Roberto Bolaño - The Third Reich

What girl could kiss that terrible mask? But there’s someone for everyone, I know.

After a while:

“You must have lots of fun,” he said.

I heard his voice as if it were coming from far away. The light bounced offthe surface of the sea, making a kind of wall that grew until it touched the clouds, which—fat, heavy, the color of dirty milk—were drifting almost imperceptibly toward the cliffs to the north. Under the clouds a parachute came in toward the beach, pulled by a speedboat. I said I felt a little sick. It must be the work waiting for me, I said, I’m a wreck until I finish what I’ve started. I did my best to explain that being a specialized writer required a complicated and cumbersome setup. (This was the main argument that the players of computerized war games could make in their favor: the savings of space and time.) I confessed that for days a huge game had been spread out in my hotel room and that I should really be working on it.

“I promised to turn in an essay at the beginning of September, and here I am, lazing around.”

El Quemado didn’t say anything. I added that the essay was for an American magazine.

“It’s an unheard-of variant. No one’s ever come up with anything like it.”

Maybe it was the sun that was making me ramble on. In my defense I should say that since I’d left Stuttgart I hadn’t had the chance to talk to anyone about war games. My fellow gamers will know what I mean. For us it’s fun to talk about games. But clearly I’d chosen the strangest conversation partner I could possibly have found.

El Quemado seemed to understand that I had to play in order to write.

“But that way you must always win,” he said, showing his ruined teeth.

“Not at all. If you play yourself there’s no way to cheat with strategies or maneuvers. All the cards are on the table. If my variant works, it’s because it’s mathematically guaranteed to work. As it happens, I’ve already tested it a few times, and both times I won, but it needs to be polished and that’s why I play alone.”

“You must write very slowly,” he said.

“No,” I said, laughing, “I write like lightning. I play slowly but I write fast. People say I’m high-strung but it isn’t true; they say it because of the way I write. Without stopping!”

“I write fast too,” murmured El Quemado.

“I guessed as much,” I said.

My own words surprised me. Actually, I hadn’t even imagined that El Quemado could write. But when he spoke, or maybe sooner, when I said that I wrote fast, I guessed that he must be a scribbler too. We stared at each other without saying anything for a few seconds. It was hard to look him in the face for too long, although little by little I was getting used to it. El Quemado’s secret smile still lurked there, maybe mocking me and our newly discovered shared trait. I kept feeling sicker. I was sweating. I didn’t understand how El Quemado could take so much sun. His craggy face, full of charred folds, sometimes glinted blue like cooking gas or took on a yellowish-black hue like something about to explode. And yet he could just sit there on the sand, with his hands on his knees and his eyes fixed on the sea, showing no signs of discomfort. In a departure from his usual behavior, which was so reserved, he asked whether I would help him bring in a pedal boat that had just arrived. Groggily, I nodded. The Italian couple on the boat couldn’t steer to shore. We got in the water and pushed gently. From their seats, the Italians kidded around and pretended to fall in. They jumped out before we got to shore. I was happy to see them head away, skirting bodies and holding hands, toward the Paseo Marítimo. After we pulled the pedal boat in, El Quemado said that I should swim for a while.

“Why?”

“You’ll fry your circuits in the sun,” he said.

I laughed and asked whether he wanted to come in with me.

We swam for a while, intent only on getting past the first line of bathers. Then we turned around to face the beach: from that vantage point, next to El Quemado, the beach and the people crowded on it seemed different.

When we returned he advised me, in a strange voice, to rub myself down with coconut oil.

“Coconut oil and a dark room,” he murmured.

With deliberate abruptness I woke Ingeborg and we left.

This afternoon I had a fever. I told Ingeborg. She didn’t believe me. When I showed her my shoulders, she told me to put a wet towel over them or to take a cold shower. Hanna was waiting and she seemed to be in a hurry to be rid of me.

For a while I stared at the game with no energy for anything; the light hurt my eyes and the hum of the hotel was lulling me to sleep. With no little effort I managed to go out in search of a pharmacy. Under the terrible sun I wandered the old streets in the center of town. I don’t remember seeing tourists. Actually, I don’t remember seeing anyone. A couple of sleeping dogs; the girl who waited on me at the pharmacy; an old man sitting in the shadow of a doorway. Meanwhile, the Paseo Marítimo was so crowded that it was impossible to walk without elbowing and pushing. Near the port a little amusement park had been built and that’s where everyone was, hypnotized. It was insanity. There were all kinds of tiny stalls that the human torrent threatened to crush at any moment. As best I could, I lost myself again in the streets of the old town and returned to the hotel the long way around.

I got undressed, closed the shutters, and smeared my body with salve. I was burning up.

Lying in bed, in the dark but with my eyes open, I tried to think about the events of the last few days before I fell asleep. Then I dreamed that I didn’t have a fever anymore and I was with Ingeborg in this same room, in bed, each of us reading a book, but at the same time there was something very intimate about it. I mean, each of us felt close to the other even though we were absorbed in our respective books; each of us felt love for the other. Then someone scratched at the door and after a while we heard a voice on the other side saying: “It’s Florian Linden, get out now, your life is in great danger.” Immediately, Ingeborg let go of her book (the book dropped splayed on the rug) and fixed her eyes on the door. I hardly moved. Frankly, I was so comfortable there, my skin so cool, that I thought it wasn’t worth being frightened. “Your life is in danger,” repeated Florian Linden’s voice, farther and farther away, as if from the end of the hallway. And in fact, just then we heard the sound of the elevator, the doors opening with a metallic click and then closing, carrying Florian Linden down to the ground floor. “He’s gone to the beach or the amusement park,” said Ingeborg, dressing quickly. “I have to find him. Wait here, I have to talk to him.” I didn’t object, of course. But left alone, I couldn’t keep reading. “How can anyone be in danger in this room?” I asked aloud. “What’s he scheming, that third-rate detective?” Getting more and more worked up, I went over to the window and looked out at the beach, expecting to see Ingeborg and Florian Linden. The sun was setting and only El Quemado was there, arranging his pedal boats under red clouds and a moon the color of a plate of boiling lentils, dressed only in shorts and remote from everything around him, that is, from the sea and the beach, the sea wall of the Paseo, and the shadows of the hotels. For a moment I was overcome by fear; I knew that danger and death lay out there. I woke up sweating. The fever was gone.

This morning, after I planned and wrote out the two first turns, obliterating essays by Benjamin Clark ( Waterloo , #14) and Jack Corso ( The General , #3, vol. 17) in which each advises against the creation of more than one front in the first year, I went down to the hotel in excellent spirits, bursting with the desire to read, write, swim, drink, laugh—all the visible signs of health and animal happiness. In the morning the bar usually isn’t very full, so I brought along a novel and a folder of photocopies of the articles I need for my work. The novel was Wally, die Zweifl erin , by K. G., but perhaps due to my inner exultation, to the thrill of a productive morning, it was impossible for me to concentrate on reading or on studying the articles, which— it must be said— I plan to refute. So I settled down to watch the people shuttling between the restaurant and the terrace, and to enjoy my beer. Just as I was getting ready to go back to the room, where with a little luck I’d be able to sketch out the third turn (spring of ’40, unquestionably of crucial importance), Frau Else appeared. When she saw me, she smiled. It was a strange smile. Then she stepped away from a few guests—leaving them in midsentence, or so it seemed—and came to sit at my table.