Roberto Bolaño - The Third Reich

She looked tired, though her expression was as composed as ever and her gaze as luminous.

“I’ve never read him,” she said, examining the book. “I don’t even know who he is. Modern?”

I shook my head with a smile. He was an author from the previous century, I said. A dead man. For a second we stared at each other without looking away or muting the effect with words.

“What’s it about? Tell me.” She pointed at the novel by G.

“If you like, I’ll lend it to you.”

“I don’t have time to read. Not in the summer. But you can tell me what happens.” Her voice, while still soft, began to take on a commanding tone.

“It’s the diary of a girl. Wally. At the end she kills herself.”

“That’s all? It sounds awful.”

I laughed:

“You asked me to tell you what it was about. Take it, you can give it back later.”

She took the book with a thoughtful expression.

“Girls like to write in their diaries… I hate that kind of drama… No, I won’t read it. Don’t you have anything a little more cheerful?” She opened the folder and glanced at the photocopied articles.

“That’s something else,” I hastened to explain. “Nothing worth looking at!”

“I see. You read English?”

“Yes.”

She nodded as if in approval. Then she closed the folder and for a while we sat there in silence. The situation was rather embarrassing, at least for me. The most incredible thing was that she didn’t seem to be in a hurry to leave. I searched mentally for a topic of conversation but I couldn’t come up with anything.

Suddenly I remembered a scene from ten or eleven years ago: in the middle of a party, the occasion of which I can’t recall, Frau Else left everyone, crossing the Paseo Marítimo and vanishing onto the beach. Back then there were no streetlights on the Paseo and you didn’t have to go far in order to step into complete darkness. I can’t remember whether anyone else noticed her flight. I don’t think so. The party was noisy and everyone was drinking and dancing on the terrace, even people who had just been walking by and had no connection to the hotel. The point is, I don’t think anyone missed her except me. I don’t know how long it was before she turned up again; I suppose it was quite a while. When she did, she wasn’t alone. Walking hand in hand with her was a tall man, very thin, with a white shirt that fluttered in the breeze as if it hung on nothing but bones, or rather, a single bone , as long as a flagpole. When they crossed the Paseo I recognized him. It was the owner of the hotel, Frau Else’s husband. When Frau Else passed me, she said hello to me in German. I’d never seen such a sad smile.

Now, ten years later, she was smiling in the same way.

Without thinking twice, I told her I thought she was a very beautiful woman.

Frau Else looked at me as if she didn’t quite understand what I’d said and then she laughed, but so softly that someone at the next table could barely have heard it.

“It’s the truth,” I said. The fear I generally felt when I was with her of making a fool of myself had disappeared.

Suddenly serious, perhaps realizing that I was serious myself, she said:

“You’re not the only one who thinks so, Udo. I guess you must be right.”

“You always have been,” I said, unable to stop now, “although I wasn’t just talking about your physical beauty, which is certainly undeniable, but about your… aura, the indefinable air that emanates from your most insignificant actions… Your silences…”

Frau Else laughed, this time openly, as if she’d just been told a joke.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m not laughing at you.”

“Just at what I’m saying,” I said, laughing too, as if I weren’t offended at all. (Although the truth is I was offended.)

This response seemed to please Frau Else. I thought that without intending to I had grazed a hidden wound. I imagined Frau Else courted by a Spaniard, perhaps involved in a secret love affair. Her husband, of course, suspects and suffers agonies; she can neither give up her lover nor find the strength to leave her husband. She is trapped by her conflicting loyalities; her own beauty is the source of her tribulations. I envisioned Frau Else as a flame, the flame that sheds light but in the process consumes itself and dies, etc.; or like a wine that, upon mixing with the blood, ceases to exist as what it once was. Beautiful and distant. And exiled… This was her most mysterious quality.

Her voice woke me from my reflections:

“You seem very far away from here.”

“I was thinking about you.”

“For God’s sake, Udo, you’ll make me blush.”

“I was thinking about the person you were ten years ago. You haven’t changed at all.”

“What was I like ten years ago?”

“The same as you are now. Magnetic. Active.”

“Active, of course, what choice do I have? But magnetic?” Her hearty laugh echoed through the restaurant once more.

“Yes, magnetic. Do you remember that party on the terrace, when you went offto the beach?… It was pitch-black there, though the terrace was brightly lit. I was the only one who saw you leave and I waited until you came back. There, on those steps. After a while you returned, but now you were with your husband. When you passed me, you smiled. You were very beautiful. I don’t remember having seen your husband go after you, so he must have been on the beach already. That’s the kind of magnetism I’m talking about. You attract people.”

“My dear Udo, I haven’t the slightest memory of that party; there’ve been so many, and it was such a long time ago. Anyway, based on your story it seems that I’m the one attracted by others. Attracted by my own husband, no less. If you say that you didn’t see him leave, then clearly he was already on the beach, but if the beach was dark, as you so rightly claim, I couldn’t have known that he was there, so when I left it must have been been because I was drawn by his magnetism, wouldn’t you say?”

I chose not to answer. Much as Frau Else tried to destroy it, a current of understanding had been established between the two of us that released us from the need for explanations.

“How old were you then? It’s only natural that a fifteen-yearold should be attracted to a slightly older woman. The truth is that I hardly remember you, Udo. My… interests lay elsewhere. I was a wild thing, I think, wild like all girls, and insecure. I didn’t like it at the hotel. As you can imagine, I suffered a lot. Well, all foreigners suffer a lot at first.”

“For me it was something… lovely.”

“Don’t look like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like a clubbed seal, Udo.”

“That’s what Ingeborg always says.”

“Really? I don’t believe it.”

“She puts it differently. But it amounts to the same thing.”

“She’s a very pretty girl.”

“Yes, she is.”

All of a sudden we were silent again. The fingers of her left hand began to drum on the plastic tabletop. I would have liked to ask about her husband, whom I still hadn’t seen even from afar and who I sensed had something important to do with the nameless essence that radiated from Frau Else, but I didn’t have the chance.

“Why don’t we change the subject? Let’s talk about literature. Or rather, you talk about literature and I’ll listen. When it comes to books, I know nothing, but believe me, I do like to read.”

I had the feeling that she was making fun of me. I shook my head in rejection. Frau Else’s eyes seemed to rake my skin. I’d even say that her eyes sought mine as if by scrutinizing them she could read my innermost thoughts. And yet her intentions were kind.