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

I came to this town by chance, many years ago now. I came one summer to open a store in Los Pinos and I stayed. Of course, I knew nothing about stores. And my time as a salesman was brief and in a way it brought an end to the cycle of all my countless extra-literary jobs. But I had heard of Blanes before. In fact, the first time I read its name was in Mexico, in the early 1970s, in a novel by Juan Marsé. I even remember the color of the Mexican sky during the two days it took me to read the novel. In it, a migrant laborer from Murcia, an interloper called Pijoaparte, who makes a living in part by stealing motorcycles, falls in love with a rich girl from Barcelona (she’s stunningly beautiful too) whose name is Teresa. Teresa’s parents have a house in Blanes, where the family spends the summers. The novel is called Ultimas tardes con Teresa [Last Afternoons with Teresa] and I advise those who haven’t read it to go to the bookstore right now and buy it. It’s Blanes in there. Not a real Blanes, but the spirit of Blanes or one of the spirits of Blanes, the paradise unattainable by the Murcian transplant Pijoaparte and the paradise attained by the Chilean transplant Bolaño. A paradise that doesn’t call too much attention to itself, with a magnificent slice of sea, the sea that I discovered the first season I spent here, when I wasn’t married yet, “ perquè de formalitat jo només en vaig tenir el dia que em vaig casar ,” as Àngel Planells says, and I walked along the Paseo Marítimo looking for the house of Teresa’s parents, from the mouth of the Tordera to the coves near Lloret, and of course I couldn’t find it, because the urban geography of Blanes as described in Ultimas tardes con Teresa is the urban geography of the soul, the geography of an exceptional writer like Marsé, and maps like those are made so that the heart doesn’t get lost, but they’re not much use if you’re trying to find a real house in a real town. All of this I knew beforehand, of course, but I still went out walking when I had a break at the store, and since walking is tiring I stopped for beers at different bars and I talked to people and in the process I didn’t find Marsé’s house but I did make some friends. My first friends in Blanes were almost all drug addicts. That sounds like an exaggeration, but it’s true. Today most of them are dead. Some died of overdoses, others of AIDS. When I met them they were young, good-looking kids. They weren’t good students, none of them went to college, but they lived their lives — short lives, as it turned out — as if they were part of a vast Greek tragedy. As if they had read Euripides or Sophocles. As if they had read Aristophanes and laughed, though his name meant nothing to them. They weren’t good students. They worked as waiters in the summer, or as construction workers. But they were generous with me and they didn’t ask me where I was from or what I was doing or anything. They were the ghostly children of Pijoaparte. The children that Pijoaparte never had in Blanes with Teresa. Now they’re dead, and almost no one remembers them, naïve kids who thought they were dangerous but who were a danger only to themselves. They welcomed me, gave me my official welcome to the town, you could say, and then I was welcomed by their mothers and fathers, who’d come to Blanes seeking a future for their children, and the tourists who each summer brightened my store, and some wonderful botiguers , straight out of Lazarillo de Tormes or the wildest chapters of Anselm Turmeda, and other kids, like Sebastián, who were princes, but not the reckless kind, because they didn’t shoot up hard drugs, though Sebastian, who really was a prince, could have been killed any number of times in a car or a motorcycle accident and wasn’t killed, and today Sebastián, Sebas, is a king and is married to a queen and has a little prince who I hope will grow up in a tolerant and open-minded Blanes, which is the greatest happiness to which a man can aspire. And I also met many other people in Blanes, by which I mean people who haven’t died, like my friend Waldo, who’s a policeman now and would surely win every shooting competition he entered if he had a decent gun, but who doesn’t win because his gun isn’t a precision instrument like his competitors’ guns. Anyway, Waldo doesn’t care, and he participates, and always places respectably. I hope these words won’t be taken as a tribute to the police but as a tribute to my friend who is a policeman and also the best marksman in Blanes and the surrounding area. And then there’s Narcís Serra, who ran and still runs a video rental store in Los Pinos and who was and I imagine still is one of the funniest people in town and also a good person, with whom I spent whole afternoons discussing the films of Woody Allen (whom Narcís recently spotted in New York, but that’s another story) or talking about thrillers that only he and I and sometimes Dimas Luna, who back then was just a kid doing his military service and who now runs a bar, had seen. And to think of them all at once, Sebastián, Waldo, and Narcís, all three of them married now, all three of them fathers, is a little bit frightening because it means that the years have gone by, it means that all of us, but especially me, are leaving our youth behind, and it brings to mind yet again the word tolerance , which for me is the word that defines Catalonia but especially the word that defines Blanes, a town or small city that despite its problems, despite its defects, is tolerant, is lively and civilized, because without tolerance there is no civilization, without tolerance there are repressive-cities, robot-cities, cities that resemble the mechanical orange of our late lamented Kubrick and our late lamented Burgess, but that will never in any way be cities where we can live. And that’s what Catalonia has taught me and what Blanes has taught me among many other things that I’ve learned here, the most important of which is to take care of my son, who is a citizen of Blanes and a Catalan by birth and not by adoption, like me: a tolerance that can sometimes be mistaken for timidity, but that knows how to be forceful when necessary. And I’ve learned many other things in Blanes, things I might have learned elsewhere but that I had the good fortune of learning here, like eating shrimp, for example, the best in the Mediterranean, according to my friend Jordi, who is a fisherman; and I’ve also learned, or learned again, because one can never let down one’s guard in this respect, not to be embarrassed about being poor (which is something that’s unfortunately common in Latin America where there are so many poor people), and this is important, because in Catalonia one is ashamed of not working, not of being poor. For a writer like me, who hasn’t accumulated wealth or possessions, and who as Àngel Planells says “ vaig passar unes dificultats tremendes, vaig haver de fer una mica de tot ,”‡‡ it’s very important. But back to the festa major. To be honest, I have no idea what saint we’re celebrating. I’ve lived in Blanes for more than fifteen years and I still don’t know. Nor do I want to know. It might be Sant Bonosi or Sant Maximià. It might be Sant Pere. Or Santa Anna. Or Sant Joan. Who knows. Or Eolus, the lord of the winds. Or Vulcan, who is a smith but who if necessary could also be the god of fireworks. As far as I’m concerned, we’re celebrating Blanes itself, which is older than New York. And we’re celebrating all of those who were born here, all of those who at some point came here, all of those who passed through, even if it was only for a day, or a fleeting night, to watch the fireworks, for example. The festa major is no more than that. A symbol that unites us all: Blanenses and Barcelonans, Basques and Andalusians, Gambians and South Americans. A symbol that reminds us that we’re alive and that every day is a treasure. A symbol that reminds us of our individuality, because when it comes down to it all symbols remind us of our individuality and our solitude, but that also reminds us of our need for others: because for there to be a festa there must be friends, family, neighbors, foreigners, strangers in whom we can see ourselves reflected and recognize ourselves or recognize a part of the mystery. And since I began by remembering the dead, I think I should end by remembering the living, the people I see every day or once a week, like the magnificent Mr. Ponsdomènech, the bard of Blanes, who knows how to enjoy people and enjoy each day as it passes, or like Rosa de Trallero, who just lost her husband, my friend Santiago Trallero, or like Santi, who works at Joker Jocs and is a minimalist philosopher, or like the girls at the Bitlloch stationery store, all of them pretty and nice without exception, or like the clerks at the Oms pharmacy, who have a kind word for everyone, and so many other friends that it would be hopeless to try to name them, and to whom I’d like to say that in three days I’m going to South America, but a month from now I hope to be back in Blanes and I also hope that by then no one will remember this clumsy New Year’s speech. And if anyone does remember it, then I hope he’ll be polite enough not to remind me of it. Bones festes a tothom!!