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

by Roberto Bolaño

  Daybreak in Tossa is different. To begin with, in Tossa there’s a Chagall (The Blue Violinist), and that sets a place apart. Chagall himself described Tossa as a paradis bleu. From celeste to blue there’s only a blink, a slight shift or fading of the light, and that’s Tossa: a luminiferous expansion and contraction. In other words, Tossa is a miracle. In other words, Tossa is the outcome — always uncertain — of a specific notion of beauty. With scarcely 4,000 inhabitants (Lloret has 15,000 and Blanes 30,000), Tossa is the little sister of the Maritime Jungle, the pretty one, the thin one, and the only one that, in addition to a Chagall, has a statue of Ava Gardner and a ghost. The statue of Ava is life-size and visitors often have their picture taken with her. They’re surprised by her height: she’s short, a bit over five feet, and sometimes one is struck by the suspicion that the statue isn’t really as true to life, especially height-wise, as it claims to be. But it’s Ava, Saint Ava, and she’s in Tossa, where she was as happy as a clam, and at night her ghost rises up from the statue and strolls along the bay of Tossa and along the Moltó and Bona coves, and on moonlit nights it reaches the coves of Giverola and Senyor Ramon. And this isn’t a legend. It’s absolutely true. One rainy spring afternoon I saw Ava walking the slopes of the massif of Cadiretes (behind Tossa).

  Tossa has a ghost. Blanes doesn’t. What Blanes has instead is pure energy. I can’t remember when it was that I first came here. All I know is that it was by train and many years ago. Juan Marsé, in Ultimas tardes con Teresa [Last Afternoons with Teresa], turned Blanes into the unattainable paradise of all Spain’s Julien Sorels. I read the novel in Mexico and the sonority of the word Blanes (which comes from the Latin blanda) enthralled me. We’re all Pijoaparte, but I never guessed that one day I would come to Blanes and that I’d never want to leave. As a desert guidebook (a guide to the desert of the mind) would put it, there are many sights of interest: the Mar I Murtra botanical garden, founded by Karl Faust in 1924, where one can admire more than 4,000 species of trees and plants; the Gothic fountain, the town jewel, built at the end of the fourteenth century by Violante de Cabrera, daughter of the Count of Prades, in the shape of a hexagon with six jets of water and six gargoyles, a fountain so beautiful and modest, there next to the old movie theater, that one asks oneself how it occured to the lovely Violante, where the master craftsmen who built it came from, how we can possibly pass it each day without weeping. And as if that weren’t enough, there’s the Pinya de Rosa botanical garden, founded by Riviere de Caralt and furnished with more than 7,000 species, a garden that definitely makes Blanes a town with a high index of exotic trees and plants; the chapel of Our Lady of Hope, where in the old days the chaplain taught grammar to the town’s children; the twelfth-century chapel of Santa Bárbara from whose bell tower the Blanenses were alerted of the presence of enemy ships; and the chapel of San Juan, built at the highest point in town by Grau de Cabrera in the mid-thirteenth century, which is the first thing one sees when one arrives by train from Barcelona, the tower of San Juan, tall and outlined against the sky and the Mediterranean. But there’s another type of monument or attraction that may be the kind I like best. The black rice at Can Tarrés, for example, or the black rice at Dimas’s restaurant, or the market that every day, except for Sundays, stretches from one end to the other of Calle de Dentro, or the fish market, where the fish are auctioned every day, or the faint presence of the great writer Josep Maria de Sagarra, who in the ’50s summered in Blanes with his young son Joan, or the big old house where Ruyra lived, or the rhapsode Ponsdomènech who still today, as he nears ninety, strolls the town reading his poems to those who need or want to hear them. Blanes is like Ponsdomènech. Blanes is like Violante de Cabrera, who instead of building fortifications or walls, like the rest of her clan, built a “Gothic civil fountain,” in the middle of the street, for the use and benefit of all. Blanes is like the Catalans of the town who went off to fight in Cuba and the Andalusians who came here to work and later left to fight on the fronts of Aragón and the Ebro. Blanes is like its beaches, where each summer Europe’s bravest come to lie in the sun, people from here and from the other side of the Pyrenees, the fat, the ugly, the skeletal, the prettiest girls of Barcelona, children of all kinds, the old, the terminally ill, the hung over, all half naked, all exposed to the Mediterranean sun and the sympathetic gaze of the tower of San Juan, and the smell that rises from the beaches (it’s nice to remember this now, in the dead of winter) is the smell of body lotion, of tanning cream, of sunscreen, a smell that is what it is, of course, but that is also the smell of democracy, history, civilization.

  Beach

  I gave up heroin and went home and began the methadone treatment administered at the outpatient clinic and I didn’t have much else to do except get up each morning and watch TV and try to sleep at night, but I couldn’t, something made me unable to close my eyes and rest, and that was my routine until one day I couldn’t stand it anymore and I bought myself a pair of black swim trunks at a store in the center of town and I went to the beach, wearing the trunks and with a towel and a magazine, and I spread my towel not too far from the sea and then I lay down and spent a while trying to decide whether to go into the sea or not, I could think of lots of reasons to go in but also some not to (the children playing at the water’s edge, for example), until at last it was too late and I went home, and the next morning I bought some sunscreen and I went to the beach again, and at around twelve I headed to the clinic and got my dose of methadone and said hello to some familiar faces, no friends, just familiar faces from the methadone line who were surprised to see me in swim trunks, but I acted as if there was nothing strange about it, and then I walked back to the beach and this time I went for a dip and tried to swim, though I couldn’t, and that was enough for me, and the next day I went back to the beach and put on sunscreen all over and then I fell asleep on the sand, and when I woke up I felt very well-rested, and I hadn’t burned my back or anything, and this went on for a week or maybe two, I can’t remember, the only thing I’m sure of is that each day I got more tan and though I didn’t talk to anyone each day I felt better, or different, which isn’t the same thing but in my case it seemed like it, and one day an old couple turned up on the beach, I remember it clearly, it looked like they’d been together for a long time, she was fat, or round, and must have been about seventy, and he was thin, or more than thin, a walking skeleton, I think that was why I noticed him, because usually I didn’t take much notice of the people on the beach, but I did notice them, and it was because the guy was so skinny, I saw him and got scared, fuck, it’s death coming for me, I thought, but nothing was coming for me, it was just two old people, the man maybe seventy-five and the woman about seventy, or the other way around, and she seemed to be in good health, but he looked as if he were going to breathe his last breath any time now or as if this were his last summer, and at first, once I was over my initial fright, it was hard for me to look away from the old man’s face, from his skull barely covered by a thin layer of skin, but then I got used to watching the two of them surreptitiously, lying on the sand, on my stomach, with my face hidden in my arms, or from the boardwalk, sitting on a bench facing the beach, as I pretended to brush sand off myself, and I remember that the old woman always came to the beach with an umbrella, under which she quickly ducked, and she didn’t wear a swimsuit, although sometimes I saw her in a swimsuit, but usually she was in a very loose summer dress that made her look fatter than she was, and under that umbrella the old woman sat reading, she had a very t
hick book, while the skeleton that was her husband lay on the sand in nothing but a tiny swimsuit, almost a thong, and drank in the sun with a voracity that brought me distant memories of junkies frozen in blissful immobility, of junkies focused on what they were doing, on the only thing they could do, and then my head ached and I left the beach, I had something to eat on the Paseo Marítimo, a little dish of anchovies and a beer, and then I smoked a cigarette and watched the beach through the window of the bar, and then I went back and the old man and the old woman were still there, she under her umbrella, he exposed to the sun’s rays, and then, suddenly, for no reason, I felt like crying and I got in the water and swam and when I was a long way from the shore I looked at the sun and it seemed strange to me that it was there, that big thing so unlike us, and then I started to swim toward the beach (twice I almost drowned) and when I got back I dropped down next to my towel and sat there panting for quite a while, but without losing sight of the old couple, and then I may have fallen asleep on the sand, and when I woke up the beach was beginning to empty, but the old man and the old woman were still there, she with her novel under the umbrella and he on his back in the sun with his eyes closed and a strange expression on his skull-like face, as if he could feel each second passing and he was savoring it, though the sun’s rays were weak, though the sun had already dipped behind the buildings along the beach, behind the hills, but that didn’t seem to bother him, and then I watched him and I watched the sun, and sometimes my back stung a little, as if that afternoon I’d burned myself, and I looked at them and then I got up, I slung my towel over my shoulders like a cape and went to sit on one of the benches of the Paseo Marítimo, where I pretended to brush non-existent sand off my legs, and from up there I had a different vision of the couple, and I said to myself that maybe he wasn’t about to die, I said to myself that maybe time didn’t exist in the way I’d always thought it existed, I reflected on time as the sun’s distance lengthened the shadows of the buildings, and then I went home and took a shower and examined my red back, a back that didn’t seem to belong to me but to someone else, someone I wouldn’t get to know for years and then I turned on the TV and watched shows that I didn’t understand at all, until I fell asleep in my chair, and the next day it was back to the same old thing, the beach, the clinic, the beach again, a routine that was sometimes interrupted by new people on the beach, a woman, for example, who was always standing, who never lay down in the sand, who wore a bikini bottom and a blue T-shirt, and who only went into the water up to the knees, and who was reading a book, like the old woman, but this woman read it standing up, and sometimes she knelt down, though in a very odd way, and picked up a big bottle of Pepsi and drank, standing up, of course, and then put the bottle back down on the towel, which I don’t know why she’d brought since she never lay down on it or went swimming, and sometimes this woman scared me, she seemed too strange, but most of the time I just felt sorry for her, and I saw other strange things too, all kinds of things happen at the beach, maybe because it’s the only place where we’re all half-naked, though nothing too important ever happened, once as I was walking along the shore I thought I saw an ex-junkie like me, sitting on a mound of sand with a baby on his lap, and another time I saw some Russian girls, three Russian girls, who were probably hookers and who were talking on cell phones and laughing, all three of them, but what really interested me most was the old couple, partly because I had the feeling that the old man might die at any moment, and when I thought this, or when I realized I was thinking this, crazy ideas would come into my head, like the thought that after the old man’s death there would be a tsunami and the town would be destroyed by a giant wave, or that the earth would begin to shake and a massive earthquake would swallow up the whole town in a wave of dust, and when I thought about all this, I hid my head in my hands and began to weep, and while I was weeping I dreamed (or imagined) that it was nighttime, say three in the morning, and I’d left my house and went to the beach, and on the beach I found the old man lying on the sand, and in the sky, up near the stars, but closer to Earth than the other stars, there shone a black sun, an enormous sun, silent and black, and I went down to the beach and lay on the sand too, the only two people on the beach were the old man and me, and when I opened my eyes again I realized that the Russian hookers and the girl who was always standing and the ex-junkie with the baby were watching me curiously, maybe wondering who that weird guy was, the guy with the sunburned shoulders and back, and even the old woman was gazing at me from under her umbrella, interrupting the reading of her interminable book for a few seconds, maybe wondering who that young man was, that man with silent tears running down his face, a man of thirty-five who had nothing at all but who was recovering his will and his courage and who knew that he would live a while longer.

  In Search of the Torico of Teruel

  I left Blanes for Teruel, where I was going to be on the jury for a short-story prize, without knowing very well whether Teruel exists (as they like to claim in Teruel) or not. Of course, I was inclined to think that it existed, but an inner voice — the rapturous voice of desire, which frightens us all — told me that it was possible that Teruel, in fact, didn’t exist. The trip along the highway from Barcelona to Valencia was uneventful. The driver — whose name I unfortunately can’t recall, just as I’m unable to recall the names of anyone else I met on that trip, except Ana María Navales, who more than anything else is a force of nature — talked to me about how good life was in Teruel, about its 30,000 inhabitants (Teruel is the same size as Blanes), about the unemployment rate (notably low), about the happy and well-documented possibility of crossing the whole city from end to end in twenty minutes. The driver was an exemplary citizen of Teruel, an excellent driver, and one could tell that he loved his city. The problems began when we turned off the highway and began to climb towards Teruel. The landscape was very beautiful, with that austere and mocking beauty of certain parts of Aragón; but there were also curves, and for a while now curves have made me sick to my stomach, which meant that several times we had to take breaks at roadside restaurants, places that vaguely reminded me of another time, when my father was a truck driver and we pulled into lost truckstops to eat fried eggs, because the roads of Teruel are lost in time and I began to feel that all zigzagging roads somehow led to Teruel, no matter where they were situated geographically or whether the roads were Chilean or Mexican or even Central American, which was rather disturbing, because everyone knows that nausea plus melancholia tends to be the harbinger of impending illness, and that made me a little sad, because not only did we have to stop at roadside restaurants, we also had to stop out in the open, which gave us the chance to gaze at the towns along the way to Teruel, sad, beautiful little towns, towns that are gradually being abandoned, the driver told me, as I gagged and retched at the side of the road, because the young people are leaving for the cities, for Valencia, Barcelona, Zaragoza, and Madrid, as if the battle of Teruel hadn’t ended and the winter in which the battle was enveloped hadn’t ended either.

  So I was still sick when I caught a glimpse of the towns just outside Teruel and I continued to be sick when we got to the city, crossed a bridge, and looked down into a very deep gorge, like the dry bed of an enormous river, but with houses and buildings where the river once flowed, something which now that I’m no longer sick and able to think more clearly, strikes me as suspiciously wonderful. How could anything have been built there, in that giant ravine? It was an astonishing sight. Like the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, but
the mirror image, with a bridge even passing over the houses. It was like Aragonese cubism in an age when no one makes cubist art anymore, let alone so obstinately. And at the other end of the bridge, Teruel rose like a minimalist labyrinth on a promontory or hill or mesa. This city is much better than people say, was what I thought. I was also thinking that I was sick, and that when I got to the hotel I’d better go straight to bed.