The Third Reich

by Roberto Bolaño

  “Maybe you’ll stay here to live,” says the Lamb.

  “Maybe you’ve found something worth staying for,” says the Wolf, winking an eye. Is he referring to Frau Else or something else?

  “What did El Quemado find?”

  “Work,” answer the two of them, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. Both are dressed as laborers in overalls stained with paint and cement.

  “The good life is over,” says the Lamb.

  Meanwhile, the Wolf’s nervous pacing carries him to the other end of the room, where he stares curiously at the game board and the Force Pool, at this point in the match a chaos of counters hard for a neophyte to understand.

  “This is the famous game?”

  I nod in assent. I’d like to know who made it famous. It’s probably all my fault.

  “And is it very difficult?”

  “El Quemado learned to play,” I answer.

  “But El Quemado is a special case,” says the Lamb, without poking around the game; in fact, he hasn’t even glanced at it, as if he fears leaving his fingerprints near the scene of the crime. Florian Linden?

  “If El Quemado learned how, I could too,” says the Wolf.

  “Do you speak English? Could you read the rules in English?”

  The Lamb is addressing the Wolf but he looks at me with a smile, complicit and sympathetic.

  “A little bit, from when I was a waiter, not enough to read, but . . .”

  “But nothing. If you can’t read the Sporting World in Spanish, how are you going to be able to read a set of rules in English? Don’t be an idiot.”

  For the first time, at least in front of me, the little Lamb has taken the upper hand with the Wolf. The Wolf, still mesmerized by the game, points to the hexes where the Battle of Britain is unfolding (though he never touches the map or the piles of counters!) and says that as he understands it, “here, for example”—he means the southeast of London—“there’s been a battle or there’s about to be one.” When I tell him he’s right, the Wolf gestures at the Lamb in a way that I imagine is obscene, but that I’ve never seen before, and says, “See, it’s not so hard.”

  “Don’t kid yourself, man,” answers the Lamb, stubbornly refusing to look at the table.

  “All right, I guessed it by sheer luck, are you happy?”

  The Wolf’s attention wanders now, cautiously, from the map to the photocopies. With his hands on his hips he examines them, skipping from one to the next without lingering long enough to read any of them. One might say that he’s looking at them like paintings.

  Part of the rules? Of course not.

  “Statement of the Meeting of the Council of Ministers, November 12, 1938,” reads the Wolf. “Fuck, this is the beginning of the war!”

  “No, the war starts later. In the autumn of the following year. The photocopies just help us . . . to set the scene. This kind of game creates a pretty interesting documentary urge. It’s as if we want to know exactly how everything was done in order to change what was done wrong.”

  “I get it,” says the Wolf, understanding nothing, of course.

  “It’s because if you just repeated the whole thing it wouldn’t be fun. It wouldn’t be a game,” whispers the Lamb, sitting down on the rug and blocking the path to the bathroom.

  “Something like that. Though it depends on your motive . . . on your point of view . . .”

  “How many books do you have to read to play well?”

  “All of them and none of them. To play a simple match you just have to know the rules.”

  “The rules, the rules, where are the rules?” The Wolf, sitting on my bed, picks up the Third Reich box from the floor and takes out the rules in English. He weighs them in one hand and shakes his head admiringly. “I can’t figure it out . . .”

  “What?”

  “How El Quemado could read this thing, with all the work he has.”

  “What work? The pedal boats aren’t bringing in any money now,” said the Lamb.

  “Maybe the money’s not there, but it’s hard work, for sure. I’ve spent time with him, helping him, in the sun, and I know what it’s like.”

  “You were just trying to hook up with some foreign chick, don’t pretend you weren’t . . .”

  “Man, that too . . .”

  The superiority, the ascendance, of the Lamb over the Wolf was undeniable. I imagined that something extraordinary had happened to the latter that reversed, even if only for now, the hierarchy between the two of them.

  “He didn’t read anything. I explained the rules to El Quemado little by little, very patiently!” I said.

  “But then he read them. He photocopied the rules and at night, at the bar, he went over them underlining the parts that he thought were most interesting. I thought he was studying to get his driver’s license; he said no, it was the rules of your game.”

  “Photocopied?”

  The Wolf and the Lamb nodded.

  I was surprised, because I knew I hadn’t lent the rules to anyone. There were two possibilities: either they were wrong and they had misunderstood El Quemado or El Quemado had told them the first thing that came into his head to get rid of them, or they were right and El Quemado, without my permission, had taken the original to photocopy it, putting it back the next day. As the Wolf and the Lamb moved on to a discussion of other matters (how nice the room was, how comfortable, how much it cost per night, the things they would do in a place like this instead of wasting time on “a puzzle,” etc.), I pondered how likely it really was that El Quemado had taken the rules and, the next day, having photocopied them, returned them to the box. It was impossible. Except for last night, he was always wearing a T-shirt, usually a ragged one, and shorts or long pants that left no room to hide a booklet even half the size of the Third Reich manual. In addition, he was always escorted in and out by me, and if it was naturally difficult to ascribe ulterior motives to El Quemado, it was even harder for me to believe that I would have overlooked a change, no matter how small—a telltale bulge!—in El Quemado’s appearance between his arrival and his departure. The logical conclusion exonerated him; it was materially impossible. At this point I was promptly confronted with a third explanation, at once simple and disturbing: another person, a person from the hotel, using the master key, had been in my room. I could think of only one possible suspect: Frau Else’s husband.

  (Just imagining him, on tiptoe, among my things, made my stomach turn. I imagined him, tall and skeletal and faceless or with his face wreathed in a kind of dark and shifting cloud, going through my papers and my clothes, alert to footsteps in the hallway, the sound of the elevator, the bastard, as if he’d been waiting for me for ten years, just waiting and biding his time, so that once the moment came he could toss me to his fire-scarred dog and destroy me . . . )

  A sound that at first struck me as bizarre and later came to seem like a portent managed to return me to reality.

  Someone was knocking at the door.

  I opened the door. It was the maid with the clean sheets. Somewhat brusquely, since her arrival couldn’t have been more inopportune, I let her in. All I wanted just then was for her to finish her job quickly so I could tip her and be left alone for a while longer with the Spaniards, in order to subject them to a series of questions that I was convinced couldn’t wait.

  “Go ahead and put them on,” I said. “I turned in the other ones this morning.”

  “Hey there, Clarita, how’s it going?” The Wolf lounged on the bed as if to emphasize his position as a guest and gave her a lazy, familiar wave.

  The maid, the same one who according to Frau Else wanted me to leave the hotel, hesitated for an instant as if she’d gotten the wrong room, an instant in which her eyes, deceptively dull, discovered the Lamb, still sitting on the rug and waving to her, and immediately the shyness or distrust (or terror!) that had blossomed in her the minute she crossed the threshhold of my room vanished. She responded to the greetings with a smile and set about putting on t
he clean sheets—or, that is, she took possession of a strategic spot next to the bed.

  “Get offof there,” she ordered the Wolf. The Wolf leaned up against the wall and started to make faces and clown around. I watched him curiously. The faces he was making, at first just idiotic, began to take on a color, gradually darkening until they traced a black mask barely softened by some red and yellow creases.

  Clarita spread the sheets. Though she didn’t look it, I realized she was nervous.

  “Careful, don’t knock the counters,” I warned.

  “What counters?”

  “The ones on the table, the game pieces,” said the Lamb. “You could cause an earthquake, Clarita.”

  Hesitating between finishing her task and leaving, she chose to stand motionless. It was hard to believe that this girl was the same maid who had such a poor opinion of me, the girl who more than once had received my tips in silence, the girl who never opened her mouth in my presence. Now she was giggling, finally laughing at jokes, and saying things like “You’ll never learn,” “Look at the mess you’ve made,” “You’re such slobs,” as if the room belonged to the Wolf and the Lamb, not to me.

  “I’d never live in a room like this,” said Clarita.

  “I don’t live here, I’m just passing through,” I explained.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Clarita. “This is a bottomless pit.”

  Later I realized that she was referring to her work, to the infinite labor of cleaning a hotel room, but at the time I took it for a personal judgment and it made me sad that even an adolescent should feel the right to express a critical view of my situation.

  “I need to talk to you about something important.” The Wolf, no longer making faces, came around the bed and grabbed the maid by the arm. She jumped as if she’d been bitten by a snake.

  “Later,” she said, looking at me and not at him, a tense smile creeping onto her lips, seeking my approval, but approval of what?

  “Now, Clarita, we have to talk now.”

  “That’s right, now.” The Lamb got up from the floor and cast an approving glance at the fingers gripping the maid’s arm.

  Little sadist, I thought, he doesn’t dare knock her around himself but he likes to watch and goad the Wolf on. Then my full attention was seized again by Clarita’s gaze, a gaze that had already piqued my interest during the unfortunate incident of the table, but which on that occasion, maybe because it had to compete with another gaze, Frau Else’s, faded into the background, into the limbo of gazes, in order to reemerge now, as rich and quiet as a landscape: Mediterranean? African?

  “Man, Clarita, you act like you’re the one who deserves an apology. That’s funny.”

  “You owe us an explanation, at least.”

  “What you did wasn’t right, was it?”

  “Javi is a mess and you don’t even care.”

  “Nobody wants to have anything to do with you anymore.”

  “Nothing.”

  With a sharp movement, the maid pulled away from the Wolf—Let me work!—and fixed the sheets, tucked them under the mattress, changed the pillowcase, pulled up the cream-colored coverlet and smoothed it. Once everything was done, the flurry of movement having left the Wolf and the Lamb with nothing more to say and no desire to continue, she didn’t leave but rather folded her arms on the opposite side of the room, separated from us by the immaculate bed, and asked what else anybody had to say to her. For an instant I thought she was talking to me. Her defiant attitude, starkly contrasting with her size, seemed charged with meaning that only I could read.

  “I don’t have anything against you. Javi is an asshole.” The Wolf sat on a corner of the bed and started to roll a joint. A single, distinct wrinkle spread until it reached the far edge of the coverlet, the precipice.

  “A fucking idiot,” said the Lamb.

  I smiled and shook my head several times as if to inform Clarita that I was taking charge of the situation. I didn’t want to say anything, but deep down it bothered me that they would take the liberty of smoking in my room without asking my permission. What would Frau Else think if she showed up all of a sudden? What would the hotel guests and staffsay if they heard about it? Who, when it came down to it, could promise that Clarita wouldn’t blab?

  “Want some?” The Wolf dragged on the joint a few times and passed it to me. For appearances’ sake, out of timidity, I inhaled deeply just once, relieved that it wasn’t damp, and handed the joint to Clarita. Inevitably our fingers brushed, maybe for longer than was strictly necessary, and it seemed to me that her cheeks turned red. Resignedly, and as if assuming that her mysterious business with the Spaniards was settled, the maid sat down by the table with her back to the balcony and blew a steady stream of smoke over the map. What a complicated game! she said in a loud voice, adding, in a whisper: For brains only!

  The Wolf and the Lamb exchanged glances, whether troubled or uncertain, I can’t say, and then they too sought my approval, but I had eyes only for Clarita, and especially for the smoke, the immense cloud of smoke hanging over Europe, blue and pearly, augmented by the dark lips of the girl, who painstakingly, like a builder, exhaled long, fine tubes of smoke that flattened out over France, Germany, the vast expanses of the East.

  “Man, Clarita, pass it back,” complained the Lamb.

  As if we were wrenching her from a beautiful and heroic dream, the maid looked at us and without getting up reached out her arm with the joint between her fingers; she had thin arms dotted with small circles lighter than the rest of her skin. I said that maybe she felt sick, maybe she wasn’t used to smoking, maybe it would be better if everyone got back to what they were doing, this last suggestion meant to include the Wolf and the Lamb.

  “Nah, she loves it,” said the Wolf, passing me the joint, which this time was soggy and which I smoked with my lips curled inward.

  “What do I love?”

  “Smoking, cunt,” spat the Lamb.

  “It’s not true,” said Clarita, jumping up in a way that was more theatrical than spontaneous.

  “Cool it, Clarita, cool it,” said the Wolf in a suddenly honeyed, velvety, even faggotty voice, as he grabbed her by the shoulder and with his other hand tapped her in the ribs. “Don’t knock over the playing pieces, what would our German friend think? That you’re an idiot, right? And you’re no idiot.”

  The Lamb winked at me and sat on the bed, behind the maid, miming sex in a way that was doubly silent because even his earto-ear smile was turned not toward me or Clarita’s back but toward . . . a kind of realm of stone . . . a silent zone (with raw staring eyes) that had surreptitiously established itself in the middle of my room . . . say, from the bed to the wall where the photocopies were tacked.

  The Wolf’s hand, which only then did I notice was balled into a fist—so the taps could have hurt—opened and closed around one of the maid’s breasts. Clarita’s body seemed to surrender completely, melted by the confidence with which the Wolf explored it. Without getting up from the bed, his torso unnaturally stiffand his arms moving like a mechanical doll’s, the Lamb grabbed the girl’s buttocks with both hands and whispered an obscenity. He said “slut,” or “bitch,” or “cunt.” I thought I was going to witness a rape and I remembered the words of Mr. Pere at the Costa Brava about the town’s rape statistics. Whether rape was their aim or not, they weren’t in a hurry: for an instant the three of them composed a living tableau in which the only jarring element was the voice of Clarita, who every so often said no, each time with different emphasis, as if she wasn’t sure of the most appropriate tone in which to refuse.

  “Should we make her more comfortable?” The question was directed at me.

  “Yeah, man, that would be better,” said the Lamb.

  I nodded, but none of the three moved: the Wolf standing and gripping Clarita by the waist, her muscles and bones seemingly turned to jelly, and the Lamb on the edge of the bed massaging the girl’s ass in a circular, rhythmic motion as if he were shuffling dominoes. Such
a lack of dynamism led me to act without thinking. I wondered whether it wasn’t all a performance, a trick to make me look ridiculous, a strange in-joke. I reasoned that if this was the case, the hallway wouldn’t be empty. Since I was the one closest to the door, it was easy to reach out and open it, thus clearing up any doubts. With unnecessary swiftness, that’s what I did. There was no one there. Nevertheless, I left the door open. As if they’d been dashed with a bucket of cold water, the Wolf and the Lamb interrupted their gropings with a leap; the maid, meanwhile, gave me a warm look that I fully appreciated and understood. I ordered her to leave. This instant, no arguments! Obediently, Clarita said goodbye to the Spaniards and went offdown the corridor with the weary step of all hotel maids. Seen from behind she looked vulnerable and not very attractive. Which probably she wasn’t.

  When we were left alone, and before the Spaniards had recovered from the surprise, I asked in a tone that admitted of no rejoinders or subterfuge whether Charly had raped anyone. In the moment, I was convinced that my words were divinely inspired. The Wolf and the Lamb exchanged a glance that was equal parts blank and wary. They had no idea what was about to hit them!

  “Rape a girl? Poor Charly, may he rest in peace?”

  “Yes, Charly, that bastard,” I said.

  I think I was prepared to get the truth out of them even if it came to blows. The only one who would make a worthy opponent was the Wolf; the Lamb wasn’t much over five feet tall and he was the scrawny type who could be dropped with a single punch. Though it didn’t pay to trust them, nor was there reason for me to be overly cautious. Strategically, I was ideally situated: I controlled the only exit, which I could block if it seemed convenient or use as a means of escape if things went badly. And I counted on the surprise factor. On the terror of unexpected confessions. On the Wolf’s and the Lamb’s predictable lack of mental agility. To be completely candid, none of this had been planned; it simply happened, like in those thrillers where you see an image over and over again before you realize that it’s the key to the crime.