Roberto Bolano: Antwerp

I was silent for a moment and then I asked whether he really thought Roberto Bolaño had helped the hunchback just because years ago he was in love with a Mexican girl and the hunchback was Mexican too. Yes, said the guitarist, it sounds like a cheap romance novel, but I don't know how else to explain it, I mean in those days Bolaño wasn't overflowing with solidarity or desperation, two good reasons to help the Mexican. But nostalgia, on the other hand…

Synopsis. The hunchback in the woods near the campground and the tennis courts and the riding school. In Barcelona a South American is dying in a foulsmelling room. Police dragnets. Cops who fuck nameless girls. The English writer talks to the hunchback in the woods. Death throes and an asshole from South America, on the road. Five or six waiters return to the hotel along a deserted beach. Stirrings of fall. The wind whips up sand and buries them.

Stray scenes kaput, longhaired kids on the beach again, but this time I might be dreamingtrees, dampness, paperbacks, slides at the end of which waits a little girl or a friend or a black car. I said wait for a movement of bodies, hairs, tattooed arms, choosing between prison and plastic (or aesthetic) surgery, I said don't wait for me. The hunchback cut out something that looked like a miniature poster and smiled at us from the branch of a pine tree. He was up in a tree, how long he'd been up there I don't know. "I can't get a fix on the frequencies of reality, they're so high"… "A girl, motionless, who nonetheless spins, pinned to a bed that's pinned to the parquet that's pinned, etc When I was a boy I used to dream something like this '… The

straight line is the sea when it's calm, the wavy line is the sea with waves, and the jagged line is a storm"… "I guess there isn't much aesthetics left in me".. "nnnnnnn"… "A little boat".. "nnnnnnn".. "nnnnnnn"…

Photographs of the Castelldefels beach… Photographs of the campground… The polluted sea… Mediterranean, October in Catalonia… Alone… The Zenith's eye…

They alternated. The straight line made me feel calm.

The wavy line made me uneasy, I sensed danger but I liked the smoothness: up and down. The last line was agitation. My penis hurt, my belly hurt, etc.

Hamlet and La Vita Nuova, in both works there's a youthful breathing. For innocence, says the Englishman, read immaturity. On the screen there's only laughter, silent laughter that startles the spectator as if he were hearing his own last gasps. "Anyone can die" means something different than "Anyone would die." A callow breathing in which it's still possible to discover wonder, play, perversion, purity. "Words are empty"… "If you put that gun away we might be able to negotiate"… On an average of three hours' sleep a night the author writes these threats by the side of a pool at the beginning of the month of October. Innocence, almost like the image of Lola Muriel that I'd like to destroy. (But you can't destroy what you don't possess.) An urge, at the cost of nervous collapse in cheap rooms, propels poetry toward something that detectives call perfection. Deadend street. A basement whose only virtue is its cleanliness. And yet who has been here if not La Vita Nuova and Hamlet. "I write by the pool at the campground, it's October, there are more and more flies now and fewer and fewer people; by the time we're halfway through the month there'll be no one left and the cleaning service will stop coming; the flies will take over until the end of the month, maybe."

We came softly forward. The place in his memory that's labeled immediat e pas t is furnished with mattresses scarcely touched by light. Gray mattresses with red and blue stripes in something that looks like a hallway or an overly long waiting room. In any case, his memory is frozen in i mmediate pas t like a faceless man in a dentist's chair. There are houses and streets that run down to the sea, dirty windows and shadows on staircase landings. We hear someone say "a long time ago it was noon," the light bounces off the center of immediat e past, something that's neither a screen nor attempts to offer images. Memory slowly dictates soundless sentences. We imagine that all of this has been done to avoid confusion, a layer of white paint covers the film on the floor. Fleein g to gether long ago became livin g togethe r and thus the integrity of the gesture was lost; the shine of immediate past. Are there really shadows on the landings? Was there really a hunchback who wrote happy poems? (Someone applauds.) "I knew it was them when I heard their foot steps on the stairs"… "I closed my eyes, the image of the gun didn't match the reality"… "I didn't bother to open the door for them"… "It was two in the morning and a blonde who looked like a man came in"… "Her eyes watched the moon through the curtain"… "A stupid smile spread slowly across her face daubed with white"… "The gun was only a word"… "Close the door, I said"… "Shattering isn't real, it's blackmail"…

The only possible scene is the one with the man on the path through the woods, running. Someone blinks a blue bedroom. Now he's twentyseven and he gets on a bus. He's smoking a cigarette, has short hair, is wearing jeans, a dark shirt, a hooded jacket, boots, the dark glasses of a political commissar. He's sitting next to the window; beside him a workman on his way back from Andalusia. He gets on a train at the station in Zaragoza, he looks back, the mist has risen to the knees of a track worker. He smokes, coughs, rests his forehead on the bus window. Now he's walking around a strange city, a blue bag in his hand, his hood pulled up, it's cold, with each breath he expels a puff of smoke. The workman sleeps with his head resting on his shoulder. He lights a cigarette, glances at the plains, closes his eyes. The next scene is yellow and cold and on the soundtrack birds beat their wings. (He says: I'm a cageit's a private jokethen he buys cigarettes and walks away from the camera.) He's sitting in a train station at dusk, he does a crossword puzzle, he reads the international news, he tracks the flight of a plane, he moistens his lips with his tongue.

Someone coughs in the darkness, a cold clear morning from the window of a hotel; he coughs. He goes out to the street, pulls up the hood of his bluejacket, buttons all the buttons except the top one. He buys a pack of cigarettes, takes one, stops on the sidewalk by the window of a jewelry shop, lights a cigarette. He has short hair. He walks with his hands in the pockets of his jacket, the cigarette dangles from his lips. The scene is a closeup of the man with his forehead resting on the window. The rest is tiny passageways that hardly ever lead anywhere. The glass is foggy. Now he's twentyseven and he gets off the bus. He heads down a deserted street.

The fuzzy images of the hunchback and the policeman begin to retreat in opposite directions. The scene is black and liquid. In the space without memory a freshly shaven man with short hair appears. He's notable for his pallor and slowness. A voice says that the South American didn't die. (It's to be assumed that the figure who replaces the misthunchback and the mistpoliceman is the South American.) He's wearing a navy blue jacket that calls to mind the last days of fall. Clearly he's been sick, his pallor and haggard face suggest as much. The screen splits down the middle, vertically. The South American walks along a deserted street. He recognizes the author and keeps walking. The screen recomposes itself as if it's just stopped raining. Sundappled gray buildings appear on an empty, familiar afternoon. The asphalt of the streets is clean and gray. The wind sweeps down avenues of red trees. Bright clouds are reflected in the windows of offices where no one is at work. Someone has created an extra silence. The mountain swoops at the end of the street. Little redroofed houses scattered along the slope; thin spirals of smoke rise from some chimneys.