Roberto Bolano - Antwerp

In the railroad car a girl on her own. She looks out the window. Outside everything splits in two: tilled fields, woods, white houses, towns, suburbs, dumps, factories, dogs, and children waving goodbye. Lola Muriel appears. August 1980. I dream of faces that open their mouths and can't speak. They try but they can't. Their blue eyes stare at me but they can't. Then I walk along the corridor of a hotel. I wake up sweating. Lola has blue eyes and she reads Poe stories by the pool, while the other girls talk about pyramids and jungles. I dream that I'm watching it rain in neighborhoods which I recognize but have never visited. I walk along an empty passageway. I see faces with eyes that close and mouths that open, though they can't speak. I wake up sweating. August 1980? A girl, eighteen, from Andalusia? The night watchman, madly in love?

Silence hovers in the yards, leaving no pages with writing on them, that thing we'll later call the work. Silence reads letters sitting on a balcony. Birds like a rasp in the throat, like women with deep voices. I no longer ask for all the loneliness of love or the tranquility of love or for the mirrors. Silence glimmers in the empty hallways, on the radios no one listens to anymore. Silence is love just as your raspy voice is a bird. And no work could justify the slowness of movements and obstacles. I wrote "a nameless girl," I saw a radio by the window and a girl sitting on a chair and in a train. The girl was tied up and the train was in motion. The folding of wings. Everything is a folding of wings and silence, from the fat girl afraid to get in the pool to the hunchback. Her hand turned off the radio… "I've seen some happy marriages — the silence builds a kind of double victoryfoggy windowpanes and names written with a finger"… "Maybe dates, not names"… "In the winter"… Scene of policemen rushing into a gray building, sound of gunfire, radios turned all the way up. Fade to black. The tenderness of an old whore and her cloak of silvery silence. And I no longer ask for all the solitude in the world, but for time. They shoot. Phrases like "I've lost even my sense of humor," "so many nights alone," etc., remind me of the meaning of retreat, a folding inward. Nothing's written. The foreigner, motionless, imagines that this is death. The hunchback trembles in the empty pool. I've found a bridge in the woods. Lightning flash of blue eyes and blond hair… "For a while, never alone again"…

She said she loved busy days. I looked up at the sky. "Busy days," and also insects and clouds that drift down to the bushes. This flower pot I leave in the country is proof of my love for you. Then I came back with my butterfly net in the fog. The girl said: "calamity," "horses," "rockets sliced open," and turned her back on me. Her back spoke. Like the chirping of crickets in the afternoons of lonely houses. I closed my eyes, the brakes squealed, and the policemen leaped out of their cars. "Keep looking out the window." Without any explanation, two of them came to the door and said "police," the rest I could hardly hear. I closed my eyes, crickets chirped, the boys died on the beach. Bodies riddled with holes. The brakes squealed and the cops got out. There's something obscene about this, said the medic when nobody was listening. I'll probably never come back to the clearing in the woods, not with flowers, not with the net, not with a fucking book to spend the afternoon. His mouth opened but the author couldn't hear a thing. He thought about the silence and then he thought "there's no such thing," "horses," "waning August moon." Someone applauded from the void. I said I guessed this was happiness.

On the terrace of the bar only three girls are dancing. Two are thin and have long hair. The other is fat, with shorter hair, and she's retarded… The guy being chased by Colan Yar vanished like a mosquito in winter… Though really, I guess in the winter all that's left are the mosquito eggs… Three happy, hardworking girls… August 7, 1980… The guy opened the door to his room, turned on the light… There was an expression of horror on his face… He turned out the light… Don't be afraid, though the only stories I have to tell you are sad, don't be afraid…

Big mistakes. Nameless girl returning to the scene of the deserted campground. Deserted bar, deserted reception area, deserted plots. This is your Wild West ghost town. She said: in the end they'll destroy us all. (Even the pretty girls?) I laughed at her despondence. Doubly afraid of himself because he couldn't help falling in love once a year at least. Then a succession of portapotties, cheap reprints, kids puking, while a retarded girl dances on the silent terrace. All writing on the edge hides a white mask. That's all. There's always a fucking mask. The rest: poor Bolaño writing at a pit stop. "Police cars with their radios on: useless information raining down on them from all the neighborhoods they pass through." "Anonymous letters, subtle threats, the real wait." "My dear, now I live in a tourist town, the people are tan, it's sunny every day, etc." There are no rules. ("Tell that stupid Arnold Bennet that all his rules about plot only apply to novels that are copies of other novels.") And so on and so on. I, too, am fleeing Colan Yar. I've worked with retarded people, at a campground, picking pineapples, harvesting crops, unloading ships. Everything

drove me toward this place, this vacant lot where nothing remains to be said… "At least you're with beautiful girls"… "I'd say the only beautiful thing here is the language"… "I mean it in the most literal way"… (Applause.)

(Everyone's Eaten More Than One Dish or One Dish Costing More Than zoo Pesetas, Except for Me!)

Dear Lisa, once I talked to you on the phone for more than an hour without realizing that you had hung up. I was at a public phone on Calle Bucareli, at the Reloj Chino corner. Now I'm in a bar on the Catalan coast, my throat hurts, and I'm close to broke. The Italian girl said she was going back to Milan to work, even if it made her sick. I don't know whether she was quoting Pavese or she really didn't feel like going back. I think I'll go to the campground nurse for some antibiotics. The scene breaks up geometrically. We see a deserted beach at eight o'clock, tall orange clouds; in the distance a group of five people walk away from the observer in Indian file. The wind lifts a curtain of sand and covers them.

In Antwerp a man was killed when his car was run over by a truck full of pigs. Lots of the pigs died too when the truck overturned, others had to be put out of their misery by the side of the road, and others took off as fast as they could… "That's right, honey, he's dead, the pigs ran right over him"… "At night, on the dark highways of Belgium or Catalonia"… "We talked for hours in a bar on Las Ramblas, it was summer and she talked as if she hadn't talked for a long time"… "When she was done, she felt my face like a blind woman"… "The pigs squealed"… "She said I want to be alone and even though I was drunk I understood"… "I don't know, it's something like the full moon, girls who are really like flies, though that's not what I mean"… "Pigs howling in the middle of the highway, wounded or rushing away from the smashedup truck"… "Every word is useless, every sentence, every phone conversation"… "She said she wanted to be alone"… I wanted to be alone too. In Antwerp or Barcelona. The moon. Animals fleeing. Highway accident. Fear.