Roberto Bolano: Monsieur Pain

“But I accepted the money. Two thousand francs.”

“There was clearly a misunderstanding and you took advantage of it.”

“Shamefully, contemptibly, like a pimp. .”

“You can return the money and that will put an end to the matter.”

“I thought I had nothing to lose, my professional ethics didn’t even come into it. Professional ethics! The ethics of the oldest profession, maybe. What I thought was: I need the money! I’m sorry.”

“. .”

“Now I wouldn’t even know where to find the Spaniards. I saw them this afternoon at the Clinique Arago, but I don’t think they work there. I don’t know why, but for some reason I’m sure they don’t work there. . Have you been to the Clinique Arago?”

“No.”

“It’s a nightmare. The hallways are endless, as if they were specially designed to disorient visitors. . Which is what generally happens. . I don’t feel well. .”

“It’s all so confusing. .”

“I didn’t want the money for any practical reason. I didn’t need it to buy food! I have a state pension. . and as you know, I spend very little. .”

“Of course, Pierre.”

“There were other, deeper reasons, Monsieur Rivette; it’s as if I could smell something lurking nearby, very near. . I took the money. . just so as not to block. . the passage. . It sounds paranoid, but that’s how it is. Unless I’m just looking for excuses!”

“I think you need to calm down, Pierre.”

“Do you remember that young lady you gave my address to more than a year ago? Her husband was in the Salpêtrière. Madame Reynaud.”

“Yes, yes, Madame and Monsieur Reynaud. He died, if I remember rightly. A very young man.”

“Indeed. Well it was Madame Reynaud who formally requested my help in this case. The patient is the husband of one of her friends.”

“I don’t see the connection, Pierre.”

“I think I’m in love with Madame Reynaud.”

“. .”

“You must think I’m ridiculous: a man of my age, forty-eight, hoping to court a young lady.”

“You’re still young, Pierre. Now if I were to fall in love, at over eighty, that would be ridiculous. Does she know?”

“Of course not.”

“What are you planning to do?”

“Return the money, I suppose, or invite Madame Reynaud to dinner at some fancy restaurant. I don’t know. Everything has started spinning. I think I had too much to drink and you’ve been too patient with me.”

“. .”

“I think Raoul’s been too patient, too. It’s time to go to bed.”

“. .”

“So Pleumeur-Bodou is in the International Brigade? Good for him. A just cause, adventures in a fascinating land, the ideal vacation.”

“No, it seems he has joined the other side.”

“The Fascists?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, that, my dear Monsieur Rivette, was predictable. Pleumeur-Bodou was never a democrat at heart.”

“I never predicted it. But anyway, at my age, I have given up judging. I accept people as they are, whatever they do.”

“You always were an overly generous master, Monsieur Rivette.”

“Not at all. It would simply be an error for an old man like me to set himself up as a judge. . But there will be judges, Pierre, you can be sure of that, judges hard as stone, who will not know the meaning of the word pity. Sometimes, between sleep and waking, I catch a glimpse of them; I see them at work, deciding. They piece it all together; they are cruel and follow rules that to us seem entirely arbitrary. In a word, they are dreadful and inscrutable. But by then, of course, I’ll be gone.”

“Perhaps it’s because I’m drunk, but the night smells of something strange.”

“Every night has a different smell, my friend; it would be unbearable otherwise. I think you should go to bed.”

“But tonight’s smell is special, as if something were moving in the streets, something vague and familiar, but I can’t quite remember what it is.”

“Go to bed. Sleep. Calm your spirit.”

“The smell will follow me there too.”

That night — the last hours of the seventh of April, and the early hours of the eighth — had the ambivalent honor of being one of the worst nights of my life. I can’t remember what time it was when I went to bed, nor in what state I climbed the stairs. I slept, if that shivering can be counted as sleep, in a low-roofed, gray-and-white labyrinth, architecturally reminiscent of the Clinique Arago with its circular corridors; sometimes the dream-corridors were broader and stretched off endlessly, sometimes they were narrower, like twisted vestibules, and the starts and groans with which I woke and fell asleep again were not the worst of it. What was I doing there? Was I there of my own free will, or was some external force holding me in that place? Was I looking for Vallejo, or for someone else? I believe that if the company of nightmares conspired to visit me all at once, the result would be similar to what I experienced that night. I remember thinking at some point, as I sat on the bed mopping the sweat from my neck with my pajama sleeve, that the dreams I was enduring had all the features of a transmission, yes, a kind of radio transmission. And so, as if my dream-world were a crystal set secretly tuned to a private radio station, scenes and voices were transmitted to my mind (I should point out that the dreams had the following peculiarity: they were composed not so much of images as of voices, whispers and grunts), scenes quite unrelated to my own fantasies — I had simply become their fortuitous receptor. The demented radio drama assailing me was no doubt an anticipation of hell: a hell of voices connecting and disconnecting in a buzz of a static that was, I presume, my troubled snoring, forming duos, trios, quartets and entire choruses advancing blindly through an empty chamber, a kind of empty reading room, which at some point I identified as my own brain. At another moment in the dream, I also thought that the ear was the eye.

An abridged version of the nightmare might run something like this:

A first voice says: “Who the devil is Pierre Pain?”

“There is a leak.”

“All I know for sure is that there is a leak.”

“It could have been caused by a trivial oversight.”

“Look around you, examine the view. Do you notice anything strange?”

“Our life in the Market, in the streets of the Great Market. .”

“Dreams, melancholy.”

“There is a leak, examine the view.”

Indistinctly, as in a blurry photograph, I see Terzeff, Pleumeur-Bodou and myself standing around Monsieur Rivette, in the study of his old apartment on the Boulevard Richard Lenoir, where he has not lived for many years; it is 1922 and the four of us are silent, although our master’s eyes are moving constantly, as if he could sense an intrusion. I understand that this image is, in some way, resisting the general drift of the dream, and that, in spite of the protection it is affording me, I will not be able to hold onto it.

A stranger smiles. He is a movie actor, but that is all I know, nothing more. His smile is beautiful, but his words lacerate the air; in a second they absorb all the oxygen in the room: “What do you mean when you say a leak? What does the word leak signify to you?”

From behind the stranger I think I can hear a muffled, intermittent roar, like a darkened backdrop, and it fills me with a sense of urgency.

I wake up. I listen attentively to the sound of the pipes. Almost imperceptibly, the walls of the room appear to be vibrating. The same phenomenon is affecting my skin.

The stranger walks away along an empty boulevard. The treetops are shedding dry leaves. Is it autumn?

Now I see myself hidden behind a curtain, peering through dirty panes of glass, watching the stranger, who is standing in the middle of the street. The stranger, in turn, is examining the windows of the building in which I am hidden, though not the particular window through which I am spying on him.