Roberto Bolano: Monsieur Pain

I was annoyed with myself. A wave of melancholy swept over me only to be replaced, a few steps further on, by a calm timeless serenity, immune to any shock. But the fear, I knew, was still there, intangible but stubborn. What did I fear? Not physical aggression, I was sure of that. So why couldn’t I muster courage enough to go home or simply walk on without looking constantly over my shoulder, expecting to see the pair of Spaniards?

Eventually I returned to my lodgings, after wandering through outlying neighborhoods, among derelict stations, along avenues that seemed to go on forever and then abruptly end in vacant lots of a kind I would never have expected to come across in that part of Paris.

It was late when I got back, and the only person I found lurking in the darkness was Madame Grenelle. She was crying noisily.

“Madame Grenelle?”

“. .”

“It’s me, Pierre Pain. What has happened?”

“Nothing, nothing, nothing. .”

“Then stop crying and go up to your room.”

“Ah, my god, shit shit shit. .”

Stepping closer, I noticed that she was drunk; a heavy, sickly smell of absinthe enveloped her. For some reason, I don’t know why, the image of the two teenage girls disappearing into the crowd sprang from my memory like a delicate animal. But what crowd? The street had been deserted. A calm, inexorable sadness clambered onto my shoulders and clung there, like a hump or a younger but infinitely wiser brother.

“Come on now, let’s go upstairs. If you stay here you’ll fall ill, it’s very cold.”

“I’m bad, Monsieur Pain, but that doesn’t mean. .”

“Up we go.”

“It’s loneliness. Doesn’t anyone understand? Look at my eye!”

I hesitated for a moment, the adolescent girls were walking down an empty, ideal, endless street. . Then I struck a match. Madame Grenelle’s shadow was climbing, step by step, up to the flaking wall of the landing. She had a black eye.

“What happened to you?”

“. .”

“Let me see. You should go up to your room and rest. Your eyelid is swollen.”

“It’s the loneliness, Monsieur Pain.”

“It looks like you’ve been hit.”

“No. .”

“Did someone hit you?”

“A woman. I’m a woman. I’m a human being too, aren’t I? Sorry. This weather is awful, it just keeps raining. Why don’t you sit down for a moment?”

I sat down on one of the steps.

“Your friend came this morning, didn’t she? You must be happy. She’s a very pretty girl.”

“I’d rather not talk about that, Madame Grenelle, let’s get you sorted out first. . Yes, of course, I’m pleased. .”

“I respect you, Monsieur Pain, something you never. . Anyway. . Would you like a shot of absinth? Sorry. .”

Her hand appeared from some mysterious recess, gripping the neck of a bottle.

“No thanks. And I don’t think you should be drinking either.”

“. .”

“I’m tired, Madame Grenelle, I’ve had a busy day, you’ve no idea how much. .”

“Me, I’m alone all day, with nothing to do, you know, I get bored. You’ve never been in my apartment, I’ll invite you in one day so you can see it, not a speck of dust. . But in the end that’s boring too. And it takes no time at all to clean, it’s so small. My little palace.”

I sighed. I felt deeply weary.

“Don’t you have anything you can put on your eye?”

“Mascara. .”

I think I smiled. Luckily she couldn’t see my face. It must have been a wretched sight.

“Well, better leave it then, just rest.”

“A damp handkerchief’s the thing, men are so impractical.”

“Excellent idea. Now stop drinking and listen to me. Go to bed.”

“You must come and see my apartment one day. Not tonight. I don’t think it’s a good time. Some day, though, whenever you feel like it. You’ll see how spick and span it is!”

“I’m sure it is.”

“Help me get up. .”

Before shutting the door of her room, she said:

“Forgive me if I’ve bothered you. I didn’t mean to bother anyone. Do you know how I did this to myself?” She pointed at her swollen eye with the neck of the bottle, which she had been gripping firmly all this time. “I fell over while I was dancing, here, in the corridor, on my own. Ridiculous, isn’t it?”

“I don’t think so. Dancing is beautiful.”

“You’re a gentleman, Monsieur Pain. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, Madame Grenelle.”

I slept well and soundly, and if I dreamed, I also had the good sense to forget my dreams. I woke late — it was becoming a habit — and having performed my ablutions went down to breakfast at Raoul’s café.

While I was waiting I picked up a morning paper that someone had left open on a table, and my eyes wandered from the headlines to the filler stories and then to the photographs, unhurriedly searching for something undefined.

I must have appeared downcast, because Raoul asked, from behind the bar:

“Bad news?”

The news was about the war in Spain: the latest on the bombing raids, the shelling, and new weapons that we hadn’t known in the Great War.

“The damned Germans are testing out their arsenal,” said Raoul.

“Rubbish, they don’t have anything special,” remarked a mechanic in dark brown overalls, who was leaning on the bar, drinking his glass of wine.

“So you don’t think there’s anything special about dive-bombing, Robert? The Stukas!” replied Raoul, who was well versed in military technology. “Single-engine, two-seater planes, with three machine guns, and they can carry more than a thousand kilos of bombs!”

“The way you talk, it’s like you’re worshipping them.”

“Of course not! Not at all. .! But you do have to admit. .”

“All right, Raoul, I didn’t really mean it, but we’re not talking about the eighth wonder of the world. People are what matters, the courage of the masses.”

“A war is a war,” pronounced the blind boy, sitting against the wall with his white cane between his knees. “If you don’t believe me, ask Monsieur Pain.”

“That’s right,” I said, without raising my eyes from the newspaper, with its advertisements, sports news, culture and entertainment pages, gossip columns. .

“Thank god I haven’t seen one.”

Some of the clients laughed.

“You’re a clown, Jean-Luc, that’s what you are,” said Raoul.

“I’m serious,” the blind boy protested, half-joking.

“It’s true,” I said. “You can count yourself lucky in that respect, Jean-Luc. The scenery of war is. . Dantesque. No: miserable. . squalid. . The problem is that if a war broke out, blindness would only spare you from active service, not from all the other disasters that wars inevitably bring in their wake. However wretched your life is, war can make it worse, and I’m speaking for all of us, not just you.”

“See, Jean-Luc?”

“All right, all right,” said the blind boy. “You’ve convinced me.”

“They’re building up their armament every day,” grumbled Raoul, putting my coffee on the table, “while we’re just sounding off. We need to act; we need to take a firm stand, be tough. .”

“But what are you proposing?” asked a small, bearded man with a spiky shock of hair, who until then had remained hidden at the other end of the bar. “Do you want our incompetent government to drag us into in an arms race, on top of everything else? For god’s sake, my friend, there are quite enough Nazis in Europe already.”

“Listen, I don’t know about Nazis, but I do know that the Germans are a threat to our country, and we should stop dreaming and face up to them.”

“The French bourgeoisie is a threat too,” put in the mechanic, “for the French working class.”