Roberto Bolaño - The Return

“And how am I supposed to know that, compadre?”

“When we started in Criminal Investigations.”

“At the station in Concepción?”

“At the station in Calle del Temple.”

“All I remember about that station is the whores.”

“I never fucked them.”

“How can you say that, compadre?”

“I mean at the start, the first months; later on it was different, I started picking up bad habits.”

“Anyway it was free, and when you fuck a whore and don’t pay, it’s like you’re not fucking a whore.”

“A whore is always a whore.”

“Sometimes I think you don’t like women.”

“What do you mean I don’t like women?”

“It’s the way you talk about them, with contempt.”

“That’s because, in my experience, when you get mixed up with whores it always goes sour.”

“Come on, nothing in the world is sweeter.”

“Yeah, sure, that’s why we used to rape them.”

“Are you talking about the station in Calle del Temple?”

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about.”

“Come on, we didn’t rape them, that was an exchange of favors. It was a way of killing time. The next morning they went off perfectly happy after giving us a bit of relief. Don’t you remember?”

“I remember lots of things.”

“The interrogations were worse. I never volunteered.”

“But you’d have done it if you’d been asked.”

“I don’t know what I would have done.”

“You remember our classmate from high school who was a prisoner?”

“Of course I do, what was his name?”

“I was the one who realized he was there, though I still hadn’t seen him myself. You’d seen him, but you didn’t recognize him.”

“We were twenty years old, compadre, and we hadn’t seen the guy for at least five years. Arturo I think he was called. He didn’t recognize me either.”

“Yeah, Arturo. He left Chile when he was fifteen and came back when he was twenty.”

“Bad timing, eh?”

“Good too, in a way, though, ending up at our station, of all the places he could have been taken. .”

“Well, that’s all ancient history now, we’re all living in peace now.”

“As soon as I saw his name on the list of political prisoners, I knew it was him. It’s not a very common name.”

“Watch where you’re going; we can swap if you like.”

“And the first thing I thought was, It’s our old classmate Arturo, crazy Arturo, who went to Mexico when he was fifteen.”

“Well, I reckon he was happy to find us there too.”

“Of course he was happy! When you saw him he was incommunicado and the other prisoners had to feed him.”

“He really was happy.”

“It’s like I’m seeing it now.”

“But you weren’t even there.”

“No, but you told me. You said, You’re Arturo Belano, aren’t you, from Los Angeles, Bio-Bio. And he replied, Yes sir, I am.”

“That’s funny, I’d forgotten that.”

“And then you said, Don’t you remember me, Arturo? Don’t you know who I am, asshole? And he looked at you as if he was thinking, Now it’s my turn to get tortured or What does this son of a bitch want with me?”

“There was fear in his eyes, it’s true.”

“And he said, No, sir, I’ve got no idea, but he’d already started to look at you differently, peering through the fecal waters of the past, as the poet might say.”

“There was fear in his eyes, that’s all.”

“And then you said, It’s me, asshole, your classmate from high school in Los Angeles, five years ago. Don’t you recognize me? Arancibia! And it was like he was making a huge effort, because five years is a long time and a lot of things had

happened to him since he’d left Chile, plus what was happening now he’d come back, and he just couldn’t place you, he could remember the faces of fifteen-year-olds, not twenty-year-olds, and anyway you were never one of his close friends.”

“He was friends with everyone, but he used to hang out with the tough kids.”

“You were never one of his close friends.”

“I would’ve liked to be, though, I have to admit.”

“And then he said, Arancibia, yeah, of course, Arancibia, and this is the funny bit, isn’t it?”

“It depends. My partner wasn’t amused at all.”

“He grabbed you by the shoulders and gave you a thump in the chest that sent you flying back at least three yards.”

“A yard and a half, just like the old days.”

“And your partner jumped on him, of course, thinking the poor jerk had gone crazy.”

“Or was trying to escape. We were so cocky back then we didn’t take our guns off to do the roll call.”

“In other words, your partner thought he was after your gun, so he jumped on him.”

“And he would have laid into him, but I said he was a friend.”

“And then you started slapping Belano on the back and said relax and told him what a good time we were having.”

“I only told him about the whores; Jesus, we were green.”

“You said, I get to screw a whore in the cells every night.”

“No, I said we organized raids and then fucked until the sun came up, but only when we were on duty, of course.”

“And he must have said, Fantastic, Arancibia, fantastic, glad to see you’re keeping up the good work.”

“Something like that; watch this curve.”

“And you said to him, What are you doing here, Belano? Didn’t you go to live in Mexico? And he told you he’d come back, and, of course, he said he was as innocent as the next man in the street.”

“He asked me to do him a favor and let him make a phone call.”

“And you let him use the phone.”

“The same afternoon.”

“And you told him about me.”

“I said: Contreras is here, too. And he thought you were a prisoner.”

“Shut up in a cell, screaming at three in the morning, like Chubby Martinazzo.”

“Who was Martinazzo? I can’t remember now.”

“We had him there for a while. Belano would have heard him yelling every night, unless he was a heavy sleeper.”

“But I said, No, compadre, Contreras is a detective too, and I whispered in his ear: But he’s left-wing, don’t go telling.”

“That was bad; you shouldn’t have said that.”

“I wasn’t going to hang you out to dry.”

“And what did Belano say?”

“He looked like he didn’t believe me. He looked like he didn’t know who the hell Contreras was. He looked like he thought this fucking cop is going to take me to the slaughterhouse.”

“Though he was a trusting sort of kid.”

“Everyone’s trusting at fifteen.”

“I didn’t even trust my own mother.”

“What do you mean you didn’t trust your own mother? You can’t fool your mother.”

“Exactly, that’s why.”

“And then I said to him: You’ll see Contreras this morning, when they take you to the john, watch out for him, he’ll give you a signal. And Belano said OK, but he wanted me to set up the phone call. That was all he cared about.”

“So he could get someone to bring him food.”

“Anyway, he was happy when I left him. Sometimes I think if we’d met in the street he mightn’t even have said hello. It’s a funny world.”

“He wouldn’t have recognized you. You weren’t one of his friends at high school.”

“Neither were you.”

“But he did recognize me. When they took them out around eleven, all the political prisoners in single file, I went over near the corridor that led to the bathroom and gave him a nod. He was the youngest of the prisoners and he wasn’t looking too good.”

“But did he recognize you or not?”

“Of course he recognized me. We smiled at each other from a distance and then he believed the stuff you’d told him.”