Roberto Bolaño: A Little Lumpen Novelita

My brother had met them at the gym, where they did some kind of work that was never clear to me. Sometimes I got the impression that they were trainers, a job with a certain prestige, and other times that they were just sweepers and errand boys, like my brother. Either way, they were always talking about the gym, like people who come home and can’t stop going on about work. They talked about the gym — and so did my brother, with a fervor new to me — and about protein diets and meals with names that had the ring of science fiction, like Fuel Tank 3000 or Weider energy bars (all the nutrients you need for the body of a champion!).

This went on until I told them that if they wanted to keep talking they should do it in the kitchen because I couldn’t hear my game show. I liked (I still like) to listen carefully to the questions and answers because that way while I’m being entertained I learn something that probably won’t help me in any way but that seems worth knowing. Sometimes I get an answer right. When that happens I start to think that maybe I could go on TV and be a contestant. But then more questions come and I don’t know any of the answers, which is when I realize that I’m better off here, on this side of the screen, because if I were there, in front of the cameras, I’d probably just make an ass of myself.

The surprising thing, though, was that when I asked them to stop talking, they stopped. And then we were all quiet watching the show, which was at the most exciting part: there were only two contestants left, an older man, maybe forty or fifty, and a girl with little glasses and a face that was too serious, kind of scrunched up. She had incredible hair, shoulder-length and shiny, all silky black. For a minute I imagined her sitting in the salon. Ugly thoughts. I tried to wipe them from my mind.

Then the girl was asked to define the word nimbus . And the Bolognan, next to me, said that it was a halo, the circle of light around a saint’s head. And before the girl could open her mouth, he added that it was also a low cloud formation, a cluster of cumulous clouds.

I stared at the Bolognan and I stared at the TV. My brother smiled, as if he knew the answer too, though I knew he didn’t. And time ticked away and the girl lost her turn and it was the older man’s turn and he said that a nimbus was, in fact, a low cloud. And when the host, to give the old guy a hard time, asked “And what else, sir?,” the man was silent and couldn’t think of anything else.

And then came more contestants and more questions and the Bolognan answered almost all of them, some of them wrong, admittedly, but most of them right, and my brother — and even I — said that he should try out for the show, he could make a shitload of money (though I didn’t use that word), and then my brother told me that his friend was always doing crossword puzzles and he actually finished them, unlike the average person, who would start a puzzle and leave it half-done, and it seemed to me that it was one thing to be able to finish crossword puzzles and another thing to be a game-show winner, but I kept my mouth shut, because clearly the Bolognan could win any quiz show he signed up for.

But then I stopped to think: when had my brother seen his friend doing crossword puzzles? Because if anything was clear it was that they knew each other from the gym where my brother worked and the Bolognan worked and even the Libyan worked, mopping floors, scrubbing lockers and showers, sweeping the weight room or selling energy drinks, all tasks incompatible with a leisurely activity like solving crossword puzzles, which — as everybody knows — is something that’s done when you have nothing else to do.

That night, when I was in bed and the house was quiet, I imagined — or rather saw — my brother and his two friends at Rome’s Central Station sitting in the cafeteria waiting, my brother and the Libyan doing nothing, watching people come in and out, and the Bolognan working the crossword puzzle from the L’Osservatore Romano , a right-wing paper no matter how you look at it, though he claimed it was an anarchist paper, a superfluous and therefore futile explanation or excuse. Once I saw him with Tutto Calcio under his arm and I said “That’s what you read,” a simple statement of fact, not meaning anything else by it, and he said yes, I read Tutto Calcio , but it isn’t a right-wing paper the way people think it is, it’s an anarchist paper.

As if I cared what newspapers he read or didn’t read.

My father read Il Messagiero . My brother and I didn’t read anything (it was a luxury we couldn’t afford). I don’t know which papers are right-wing and which are left-wing. But the Bolognan was always justifying himself. It was part of who he was, and also part of his charm, or so he thought. But as I was saying, I was in bed with the lights out and the covers pulled up to my chin, in the silence of the night, a silence that looked yellow to me, and I saw my brother and his two friends in a bar at Central Station, sitting around a table with three glasses of beer and looking bored, because waiting is terrible and they were waiting for something that wasn’t coming, but was about to come, or at least that was what they were betting on, the three of them, and while they were sitting there the Bolognan had more than enough time to finish a crossword puzzle, from L’Osservatore Romano or La Repubblica or Il Messagiero . And imagining this scene, I was overcome by an infinite sadness. I felt a weight on my chest, a pain in my heart, a sense of anguish. As if a fog were rising from the underground tunnels and swamping the whole of Central Station, and I was the only one who could see it (but I wasn’t there). As if the fog was blurring my brother’s face and coming irrevocably between us. But then I fell asleep and I forgot or dismissed what I had seen — or what I had foreseen, because it really was a premonition.

And so the days went by.

One morning the Bolognan and the Libyan left. I spent an hour, more or less, going through the drawers to see whether they’d stolen anything. Nothing was missing.

Even I couldn’t deny that their conduct had been impeccable for the five days they’d stayed with us. They always washed the dishes, three times they made dinner themselves, and they didn’t try anything with me, which was important. I could sense the interest in their eyes, in the way they moved, and the way they talked to me, but I also noted their self-control and found it flattering.

I’d only had one boyfriend in my life and we had broken up shortly before my parents’ car accident on that terrible southern highway.

My boyfriend lived nearby and was the same age as me, so it wasn’t long before I saw him with another girl, both of them looking happy, near the entrance to a club. I was on my way home from my job at the salon, it was a Saturday, and I was walking in a daze, staring up at the sky, which — as I’ve said — looked stranger every day. My ex-boyfriend was with his new girlfriend, propped on the wall outside the club, and when he saw me go by he said my name. I lowered my eyes and there he was. He was smiling a friendly smile. I smiled at him too. He asked if I had dropped out of school. I didn’t answer. I thought for a second that the logical thing would be to stop and talk to him and his new girlfriend, but instead I kept walking. When I had gone a little way I stared up at the sky again and I had the feeling that I was living on another planet.

So much for that.

You couldn’t say I’d gained much experience with my boyfriend. He was an ordinary guy and I liked him and then one day I stopped liking him. That was all. With the Bolognan (and the Libyan) it was different, because they shared meals with us, slept in my parents’ room, and watched me from up close in a way that no one (except my brother) ever had. What do they see ? I wondered. What face, what eyes do they see? I didn’t wonder this very often, but once or twice I did. Now I know that there’s no such thing as closeness. One person’s eyes are always shut. The first person sees and the second doesn’t. Or the second person sees and the first doesn’t. Only a mother can be close, but that was unknown territory back then. A blank space. There was only the illusion of closeness.