Roberto Bolaño - The Secret of Evil

All of them, more or less warmly dressed, captured by the camera at that moment in 1977 or thereabouts, are friends, and some of them are lovers too. For a start, Sollers and Kristeva, obviously, and the two Devades, Marc and Carla. Those, we might say, are the stable couples. And yet there are certain features of the photo (something about the arrangement of the objects, the petrified, musical rhododendron, two of its leaves invading the space of the ficus like clouds within a cloud, the grass growing in the planter, which looks more like fire than grass, the immortelle leaning whimsically to the left, the glasses in the center of the table, well away from the edges, except for Kristeva’s, as if the other members of the group were worried they might fall) which suggest that there is a more complex and subtle web of relations among these men and women.

Let’s imagine J.-J. Goux, for example, who is looking out at us through his thick submarine spectacles.

His space in the photo is momentarily vacant and we see him walking along Rue de l’École de Médecine, with books under his arm, of course, two books, till he comes out onto the Boulevard Saint-Germain. There he turns his steps toward the Mabillon metro station, but first he stops in front of a bar, checks the time, goes in and orders a cognac. After a while J.-J. moves away from the bar and sits down at a table near the window. What does he do? He opens a book. We can’t tell what book it is, but we do know that he’s finding it difficult to concentrate. Every twenty seconds or so he lifts his head and looks out onto the Boulevard Saint-Germain, his gaze a little more gloomy each time. It’s raining and people are walking hurriedly under their open umbrellas. J.-J.’s blond hair isn’t wet, from which we can deduce that it began to rain after he entered the bar. It’s getting dark. J.-J. remains seated in the same place, and now there are two cognacs and two coffees on his tab. Coming closer we can see that the dark rings under his eyes have the look of a war zone. At no point has he taken off his glasses. He’s a pitiful sight. After a very long wait, he goes back out onto the street where he is gripped by a shiver, perhaps because of the cold. For a moment he stands still on the sidewalk and looks both ways, then he starts walking in the direction of the Mabillon metro station. When he reaches the entrance, he runs his hand through his hair several times, as if he’d suddenly realized that his hair was a mess, although it’s not. Then he goes down the steps and the story ends or freezes in an empty space where appearances gradually fade away. Who was J.-J. Goux waiting for? Someone he’s in love with? Someone he was hoping to sleep with that night? And how was his delicate sensibility affected by that person’s failure to show up?

Let’s suppose that the person who didn’t come was Jacques Henric. While J.-J. was waiting for him, Henric was riding a 250-cc Honda motorbike to the entrance of the apartment building where the Devades live. But no. That’s impossible. Let’s imagine that Henric simply climbed onto his Honda and rode away into a vaguely literary, vaguely unstable Paris, and that his absence on this occasion is strategic, as amorous absences nearly always are.

So let’s set up the couples again. Carla Devade and Marc Devade. Sollers and Kristeva. J.-J. Goux and Jacques Henric. Marie-Thérèse Réveillé and Pierre Guyotat. And let’s set up the night. J.-J. Goux is sitting and reading a book whose title is immaterial, in a bar on the Boulevard Saint-Germain; his turtleneck sweater won’t let his skin breathe, but he doesn’t yet feel entirely ill at ease. Henric is stretched out on his bed, half undressed, smoking and looking at the ceiling. Sollers is shut up in his study, writing (pinkly snug and warm inside his turtleneck sweater). Julia Kristeva is at the university. Marie-Thérèse Réveillé is walking along Avenue de Friedland near the intersection with Rue Balzac, and the headlights of cars are shining in her face. Guyotat is in a bar on Rue Lacépède, near the Jardin des Plantes, drinking with some friends. Carla Devade is in her apartment, sitting on a chair in the kitchen, doing nothing. Marc Devade is at the Tel Quel office, speaking politely on the phone to one of the poets he most admires and hates. Soon Sollers and Kristeva will be together, reading after dinner. They will not make love tonight. Soon Marie-Thérèse Réveillé and Guyotat will be together in bed, and he will sodomize her. They will fall asleep at five in the morning, after exchanging a few words in the bathroom. Soon Carla Devade and Marc Devade will be together, and she will shout, and he will shout, and she will go to the bedroom and pick up a novel, any one of the many that are lying on her bedside table, and he will sit at his desk and try to write but he won’t be able to. Carla will fall asleep at one in the morning, Marc at half-past two, and they will try not to touch each other. Soon Jacques Henric will go down to the underground parking lot and climb onto his Honda and venture out into the cold streets of Paris, becoming cold himself, a man who shapes his own destiny, and knows, or at least believes, that he is lucky. He will be the only member of the group to see the day dawning, with the disastrous retreat of the last night wanderers, each an enigmatic letter in an imaginary alphabet. Soon J.-J. Goux, who was the first to fall asleep, will have a dream in which a photo will appear, and he’ll hear a voice warning him of the devil’s presence and of hapless death. He’ll wake with a start from this dream or auditory nightmare and won’t be able to get back to sleep for the rest of the night.

Day breaks and the photo is illuminated once again. Marie-Thérèse Réveillé and Carla Devade look off to the left, at an object beyond Henric’s muscular shoulders. There is recognition or acceptance in Carla’s gaze: that much is clear from her half-smile and gentle eyes. Marie-Thérèse, however, has a penetrating gaze: her lips are slightly open, as if she were having difficulty breathing, and her eyes are trying to fix on (trying, unsuccessfully, to nail ) the object of her attention, which is presumably moving. Both women are looking in the same direction, but it’s clear that they have quite different emotional reactions to whatever it is they are seeing. Carla’s gentleness may be conditioned by ignorance. Marie-Thérèse’s insecurity, her defensive yet inquisitorial glare, may result from the sudden stripping away of various layers of experience.

Any moment now, J.-J. Goux might start to cry. The voice that warned him of the devil’s presence is still ringing, though faintly, in his ears. He is not, however, looking to the left, at the object that has attracted the women’s attention, but directly at the camera, and an infinitesimal smile is creeping over his lips, a would-be ironic smile confined, for the moment, to the safer domain of placidity.

When night falls over the photograph again, J.-J. Goux will head straight for his apartment, make himself a sandwich, watch television for exactly fifteen minutes, not one more, then sit in an armchair in the living room and call Philippe Sollers. The phone will ring five times and J.-J. will hang up slowly, holding the receiver in his right hand, raising his left hand to his lips, and touching them with two fingers, as if to check that he’s still there, that the person there is him , in a living room that’s not too big, not too small, crowded with books, and dark.

As for Carla Devade, having lost her acquiescent smile, she’ll call Marie-Thérèse Réveillé, who will pick up the phone after three rings. In a roundabout way, they’ll talk about things they don’t really want to talk about at all, and arrange to meet in three days’ time at a café on Rue Galande. Tonight Marie-Thérèse will go out on her own, with nowhere in particular to go, and Carla will shut herself in her room as soon as she hears the sound of Marc Devade’s key sliding into the lock. But for now nothing tragic will happen. Marc Devade will read an essay by a Bulgarian linguist; Guyotat will go to see a film by Jacques Rivette; Julia Kristeva will stay up late reading; Philippe Sollers will stay up late writing, and he and his wife will barely exchange a few words, shut away in their respective studies; Jacques Henric will sit down at his typewriter but nothing will occur to him, so after twenty minutes he’ll put on his leather jacket and his boots and go down to the underground parking garage and look for his Honda in the dark; for some reason the lights in the parking lot don’t seem to be working, but Henric can remember where he left his bike, so he walks in the dark, in the belly of that whale-like parking lot, without fear or apprehension of any kind, until about halfway there he hears an unusual noise (not a knocking in the pipes or the noise of a car door opening or closing) and he stops, without really understanding why, and listens, but the noise is not repeated, and now the silence is absolute.