Roberto Bolaño: A Little Lumpen Novelita

Around this time I remember a conversation with one of my friends at work. She was the same age as me, but she had a boyfriend, and one evening before we closed up the salon she started to talk about her future. For a second I thought I was losing my mind. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

“Are you serious? Are you making this up?”

She was serious, but when she saw how upset I was she stopped talking and went over to the other end of the room, where she said something to a stylist who was taking a break, sitting in a chair, smoking a cigarette and watching the sunset. There was an expression of deep melancholy on the stylist’s face. But the look on the other girl’s face was malevolent, I thought. I was breathing hard, as if I’d run from one point to another in record time, and though the other girl laughed a few times, as if she couldn’t believe her own words, she seemed afraid. The stylist listened without getting up from her chair. It was as if the girl’s words were sliding off her face, a hard face without a hint of indulgence. That’s what I remember. And I remember the sunset, a sunset of rose and ocher that crept all the way to the back of the salon, but never touched me.

That night I didn’t cry on the way home, which was something I’d been doing for a while. It was as if when I left work I walked straight into a wind tunnel that made me cry for no reason. A tunnel that at first seemed to have only a physical effect, bringing on tears and nothing else, but rather than getting used to it, over the last few days I had been struck by a feeling of enormous sadness, a sadness that I could only handle by crying.

But that day, as if I glimpsed that my life was about to take a sharp turn, I didn’t cry. I put on my sunglasses, left the salon, stepped into the tunnel, and didn’t cry. Not a single tear.

My brother and the two men who lived in our house were waiting for me. I saw them from outside. The three of them were standing in the window, like fish in a fishbowl, watching the street. It took them a while to spot me there on the sidewalk, watching them.

I climbed slowly up the stairs. I closed the door and paused in the hallway. All of a sudden there they were, talking. I listened. What else could I do? Though I’ve forgotten what they said. They had a plan. That much I do remember. A hazy plan on which each of them, my brother included, had gambled his future, and to which each had added his bit, his personal touch, his vision of fate and the turns of fate.

I remember I listened to them and then I pushed past them into the living room and sat down, tired of taking in so much information at once. They followed me and were silent, expectant.

I said:

“Don’t stop, it’s a good idea, keep talking.”

Maybe I didn’t say it was a good idea. Maybe I said that I wanted to hear them out. (I thought we were all going to end up in jail, but I didn’t tell them that — I’m not a killjoy.)

They smiled and obeyed. My brother seemed the most enthusiastic, as if it had been his idea, though I knew it hadn’t. The Libyan seemed the most skeptical. But the three of them were committed to the plan and they clung to it like shipwrecked sailors, laying it all out for me and presenting it in the best possible light. It was something that would require only the tiniest sacrifice, a plan in which cleverness was key. It was the perfect coup, a scheme that would open the doors of a new life to us, that would get us a house on the beach, or a restaurant in Tangiers, or a gym up north.

When they were done talking I said that it sounded good to me. Then I got up and went to bed and fell asleep without eating dinner.

At five in the morning I woke up. I turned on the light, I leafed through old magazines, and for a while I mulled over what they had explained. So this is the life of crime, I thought without fear.

The next morning I didn’t go to work, I got up early, went out, bought bread, and called in sick from a payphone. I don’t know whether they believed me or not. I didn’t care.

At midday, the Libyan and the Bolognan brought me to Maciste’s house. That wasn’t his name, but it was what everyone called him. To some he was Maciste, to others Mr. Maciste or Mr. Bruno, to others Mr. Universe. It depended. Most didn’t call him anything because Maciste never left the house and no one knew him and many of those who had known him, personally or by name, had forgotten him.

The house was on Via Germanico. It was a two-story house, with a small, overgrown garden in front, flanked by two six- or seven-story buildings. There was a tall metal gate. The shutters were closed, as if no one lived there. The paint on the façade was peeling in places, which made the place look even more neglected, if possible. And yet as we walked up to the door, we didn’t see mail on the ground or trash in the garden, which meant that someone did come occasionally to clean. Sometimes Maciste made an appearance at a gym on Via Palladio, according to the Bolognan, and sometimes someone was sent from the gym to fix a piece of Maciste’s exercise equipment.

“In there,” said the Bolognan as we were leaving, “he has a huge private gym set up just for him. Once I came with another guy to fix a weight rack and we got to be friendly. I came back twice, but I couldn’t get past the door. Maciste doesn’t trust anybody.”

Then, as we talked that afternoon about what we would do, they told me that for a while, probably before my brother and I were born, Maciste had been a movie star and his movies were seen all over the world. Then he’d had the accident and retired, and after that he’d gradually been forgotten.

But Maciste wasn’t the kind of person who’s easy to forget. I, for one, know I’ll never forget him. No matter what happens, I’ll never forget him.

His real name was Giovanni Dellacroce. This was something that neither the Bolognan nor the Libyan knew (let alone my brother, who because of his age and lack of skills plays a marginal role here, I’m afraid). His stage name was Franco Bruno. People called him Mr. Universe, because he had won the title twice in the early sixties, or Maciste, which was the name of the character he played in four or maybe five movies, all huge hits in Italy and around the world. He was born in Pescara, but had lived in Rome since he was fifteen, in Santa Loreto, a suburb that he thought of as home and for which he was sometimes nostalgic, though when luck was on his side, he bought the big house on Via Germanico where I met him the night I was brought there.

A night that was like high noon in August and was one of the strangest nights in my life.

The Bolognan rang the bell several times. A voice over an intercom asked who was there.

“Friends,” said the Bolognan. No answer. The intercom might as well have been broken. After a while he rang again and said the name of the gym and the name — or so I thought I understood — of a mutual friend, and as if this weren’t enough, he announced our full names, mine included.

Then the gate opened and we were let into the little garden where even at night the plants struggled for scarce living space. More than a garden, it was like a cemetery.

There were three stone steps up to the porch. For a long time we stood there waiting for someone to open the door.

The tension on the faces of my brother’s friends, the tension and at the same time the joy, a primordial joy, pure and unwavering, is one of the things that comes back to me whenever I remember that night, and each time it does I try to brush it away, because it’s a joy that I want neither for myself nor anywhere near me. It’s a joy that comes too close to beggarliness, an explosion of beggarliness, and also to cruelty, indifference.