Roberto Bolaño - Between Parentheses - Essays, Articles and Speeches, 1998-2003

All is not lost, Ferdydurkists. A few months ago, almost on tiptoe, one of the most luminous books of this century of shadows became available for purchase. It’s Ferdydurke (Quaderns Crema), the first novel by Witold Gombrowicz, originally published in 1937, and whose translation into Spanish, sponsored by the literary circles of Café Rex in Buenos Aires, surely constitutes a landmark of extravagance and generosity, in other words one of our century’s landmarks of literary joy. That legendary translation, whose main author was the Cuban writer Virgilio Piñera, is difficult if not impossible to find in the bookstores of Spain, which has deprived readers of the key work in the Gombrowiczian oeuvre, unless one could lay hands on the French or Italian or German version. From now on, however, we’ll no longer have to go so far to look for it. Anyone who can read Catalan and who has two thousand pesetas in his pocket will be granted access to one of the key novels of this century, in an excellent translation by Anna Rubió and Jerzy Slawomirski. All of this is made possible thanks to Jaume Vallcorba Plana, a model publisher if ever there was one, in whose catalogues one can find jewels like Lord Byron’s Cain , Hölderlin’s The Death of Empedocles , and Novalis’s Fragments , as well as contemporary Catalan writers like Quim Monzó, Ponç Puigdevall, or Maurici Pla, to name just a few. What was going through Vallcorba’s head when he decided to publish Ferdydurke ? I don’t know. Anything, except thoughts of profit. What I do know is that a publisher who sets out to publish Gombrowicz is a publisher to watch and that a language — Catalan — in which it’s possible to reproduce the work of the great Polish writer is certainly a living language, a language in which Filidor can live on and continue to scheme. All is not lost, Ferdydurkists.

A little while ago I was in Berlin to read from my novel Nazi Literature in the Americas . All fine and good. The hospitality of the Berliners, beginning with my translator and friend Heinrich von Berenberg, was commendable; the food wasn’t bad; I walked all over the city, day and night, and met lots of interesting people. All unexceptional. Except for two things. First: the organization put me up in a mansion on the Wannsee, the lake on the edge of the city where, in 1811, von Kleist killed himself along with the unfortunate Henriette Vogel, who did in fact resemble a bird, but a drab and ugly bird, one of those birds that doesn’t have to spread its wings to resemble a gateway to darkness, to the unknown. But I read von Kleist when I was twenty, and I thought I had left him behind. I remembered the Prince of Homburg , which dramatizes the struggle between the writer and his father, between the individual and the State; I remembered Michael Kohlhaas , published as part of the old Austral series, a story about bravery and its twin, stupidity, and also a story called The Earthquake in Chile , published in 1806, from which there are still moral and aesthetic lessons to be learned. But the fact is that I’d left von Kleist behind. I’d been told that other writers stayed at the mansion and that the scene there was lively, especially after sundown, which was when the residents, Eastern Europeans, a Greek or two, the odd African, came out to drink and discuss literature in one of the castle’s countless halls. The first night I got in very late. They left me the key in a kind of mailbox made to look like a drainpipe, with a note informing me of my room number. Oddly, the key opened one of the outside doors to the castle, a side door once used by the service, as well as the door to my room. Surprise. There wasn’t a soul anywhere. The place was huge. In one hall I saw fallen flags (Heinrich said that during the day they were shooting a period film). In another hall there was a long table. In another there was nothing but an ancient iron lamp that didn’t work. And there were corridors everywhere, shadows that stretched high up the walls, and stairs that led nowhere. When I found my room at last, the window was open and the walls were covered with mosquitos, the mosquitos of Wannsee, a plague the likes of which I hadn’t seen in years, ever since I was in Panama, which in itself was an odd thing, because one can accept mosquitos in Panama or the Amazon as a normal if annoying phenomenon, whereas in Berlin it’s certainly not what one expects. Upset, I went to ask someone for insect repellant and only then did I realize that I was alone in that enormous mansion on the lake. There were no writers, no staff, no one. I was the only overnight guest there that week. On tiptoe, trying not to make a sound, I went back to my room and spent all night killing bugs. After my fortieth victim I stopped counting. In between I pressed my nose to the window, which I didn’t dare to open now, and I thought I could see, on the shores of the Wannsee, the ghost of von Kleist dancing in a cloud of phosphorescent mosquitoes. But one can get used to anything and at last I fell asleep.

The second strange thing I saw in Berlin was much more disturbing. I was with a friend, in her car, driving along the Bismarckstrasse, when all of a sudden a stretch of boulevard no more than fifteen yards long became a street in Lloret de Mar. The very same street.

For the Robert Duvall character in Apocalypse Now , there was no better breakfast than the smell of napalm. According to him, it smelled like victory. Perhaps. The smell of burning (with that tinge of acid said to be left hanging in the air) is sometimes like victory, and other times like fear.

I’ve never smelled napalm. I’ve smelled gunpowder, and gunpowder definitely doesn’t smell like victory. Sometimes it smells like verbena and other times it smells like fear. In contrast, the smell of tear gas (which tends to precede the smell of gunpowder in some countries) is reminiscent of sporting events and rotting guts. Triumphal marches always smell like dust, a hyaline and solar dust that clings like leprosy to the skin and arms. Crowds in closed spaces smell like dust and death, which may be the same thing. Crowds in big open spaces, like stadiums or esplanades, smell like fear. I hate soccer matches, concerts, and rallies: the fear that clings to them is unbearable.

Instead, I like to walk with the dirty old men along the Paseo Marítimo in Blanes in the summer. I like to watch the beach. There, from that triumphal throng of half-naked bodies, beautiful and ugly, fat and thin, perfect and imperfect, a magnificent smell wafts up to us, the smell of suntan lotion. I like the smell that rises from that mass of bodies in all shapes and sizes. It isn’t strong, but it’s bracing. Though it isn’t perfect. Sometimes it’s even a sad smell. And possibly metaphysical. The thousand lotions, the sunscreens. They smell of democracy, of civilization.

A while ago I was in Toledo with Carolina and our son Lautaro and we visited the poet Olvido García Valdés and her partner, the poet Miguel Casado. I had come to know Miguel through a kind of epistolary and telephonic friendship, and through my admiration for his poetry, in my judgment some of the liveliest being written in Spain today. Actually, my friendship with Miguel began in an unusual way. One day I received a letter from him. My ignorance of the wasps’ nest of contemporary Spanish poetry meant that his name didn’t ring any bells, but I suspected that he might be a poet and in response I asked him to send me some of his poems. Miguel sent me a journal, El signo del gorrión [The Sign of the Swallow], and — much later, as befits a Castilian poet, by nature modest and retiring — one of his books. From that moment on I became a faithful reader of his work. The poets of his generation that I had read struck me as terrible, and for years I had chosen to ignore what was being written in Spanish poetry by those born after 1950, contenting myself with reading and rereading Pere Gimferrer, Leopoldo Panero, and a few others of the previous generation. But discovering Miguel Casado reconciled me to a certain extent with the poetry of my own generation, though it would be more accurate to say that it reconciled me with one poet of my generation; in any case a friendship grew up between us, and Miguel’s collections of poems became daily fare, the kind of books that once read are left somewhere around the house near at hand and that one takes to the movies or the bathroom, rereading one or two poems at random, and whose ability to inspire discomfort, reflection, and aesthetic pleasure doesn’t wane as time goes by. The three books of his that I own ( Inventario [Inventory], published by Hiperión, and Falso movimiento [False Move] and La mujer automática [The Automatic Woman], both Cátedra), were dedicated succinctly to Olvido. I didn’t know back then that Olvido was Olvido García Valdés, considered by many to be the best Spanish woman poet of the twentieth century, which sounds extreme, but isn’t so much if one considers the scarcity of female voices in twentieth-century Spanish poetry. Anyway, that was my baggage before traveling to Toledo to spend a few days there. I had read Miguel in a conscientious way and each reading had brought him closer to me. I hadn’t read Olvido (although I did know her by name long before I met Miguel) and what people told me about her was wild and even terrifying. There were those who compared her to Santa Teresa, others who said that she was too serious, even gruff, and those who claimed that even her friends were stunned by her arrogance. I looked for a picture of her. I found one in which she appeared with a group of writers, but it was blurry. In another, published in a poetry journal, she was surrounded by old men, poets of Madrid, like in the Poussin painting Susanna and the Elders . Finally I went to a bookstore in Barcelona and looked for one of her books, but they told me that the most recent ones had sold out and there was no picture of her in the only one they had. So we left for Toledo with no face for Olvido García Valdés. What we finally discovered exceeded all our expectations. In a single day, hand in hand with Miguel, but especially hand in hand with Olvido, we saw all the synagogues, mosques, and cathedrals of Toledo. We lunched and dined opulently. At the first toy store we passed, Olvido bought my son three toys. My son, naturally, fell in love with her. And continuing on in the same Rabelaisian vein, that night, after showering, I read straight through Ella, los pájaros [ She, the Birds ], a collection of poems by Olvido that dazzled me as only true poetry can dazzle. Much later, when I was back in Blanes and far from Toledo, I read Caza nocturna [Night Hunt], her most recent book (Ave del Paraíso, 1997), and my admiration for her grew even more, if possible. We have almost nothing in common. The poets she likes I don’t like, and vice versa.