Roberto Bolano: Antwerp

He’s eating. His eyes scan the foliage. He hears the train go by.

The ghosts of the Plaza Real are on the stairs. Blankets pulled up to my ears, motionless in bed, sweating and repeating meaningless words to myself, I hear them moving around, turning the lights on and off, climbing up toward the roof with unbearable slowness. I’m the moon, someone ventures. But I used to be in a gang and I had the Arab in my sights and I pulled the trigger at the worst possible moment. Narrow streets in the heart of Distrito V, and no way to escape or alter the fate that slid like a djellaba over my greasy hair. Words that drift away from one another. Urban games played from time immemorial. . “Frankfurt”. . “A blond girl at the biggest window of the boarding house”. . “There’s nothing I can do now”. . I’m my own bewitchment. My hands move over a mural in which someone, eight inches taller than me, stands in the shadows, hands in the pockets of his jacket, preparing for death and his subsequent transparency. The language of others is unintelligible to me. “Tired after being up for days”. . “A blond girl came down the stairs”. . “My name is Roberto Bolaño”. . “I opened my arms”. .

The Calabria Commune campground, according to a sensationalistic article in PEN. Harassed by the townspeople: inside, the campers walked around naked. Six kids dead in the surrounding area. “They were campers”. . “Not from around here, that’s for sure”. . Months before, the AntiTerrorist Brigade paid them a visit. “They were out of control, I mean, screwing all over the place: they screwed in groups and wherever they felt like it”. . “At first they kept to themselves, they only did it at the campground, but this year they had orgies on the beach and right outside town”. . The police questioning the locals: “I didn’t do it,” says one, “if somebody had set fire to that place, you could blame me, it’s crossed my mind more than once, but I don’t have the heart to shoot six kids”. . Maybe it was the mafia. Maybe they committed suicide. Maybe it was all a dream. The wind in the rocks. The Mediterranean. Blue.

“They suspected me from the beginning”. . “Pale men could see what was hidden in the landscape”. . “A campground, a forest, a tennis club, a riding school — the road will take you far away if you want to go far away”. . “They suspected I was a spy but what kind of fucking spy”. . “Reasonable people vs. unreasonable people”. . “That guy running around here doesn’t exist”. . “He’s the real ringleader of all this”. . “But I also dreamed of girls”. . “People we know, the same faces from last summer”. . “The same kindness”. . “Now time erases all that”. . “The perfect girl suspected me from the very beginning”. . “Something I made up”. . “There was no spying or any shit like that”. . “It was so obvious that they refused to believe it”. .

The hell to come. . Sophie Podolski killed herself years ago. . She would’ve been twentyseven now, like me. . Egyptian designs on the ceiling, the workers slowly

approach, dusty fields, it’s the end of April and they’re paid in heroin. . I’ve turned on the radio, an impersonal voice gives the citybycity count of those arrested today. . “Midnight, nothing to report”. . A girl who wrote dragons, completely fucking sick of it all in some corner of Brussels. . “Assault rifles, guns, old grenades”. . I’m alone, all the literary shit gradually falling by the wayside — poetry journals, limited editions, the whole dreary joke behind me now. . The door opened at the first kick and the guy jammed the gun under your chin. . Abandoned buildings in Barcelona, almost an invitation to kill yourself in peace. . The sun on the Nile behind the curtain of dust at sunset. . The boss pays in heroin and the farm workers snort it in the furrows, on blankets, under scrawled palm trees that someone edits away. . A Belgian girl who wrote like a star. . “She would’ve been twentyseven now, like me”. .

All praise to the highways and to these moments. Umbrellas abandoned by bums in shopping plazas with white supermarkets rising at the far ends. It’s summer and the policemen are drinking at the back of the bar. Next to the jukebox a girl listens to the latest hits. Around the same time, someone is walking, far from here, away from here, with no plans to come back. A naked boy sitting outside his tent in the woods? The girl stumbled into the bathroom and began to vomit. When you think about it, we’re not allotted much time here on Earth to make lives for ourselves: I mean, to scrape something together, get married, wait for death. Her eyes in the mirror like letters fanned out in a dark room; the huddled breathing shape burrowed into bed with her. The men talk about dead smalltime crooks, the pride of houses on the coast, extra paychecks. One day I’ll die of cancer. Cleaning utensils begin to levitate in her head. She says: I could go on and on. The kid came into the room and grabbed her by the shoulders. The two of them wept like characters from different movies projected on the same screen. Red scene of bodies turning on the gas. The bony beautiful hand turned on the gas. Choose just one of these phrases: “I escaped torture” … “An unknown hotel” … “No more roads” …

To name is to praise, said the girl (eighteen, a poet, long hair). The hour of the ambulance parked in the alley. The medic stubbed out his cigarette on his shoe, then lumbered forward like a bear. I wish those miserable people in the windows would turn out the lights and go to sleep. Who was the first human being to look out a window? (Applause.) People are tired, it wouldn't surprise me if one of these days they greeted us with a hail of bullets. I guess a monkey. I can't string two words together. I can't express myself coherently or write what I want. I should probably give up everything and go away, isn't that what Teresa of Avila did? (Applause and laughter.) A monkey looking out a putrid window, watching the daylight fade. The medic came over to where the sergeant was smoking; they gave each other a slight nod without making eye contact. It was clear at a glance that he hadn't died of a heart attack. He was face down and you could see the bullet holes in his back, in his brown sweater. They emptied a machine gun into him, said a dwarf who was standing to the left of the sergeant and whom the medic hadn't seen. In the distance they heard the muted sounds of a protest march. We'd better go before they block the street, said the dwarf. The sergeant didn't seem to hear him, sunk in contemplation of the dark windows from which people were watching the spectacle. Let's hurry. But where do we go? There aren't any police stations. To name is to praise, said the girl, laughing. The same passion, taken to infinity. Cars stop between potholes and garbage cans. Doors that open and then close for no apparent reason. Engines, streetlights, the ambulance reverses away. The hour swells, bursts. I guess it was a monkey at the top of a tree.

There are no police stations, no hospitals, nothing. At least there’s nothing money can buy. “We act on instantaneous impulses” … “This is the kind of thing that destroys the unconscious, and then we’ll be left hanging” … “Remember that joke about the bullfighter who steps out into the ring and then there’s no bull, no ring, nothing?” … The policeman drank anarchic breezes. Someone started to clap.