Roberto Bolano - Woes of the True Policeman

Padilla’s friend never knew whether he was serious or not, but from then on, in certain circles, going out late at night with him became a guarantee of safety.

The second time, he hit his lover, a kid of eighteen, good-looking but not too bright, who one night transferred his affections to a rich architect, thirty and not too bright, either, with whom he was indiscreet enough to make the rounds of the places he used to hang out with Padilla, flaunting his happiness plus a weekend jaunt to Thailand and summer in Italy and a duplex complete with Jacuzzi, which was more than Padilla — who was only seventeen at the time and lived with his father in a dark three-bedroom apartment in the Eixample — could take. This time, however, Padilla acted with premeditation: he waited until five in the morning, hiding in a doorway, for his ex-lover to come home. Once the taxi had gone he was on him, and the attack was swift and brutal. He didn’t touch his face. He hit him in the belly and the genitals and, once his ex-lover was on the ground, aimed kicks at his legs and rear. If you turn me in I’ll kill you, baby, he warned before he vanished down the dark streets, gnawing his lip.

His relationship with his father was good, though somewhat distant and perhaps a little sad. The abrupt and enigmatic messages they flung at each other with seeming carelessness tended to be misinterpreted on both sides. Padilla’s father believed that his son was very intelligent, of higher-than-average intelligence, but at the same time deeply unhappy. And he blamed himself and fate. Padilla believed that his father might long ago have been an interesting person or might have had the chance to become one, but the deaths in the family had turned him into a spiritless, resigned man, sometimes mysteriously happy (when a soccer match was on TV), but usually quiet and hardworking, a man who demanded nothing of Padilla beyond perhaps the occasional bit of trivial conversation. Nothing more. They weren’t rich, but since his father owned the apartment and hardly spent a thing, Padilla always had a decent amount of money at his disposal. With it he bought movie and theater tickets; went out to dinner; bought books, jeans, a leather jacket with metal studs, boots, sunglasses, a small weekly supply of hash, very occasionally some cocaine, albums by Satie; paid for his college tuition, his metro passes, his black and purple blazers, the rooms in Distrito V where he brought his lovers. He never went on vacation.

Padilla’s father never went on vacation, either. When summer came, Padilla and his father slept until late, with the blinds down and the apartment plunged into a gentle dusk, redolent of the previous night’s dinner. Then Padilla would go out to roam the streets of Barcelona, and his father, after washing the dishes and giving the kitchen a once-over, would spend the rest of the day watching television.

At eighteen Padilla completed his first book of poetry. He sent a copy to Leopoldo María Panero at the Mondragón asylum, put the original in a drawer in his desk — the only one with a lock and key — and forgot all about it. Three years later, when he met Amalfitano, he retrieved the poems from the drawer and begged him to read them. Amalfitano thought they were interesting, maybe too faithful to certain conventions, but elegant and polished. Their subjects were the city of Barcelona, sex, illness, crime. In one of them, for example, the poet described in perfect alexandrines some fifty ways of masturbating, each more painful and terrible than the last, as a nuclear twilight settled slowly over the city’s suburbs. In another he minutely chronicled the death of his father, alone in his room, as the poet cleans the house, cooks, rations out the provisions (ever dwindling) in the pantry, searches for good music on the radio, reads curled up on the sofa in the living room, and tries in vain to reorder his memories. His father takes his time dying, of course, and stretching between his sleep and the poet’s wakefulness, lost in the mist, is a ruined bridge. Vladimir Holan is my model in the art of survival, he told Amalfitano. Wonderful, thought Amalfitano, one of my favorite poets.

Up until this point, Amalfitano had hardly seen Padilla, who only very rarely showed up in class. After the reading and the favorable comments, he was never absent again. Soon they became friends. By then Padilla wasn’t living with his father anymore; he had rented a studio near the university, where he hosted parties and gatherings that Amalfitano soon began to attend. Poems were read and later on in the evening the guests put on little plays in Catalan. Amalfitano found it charming, like the tertulias of South American literary circles in the old days, but with more style and taste, more flair, something like what the tertulias of Mexico’s Contemporáneos might have been if the Contemporáneos had written plays, which Amalfitano doubted. Also: there was a lot of drinking and sometimes one of the guests had a breakdown that usually ended — after much screaming and sobbing — with the sufferer shut in the bathroom and two volunteers trying to calm him down. Every so often a woman made an appearance, but usually it was just men, most of them young, students of literature and art history. A painter also came, a strange man, maybe forty-five, who wore only leather and who sat silently in a corner during the tertulias , not drinking, chain-smoking little hash cigarettes that he selected, pre-rolled, from a gold cigarette case. And the owner of a pastry shop in Gracia, a cheerful, animated fat man who talked to everyone and who was, as Amalfitano soon realized, the one bankrolling Padilla and the other boys.

One night, as they were performing one of the Dialogues with Leucò translated into Catalan by a very tall, fair-skinned boy, Padilla surreptitiously took one of Amalfitano’s hands. Amalfitano didn’t let go.

The first time they made love was one Sunday morning, with the dawn light filtering through the lowered blinds, when everyone else had gone and all that was left in the studio were cigarette butts and a jumble of glasses and scattered cushions. Amalfitano was fifty and it was the first time he had slept with a man. I’m not a man, said Padilla, I’m your angel.

At some point, as they were coming out of a movie theater, remembered Amalfitano, Padilla confessed that in the not-too-distant future he planned to make a movie. The movie would be called Leopardi , and according to Padilla it would be a Hollywood-style biopic about the famous and multidisciplinary Italian poet. Like John Huston’s Toulouse-Lautrec movie. But since Padilla’s movie wouldn’t have a big budget (in fact it had no budget), the main roles would be played not by great actors but by fellow writers, who would work for the love of art in general, love of the gobbo in particular, or simply to be included. The role of Leopardi was reserved for a young poet and heroin addict from La Coruña whose name Amalfitano had forgotten. The role of Antonio Ranieri was reserved for Padilla himself. It’s the most interesting of all, he declared. Count Monaldo Leopardi would be played by Vargas Llosa, who, with a brooding look and some talcum powder, would be perfect for the role. Paolina Leopardi would go to Blanca Andreu, and Carlo Leopardi to Enrique Vila-Matas. The role of Countess Adelaida Antici, mother of the poet, was to be offered to Josefina Aldecoa. Adelaida García Morales and Carmen Martín Gaite would play peasants from Recanati. Giordani, faithful friend and epistolary confidant — a bit of a drip, really — would go to Muñoz Molina. Manzoni: Javier Marías. Two Vatican cardinals, tremulous Latinists, loathsome Hellenists: Cela and Juan Goytisolo. Uncle Carlo Antici was reserved for Juan Marsé. Stella, the publisher, would be offered to Herralde. Fanny Targioni, the fickle and too-human Fanny, to Soledad Puértolas. And then there were some of the poems, which — to make them more comprehensible to the audience — would be played by actors. That is, the poems would be given physical presence instead of being ladders of words. Example: Leopardi is writing “The Infinite” and from beneath the table springs Martín de Riquer, in a small but effective role, though Padilla doubted that the eminent academic would accept the ephemeral glory of the cinema. The “Night Song of a Wandering Shepherd in Asia,” Padilla’s favorite poem, would be played by Leopoldo María Panero, naked or in a tiny bathing suit. Eduardo Mendicutti would play “To Silvia.” Enrique Vila-Matas: “The Calm After the Storm.” “To Italy,” the poet Pere Girau, Padilla’s best friend. He planned to shoot the interiors in his own Eixample apartment and at the gym of an ex-lover in Gracia. The exteriors: Sitges, Manresa, the Barrio Gótico of Barcelona, Girona, Olot, Palamós. He even had a completely original and revolutionary idea for re-creating Naples in 1839 and the cholera epidemic that ravaged the city, an idea that he could have sold to the big Hollywood studios, but Amalfitano couldn’t remember what it was.