Roberto Bolano: The Skating Rink

It’s too late to put things right now, and it would be futile to try; I only want to clarify my part in the events that took place last summer in Z. Don’t ask me to be measured and objective; this is my town after all, and although I might have to move on, I don’t want to leave under a cloud of deceit and misapprehension. I am not a front man for some Colombian drug lord, contrary to certain rumors. I do not belong to a Latin American mafia gang specializing in the white slave trade. I have absolutely no links to Brazilian bondage and discipline circles, although I have to say I wouldn’t mind that. I’m just a man who’s had some lucky breaks and a writer, or rather I was. I came to this town years ago, at a dull and dingy time in my life. There’s no point going back over it. I had worked as a street vendor in Lourdes, Pamplona, Zaragoza and Barcelona, and saved up a little money. I could have ended up anywhere; by chance I settled in Z. With my savings I rented a place that I turned into a jewelry store; it was the cheapest place I could find but it cost me all I had, down to the last peseta. I soon realized that because of my constant trips to Barcelona in search of stock, which I was buying in absurdly small quantities, it was going to be impossible to run the business without help, so I had to look for an assistant. On one of my trips I met Alex Bobadilla. I was coming back in the train with four thousand pesetas’ worth of jewelry and he was dreamily immersed in The Globetrotter’s Guide . Beside him, on the empty seat, was a little, well-worn backpack, from which a voluminous bag of peanuts was protruding. Alex was sitting there eating and reading; he looked like a Buddhist monk who had decided to become a boy scout, or vice versa; he also looked like a monkey. After observing him attentively, I asked if he was going abroad. He replied that he was planning to, after the summer, in September or October, but first he had to find a job. I offered him one on the spot. That was the beginning of our friendship and our ascent in the world of business. For the first year, Alex and I slept in the store, next to the tables on which we displayed necklaces and pendants during the day. By the end of the season, in September, I had made a healthy profit. I could have kept the money, found a decent apartment or left Z, but instead I leased a bar that had gone bust for some mysterious reason. The Cartago, it’s called. I closed the shop and worked in the bar through the winter. Alex stayed with me; he only went away for a weekend to see his parents, a likeable pair of retirees who keep themselves busy tending their garden in Badalona and come to Z once a month, as a rule. They seem more like his grandparents than his parents, really. That winter we made the shop our home; we moved our sleeping bags and foam mats in there, along with our clothes and our books (although I never saw Alex read anything other than The Globetrotter’s Guide ). The Cartago kept us going, and by the following summer we were running two businesses. The jewelry store, which was now well established, made money, but not nearly as much as the bar. Everyone wanted to make the most of their fortnight or week of happiness, as if the Third World War was about to begin. At the end of the season I leased another jewelry store, in Y this time, just a few miles from Z, and I got married too, but I’ll tell you about that later. The next season lived up to expectations, and I was able to get a foothold in X, which is south of Y, but close enough to Z for Alex to check on the takings each day. Three seasons later I was already divorced, and as well as the bar and the stores, I had a campground, a hotel and two other places selling jewelry as well as souvenirs and suntan lotion, all doing a roaring trade. The hotel, which was small but comfortable, was called Hotel Del Mar. The campground is Stella Maris. And the shops: Frutos de Temporada, Sol Naciente, Bucanero, Costa Brava and Montané y hijos. Naturally, I haven’t changed the names. The Hotel Del Mar belongs to a German widow. The Stella Maris campground is owned by a family of local worthies, who did, at one time, try to run it, which was a complete disaster, so they decided to lease it instead; in fact they would like to sell the land, but no one’s prepared to buy it, because you can’t build there. One day, no doubt, all the campgrounds in Z will be rezoned and turned into hotels and apartment buildings; then I’ll have to choose between buying and pulling out. If I’m still here, that is; I’ll probably be long gone. My first store, as its name suggests, used to sell fruit and vegetables. I can’t say much about the others: Montané y hijos is the one with the most mysterious past. Who are or were Mr. Montané and his sons? What did they do? The property is leased through an agency, but as far as I know the owner isn’t called Montané. Occasionally, to pass the time, I speculate about it, telling Alex it must have been a funeral parlor, an antique store or a place that sold hunting equipment, three kinds of commerce that my assistant finds deeply revolting. They’re not ethical, he says. They bring bad luck. Maybe he’s right. If Montané & Sons was a hunting store, that might be where I picked up the bad luck, because I haven’t always been unlucky. . Blood. . Murder. . The victim’s fear. . I remember a poem, from way back. . The killer is asleep and the victim is taking pictures of him. . Did I read that in some book, or write it myself. .? I honestly can’t remember, although I think I must have written it, in Mexico City, when I used to hang out with the hardened poets, and Gasparín would turn up in the bars of Colonia Guerrero or the Calle Bucareli, after walking right across the city, looking for something, but for what? Or who? Gasparín’s black eyes lost in the Mexican fog: why is it that when I think of him the landscape takes on prehistoric forms? Huge and ponderous, emerging from the murk. . But maybe I didn’t write that poem. . The sleeping killer photographed by the victim, what do you think? In the ideal setting for a crime, the Palacio Benvingut, naturally. .

Sometimes, when I looked out through the campground fence, in the early hours of the morning, I saw him come out of the disco opposite, drunk and alone, or with people I didn’t know, and neither did he, to judge from his manner: off in a world of his own, like an astronaut or a castaway. Once I saw him with a blonde and that was the only time he seemed happy; the blonde was pretty and the pair of them seemed to be the last to leave the disco. On the rare occasions when he saw me, we greeted each other with a wave, and that was all. The street is broad and at that hour of the night it often has an eerie feel: the sidewalks are covered with bits of paper, food scraps, empty cans and broken glass. From time to time, you come across drunks wandering back to their respective hotels and campgrounds; most of them get lost and end up sleeping on the beach. Once Remo crossed the street and asked me if the job was going OK. I said yes and we wished each other good night. We didn’t talk much in general; he hardly ever came to the campground. Bobadilla would turn up every afternoon, though, and hang around for a while looking at the books and the files. I never got to know Bobadilla well; he paid me each fortnight, but our relations never went further than that, although they were always polite. Remo was well liked by the campground staff, and Bobadilla too, though not as much; they paid well, and if a real problem came up, they were understanding. For the receptionists, a girl from Z and a Peruvian, who was also the campground’s electrician, and the three cleaning ladies, one of whom was from Senegal (her Spanish was limited to hola and adiós ), it was laid-back as workplaces go, and even conducive to romance: the receptionists had fallen in love. In any case, there were very few problems with the employers, and none at all among the employees. That harmony was probably due in part to the atypical composition of the staff: three foreigners without work permits and three old Spaniards no one else would have taken on, that was about it. I don’t know if Remo staffed his other businesses like that; I guess not. Miriam, the Senegalese woman, was the only one of the cleaners who didn’t live on the site. The other two, Rosa and Azucena, who came from the outskirts of Barcelona, slept in a two-room family tent, next to the main shower block. They were widowed sisters, and topped up their wages with cleaning jobs for an agency that rented out apartments. That was their first year at Stella Maris; the year before they had worked for another campground in Z, which had fired them because, with the various jobs they were doing, they couldn’t be relied on to be there when something urgent came up. Although they both worked an average of fifteen hours a day, they still found time to have a few drinks at night, by the light of a butane lamp, sitting on plastic chairs by the front door of their tent, brushing away the mosquitoes and chatting about this and that. Mainly about how filthy human beings are. Their nightly debriefings always came around to shit, in its various forms, as if it was a language they were struggling to decipher. Talking with them I learned that people shat in the showers, on the floors, on either side of the toilet bowl, and even on its edges, which is no mean feat, requiring a considerable degree of balance and skill. People used shit to write on the doors and to foul the hand basins. Shit that had to be shat and then shifted to symbolic and prominent places: the mirror, the fire extinguisher, the faucets. Shit gathered and daubed to make animal forms (giraffes, elephants, Mickey Mouse), or the letters of soccer graffiti, or bodily organs (eyes, hearts, dicks). For the sisters, the supreme offense was that it happened in the women’s bathroom too, though not as often, and always with certain tell-tale features suggesting that a single culprit was responsible for those outrages. A “filthy delinquent” they were determined to hunt down. So they joined forces with Miriam and mounted a discreet stake-out, based on the dull and stubborn process of elimination. That is, they kept a close eye on who was using the bathroom, and went in straight after to check on the state of the place. That was how they found out that the fecal disgraces occurred at a certain time of night, and the principal suspect turned out to be one of the two women I used see on the terrace of the bar. Rosa and Azucena complained to the receptionists and spoke to El Carajillo, who told me, and asked if I might have a word with the woman in question, politely, without offending her, just to see what I could do. Not a simple mission, as I’m sure you’ll understand. That night I waited on the terrace until everyone had gone. As usual, the two women were the last to leave; they were sitting on the far side, opposite my table, half hidden, under an enormous tree, whose roots had broken up the cement. What are those trees called? Plane trees? Stone pines? I don’t know. I went over to the woman with a glass in one hand and my watchman’s flashlight in the other. I got within a yard of their table before they showed any sign of having noticed my presence. I asked if I could sit down with them. The old woman chuckled and said, Of course, be our guest, cutie-locks. Both of them had clean hands. Both seemed to be enjoying the cool of the night. I don’t know what I came out with. Some nonsense. They were enveloped and protected by a curious air of dignity. The young woman was silent and plunged in darkness. But the old woman was up for a chat, and she was the color of the flaking, crumbling moon. What did we talk about that first time? I can’t remember. Even a minute after leaving them, I wouldn’t have been able to remember. All I can recall, but these two things I do recall with the utmost clarity, are the old woman’s laughter and the young woman’s flat eyes. Flat: as if she was looking inwards? Maybe. As if she was giving her eyes a rest? Maybe. Maybe. And meanwhile the old woman kept talking and smiling, speaking enigmatically, as if in code, as if everything there, the trees, the irregular surface of the terrace, the vacant tables, the shifting reflections on the bar’s glass canopy, were being progressively erased, unbeknownst to everyone but them. A woman like that, I thought, couldn’t have done what she was accused of doing, or if it was her, she must have had her reasons. Above us, on the branches, among the jittery leaves, the campground rats were carrying out their nocturnal maneuvers. (Rats, not squirrels as I had thought the first night!) The old woman began to sing, neither loudly nor softly, as if her voice, attentive to my presence, was also warily climbing down out of the branches. A trained voice. Although I know nothing about opera, I thought I recognized snatches of various arias. But the most remarkable thing was the way she kept switching from language to language, deftly linking little fragments, melodic flourishes produced for my pleasure alone. And I say my pleasure alone because the girl seemed far away the whole time. Occasionally she touched her eyes with the tips of her fingers, but that was all. Although she was clearly not well, she held off coughing with remarkable willpower until the old woman had finished her trills. Did we look each other in the eye at any point? I don’t think so, although we might have. And when I looked at her I could tell that her face was working like an eraser. It was coming and going! Even the campground lights began to waver, brightening and fading as I looked at her face and looked away, or perhaps keeping time with the rise and fall of the singer’s voice. For a moment I felt something like rapture: the shadows lengthened, the tents swelled like tumors unable to detach themselves from the gravel, the metallic gleaming of the cars hardened into sheer pain. In the distance, at a corner near the entrance gate, I saw El Carajillo. He looked like a statue and I knew he had been observing us for some time. The old woman said something in German and stopped singing. What did you think, cutie-locks? Very nice, I said, and got up. The girl kept staring at her glass. I would have liked to buy them a drink or something to eat, but the bar had been closed for a long time. I wished them good night and left. By the time I got to the corner, El Carajillo was gone. I found him sitting in the office. He had switched on the television. With an air of indifference, he asked me what had happened. I said I didn’t think that woman could be the shitter Rosa and Azucena were looking for. I remember what was on television: a replay of a golf tournament in Japan. El Carajillo looked at me sadly and said that it was her, but it didn’t matter. What were we going to tell the cleaning ladies? We’d tell them we were working on it, there were other suspects, other angles to consider. . We’d come up with something. .