Roberto Bolaño - The Third Reich

After midnight, the photocopies tacked to the wall take on a funereal air, little doors to the void.

“It’s starting to get chilly,” I say.

El Quemado is wearing a leather jacket, too small, doubtless the gift of some charitable soul. The jacket is old but well made. When he comes over to the game board after eating, he takes it off and sets it on the bed, folding it carefully. His abstracted courtesy is touching. He has a notebook (or maybe a diary, like mine?) in which he jots down the strategic or economic shifts in his alliance, a notebook that he never lets out of his sight… It’s as if he’s found, in Third Reich , a satisfactory mode of communication. Here, alongside the map and the Force Pool, he isn’t a monster but rather a thinking being who expresses himself through hundreds of counters… He’s a dictator and a creator… And he’s having fun… If it weren’t for the photocopies, I’d say that I’ve done him a favor. But these are like a clear warning, the first signal that I should watch my step.

“Quemado,” I ask him, “do you like the game?”

“Yes, I do.”

“And do you think that because you’ve brought me to a standstill you’re going to win?”

“I don’t know, it’s still too early to tell.”

As I open the balcony doors to let the night air clear the smoke from the room, El Quemado, like a dog, his head tilted, snuffles with difficulty and says:

“Tell me which counters are your favorite. Which divisions you think are the most beautiful (yes, literally!) and which battles the most difficult. Talk to me about the games…”

The Wolf and the Lamb show up at my room. The absence of Frau Else has relaxed the apparently strict rules of the hotel and now anyone is allowed in. As the hot days come to an end, anarchy is quietly settling in at every level. It’s as if people knew how to work only when they were drenched in sweat, or when they saw us, the tourists, drenched in sweat. This might be a good moment to leave without paying, an ignoble act that I would contemplate only if some genie could guarantee that afterward I would see the look on Frau Else’s face, her surprise, her astonishment. Maybe when summer ends and many of the seasonal workers also reach the end of their contracts, discipline grows lax and the inevitable occurs: thefts, poor service, untidiness. Today, for example, no one came up to make the bed. I had to do it myself. And I need clean sheets. When I call the reception desk, no one can give me a convincing explanation. As it happens, the Wolf and the Lamb arrive while I’m waiting for someone from the laundry room to bring up clean sheets.

“We just had a little free time and we decided to come and see you. We didn’t want you to leave without saying good-bye.”

I reassured them that I still hadn’t decided when to go.

“Then we should go out for a few drinks to celebrate.”

“Maybe you’ll stay here to live,” says the Lamb.

“Maybe you’ve found something worth staying for,” says the Wolf, winking an eye. Is he referring to Frau Else or something else?

“What did El Quemado find?”

“Work,” answer the two of them, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. Both are dressed as laborers in overalls stained with paint and cement.

“The good life is over,” says the Lamb.

Meanwhile, the Wolf’s nervous pacing carries him to the other end of the room, where he stares curiously at the game board and the Force Pool, at this point in the match a chaos of counters hard for a neophyte to understand.

“This is the famous game?”

I nod in assent. I’d like to know who made it famous. It’s probably all my fault.

“And is it very difficult?”

“El Quemado learned to play,” I answer.

“But El Quemado is a special case,” says the Lamb, without poking around the game; in fact, he hasn’t even glanced at it, as if he fears leaving his fingerprints near the scene of the crime. Florian Linden?

“If El Quemado learned how, I could too,” says the Wolf.

“Do you speak English? Could you read the rules in English?”

The Lamb is addressing the Wolf but he looks at me with a smile, complicit and sympathetic.

“A little bit, from when I was a waiter, not enough to read, but…”

“But nothing. If you can’t read the Sporting World in Spanish, how are you going to be able to read a set of rules in English? Don’t be an idiot.”

For the first time, at least in front of me, the little Lamb has taken the upper hand with the Wolf. The Wolf, still mesmerized by the game, points to the hexes where the Battle of Britain is unfolding (though he never touches the map or the piles of counters!) and says that as he understands it, “here, for example”—he means the southeast of London—“there’s been a battle or there’s about to be one.” When I tell him he’s right, the Wolf gestures at the Lamb in a way that I imagine is obscene, but that I’ve never seen before, and says, “See, it’s not so hard.”

“Don’t kid yourself, man,” answers the Lamb, stubbornly refusing to look at the table.

“All right, I guessed it by sheer luck, are you happy?”

The Wolf’s attention wanders now, cautiously, from the map to the photocopies. With his hands on his hips he examines them, skipping from one to the next without lingering long enough to read any of them. One might say that he’s looking at them like paintings.

Part of the rules? Of course not.

“Statement of the Meeting of the Council of Ministers, November 12, 1938,” reads the Wolf. “Fuck, this is the beginning of the war!”

“No, the war starts later. In the autumn of the following year. The photocopies just help us… to set the scene. This kind of game creates a pretty interesting documentary urge. It’s as if we want to know exactly how everything was done in order to change what was done wrong.”

“I get it,” says the Wolf, understanding nothing, of course.

“It’s because if you just repeated the whole thing it wouldn’t be fun. It wouldn’t be a game,” whispers the Lamb, sitting down on the rug and blocking the path to the bathroom.

“Something like that. Though it depends on your motive… on your point of view…”

“How many books do you have to read to play well?”

“All of them and none of them. To play a simple match you just have to know the rules.”

“The rules, the rules, where are the rules?” The Wolf, sitting on my bed, picks up the Third Reich box from the floor and takes out the rules in English. He weighs them in one hand and shakes his head admiringly. “I can’t figure it out…”

“What?”

“How El Quemado could read this thing, with all the work he has.”

“What work? The pedal boats aren’t bringing in any money now,” said the Lamb.

“Maybe the money’s not there, but it’s hard work, for sure. I’ve spent time with him, helping him, in the sun, and I know what it’s like.”

“You were just trying to hook up with some foreign chick, don’t pretend you weren’t…”

“Man, that too…”

The superiority, the ascendance, of the Lamb over the Wolf was undeniable. I imagined that something extraordinary had happened to the latter that reversed, even if only for now, the hierarchy between the two of them.

“He didn’t read anything. I explained the rules to El Quemado little by little, very patiently!” I said.

“But then he read them. He photocopied the rules and at night, at the bar, he went over them underlining the parts that he thought were most interesting. I thought he was studying to get his driver’s license; he said no, it was the rules of your game.”