Roberto Bolaño: A Little Lumpen Novelita

One day my brother rented an X-rated movie and we watched it together. It was horrible and I said so. He agreed. We watched the whole thing and then we watched TV, first an American series and then a game show. The next day my brother returned the movie and rented another one. It was X-rated too. I said that we didn’t have enough money to rent movies every day. He didn’t answer. When I asked him why he’d rented the same kind of movie again, he said it was to learn.

“Learn what?”

“Learn how to make love,” said my brother without looking at me.

“Watching dirty movies isn’t going to teach you anything,” I said.

“Don’t be so sure,” he answered in a hoarse voice that I had never heard before.

His eyes were bright. Then he started to do exercises on the floor, sit-ups and other things, and for a second I thought he was going crazy. I shouldn’t be so hard on him, I thought. I said that maybe he was right and I was wrong — maybe he was on the right track. “Are you still a virgin?” he asked me from the floor. “I am,” I said. “Me too,” he said. I said that was normal at his age.

The next night there was a new X-rated movie in the house. As we were watching it I fell asleep. Before I closed my eyes, I thought: I’m going to dream about this filth, but instead I dreamed about the desert. I was walking in the desert, dying of thirst, and on my shoulder there was a white parrot, a parrot that kept saying: “I can’t fly, I’m sorry, please forgive me, but I can’t fly.” He was saying this because at some point in the dream I had asked him to fly. He weighed too much (ten pounds at least, he was a big parrot) to be carried for so long, but the parrot wouldn’t budge, and I could hardly walk, I was shaking, my knees hurt, my legs, my thighs, my stomach, my neck, it was like having cancer, but also like coming — coming endlessly and exhaustingly — or like swallowing my eyes, my own eyes, swallowing them and at the same time trying not to bite down on them, and every so often the white parrot tried to help, saying: “Courage, Bianca,” but mostly it kept its beak shut, and I knew that when I dropped on the hot sand and I was dying of thirst it would fly, fly away from this part of the desert to another part of the desert, fly away from my expiring flesh in search of other, less expiring flesh, fly away from my dead body forever, forever.

When I woke up my brother was asleep in his chair and the screen was a gray sea, gray and black stripes, as if a storm was approaching Rome and only I could see it.

Soon I was going along with my brother on his video store forays. In the mornings, during school hours, while kids our age were in class or shoplifting or getting high or having sex for money, I started to visit the video stores in our neighborhood and the surrounding neighborhoods, at first with my brother, who was trying to find the lost films of Tonya Waters, a porn star he had fallen in love with and whose adventures he was getting to know by heart, and then alone, though I didn’t rent X-rated movies except when my brother had a special request, say for something featuring Sean Rob Wayne, who had worked twice with Tonya Waters and whose film career had thereby acquired a particular significance for my brother, as if anything that came into contact with Waters became automatically worthy of his attention.

Without surprise I discovered that I liked video stores. Not so much the ones in our neighborhood, but the stores in other neighborhoods. In that sense I was different from my brother, who only went to the video stores that were near home or on the way between our house and the gym where he worked. Familiarity was a source of comfort for my poor brother.

I, on the other hand, liked to try new places, plasticky sanitized stores with lots of customers, or dubious establishments with a single Balkan or Asian clerk, where no one knew anything about me. In those days I felt something that wasn’t quite happiness but that did resemble enthusiasm, wandering streets I had hardly ever been down and that invariably ran into Via Tiburtina or Trajan’s Park. Sometimes I went into a video store and spent half an hour or more scanning the shelves of video cases and then I would leave without renting anything, not because I wouldn’t have liked to, but because I had no money.

Other times, throwing caution to the wind, I’d rent two movies at once. I was omnivorous: I liked romance (which almost always made me laugh), classic horror, gore, psychological horror, crime horror, military horror. Sometimes I sat for a long time on Garibaldi Bridge or on a bench on Tiber Island, next to the old hospital, and I studied the video cases as if they were books.

Some cars would slow down as they passed. I heard whispers, which I ignored. Usually people would roll down the window and say something, make some promise, and then keep going. There were cars that passed and didn’t stop. There were cars that passed with the windows already rolled down and kids inside yelling — “Fascism or barbarism!” — and they’d keep going too. I didn’t look at them. I stared at the river and my videos and tried to forget the few things I knew.

One evening my brother came home with two men.

They weren’t his friends, though my brother chose to think they were. One was from Bologna, the other from Libya or Morocco. But they looked like twins. Same head, same nose, same eyes. They reminded me of a clay bust I had seen recently in a magazine at the salon. They spent the night.

“But where will they sleep?” I said to my brother, “There’s no room,”

He gave me a haughty look, as if to say he had the situation under control.

“In our parents’ bedroom,” he said.

He was right, there was room. The men slept there.

I went to bed early. I didn’t feel like watching my favorite shows.

I hardly slept a wink. When I got up at six in the morning, the kitchen was clean. The men had washed the pots, the dishes, and the silverware and left it all on the rack to dry. The ashtrays were empty and clean. I think they even swept before they went to bed. I thought about that as I ate breakfast and then I went to work, though it was very early and I spent almost two hours wandering around the neighborhood.

When I got back they were still there. They had made a spinach purée and a spicy tomato sauce. The table was set. In the refrigerator were two big bottles of beer. It was only then, as we ate, that I learned their names. They introduced themselves. But I don’t remember the names anymore and I’d rather not make an effort to remember them. My brother looked nervous and happy. The two men looked relaxed. The Bolognan even pulled out a chair for me.

That night I realized how alike they were, and that night, too, they told me that they weren’t brothers, though many people thought they were. The Libyan said something that at the time I found mysterious. In a way, he said, those people weren’t wrong. Silly as it may seem, people are never wrong. Even if we look down on them, and sometimes rightly so, people are never wrong. That’s our curse, he said.

“Are you brothers or not?” I asked.

The Libyan said that they were blood brothers.

“Did you swear a blood oath, did you cut your palms and rub the blood together? Is that what you mean?”

That’s what they meant. My brother thought it was great that there were still people who swore blood oaths. I thought it was childish. The Libyan said he agreed with me, but I think he only agreed to be polite, since if he thought it was childish, why had he done it? Unless they’d known each other since they were children, which they hadn’t.

That night I watched TV with them for a while.