Roberto Bolano: Monsieur Pain

“And what are you? A detective?”

“No, god forbid. . Do I look like a detective? I’m just trying to return something that belongs to those two doctors.”

“What?”

I examined her carefully for the first time. Her face seemed to be undergoing a gradual transformation. Now it combined the features of a guard dog and the fearfully anticipated prostitute of my adolescent fantasies.

“It’s a personal matter, you understand.”

“I’m afraid I don’t.”

“Anyway, if you’re sure they don’t work here. .”

In the street I decided to take a taxi and go home immediately. The air was fresh and it was no longer raining, although the paving stones in the street were shining, as if freshly polished, and some people were still walking with their umbrellas open.

When the taxi pulled up in front of my building, I told the driver to wait, but explained that I would not be getting out.

I looked through the window of the taxi. The entrance hall was a mass of pure shadow, and there was no one to be seen, although there could well have been someone hidden in the darkness. I could feel the desire to return to my apartment evaporating.

“Switch off the motor,” I said to the driver. “We’re going to wait a little.”

The driver turned around to look at me and nodded without saying a word, his hands resting compliantly on the steering wheel. I looked up and down both sidewalks — no sign of the Spaniards — but decided to wait. Fifteen minutes later, I told the driver to go. I watched through the back window to make sure that no one was following us.

“Are you following someone or is someone following you?” asked the driver.

I didn’t answer.

What have you got to lose here? one of the Spaniards had asked.

Maybe that was the heart of the matter: losing or finding something.

“What do you two have to lose?” I replied.

The thin one blinked.

“Don’t be stubborn,” he said.

I suspected they hadn’t understood, but it didn’t matter.

“It makes no sense to me,” I continued, “but it’s some consolation to think that nobody could make sense of what you’re trying to do. You’re just giving me money.”

When the thin one saw me take the envelope containing the two thousand francs and slip it into one of my jacket pockets, his blinking turned into a smile.

“You can’t even imagine how little I have to lose,” I said, excusing myself. “Nothing, in fact.”

“Don’t worry,” said the dark one, smiling, “We have a lot of money, it’s not an issue.”

“And besides, don’t underestimate the imagination.”

“The imagination can imagine anything.”

“ Anything ,” said the thin one.

“Leave Vallejo to us, we’ll take care of him; he’s a friend, a dear friend.”

A dear friend? The imagination can imagine anything? I had a sharpening sense that I didn’t understand what they meant.

“Place Blanche.” My voice gave the taxi driver a start.

“Where?” he asked, accelerating suddenly.

“Place Blanche.”

The driver looked at me in the rear-view mirror, bewildered. We had gone around the block and were back in the street where I lived. For a moment I thought he was going to refuse and I felt a flutter of fear at the thought of being left alone in the street, near my apartment.

“Keep going, keep going, I’ll show you the way.”

I got out of the taxi in a street that was, I thought, close to the residence of a friend whom I was planning to visit and perhaps inform of my ongoing adventures. But after a while I changed my mind and instead went wandering through streets I vaguely recognized, which in the course of my walk, as the minutes went by, became gradually stranger, until I knew for certain that I had entered a completely unknown neighborhood.

I went into a café: the roof, the walls, the tables, the seats, everything was green. As if the proprietor had, in a fit of madness, tried to give it a jungle-like ambiance or, as I later thought, endeavored to camouflage the premises, and partly succeeded, although in a way that was clearly inept.

I sat at one of the tables, under a motionless two-bladed fan, which was also green, and scrutinized the interior, deserted except for two blond boys, three tables away, sitting quietly with their half-empty glasses.

“The service is a bit slow here,” said one of them after a while. I didn’t realize at first that he was speaking to me.

“Pardon. .”

“I said the service is a bit slow here. The waiter has gone off to pee.”

The one who had not spoken lifted his hand to his mouth and stifled a little giggle. I observed them more closely. They were very young, neither could have been more than twenty, and very carefully dressed. I told them I was in no hurry. In fact I was tired, and the tranquility of that eccentric café was doing me good.

“Sometimes it takes him half an hour to pee. It’s tempting to think he’s up to something else, but no, he’s just trying to urinate, to squeeze out a few little mercurial drops. .”

“Poor thing,” the other one chimed in.

“It’s an odd place, this,” I ventured to remark.

“The Forest. .”

“The what?”

“The Forest. . that’s what it’s called.”

“Most appropriate.”

“The underwater forest,” said my interlocutor, pointing to one end of the café.

I looked in the direction indicated by his finger and saw an enormous rectangular fish-tank backed by satin curtains.

“You can go and have a look. It’s nothing special, but you’re sure to find something to pique your curiosity.”

I went across to the tank. On the bottom, resting on a layer of very fine sand, were miniature boats, trains and planes arranged to depict calamities, disasters simultaneously frozen in an artificial moment, over which indifferent goldfish were swimming back and forth.

I guessed that the miniatures were made of lead; their details were remarkably realistic.

“There are no bodies,” I murmured, more to myself than to make conversation; nevertheless one of the boys heard, or perhaps intuited, my words.

“Look carefully.”

And there, indeed, next to one of the trains, beside the last carriage, half buried in the sand, was a little man-shaped figure. It was not the only one: near a single-seater airplane, leaning against a pumice stone, another figure surveyed the almanac of calamities, a figure made of dark gray, unpainted metal, standing tall, although, had the stone been removed, it would in all likelihood have toppled irrevocably.

“Interesting.”

“The light doesn’t help much. A cold, white light would be ideal, rather than this Indochinese green. But the ideal, as you know. . only by miracle. .”

“Are you the. . creator?”

“We are.”

A world submerged and preserved, where the only flags flying were flags of death: the goldfish. But even they seemed afraid.

The shadow of a smile flickered on the boy’s lips.

“It’s no big deal, but it was fun finding the miniatures; you can’t imagine how hard it is to find good lead trains. . Look at that one, on the left there. .”

I looked for the one he was pointing out. A splendid black train with more than ten carriages, Meersburg Express painted on their sides. The locomotive was blue; for a few moments I was puzzled by the black spots standing out against the sand, scattered all along beside the train. Then I realized: they were severed heads or bodies buried up to the neck. A string of corpses, but, oddly, there were none inside the train, which apart from the effects of the water had come through unharmed.

“It’s German. We had to order it from Germany.”