Roberto Bolano - The Skating Rink

The day after the party at the disco that wretched old woman came bursting into my office. The morning was calm, as if wrapped in a quiet, damp towel, although the calm was only apparent, or rather confined to one side of the morning, the left side, say, while chaos was seething on the right-hand side, a chaos that only I could hear and sense. To be quite honest, I should say that from the moment I opened my eyes, I began to feel anxious, as if I could smell disaster even in the air of my bedroom. As I drove to Z, after a shower and breakfast, that feeling, which was not entirely new to me, diminished in intensity, but the irrational aspects of the problem remained, there in the car and later in the office, if you see what I mean; they remained with me in attenuated form, as a sense of foreboding. I felt I could actually see things and people aging second by second, all of them swept along in a time-stream flowing inexorably toward misery and grief. Then the door of the office swung open with a dull thud, and the old woman appeared, followed by my secretary, who, half aggrieved, half annoyed, was trying to shepherd her back into the waiting room. The old lady was thin and her hair was unevenly cut; she fixed her little eyes on me, in a brief intense examination, before announcing that she had something to tell me. At first I didn’t even stand up; I was absorbed in my own premonitions, and incidents like this are not unusual, given the nature of my work. A high proportion of our clients suppose that by going to management they will finally get their problems solved. In such cases, armed with kind words and a great deal of patience, I direct them to the offices located in the district of M, where they will be helped by our social workers and child welfare agents. I was on the point of doing just that when the old woman, after checking that it was me and not someone else observing her calmly from the other side of the desk, winked at me and softly uttered her talismanic sentence: I was hoping to discuss the business of the skating rink, either with you or with the mayor. Everything I had been suspecting and fearing since I woke up that morning materialized at once, taking shape with devastating force, as if I had stepped into a science-fiction movie. It would not be an exaggeration to say that I nearly collapsed into a mass of trembling jelly. Nevertheless, I steeled myself and managed to prevent my nerves from giving me away. Feigning a sudden and cheerful interest, I asked my secretary to leave us alone. She released the old woman, whom she had been holding by the arm, and looked at me as if she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. I had to repeat the order; then she left my office and shut the door behind her. The infamous discussion that is supposed to have taken place between the old woman and myself is, of course, a fabrication, one of many. From my secretary’s desk you can’t hear anything that is said in my office, unless it is shouted, and I can assure you that there were no shouts, or threats, or screams. The door remained shut throughout. My spirits, as you can well imagine, were about as low as they could be. The adjective “exhausted” gives a fair description of my state of mind, faced with that old woman; she, however, seemed to be possessed of boundless energy and vitality. As she spoke, sometimes in a normal tone of voice, sometimes in whispers, the way she gestured with her hands was consistently reminiscent of a movie about pharaohs and pyramids. From that torrent of nonsense, I gathered that she wanted a subsidized apartment, a “pension or financial aid,” and a job for some unnamed monster. None of those things, I said, were within my power. Then she demanded to see the mayor. Somehow she associated both of us with the existence of the skating rink. I asked her what she hoped to get out of a meeting with the mayor, and her reply confirmed my fears: Pilar, the old woman felt, would be more sympathetic to her requests. I said it wasn’t necessary, I’d see what I could do to sort out her situation, and immediately pulled out my wallet and gave her ten thousand pesetas, which the old woman put straight into her pocket. Then, trying to sound relaxed, I explained that for the moment I couldn’t do anything about the subsidized apartment, but when the season was over, say mid-September, I’d look into it, and try to find her something. The old woman inquired about her pension. I pulled out a sheet of paper and took down some details: there again, I explained, the problem was that until the rest of the municipal staff came back from vacation, nothing could be done. The old woman looked thoughtful for a while, but soon it was clear that, for the time being at least, the matter was in abeyance. Before taking her leave, she said that this deal would wipe the slate clean, and she was prepared to put our previous differences behind her. Unable to conceal my surprise, I assured her that we could hardly have had previous differences since this was the first time we had met. Then the old woman cast her mind back; it turned out that, some years before, she had paid a visit to Social Services. She recalled the past in clear and precise words that set me trembling from head to foot. You have to understand, I was sitting behind my desk and that damn witch, speaking those oily-smooth, razor-sharp words, was painting a picture in which only she and I existed, and neither had any chance of escape. But now the slate is clean, she said, with a sparkle in her eyes. I nodded. I knew I hadn’t fooled her with any of my lies. I felt the way any of you would have felt: trapped. .

At exactly ten in the morning I got into my car and set off for the Palacio Benvingut. It was a foggy day and the bends on the highway to Y are notoriously hazardous, so I drove with extreme care. There wasn’t much traffic and I had no trouble finding the palace, which had always intrigued me, because of the legend of its creator and first owner, but also because of its bewildering architecture. Like so many uninhabited houses on the Costa Brava and in the Maresme, the mansion had conserved its beauty even in ruins. The garden’s iron gates were open, but not far enough to let a car through. I got out and opened them right up. The hinges made an awful screeching noise. For a moment I considered continuing on foot, but then I thought better of it and returned to the car. There was a considerable distance from the main gate to the house itself, and the road, half gravel, half dirt, was lined with anemic shrubs and derelict flower beds. In the garden, a few enormous trees reared skyward, and beyond them, bushes grew wild among pavilions and ruined fountains, forming a dense, black-green wall. On the façade of the mansion, I discovered an inscription. It’s the sort of thing that only happens by serendipity; if someone had told me to look for the inscription, I’d never have been able to find it. With letters chiseled into the stone, the house said, in Catalan: “Benvingut made me.” The blue of the façade, shaded from the sun, seemed to confirm the assertion: I am as I am because Benvingut made me so. I left the car parked by the porch and knocked on the door. No one answered. I thought the house must be empty; even my own presence, as I stood there waiting, seemed no more imposing than the weeds growing all around. After a moment of hesitation I decided to go and take a look around the back. A stone path ran along under the shuttered windows of the first floor to an archway, beyond which lay another garden, at a lower level than the one I had just crossed, surrounded by walls and terraces, on each of which I noticed the mutilated remains of a statue. Each of the steps leading up to the terraces was decorated with a little cornucopia carved in the stone, almost at ground level. At the far end, a wooden lattice door opened onto a patio which directly overlooked the sea. Part of the house was built on the rocks, or rather hollowed out of the rocky promontory, clasping it in a cryptic embrace, and to one side, next to the stairways that went winding down to the beach, stood an enormous wooden structure, with protruding beams, a cross between a barn and a Protestant church, blighted by time and neglect, but still sound. The large sheet-metal doors were open. I went in. Inside, someone animated by a fierce childish willfulness had used an enormous number of packing cases to build a series of awkward passages, with walls about nine feet high for a start, but dropping to just over a foot and a half as you went further in. The passages formed concentric circles around the skating rink. In the center of the rink was a dark huddled mass, black like some of the beams running clear across the ceiling. Blood, from various parts of the fallen body, had flowed in all directions, forming patterns and geometrical figures that I mistook at first for shadows. In some places it had almost reached the edge of the rink. Kneeling down, feeling dizzy and nauseated, I observed how the ice had begun to absorb and harden around all that butchery. In a corner of the rink I spotted the knife. I didn’t go over to take a closer look, much less touch it; from where I was, I could see clearly that it was a kitchen knife, with a broad blade and a plastic handle. The bloodstains on the handle were visible even at a distance. After a while I approached the body gingerly, trying not to slip on the ice or step in the congealed puddles of blood. I had known straight away that she was dead, but from close up she seemed to be sleeping, and the one eye I could see without shifting her had a slightly disgruntled look. Presuming that she was the old woman who had gone to see Lola, I squatted there for a long time, staring at her as if under hypnosis, irrationally expecting Nuria to appear at the scene of the crime. The skating rink seemed to have some kind of magnetic pull, although, from what I could see, all its potential users and visitors had vanished a good while ago, and I was the last to appear. When I stood up, my legs were frozen. Outside, clouds had entirely filled the sky and a threatening wind was beginning to blow from the sea. I know I should have retraced my steps, gone back to Z and informed the police, but I didn’t. Instead, I took several deep breaths and tried to get the blood flowing in my legs — they weren’t just cold, I was starting to get cramps — and then, as if something in there was attracting me irresistibly, I went back into the storehouse, and wandered around the circular passages, looking absently at the packing cases, counting the spotlights aimed at the rink, trying to imagine what had happened in that glacial enclave. Taking care not to leave any fingerprints, I climbed on top of some cases and surveyed the storehouse. From that vantage point I had a panoramic view of what looked like a labyrinth with a frozen center, marked by a black hole: the body. I could also see that in one of the other walls, half hidden by the cases, there was another door. I went straight to it. And after climbing a staircase and walking down a gallery that opened onto the terraced garden, I found myself wandering through the endless corridors of the Palacio Benvingut. I soon lost count of the rooms I had passed through or looked into. Predictably, most of them were in a state of utter neglect: thick dust, cobwebs, paint flaking off the walls. In some rooms the wind had forced the windows, and the walls and floor bore witness to the rains of the last thirty years. In others, the windows had been firmly nailed to the frames, and the smell of rot was unbearable. Surprisingly, on the first floor I found two rooms that had been recently painted, with some carpenter’s tools lying outside in the hallway. I still don’t know exactly what drove me to search the whole house. In a kind of reading room shaped like a horseshoe, on the top floor, under a window looking out over the sea, I found Gasparín wrapped up in ragged tartan rugs, with a girl apparently asleep beside him. Days later he confessed to me that when he heard my steps he thought it was the police, and there was nowhere to run. Behind them, on the wall, above the single, magnificent window, was the following inscription: CORAJE, CANEJO (“Courage, damn it” ). The letters, which had faded over the years, were all capitals, and weirdly shaped, like the rest of the house, which left me in no doubt as to who had written them. Benvingut, the Indian. But that was odd, because as far as I knew, Benvingut had lived, traveled and made his fortune in Cuba, Mexico and the United States, while the expression was Argentinean or Uruguayan. And it was stranger still to have painted it in a reading room, where a maxim in Latin or Greek would be more appropriate, especially since it stared you in the face as soon as you opened the door. That is, if the room had ever served its ostensible function, which I was beginning to doubt. In any case, I wasn’t surprised that Gasparín had chosen to wait in that place for what he supposed was imminent. We didn’t say a word, just looked at each other, me in the doorway and him on the floor, under the inscription, with his arm around the sleeping girl. It was a pity to speak and wake her from what seemed such a calm and happy sleep. What do I remember most clearly about that moment? Gasparín’s eyes and the blood-stained cheeks of the girl. When I finally broke the silence, and asked if he knew what was downstairs, on the rink, he nodded. For a moment I imagined him stabbing the old woman, but I knew straight away in my heart that he couldn’t have. Then I told him to get up and go. I can’t leave her, he said. Take her with you. Where? asked Gasparín with a touch of sarcasm. The campground, I said, wait for me there. Gasparín nodded. The girl was moving but she seemed to be still asleep. Try to keep a low profile, I said as they left the palace. I went back to the ice rink and wiped the prints from the knife with my handkerchief; then I got in the car and drove back to Z. I had put the old tartan rugs that Gasparín and the girl had been using in the trunk. I saw them before I reached the town: they were walking along the highway, with their arms around each other, in something of a hurry, as if they were worried about the approaching rain. I had never seen Gasparín with his arm around a girl, although I had known him since he was nineteen and I was twenty. The highway seemed very broad and the sea much broader still, and they were like two blind stubborn dwarves. I don’t think they recognized the car; in fact I think they hardly noticed it. On my way to the hospital, I got stuck in heavy traffic. When I finally got there, Lola was gone. I found her in her office, where I told her everything, except for my encounter with Gasparín and the sleeping girl. For a while we discussed what to do. Lola seemed distraught. I should never have asked you to help me out, she said. Do you think the girl with the knife killed her? I don’t think any such girl exists, I said. Then we rang the police. .