Roberto Bolaño - The Savage Detectives

"Yes, look at my hands," he said.

He held his two hands at chest height. They were trembling considerably.

"On a project?" I said affably, looking at the papers spread out on the table.

"No," said Quim, "on a magazine. A magazine that's coming out soon."

I don't know why, but I immediately thought (or knew, as if he had told me so himself) that he meant the visceral realist magazine.

"I'm going to show them, everyone who's against me, yes, sir," he said.

I went over to the table and studied the diagrams and drawings, leafing slowly through the rough stack of papers. The mock-up for the magazine was a chaos of geometric figures and randomly scribbled names or letters. It was obvious that poor Mr. Font was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

"What do you think?"

"Extremely interesting," I said.

"Those jackasses will learn what the avant-garde is now, won't they? And that's even without the poems, see? This is where all of your poems will go."

The space he showed me was full of lines, lines mimicking writing, but also little drawings, like when someone swears in the comics: snakes, bombs, knives, skulls, crossbones, little mushroom clouds. The rest of each page was a compendium of Quim Font's extravagant ideas about graphic design.

"Look, this is the magazine's logo."

A snake (which might have been smiling but more likely was writhing in a spasm of pain) was biting its tail with a hungry, agonized expression, its eyes fixed like daggers on the hypothetical reader.

"But nobody knows what the magazine will be called yet," I said.

"It doesn't matter. The snake is Mexican and it also symbolizes circularity. Have you read Nietzsche, García Madero?" he said suddenly.

I confessed apologetically that I hadn't. Then I looked at each of the pages of the magazine (there were more than sixty), and just as I was getting ready to leave, Quim asked how things were going between me and his daughter. I told him that things were fine, that María and I were getting along better and better every day, and then I decided to shut my mouth.

"Life is hard for parents," he said, "especially in Mexico City. How long has it been since you slept at home?"

"Three nights," I said.

"And isn't your mother worried?"

"I talked to them on the phone. They know I'm all right."

Quim looked me up and down.

"You're not in great shape, my boy."

I shrugged my shoulders. The two of us stood there pensively for a minute without saying anything, him drumming his fingers on the table and me looking at old plans tacked to the walls, plans for dream houses that Quim would probably never see built.

"Come with me," he said.

I followed him to his room on the second floor, which was about five times the size of his study.

He opened the closet and took out a green sports shirt.

"Try this on, see how it fits."

I hesitated for a second, but Quim's gestures were abrupt, as if there were no time to lose. I dropped my shirt at the foot of the bed, an enormous bed where Quim, his wife, and his three children could've slept, and I put on the green shirt. It fit me well.

"It's yours," said Quim. Then he stuck his hand in his pocket and handed me some bills: "So you can treat María to a soda."

His hand was trembling, his outstretched arm was trembling, his other arm, which was hanging at his side, was trembling too, and his face was twisting into horrible expressions that forced me to look anywhere but at him. I thanked him but said there was no way I could accept such a gift.

"Strange," said Quim, "everybody takes my money: my daughters, my son, my wife, my employees"-he used the plural, although I knew perfectly well that at this point he didn't have any employees, except for the maid, but he didn't mean the maid-"even my bosses love my money and that's why they keep it."

"Thank you very much," I said.

"Take it and put it in your pocket, damn it!"

I took the money and put it away. It was quite a bit, though I didn't have the nerve to count it.

"I'll return it as soon as I can," I said.

Quim let himself fall backward on the bed. His body made a muffled sound and then quivered. For a second I wondered whether it could be a water bed.

"Don't worry, boy. We were put on this earth to help each other. You help me with my daughter, I'll help you with a little cash for your expenses. Call it an extra allowance, all right?"

His voice sounded tired, as if he were about to collapse in exhaustion and sleep, but his eyes were still open, staring nervously at the ceiling.

"I like the way the magazine looks, I'll give those bastards something to talk about," he said, but his voice was a whisper now.

"It's perfect," I said.

"Well, naturally, I'm not an architect for nothing," he said. And then, after a moment: "We're artists too, but we do a good job hiding it, don't we?"

"Sure you do," I said.

He seemed to be snoring. I looked at his face: his eyes were open. Quim? I said. He didn't answer. Very slowly, I approached him and touched the mattress. Something inside it responded to my touch. Bubbles the size of an apple. I turned and left the room.

I spent the rest of the day with María and chasing María.

It rained a few times. The first time it stopped, a rainbow appeared. The second time there was nothing, black clouds and night in the valley.

Catalina O'Hara is red-haired, twenty-five, has a son, is separated, is pretty.

I also met Laura Jáuregui, who used to be Arturo Belano's girlfriend. She was at the party with Sofía Gálvez, Ulises Lima's lost love.

Both of them are pretty.

No, Laura is much prettier.

I drank too much. Visceral realists were swarming everywhere, although more than half of them were just university students in disguise.

Angélica and Pancho left early.

At a certain point during the night, María said to me: disaster is imminent.

I woke up at Catalina O'Hara's house. As I was having breakfast, very early, with Catalina and her son, Davy, who had to be taken to nursery school (María wasn't there, everyone else was asleep), I remembered that the night before, when there were just a few of us left, Ernesto San Epifanio had said that all literature could be classified as heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. Novels, in general, were heterosexual, whereas poetry was completely homosexual; I guess short stories were bisexual, although he didn't say so.

Within the vast ocean of poetry he identified various currents: faggots, queers, sissies, freaks, butches, fairies, nymphs, and philenes. But the two major currents were faggots and queers. Walt Whitman, for example, was a faggot poet. Pablo Neruda, a queer. William Blake was definitely a faggot. Octavio Paz was a queer. Borges was a philene, or in other words he might be a faggot one minute and simply asexual the next. Rubén Darío was a freak, in fact, the queen freak, the prototypical freak.

"In our language, of course," he clarified. "In the wider world the reigning freak is still Verlaine the Generous."

Freaks, according to San Epifanio, were closer to madhouse flamboyance and naked hallucination, while faggots and queers wandered in stagger-step from ethics to aesthetics and back again. Cernuda, dear Cernuda, was a nymph, and at moments of great bitterness, a faggot, whereas Guillén, Aleixandre, and Alberti could be considered a sissy, a butch, and a queer, respectively. As a general rule, poets like Carlos Pellicer were butches, while poets like Tablada, Novo, and Renato Leduc were sissies. In fact, there was a dearth of faggots in Mexican poetry, although some optimists might point to López Velarde or Efraín Huerta. There were lots of queers, on the other hand, from the mauler (although for a second I heard mobster) Díaz Mirón to the illustrious Homero Aridjis. It was necessary to go all the way back to Amado Nervo (whistles) to find a real poet, a faggot poet, that is, and not a philene like the resurrected and now renowned Manuel José Othón from San Luis Potosí, a bore if ever there was one. And speaking of bores: Manuel Acuña was a fairy and José Joaquín Pesado was a Grecian wood nymph, both longtime pimps of a certain kind of Mexican lyrical verse.