Roberto Bolaño - The Third Reich

“Poor man,” I heard Hanna say.

I asked to whom she was referring; I was told to take a closer look without being obvious about it. The rental guy was dark, with long hair and a muscular build, but the most noticeable thing about him by far were the burns—I mean burns from a fire, not the sun— that covered most of his face, neck, and chest, and that he displayed openly, dark and corrugated, like grilled meat or the crumpled metal of a downed plane.

For an instant, I must admit, I was hypnotized, until I realized that he was looking at us too and that there was an indifference in his gaze, a kind of coldness that suddenly struck me as repulsive.

After that I avoided looking at him.

Hanna said that she would kill herself if she ended up like that, scarred by fire. Hanna is a pretty girl, with blue eyes and brown hair, and her breasts—neither Hanna nor Ingeborg was wearing her bikini top—are large and shapely, but it didn’t take much effort for me to imagine her covered in burns, screaming and wandering blindly around her hotel room. (Why, precisely, around her hotel room?)

“Maybe it’s a birthmark,” said Ingeborg.

“Maybe. You see the strangest things,” said Hanna. “Charly met a woman in Italy who was born without hands.”

“Really?”

“I swear. Ask him. He slept with her.”

Hanna and Ingeborg laughed. Sometimes I don’t understand how Ingeborg can find this kind of talk funny.

“Maybe it was a birth defect.”

I don’t know whether Ingeborg was talking about the woman without hands or the rental guy. Either way I tried to convince her that she was wrong. No one is born like that, with such ravaged skin. At the same time, it was clear that the burns weren’t recent. They probably dated back five years, or even more to judge by the attitude of the poor guy (I wasn’t looking at him), who had clearly grown used to attracting the same interest and stares as monsters and the mutilated, glances of involuntary revulsion, of pity at a great misfortune. To lose an arm or a leg is to lose a part of oneself, but to be burned like that is to be transformed, to become someone else.

When Charly woke up at last, Hanna told him she thought the rental guy was good-looking. Great biceps! Charly laughed and we all went swimming.

After lunch that afternoon I set up the game. Ingeborg, Hanna, and Charly headed to the old part of town to go shopping. During lunch, Frau Else came over to our table to ask whether we were enjoying ourselves. She gave Ingeborg a frank and open smile, although when she spoke to me I thought I detected a certain irony, as if she were saying: you see, I care about your well-being, I haven’t forgotten you. Ingeborg thought she was a pretty woman and wondered how old she was. I said I didn’t know.

How old must Frau Else be? I remember my parents said that she had married the Spaniard—whom incidentally I still haven’t seen—when she was very young. The last summer that we were here she must have been about twenty-five, around the same age as Hanna, Charly, and me. Now she’s probably thirty-five.

After lunch the hotel lapses into a strange lethargy. Those who aren’t going to the beach or on an outing fall asleep, overcome by the heat. The staff, except for those stoically tending bar, vanish and aren’t seen on the hotel grounds until past six. A sticky silence reigns on every floor, interrupted from time to time by the low voices of children and the hum of the elevator. At times one has the impression that a group of children has gotten lost, but that’s not the case; it’s just that their parents can’t bring themselves to speak.

If it weren’t for the heat, barely mitigated by the air-conditioning, this would be the best time of day to work. There is natural light, the restlessness of morning has worn off, and there are still many hours ahead. Conrad—my dear Conrad—prefers to work at night, which explains the frequent circles under his eyes and his sometimes alarming pallor, which makes us wonder whether he’s sick when he’s simply sleep deprived. He claims to be unable to work, unable to think, unable to sleep, and yet it’s he who has bestowed upon us many of the best variants for any number of campaigns, as well as countless analytical, historical, and methodological studies, and even simple introductions and reviews of new games. Without him, Stuttgart’s gaming scene would be different—smaller and with a lower level of play. In some sense he has been our protector (mine, Alfred’s, Franz’s), recommending books that we never would have read otherwise and passionately addressing us on the most disparate subjects. What holds him back is his lack of ambition. Ever since I’ve known him—and for a long time before that, as far as I can tell—Conrad has worked at a small-time construction company, in one of the lowest-ranking jobs, beneath nearly all the office staffand construction workers, performing tasks that used to be handled by office boys and messengers-withoutmotorbikes, the latter the title he likes to claim for himself. He makes enough to pay for his room, he eats at a cheap restaurant where he’s practically one of the family, and every once in a while he buys some clothes. The rest of his money goes to pay for games, subscriptions to European and American magazines, club dues, some books (only a few, because he usually borrows from the library, saving up his money for more games), and donations to the city’s fanzines, for virtually all of which he writes. It goes without saying that many of these fanzines would collapse without Conrad’s generosity, and in this too one can see his lack of ambition: the best that some of them deserve is to vanish without a trace, putrid little ditto sheets spawned by adolescents more interested in role-playing games or even computer games than the rigors of the hexagonal board. But that doesn’t matter to Conrad and he supports them. Many of his best articles, including his piece on the Ukrainian Gambit—which Conrad calls General Marcks’s Dream—were not only published by such a magazine but in fact written expressly for it.

Curiously, it was Conrad who encouraged me to write for publications with a broader circulation and who persuaded me to go semipro. It’s to him that I owe my first contacts with Front Line , Jeux de Simulation , Stockade , Casus Belli , The General , etc. According to Conrad—and we spent an afternoon working this out—if I write regularly for ten magazines, some of them monthly, most bimonthly or trimonthly, I could give up my job and still get by while devoting myself entirely to writing. When I asked why he didn’t try it, since his job was worse than mine and he could write as well as I could, or better, he answered that he was so shy that it was painful for him, if not impossible, to establish business relationships with people he didn’t know, and that the work required a certain command of English, a language that Conrad could only just barely decipher.

On that memorable day we set the goals to realize our dreams, and we got straight to work. Our friendship was cemented.

Then came the Stuttgart tournament, preceding by a few months the Interzonal (essentially the national championship), to be held in Cologne. We both entered, promising half in earnest and half in jest that if fate pitted us against each other, we would be ruthless despite our steadfast friendship. Around that time Conrad had just published his Ukrainian Gambit in the fanzine Tötenkopf .

At first the matches went well. We both made it through the first round without too much trouble. In the second round, Conrad was slated to play Mathias Müller, Stuttgart’s boy wonder, eighteen years old, editor of the fanzine Forced Marches and one of the fastest players we knew. The match was tough, one of the hardest fought of the tournament, and in the end Conrad was defeated. But this in no way discouraged him: with the enthusiasm of a scientist who after a resounding failure is at last able to see things clearly, he explained to me the initial flaws of the Ukrainian Gambit and its hidden virtues, how to use armored and mountain corps from the start, and where one could or couldn’t apply the Schwerpunkt, etc. In short, he became my adviser.