Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998-2003

by Roberto Bolaño

  BORGES AND THE RAVENS

  I’m in Geneva and I’m looking for the cemetery where Borges is buried. It’s a cold autumn morning, although to the east there’s a glimpse of sun, a few rays that cheer the citizens of Geneva, a stubborn people of great democratic tradition. The Plainpalais, the cemetery where Borges is buried, is the perfect cemetery: the kind of place to come every afternoon to read a book, sitting across from the grave of some government minister. It’s really more like a park than a cemetery, an extremely manicured park, every inch well-tended. When I ask the keeper about Borges’s grave, he looks down at the ground, nods, and tells me how to find it, not a word wasted. There’s no way to get lost. From what he says it’s clear that visitors are always coming and going. But this morning the cemetery is literally empty. And when I finally reach Borges’s grave there’s no one nearby. I think about Calderón, I think about the English and German Romantics, I think how strange life is, or, rather: I don’t think anything at all. I just look at the grave, the stone inscribed with the name Jorge Luis Borges, the date of his birth, the date of his death, and a line of Old English verse. And then I sit on a bench facing the grave and a raven says something in a croak, a few steps from me. A raven! As if instead of being in Geneva I were in a poem by Poe. Only then do I realize that the cemetery is full of ravens, enormous black ravens that hop up on the gravestones or the branches of the old trees or run through the clipped grass of the Plainpalais. And then I feel like walking, looking at more graves, maybe if I’m lucky I’ll find Calvin’s, and that’s what I do, growing more and more uneasy, with the ravens following me, always keeping within the bounds of the cemetery, although I suppose that one occasionally flies off and goes to stand on the banks of the Rhone or the shores of the lake to watch the swans and ducks, somewhat disdainfully, of course.

  SUN AND SKULL

  The other day I was at the beach and I thought I saw a dead body. I was sitting on one of the benches along Blanes’s Paseo Marítimo, brushing the sand off my feet, waiting for my son to brush the sand off his feet so we could go home, when I thought I saw a body. I got up and looked again: an old woman was sitting under a beach umbrella reading a book and next to her was a man, the same age or maybe a few years older, in a tiny bathing suit, lying in the sun. This man’s head was like a skull. I saw him and said to myself that he would soon be dead. And I realized that his old wife, reading peacefully, knew it too. She was sitting in a beach chair with a blue canvas back. A small but comfortable chair. He was stretched out on the sand, only his head in the shade. On his face I thought I glimpsed a frown of contentment, or maybe he was just sleeping while his wife read. He was very tan. Skeletal but tan. They were tourists from up north. Possibly German or English. Maybe Dutch or Belgian. It doesn’t really matter. As the seconds went by, his face looked more and more skull-like. And only then did I realize how eagerly, how recklessly, he was exposing himself to the sun. He wasn’t using sunscreen. And he knew he was dying and he was lying in the sun on purpose like a person saying goodbye to someone very dear. The old tourist was bidding farewell to the sun and to his own body and to his old wife sitting beside him. It was a sight to see, something to admire. It wasn’t a dead body lying there on the sand, but a man. And what courage, what gallantry.

  THE SINALOA STORY

  Barry Gifford, creator of Perdita Durango and Romeo Dolorosa, is known for his habit of giving his fictional characters catchy and colorful names, but in this book, The Sinaloa Story (Destino), the most recent of his novels to fall into my hands, he probably goes too far. The main character is called Ava Varazo, a name that instead of a palindrome hides a dark riddle. Her friend is DelRay Mudo. It’s possible to find weird last names like these among the Mexicans living in the north of Mexico and the southern United States. Unlikely but possible. DelRay’s father, however, is Duro Mudo, and here we head straight into the realm of madness. Ava Varazo’s boss, a thug from the Texas-Mexico border, is Indio Desacato, Mr. Desacato to outsiders, Indio to his friends. The whorehouse madam is Santa Niña de las Putas and her saint day is celebrated “when there is a second full moon in the month on the final day of February in a leap year.” A young messenger and flyweight amateur boxer is Framboyán Lanzar. There’s another boxer called Danny Molasses, whom Lanzar calls Melaza, and another one called Chuy Chancho. Indio Desacato’s bodyguard and factotum is a six-foot-seven, 380-pound former football player called Thankful Priest. The only goodhearted old man in town is called Arkadelphia Quantrill Smith, but his friends — in other words everybody — call him Arky. And so on, through more than fifty names.

  What lies behind Gifford’s taste for colorful last names? Many things: the loneliness of the border, that mythical territory between the United States and Mexico, and the loneliness of all men. The madness of parents who try to perpetuate themselves or to perpetuate something they don’t understand but can sense. The desperate pride of possessing at least one thing that’s unique and showing it off. Humorous portraits sketched of dust and wind.

  BURROUGHS

  For some of those of my generation, William Burroughs was the affectless man, the shard of ice that never melts, the eye that never closes. They say he possessed every vice there was, but I think he was a saint who attracted all the sinners in the world because he was gracious and unwise enough never to shut his door. Literature, his livelihood for the last thirty years, interested him, but not too much, and in that regard he was like other classic American figures who focused their efforts on observing life or on experience. When he talked about what he read one got the impression that he was remembering vague stretches of time in prison.

  He was certainly familiar with prison, and his writing on the prison system in the United States might be some of the sharpest ever penned. He traveled all over the world: his vision of the planet is perhaps one of this century’s bleakest. And he experimented with all kinds of drugs and escaped unscathed from fifteen years of heroin addiction.

  His observations on certain hard drugs give him a kinship to the great chroniclers of hell, except that in Burroughs there’s no moral or ethical motive, only the description of a frozen abyss, the description of an endless process of corruption. Language, he said, is a virus from outer space, in other words, a disease, and he spent his whole life trying to fight that disease.

  He loved guns. He killed his wife while they were practicing their William Tell act in Mexico. He was a follower of Wilhelm Reich and he built orgone boxes in the shabby backyards of lost cities, to which (the cities and the boxes) he retreated like an Andromedan Dracula.

  He had no liking at all for life on earth, or human life, and he would rather have been born on any other planet. A planet of spiders or giant insects. In the cover photograph of My Education (Península), he appears with a shotgun, and from the way he looks at us it’s clear he’s not afraid to use it. In his later years he played small roles in a number of films: Drugstore Cowboy was perhaps the most memorable.

  NEUMAN, TOUCHED BY GRACE

  Among young writers who’ve already published a first book, Neuman may be the youngest of all, and his precocity, which comes studded with lightning bolts and proclamations, isn’t his greatest virtue. Born in Argentina in 1977, but raised in Andalusia, Andrés Neuman is the author of a book of poems, Métodos de la noche [Night Methods], published by Hiperión in 1998, and Bariloche, an excellent first novel that was a finalist for the most recent Herralde Prize.

  The novel is about a trash collector in Buenos Aires who works jigsaw puzzles in his spare time. I happened to be on the prize committee and Neuman’s novel at once enthralled — to use an early twentieth-century term — and hypnotized me. In it, good readers will find something that can be found only in great literature, the kind written by real poets, a literature that dares to venture into the dark with open eyes and that keeps its eyes open no matter what. In principle, this is the most difficult test (also the most difficult exercise and stretch) and on no few occasions Neuman pulls it off wit
h frightening ease. Nothing in this novel sounds contrived: everything is real, everything is an illusion. The dream in which Demetrio Rota, the Buenos Aires trash collector, moves like a sleepwalker, is the dream of great literature, and its author serves it up in precise words and scenes. When I come across these young writers it makes me want to cry. I don’t know what the future holds for them. I don’t know whether a drunk driver will run them down some night or whether all of a sudden they’ll stop writing. If nothing like that happens, the literature of the twenty-first century will belong to Neuman and a few of his blood brothers.

  COURAGE

  Everything there is to say about courage has already been said by the poet Archilochus, who lived in the seventh century BC. Of his tumultuous life little is known with certainty. He was born on the island of Paros and he was a mercenary and his inclinations may have been more Dionysian than Apollonian. “My ash spear is my barley bread, / My ash spear is my Ismarian wine. / I lean on my spear and drink,”§ he wrote. There’s little doubt that he took part in small battles, in countless skirmishes where glory shone by its absence, under the command of different lords. During one of these encounters, Archilochus himself tells us, he abandoned his shield and ran, which in that age was synonymous with shame and dishonor. And yet Archilochus tells or sings of his cowardice without the slightest blush: “Some Saian mountaineer / Struts today with my shield. / I threw it down by a bush and ran / When the fighting got hot. / Life seemed somehow more precious. / It was a beautiful shield. / I know where I can buy another / Exactly like it, just as round.”

  Far from Greece, and in a different age, another poet, Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241), who loved the valiant, also came face to face in a single night with fear and the true picture of valor: a field of bones that we all must cross. Courage takes many forms. Sometimes it’s a ghost that hovers over our heads. Sometimes it’s a gleam to which we’re irrationally faithful. For my generation the picture of courage is Billy the Kid, who gambled his life for money, and Che Guevara, who gambled it for generosity; Rimbaud, who walked alone at night, and Violeta Parra, who opened windows in the night. Courage is useless, we were told happily, carelessly, by the poet and Spanish soldier Alonso de Ercilla, the most generous of brave men and perhaps one of the most swiftly forgotten, but we can’t live without it.

  WILCOCK

  Many years ago, when I lived in Gerona and was poor, or at least poorer than I am now, a friend loaned me the book The Temple of Iconoclasts, by J. Rodolfo Wilcock, published by Anagrama, Number 7 in the Panorama de Narrativas collection, which was just getting underway.

  In those days I didn’t have the money to buy books and everything I read was borrowed from the library (it was there that I discovered Tomeo, there that I read Liddell Hart and all the books I could find on the Napoleonic wars), although every once in a while some friend (always the same one, now that I think about it) would loan me a new novel, something that had just come out. This friend’s name was Carles and he was a sportswriter, but he was sent books from Anagrama, why I don’t remember, since of course he never reviewed a single one. Nor can I say that Carles was a fan of literature, which he in fact viewed with some distrust and perplexity, being on much surer ground, this friend of mine, in matters of local sports and even the crime beat, which he sometimes worked. But he was a good person, and when I went to see him I always left with a book, which fifteen days later I religiously returned.

  Thus it was that The Temple of Iconoclasts came into my hands, during a cold, wet winter, and I still remember the enormous pleasure it brought me, and the consolation, too, at a time when almost everything was full of sadness. Wilcock’s book restored happiness to me, as is only the case with those masterpieces of literature that are also masterpieces of black humor, like Lichtenberg’s Aphorisms or Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Of course, Wilcock’s book tiptoed out of bookstores. Today, seventeen years later, it has just been reprinted. If you want to have a good time, if you want to cure what ails you, buy it, steal it, borrow it, but most importantly, read it.

  PUIGDEVALL THE STRANGE

  Among my friends, the strangest is Ponç Puigdevall. Sometimes I see him walking the winding streets of Gerona, completely oblivious of everything around him, and then I know he’s mulling over the framework of a story, the secret mechanisms of structure, that jungle full of predatory beasts from which most writers flee and through which he strolls like Stewart Granger through the ruins of King Solomon’s mines or like Edgar Allan Poe through the icy landscapes of Antarctica, or in other words in the calmest and most inscrutable fashion, and it’s only because of this that Ponç sometimes fails to recognize or greet anyone while he’s wandering the streets of Gerona, or if he does greet you it’s in a mechanical way, as if he were seeing you in a dream or after many sleepless nights.

  Cult writer, difficult writer, strange writer: Ponç’s work is hard to classify. Sometimes I see him walking with his dog, who’s called Book, and besides not being able to tell who’s walking whom, I get the sense that both of them, the dog-book and the man-reader, are heading straight for the abyss or toward a similar accident with an indifference and elegance that I haven’t encountered in any other Catalan writer or any other dog. This must be a consequence of the esteem I feel for Ponç, which, by the way, doesn’t extend to the dog, who once growled at me in my own house and who, as his name suggests, is a somewhat overwrought animal. And yet I haven’t known Ponç for long: three years, if that. Then why do I feel so close to him? It may be his fragility and his radicalism. Because Ponç, who writes like one possessed, hasn’t received grants or assistance or anything: his books are the product of a vast storm-tossed library and of his intelligence and scrupulousness, not of a comfortable situation or prior agreements made with anyone. His devotion to literature might frighten some. Do I need to say that in my opinion he’s one of the three or four best living Catalan writers, and that I feel honored to be his friend?

  JAVIER CERCAS COMES HOME

  I met Javier Cercas when he was seventeen. I was living in Gerona at the time, and he lived in Gerona too, and he was a kid who wanted to be a writer. He was a friend of Xavi Coromines, who introduced him to me. I don’t know what happened to Coromines, whom I liked, but I do know, at least by hearsay, what happened to Cercas. After he graduated from college he spent a long time teaching in the United States, in the Midwest. He wrote a short novel, El inquilino [The Tenant], and a long one, El vientre de la ballena [The Belly of the Whale] — the first published by Sirmio and the second by Tusquets — that got the attention of readers and especially of writers because of the glimpse the novels gave of an uncommonly talented writer; he also wrote a story collection and a collection of literary essays in which he expresses his irrational enthusiasm for John Irving, an enthusiasm that I don’t share. One day he decided to return to Catalonia and he got a job teaching at the University of Gerona. But although he worked in Gerona, Cercas lived in Barcelona and made his life in Barcelona. When I saw him again he was married and had a son, Raulito, a fan of the Teletubbies. His life in those days was extreme, mostly because Cercas is essentially extreme, capable of uniting in himself the understated and the outlandish, rationalism and eccentricity. Now, at last, Cercas is back in Gerona. He’s here to take it easy. Or at least that’s the official explanation. Or so his wife and son can have a yard. Or to be closer to his job, so he isn’t killed in a car accident. The truth is, I doubt all of these explanations. Cercas has come home to write the big books that are up there in his head. He’s back home to become one of the best writers in the Spanish language. Only great challenges make it worthwhile to pack up and move all one’s books.

  NERUDA

  I’ve just read, or reread, or randomly flipped through, the way you might skim your grandfather’s business correspondence and love letters, the first volume of Pablo Neruda’s Obras completas [Complete Works], (from Crepusculario to Las uvas y el viento [The Grapes and the Wind], 1923–1954), published by Galaxia Gutenberg–
Círculo de Lectores in an excellent edition compiled by Hernán Loyola, a Chilean and top Neruda scholar, with the assistance of the Argentine poet Saúl Yurkievich.

  The book, more than twelve hundred pages long, contains the main body of Neruda’s work and includes the three volumes that, for different reasons, brought the poet worldwide fame: Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1923–1924), Residence on Earth (1925–1935), probably the greatest Neruda, and Canto general (1938–1949), an endless, repetitive Neruda, the place where Whitman’s influence takes a crucial turn in Latin American poetry, a book in which extraordinary poems sit side by side with others that are clearly unsalvageable.

  But in this first volume of the Obras completas readers will also find other, lesser known books, like The Captain’s Verses, the love poems of a mature Neruda who embarks on a new love affair with characteristic abandon; or the poems of Las uvas y el viento, postcards from a man naively or stubbornly blind as he travels the length and breadth of the Soviet Union and notices nothing, absolutely nothing, belying the vaunted notion of a poet’s instinct, because poets may sometimes be beggars or adventurers in their hearts, but most of the time they are courtesans; or Tentativa del hombre infinito [Venture of the Infinite Man], a young Neruda full of discoveries; or one of his least known books, El habitante y su esperanza [The Inhabitant and His Hope] from 1926, which Neruda calls a “novel,” and which may very well be one, an interesting book, of poetic prose with one foot in modernism and the other in the avant-garde, a book of formal inventiveness and mannerisms, of weaknesses and taut gestures.