontaine and Aesop's Fables. On the second list, La Fontaine disappeared. On the third list there was a popular book about gangster life in the United States, a book that might (though only might) be appropriate for adolescents, but never for children, which in turn vanished from the fourth list, replaced by a collection of medieval tales. Stevenson's Treasure Island and Martí's The Golden Age remained on all the lists, though they were books that the teacher considered most appropriate for adolescents.

  After that, it was a long time before the teacher had any news of Cesárea. How long? said Belano. Years, said the teacher. Until one day she saw her again. It was during Santa Teresa's fiesta, when the city filled with peddlers from every corner of the state.

  Cesárea was behind a stand selling medicinal herbs. The teacher walked right past her, but since she was with her husband and another couple she was ashamed to say hello. Or maybe it wasn't shame but shyness. And it might not even have been shame or shyness: she simply wasn't sure whether this woman selling herbs could be her old friend. Cesárea didn't recognize her either. She was sitting behind her table, a plank resting on four wooden boxes, and she was talking to a woman about the goods for sale. She had changed physically: now she was fat, hugely fat, and although the teacher didn't see a single gray hair amid the black, she had wrinkles around her eyes and deep circles under them, as if the journey she had made to Santa Teresa, to Santa Teresa's fiesta, had taken her months, even years.

  The next day the teacher came back alone and saw her again. Cesárea was standing up and she looked much bigger than the teacher remembered. She must have weighed three hundred pounds and she was wearing an ankle-length gray skirt that accentuated her fatness. Her naked arms were like logs. Her neck had disappeared behind a giant's double chin, but her head was still Cesárea Tinajero's noble head: big, with prominent bones, her skull arched and her forehead wide and smooth. This time the teacher went up to her and said good morning. Cesárea looked at her and didn't recognize her, or pretended not to. It's me, said the teacher, your friend Flora Castañeda. When she heard the name, Cesárea frowned and got up. She moved around the plank of herbs and came up close to the teacher as if she couldn't see her well from a distance. She put her hands (two claws, according to the teacher) on her shoulders and for a few seconds she scrutinized her face. Oh, Cesárea, what a terrible memory you have, said the teacher, to say something. Only then did Cesárea smile (foolishly, according to the teacher) and say of course, how could she forget her. Then they talked for a while, the two of them sitting behind the table, the teacher on a wooden folding chair and Cesárea on a box, as if the two of them were tending the little herb stall together. And although the teacher realized immediately that they had very little to say to each other, she told Cesárea that she had three children now and that she was still working at the school, and remarked on thoroughly unimportant things that had happened in Santa Teresa. And then she thought about asking Cesárea whether she had married and had children, but she couldn't formulate the question because she could see for herself that Cesárea hadn't married and didn't have children, so she just asked her where she lived, and Cesárea said sometimes in Villaviciosa and other times in El Palito. The teacher knew where Villaviciosa was, although she'd never been there, but it was the first time she'd heard of El Palito. She asked her where the town was and Cesárea said that it was in Arizona. Then the teacher laughed. She said she had always suspected that Cesárea would end up living in the United States. And that was all. They parted. The next day the teacher didn't go to the market and she spent her idle hours wondering whether it would be a good idea to invite Cesárea over for lunch. She discussed it with her husband, t
hey fought, she won. The next day, first thing, she went back to the market, but when she got there Cesárea's stall was occupied by a woman selling kerchiefs. She never saw her again.

  Belano asked her whether she thought Cesárea was dead. Possibly, said the teacher.

  And that was all. Belano and Lima were pensive for hours after the interview. We got rooms at the Hotel Juárez. At dusk the four of us met in Lima and Belano's room and talked about what to do. According to Belano, first we should go to Villaviciosa, then we could decide whether we wanted to go back to Mexico City or on to El Palito. The problem with El Palito was that he couldn't enter the United States. Why not? asked Lupe. Because I'm Chilean, he said. They won't let me in either, said Lupe, and I'm not Chilean. And García Madero won't get in either. Why not me? I said. Does anyone have a passport? said Lupe. No one did, except for Belano. That night Lupe went to the movies. When she got back to the hotel she said that she wasn't going back to Mexico City. So what will you do? said Belano. Live in Sonora or cross over into the United States.

  JANUARY 30

  Last night they found us. Lupe and I were in our room, fucking, when the door opened and Ulises Lima came in. Get dressed fast, he said, Alberto is in the lobby talking to Arturo. We did as he ordered without saying a word. We put our things in plastic bags and went down to the first floor, trying not to make a sound. We went out the back door. The alley was dark. Let's get the car, said Lima. There wasn't a soul on Avenida Juárez. We walked three blocks from the hotel, to the place where the Impala was parked. Lima was afraid that there would be someone there, but the spot was deserted and we started the car. We passed the Hotel Juárez. Part of the lobby and the lit-up window of the hotel bar were visible from the street. There was Belano, and across from him was Alberto. We didn't see Alberto's policeman friend anywhere. Belano didn't see us either and Lima thought it wasn't a good idea to honk the horn. We drove around the block. The sidekick, Lupe said, had probably gone up to our rooms. Lima shook his head. A yellow light was falling on Belano and Alberto's heads. Belano was talking, but it might just as well have been Alberto. They didn't seem angry. When we drove by again, they'd each lit a cigarette. They were drinking beer and smoking. They looked like friends. Belano was talking: he moved his left hand as if he was tracing a castle or the silhouette of a woman. Alberto never took his eyes off him and sometimes he smiled. Honk the horn, I said. We drove around the block once more. When the Hotel Juárez appeared again, Belano looked out the window and Alberto lifted a can of Tecate to his lips. A man and a woman were arguing at the main entrance to the hotel. Alberto's policeman friend was watching them, leaning on the hood of a car some thirty feet away. Lima honked the horn three times and slowed down. Belano had already seen us. He turned around, got up close to Alberto, and said something. Alberto grabbed him by the shirt. Belano pushed him and went running. By the time he reached the hotel door the cop was heading toward him and reaching into his jacket. Lima honked the horn three more times and stopped the Impala sixty feet from the Hotel Juárez. The policeman pulled out a gun and Belano kept running. Lupe opened the car door. Alberto appeared on the sidewalk outside the hotel with a gun in his hand. I had been hoping he was carrying the knife. As Belano got into the car, Lima took off and we sped away along the dimly lit streets of Santa Teresa. Somehow we ended up heading in the direction of Villaviciosa, which we thought was a good sign. By around three in the morning we were completely lost. We got out of the car to stretch our legs. There wasn't a single light anywhere. I'd never seen so many stars in the sky.