The Third Reich

by Roberto Bolaño

  “I guessed as much,” I said.

  My own words surprised me. Actually, I hadn’t even imagined that El Quemado could write. But when he spoke, or maybe sooner, when I said that I wrote fast, I guessed that he must be a scribbler too. We stared at each other without saying anything for a few seconds. It was hard to look him in the face for too long, although little by little I was getting used to it. El Quemado’s secret smile still lurked there, maybe mocking me and our newly discovered shared trait. I kept feeling sicker. I was sweating. I didn’t understand how El Quemado could take so much sun. His craggy face, full of charred folds, sometimes glinted blue like cooking gas or took on a yellowish-black hue like something about to explode. And yet he could just sit there on the sand, with his hands on his knees and his eyes fixed on the sea, showing no signs of discomfort. In a departure from his usual behavior, which was so reserved, he asked whether I would help him bring in a pedal boat that had just arrived. Groggily, I nodded. The Italian couple on the boat couldn’t steer to shore. We got in the water and pushed gently. From their seats, the Italians kidded around and pretended to fall in. They jumped out before we got to shore. I was happy to see them head away, skirting bodies and holding hands, toward the Paseo Marítimo. After we pulled the pedal boat in, El Quemado said that I should swim for a while.

  “Why?”

  “You’ll fry your circuits in the sun,” he said.

  I laughed and asked whether he wanted to come in with me.

  We swam for a while, intent only on getting past the first line of bathers. Then we turned around to face the beach: from that vantage point, next to El Quemado, the beach and the people crowded on it seemed different.

  When we returned he advised me, in a strange voice, to rub myself down with coconut oil.

  “Coconut oil and a dark room,” he murmured.

  With deliberate abruptness I woke Ingeborg and we left.

  This afternoon I had a fever. I told Ingeborg. She didn’t believe me. When I showed her my shoulders, she told me to put a wet towel over them or to take a cold shower. Hanna was waiting and she seemed to be in a hurry to be rid of me.

  For a while I stared at the game with no energy for anything; the light hurt my eyes and the hum of the hotel was lulling me to sleep. With no little effort I managed to go out in search of a pharmacy. Under the terrible sun I wandered the old streets in the center of town. I don’t remember seeing tourists. Actually, I don’t remember seeing anyone. A couple of sleeping dogs; the girl who waited on me at the pharmacy; an old man sitting in the shadow of a doorway. Meanwhile, the Paseo Marítimo was so crowded that it was impossible to walk without elbowing and pushing. Near the port a little amusement park had been built and that’s where everyone was, hypnotized. It was insanity. There were all kinds of tiny stalls that the human torrent threatened to crush at any moment. As best I could, I lost myself again in the streets of the old town and returned to the hotel the long way around.

  I got undressed, closed the shutters, and smeared my body with salve. I was burning up.

  Lying in bed, in the dark but with my eyes open, I tried to think about the events of the last few days before I fell asleep. Then I dreamed that I didn’t have a fever anymore and I was with Ingeborg in this same room, in bed, each of us reading a book, but at the same time there was something very intimate about it. I mean, each of us felt close to the other even though we were absorbed in our respective books; each of us felt love for the other. Then someone scratched at the door and after a while we heard a voice on the other side saying: “It’s Florian Linden, get out now, your life is in great danger.” Immediately, Ingeborg let go of her book (the book dropped splayed on the rug) and fixed her eyes on the door. I hardly moved. Frankly, I was so comfortable there, my skin so cool, that I thought it wasn’t worth being frightened. “Your life is in danger,” repeated Florian Linden’s voice, farther and farther away, as if from the end of the hallway. And in fact, just then we heard the sound of the elevator, the doors opening with a metallic click and then closing, carrying Florian Linden down to the ground floor. “He’s gone to the beach or the amusement park,” said Ingeborg, dressing quickly. “I have to find him. Wait here, I have to talk to him.” I didn’t object, of course. But left alone, I couldn’t keep reading. “How can anyone be in danger in this room?” I asked aloud. “What’s he scheming, that third-rate detective?” Getting more and more worked up, I went over to the window and looked out at the beach, expecting to see Ingeborg and Florian Linden. The sun was setting and only El Quemado was there, arranging his pedal boats under red clouds and a moon the color of a plate of boiling lentils, dressed only in shorts and remote from everything around him, that is, from the sea and the beach, the sea wall of the Paseo, and the shadows of the hotels. For a moment I was overcome by fear; I knew that danger and death lay out there. I woke up sweating. The fever was gone.

  AUGUST 27

  This morning, after I planned and wrote out the two first turns, obliterating essays by Benjamin Clark (Waterloo, #14) and Jack Corso (The General, #3, vol. 17) in which each advises against the creation of more than one front in the first year, I went down to the hotel in excellent spirits, bursting with the desire to read, write, swim, drink, laugh—all the visible signs of health and animal happiness. In the morning the bar usually isn’t very full, so I brought along a novel and a folder of photocopies of the articles I need for my work. The novel was Wally, die Zweifl erin, by K. G., but perhaps due to my inner exultation, to the thrill of a productive morning, it was impossible for me to concentrate on reading or on studying the articles, which— it must be said— I plan to refute. So I settled down to watch the people shuttling between the restaurant and the terrace, and to enjoy my beer. Just as I was getting ready to go back to the room, where with a little luck I’d be able to sketch out the third turn (spring of ’40, unquestionably of crucial importance), Frau Else appeared. When she saw me, she smiled. It was a strange smile. Then she stepped away from a few guests—leaving them in midsentence, or so it seemed—and came to sit at my table.

  She looked tired, though her expression was as composed as ever and her gaze as luminous.

  “I’ve never read him,” she said, examining the book. “I don’t even know who he is. Modern?”

  I shook my head with a smile. He was an author from the previous century, I said. A dead man. For a second we stared at each other without looking away or muting the effect with words.

  “What’s it about? Tell me.” She pointed at the novel by G.

  “If you like, I’ll lend it to you.”

  “I don’t have time to read. Not in the summer. But you can tell me what happens.” Her voice, while still soft, began to take on a commanding tone.

  “It’s the diary of a girl. Wally. At the end she kills herself.”

  “That’s all? It sounds awful.”

  I laughed:

  “You asked me to tell you what it was about. Take it, you can give it back later.”

  She took the book with a thoughtful expression.

  “Girls like to write in their diaries . . . I hate that kind of drama . . . No, I won’t read it. Don’t you have anything a little more cheerful?” She opened the folder and glanced at the photocopied articles.

  “That’s something else,” I hastened to explain. “Nothing worth looking at!”

  “I see. You read English?”

  “Yes.”

  She nodded as if in approval. Then she closed the folder and for a while we sat there in silence. The situation was rather embarrassing, at least for me. The most incredible thing was that she didn’t seem to be in a hurry to leave. I searched mentally for a topic of conversation but I couldn’t come up with anything.

  Suddenly I remembered a scene from ten or eleven years ago: in the middle of a party, the occasion of which I can’t recall, Frau Else left everyone, crossing the Paseo Marítimo and vanishing onto the beach. Back then there were no streetlights on the Paseo and you didn’t have to go far i
n order to step into complete darkness. I can’t remember whether anyone else noticed her flight. I don’t think so. The party was noisy and everyone was drinking and dancing on the terrace, even people who had just been walking by and had no connection to the hotel. The point is, I don’t think anyone missed her except me. I don’t know how long it was before she turned up again; I suppose it was quite a while. When she did, she wasn’t alone. Walking hand in hand with her was a tall man, very thin, with a white shirt that fluttered in the breeze as if it hung on nothing but bones, or rather, a single bone, as long as a flagpole. When they crossed the Paseo I recognized him. It was the owner of the hotel, Frau Else’s husband. When Frau Else passed me, she said hello to me in German. I’d never seen such a sad smile.

  Now, ten years later, she was smiling in the same way.

  Without thinking twice, I told her I thought she was a very beautiful woman.

  Frau Else looked at me as if she didn’t quite understand what I’d said and then she laughed, but so softly that someone at the next table could barely have heard it.

  “It’s the truth,” I said. The fear I generally felt when I was with her of making a fool of myself had disappeared.

  Suddenly serious, perhaps realizing that I was serious myself, she said:

  “You’re not the only one who thinks so, Udo. I guess you must be right.”

  “You always have been,” I said, unable to stop now, “although I wasn’t just talking about your physical beauty, which is certainly undeniable, but about your . . . aura, the indefinable air that emanates from your most insignificant actions . . . Your silences . . .”

  Frau Else laughed, this time openly, as if she’d just been told a joke.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m not laughing at you.”

  “Just at what I’m saying,” I said, laughing too, as if I weren’t offended at all. (Although the truth is I was offended.)

  This response seemed to please Frau Else. I thought that without intending to I had grazed a hidden wound. I imagined Frau Else courted by a Spaniard, perhaps involved in a secret love affair. Her husband, of course, suspects and suffers agonies; she can neither give up her lover nor find the strength to leave her husband. She is trapped by her conflicting loyalities; her own beauty is the source of her tribulations. I envisioned Frau Else as a flame, the flame that sheds light but in the process consumes itself and dies, etc.; or like a wine that, upon mixing with the blood, ceases to exist as what it once was. Beautiful and distant. And exiled . . . This was her most mysterious quality.

  Her voice woke me from my reflections:

  “You seem very far away from here.”

  “I was thinking about you.”

  “For God’s sake, Udo, you’ll make me blush.”

  “I was thinking about the person you were ten years ago. You haven’t changed at all.”

  “What was I like ten years ago?”

  “The same as you are now. Magnetic. Active.”

  “Active, of course, what choice do I have? But magnetic?” Her hearty laugh echoed through the restaurant once more.

  “Yes, magnetic. Do you remember that party on the terrace, when you went offto the beach? . . . It was pitch-black there, though the terrace was brightly lit. I was the only one who saw you leave and I waited until you came back. There, on those steps. After a while you returned, but now you were with your husband. When you passed me, you smiled. You were very beautiful. I don’t remember having seen your husband go after you, so he must have been on the beach already. That’s the kind of magnetism I’m talking about. You attract people.”

  “My dear Udo, I haven’t the slightest memory of that party; there’ve been so many, and it was such a long time ago. Anyway, based on your story it seems that I’m the one attracted by others. Attracted by my own husband, no less. If you say that you didn’t see him leave, then clearly he was already on the beach, but if the beach was dark, as you so rightly claim, I couldn’t have known that he was there, so when I left it must have been been because I was drawn by his magnetism, wouldn’t you say?”

  I chose not to answer. Much as Frau Else tried to destroy it, a current of understanding had been established between the two of us that released us from the need for explanations.

  “How old were you then? It’s only natural that a fifteen-yearold should be attracted to a slightly older woman. The truth is that I hardly remember you, Udo. My . . . interests lay elsewhere. I was a wild thing, I think, wild like all girls, and insecure. I didn’t like it at the hotel. As you can imagine, I suffered a lot. Well, all foreigners suffer a lot at first.”

  “For me it was something . . . lovely.”

  “Don’t look like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like a clubbed seal, Udo.”

  “That’s what Ingeborg always says.”

  “Really? I don’t believe it.”

  “She puts it differently. But it amounts to the same thing.”

  “She’s a very pretty girl.”

  “Yes, she is.”

  All of a sudden we were silent again. The fingers of her left hand began to drum on the plastic tabletop. I would have liked to ask about her husband, whom I still hadn’t seen even from afar and who I sensed had something important to do with the nameless essence that radiated from Frau Else, but I didn’t have the chance.

  “Why don’t we change the subject? Let’s talk about literature. Or rather, you talk about literature and I’ll listen. When it comes to books, I know nothing, but believe me, I do like to read.”

  I had the feeling that she was making fun of me. I shook my head in rejection. Frau Else’s eyes seemed to rake my skin. I’d even say that her eyes sought mine as if by scrutinizing them she could read my innermost thoughts. And yet her intentions were kind.

  “Then let’s talk about the movies. Do you like the movies?” I shrugged. “Tonight there’s a Judy Garland film on TV. I love Judy Garland. Do you like her?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never seen her in anything.”

  “You haven’t seen The Wizard of Oz?”

  “Yes, but it was a cartoon, the way I remember it.”

  She gave me a disappointed look. From some corner of the restaurant came very soft music. We were both perspiring.

  “No, that’s something else entirely,” said Frau Else. “Although I suppose that at night you and your girlfriend must have better things to do than come down to the hotel lobby to watch TV.”

  “Not much better. We go out to clubs. It’s mostly boring.”

  “Are you a good dancer? Yes, I think you must be. One of those serious dancers, the kind who never gets tired.”

  “No, that’s not me.”

  “What’s your style, then?”

  “I have two left feet.”

  Frau Else nodded in an enigmatic way that indicated she understood. The restaurant was filling up with people coming back from the beach; we hadn’t noticed. In the next room guests were already seated, ready to eat. I thought Ingeborg would be in soon.

  “These days I don’t do it as often; when I first came to Spain I went out dancing with my husband almost every night. Always at the same place, because back then there weren’t as many clubs and also because this one was the best, the newest. No, it wasn’t here, it was in X . . . It was the only club my husband liked. Maybe precisely because it was out of town. It doesn’t exist anymore. It closed years ago.”

  I seized the opportunity to tell her what had happened on our last visit to a club. Frau Else listened unperturbed as I gave a detailed account of the dispute between the waiter and the man with the stick that had ended in a general brawl. She seemed more interested in the part of the story involving our Spanish companions, the Wolf and the Lamb. I thought she must know them, or know who they were, and I said so. No, she didn’t know them, but they couldn’t be the most appropriate company for a young couple on their first trip together, practically a honeymoon. But what harm could they do? A worried look crossed Frau
Else’s face. Did she perhaps know something that I didn’t? I told her that the Wolf and the Lamb were more friends of Charly and Hanna’s than mine, and that in Stuttgart I was acquainted with much shadier characters. I was lying, of course. Finally I promised that the Spaniards interested me only as conversation partners with whom I could practice my Spanish.

  “You should think about your girlfriend,” she said. “You should be considerate of her.”

  On her face was an expression akin to disgust.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll be fine. I’m cautious by nature and I know how to keep my distance, depending on the person. Anyway, Ingeborg likes spending time with them. I guess she’s not used to that kind of people. Of course, neither of us takes them seriously.”

  “But they are real.”

  I was about to tell her that everything seemed unreal to me just then: the Wolf and the Lamb, the hotel and the summer, El Quemado (whom I hadn’t mentioned) and the tourists, everyone except for Frau Else herself, lonely and alluring; but luckily I kept my mouth shut.

  We sat there for a while longer without speaking, although in the midst of our silence I felt closer to her than ever. Then, with a visible effort, she got up, shook my hand, and left.

  As I was on my way up to the room, in the elevator, a stranger remarked in English that the boss was sick. “Too bad the boss is sick, Lucy,” were his words. I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that he was referring to Frau Else’s husband.

  When I got to the room, I surprised myself by repeating: He’s sick, he’s sick, he’s sick . . . So it was true. On the map, the game pieces seemed to melt. The light fell at a slant on the table, and the counters that represented German armored units sparkled as if they were alive.

  For lunch today we had chicken and french fries and salad, chocolate ice cream and coffee. A rather sad meal. (Yesterday it was cutlets and salad, chocolate ice cream and coffee.) Ingeborg told me that she’d been with Hanna at the Municipal Garden behind the port, between two cliffs that plunge straight into the sea. They took lots of pictures, bought postcards, and decided to walk back to town. A full morning. I hardly said a thing. The noise of the dining room gave me a slight but nagging headache. Just after we finished eating, Hanna came in, wearing only a bikini and a yellow T-shirt. When she sat down she looked at me with a somewhat forced smile, as if she were apologizing for something, or as if she felt ashamed. Of what, I have no idea. The truth is that I wasn’t at all happy to see her, although I was careful not to show it. Finally the three of us went up to the room, where Ingeborg put on her bathing suit and then the two of them went to the beach.