Roberto Bolaño - The Return

It makes you want to cry or pray. The first minutes of ghosthood are minutes of imminent knockout. You’re like a punch-drunk boxer staggering around the ring in the drawn-out moment of the ring’s evaporation. But then you calm down and what generally happens is that you follow the people who were there when you died — your girlfriend, your friends — or you follow your own body.

I was with Cécile Lamballe, the woman of my dreams, I was with her and saw her just before I died, but when my soul came out of my body I couldn’t see her anywhere. It was quite a surprise and a great disappointment, especially when I think about it now, though back then I didn’t have time to be sad. There I was, looking at my body lying in a grotesque heap on the floor, as if, seized by the dance and the heart attack, I’d completely fallen apart, or as if I hadn’t died of a heart attack at all but dropped from the top of a skyscraper, and while I looked on and walked around and fell over (because I was completely dizzy), a volunteer (there’s always someone) gave me (or my body) mouth-to-mouth, while another one thumped my chest, then someone thought of switching off the music and a murmur of disapproval swept through the disco, which was pretty full in spite of the late hour, and the deep voice of a waiter or a security guard told them all not to touch me, to wait for the police and the magistrate, and although I was groggy I would have liked to say, Keep going, keep trying to revive me, but they were tired, and as soon as the police were mentioned they all stepped back, and my body lay there on its own at the edge of the dance floor, eyes closed, until a charitable soul put a blanket over me to cover what was now definitively dead.

Then the police turned up along with some guys who confirmed what everyone already knew, and later the magistrate arrived and only then did I realize that Cécile Lamballe had vanished from the disco, so when they picked up my body and put it in an ambulance, I followed the medics and slipped into the back of the vehicle, and off I went with them into the sad and weary Paris dawn.

What a paltry thing it seemed, my body or my ex-body (I’m not sure how to put it), confronted with the labyrinthine bureaucracy of death. First they took me to the basement of a hospital, although I couldn’t swear it was a hospital, where a young woman with glasses ordered them to undress me, and when they left her on her own, she spent a few moments examining and touching me. Then they covered me with a sheet, and moved me to another room to take a complete set of fingerprints. Then they brought me back to the first room, which was empty now, and I stayed there for what seemed like a long time, though I couldn’t say how many hours. Maybe it was only minutes, but I was getting more and more bored.

After a while, a black orderly came to get me and take me to another underground room, where he handed me over to a pair of young guys also dressed in white, who made me feel uneasy right from the start, I don’t know why. Maybe it was their would-be sophisticated way of talking, which identified them as a pair of tenth-rate artists, maybe it was their earrings, the sort all the hipsters were wearing that season in the discos that I had frequented with an irresponsible persistence: hexagonal in shape and somehow evocative of runaways from a fantastic bestiary.

The new orderlies made some notes in a book, spoke with the black guy for a few minutes (I don’t know what that was about) and then the black guy went and left us alone. So in the room there were the two young guys behind the desk, filling out forms and chatting away, there was my body on the trolley, covered from head to foot, and me standing beside it, with my left hand resting on the trolley’s metal edge, trying to think with a modicum of clarity about what the days to come might hold, if there were any days to come, which was far from obvious to me right then.

Then one of the young guys approached the trolley and uncovered me, or uncovered my body, and scrutinized it for a few seconds with a thoughtful expression that didn’t bode well. After a while he covered it up again, and the two of them wheeled the trolley into the next room, a sort of freezing honeycomb, which I soon discovered was a storehouse for corpses. I would never have imagined that so many people could die in the course of an ordinary night in Paris. They slid my body into a refrigerated niche and left. I didn’t follow them.

I spent that whole day there in the morgue. Every so often I went to the door, which had a little glass window, and checked the time on the wall clock in the next room. The feeling of dizziness gradually abated, although at one point I got to thinking about heaven and hell, reward and punishment, and I had a panic attack, but that bout of irrational fear was soon over. And, in fact, I was starting to feel better.

Throughout the day new bodies kept arriving, but never accompanied by ghosts, and at about four in the afternoon, a near-sighted young man performed an autopsy on me and established the causes of my accidental death. I have to admit I didn’t have the stomach to watch them open me up. But I went to the autopsy room and listened as the coroner and his assistant, quite a pretty girl, performed their task efficiently and quickly — if only all public servants worked like that — while I waited with my back turned, looking at the ivory-colored tiles on the wall. Then they washed me and sewed me up and an orderly took me back to the morgue again.

I stayed there until eleven at night, sitting on the floor in front of my refrigerated niche, and although at one point I thought I was going to doze off, I was beyond the need for sleep, so what I did was just go on thinking about my past life and the enigmatic future (to give it a name of some kind) that lay before me. After ten o’clock, the comings and goings, which during the day had been like a constant but barely perceptible dripping, stopped or diminished considerably. At five past eleven the young guys with the hexagonal earrings reappeared. I was startled when they opened the door. But I was beginning to get used to my ghostly state and, having recognized them, I remained seated on the floor, thinking of the distance separating me from Cécile Lamballe, which was infinitely greater than the distance between us when I was still alive. Realizations always come too late. In life I was afraid of being a toy (or less than a toy) for Cécile, and now that I was dead, that fate, once the cause of my insomnia and pervasive insecurity, seemed sweet, and not without a certain grace and substance: the solidity of the real.

But I was talking about the hipster orderlies. I saw them come into the morgue and although I noticed something cautious in their bearing, which sat oddly with their oily, feline manner, like wannabe artists out clubbing, at first I paid no attention to their movements and their whispering until one of them opened the niche where my body was lying.

Then I got up and started watching them. Moving like seasoned professionals, they placed my body on a trolley. Then they rolled the trolley out of the morgue and along a long corridor, sloping gently upwards, which eventually led into the building’s parking garage. For a moment I thought they were stealing my body. In my delirium I imagined Cécile Lamballe, the milk-white face of Cécile Lamballe; I imagined her emerging from the darkness of the parking lot to give the pseudo-artists the sum they had demanded for the rescue of my body. But there was no one in the garage — clearly, I was still a long way from recovering my powers of reasoning or even my composure.

To tell the truth I’d been really hoping for a quiet night.

For a few moments, as I followed the orderlies between the unwelcoming rows of cars with a certain trepidation and disquiet, I experienced the dizziness I had felt in my first few minutes as a ghost. They put my body in the trunk of a gray Renault, covered all over with little dents, and we emerged from the belly of that building, which I was already beginning to think of as home, into the utter freedom of the Paris night.