Roberto Bolano - Antwerp

There's a secret sickness called Lisa. Like all sicknesses, it's miserable and it comes on at night. In the weave of a mysterious language whose words signify without exception that the foreigner "isn't well." And somehow I would like her to know that the foreigner is "struggling." "in strange lands," "without much chance of writing epic poetry," "without much chance of anything." The sickness takes me to strange and frozen bathrooms where the plumbing works according to an unexpected mechanism. Bathrooms, dreams, long hair flying out the window to the sea. The sickness is a wake. (The author appears shirtless, in black glasses, posing with a dog and a backpack in the summer somewhere.) "The summer somewhere," sentences lacking in tranquility, though the image they refract is motionless, like a coffin in the lens of a still camera. The writer is a dirty man, with his shirt sleeves rolled up and his short hair wet with sweat. hauling barrels of garbage. He's also a waiter who watches himself filming as he walks along a deserted beach, on his way back to the hotel… "The wind whips grains of sand"… "Without much chance"… The sickness is to sit at the base of the lighthouse staring into nothing. The lighthouse is black, the sea is black, the writer's jacket is also black.

You can't go back. This world of cops and robbers and foreigners without papers is too powerful for you. Powerful means it's comfortable, a featherweight world, without entropy, a world you know and from which you're never able to remove yourself. Like a tattoo. In exchange, however, you'd get back your native land, and the laws that protect you, and the right to meet a very beautiful girl with a dumb voice. A girl standing in the door to your room, the maid who's come to make your bed. I stopped at the word "bed" and closed the notebook. All I had the strength to do was turn out the light and fall into "bed." Immediately I began to dream about a window with a heavy wooden frame, carved like the ones in children's book illustrations. I shoved the window with my shoulder and it opened. Outside there was no one. A silent night in the blocks of bungalows. The policeman showed his badge, trying not to stutter. Car with a Madrid license plate. The man on the passenger side was wearing a Tshirt with the Barcelona colors, the stripes horizontal instead of vertical. An indelible tattoo on his left arm. Behind them gleamed a mass of fog and sleep. But the cop stuttered and I smiled. You cccan't gggo bbback. Go back.

That's the way it is, he said, a slight sense of failure that keeps growing stronger and the body gets used to it. You can't escape the void, just as you can't help crossing streets if you live in a city, with the added annoyance that sometimes the street is endlessly wide, the buildings look like warehouses out of gangster movies, and some people choose the worst moments to think about their mothers. "Gangsters" equals "mothers." At the golden hour, no one remembered the hunchback. "That's the Way It Is," the name of a piece by Monty Alexander recorded in the early 1960s at an L.A. club. Maybe "warehouses" equals "mothers," a wide margin of error is permissible when you're dealing with superimpositions. All thought is registered on the path through the woods along which the foreigner walked back and forth. If you saw him from above you'd think he was a solitary ant. Flash of doubt: there's always another ant that the camera doesn't see. What poems lack is characters who lie in wait for the reader. "Warehouses," "gangsters," "mothers," "forever." His voice was hard, he said, solid in timbre like the collapse of a cattle hoist or a hay bale in a cattle pond. He drooled as he spoke, some sentences were riddles that no one bothered to decipher. Ray Brown on bass, Milt Jackson on vibraphone, and two others on sax and drums. Monty Alexander himself played piano. ManneHole, 1961? The last thing he saw was the beach at nine o'clock. In July it got dark very late, at ninethirty it was still light out. A group of waiters moving away from the eye. (But the eye envisions "warehouses," not "waiters.") The wind lifts soft curtains of sand. From here, it looks like they'll try to come back.

The nameless girl wanders the workingclass neighborhoods of Barcelona. A girl born in France, to Spanish parents? The beach stretches in a straight line to the next town. She opened the window, it was overcast but hot. She went back into the bathroom. She gazed curiously at the buildings along the street. All of this is paranoia, she thought. She's eighteen but she doesn't exist. she was born in an industrial city of France and her name is Rosario or María Dolores, but she can't exist because I'm still here. The guard is asleep? She checked her watch. Returning to the window, she lit a cigarette. Through the curtains the boys dozed amid the shadows on the street. Intermittent forms, the sound of barely audible voices. She stared at the moon that hung over the building across the street. From the street came the words "ship," "Olympia," "restaurant." The girl sat on the terrace of a "restaurant" and asked for a glass of white wine. Over her head was the green awning, and, above that, the summer. Like the moon peeping over the building and her gazing at it, thinking about the motorcyclists and the name of the month: July. Born in France to Spanish parents, blond hair, very far away from the restaurant and the words with which they try to distract her. "I woke up because you were lost in the shadows of the bedroom"… "A powerful explosion—… "I was deaf for the rest of the day"… She dreamed of empty cars in lots as black as coal. There are no more towns or workingclass neighborhoods for this actor. Eighteen years old, so far away. She goes back into the bathroom. Girl kaput.

Movies under the pines at the Estrella de Mar campground. The spectators watch the screen and slap at mosquitoes. A yellow face suddenly appears among the rocks and asks: are you, too, being chased by Colan Yar? (Yellow face crisscrossed with broad dark scars, burned trees, white plastic chairs left in front of the bungalows, a bicycle in the weeds.) Colan Yar, of course, and plaques faintly lit by the the moon. I left my post; with slow steps I headed to the restaurant, which was still open at this late hour. "Colan Yar after me, right on my heels," I heard people saying behind my back. When turned all I could see were the shapes of trees and dark tents. In the movie one of the actors said "we're being chased by a volcano." Another character, a woman, at some point observed: "it's no easy thing to become a major in the English army." Chased by the Nagas, diabolical warriors in black leather helmets, worshippers of the volcano, maybe priests, not warriors; in any case, soon wiped out. The actress: "I'm tired of fighting these awful creatures." An actor says: "Do you want me to carry you to the plane?" Five figures flee through a valley in flames. An Armada icebreaker waiting for them at 20:30 hours, not a minute later. The captain: "If we stay, we won't be able to get out later." The captain's hair is completely white and he's wearing a blue winter uniform. He enunciates slowly: "We won't be able to get out." I glanced away from the screen. From the distance the tennis court lights made it look like a secret airfield. Back there, the person fleeing Colan Yar writes a letter sitting on a bench outside. Secret airfield. Mirrors. Other elements.

Movies in the woods? The projectionist naps on a lounge chair in the backyard of his bungalow. The nameless girl disappeared as meekly as the first time I saw her. I walked forward unafraid, leaving faint footprints in the dust. It was midnight and I saw police cars pulled over on the highway. I didn't answer Mara's last letter. The girl walked back to her tent and no one could say whether she'd come out or not. The next morning she was gone. "I've written all I