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

And yet his stories are still alive, as is La orquesta de cristal [The Glass Orchestra], a book so hard to find that it’s become a mythical object, and that I don’t dare to call a novel, though I know that if it has to be called something, novel comes closest to fitting. There are two prose writers of the Generación del ’50 who have yet to be discovered: Lihn and Giaconi.

These days it’s strange to think of Lihn, Giaconi, Parra, Teillier, Rodrigo Lira, or Gonzalo Rojas, of poets like Maquieira and Bertoni, of young writers like Contreras and Collyer; it’s strange to think of them, and of so many others. One is left with the strange feeling that for once literature has measured up to reality. The famous re , the re , the re , the re-al-it-y .

My friendship with Rodrigo Fresán is based not only on mutual esteem (and affection, on my side) but also on our endless conversations on the most random topics, which often turn into arguments, though this doesn’t always happen in Barcelona, because I live on the Costa Brava and not even on the Costa Brava but more concretely in the living room of my house in Blanes, and he lives in Barcelona, and despite the fact that both of us travel quite a bit (he more than I), neither of us has a car or knows how to drive, and with time we’re becoming sedentary.

In general, it could be said that we talk about many things. I’ll try to list them in no particular order. 1) The Latin American hell that, especially on weekends, is concentrated around some Kentucky Fried Chickens and McDonald’s. 2) The doings of the Buenos Aires photographer Alfredo Garófano, childhood friend of Rodrigo and now a friend of mine and of anyone with the least bit of discernment. 3) Bad translations. 4) Serial killers and mass murderers. 5) Prospective leisure as the antidote to prospective poetry. 6) The vast number of writers who should retire after writing their first book or their second or their third or their fourth or their fifth. 7) The superiority of the work of Basquiat to that of Haring, or vice versa. 8) The works of Borges and the works of Bioy. 9) The advisablity of retiring to a ranch in Mexico near a volcano to finish writing The Turkey Buzzard Trilogy . 10) Wrinkles in the space-time continuum. 11) The kind of majestic women you’ve never met who come up to you in a bar and whisper in your ear that they have AIDS (or that they don’t). 12) Gombrowicz and his conception of immaturity. 13) Philip K. Dick, whom we both unreservedly admire. 14) The likelihood of a war between Chile and Argentina and its possible and impossible consequences. 15) The life of Proust and the life of Stendhal. 16) The activities of some professors in the United States. 17) The sexual practices of titi monkeys and ants and great cetaceans. 18) Colleagues who must be avoided like limpet mines. 19) Ignacio Echevarría, whom both of us love and admire. 20) Some Mexican writers liked by me and not by him, and some Argentine writers liked by me and not by him. 21) Barcelonan manners. 22) David Lynch and the prolixity of David Foster Wallace. 23) Chabon and Palahniuk, whom he likes and I don’t. 24) Wittgenstein and his plumbing and carpentry skills. 25) Some twilit dinners, which actually, to the surprise of the diner, become theater pieces in five acts. 26) Trashy TV game shows. 27) The end of the world. 28) Kubrick’s films, which Fresán loves so much that I’m beginning to hate them. 29) The incredible war between the planet of the novel-creatures and the planet of the story-beings. 30) The possibility that when the novel awakes from its iron dreams, the story will still be there.

Of course, these thirty items come nowhere near to exhausting our topics of conversation. Let me add just a couple of things. I laugh a lot when I talk to Fresán. We almost never talk about death.

A few months ago I was flying from Madrid to Barcelona and I ended up sitting next to a young guy, a Chilean. He turned out to be from Los Ángeles, Bío-Bío, the place I lived longest in Chile. He was on his way to Cairo, on a business trip, god knows what he was selling, and our conversation was brief and not particularly illuminating. He said that Los Ángeles had grown a lot but was still a town, he mentioned two or three factories, he talked about a ranch that produced I don’t know what. He was an ordinary and profoundly ignorant kid, but he knew how to travel first class.

After the plane took off I traded seats with a woman who wanted to be next to her children and I went to sit next to a photographer who was sweating profusely. He looked like a Pakistani, so I thought that maybe after a while he would pull out a nail file and hijack the plane. If I have to die, I said to myself, I’d rather die gnawing on the ankle of a Pakistani than sitting next to a Chilean from Los Ángeles. Then I began to think about my childhood and the part of my adolescence that I spent in Bío-Bío.

To my surprise, I realized that I remembered lots of things. For example, I remembered the wooden walls of the house where we lived. And how the walls (and the floorboards) were soaked during the endless southern rains. I also remembered a dwarf lady who lived five houses away. A dwarf lady from Germany, teacher of something at some school, who was the living image of exile, or anyway the nineteenth-century image, the Pontian image. For a while I thought this woman was actually an extraterrestrial.

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.

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.