Roberto Bolano - The Insufferable Gaucho

Of all the artists we have known, or at least of those who remain in our memories like skeletal question marks, the greatest was, without a doubt, my aunt Josephine. Great in the sense that she made exceptional demands on us; incommensurably great in the sense that our community acquiesced or pretended to acquiesce to her whims.

The old police officer liked to talk about her, but his memories, I soon realized, were as flimsy as a cigarette paper. Sometimes he said that Josephine was fat and tyrannical, and that dealing with her required enormous patience or an enormous sense of sacrifice, two not unrelated virtues, both quite common among us. Sometimes, however, by contrast, he said that all he had glimpsed of Josephine — he’d have been an adolescent, just starting out in the force — was a shadow, a tremulous shadow, trailing a range of odd squeaking noises, which constituted, at the time, the entirety of her repertoire, yet could, if not transport her listeners, certainly plunge some of those in the front row into a state of extreme sadness. Those rats and mice, of whom we have no record now, are perhaps the only ones to have glimpsed something in my aunt’s musical art. But what? They probably didn’t know themselves. Something indefinite, a lake of emptiness. Something resembling the desire to eat, perhaps, or the need to fuck, or the longing for sleep that sometimes overtakes us, since those who work without respite must at least sleep from time to time, especially in winter, when the temperature falls, as they say the leaves fall from the trees in the outside world, and our chilled bodies yearn for a warm corner to share with our kind, a burrow full of hot fur and the familiar movements and sounds — such as they are, neither coarse nor gracious — of our everyday nocturnal life, or the life that we call nocturnal for the sake of convenience.

The difficulty of finding warm places to sleep is one of the main disadvantages of being a police officer. We generally sleep alone, in makeshift holes, sometimes in unfamiliar territory, although of course, whenever possible, we try to find an alternative. Sometimes, but not very often, we curl up in holes that we share with other police, all eyes shut, ears and noses on alert. And sometimes we go to the sleeping quarters of those who, for one reason or another, live along the perimeter. As you would expect, they are quite unperturbed by our presence. Sometimes we say goodnight before falling exhausted into a warm and restorative sleep. Sometimes we simply mumble our names; our hosts know who we are and know they have nothing to fear from us. They treat us well. They don’t make a fuss or show any sign of joy, but they don’t throw us out of their burrows. Occasionally someone will say, in a voice still thick with sleep, Pepe the Cop, and I will reply, Yes, yes, good night. After a few hours, however, while all the others are still sleeping, I get up and start again, because police work is never done, and our hours of sleep have to be fitted in around the incessant demands of the job. Patrolling the sewers is a task that requires the utmost concentration. Generally we don’t see or meet with anyone; we can do the rounds of the main and branch sewers, and go into the disused tunnels originally dug by our people, all without coming across a single living being.

We do, however, glimpse shadows, and hear noises — objects falling into the water, distant squeaking. At the begining, when you’re new to the job, you’re hypersensitive to those noises and you live in a state of perpetual fright. As time goes by, however, you grow accustomed to them, and although you try to stay alert, you lose the fear, or build it into the daily routine, which is the same as losing it, in the end. There are even police officers who have slept in the dead sewers. I have never met one personally, but the old guys often tell stories in which an officer, back in the old days, of course, overtaken by fatigue, would curl up and go to sleep in a dead sewer. How seriously should we take those stories? I don’t know. No police officer today would dare to do such a thing. The dead sewers are places that have been forgotten for one reason or another. When the tunnel-diggers reach a dead sewer, they block the tunnel. The water in them barely flows at all, so the putrefaction is almost unbearable. It is safe to say that our people only use the dead sewers to flee from one zone to another. The quickest way to get into them is by swimming, but swimming in such places involves greater risks than we are usually prepared to take.

It was in a dead sewer that my investigation began. A group of our pioneers who, over time, had multiplied and settled just beyond the perimeter came and told me that the daughter of one of the older rats had disappeared. While half the group worked, the other half went looking for this girl, who was called Elisa, and who, according to her relatives and friends, was very beautiful and strong, as well as possessing a lively intelligence. I wasn’t sure exactly what possessing a lively intelligence meant. I associated it vaguely with cheerfulness, but not curiosity. I was tired that day, and after examining the area in the company of one of the missing girl’s relatives, I conjectured that the unfortunate Elisa had been the victim of some predator roaming in the vicinity of the new colony. I looked for traces of the predator. All I found were old tracks, which showed that other creatures had passed that way, before the arrival of our pioneers.

Finally I discovered a trail of fresh blood. I told Elisa’s relative to go back to the burrow and I continued on my own. The trail of blood was curious: it kept stopping at the edge of a canal, but then reappearing a few yards further on (and sometimes many yards further), always on the same side, not the far side, as one might have expected. Whatever had left that trail clearly wasn’t trying to cross the canal, so why had it kept getting into the water? In any case, the trail itself was barely detectable, so the precautions taken by the predator, whatever it was, seemed, at first, to be excessive. After a while I came to a dead sewer.

I got into the water there, and swam toward a bank of accumulated rotting trash, and when I reached it I had to climb up a beach of filth. Beyond the bank, above water level, I could see the thick bars at the top of the sewer’s entrance. For a moment I was afraid I might find the predator huddled in some corner, feasting on the body of the hapless Elisa. But I could hear nothing, so I kept going.

A few minutes later, among cardboard boxes and old food cans, I found the girl’s body left in one of the few relatively dry parts of the sewer.

Elisa’s neck was torn open. Apart from that, I couldn’t see any other wound. In one of the cans I found the remains of a baby rat. I examined them: dead for at least a month. I searched the surroundings but couldn’t detect the slightest trace of the predator. The baby’s corpse was complete. The only wound on poor Elisa’s body was the one that had killed her. I began to think that perhaps it hadn’t been a predator. Then I put the girl on my back and picked up the baby in my mouth, trying not to damage his skin with my sharp teeth. I retreated from the dead sewer and returned to the pioneers’ burrow. Elisa’s mother was large and strong, one of those specimens who can face up to a cat, but when she saw the body of her daughter, she burst into long sobs that made her companions blush. I showed them the body of the baby and asked them if they knew anything about him. No one knew anything, no child had been lost. I said that I had to take both bodies to the station. I asked for help. The mother carried Elisa’s body. I carried the baby. When we left, the pioneers returned to work, digging tunnels, looking for food.

This time I went to fetch the coroner and stayed with him until he finished examining both bodies. Elisa’s mother, asleep beside us, was seized from time to time by dreams, which wrested incomprehensible and incoherent words from her. After three hours the coroner had decided what he was going to tell me; it was what I had been afraid to imagine. The baby had died of hunger; Elisa had died from the wound to her throat. I asked him if that wound could have been inflicted by a snake. I don’t think so, said the coroner, unless it’s a new kind of snake. I asked him if the wound could have been inflicted by a blind alligator. Impossible, said the coroner. Maybe a weasel, he said. Weasels have been seen in the sewers recently. Scared to death, I said. That’s true, replied the coroner. Most of them die of hunger. They get lost, they drown, they’re eaten by alligators. We can forget the weasels, said the coroner. Then I asked him if Elisa had struggled with her killer. The coroner looked at the girl’s corpse for a long time. No, he concluded. That’s what I thought, I said. While we were talking, another police officer appeared. His rounds, as opposed to mine, had been quite uneventful. We woke Elisa’s mother. The coroner said goodbye. Is it all over? asked the mother. It’s all over, I replied. She thanked us and left. I asked my colleague to help me get rid of Elisa’s corpse.