Roberto Bolaño - The Savage Detectives

The next few weeks I lived as if in a dream. I did everything correctly, as I always had, but I was no longer living in my own skin. Instead I was watching myself from the outside, facies tua computat annos , pitying myself, criticizing myself in the harshest terms, mocking my ridiculous propriety, the manners and empty phrases that I knew wouldn't get me anywhere.

I soon understood how vain all my ambitions had been, the ambitions that trundled the golden labyrinth of the law as well as those I set spinning along the edge of the edge of the cliff of literature. Interdum lacrimae pondera vocis habent . I realized what Arturo Belano had known from the moment he saw me: I was a terrible poet.

At least things still functioned when it came to love, I mean I could still get it up, but I'd almost lost my taste for sex: I didn't like to see myself fucking, I didn't like to see myself moving on top of the defenseless body of the woman whom I was seeing at the time (poor innocent soul!). Soon I managed to shake her off. Gradually I began to prefer strangers, girls I picked up in bars or all-night clubs and whom I could confuse, at least at first, with the shameless display of my old giant's powers. Some, I'm sorry to say, could have been my daughters. More than once I came to this realization in situ, which troubled me greatly and made me want to go running outside howling and leaping, though out of respect for the neighbors, I never did. In any case, amor odit inertes , I slept with women and made them happy (the gifts I had once lavished on young poets I began to give to wayward girls) and their happiness pushed back the onset of my unhappiness, which came when it was time to sleep and dream, or dream that I was dreaming, about the cries that came from the maw of a chasm in a Galicia that was itself like the maw of a savage beast, a gigantic green mouth open painfully wide under a sky in flames, the sky of a scorched world, a world charred by a World War III that never was or at least never was in my lifetime, and sometimes the wolf was maimed in Galicia, but other times the backdrop of its martyrdom was the Basque country, Asturias, Aragon, even Andalusia! and in my dream, I remember, I would take refuge in Barcelona, a civilized city, but even in Barcelona the wolf howled and writhed in madness and the sky was rent and nothing could be put right.

Who was torturing me?

I asked myself this question more than once.

Who was making the wolf howl morning and night, when I fell exhausted into bed or some unfamiliar armchair?

Insperata accidunt magis saepe quam quae spes , I said to myself.

I thought it was the giant.

For a while, I tried to sleep without sleeping. Close just one eye. Sneak down the backstreets of sleep. But great efforts only brought me to the lip of the chasm, nemo in sese tentat descendere , and there I would stop and listen: my own snoring in restless sleep, the far-off noises drifting in on the breeze from the street, muffled sounds from the past, the senseless words of the terrified campers, the sound of the footsteps of those who circled the chasm not knowing what to do, the voices announcing the arrival of reinforcements from the campground, a mother weeping (sometimes it was my own mother!), my daughter's garbled words, the sound of the rocks that fell like little guillotine blades when the watchman went down after the boy.

One day I decided to look for Belano. I did it for my own sake, for the sake of my health. The eighties, which had been such a disastrous decade for his continent, seemed to have swallowed him up without a trace. From time to time poets of the right age or nationality, poets who might have known where he lived or what he was doing, would come by the magazine's offices, but the truth is that as time went by his name was blotted out. Nihil est annis velocius . When I brought him up with my daughter, I got an address in Ampurdán and a reproachful look. The address belonged to a house where no one had lived for a long time. One particularly desperate night I even called the Castroverde campground. It had closed.

After a while I thought I might get used to living with the demented giant and the howls that came from the chasm night after night. I sought peace, or if not peace, then distraction, in my social life (which I had let go a little, thanks to the wayward girls), in the growth of the magazine, in some official honor that the Generalitat had always begrudged me because I was a Galician immigrant. Ingrata patria, ne ossa quidem mea habes . I sought peace in my dealings with poets and the recognition of my peers. I didn't find it. Instead, I found desolation and opposition. I found brittle women who wanted the velvet-glove treatment (and who were all on the far side of fifty!), I found clerks from the Castroverde campground who looked at me like what they were, Galicians frightened in the face of the irremediable, and who only made me feel more like weeping, I found new magazines joining the fray, their existence putting my magazine's existence in constant jeopardy. I sought peace and I didn't find it.

By then I think I could recite Don Pío's story by heart, periturae parcere chartae , and still I understood nothing. My life seemed to be progressing through the same realms of mediocrity as usual, but I knew that I was walking in the land of destruction.

At last I contracted a fatal illness and stopped working. In a final effort to regain my lost identity, I tried to secure the City of Barcelona Award for myself. Contemptu famae contemni virtutes . Those who knew the state of my health thought I was trying to achieve some kind of posthumous recognition while I was still alive and took me bitterly to task. I was just trying to die as myself, not as an ear on the edge of a chasm. Catalans only understand what suits them.

I made a will. I divided up my worldly goods, which were less plentiful than I'd thought, among the women of my family and two wayward girls of whom I'd grown fond. I hate to imagine the look on my daughters' faces when they find out that they have to share my money with two street lovelies. Venenum in auro bibitur . Then I sat in my dark office and I saw the weak flesh and the strong mind passing before me, as if in a diorama, like a husband and wife who hate each other, and I also saw the strong flesh and the weak mind pass by arm in arm, another model couple, and I saw them stroll around a park like the Parque de la Ciudadela (although sometimes it was more like the Gianicolo near the Piazzale Giuseppe Garibaldi), weary yet unwearying, at the pace of cancer patients or prostate sufferers, well dressed, haloed in a kind of horrible dignity, and the strong flesh and the weak mind went from right to left and the weak flesh and the strong mind went from left to right, and each time they crossed paths they acknowledged each other but didn't stop, out of politeness or because they knew each other from other walks, if only slightly, and I thought: my God, talk, talk, speak to each other, dialogue is the key to any door, ex abundantia cordis os loquitur , but the weak mind and the strong mind only nodded, and perhaps their consorts did no more than bow their eyelids (eyelids don't bow, Toni Melilla told me one day, but how wrong he was! of course they bow, eyelids can even kneel), proud as bitches, the weak flesh and the strong flesh, steeped together in the crucible of fate, if you'll permit me the expression, an expression that means nothing but is as sweet as a bitch lost on the mountainside.

Then I checked into a clinic in Barcelona, then a clinic in New York, and then one night all my Galician orneriness rose up in me and I pulled off my tubes and got dressed and traveled to Rome, where I was admitted to the Ospedale Britannico, where my friend Dr. Claudio Palermo Rizzi works (he's a poet in the little free time he has), and after submitting to countless tests and indignities (the same ones to which I'd submitted in Barcelona and New York) the diagnosis was that I had only a few days left to live. Qui fodit foveam, incidet in eam .