Roberto Bolano - The Insufferable Gaucho

It’s hardly surprising that they are prone to sudden fatigue. The struggle for respectability is exhausting. But the new writers had and in some cases still have parents (may God preserve them for many years to come), parents who exhausted themselves, who wore themselves out for a manual laborer’s paltry wages, and as a result the new writers know that there are things in life far more exhausting than smiling incessantly and saying yes to the powerful. Of course there are far more exhausting things. And there’s something touching about their efforts to secure a place in the pastures of respectability, although it means elbowing others aside. There are no more heroes like Aldana, who said, Now it is time to die, but there are professional pundits and talk show guests, there are members of the academy and political party animals (on the left and the right), there are cunning plagiarists, seasoned social climbers, Machiavellian cowards, figures who would not be out of place in earlier ages of literary history, and who, in the face of numerous obstacles, play their parts, often with a certain elegance — and they are precisely the writers that we, the readers or the viewers or the public (the public, the public, as Margarita Xirgu whispered into García Lorca’s ear) deserve.

God bless Hernán Rivera Letelier, God bless his schmaltz, his sentimentality, his politically correct opinions, his clumsy formal tricks, since I am partly responsible. God bless the idiot children of García Márquez and the idiot children of Octavio Paz, since I am to blame for them seeing the light. God bless Fidel Castro’s concentration camps for homosexuals and the twenty thousand who disappeared in Argentina and Videla’s puzzled mug and Perón’s old macho grin projected into the sky and the child-killers of Rio de Janeiro and Hugo Chávez’s Spanish which smells of shit and is shit, since I created it.

Everything is folklore in the end. We’re good at fighting and lousy in bed. Or was it the other way round, Maquieira? I can’t remember any more. Fuguet is right: you have to land those fellowships and massive advances. You have to sell yourself before the buyers (whoever they are) lose interest. The last Latin Americans who knew who Jacques Vaché was were Julio Cortázar and Mario Santiago, and both of them are dead. The story of Penelope Cruz in India is worthy of our most illustrious stylists. Pe arrives in India. Since she likes local color or authenticity she goes to eat in one of the worst restaurants in Calcutta or Bombay. Pe’s own words. One of the worst or one of the cheapest or one of the most down-market places. She sees a hungry little boy at the door who stares back at her fixedly. Pe gets up, goes out and asks the boy what’s wrong. The boy asks her for a glass of milk. Which is odd, because Pe isn’t drinking milk. Nevertheless, the actress gets a glass of milk and takes it to the boy, who is waiting patiently at the door. He gulps the glass of milk straight down, under Pe’s benevolent gaze. When the boy finishes the glass, Pe tells us, his grateful happy smile makes her think of all the things she has but doesn’t need, although Pe is wrong there, because in fact she needs everything she has, absolutely everything. A few days later, Pe has a long philosophical but also practical conversation with Mother Teresa of Calcutta. At one point she tells the story of the boy. She talks about the necessary and the superfluous, about being and not-being, about being-in-relation-to and not-being-in-relation-with… what? How does it work? And in the end what does it mean “to be”? To be oneself? Pe gets confused. Meanwhile Mother Teresa keeps moving like a rheumatic weasel around the room or the porch where they’re talking, while the Calcutta sun, the balmy sun, but also the sun of the living dead, scatters its dying rays, as it sinks away in the west. Yes, yes, says Mother Teresa and then she murmurs something that Pe doesn’t understand. What? asks Pe in English. Be yourself. Don’t worry about fixing the world, says Mother Teresa: help, help, help one person, give a glass of milk to one child, and that will be enough, sponsor one child, just one, and that will be enough, says Mother Teresa in Italian, clearly in a bad mood. When night falls, Pe returns to her hotel. She takes a shower, changes her clothes, dabs herself with perfume, all the while unable to forget Mother Teresa’s words. When dessert is served: suddenly — illumination! It’s all a matter of taking a tiny pinch out of your savings. It’s all a matter of not getting distressed. Give an Indian child twelve thousand pesetas a year and you’re already doing something. And don’t get distressed and don’t feel guilty. Don’t smoke, eat dried fruit, and don’t feel guilty. Thrift and goodness are indissolubly linked.

A number of enigmas are still floating in the air like ectoplasm. If Pe went to eat in a cheap restaurant, why didn’t she end up with a case of gastroenteritis? And why did Pe, who isn’t short of money, go to a cheap restaurant in the first place? To save money?

We’re lousy in bed, lousy at braving the elements, but good at saving. We hoard everything. As if we knew the asylum was going to burn down. We hide everything. The treasures that Pizarro will return to rob over and over again, but also utterly useless things: junk, loose threads, letters, buttons, which we stash in places that are then wiped from our memories, because our memories are weak. And yet we like to keep, to hoard, to save. If we could, we’d save ourselves for better times. We’re lost without mom and dad. Although we suspect that mom and dad made us ugly and stupid and bad so they could shine by contrast in the eyes of posterity. Saving, for mom and dad, meant permanence, work and a pantheon, while for us, saving is about success, money and respectability. We’re only interested in success, money and respectability. We are the middle-class generation.

Permanence has been swept aside by the rapidity of empty images. The pantheon, we discover to our astonishment, is the doghouse of the burning asylum.

If we could crucify Borges, we would. We are the fearful killers, the careful killers. We think our brain is a marble mausoleum, when in fact it’s a house made of cardboard boxes, a shack stranded between an empty field and an endless dusk. (And, anyway, who’s to say that we didn’t crucify Borges? Borges said as much by dying in Geneva.)

And so let us do as García Márquez bids and read Alexandre Dumas. Let us follow the advice of Pérez Dragó or García Conte and read Pérez Reverte. The reader (and by the same token the publishing industry) will find salvation in the bestseller. Who would have thought. All that carrying on about Proust, all those hours spent examining pages of Joyce suspended on a wire, and the answer was there all along, in the bestseller. Ah, the bestseller. But we’re lousy in bed and we’ll probably put our foot in it again. Everything suggests that there is no way out of this.