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

by Roberto Bolaño

  And more memories: a girl called Loreto, another called Veronica, and the Saldivia sisters, one whose name I’ve forgotten but whom I kissed on my last day in Los Ángeles. The foosball championships. The face of my friend Fernando Fernández. My mother’s asthma attacks. One afternoon when I thought I was going crazy. Another afternoon when I drank lamb’s blood.

  In Los Ángeles I realized that playing any sport was an aberration, that if I had to choose between O’Higgins and Guiraut de Bornelh I would choose Guiraut, and that without leaving my house I could get to know the whole world.

  Of course, I did other things that I still remember: I broke my own record masturbating, broke my own record of pages read in a day, broke my own record of schooldays skipped, broke my own record of happy hours squandered doing absolutely nothing.

  I was happy there, but thank goodness my parents decided to leave.

  Autobiographies: Amis & Ellroy

  I’ve always thought autobiographies were odious. What a waste of time trying to pass a cat off as a rabbit, when what a real writer should do is snare dragons and dress them up as rabbits. I take it for granted that in literature a cat is never a cat, as Lewis Carroll made clear once and for all.

  There are few really memorable autobiographies. In Latin America, there are probably none. The first volume of García Márquez’s memoirs is just out now. I haven’t read it, but it makes my hair stand on end just to imagine what our Nobel Laureate might have written. And it’s even worse when I think of him struggling, in ill health, mustering the little strength he has left simply to undertake a melancholic exercise in navel-gazing.

  A while ago I read a couple of memoirs by two of the best living writers in the English language. Experience, by Martin Amis, and My Dark Places, by James Ellroy. The one thing the two books have in common is that they’re both by young writers — that is, by writers whom one wouldn’t imagine ready to take stock of their lives, since those lives, barring the unexpected, are nowhere near the final stretch. That’s the extent of the resemblance; after that, the books permanently part company. Amis writes a brilliant, pedantic, bland autobiography, the life of a writer who’s the son of a writer. Ellroy, whom many look down upon for stupid reasons like the fact that he’s a genre writer, writes a twisted memoir, a book that springs straight from the verge of hell. What Ellroy actually does is to exhaustively investigate and recreate the life of his mother, the last days of the life of his mother, who was raped and killed in 1958 and whose killer was never found.

  Since crime seems to be the symbol of the twentieth century, in Amis’s memoirs there’s also a serial killer, the infamous Fred West, in whose yard the remains of eight women were found, among them a cousin of Amis’s who disappeared years ago. But when Amis approaches the abyss he closes his eyes because he knows, like a good college student who has read his Nietzsche, that the abyss can look back. Ellroy knows it too, whether or not he’s read his Nietzsche, and that’s the main difference between them: he keeps his eyes open. In fact, he doesn’t just keep his eyes open. Ellroy is capable of dancing the conga with the abyss staring back at him.

  Amis’s book isn’t bad. But almost all his previous books are better. Those who seek in Experience the author of Money or London Fields or The Information or Night Train will be disappointed. Ellroy’s book, in contrast, is a model book. The second and third parts, which describe Ellroy’s childhood and adolescence after his mother’s death, are the best things written in the literature of any language in the last thirty years.

  Amis’s book ends with children. It ends with peace and love. Ellroy’s book ends with tears and shit. It ends with a man alone, standing tall. It ends with blood. In other words, it never ends.

  THE CURIOUS MR. ALAN PAULS

  The first thing I read by Pauls was an utterly original short story, “El caso Berciani” [The Berciani Case], published in Buenos Aires, an anthology edited by Juan Forn (Anagrama, 1992). In this collection, alongside texts by writers as relevant as Piglia, Aira, Saccomanno, or Fresán, the story by Mr. Pauls stood out for a number of reasons, the most notable of which was an anomaly: there was something in “El caso Berciani” that suggested a wrinkle in the space-time continuum, not just in the plot (which didn’t actually have anything to do with that, by which I mean that it wasn’t science fiction or anything of the kind) but in the links between the events described, in the story’s fierce, scarcely visible entropy; in the arrangement of paragraphs and sentences.

  For a long time I was a fervent reader of Pauls, having read just a single story. I didn’t know much about him: he was born in Buenos Aires in 1959, he had published two novels that I could never find, El pudor del pornógrafo [The Modesty of the Pornographer] and El coloquio [The Colloquium], and an essay on Manuel Puig. So for a long time I had to be satisfied — and this was more than enough — with reading and rereading “El caso Berciani,” which by this point, it’s clear, seemed to me a perfect story, if there’s such a thing as perfect monsters, which isn’t exactly a reasonable assumption to make.

  Until one day I came into contact with the fabulous Mr. Pauls. I don’t know whether I wrote to him or he wrote to me. I think it was he. A letter so deadpan that it left me in awe. Trembling, even. In it he told me about a car trip he’d taken with his daughter, a girl about the age of my son, maybe a little younger. The trip, as far as I could tell after reading the letter ten times (a vice acquired with “El caso Berciani”), had begun in the center of Buenos Aires and ended in the suburbs. The younger Pauls seemed to be a very intelligent child. Her father, an expert driver. The world, inhospitable. I answered the letter by sending greetings to the girl, from me and also from my son. Maybe that wasn’t the proper thing to do, because Pauls took his time getting back to me, claiming some mysterious problem with his computer. His daughter ignored the greetings from my son.

  A little while later I read two stories or two fragments of a hypochondriacal or medical saga by Mr. Pauls, which as far as I know are still unpublished. Both stories or fragments or whatever they are seemed perfect to me, perfect monsters. By now, as any reader will understand, all I wanted was to read more. So I asked Rodrigo Fresán (who not only is a friend of Mr. Pauls but for a while was his neighbor) to make off with everything by the author on his next trip to Argentina. So I read Wasabi, his third and as-of-now latest novel, in which he describes the growth of a boil and the ultimate impossibility of controlling it, and his book of essays on Borges, The Borges Factor, a great book, like Wasabi, but one that from the beginning presents a series of Borgesian dilemmas: on the title page it says that the book is by Alan Pauls and Nicolás Helft, but on the copyright page it’s explained that the text is by Alan Pauls and the images were generously provided by the Archives of the San Telmo Foundation. So why is Nicolás Helft credited on the cover as one of the authors? And who is Nicolás Helft? According to Fresán, Nicolás Helft is the owner of some of the illustrations or reproductions that appear in the book. I don’t believe it. Nor do I believe that it’s a pseudonym created by Mr. Pauls, who’s little given to such elaborate games, but rather the shadow of a shadow, the shadow of a Polish count, for example, or the shadow of a certain disheartening clarity.

  I remember a letter that Mr. Pauls wrote to me a long time ago now. In it he told me that he had gone with his wife — and presumably his daughter — to a Uruguayan hippie commune. Not to live, he explained, but to spend a few days. During those few days all he did was read a long novel, or so I understood after reading his letter ten times, and he watched a kind of dune that the wind kept shifting from place to place in the most obvious way. The strange thing was that no one noticed it. But so it is always, my dear Mr. Pauls, I thought after the tenth reading. You’re one of the best living Latin American writers and there are very few of us who know it and can appreciate it.

  JAVIER ASPURÚA AT HIS OWN FUNERAL

  Not long ago, I learned of the death of Javier Aspurúa from a friend on his way through Barcelona and from a messa
ge that arrived by email. The particulars of this death, as is often true in such cases, were not entirely clear. Aspurúa, I calculate, must have been over seventy. He was sick, according to one of my informants; he only had a cold, according to the other. The point is that one afternoon, as he was convalescing in the town where he lived — Quilpué or maybe Villa Alemana, I’ve forgotten which — a car hit him and he stopped breathing or, in other words, he died.

  Some friends and acquaintances say that he made his first appearance in the literary world — the professional literary world, such as it is — when he was fifty-five, others when he was past sixty, after an obscure early retirement from some government job. Like an apparition, he sluiced along courses (or irrigation channels, since we’re using hydrographic metaphors) of the strictest propriety. As far as anyone knows, he wrote only book reviews. As far as anyone knows, his complete works appeared in the newspaper Las Últimas Noticias, and, though I may be wrong, a one-hundred page volume might suffice to contain them.

  I met him in 1999, in Santiago. It was the first and last time I saw him. He was at the offices of Las Últimas Noticias to turn in a review; I was there with Andrés Braithwaite and Rodrigo Pinto. I thanked him for a positive review he’d written of one of my books. He blushed and gazed up at the ceiling. Then we went to a bar and at some point during the night there were more than eight people at our table and we were all talking and pontificating, except for Javier Aspurúa, who sat in silence. Next to him was a plastic bag full of books. At one point, the general conversation didn’t interest me, and I leaned over and asked him what books he’d bought. He handed me the bag so I could take a look: English novels. We talked about some of the authors. Later on Mr. Aspurúa consulted his watch and said that he had to go because otherwise he would miss the last bus to Quilpué or Villa Alemana.

  I walked him outside. When he was out of sight I thought of the invisible man, but a few seconds later, as I turned and went back into the bar, it hit me that Aspurúa wasn’t the type, and that in fact all his mannerisms, all his shyness, even his reserve, indicated a man who was fully conscious, maybe painfully conscious, of his visibility and the visibility of others. In this sense, I thought, though I thought this much later, maybe on the plane back to Spain, books — the books that he always read with such enthusiasm, an enthusiasm in which one could glimpse the adolescence that never abandons some old people — were like aspirin for a headache or like the opaque sunglasses that some madmen wear to block out everything and find peace, because the truth, experienced day by day as visibility, is exhausting and draining and sometimes brings on madness. Maybe that was his relationship to books. Or maybe not. Maybe what he expected from books, as I’d like to believe now that he’s dead, was messages in a bottle or hard drugs or windows through which, on rare occasions, one sees Alice’s white rabbit skim past like a lightning bolt.

  According to Braithwaite, who was at his funeral, at some point a rabbit really did run between the gravestones. Not a white rabbit but a gray or brown one, maybe a hare, though from the same family in the end.

  THE REAL WAY TO GET TO MADRID

  Of the many ways to get to Madrid, my favorite is hitchhiking, like when I was Poil de Carotte, in the melancholy words of Renard in his Journal, the time he wet his bed just a little because he was sick and nothing could ever be right again, if it’s possible to wet one’s bed just a little in a world (and in a bed, which is the flip side of the coin on which the metaphor of the world is etched) where the density of voluntary and involuntary acts is anything but sleep or desire, but instead a tangible and in some way irremediable reality: a yellow liquid that runs down your leg, a liquid that the French author, Schwob’s great friend, observes with curiosity and indifference, reminded of himself as a boy, and also of himself as written by himself but so long ago now.

  Of the many hotels in Madrid, I prefer the ones between the Plaza de Santa Ana and the Plaza de Lavapiés. Just like when I used to hitchhike and I could go for days without eating or sleeping. Although I’m acquainted with better hotels, like the Wellington, for example, which is the hotel where one day I saw the Baroness von Thyssen sitting alone in the lobby, wrapped in a white fur coat as if it were a shield or the kind of rough quilt that bums and the homeless use to protect themselves from the elements in winter, her look rapidly morphing from baroness to commoner.

  When you think about it, living in Madrid or being there isn’t much different from living or being in Tacuarembó. The air, maybe, is different. It’s so clear that sometimes it blinds the soul, allowing us to see more clearly: the notional streets and the Castilian Spanish, the kind of slang they speak so well in the old capital of the mother country.

  And the women, the native daughters of Madrid, the blondes and the brunettes, add mystery to a place already rich in mystery, although it’s well known that the Spanish, like Latin Americans, aren’t just poorly educated but also no good in bed. That’s the source of the look one sees in the eyes of the women of Madrid: part sarcasm and part Merimée.

  The truth is that Madrid is a city that doesn’t exist — despite the warriors and priests who left the capital and never came back, despite the women of Madrid, melancholy and practical in the meseta’s least pragmatic region.

  Or maybe Madrid is an imaginary city, to which one has to hitchhike, not fly, and to which one can only come when one is twenty-five, not nearly fifty.

  THE BUKOWSKI OF HAVANA

  To call someone the Bukowski of Havana might even be flattering in a way, more of a compliment than an insult, but to say such a thing about a writer, a Cuban writer, I don’t know, it could be taken as an open or veiled expression of contempt, because Bukowski, who was an excellent poet, a drunken poet shaped by the reading of bad translations of Li Po, another legendary drunk, has fallen into discredit in recent years, which is something that for the most part seems unfair, since even if he never really shone as a novelist, as a writer of short stories in a tradition that stretches from Twain to Ring Lardner he’s the author of some notable works.

  The critics call Pedro Juan Gutiérrez the Bukowski of Havana, and in fact the Cuban writer and the American writer have a number of things in common: a lifetime of odd jobs, most seemingly unrelated to literature; belated success; a simple style of writing (although here one has to be very careful); shared subjects like women, alcohol, and the struggle to live just one more week. Also, like Bukowski’s, Gutiérrez’s novels are notably inferior to his stories.

  Simply put, Pedro Juan isn’t taken seriously, which is something that I imagine he couldn’t care less about, since on the one hand he’s used to not being taken seriously and on the other hand I don’t think that’s quite what he wants anyway. His public image couldn’t be more contradictory: there are those who see him as the ultimate priapic figure, the authentic Caribbean goods. In this sense Gutiérrez is like an unchained sexual Prometheus. His attraction to women knows neither age (though certainly no one has ever claimed he was a pedophile; on the contrary) or race (Gutiérrez flies the rainbow flag), or personal grudges (he could fall in love with the worst hellcats on Earth). I know readers who ask where this satyr finds the time to write, since he seems to be fucking all day long. I also know readers who think that Gutiérrez is a spy for Castro’s regime and that his books are written by a team of literary commissars while he carries out his espionage duties. Castro’s secret police would have to be truly deranged to invent a writer like this.

  In Gutiérrez’s stories, besides sex, drugs, and the survival instinct, the protagonist is Havana. A pitiful Havana in a state of coma, where the Revolution isn’t even a joke anymore. Actually, Gutiérrez’s Havana isn’t comatose; it’s anemic and feverish. Bucharest and Kiev or Sofia were comatose. But the fragility of the citizens of Havana resembles the fragility of the citizens of those formerly communist cities and also is not much different from the fragility of the citizens of any other big city in Latin America. Gutiérrez’s stories, in this sense, insert themselves i
nto the chaos of history (and not just into the chaos of the stories of individuals), and though Gutiérrez may be the Bukowski of Havana, they’re more real and authentic and often much better written than the stories of authors dubbed serious by the critics, authors who are still struggling in the increasingly pestilent waters of the Boom, to give an example close to home, or who try, usually pathetically, to cross-dress in the garb of mandarin aloofness and aristocracy on a continent where there is no aristocracy and where the most terrible things happen inches from our wan faces (if they can be called faces).

  Cuba is in bad shape. Latin America is in bad shape. Gutiérrez doesn’t seem to be in much better shape. But I fear he remains faithful to his principles or to his nature. Whoever wants to judge for himself should read Dirty Havana Trilogy or the three paperback volumes in which Anagrama has collected all of his published stories.

  SERGIO GONZÁLEZ RODRÍGUEZ IN THE EYE OF THE STORM

  A few years ago, my friends in Mexico got tired of me asking for information — more and more detailed information, too — about the killings of women in Ciudad Juárez, and they decided, apparently by common accord, to hand the job over to Sergio González Rodríguez, who is a novelist, essayist, reporter, and probably all kinds of other things besides, and who, according to my friends, was the person who knew most about this case, a unique case in the annals of Latin American crime: more than three hundred women raped and killed in an extremely short period of time, between 1993 and 2002, in a city on the U.S. border with a population of just under one million.

  I don’t remember now what year it was when I began to correspond with Sergio González Rodríguez. All I know is that my fondness and admiration for him have only grown with time. His technical help — if I can call it that — in the writing of my novel, which I have yet to finish and don’t know whether I’ll ever finish, has been substantial. Out just now is his book Huesos en el desierto [Bones in the Desert] (Anagrama), a book that delves directly into the horror. Sergio is here in Barcelona to celebrate its publication, and soon there will be more celebrations in Mexico City and then in Guadalajara, during the Book Fair. And the book will be distributed throughout Latin America. And surely translated into other languages. But before all that, other things happened. Among them, an assassination attempt that Sergio escaped by a hair. And various stalkings. And threats and tapped phones. Things that would have frightened off anyone else, but that Sergio, with stunning calm, has experienced like someone watching the rain fall.