Javier Cercas - Soldiers of Salamis

The Motive and The Tenant were the titles of the only two books I'd published, more than ten years before, without anyone except the odd friend from back then noticing. Bewildered or incredulous, I nodded.

'I know them,' he said. 'I think I even bought them.'

'Oh, so you were the one, were you?'

He ignored the joke.

'Hang on a second.'

He disappeared down a hallway and came back a little while later.

'Here they are,' he said, brandishing my books triumphantly.

I flipped through the two copies, saw they were worn. Almost sadly, I remarked:

'You read them.'

'Of course,' Bolaño sort of smiled; he almost never smiled but he never quite seemed to be entirely serious either. 'I read everything, even bits of paper I find blowing down the street.'

This time it was me who smiled.

'I wrote them ages ago.'

'You don't have to apologize,' he said. 'I liked them, or at least I remember liking them.'

I thought he was mocking me; I raised my gaze from the books and looked him in the eye: he wasn't mocking. I heard myself ask:

'Really?'

Bolaño lit a cigarette and seemed to think it over for a moment.

'I don't remember the first one too well,' he finally admitted. 'But I think there was a really good story about a son of a bitch who persuades some poor guy to commit a crime so he can finish his novel, right?' Without giving me time to agree, he added: 'As for The Tenant, I thought it was a delightful little novel.'

Bolaño pronounced this judgement with such a mixture of ease and conviction that I suddenly knew those few bits of praise my books had received were products of courtesy or pity. I was speechless, and felt an enormous urge to hug that softly-spoken, curly-haired, scruffy, unshaven Chilean I'd only just met.

'Well,' I said. 'Shall we start the interview?'

We went to a bar by the port, between the market-place and the breakwater, and sat down by a large window from which we could make out, through the golden chilly morning air, the whole of Blanes bay, majestically criss-crossed by seagulls, with the dock in the foreground, its idle fishing boats, and in the background the Palomera promontory, marking the geographic border of the Costa Brava. Bolaño ordered tea and toast; I ordered coffee and water. We talked. Bolaño told me things were going well for him now, because his books were starting to bring in money, but for the last twenty years he'd been as poor as a church mouse. He'd quit school when he was practically still a kid; he'd had all kinds of odd jobs (though he'd never done any serious work other than writing); he'd been a revolutionary in Allende's Chile and in Pinochet's he'd been in prison; he'd lived in Mexico and France; he'd travelled all over the world. Years ago he'd undergone some very complicated surgery, and since then he lived the life of an ascetic in Blanes, with no other vice than writing, and seeing no one but his family. By chance, the day I interviewed Bolaño, General Pinochet had just returned to Chile to a hero's welcome from his supporters, after spending two years in England waiting to be extradited to Spain and tried for his crimes. We talked about Pinochet's return, about Pinochet's dictatorship, about Chile. Naturally, I asked him what it'd been like to live through Pinochet's coup and the fall of Allende. Naturally, he regarded me with an expression of utter boredom; then he said:

'Like a Marx Brothers' movie, but with corpses. Unimaginable pandemonium.' He blew a little on his tea, took a sip and put the cup back down on the saucer. 'Look, I'll tell you the truth. For years I spat on Allende's name every chance I got, I thought it was all his fault, for not giving us weapons. Now I kick myself for having said that about Allende. Fuck, the bastard thought about us as if we were his kids, you know? He didn't want them to kill us. And if he'd let us have those guns we would have died like flies. So,' he finished, picking up his cup again, 'I think Allende was a hero.'

'And what's a hero?'

The question seemed to surprise him, as if he'd never asked himself, or as if he'd been asking himself forever; his cup in mid-air, he looked me fleetingly in the eye, then turned his gaze back out over the bay and thought for a moment; then he shrugged his shoulders.

'I don't know,' he said. 'Someone who considers himself a hero and gets it right. Or someone who has courage and an instinct for virtue, and therefore never makes a mistake, or at least doesn't make a mistake the one time when it matters, and therefore can't not be a hero. Or someone, like Allende, who understands that a hero isn't the one who kills, but the one who doesn't kill or who lets himself get killed. I don't know. What's a hero to you?'

By then it had been almost a month since I'd thought about Soldiers of Salamis, yet at that moment I couldn't help but remember Sánchez Mazas, who never killed anyone and at some point, before reality showed him he lacked courage and an instinct for virtue, perhaps considered himself a hero. I said:

'I don't know. John Le Carré says one must think like a hero to behave like a decent human being.'

'Yeah, but a decent human being isn't the same as a hero,' Bolaño shot back. 'There're lots of decent people: they're the ones who know enough to say no in time; heroes, on the other hand, are few and far between. Actually, I think there's almost always something blind, irrational, instinctive in a hero's behaviour, something that's in their nature and inescapable. Also, you can be a decent person for a whole lifetime, but you can't be awe-inspiring without a break, and that's why a hero is only a hero exceptionally, once, or at most, during a spell of insanity or inspiration. There's Allende, speaking on Radio Magallanes, lying on the floor in a corner of La Moneda, with a machine gun in one hand and microphone in the other, talking as if he were drunk or as if he were already dead, not really knowing what he's saying and saying the purest, most noble words I've ever heard. . I just remembered another story. It happened in Madrid a while back, I read it in the paper. A young guy was walking down a street in the city centre and suddenly saw a house enveloped in flames. Without a word to anyone he rushed into the house and came out with a woman in his arms. He went back in and this time brought a man out. Then he went in again and brought out another woman. By this time the fire had reached such proportions that not even the firemen would dare enter the house, it was suicide; but the guy must've known there was someone still inside, because he went back in. And, of course, he never came out.' Bolaño halted, pushed his glasses up with his index finger so the frame brushed his eyebrows. 'Brutal, isn't it? Still, I'm not sure that guy was acting out of compassion, or some sort of benevolence; I think he acted out of a kind of instinct, a blind instinct that overcame him, took him over, acted for him. More than likely the guy was a decent person, I'm not saying he wasn't; but he iulght not have been. Fuck, Javier, he didn't need to be: the bastard was a hero.'

Bolaño and I spent the rest of the morning talking about his books, the authors he liked — who were many — and the ones he despised — more still. Bolaño talked about them with a strange, icy passion, which fascinated me at first and then made me feel uncomfortable. I cut the interview short. When we were about to say goodbye, on the seaside promenade, he invited me to come and have lunch at his house, with his wife and son. I lied: I said I couldn't, because they were expecting me back at the paper. Then he invited me to come and see him some time. I lied again: I said I would very soon.

A week later, when the interview was published, Bolaño phoned me at the newspaper office. He said he'd liked it a lot. He asked: