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

The third lineage in play in contemporary or post-Borgesian Argentine literature is the one that begins with Osvaldo Lamborghini. This is the secret current. It’s as secret as the life of Lamborghini, who died in Barcelona in 1985, if I’m not mistaken, and who left as literary executor his most beloved disciple, César Aira, which is like a rat naming a hungry cat as executor.

If Arlt, who as a writer is the best of the three, is the basement of the house that is Argentine literature, and Soriano is a vase in the guest room, Lamborghini is a little box on a shelf in the basement. A little cardboard box, covered in dust. And if you open the box, what you find inside is hell. Forgive me for being so melodramatic. I always have the same problem with Lamborghini. There’s no way to describe his work without falling into hyperbole. The word cruelty fits it like a glove. Harshness does too, but especially cruelty. The unsuspecting reader may glimpse the sort of sadomasochistic game of writing workshops that charitable souls with pedagogical inclinations organize in insane asylums. Perhaps, but that doesn’t go far enough. Lamborghini is always two steps ahead of (or behind) his pursuers.

It’s strange to think about Lamborghini now. He died at forty-five, which means that I’m four years older than he was then. Sometimes I pick up one of his two books, edited by Aira — which is only a figure of speech, since they might just as well have been edited by the linotypist or by the doorman at his publishing house in Barcelona, Serbal — and I can hardly read it, not because I think it’s bad but because it scares me, especially all of Tadeys , an excruciating novel, which I read (two or three pages at a time, not a page more) only when I feel especially brave. Few books can be said to smell of blood, spilled guts, bodily fluids, unpardonable acts.

Today, when it’s so fashionable to talk about nihilists (although what’s usually meant by this is Islamic terrorists, who aren’t nihilists at all), it isn’t a bad idea to take a look at the work of a real nihilist. The problem with Lamborghini is that he ended up in the wrong profession. He should have gone to work as a hit man, or a prostitute, or a gravedigger, which are less complicated jobs than trying to destroy literature. Literature is an armor-plated machine. It doesn’t care about writers. Sometimes it doesn’t even notice they exist. Literature’s enemy is something else, something much bigger and more powerful, that in the end will conquer it. But that’s another story.

Lamborghini’s friends are fated to plagiarize him ad nauseam, something that might — if he could see them vomit — make Lamborghini himself happy. They’re also fated to write badly, horribly, except for Aira, who maintains a gray, uniform prose that, sometimes, when he’s faithful to Lamborghini, crystallizes into memorable works, like the story “Cecil Taylor” or the novella How I Became a Nun , but that in its neo-avantgarde and Rousselian (and utterly acritical) drift, is mostly just boring. Prose that devours itself without finding a way to move forward. Acriticism that translates into the acceptance — qualified, of course — of that tropical figure, the professional Latin American writer, who always has a word of praise for anyone who asks for it.

Of these three lineages — the three strongest in Argentine literature, the three departure points of the literature of doom — I’m afraid that the one which will triumph is the one that most faithfully represents the sentimental rabble, in the words of Borges. The sentimental rabble is no longer the Right (largely because the Right busies itself with publicity and the joys of cocaine and the plotting of currency devaluations and starvation, and in literary matters is functionally illiterate or settles for reciting lines from Martín Fierro ) but the Left, and what the Left demands of its intellectuals is soma, which is exactly what it receives from its masters. Soma, soma, soma Soriano, forgive me, yours is the kingdom.

Arlt and Piglia are another story. Let’s call theirs a love affair and leave them in peace. Both of them — Arlt without a doubt — are an important part of Argentine and Latin American literature, and their fate is to ride alone across the ghost-ridden pampa. But that’s no basis for a school.

Corollary. One must reread Borges.

This preface or prologue or introduction to my Caracas Speech is dedicated to Domingo Miliani, who for me is the incarnation of the classic Latin American intellectual, someone who has read everything and lived everything, and, on top of it all, is a good man. He’s the perfect illustration of the phrase “to know him is to love him.” But I would go even further: to see him is to love him. What do I see when I see Domingo Miliani? I see a brave and intelligent man, I see a good man. You don’t even need to hear him speak. Miliani is part of the generation that is our common legacy. For Latin Americans it’s a luxury — and I say luxury in full consciousness of what I’m saying — to have men like these. A few years ago I wrote a novel about a pilot who was the incarnation of near-absolute evil and who personified in some way the terrible fate of our continent. Domingo Miliani, who has also flown planes, is the incarnation of the good part of our story. He’s one of those men who tried in vain to educate us. We — my turbulent generation — ignored them completely. Among other reasons because we ignored everyone, except for Rimbaud and Lautréamont. But we loved them and each time one of them vanished it was as if a distant uncle had vanished, our mother’s crazy brother, or the forgotten grandfather who leaves an incalculable, intangible inheritance. It has been a joy and a privilege for me to meet him. And that’s the end of this preface.

I’ve always had a problem with Venezuela. A silly problem, fruit of my haphazard education, the most inconsequential of problems, but a problem nonetheless. At its heart, the problem is verbal and geographic. It’s also probably due to a kind of undiagnosed dyslexia. Though by this I don’t mean to say that my mother never took me to the doctor. In fact, until I was ten I was a frequent visitor of doctors’ offices and even hospitals, but after that my mother thought I was strong enough to handle anything. But to get back to my problem. When I was little I played soccer. My number was 11, the same as Pepe and Zagallo in the Sweden World Cup, and I was an enthusiastic but pretty bad player, though my shooting foot was my left foot, and the conventional wisdom is that lefties are always useful to have in a match. In my case that wasn’t true, I was almost never useful, although sometimes — once every six months, say — I made a good play and won back at least a fraction of all the credit I’d lost. At night, as is only natural, I would lie awake thinking, and reflect on the sad state of my soccer career. And it was then that I had the first conscious glimpse of my dyslexia. I was left-footed, but right-handed. That was a fact. I would have liked to be left-handed, but I was right-handed. And that was the problem. For example, when the coach said: pass to the right, Bolaño, I didn’t know where I was supposed to pass the ball. And sometimes, playing on the left side of the field, at the coach’s hoarse shout I even had to stop and think: left-right. Right was the soccer field, to shoot left was to kick the ball out of bounds, toward the few spectators, kids like me, or toward the scrubby vacant lots that surrounded the soccer fields of Quilpué, or Cauquenes, or the province of Bío-Bío. In time, of course, I learned to consult a reference point whenever anyone asked me directions or told me about a street to the right or left, and that reference point wasn’t my writing hand but my shooting foot. And more or less around the same time, or in other words until just yesterday, I had a similar problem with Venezuela. The problem was its capital. For me it was only logical that the capital of Venezuela should be Bogotá. And that the capital of Colombia should be Caracas. Why? Well, on the basis of verbal or alphabetical logic. The v of Venezuela bears a resemblance, almost a family resemblance, to the b of Bogotá.† And the c of Colombia is first cousin to the c of Caracas. This may seem trivial, and it probably is, but for me it became a major problem, so that once, in Mexico, during a lecture I was giving on the urban poets of Colombia, I talked about the force of the Caracas poets, and the audience, people as nice and polite as all of you, were quiet, waiting for me to end this digression on the poets of Caracas and move on to the poets of Bogotá, but I kept talking about the Caracas poets, about their aesthetic of destruction, and I even compared them to the Italian futurists, though without taking the comparison too far, of course, and to the first Lettrists, the group of Isidore Isou and Maurice Lemaître, the group where the seed of Guy Debord’s situationism was planted, and at this point the people in the audience began to wonder, I think, speculating whether the Bogotá poets had all moved together to Caracas, or whether the Caracas poets had played a key role in the development of this new group of Bogotá poets, and when I ended the talk, abruptly, as I liked to end things back then, people got up, clapped timidly, and hurried out to check the flyer at the door, and when I emerged, accompanied by the Mexican poet Mario Santiago, who was always with me and who had surely noticed my mistake, though he didn’t say so because for Mario mistakes and misunderstandings were like Baudelaire’s clouds drifting across the sky, in other words something to be gazed at, not corrected, and on our way out, as I was saying, we bumped into an old Venezuelan poet — and when I say old I think back and he was probably younger than I am now — who said to us with tears in his eyes that there must be some mistake, that he had never heard a word about these mysterious poets from Caracas. At this point in my speech I get the sense that Don Rómulo Gallegos must be turning over in his grave. Who is this person who’s won my prize, he must be thinking. Forgive me, Don Rómulo. But even his Doña Bárbara, with a b , sounds like Venezuela, and Bolívar sounds like Venezuela and Doña Bárbara, too, Bolívar and Bárbara, what a great pair they would have made, although Don Rómulo’s other two great novels, Cantaclaro and Canaima , could easily be Colombian, which leads me to think that they might be, and that there might be a method hidden in my dyslexia, a bastard semiotic or graphological or metasyntactic or phonemic method, or simply a poetic method, and that the underlying truth is that Caracas is the capital of Colombia just as Bogotá is the capital of Venezuela, in the same way that Bolívar, who is Venezuelan, died in Colombia, which is also Venezuela and Mexico and Chile. I don’t know whether you’re following Pobre negro [Poor Black], for example, by Don Rómulo, is an essentially Peruvian novel. La casa verde, or The Green House , by Vargas Llosa, is a Colombian-Venezuelan novel. Terra Nostra , by Fuentes, is an Argentine novel, and I should warn you that it’s best not to inquire as to my reasoning here because the answer would be long and boring. In its extremely mysterious way, the pataphysical school teaches the science of imaginary solutions, which is, as you know, the study of the laws that regulate exceptions. And this confusion of letters is in some sense an imaginary solution that demands an imaginary solution. But let’s get back to Don Rómulo before we take on Jarry, and meanwhile let’s reflect on some strange portents. I’ve just been awarded the eleventh Rómulo Gallegos Prize. The 11th. My jersey number was 11. You’ll think this is a coincidence, but it gives me the shivers. The 11 who didn’t know how to tell left from right and who therefore mixed up Caracas with Bogotá has just won (and parenthetically, let me once more thank the jury, especially Ángeles Mastretta, for this distinction) the 11th Rómulo Gallegos Prize. What would Don Rómulo think? On the phone the other day, Pere Gimferrer, who is a great poet and who also knows everything and has read everything, told me that there are two commemorative plaques in Barcelona on different buildings where Don Rómulo lived. According to Gimferrer, although he wouldn’t swear to this, it was in one of these two places that the great Venezuelan writer started Canaima . I really do have complete faith in 99.9 percent of the things Gimferrer tells me (though one of the buildings with a plaque on it was a bank, not a house, which planted a series of doubts: for example, whether during Don Rómulo’s stay in Barcelona — I say stay and not exile because a Latin American is never an exile in Spain — he had worked at a bank or whether the bank had later moved into the house where he once lived), and then, while Gimferrer was talking, I started to think about my walks around the Eixample, long-ago walks that were exhausting then and are no less exhausting now to remember, and I saw myself there again, knocking around in 1977, 1978, maybe 1982, and all of a sudden I thought I saw a street at dusk, near Muntaner, and I saw a number, I saw the number 11, and then I walked a little farther, a few more steps, and there was the plaque. That’s how I imagined it. But it’s also likely that when I lived in Barcelona I walked along that street and spotted the plaque, a plaque that says something like “Here lived Rómulo Gallegos, novelist and politician, b. Caracas 1884, d. Caracas 1969,” and then, in smaller letters, other things, titles of books, coats of arms, etc., and it’s possible that I thought, without stopping to take a closer look, about another famous Colombian writer, though if I had stopped, I never would have thought such a thing, I swear, because I really had read Don Rómulo in school, whether early on in Chile or later in Mexico I don’t know, and I liked Doña Bárbara , although according to Gimferrer, Canaima is better, and of course I knew that Don Rómulo was Venezuelan and not Colombian. Not that it really matters whether one is Venezuelan or Colombian, which brings us back at lightning speed to the b of Bolívar, who wasn’t dyslexic and who wouldn’t have been displeased by a united Latin America, which is a sentiment that I share with the Liberator, since it doesn’t matter to me whether people say I’m Chilean, although some of my Chilean fellow writers would rather see me as Mexican, or whether they say I’m Mexican, although some of my Mexican fellow writers would rather see me as Spanish, or simply as lost in combat, and I don’t even care whether people think of me as Spanish, although some of my Spanish fellow writers might protest and decide from now on to call me Venezuelan, born in Caracas or Bogotá, which wouldn’t bother me either, in fact on the contrary. The truth is that I’m Chilean and I’m also many other things. And at this point I have to abandon Jarry and Bolívar and try to remember who it was who said that a writer’s homeland is his language. I don’t remember his name. Maybe it was someone who wrote in Spanish. Maybe it was someone who wrote in English or French. The homeland of a writer, he said, is his language. It sounds a little demagogic but I completely agree with him, and I know that sometimes we have no choice but to be demagogic, just as sometimes we have no choice but to dance a bolero under a streetlight or a red moon. Though it’s also true that a writer’s homeland isn’t his language or isn’t only his language but the people he loves. And sometimes a writer’s homeland isn’t the people he loves but his memory. And other times a writer’s only homeland is his steadfastness and his courage. In fact, a writer can have many homelands, and sometimes the identity of that homeland depends greatly on what he’s writing at the moment. It’s possible to have many homelands, it occurs to me now, but only one passport, and that passport is obviously the quality of one’s writing. Which doesn’t mean writing well, because anyone can do that, but writing incredibly well, and not even that, because anyone can write incredibly well. So what is top-notch writing? The same thing it’s always been: the ability to peer into the darkness, to leap into the void, to know that literature is basically a dangerous undertaking. The ability to sprint along the edge of the precipice: to one side the bottomless abyss and to the other the faces you love, the smiling faces you love, and books and friends and food. And the ability to accept what you find, even though it may be heavier than the stones over the graves of all dead writers. Literature, as an Andalusian folk singer would put it, is danger. And as I return now at last to the number 11, which is the number of those who play the wing, and having mentioned danger, I’m reminded of the passage from Don Quixote in which the relative merits of military service and poetry are argued, and I guess the real argument is about the degree of danger, which is also an argument about the intrinsic value of each pursuit. And Cervantes, who was a soldier, makes military service win out, makes the task of the soldier triumph over the honorable work of being a poet, and if we read the passage carefully (which I’m not doing as I write this speech, although from the desk where I’m writing I can see my two editions of Don Quixote ) we get a strong whiff of melancholy, because Cervantes makes his own youth, the ghost of his lost youth, triumph over the reality of his labors in prose and poetry, so thankless thus far. And I’m reminded of this because to a great extent everything that I’ve written is a love letter or a farewell letter to my own generation, those of us who were born in the 1950s and who at a certain moment chose military service, though in this case it would be more accurate to say militancy, and we gave the little we had — the great deal that we had, which was our youth — to a cause that we thought was the most generous cause in the world and in a certain way it was, but in reality it wasn’t. It goes without saying that we fought our hardest, but we had corrupt leaders, cowardly leaders with a propaganda apparatus that was worse than a leper colony, we fought for parties that if they had won would have sent us straight to labor camps, we fought for and put all our generosity into an ideal that had been dead for more than fifty years, and some of us knew it, and how could we not when we’d read Trotsky or were Trotskyites, but we did it anyway, because we were stupid and generous, as young people are, giving everything and asking for nothing in return, and now those young people are gone, because those who didn’t die in Bolivia died in Argentina or Peru, and those who survived went on to die in Chile or Mexico, and those who weren’t killed there were killed later in Nicaragua, Colombia, or El Salvador. All of Latin America is sown with the bones of these forgotten youths. And that’s what moves Cervantes to choose military service over poetry. His companions were dead too. Or old and forgotten, poor and weary. To choose was to choose youth and to choose the defeated and to choose those who were stripped of everything. And that’s what Cervantes does, he chooses youth. And even in this melancholy weakness, in this sense of loss, Cervantes is clear-sighted, because he realizes that writers don’t need anyone to sing the praises of their work. We sing its praises ourselves. Our way of praising it is often to curse the evil hour that we decided to become writers, but most of the time we clap and dance when we’re alone, because this is a solitary pursuit, and we read aloud what we’ve written and that’s our way of singing our own praises and we don’t need anyone to tell us what to do, much less a survey to show us that ours is the most honorable profession. Cervantes, who wasn’t dyslexic but who lost an arm in the service, knew perfectly well what he was talking about. Literature is a dangerous game. Which leads us straight to Alfred Jarry, who had a gun and liked to shoot, and to number 11, the left-winger who, as plaque and house whizz by, gets a glimpse out of the corner of his eye of the former residence of Don Rómulo, who by now I hope isn’t quite so angry with me, and who hopefully won’t turn up in Domingo Miliani’s dreams to ask why I was given the prize that bears his name, a prize that means so much to me, I’m the first Chilean to win it, a prize that doubles the challenge, if that were possible, if the challenge by its very nature, by virtue of its inherent worth, weren’t already doubled or tripled. In this case, the awarding of a prize would be a gratuitous act, and now that I think about it, there is something gratuitous about it. It’s a gratuitous act that says less about my novel and its merits than about the generosity of the jury. (Incidentally, until yesterday I hadn’t met any of its members.) Let me be clear: like Cervantes’s veterans of Lepanto and like the veterans of the ceremonial wars of Latin America, all I have is my honor. I read this and I can’t believe it. Me talking about honor. Maybe the spirit of Don Rómulo will appear in my dreams instead of Domingo Miliani’s. The words I’ve just read were written in Caracas (Venezuela) and one thing is clear: Don Rómulo can’t appear in my dreams for the simple reason that I can’t sleep. Outside, the crickets are chirping. At best guess, I calculate that there must be ten or twenty thousand of them. Maybe the song of one of those crickets is the voice of Don Rómulo, bewildered, happily bewildered, in the Venezuelan night, in the American night, in the night that belongs to all of us, to those who’re asleep and to those who can’t sleep. I feel like Pinocchio.