The Third Reich

by Roberto Bolaño

  There was something obscene about hearing him call Ingeborg Inge. Unfortunately, her friends, a few work colleagues, called her that too. It was no big deal and yet I’d never thought of this: I didn’t know any of Ingeborg’s friends. A shiver ran through me.

  I ordered another coffee. The Wolf had one with a shot of rum (if he had to go to work, he didn’t seem very worried about it). Charly didn’t want anything. He only felt like smoking, which he did without stopping, one cigarette after another. But he promised he would pick up the bill.

  “What happened in Barcelona?” I was about to say “You’ve changed,” but it seemed ridiculous: I hardly knew him.

  “Nothing. We walked around. We shopped for souvenirs. It’s a pretty town. Too crowded, though. For a while I was a fan of FC Barcelona, when Lattek was coach and Schuster and Simonsen were playing. Not anymore. I’ve lost interest in the club but I still like the city. Have you been to the Sagrada Família? Did you like it? Yeah, it’s pretty. And we went out drinking at some really old bar, full of posters of bullfighters and Gypsies. Hanna and Ingeborg thought it was cool. And it was cheap, much cheaper than the bars here.”

  “If you’d seen Hanna’s face you wouldn’t be sitting here like this. Ingeborg thought about reporting you to the police. If it had happened in Germany, I’m sure she would have.”

  “You’re exaggerating . . . In Germany, in Germany . . .” He made a face, as if to say there was nothing to be done. “I don’t know, maybe things there don’t stand still for a second either. Shit. I don’t care. Anyway, I don’t believe you, I don’t think it ever crossed Ingeborg’s mind to call the police.”

  I shrugged, offended. Maybe Charly was right, maybe he knew Ingeborg’s heart better than I did.

  “What would you have done?” There was an evil gleam in Charly’s eye.

  “In your place?”

  “No, in Inge’s.”

  “I don’t know. Beaten you up. Knocked you around.”

  Charly closed his eyes. To my surprise, my answer hurt him.

  “Not me.” He grasped in the air as if something very important were escaping him. “In Inge’s place, I wouldn’t have done that.”

  “Of course not.”

  “And I didn’t want to rape the German girl on the beach, either. I could have done it, but I didn’t. See what I mean? I could have wrecked Hanna’s face, really wrecked it, and I didn’t. I could have thrown a stone and broken your window or kicked your ass after you bought those filthy newspapers. I didn’t do any of it. All I do is talk and smoke.”

  “Why would you want to break my window or hit me? That’s idiotic.”

  “I don’t know. It was just an idea. Fast, quick, with a stone the size of a fist.” His voice broke as if suddenly he were remembering a nightmare. “It was El Quemado. When he looked up at the light in your window, just a way to get attention, I guess . . .”

  “It was El Quemado’s idea to break my window?”

  “No, Udo, no. You don’t understand anything, man. El Quemado was drinking with us, none of us saying a word, just listening to the sea, that’s all, and drinking, but wide-awake, you know? and El Quemado and I were looking up at your window. I mean, when I spotted your window El Quemado was already staring up at it, and I realized it, and he realized that I had him. But he didn’t say anything about throwing stones. That was my idea. I planned to warn you . . . Do you know what I mean?”

  “No.”

  Charly gave me a look of disgust. He picked up the newspapers and flipped through them at incredible speed, as if before he was a mechanic he’d been a bank teller; I’m sure he didn’t read a single full sentence. Then, with a sigh, he put them aside; by this he seemed to say that the news was for me, not for him. For a few seconds we were both silent. Outside, the street slowly resumed its daily rhythm; we were no longer alone in the bar.

  “Deep down, I love Hanna.”

  “You should go see her right now.”

  “She’s a good girl, she really is. And there’s been a lot of good in her life even though she doesn’t think so.”

  “You should go back to the hotel, Charly . . .”

  “First let’s drop the Wolf offat work, all right?”

  “Fine, let’s go right now.”

  When he got up from the table he was white, as if there was no blood left in his body. Without stumbling once, by which I deduced that he wasn’t as drunk as I’d thought he was, he went up to the bar and paid, and we left. Charly’s car was parked near the water. On the roof rack I saw the windsurfing board. Had he taken it with him to Barcelona? No, he must have put it there when he came back, which meant that he’d already been to the hotel. Slowly we covered the distance that separated us from the supermarket where the Wolf worked. Before the Wolf got out Charly told him that if he got fired he should come see him at the hotel, that he’d find some way to fix things. I translated. The Wolf smiled and said they wouldn’t dare. Charly nodded gravely, and when we’d left the supermarket behind he said it was true, that with the Wolf any altercation could get complicated, not to say dangerous. Then he talked about dogs. In the summer it was common to see abandoned dogs starving in the streets. “Especially here,” he said.

  “Yesterday, on my way to the Wolf’s house, I hit one.”

  He waited for me to say something, and he continued:

  “A little black dog, one I’d seen on the Paseo Marítimo . . . Looking for his rotten owners or scraps of food . . . I don’t know . . . Do you know the story of the dog who died of hunger next to his owner’s body?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought about that. At first the poor animals don’t know where to go, all they do is wait. That’s loyalty, isn’t it, Udo? If they make it through that stage they go roaming around and looking for food in trash cans. Yesterday, I got the feeling that the little black dog was still waiting. What does that say to you, Udo?”

  “How are you so sure that you’d seen it before or that it was a stray dog?”

  “Because I got out of the car and took a good look at it. It was the same one.”

  The light inside the car was beginning to put me to sleep.

  For an instant I thought I saw tears in Charly’s eyes.

  “We’re both tired,” I said to myself.

  At the door to his hotel I advised him to take a shower, go to bed, and wait to talk to Hanna until after he got up. Some guests were beginning to file toward the beach. Charly smiled and vanished down the corridor. I went back to the Del Mar, feeling uneasy.

  I found Frau Else on the roof, after blithely ignoring the signs that indicated which areas were for guests and which were reserved for the hotel staff. And yet I must confess that I wasn’t looking for her. It just so happened that Ingeborg was still asleep, the bar made me feel claustrophobic, I didn’t feel like going out again, and I wasn’t sleepy. Frau Else was reading, lying on a sky-blue lounge chair with a glass of juice beside her. She wasn’t surprised to see me. In fact, in her usual calm voice she congratulated me on discovering the entrance to the roof. “The advantages of sleepwalking,” I answered, cocking my head to get a look at the book she was holding. It was a guide to the south of Spain. Then she asked me whether I wanted something to drink. At my inquiring gaze she explained that even on the roof she had a bell to call the staff. Out of curiosity, I accepted. After a while I asked what she’d been up to the day before. I added that I’d been searching for her all over the hotel, to no avail. “You vanish with the rain,” I said.

  Frau Else’s face darkened. In a gesture that seemed studied (but I know this is just the way she is, just another part of her spontaneity and verve), she took offher sunglasses and fixed her eyes on me before answering: yesterday she spent all day in her husband’s room. Was he ill, perhaps? The bad weather, the clouds charged with electricity, bothered him; he had terrible headaches that affected his sight and his nerves; a few times he’d been afflicted with temporary blindness. Brain fever, said Frau Else’s perfect lips. (As far
as I know, there is no such illness.) Immediately, with the hint of a smile, she made me promise that I wouldn’t come looking for her anymore. We’ll see each other only when fate ordains. And if I refuse? I’ll have to make you promise, whispered Frau Else. At that moment a maid appeared with a glass of juice just like the one in Frau Else’s hand. For a few seconds, dazzled by the sun, the poor girl blinked and didn’t know where to turn, then she set the glass on the table and left.

  “I promise,” I said, walking away toward the edge of the roof.

  The day was yellow and from everywhere there came a glow of human flesh that made me sick.

  I turned toward her and confessed that I hadn’t slept all night. “No need to swear to it,” she answered without lifting her gaze from the book again in her hands. I told her that Charly had hit Hanna. “Some men do that,” was her reply. I laughed. “Clearly you’re no feminist!” Frau Else turned the page without answering me. I told her then what Charly had explained to me about dogs, the dogs that people abandon before or during their vacations. I noticed that Frau Else was listening with interest. When I finished my story I saw a look of alarm in her eye; I was afraid that she was about to get up and come over to me. I was afraid that she would speak the words that at that moment I least wanted to hear. But she made no comment, and shortly afterward I considered it most prudent to retire.

  Tonight everything was back to normal. At a club near the campgrounds, Hanna, Charly, Ingeborg, the Wolf, the Lamb, and I all raised our glasses to friendship, wine, beer, Spain, Germany, Real Madrid (the Wolf and the Lamb aren’t Barcelona fans, as Charly assumed, but Real Madrid fans), pretty women, vacations, etc. Peace restored. Hanna and Charly, of course, had made up. Charly was back to being more or less the same ordinary boor we met on August 21, and Hanna had put on her flashiest and lowest-cut dress to celebrate it. Even her bruised cheek gave her a kind of erotic and roguish charm. (While she was sober she hid it under sunglasses, but in the clamor of the club she flaunted it cheerfully, as if she’d rediscovered herself and her raison d’être.) Ingeborg officially forgave Charly, who, in everyone’s presence, kneeled at her feet and praised her virtues, to the delight of all those who could hear and understand German. The Wolf and the Lamb were no laggards in this show of goodwill; we owe to them the discovery of the most authentically Spanish restaurant we’ve been to thus far. A restaurant where, in addition to eating well and cheaply and to drinking even more abundantly and more cheaply, we got to hear a flamenco singer (that is, a singer of typical songs) who turned out to be a transvestite called Andromeda, a close acquaintance of our Spanish friends. After dinner, we spent a long time telling stories, singing, and dancing. Andromeda, sitting with us, showed the women how to clap their hands and then danced a dance called a sevillana with Charly; soon everybody was getting up to join them, even people from other tables, except for me; I refused categorically and a bit brusquely. I would have made a fool of myself. My brusqueness, however, seemed to please the transvestite, who read my palm once the dance was over. I’ll have money, power, love; a full life; a gay son (or grandson) . . . Andromeda read the future and interpreted it. At first her voice was almost inaudible, a whisper, then gradually it rose, and by the end she was speaking so loudly that everyone could hear and laugh at her witty remarks. Anyone who volunteers for these games becomes the butt of the other patrons’ jokes, but she had nothing unpleasant to say and before we left she gave us each a carnation and invited us to return. Charly left a thousand-peseta tip and swore in the name of his parents that he would. We all agreed that it was a place “worth seeing”; praise was showered on the Wolf and the Lamb. At the club the atmosphere was different, there were more young people and the setting was artificial, but it didn’t take us long to get into the groove. Resignation. There I did dance and I kissed Ingeborg and Hanna and I went looking for the bathroom and I vomited and combed my hair and returned to the dance floor. At one point I grabbed Charly by the lapels and asked: Everything all right? Everything’s amazing, he answered. From behind, Hanna threw her arms around him and pulled him away from me. Charly was trying to tell me something but all I could see were his lips moving and finally just his smile. Ingeborg had also gone back to being the Ingeborg of the night of August 21, the same old Ingeborg. She kissed me, hugged me, begged me to make love to her. So when we got back to our room, at five in the morning, we made love. Ingeborg came quickly; I held out and possessed her for many long minutes afterward. We were both tired. Naked on the sheets, Ingeborg said everything was simple. “Even your miniatures.” She insisted on this term before falling asleep. “Miniatures.” “Everything is simple.” For a long time I lay staring at my game and thinking.

  AUGUST 30

  Today’s events are still confused, but I’ll try to set them down in orderly fashion so that I can perhaps discover in them something that has thus far eluded me, a difficult and possibly useless task, since there’s no remedy for what’s happened and little point in nurturing false hopes. But I have to do something to pass the time.

  I’ll start with breakfast on the hotel terrace, in our bathing suits, on a cloudless morning tempered by a pleasant breeze blowing from the sea. My original plan was to go back to the room after it had been tidied and spend a few hours immersed in the game, but Ingeborg did her best to change my mind: the morning was too splendid not to leave the hotel. On the beach we found Hanna and Charly lying on a giant mat; they were asleep. The mat, brand-new, still had the price tag in one corner. I remember it with the sharpness of a tattoo: 700 pesetas. It occurred to me then, or maybe it occurs to me now, that the scene was familiar. The same thing often happens when I stay up too late: insignificant details are magnified and linger in my mind. I mean, it was nothing out of the ordinary. And yet it struck me as disturbing. Or it strikes me that way now, in the dark of night.

  We spent the morning wrapped up in the same vain activities as ever: swimming, talking, reading magazines, plastering our bodies with lotions and tanning oils. We ate early, at a restaurant packed with tourists who, like us, were in bathing suits and smelled of sunscreen (not a pleasant scent at mealtime). Afterward I managed to escape; Ingeborg, Hanna, and Charly went back to the beach and I returned to the hotel. What did I do? Not much. I stared at my game, unable to concentrate, then I took a nap plagued with nightmares until six. When I saw from the balcony that the bathers were beating a mass retreat toward the hotels and campgrounds, I went down to the beach. It’s a sad time of day, and the bathers are sad: tired, sated with sun, they turn their gazes toward the line of buildings like soldiers already sure of defeat. With tired steps they cross the beach and the Paseo Marítimo, prudent but with a hint of scorn, of arrogance in the face of a remote danger, their peculiar way of turning down side streets where they immediately seek out the shade leading them directly—they’re a tribute—toward the void.

  The day, viewed in retrospect, seems devoid of people and of omens. No Frau Else, no Wolf, no Lamb, no letter from Germany, no phone call, nothing significant. Only Hanna and Charly, Ingeborg and me, the four of us in peaceful coexistence, and El Quemado, but in the distance, busy with his pedal boats (there weren’t many takers anymore), though Hanna, I don’t know why, went over to talk to him, just for a bit, less than a minute, to be polite, she said afterward. Overall, a quiet day, a day of sunbathing and that was all.

  I remember that when I went down to the beach for the second time, the sky suddenly filled with an infinity of clouds, tiny clouds that began to scurry toward the east or the northeast, and that Ingeborg and Hanna were swimming and when they saw me they came out, first Ingeborg, who kissed me, and then Hanna. Charly was lying facedown in the sun, which was no longer so strong, and he seemed to be asleep. To our left, El Quemado was patiently building his nightly fortress, removed from everything, at the time of day when surely his monstrous appearance was plainly revealed to him. I remember the ashen yellow color of the late afternoon, our insubstantial conversation (I couldn’t tell you for su
re what we talked about), the girls’ wet hair, Charly’s voice telling the absurd story of a boy learning to ride a bike. Everything indicated that this was a pleasant evening like any other and that soon we would return to our hotels to shower, preparing to cap offthe night in some club.

  Then Charly leaped up, grabbed his windsurfing board, and headed for the water. Until that instant I hadn’t noticed the board was there, that it had been there all the time.

  “Don’t be long,” shouted Hanna.

  I don’t think he heard her.

  The first few yards he swam dragging the board after him; then he got up, raised the sail, waved to us, and headed out to sea on a favorable gust of wind. It must have been seven o’clock, not much later. He wasn’t the only windsurfer. Of that I’m sure.

  After an hour, tired of waiting, we went for a drink on the terrace of the Costa Brava, with a view of the whole beach and of the place where it seemed logical that Charly would appear. We felt dirty and thirsty. I remember that El Quemado, whom I saw every time I turned around in search of Charly’s sail, never once stopped moving around his pedal boats, a kind of hardworking golem, until suddenly he simply disappeared (into his hut, I infer), but so unexpectedly, so dryly, that the beach telegraphed a double absence: Charly was missing and now El Quemado was missing. I think it was then that I began to worry that something was wrong.

  At nine o’clock, though it still wasn’t dark, we decided to ask the advice of the receptionist at the Costa Brava. He sent us to the Red Cross of the Sea, whose offices are on the Paseo Marítimo, just outside of the old town. There, after getting a detailed account from us, they radioed a rescue Zodiac. After half an hour the Zodiac called back, advising that we alert the police and the port’s maritime authorities. Night was falling fast; I remember that I looked out the window and for a second I glimpsed the Zodiac we’d been speaking to. The clerk explained that the best thing for us to do was to return to the hotel and call Navy Headquarters, the police, and the Civil Protection offices; the manager of the hotel could advise us on everything. We said that’s what we would do and we left. Half of the way home we were silent and the other half we spent arguing. According to Ingeborg they were all incompetents. Hanna wasn’t so sure, but she insisted that the manager of the Costa Brava hated Charly. There was also the possibility that Charly had ended up in a nearby town, the way he had once before, did we remember? I gave her my opinion: that she should do exactly what we’d been told to do. Hanna said yes, I was right, and she broke down in sobs.