Roberto Bolaño - The Savage Detectives

Today I went to my uncle's office and told him everything.

"Uncle," I said, "I'm living with a woman. That's why I don't come home to sleep. But there's no need for you to worry because I'm still going to class and I plan to finish my degree. Otherwise, I'm fine. I eat a good breakfast. I get two meals a day."

My uncle looked at me without getting up from his desk.

"What money do you plan to live on? Have you found work or is she supporting you?"

I answered that I didn't know yet, and that for now, Rosario was in fact covering my expenses, which were modest anyway.

He wanted to know who this woman was I was living with, and I told him. He wanted to know what she did. I told him, maybe slightly glossing over the coarser aspects of the job of bar girl. He wanted to know how old she was. From then on, despite my initial resolve, everything was a lie. I said that Rosario was eighteen when she's almost definitely older than twenty-two, maybe even twenty-five, although that's only a guess, since I've never asked her; it doesn't seem right to seek out the information unless she volunteers it herself.

"Just so you don't make a fool of yourself," said my uncle, and he wrote me a check for five thousand pesos.

Before I left he urged me to call my aunt that night.

I went to the bank to cash the check and then I stopped by some of the downtown bookstores. I looked in at Café Quito. The first time I didn't see anyone. I ate there and went back to Rosario's room, where I sat reading and writing until late. After dark I went back and found Jacinto Requena dying of boredom. None of the visceral realists except for him, he said, were showing their faces at the café. Everybody was afraid of running into Arturo Belano, though their fears were unwarranted since the Chilean hadn't been there in days. According to Requena (who is definitely the most laid-back of the visceral realists), Belano had begun to kick more poets out of the group. Ulises Lima was remaining discreetly in the background, but apparently he supported Belano's decisions. I asked who'd gotten purged this time. He named two poets I didn't know and Angélica Font, Laura Jáuregui, and Sofía Gálvez.

"He's expelled three women!" I exclaimed, unable to help myself.

Moctezuma Rodríguez, Catalina O'Hara, and Jacinto himself were hanging in the balance. You, Jacinto? Belano hasn't been wasting any time, said Requena, resigned. And me? No, no one's said anything about you yet, said Requena, sounding unsure. I asked him the reason for the expulsions. He didn't know. He repeated his original opinion: temporary madness on the part of Arturo Belano. Then he explained to me (although this I already knew ) that Breton recklessly indulged in the same sport. Belano thinks he's Breton, said Requena. Actually, all the capi di famiglia of Mexican poetry think they're Breton, he sighed. And the people who were expelled, what are they saying? Why don't they form a new group? Requena laughed. Most of the people who were expelled, he said, don't even know they've been expelled! And those who do know couldn't care less about visceral realism. You might say Arturo has done them a favor.

"Pancho couldn't care less? Luscious Skin couldn't care less?"

"Those two might care. The others have just been relieved of a burden. Now they're free to join the ranks of the peasant poets or go kiss up to Paz."

"What Belano is doing doesn't seem very democratic to me," I said.

"True enough. It isn't exactly what you might call democratic."

"We should go see him and tell him," I said.

"No one knows where he is. He and Ulises have disappeared."

For a while we sat watching the Mexico City night through the window.

Outside people were walking fast, hunched over, not as if they were expecting a storm, but as if the storm were already here. Still, no one seemed to be afraid.

Later Requena started to talk about Xóchitl and the baby they were going to have. I asked what they would call it.

"Franz," said Requena.

Since I don't have anything to do, I've decided to go looking for Belano and Ulises Lima in the bookstores of Mexico City. I've discovered the antiquarian bookstore Plinio el Joven, on Venustiano Carranza. The Lizardi bookstore, on Donceles. The antiquarian bookstore Rebeca Nodier, at Mesones and Pino Suárez. At Plinio el Joven the only clerk is a little old man who, after waiting obsequiously on a "scholar from the Colegio de México," soon fell asleep in a chair next to a stack of books, supremely ignoring me. I stole an anthology of Marco Manilio's Astronómica , with a prologue by Alfonso Reyes, and Diary of an Unknown Writer by a Japanese writer from the Second World War. At Lizardi I thought I saw Monsiváis. I tried to sidle up next to him to see what book he was looking at, but when I reached him, Monsiváis turned around and stared straight at me, with a hint of a smile, I think, and keeping a firm grip on his book and hiding the title, he went to talk to one of the clerks. Provoked, I filched a little book by an Arab poet called Omar Ibn al-Farid, published by the university, and an anthology of young American poets put out by City Lights. By the time I left, Monsiváis was gone. The Rebeca Nodier bookstore is tended by Rebeca Nodier herself, an old woman in her eighties who is completely blind and wears unruly white dresses that match her dentures; armed with a cane and alerted by the creaky wooden floor, she hops up and introduces herself to everyone who walks into her store, I'm Rebeca Nodier, etc., finally asking in turn the name of the "lover of literature" she has the "pleasure of meeting" and inquires what kind of literature he or she is looking for. I told her that I was interested in poetry, and to my surprise, Mrs. Nodier said all poets were bums but they weren't bad in bed. Especially if they don't have any money, she went on. Then she asked me how old I was. Seventeen, I said. Oh, you're still a pipsqueak, she exclaimed. And then: you're not planning to steal any of my books, are you? I promised her that I would rather die. We chatted for a while, and then I left.

The Mexican literary mafia has nothing on the Mexican bookseller mafia. Bookstores visited: the Librería del Sótano, in a basement on Avenida Juárez where the clerks (numerous and neatly uniformed) kept me under strict surveillance and from which I managed to leave with volumes by Roque Dalton, Lezama Lima, and Enrique Lihn. The Librería Mexicana, staffed by three samurais, on Calle Aranda, near the Plaza de San Juan, where I stole a book by Othón, a book by Amado Nervo (wonderful!), and a chapbook by Efraín Huerta. The Librería Pacífico, at Bolívar and 16 de Septiembre, where I stole an anthology of American poets translated by Alberto Girri and a book by Ernesto Cardenal. And in the evening, after reading, writing, and a little fucking: the Viejo Horacio, on Correo Mayor, staffed by twins, from which I left with Gamboa's Santa , a novel to give to Rosario; an anthology of poems by Kenneth Fearing, translated and with a prologue by someone called Doctor Julio Antonio Vila, in which Doctor Vila talks in a vague, question mark-filled way about a trip that Fearing took to Mexico in the 1950s, "an ominous and fruitful trip," writes Doctor Vila; and a book on Buddhism written by the Televisa adventurer Alberto Montes. Instead of the book by Montes I would have preferred the autobiography of the ex-featherweight world champion Adalberto Redondo, but one of the inconveniences of stealing books-especially for a novice like myself-is that sometimes you have to take what you can get.

Librería Orozco, on Reforma, between Oxford and Praga: Nueve novísimos , the Spanish anthology; Corps et biens , by Robert Desnos; and Dr . Brodie's Report , by Borges. Librería Milton, at Milton and Darwin: Vladimir Holan's A Night with Hamlet and Other Poems , a Max Jacob anthology, and a Gunnar Ekelöf anthology. Librería El Mundo, on Río Nazas: selected poems by Byron, Shelley, and Keats; Stendhal's The Red and the Black (which I've already read); and Lichtenberg's Aphorisms , translated by Alfonso Reyes. This afternoon, as I arranged my books in the room, I thought about Reyes. Reyes could be my little refuge. A person could be immensely happy reading only him or the writers he loved. But that would be too easy.