Roberto Bolaño - The Third Reich

“Photocopied?”

The Wolf and the Lamb nodded.

I was surprised, because I knew I hadn’t lent the rules to anyone. There were two possibilities: either they were wrong and they had misunderstood El Quemado or El Quemado had told them the first thing that came into his head to get rid of them, or they were right and El Quemado, without my permission, had taken the original to photocopy it, putting it back the next day. As the Wolf and the Lamb moved on to a discussion of other matters (how nice the room was, how comfortable, how much it cost per night, the things they would do in a place like this instead of wasting time on “a puzzle,” etc.), I pondered how likely it really was that El Quemado had taken the rules and, the next day, having photocopied them, returned them to the box. It was impossible. Except for last night, he was always wearing a T-shirt, usually a ragged one, and shorts or long pants that left no room to hide a booklet even half the size of the Third Reich manual. In addition, he was always escorted in and out by me, and if it was naturally difficult to ascribe ulterior motives to El Quemado, it was even harder for me to believe that I would have overlooked a change, no matter how small—a telltale bulge!—in El Quemado’s appearance between his arrival and his departure. The logical conclusion exonerated him; it was materially impossible. At this point I was promptly confronted with a third explanation, at once simple and disturbing: another person, a person from the hotel, using the master key, had been in my room. I could think of only one possible suspect: Frau Else’s husband.

(Just imagining him, on tiptoe, among my things, made my stomach turn. I imagined him, tall and skeletal and faceless or with his face wreathed in a kind of dark and shifting cloud, going through my papers and my clothes, alert to footsteps in the hallway, the sound of the elevator, the bastard, as if he’d been waiting for me for ten years, just waiting and biding his time, so that once the moment came he could toss me to his fire-scarred dog and destroy me… )

A sound that at first struck me as bizarre and later came to seem like a portent managed to return me to reality.

Someone was knocking at the door.

I opened the door. It was the maid with the clean sheets. Somewhat brusquely, since her arrival couldn’t have been more inopportune, I let her in. All I wanted just then was for her to finish her job quickly so I could tip her and be left alone for a while longer with the Spaniards, in order to subject them to a series of questions that I was convinced couldn’t wait.

“Go ahead and put them on,” I said. “I turned in the other ones this morning.”

“Hey there, Clarita, how’s it going?” The Wolf lounged on the bed as if to emphasize his position as a guest and gave her a lazy, familiar wave.

The maid, the same one who according to Frau Else wanted me to leave the hotel, hesitated for an instant as if she’d gotten the wrong room, an instant in which her eyes, deceptively dull, discovered the Lamb, still sitting on the rug and waving to her, and immediately the shyness or distrust (or terror!) that had blossomed in her the minute she crossed the threshhold of my room vanished. She responded to the greetings with a smile and set about putting on the clean sheets—or, that is, she took possession of a strategic spot next to the bed.

“Get offof there,” she ordered the Wolf. The Wolf leaned up against the wall and started to make faces and clown around. I watched him curiously. The faces he was making, at first just idiotic, began to take on a color , gradually darkening until they traced a black mask barely softened by some red and yellow creases.

Clarita spread the sheets. Though she didn’t look it, I realized she was nervous.

“Careful, don’t knock the counters,” I warned.

“What counters?”

“The ones on the table, the game pieces,” said the Lamb. “You could cause an earthquake, Clarita.”

Hesitating between finishing her task and leaving, she chose to stand motionless. It was hard to believe that this girl was the same maid who had such a poor opinion of me, the girl who more than once had received my tips in silence, the girl who never opened her mouth in my presence. Now she was giggling, finally laughing at jokes, and saying things like “You’ll never learn,” “Look at the mess you’ve made,” “You’re such slobs,” as if the room belonged to the Wolf and the Lamb, not to me.

“I’d never live in a room like this,” said Clarita.

“I don’t live here, I’m just passing through,” I explained.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Clarita. “This is a bottomless pit.”

Later I realized that she was referring to her work, to the infinite labor of cleaning a hotel room, but at the time I took it for a personal judgment and it made me sad that even an adolescent should feel the right to express a critical view of my situation.

“I need to talk to you about something important.” The Wolf, no longer making faces, came around the bed and grabbed the maid by the arm. She jumped as if she’d been bitten by a snake.

“Later,” she said, looking at me and not at him, a tense smile creeping onto her lips, seeking my approval, but approval of what?

“Now, Clarita, we have to talk now.”

“That’s right, now.” The Lamb got up from the floor and cast an approving glance at the fingers gripping the maid’s arm.

Little sadist, I thought, he doesn’t dare knock her around himself but he likes to watch and goad the Wolf on. Then my full attention was seized again by Clarita’s gaze, a gaze that had already piqued my interest during the unfortunate incident of the table, but which on that occasion, maybe because it had to compete with another gaze, Frau Else’s, faded into the background, into the limbo of gazes, in order to reemerge now, as rich and quiet as a landscape: Mediterranean? African?

“Man, Clarita, you act like you’re the one who deserves an apology. That’s funny.”

“You owe us an explanation, at least.”

“What you did wasn’t right, was it?”

“Javi is a mess and you don’t even care.”

“Nobody wants to have anything to do with you anymore.”

“Nothing.”

With a sharp movement, the maid pulled away from the Wolf—Let me work!—and fixed the sheets, tucked them under the mattress, changed the pillowcase, pulled up the cream-colored coverlet and smoothed it. Once everything was done, the flurry of movement having left the Wolf and the Lamb with nothing more to say and no desire to continue, she didn’t leave but rather folded her arms on the opposite side of the room, separated from us by the immaculate bed, and asked what else anybody had to say to her. For an instant I thought she was talking to me. Her defiant attitude, starkly contrasting with her size, seemed charged with meaning that only I could read.

“I don’t have anything against you. Javi is an asshole.” The Wolf sat on a corner of the bed and started to roll a joint. A single, distinct wrinkle spread until it reached the far edge of the coverlet, the precipice.

“A fucking idiot,” said the Lamb.

I smiled and shook my head several times as if to inform Clarita that I was taking charge of the situation. I didn’t want to say anything, but deep down it bothered me that they would take the liberty of smoking in my room without asking my permission. What would Frau Else think if she showed up all of a sudden? What would the hotel guests and staffsay if they heard about it? Who, when it came down to it, could promise that Clarita wouldn’t blab?

“Want some?” The Wolf dragged on the joint a few times and passed it to me. For appearances’ sake, out of timidity, I inhaled deeply just once, relieved that it wasn’t damp, and handed the joint to Clarita. Inevitably our fingers brushed, maybe for longer than was strictly necessary, and it seemed to me that her cheeks turned red. Resignedly, and as if assuming that her mysterious business with the Spaniards was settled, the maid sat down by the table with her back to the balcony and blew a steady stream of smoke over the map. What a complicated game! she said in a loud voice, adding, in a whisper: For brains only!