Roberto Bolaño - The Third Reich

“Your Spanish is nonexistent,” I said.

Charly laughed without much conviction.

“Do you want me to ask him and then you’ll know for sure?” I added.

“No. It’s none of my business… Anyway, believe me, I can communicate with my friends and the Wolf is my friend and we communicate just fine.”

“I’m sure you do.”

“That’s right… It was a gorgeous night, Udo… A quiet night, full of dangerous ideas but no bad behavior… A quiet night, let me try to explain, quiet and yet without a still moment, a single still moment… Even when the sun came up and it seemed as if everything might be over, you came out of the hotel… At first I thought you’d seen me from the balcony and were coming to join the party. When you went offtoward the port I woke up the Wolf and we followed you… Taking our time, as you saw. Like we were just out for a stroll.”

“Hanna’s not all right. You should go see her.”

“Inge’s not all right either, Udo. Neither am I. Neither is my pal the Wolf. Neither are you, if you don’t mind me saying so. Only the Wolf’s mother is all right. And Hanna’s little boy, in Oberhausen. They’re the only one’s who’re… well, not exactly all right, but compared to everybody else, more or less all right. Yes: all right.”

There was something obscene about hearing him call Ingeborg Inge. Unfortunately, her friends, a few work colleagues, called her that too. It was no big deal and yet I’d never thought of this: I didn’t know any of Ingeborg’s friends. A shiver ran through me.

I ordered another coffee. The Wolf had one with a shot of rum (if he had to go to work, he didn’t seem very worried about it). Charly didn’t want anything. He only felt like smoking, which he did without stopping, one cigarette after another. But he promised he would pick up the bill.

“What happened in Barcelona?” I was about to say “You’ve changed,” but it seemed ridiculous: I hardly knew him.

“Nothing. We walked around. We shopped for souvenirs. It’s a pretty town. Too crowded, though. For a while I was a fan of FC Barcelona, when Lattek was coach and Schuster and Simonsen were playing. Not anymore. I’ve lost interest in the club but I still like the city. Have you been to the Sagrada Família? Did you like it? Yeah, it’s pretty. And we went out drinking at some really old bar, full of posters of bullfighters and Gypsies. Hanna and Ingeborg thought it was cool. And it was cheap, much cheaper than the bars here.”

“If you’d seen Hanna’s face you wouldn’t be sitting here like this. Ingeborg thought about reporting you to the police. If it had happened in Germany, I’m sure she would have.”

“You’re exaggerating… In Germany, in Germany…” He made a face, as if to say there was nothing to be done. “I don’t know, maybe things there don’t stand still for a second either. Shit. I don’t care. Anyway, I don’t believe you, I don’t think it ever crossed Ingeborg’s mind to call the police.”

I shrugged, offended. Maybe Charly was right, maybe he knew Ingeborg’s heart better than I did.

“What would you have done?” There was an evil gleam in Charly’s eye.

“In your place?”

“No, in Inge’s.”

“I don’t know. Beaten you up. Knocked you around.”

Charly closed his eyes. To my surprise, my answer hurt him.

“Not me.” He grasped in the air as if something very important were escaping him. “In Inge’s place, I wouldn’t have done that.”

“Of course not.”

“And I didn’t want to rape the German girl on the beach, either. I could have done it, but I didn’t. See what I mean? I could have wrecked Hanna’s face, really wrecked it, and I didn’t. I could have thrown a stone and broken your window or kicked your ass after you bought those filthy newspapers. I didn’t do any of it. All I do is talk and smoke.”

“Why would you want to break my window or hit me? That’s idiotic.”

“I don’t know. It was just an idea. Fast, quick, with a stone the size of a fist.” His voice broke as if suddenly he were remembering a nightmare. “It was El Quemado. When he looked up at the light in your window, just a way to get attention, I guess…”

“It was El Quemado’s idea to break my window?”

“No, Udo, no. You don’t understand anything, man. El Quemado was drinking with us, none of us saying a word, just listening to the sea, that’s all, and drinking, but wide-awake, you know? and El Quemado and I were looking up at your window. I mean, when I spotted your window El Quemado was already staring up at it, and I realized it, and he realized that I had him. But he didn’t say anything about throwing stones. That was my idea. I planned to warn you… Do you know what I mean?”

“No.”

Charly gave me a look of disgust. He picked up the newspapers and flipped through them at incredible speed, as if before he was a mechanic he’d been a bank teller; I’m sure he didn’t read a single full sentence. Then, with a sigh, he put them aside; by this he seemed to say that the news was for me, not for him. For a few seconds we were both silent. Outside, the street slowly resumed its daily rhythm; we were no longer alone in the bar.

“Deep down, I love Hanna.”

“You should go see her right now.”

“She’s a good girl, she really is. And there’s been a lot of good in her life even though she doesn’t think so.”

“You should go back to the hotel, Charly…”

“First let’s drop the Wolf offat work, all right?”

“Fine, let’s go right now.”

When he got up from the table he was white, as if there was no blood left in his body. Without stumbling once, by which I deduced that he wasn’t as drunk as I’d thought he was, he went up to the bar and paid, and we left. Charly’s car was parked near the water. On the roof rack I saw the windsurfing board. Had he taken it with him to Barcelona? No, he must have put it there when he came back, which meant that he’d already been to the hotel. Slowly we covered the distance that separated us from the supermarket where the Wolf worked. Before the Wolf got out Charly told him that if he got fired he should come see him at the hotel, that he’d find some way to fix things. I translated. The Wolf smiled and said they wouldn’t dare. Charly nodded gravely, and when we’d left the supermarket behind he said it was true, that with the Wolf any altercation could get complicated, not to say dangerous. Then he talked about dogs. In the summer it was common to see abandoned dogs starving in the streets. “Especially here,” he said.

“Yesterday, on my way to the Wolf’s house, I hit one.”

He waited for me to say something, and he continued:

“A little black dog, one I’d seen on the Paseo Marítimo… Looking for his rotten owners or scraps of food… I don’t know… Do you know the story of the dog who died of hunger next to his owner’s body?”

“Yes.”

“I thought about that. At first the poor animals don’t know where to go, all they do is wait. That’s loyalty, isn’t it, Udo? If they make it through that stage they go roaming around and looking for food in trash cans. Yesterday, I got the feeling that the little black dog was still waiting. What does that say to you, Udo?”

“How are you so sure that you’d seen it before or that it was a stray dog?”

“Because I got out of the car and took a good look at it. It was the same one.”

The light inside the car was beginning to put me to sleep.

For an instant I thought I saw tears in Charly’s eyes.

“We’re both tired,” I said to myself.

At the door to his hotel I advised him to take a shower, go to bed, and wait to talk to Hanna until after he got up. Some guests were beginning to file toward the beach. Charly smiled and vanished down the corridor. I went back to the Del Mar, feeling uneasy.