Roberto Bolaño - The Third Reich

Perhaps too brusquely, I ordered her to wait, then I found a thousand-peseta note and put it in her hand. The poor girl gazed at me, perplexed, not knowing whether she should accept the money or what in the world I was giving it to her for. It’s a tip, I said. Then came the most astonishing part: first she bit her lower lip, like a nervous schoolgirl, and then she gave a little curtsy, surely copied from some Three Musketeers movie. I didn’t know what to do, how to interpret her gesture; I thanked her and said she could go, though in German, not in Spanish, which I’d been speaking before. The girl obeyed immediately. She left as silently as she’d come.

The rest of the morning I spent writing in what Conrad calls my Campaign Notebook, outlining a draft of my variant.

At noon I joined Ingeborg on the beach. I was, I must admit, in a state of exaltation after having spent a productive morning with the game board, and I did something I don’t usually do: I gave a detailed account of my opening strategy, until Ingeborg interrupted me, saying that people were listening.

I contended that this was only to be expected, since thousands of people were crowded on the beach, nearly shoulder to shoulder.

Later I realized that Ingeborg was ashamed of me, of the words coming out of my mouth (infantry corps, armored corps, air combat factors, naval combat factors, preemptive strikes on Norway, the possibility of launching an offense against the Soviet Union in the winter of ’39, the possibility of obliterating France in the spring of ’40), and it was as if an abyss opened up at my feet.

We ate at the hotel. After dessert, Ingeborg suggested a boat ride. At the reception desk they had given her the schedules of the little boats that make the trip between our beach and two neighboring towns. I said I couldn’t come, claiming work as my excuse. When I told her that I planned to sketch out the first two turns that afternoon, she gave me the same look that I had already witnessed on the beach.

With true horror I realize that something is beginning to come between us.

A boring afternoon otherwise. At the hotel there are hardly any more pale-skinned guests to be seen. All of them, even the ones who have been here just a few days, boast perfect tans, the fruit of many hours spent on the beach and of the lotions and creams that our technology produces in abundance. In fact, the only guest who’s kept his natural color is me. Not coincidentally, I’m also the one who spends the most time at the hotel. Me and an old lady who hardly ever ventures offthe terrace. This fact seems to arouse the curiousity of the staff, who have begun to watch me with mount-ing interest, though from a prudent distance, and with something that at the risk of exaggeration I’ll call fear. Word of the table incident must have spread at lightning speed. The difference between the old lady and me is that she sits placidly on the terrace, watching the sky and the beach, and I’m constantly emerging like a sleepwalker from my room to head to the beach to see Ingeborg or have a beer at the hotel bar.

It’s odd: sometimes I’m convinced that the old lady was here back in the days when I used to come to the Del Mar with my parents. But ten years is a long time, at least in this instance, and her face doesn’t ring a bell. Maybe if I went up to her and asked whether she remembered me…

But what are the odds? In any case I don’t know whether I could bring myself to talk to her. There’s something about her that repels me. And yet, at first glance she’s an ordinary old lady: more thin than fat, very wrinkled, dressed all in white, wearing sunglasses and a little straw hat. This afternoon, after Ingeborg left, I watched her from the balcony. She always claims the same spot on the terrace, in a corner near the sidewalk. There, half hidden under an enormous white umbrella, she whiles away the time watching the few cars that pass by along the Paseo Marítimo, like a jointed doll, content. And, strangely, essential to my own happiness: when I can no longer stand the stuffy air of the room I come out and there she is, a kind of font of energy that boosts my spirits so I’m able to sit back down at the table and go on working.

And what if she, in turn, sees me every time I come out onto the balcony? What must she think of me? Who must she think I am? She never tilts her head up, but with those sunglasses it’s hard to say what she’s watching. She might have glimpsed my shadow on the tile floor of the terrace. There aren’t many people at the hotel and surely she would consider it unseemly for a young man to keep appearing and disappearing. The last time I came out she was writing a postcard. Might she have mentioned me in it? I don’t know. But if she did, how did she describe me? And from what perspective? As a pale young man with a smooth brow? Or a nervous young man, clearly in love? Or maybe an ordinary young man with a skin condition?

I don’t know. What I do know is that I’m getting offthe subject, losing myself in pointless speculation that only upsets me. I don’t understand how my dear friend Conrad could ever say that I write like Karl Bröger. If only.

Thanks to Conrad I was introduced to the literary group Workers of Nyland House. It was he who put Karl Bröger’s Soldaten der Erde in my hands, and who pushed me, after I had read it, to embark on an ever more dizzying and arduous search through the libraries of Stuttgart for Bröger’s Bunker 17 , Heinrich Lersch’s Hammerschläge , Max Barthel’s Das vergitterte Land , Gerrit Engelke’s Rhythmus des neuen Europa , Lersch’s Mensch im Eisen , etc.

Conrad knows our national literature. One night in his room he reeled offthe names of two hundred German writers. I asked if he’d read them all. He said yes. He especially loved Goethe, and of the moderns, Ernst Jünger. There were two books by Jünger that he was always rereading: Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis and Feuer und Blut . And yet he didn’t turn his nose up at more obscure writ-ers; hence his fervent regard—which we would soon share—for the Nyland Circle.

How many nights after that did I go to bed late, busy not just deciphering the tricky rules of new games but immersed in the joys and miseries, the heights and depths, of German literature!

Of course, I’m talking about the literature written in blood, not Florian Linden novels, which, according to Ingeborg, just keep getting more far-fetched. On the same subject, I feel it’s appropriate to air a grievance here: the few times that I’ve talked in public to Ingeborg about my work, going into some detail about the progress of a game, she’s gotten angry or embarrassed, and yet she’s always telling me (during breakfast, at the club, in the car, in bed, during dinner, and even over the phone) about the riddles that Florian Linden has to solve. And I haven’t gotten angry at her or been embarrassed by what she has to say. On the contrary, I’ve tried to take a broad and objective view (in vain), and then I’ve suggested possible logical solutions to the fairy-tale detective puzzles.

A month ago, not to put too fine a point on it, I dreamed about Florian Linden. That was the limit. I remember it vividly: I was in bed, because I was very cold, and Ingeborg was saying to me: “The room is hermetically sealed.” Then, from the hallway, we heard the voice of Florian Linden, who warned us of the presence in the room of a poisonous spider, a spider that could bite us and then vanish, even though the room was “hermetically sealed.” Ingeborg started to cry and I held her tight. After a while she said: “It’s impossible, how did Florian do it this time?” I got up and looked around, going through drawers in search of the spider, but I couldn’t find any-thing; of course there were many places where it could hide. Ingeborg shouted, Florian, Florian, Florian, what should we do? but no one answered. I think we both knew we were on our own.