Roberto Bolaño - The Return

“I’m not going to pick you up, Max, you’re fine like that. Keep your eyes open or close them, it doesn’t matter; think of something nice or don’t think at all. It’s getting light out but, the way things are, it might just as well be getting dark. You’re the prince and you’re arriving at exactly the right time. You’re welcome whenever you come and wherever you come from, whether you’ve come on a motorbike or on foot, whether or not you know what awaits you, whether you were tricked or came knowing that you would meet your destiny here. Your face, which until recently could express only stupidity or rage or hatred, is reconfigured now and can express what can only be guessed at inside a tunnel where physical time and verbal time flow into one another and mingle. You proceed resolutely through the corridors of my palace, barely pausing for the few seconds it takes to look at the pictures of the Catholic Monarchs, to drink a glass of crystal-clear water, to touch the mirrors’ quicksilver with your fingertips. The castle only seems to be quiet, Max. Sometimes you think you’re alone, but deep down you know that you’re not. Your hand raised in salute, your naked torso, the tee-shirt furled around your waist, your warrior hymns about purity and the future, you leave all that behind. This castle is your mountain, and you will have to spend all your strength climbing and exploring it, because after that there will be nothing more; the mountain and the climbing will demand the highest price you can pay. Now think about what you’re leaving, what you could and had to leave behind, and think about chance, the greatest criminal that ever walked the earth. Free yourself of fear and regret, Max, because you are already inside the castle, and here there is only the movement that will bring you ineluctably to my arms. Now you are inside the castle and you hear the doors closing behind you. Deep in the dream you walk on through passages and rooms of bare stone. What weapons do you carry, Max? Only your solitude. You know that somewhere I am waiting for you. You know that I am naked too. Sometimes you feel my tears, you see my tears flow on the dark stone and you think you have found me, but the room is empty, which distresses and yet at the same time excites you. Keep climbing, Max. The next room is dirty and doesn’t seem to belong in a castle. There’s an old TV that doesn’t work and a folding bed with two mattresses on it. Someone is crying somewhere. You see children’s drawings, old clothes covered with mold, dried blood and dust. You open another door. You call someone. You tell them not to cry. Your footsteps show in the dust on the floor of the passage. The tears sometimes seem to be dripping from the ceiling. It doesn’t matter. The way things are, they might as well be spurting out the end of your dick. Sometimes all the rooms seem the same, the same room devastated by time. If you look at the ceiling you’ll imagine you can see a star or a comet or a cuckoo clock sailing through the space that separates the prince’s lips from those of the princess. Sometimes it all goes back to the way it used to be. The castle is dark, enormous, cold, and you are alone. But you know there is another person hidden somewhere, you feel the tears, you feel the nakedness. Peace and warmth are waiting for you in that person’s arms, so you keep going, drawn on by hope, stepping around boxes full of memories that no one will ever look at again, suitcases full of old clothes that someone forgot or didn’t want to throw away, and from time to time you call her, your princess — where is she? — your body stiff with cold, your teeth chattering, right in the middle of the tunnel, smiling in the darkness, free of fear for the first time perhaps, and with no intention of inspiring fear, spirited, exultant, full of life, feeling your way through the dark, opening doors, following passages that bring you closer to the tears, in the dark, guided only by your body’s need for another body, falling down and getting up again, and finally you arrive at the central chamber, and finally you see me and cry out. I remain silent and cannot tell the nature of your cry. All I know is that we have finally come together, that you are the zealous prince and I am the princess without pity.”

I have good news and bad news. The good news is that there is life (of a kind) after this life. The bad news is that Jean-Claude Villeneuve is a necrophiliac.

Death caught up with me in a Paris disco at four in the morning. My doctor had warned me, but some things are stronger than reason. I was convinced, mistakenly (and even now it’s something I regret), that drinking and dancing were not the most hazardous of my passions. Another reason I kept going out every night to the fashionable places in Paris was my routine as a middle manager at Fracsa; I was after what I couldn’t find at work or in what people call the inner life: the buzz that you get from a certain excess.

But I’d rather not talk about that, or only as much as I have to. When my death occurred, I was recently divorced and thirty-four years old. I hardly realized what was going on. A sudden sharp pain in the chest, her face, the face of Cécile Lamballe, the woman of my dreams, imperturbable as ever, the dance floor spinning in a brutal whirl, sucking in the dancers and the shadows, and then a brief moment of darkness.

What happened next was like what you sometimes see in movies and I’d like to say a few words about that.

In life I wasn’t especially intelligent. I’m still not (though I’ve learned a lot). When I say intelligent, what I really mean is thoughtful. But I have a certain energy and a certain taste. What I mean is, I’m not a philistine. It couldn’t be said, objectively, that I’d ever behaved like a philistine. It’s true that I graduated in business studies, but that didn’t stop me from reading a good book or seeing a play every now and then, or being a keener moviegoer than most. Some of the movies I was pressured to see by my ex-wife. But the others I saw for love of the seventh art.

Like just about everyone else, I went to see Ghost , I don’t know if you remember it, a box office hit, with Demi Moore and Whoopi Goldberg, the one where Patrick Swayze gets killed and his body is left lying on a Manhattan street, or in an alley, maybe, on a dirty pavement anyway, while in a special-effects extravaganza (they were special for the time, anyway) his soul comes out of his body and stares at it in astonishment. Well, apart from the special effects, I thought it was idiotic. A typical Hollywood cop-out, inane and unbelievable.

But when my turn came, that was exactly what happened. I was stunned. First, because I had died, which always comes as a surprise, except, I guess, in some cases of suicide, and then because I was unwillingly acting out one of the worst scenes of Ghost . One of the many things experience has taught me is that there is sometimes more to American naiveté than meets the eye; it can hide something that we Europeans can’t or don’t want to understand. But once I was dead, I didn’t care about that. Once I was dead, I felt like bursting out laughing.

You get used to anything in the end, but in the early hours of that morning I felt dizzy or drunk, not because I was under the influence of alcohol on the night of my death — I wasn’t; on the contrary, it had been a night of pineapple juice and non-alcoholic beer — but because of the shock of being dead, the fear of being dead and not knowing what was coming next. When you die the real world shifts slightly and that adds to the dizziness. It’s as if you’d suddenly put on a pair of glasses that don’t match your prescription; they’re not all that different, but not quite right. And the worst thing is you know that the glasses you’ve put on belong to you and nobody else. And the real world shifts slightly to the right, down a little, the distance separating you from a given object changes almost imperceptibly, but you perceive that change as an abyss, and the abyss adds to your dizziness, but in the end it doesn’t matter.