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

New Chilean fiction, which is hardly new and sometimes hardly fiction, has just gained a new practitioner: Roberto Brodsky, a Chilean born in 1957, who in this first novel delves confidently into horror’s forgotten corners. The novel is called El peor de los héroes [The Worst of Heroes] (Alfaguara, 1999) and its subject, or one of its subjects, is sadness in the face of the irrevocable, though it can also be read as an existential adventure story. The protagonist, lawyer Bruno Marconi, recalls Chile’s recent history as he tries to piece together a contemporary picture in his memory and the reader’s mind: that of bodies piled in a refrigerator like a shipment of frozen chicken, which Marconi discovers by chance. Roberto Brodsky, in addition to being from the same country as me and sharing the same name, is my friend, and sometimes I ask myself how often he’s been on the verge of death, in what strange way he isn’t also the “worst of heroes.” When he was a boy, fishing on a deserted beach, he got his hand caught in the rocks. Then the tide began to rise and no matter how hard he pulled he couldn’t get it loose. When he told me this story I imagined he was making it up, but deep down I knew it was true. I also imagined that Brodsky the boy had died and I was talking to a ghost. At the last minute, of course, a fisherman appeared who dove down and freed his hand from the rocks. A few months ago Brodsky was at my house in Blanes with Paula, his wife, and his incorrigible son, Pascual. El peor de los heroes hadn’t come out yet. We talked about sadness and bravery, two constants in his novel, and I think sadness won. We talked about laughter, which follows Brodsky the way other people are followed by dogs. We talked about likely and unlikely adventures and we agreed that the two were one and the same.

July has been a strange month. The other day I went to the beach and I saw a woman of about thirty, pretty, wearing a black bikini, who was reading standing up. At first I thought she was about to lie down on her towel, but when I looked again she was still standing, and after that I didn’t take my eyes off her. For two hours, more or less, she read standing up, walked over to the water, didn’t go in, let the waves lap her shins, went back to her spot, kept reading, occasionally put the book down while still standing, leaned over a few times and took a big bottle of Pepsi out of a bag and drank, then picked up the book again, and, finally, without ever bending a knee, put her things away and left. Earlier the same day, I saw three girls, all in thongs, gorgeous, one of them had a tattoo on one buttock, they were having a lively conversation, and every once in a while they got in the water and swam and then they would lie down again on their mats, basically a completely normal scene, until all of a sudden a cell phone rang, I heard it and thought it was mine until I realized it had been a while since I had a cell phone, and then I knew the phone belonged to one of them. I heard them talking. All I can say is that they weren’t speaking Catalan or Spanish. But they sounded deadly serious. Then I watched two of them get up, like zombies, and walk toward some rocks. I got up too and pretended to brush the sand off my trunks. On the rocks, I watched them talk to a huge, hideously ugly man covered in hair, in fact one of the hairiest men I’ve ever seen in my life. They knelt before him and listened attentively without saying a word, and then they went back to where their friend was waiting for them and everything went on as before, as if nothing had happened. Who are these women? I asked myself once it was dark and I had showered and dressed. One drank Pepsi. The others bowed down to a bear. I know who they are. But I don’t really know.

There’s a new novel out ( Braudel por Braudel [Braudel by Braudel] , El Acantilado) by my friend A.G. Porta, whom I’ve known since his son was practically an infant and now the kid is twenty-one or twenty-two, a film student, and is taller than his father and taller than me, too. I remember that I met A. G. Porta in 1978, at the offices of a fringe Barcelona publishing house that only published poetry and that resignedly called itself La Cloaca, or The Sewer. It wasn’t a great start, but for us — poets at the time and the foosball champions of Barcelona’s fifth district — it was at least a promising start. I’ll never forget that when I didn’t have a cent my friend would show up at my apartment on Calle Tallers with yogurt and cigarettes, sensible gifts. Then the years went by. I left for Girona and later Blanes, and A. G. Porta stayed in Barcelona. But my first novel is also his first novel, for the simple reason that we co-wrote it. Its title: Consejos de un discipulo de Morrison a un fanático de Joyce [Advice from a Morrison Disciple to a Joyce Fanatic]. Many times I’ve been asked which of us was the Morrison disciple and which of us was the Joyce fanatic. A. G. Porta, clearly, was the Joyce fanatic. He’d read everything by Joyce and in fact his subsequent long silence is in some way a product of his reading. I remember that for many years he wrote or collected random sentences from Ulysses with which he assembled poems that he called readymades, à la Duchamp. Some were very good. Now, at last, he’s written another novel. Braudel por Braudel is about life, about the flow of life, about appearances, about deceit, and about happiness. His writing is as clear as a Hockney painting. Whoever picks up the novel won’t be able to put it down until the last page.

One is prepared for friendship, not for friends. And sometimes not even for friendship, but at least we try: usually we flail in the darkness, a darkness that’s not foreign to us, a darkness that comes from inside us and meshes with a purely external reality, with the darkness of certain gestures, certain shadows that we once thought were familiar and that in fact are as strange as a dinosaur.

Sometimes that’s what a friend is: the distant shape of a dinosaur crossing a swamp, a dinosaur that we can’t grab or call or warn of anything. Friends are strange: they disappear. They’re very strange: sometimes, after many years, they turn up again and although most have nothing to say to us anymore, some do, and they say it.

Recently I had the rare privilege of seeing an old friend again. I met him in Chile, in 1973, and I saw him again last year. After the usual niceties, my friend launched into his story, telling it to my wife and me. It was a story full of danger, adventure, prisons, bloodshed. At a certain moment he recalled a night on which two kids dodged the bullets of a night patrol, leaping through the yards of a suburban neighborhood. My wife was listening carefully. I started to listen carefully too. It didn’t sound real. One of those kids was my friend. When I asked him who the other one was, he said: Don’t you remember? No, I didn’t remember. The other one was you, he said. At first I didn’t believe him. That night had been erased from my memory. But later I remembered and it was then that I saw the dinosaur or the shadow of the dinosaur slipping across the swamp with every gun in the world pointed at its head.

The other day I was on my way back from America and it was night and the plane was over Brazil, I guess, and everyone or almost everyone was asleep; the plane was flying with the cabin lights dimmed and there was a movie on the TV, a comedy, I think, that played silently except for the insomniacs, except for the fanatic omnivores of film, when suddenly a voice came over the speakers and told us to fasten our seatbelts and then a stewardess who only spoke English hurried down the aisle waking us and telling us to put on our seatbelts, and the seatbelt lights came on, ordering us to fasten our seatbelts and not to unfasten them until further notice. And we did as we were told, and the plane entered a patch of turbulence that didn’t wake us up although in our dreams we felt the creaking of the plane, the vibrating, as if another dream had invaded our dream or as if we were sick in the middle of the dream (inside the dream) and that was all there was to it. But then the plane shuddered all along its length and we began to drop. My wife, one of the insomniacs, clutched our son and me. I woke up just when all the plane’s lights (already dim) went off, including the TV and its movie. I woke up and it was dark and there were screams in the dark. The plane was dropping at an impressive speed, although the word impressive is meaningless here. The sense I had, huddled with my wife and son, was of reality. A dense, heavy, irrevocable reality. There was nothing fake. No lights, no movies, no stewardesses telling us what to do. Cries and whimpers, yes. An old sense of reality familiar to all human beings. Then, ten seconds later, the plane leveled out. Some people went back to sleep. Others asked for whiskey. One of the passengers claimed to have seen a stewardess praying on her knees in the kitchen.