Roberto Bolaño - The Return

The program was long and detailed. There was stuff about the Cup, what it had meant for the club, about Buba and his first year in Europe, but there was also stuff about Buzatti and Delève, Palau and Pepito Vila, and me, and especially about Herrera and his long sports career, an example for the young. There were six ex-players, three journalists and two celebrity fans: a movie actor and a Brazilian singer who turned out to be the most fanatical supporter I’ve ever come across. She was called Liza Do Elisa, though I don’t think that was her real name, and when the interviews were finished (I said hardly anything, a few dumb remarks, my stomach was all in knots) she came to dinner with us, with Herrera and me and Pepito Vila and one of the journalists, maybe she was a friend of journalist’s, I don’t know, anyhow, suddenly I found myself in a dimly lit restaurant with all these people, and then in a disco, which was even darker, except for the dance floor, where I danced, sometimes on my own, sometimes with Liza Do Elisa, and then, some time after midnight, I ended up in a bar near the port, sitting at a grimy table, drinking coffee with a shot, along with Herrera and the Brazilian singer — the others had gone.

I don’t remember which of them brought it up. Maybe Liza Do Elisa was talking about magic, she could’ve been, or maybe it was Herrera who got her onto it, I think she mentioned black magic and white magic, and then she started telling stories, true stories, things that had happened to her as a child, or when she was young and making her way in the world of show business. I remember looking at her and thinking she was a formidable woman: she was speaking in the same forceful, vehement way as she’d spoken in front of the TV cameras. She’d had to struggle to make it and she was permanently on guard, as if she could be attacked at any moment. She was a pretty woman, about thirty-five, with a nice rack. You could tell her life hadn’t been easy. But Herrera wasn’t interested in her life story, I realized that straightaway. Herrera wanted to talk about magic, voodoo, Candomblé rituals, black people’s business, in short. And Liza Do Elisa was happy to oblige.

So I finished my coffee and let them talk, and since, to be honest, I wasn’t all that interested in the topic of their conversation, I ordered a whiskey and then another, and when daylight was already beginning to shine in through the windows of the bar, Herrera said he had a story a bit like the ones Liza Do Elisa had been telling, and he was going to tell it and see what she thought. Then I shut my eyes, like I was sleepy, although I wasn’t sleepy at all, and listened to Herrera telling Buba’s story, our story, but without saying that Buba was Buba and pretending that he and I were some French players he’d met a while back, and Liza Do Elisa went quiet (I think it was the first time she’d been quiet all night) until Herrera came to the end, to Buba’s death, and only then did she speak up and say yes, it was possible, and Herrera asked about the blood that the three players spilled into the glass, and Liza Do Elisa said it was part of the ceremony, and Herrera asked about the music that came from the bathroom when the black guy shut himself in there, and Liza Do Elisa said it was part of the ceremony, and then Herrera asked about what happened to the blood when the black guy took it into the bathroom, and about the sponge and the bucket of water with bleach, and he also wanted to know what Liza Do Elisa thought the guy did in the bathroom, and the Brazilian singer replied to all his questions by saying that it was part of the ceremony, until Herrera started getting annoyed and said obviously it was part of the ceremony but he wanted to know what the ceremony was. And then Liza Do Elisa said, Nobody raises his voice to me, especially not — and I quote — if he wants to fuck me, to which Herrera replied with a laugh that reminded me of the good old days — the Herrera of the Champion’s League and the two Spanish Leagues we won together, I mean, the two we won with Buba and the five we won overall — and then he said he hadn’t meant to offend her (Liza Do Elisa took offense at the slightest little thing), and repeated his question.

The singer seemed to be deep in thought for a while, then she looked at Herrera and me (but she looked much more intensely at Herrera) and said she didn’t know for sure. Maybe he drank the blood, maybe he poured it down the toilet, maybe he pissed or shat on it, maybe he didn’t do any of those things, maybe he took his clothes off and smeared himself with blood and then took a shower, but it was all speculation. Then the three of us sat there in silence until Liza Do Elisa said that whatever he did, one thing was for sure: the guy had suffered and loved deeply.

And then Herrera asked her what she thought about this black guy who had played in the French team: did his magic work? No, said Liza Do Elisa. He was crazy. How could it work? And Herrera asked, How come his teammates started playing better? Because they were good players, said the singer. And then I weighed in and asked what she meant when she said he’d suffered deeply, how do you mean? And she replied, With his whole body, but more than that, with his whole mind.

“What do you mean, Liza?” I insisted.

“That he was crazy,” said the singer.

The bar’s metal gates had been pulled down. On a wall I noticed various photos of our team. The singer asked us (not just Herrera, me too) if we’d been talking about Buba. Not one muscle in Herrera’s face moved. I might have nodded. Liza Do Elisa crossed herself. I got up and went to take a look at the photos. There we were, the eleven of us: Herrera standing with his arms crossed next to Miquel Serra, the goalkeeper, and Palau, and, in front of them, squatting down, Buba and me. I was smiling, as if I didn’t have a care in the world, and Buba was serious, looking straight at the camera.

I went to the bathroom and when I came back Herrera was paying at the bar, and the singer was standing beside the table, smoothing her close-fitting, deep red dress. Before we left, the bartender, or maybe he was the owner, the guy who’d put up with us until dawn, anyway, asked me to sign another one of the photos decorating the wall. It was a photo of me on my own, taken just after I arrived in the city. I asked him his name. He said he was called Narcis. To Narcis, I signed it, affectionately.

It was already getting light when we left. We walked through the streets of Barcelona, like in the old days. I wasn’t surprised to notice that Herrera had his arm around the singer’s waist. Then we hailed a taxi and they accompanied me back to my hotel.

When it comes to poets, give me the French, thinks Arturo Belano, lost in Africa, leafing through a sort of photo album in which Francophone poetry celebrates itself, sons of bitches, he thinks, sitting on the ground, a ground of red clay, or something like that, but it’s not clay, not even clayey, though it is red, or rather coppery in color, or reddish, except at midday when it’s yellow, the book lying between his legs, a fat book, nine hundred and thirty pages, so close enough to a thousand pages long, a hardback, La poésie contemporaine de langue française depuis 1945 , edited by Serge Brindeau, published by Bordas, a compendium of little texts about all the poets writing in French around the world, be it in France or Belgium, Canada or North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa or the Middle East, so it’s not such a miracle to find the book here, thinks Belano, because if it includes African poets, some copies would have come to Africa, obviously, in the luggage of the poets themselves or the luggage of some tragically naïve bookseller committed to the Francophone cause, though it’s still a miracle that one of those copies should happen to turn up just here, in this village, forsaken by god and abandoned by the human race, where there’s no one left but me and the ghosts of the contributors and not much else except the book and the changing colors of the earth, it’s weird, but the earth does actually change color every so often, dark yellow in the morning, yellow at midday, with watery streaks, like crystallized, dirty water, and who’d want to look at it after that, thinks Belano, looking up at the sky through which three clouds are floating, like three signs in a blue field, the field of conjectures or the field of mystical doctrines, amazed by the elegance of the clouds and their unspeakably slow procession, then looking at the photos, his nose almost touching the page, examining those faces with all their contortions, which isn’t the word exactly, yes it is, Jean Pérol, for example, who looks like he’s listening to a joke, or Gérald Neveu (whom Belano has read), who looks like he’s dazzled by the sun or living in a month that’s a monstrous coupling of July and August, something that only Africans can stand or the poets of Germany and France, or Vera Feyder, who is holding and stroking a cat, as if holding and stroking were one and the same, and they are, thinks Belano, or Jean-Philippe Salabreuil (whom he has read), so young, so handsome, he looks like a movie star, looking at me from the far side of death with a half smile, telling me or the African reader to whom this book belonged that it’s all right, that the constant motion of the spirit is futile and it’s all right, and Belano shuts his eyes without lowering his head, then he opens them again and turns the page and here we have Patrice Cauda, who looks like he hits his wife — what am I saying, his wife, I mean his girlfriend — and Jean Dubacq, who looks like he works in a bank, like a sad bank clerk with little hope left, a Catholic, and Jacques Arnold, who looks like the manager of the bank that employs the unfortunate Dubacq, and Janine Mitaud, large mouth, sparkling eyes, a middle-aged woman with short hair, a slim neck and, to judge from her expression, a subtle sense of humor, and Philippe Jaccottet (whom he has read), who’s thin and has a kind-looking face, though maybe, thinks Belano, it’s one of those kind-looking faces you should never trust, and Claude de Burine, the incarnation of Little Orphan Annie — even her dress, or what the photo shows of her dress, is identical to Little Orphan Annie’s-but who is this Claude de Burine, Belano asks himself aloud, alone in an African village whose inhabitants have all fled or been killed, sitting on the ground with his knees up, while his fingers flick with a singular rapidity through the pages of La poésie contemporaine in search of information about this poet, which he eventually finds: Claude de Burine, he reads, was born in Saint-Léger-des-Vignes (Nièvre), in 1931, and she is the author of Lettres à l’enfance (Rougerie, 1957), La Gardienne (Le soleil dans la tête — good name for a publishing house-1960), L’allumeur de réverbères (Rougerie, 1963) and Hanches (Librairie Saint-Germain-des-Près, 1969), and that’s all the biographical information there is, as if at the age of thirty-eight, after the publication of Hanches , Little Orphan Annie had disappeared, although the author of the introductory note says: Claude de Burine, avant toute autre chose, dit l’amour, l’amour inépuisable , and when Belano reads that, it all makes sense in his overheated brain: someone who dit l’amour could perfectly well disappear at the age of thirty-eight, especially, especially if that person is the double of Little Orphan Annie, with the same round eyes, the same hair, the eyebrows of someone who has seen the inside of a foundling hospital, an expression of perplexity and pain, a pain alleviated to some degree by caricature, but it’s pain all the same, and then Belano says to himself, I’m going to find a lot of pain here, and turns back to the photos and discovers, under the photo of Claude de Burine, between the photo of Philippe Jaccottet and the photo of Jacques Réda, Marc Alyn and Dominique Tron sharing the same snapshot, a lighter moment, Dominique Tron who’s so different from Claude de Burine, on the one hand, the existentialist, the beatnik, the rocker, and on the other, meekness incarnate, a woman forsaken and banished, thinks Belano, as if Dominique lived in a whirlwind while the all-suffering Claude looked on from a metaphysical distance, and again Belano’s curiosity is piqued and he consults the index and then after reading né à Bin el Oidane (Maroc) le 11 décembre 1950 , he realizes that Dominique Tron is a man, and he thinks as he brushes a (completely imaginary) mosquito away from his ear, I must be suffering from sunstroke, and reads Tron’s list of publications: Stéréophonies (Seghers, 1965, that is, at the age of fifteen), Kamikaze Galapagos (Seghers, 1967, that is, at the age of seventeen), La Souffrance est inutile (Seghers, 1968, that is, at the age of eighteen), D’Épuisement en épuisement jusqu’à l’aurore, Elisabeth , an autobiographical oratorio, followed by a mystery, Boucles de feu (Seghers, 1968, that is, again, at the age of eighteen), and De la Science-fiction c’est nous à l’interprétation des corps (Eric Losfeld, 1972, that is, at the age of twenty-two), and that’s all there is, largely because La poésie contemporaine was published in 1973, had it been published in 1974 there surely would have been more titles, and then Belano thinks about his own youth, when he used to churn it out like Tron, and was perhaps even better looking than Tron, he thinks, squinting at the photo, but to publish a poem, in Mexico, all those years ago when he lived in Mexico City, he’d had to sweat blood, because Mexico is Mexico, he reflects, and France is France, and then he shuts his eyes and sees a torrent of ghostly, emblematic Mexicans flowing like a gray breath of air along a dry river bed, and before opening his eyes, holding the book firmly in both hands, he sees Claude de Burine again, the photo-portrait of Claude de Burine, in her lonely poet’s tower, watching the adolescent cyclone that is Dominique Tron, who wrote La souffrance est inutile , and perhaps he wrote it for her, for Claude, a book that is a burning bridge, which Dominique himself will not cross, but Claude will, oblivious to the bridge, oblivious to everything, she will cross it and be burnt in the attempt, thinks Belano, as all poets are burnt, even the bad ones, on those burning bridges that are so enticing, so fascinating when you’re eighteen, or twenty-one, but then so dull, so monotonous, beginning and ending so predictably, those bridges that he crossed like Ulysses on his way home, bridges theorized and conjured up before his eyes like fantastic Ouija boards, enormous burning structures repeated over and over into the depths of the screen, which may stop poets at eighteen or twenty-one, but twenty-three-year-old poets can cross them with their eyes closed, like sleepwalking warriors, thinks Belano as he imagines the helpless, the fragile, the terribly fragile Claude de Burine running toward the arms of Dominique Tron, on a course he chooses to imagine as erratic, although there is something in Claude’s eyes, and in Dominique’s, and in the eyes of the burning bridge, that strikes him as familiar, something that — like the changing colors all around the empty village-speaks in a down-to-earth way of the arid, sad and terrible end to come, and then Belano shuts his eyes and keeps still, and opens his eyes again and turns to another page, although this time he’s determined to look at the photos and nothing else, and that’s how he finds Pierre Morency, a good-looking kid, Jean-Guy Pilon, a difficult character, not photogenic, Fernand Ouellette, a man who’s going bald (and remembering that the book was published in 1973, all things considered, it’s pretty safe to assume that he’s completely bald by now), and Nicole Brossard, a girl with straight hair, with a part in the middle, big eyes, a square jaw, pretty, Belano finds her pretty, but he doesn’t want to know how old Nicole is or what books she has written so he turns the page, and suddenly enters (though in the village where he happens to be stranded there is no such thing as a sudden entry) the kingdom of the thousand and one nights of literature and memory, because he has come to the photos of Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine and Kateb Yacine and Anna Greki and Malek Haddad and Abdellatif Laabi and Ridha Zili, Arab poets who write in French, and he remembers having seen some of those poets already, many years ago, maybe in 1972, before the publication of the book he is holding, or in 1971, or perhaps he’s mistaken and is seeing them for the first time, with a persistent and as yet unexplained feeling, somewhere between perplexity — a singularly sweet perplexity — and envy, wishing he had belonged to that group, it was 1973 or ’74, he remembers now, in a book on Arab poets or North African poets that a Uruguayan woman carried around with her for a couple of days everywhere she went in Mexico City, a book with an ochre or yellow cover, the color of desert sands, and then Belano turns the page and more photos appear, Kamal Ibrahim (whom he has read), Salah Stétié, Marwan Hoss, Fouad Gabriel Naffah (a diabolically ugly poet), and Nadia Tuéni, Andrée Chédid and Vénus Khoury, and Belano cranes forward, his face almost touching the page, to see the women poets in more detail, and Nadia and Vénus seem truly beautiful, with Nadia he’d fuck until dawn, he thinks (assuming that night will fall again sometime, since where he is, the evenings drag on as if the village were following the sun in its westward march, Belano thinks, with a certain disquiet) and with Vénus he’d fuck until three in the morning, and then I’d get up, light a cigarette and go out for a walk along the esplanade in Malgrat de Mar, but with Nadia he’d go on till dawn, and the things he’d do with Vénus he’d do with Nadia too, but he’d do things with Nadia that he wouldn’t do with anyone else, thinks Belano as he stares without blinking at Nadia’s smile, his nose almost touching the page, and Nadia’s lively eyes, her dark shining abundant hair, a protective cowl of shadow, and then Belano looks up and can no longer see the three solitary clouds in the African sky over the village where he has washed up, a village the sun is dragging westward — the clouds have disappeared, as if they were superfluous now that he has seen the smile of the Arab poet of the thousand and one nights, and then Belano breaks his promise, looks up the name Tuéni in the index and turns intrepidly to the pages in the critical section where he knows he will find her biographical note, a note that says that Nadia was born in Beirut in 1935, which means that when the book was published she was thirty-eight, although the photo is earlier, and the note also says that she has published a number of books, including Les Textes blonds (Beyrouth, Éd. An-Nahar, 1963), L’Age d’écume (Seghers, 1966), Juin et les mécréantes (Seghers, 1968), and Poèmes pour une histoire (Seghers, 1972), and in the paragraphs about her, Belano reads habituée aux chimères , and he reads chez ce poète des marées, des ouragans, des naufrages , and he reads fille elle-même d’un père druze et d’une mère française , and he reads mariée à un Chrétien orthodoxe , and he reads Nadia Tuéni (née Nadia Mohammed Ali Hamadé) , and he reads Timidir la Chrétienne, Sabba la Musulmane, Dâhoun la Juive, Sioun la Druze , and he stops reading and looks up because he thinks he heard something, the cry of a vulture or a turkey buzzard, even though he knows there are no turkey buzzards here, but that can be fixed, given time, not necessarily years of time, hours or even minutes would do, at some point you stop knowing what you used to know, it’s as simple and as hard as that, even a Mexican turkey buzzard could turn up in this lousy village, thinks Belano with tears in his eyes, and it’s not the sound of the turkey buzzards making him cry but the physical presence of Nadia Tuéni’s image looking at him from a page in the book with a petrified smile that seems to open out like blown glass in the landscape surrounding Belano, which is also made of glass, and then he thinks he hears words, the words he has just read but cannot read now because he is crying, l’air torride, habituée aux chimères , and a story about Druses, Jews, Muslims and Christians, from which Nadia emerges at the age of thirty-eight (the same age as Claude de Burine) with the hair of an Arab princess, immaculate, perfectly serene, like the accidental muse of certain poets, or their provisional muse, the one who says, Don’t worry, or who says, Worry, but not too much, the one who doesn’t speak in dry and definite words but whispers, whose parting gift is a kind look, and then Belano thinks of the age the real Nadia Tuéni must be, in 1996, and he realizes that now she is sixty-one, and he stops crying, l’air torride has dried his tears once again, and he starts turning the pages, he returns to the mug shots of the Francophone poets with an obstinacy worthy of a higher enterprise, like a scavenging bird he returns to the face of Tchicaya U Tam’si, born in Mpili in 1931, the face of Matala Mukadi, born in Luiska in 1942, the face of Samuel-Martin Eno Belinga, born in Ebolowa in 1935, the face of Elologué Epanya Yondo, born in Douala in 1930, and so many other faces, faces of poets who write in French, photogenic or not, the face of Michel Van Schendel, born in Asnières in 1929, the face of Raoul Duguay (whom he has read), born in Val d’Or in 1939, the face of Suzanne Paradis, born in Beaumont in 1936, the face of Daniel Biga (whom he has read), born in Saint-Sylvestre in 1940, the face of Denise Jallais, born in Saint-Nazaire in 1932 and almost as pretty as Nadia, Belano thinks with a kind of comprehensive tremor, while evening keeps dragging the village westward, and turkey buzzards start to appear in the tops of some small trees, except that Denise is blonde and Nadia is dark, both very beautiful, sixty-one and sixty-four respectively, I hope they’re alive, he thinks, his gaze fixed not on the photos in the book but on the line of the treetops against the sky where the birds are teetering, crows or vultures or turkey buzzards, and then Belano remembers a poem by Gregory Corso, in which the hapless North American poet spoke of his one true love, an Egyptian woman dead two thousand five hundred years ago, and Belano remembers Corso’s street-kid face and a figure from Egyptian art that he saw a long time ago on a matchbox, a girl getting out of a bath or a river or a swimming pool, and the beat poet (the enthusiastic, hapless Corso) is watching her from the other side of time, and the Egyptian girl with long legs senses that she is being watched, and that’s all, her flirting with Corso is as brief as a sigh in the immensity of time, but time itself and its remote sovereignty can also pass like a sigh, thinks Belano as he watches the birds up in the branches, silhouettes on the horizon, an electrocardiogram agitated by the ruffling or spreading of wings as it waits for death, my death, thinks Belano, and then he shuts his eyes for a long time, as if he were thinking or crying with his eyes shut, and when he opens them again the crows are there, the electroencephalogram trembling on the African horizon, and then Belano shuts the book and stands up, still holding it, grateful, and begins to walk westward, toward the coast, with the book of Francophone poets under his arm, grateful, and his thought speeds ahead of his steps through the jungles and deserts of Liberia, as it did when he was an adolescent in Mexico, and soon his steps lead him away from the village.