Roberto Bolaño - The Return

At thirty-two, her sex life was almost nonexistent. Shortly before she turned thirty-three, Luis told her that he loved her, he respected her, he would never forget her, but for some months he had been seeing someone from work, who was divorced and had children, a nice, understanding woman, and he was planning to go and live with her.

On the surface, Clara took the break-up pretty well (it was the first time someone had left her). But a few months later she lapsed into depression again and had to take some time off work and undergo psychiatric treatment, which didn’t help much. The medication suppressed her libido, although she did make some willful but unsatisfactory attempts to sleep with other men, including me. She started talking about the rats again; they wouldn’t leave her alone. When she got nervous she had to go to the bathroom constantly (the first night we slept together, she must have gotten up to pee ten times). She talked about herself in the third person; in fact, she once told me that there were three Claras in her soul: a little girl, an old crone enslaved by her family, and a young woman, the real Clara, who wanted to get out of that city forever, and paint, and take photos, and travel, and live. For the first few days after we got back together, I feared for her life. Sometimes I wouldn’t even go out shopping because I was scared of coming back and finding her dead, but as the days went by my fears gradually faded away and I realized (or perhaps conveniently convinced myself) that Clara wasn’t going to take her own life; she wasn’t going to throw herself off the balcony of her apartment — she wasn’t going to do anything.

Soon after that, I left, but this time I decided to call her every so often, and stay in touch with one of her friends, who could fill me in (if only now and then). That’s how I came to know a few things it might have been easier not to have known, stories that did nothing for my peace of mind, the kind of news an egotist should always take care to avoid. Clara went back to work (the new pills she was taking had done wonders for her outlook), but before long she was transferred to a branch in another Andalusian city — though not very far away — maybe to pay her back for such a long absence. She moved, started going to the gym (at thirty-four she was no longer the beauty I had known at seventeen), and made new friends. That’s how she met Paco, who was divorced, like her.

Before long, they were married. At first, Paco would tell anyone prepared to listen what he thought of Clara’s photos and paintings. And Clara thought that Paco was intelligent and had good taste. As time went by, however, Paco lost interest in Clara’s esthetic efforts and wanted to have a child. Clara was thirty-five and at first she wasn’t keen on the idea, but she gave in, and they had a child. According to Clara, the child satisfied all her yearnings — that was the word she used. According to her friends, she was getting steadily worse, whatever that meant.

On one occasion, for reasons irrelevant to this story, I had to spend a night in the city where Clara was living. I called her from the hotel, told her where I was, and we arranged to meet the following day. I would have preferred to see her that night, but after our previous encounter Clara regarded me, and perhaps with good reason, as a kind of enemy, so I didn’t insist.

She was almost unrecognizable. She had put on weight and although she was wearing makeup her face looked worn, not so much by time as by frustration, which surprised me, since I’d never really thought that Clara aspired to anything. And if you don’t aspire to anything, how can you be frustrated? Her smile had also undergone a transformation. Before, it had been warm and slightly dumb, the smile of a young lady from a provincial capital, but it had become a mean, hurtful smile, and it was easy to read the resentment, rage and envy behind it. We kissed each other on the cheeks like a pair of idiots and then sat down; for a while we didn’t know what to say. I was the one who broke the silence. I asked about her son; she told me he was at day care, and then she asked me about mine. He’s fine, I said. We both realized that unless we did something, that meeting was going to become unbearably sad. How do I look? asked Clara. It was as if she were asking me to slap her. Same as ever, I replied automatically. I remember we had a coffee, then went for a walk along an avenue lined with plane trees, which led directly to the station. My train was about to leave. We said good-bye at the door of the station, and that was the last time I saw her.

We did, however, talk on the phone before she died. I used to call her every three or four months. I had learned from experience not to touch on personal or intimate matters (a bit like sticking to sports when chatting with strangers in bars), so we talked about her family, which, in those conversations, remained as abstract as a cubist poem, or her son’s school, or her job at the office; she was still at the same place, and over the years she had got to know about all her colleagues and their lives, and all the problems the executives were having — those secrets gave her an intense and perhaps excessive pleasure. On one occasion I tried to get her to say something about her husband, but at that point Clara clammed up. You deserve the best, I told her once. That’s strange, replied Clara. What’s strange? I asked. It’s strange that you should say that — you, of all people, said Clara. I quickly tried to change the subject, claimed I was running out of coins (I’ve never had a phone of my own, and never will; I always called from a phone booth), hurriedly said good-bye and hung up. I realized I couldn’t face another argument with Clara; I couldn’t listen to her working up another one of her endless justifications.

One night, not long ago, she told me she had cancer. Her voice was as cold as ever, the voice in which, years before, she had announced that she was going to compete in a beauty contest, the voice in which she recounted her life with the detachment of a bad storyteller, putting exclamation marks in all the wrong places, and passing over what she should have gone into, the parts where she should have cut to the quick. I remember asking her if she had already been to see a doctor, as if she had diagnosed the cancer herself (or with Paco’s help). Of course, she said. At the other end of the line I heard something like a croak. She was laughing. We talked briefly about our children, and then (she must have been feeling lonely or bored) she asked me to tell her something about my life. I made something up on the spot and said I’d call her back the following week. That night I slept very badly. I had one nightmare after another, and woke up suddenly, shouting, convinced that Clara had lied to me: she didn’t have cancer; something was happening to her, for sure, the way things had been happening for the last twenty years, little, fucked-up things, all full of shit and smiles, but she didn’t have cancer. It was five in the morning. I got up and walked to the Paseo Marítimo, with the wind at my back, which was strange because the wind usually blows in from the sea, and hardly ever from the opposite direction. I didn’t stop until I got to the phone booth next to one of the biggest cafés on the Paseo. The terrace was empty, the chairs were chained to the tables, but a little way off, right near the seaside, a homeless guy was sleeping on a bench, with his knees drawn up, and every now and then he shuddered, as if he were having nightmares.

My address book only contained one other number in Clara’s city. I called it. After a long time, a woman’s voice answered. I said who I was, but suddenly found I couldn’t say anything more. I thought she’d hang up, but I heard the click of a lighter and smoke rushing in through lips. Are you still there? asked the woman. Yes, I said. Have you talked to Clara? Yes, I said. Did she tell you she had cancer? Yes, I said. Well, it’s true.