Roberto Bolaño - The Return

Exhausted by the night’s events, Villeneuve didn’t get up from the sofa. The pseudo-artists greeted him, and it seemed to me that one of them was in the mood for a chat, but the other one gave him a nudge and they went down to get my body without further ado. Villeneuve had his eyes closed and seemed to be asleep. I followed the orderlies down to the basement. My body was lying there half covered by the body bag from the morgue. I watched them put it back in the bag and carry it up and place it in the trunk of the car. I imagined it waiting there, in the cold morgue, until a relative or my ex-wife came to claim it. But I mustn’t give in to sentimentality, I thought, and when the orderlies’ car left the garden and vanished down that elegant, tree-lined street, I didn’t feel the slightest twinge of nostalgia or sadness or melancholy.

When I returned to the living room, Villeneuve was still on the sofa, with his arms crossed, shivering with cold, and he was talking to himself (though I soon realized that he thought he was talking to me). I sat on a chair in front of him, a chair of carved wood with a satin backrest, facing the window and the garden and the beautiful morning light, and I let him go on talking as long as he liked.

The city of sanity. The city of common sense. That’s what the people of Barcelona used to call their city. I liked it. It was a beautiful city and I think I felt at home there from the second day on (if I said from the very first day I’d be exaggerating) but the club wasn’t doing so well, and people started going kind of sour, it always happens, I’m speaking from experience, at first the fans want your autograph, they hang around outside the hotel, they’re so friendly it’s exhausting, but then you have a run of bad luck, which leads to another, and soon enough they start making faces, maybe you’re just lazy, they think, or partying too much, or whoring, you know what I mean, people start to take an interest in what you’re getting paid, they speculate, they calculate, and there’s always a wise guy who’ll come out and accuse you of being a thief or something a thousand times worse. This stuff happens everywhere, I’d already been through it once, but that was back home, in my country, and this time I was a foreigner, and the press and the fans always expect something extra special from foreigners. I mean, why else would they hire us?

Me, for example, I’m a left winger, everyone knows that. When I played in Latin America (in Chile, then in Argentina) I scored an average of ten goals per season. But my debut here was disastrous; I got injured in the third game, had to have an operation on my ligaments, and my recovery, which in theory should have been quick, was laborious and drawn-out, but I won’t go into that. Suddenly I was back to feeling as lonely as a lighthouse. That’s the way it was. I spent a fortune on calls to Santiago, but that only made Mom and Dad worry; they didn’t understand at all. So one day I decided to go whoring. Why should I deny it? That’s the way it was. Actually, I was just following some advice that Cerrone, the Argentinean goalkeeper, had given me one day. He said to me, Kid, if you can’t think of anything else to do, and your problems are eating away at you, go see a whore. He was great guy, Cerrone. I would have been nineteen at the most and I had just joined Gimnasia y Esgrima in La Plata. Cerrone was already around 35 or 40, his age was a mystery, and he was the only one of the older players who wasn’t married. Some said Cerrone was queer. That made me wary of him for a start. I was a shy sort of kid and I thought that if I got to know a homosexual, he’d try and get me into bed straightway. Anyway, maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t, all I know for sure is that one afternoon, when I was lower than ever, he took me aside, it was the first time we’d talked, really, and said he was going to take me to meet some girls from Buenos Aires. I’ll never forget that night. The apartment was downtown, and while Cerrone stayed in the living room drinking and watching a late show on TV, I slept with an Argentinean woman for the first time, and my depression began to lift. Going home the next morning, I knew that things would get better and that I still had plenty of glory days to look forward to in the Argentinean League. I was bound to get depressed occasionally, I thought, but Cerrone had given me the remedy to make it bearable.

And I did the same thing at my first European club: I went whoring and it helped me to get over the injury, the recovery period and the loneliness. Did it become a habit? Maybe, maybe not; that’s not something I can really judge objectively. The whores there are gorgeous, the high-class whores I mean, and most of them are pretty smart and educated too, so it really isn’t difficult to develop a serious taste for them.

Anyhow, I started going out every night, even Sundays when there was a match on, and the injured players were expected to be there, in the stands, doing their bit as VIP supporters. But that doesn’t help your injuries to heal, and I preferred to spend Sunday afternoons in some massage parlor with a glass of whiskey and one or two lady friends on either side, discussing more serious matters. At first, of course, no one realized. I wasn’t the only injured player, there must have been six or seven of us in the dry dock — bad luck seemed to be dogging the club. But of course, there’s always some fucking journalist who sees you coming out of a nightclub at four in the morning, and the game’s up. News travels fast in Barcelona, though it seems such a big and civilized city. Soccer news, I mean.

One morning the trainer called and said he’d found out about the life I was leading: it was inappropriate for a professional athlete and had to stop. Naturally I said, Yes, I’d just been having a bit of fun, and then I went on like before, because, come on, what else was I going to do while I was still unfit to play and the team slid down the ranking and opening the paper on a Monday morning to look at the league table was a downer week after week. Also, I was convinced that what had worked for me in Argentina was going to work for me in Spain, and the worst thing was, I was right: it did work. But then the bureaucrats got involved and told me: Listen, Acevedo, this has got to stop, you’re becoming a bad example for the young and a disastrous investment for the club, we only employ hard workers here, so from now on, no more nightlife, or else. And then, before I knew it, I was liable for a fine if I broke the curfew; I could have paid it, of course, but if I was going to be throwing money away, I’d rather have sent it to someone in Chile, like my uncle Julio, so he could fix up his house.

These things happen and you have to deal with it. So I dealt with it and resolved to go out less often, once every two weeks, say, but then Buba turned up and the management decided that the best thing for me would be to move out of the hotel and share the apartment they’d rented for him right next to our training ground; it was small but kind of cozy, with two bedrooms and a terrace that was tiny but had a good view. So that was what I had to do. I packed my bags and went to the apartment with one of the club’s administrators, and since Buba wasn’t there, I chose the bedroom I wanted and took out my stuff and put it in the closet, and then the administrator gave me my keys and left and I lay down to take a siesta.

It was about five, and earlier that afternoon I’d put away a fideuà , a Barcelona specialty, which I’d already tried (I love it, but it isn’t easy to digest) and as soon as I flopped onto my new bed I felt so tired it was all I could do to pull off my shoes before I fell asleep. Then I had the weirdest dream. I dreamed I was in Santiago again, in my neighborhood, La Cisterna, and I was with my father, crossing the square where there’s a statue of Che Guevara, the first statue of Che in the Americas, outside Cuba, and that was what my father was telling me in the dream, the story of the statue and the various attempts to destroy it before the soldiers came and blew it away, and as we walked I was looking all around and it was like we were deep in the jungle, and my father was saying the statue should be around here somewhere, but you couldn’t see anything, the grass was high and only a few feeble rays of sunlight were filtering down through the trees, just enough to see by, to show that it was daytime, and we were following a path of earth and stones, but the vegetation on either side was dense, there were even lianas, and you couldn’t see anything, only shadows, until suddenly we came to a sort of clearing, with forest all around, and then my father stopped, put one hand on my shoulder and pointed with the other hand to something rearing up in the middle of the clearing, a pedestal of light-colored cement, and on top of the pedestal there was nothing, not a trace of the statue of Che, but my father and I already knew that, Che had been removed from there a long time ago, it didn’t come as a surprise, what mattered was that we were there together, my old man and me, and we had found the exact place where the statue used to stand before, but while we looked around the clearing, standing still, as if absorbed in our discovery, I noticed that there was something at the bottom of the pedestal, on the other side, something dark, which was moving, and I broke away from my father (he had been holding me by the hand) and began to walk slowly toward it.