Roberto Bolaño - The Savage Detectives

Before, I didn't have time for anything, and now I have time for everything. I used to spend my life on the bus and subway, having to cross the city from north to south at least twice a day. Now I walk everywhere, read a lot, write a lot. Every day I make love. In our tenement room, a little library has already begun to grow from my thefts and visits to bookstores. Last on the list, the Batalla del Ebro: its owner is a little old Spaniard named Crispín Zamora. I think we've gotten to be friends. Naturally, the store is almost always deserted and Don Crispín likes to read but he doesn't mind spending hours at a time talking about any old thing. Sometimes I need to talk too. I confessed that I was making the rounds of Mexico City bookstores looking for two friends who had disappeared, that I'd been stealing books because I didn't have any money (Don Crispín immediately gave me a Porrúa edition of Euripides translated by Father Garibay), that I admired Alfonso Reyes because in addition to Greek and Latin he knew French, English, and German, and that I had stopped going to the university. Everything I tell him makes him laugh, except my not going to class anymore, because it's important to have a degree. He distrusts poetry. When I explained that I was a poet, he said that distrust wasn't exactly the right word and that he'd known some poets. He wanted to read my poems. When I brought them to him I could see he found them a little confusing, but when he was done reading he didn't say anything. All he asked me was why I used so many ugly-sounding words. What do you mean, Don Crispín? I asked. Blasphemy, swear words, curses, insults. Oh, that, I said, well, it must just be the way I am. When I left that afternoon, Don Crispín gave me Ocnos , by Cernuda, and urged me to study it, because Cernuda was also a poet with a difficult disposition.

After I walked Rosario to the door of the Encrucijada Veracruzana (all the waitresses, including Brígida, greeted me effusively, as if I'd become part of the club or the family, all of them convinced that someday I'd be an important person in Mexican literature), my feet carried me unthinkingly to Río de la Loza and the Media Luna hotel, where Lupe was staying.

In the shoe box-size lobby, much more sinister than I remembered it, the wallpaper patterned with flowers and bleeding deer, a squat man with a broad back and big head said there was no Lupe staying there. I demanded to see the register. The clerk told me it was impossible, that the register was absolutely confidential. I argued that it was my sister, separated from my brother-in-law, and that the reason I was there was to bring her money to pay the hotel bill. The clerk must have had a sister in similar circumstances, because he immediately became more understanding.

"Is your sister a thin little dark girl who goes by Lupe?"

"That's her."

"Wait just a second, I'll go knock on her door."

While the receptionist went up to get her I looked through the register. The night of November 30, someone called Guadalupe Martínez had arrived. That same day, a Susana Alejandra Torres, a Juan Aparicio, and a María del Mar Jiménez had checked in. Following my instincts, I decided that Susana Alejandra Torres, not Guadalupe Martínez, must be the Lupe I was looking for. I decided not to wait for the receptionist to come down and I took the stairs in threes to the second floor, room 201, where Susana Alejandra Torres was staying.

I knocked just once. I heard footsteps, a window closing, whispers, more footsteps, and finally the door opened and I found myself face-to-face with Lupe.

It was the first time I'd seen her with so much makeup on. Her lips were painted a deep red, her eyes lined with pencil, her cheeks smeared with glitter. She recognized me at once:

"You're María's friend," she exclaimed with undisguised happiness.

"Let me in," I said. Lupe looked over her shoulder and then stood aside. The room was a jumble of women's clothes strewn in the most unlikely places.

I could tell right away that we weren't alone. Lupe was wearing a green bathrobe and she was smoking furiously. I heard a noise in the bathroom. Lupe looked at me and then looked toward the bathroom door, which was half open. I was sure it must be a client. But then I saw a paper with drawings on it lying on the floor, the mock-up of the new visceral realist magazine, and the discovery filled me with alarm. I thought, rather illogically, that it was María in the bathroom, or Angélica, and I didn't know how I was going to justify my presence at the Media Luna to them.

Lupe, who hadn't taken her eyes off me, noticed my discovery and started to laugh.

"You can come out now," she shouted, "it's your daughter's friend."

The bathroom door opened and Quim Font came out wrapped in a white robe. His eyes were weepy and there were traces of lipstick on his face. He greeted me warmly. In his hand he was holding the folder with the plan for the magazine in it.

"You see, García Madero," he said, "I'm always hard at work, always paying attention."

Then he asked me whether I'd been by his house.

"Not today," I said, and I thought about María again and everything seemed unbearably sordid and sad.

The three of us sat on the bed, Quim and I on the edge and Lupe under the covers.

Really, the situation was untenable!

Quim smiled, Lupe smiled, and I smiled, and none of us could bring ourselves to say anything. A stranger would have assumed that we were there to make love. The idea was gruesome. Just thinking about it made my stomach lurch. Lupe and Quim were still smiling. To say something, I started to talk about Arturo Belano's purge of the ranks of visceral realism.

"It was about time," said Quim. "All the freeloaders and incompetents should be tossed out. The movement only needs the pure of heart, like you, García Madero."

"True," I said, "but the more of us, the better, it seems to me."

"No, numbers are an illusion, García Madero. For our purposes, five is as good as fifty. That's what I told Arturo. Make heads roll. Shrink the inner circle until it's a microscopic dot."

I thought he was going off the rails, and I kept quiet.

"Where were we going to get with an idiot like Pancho Rodríguez, tell me that?"

"I don't know."

"Do you actually think he's a good poet? Does he strike you as a model member of the Mexican avant-garde?"

Lupe didn't say a thing. She just watched us and smiled. I asked Quim whether there was any news of Alberto.

"We're few and soon we'll be fewer," said Quim enigmatically. I didn't know whether he was referring to Alberto or the visceral realists.

"They've expelled Angélica too," I said.

"My daughter Angélica? Good Lord, that is news, man. I had no idea. When was this?"

"I don't know," I said, "Jacinto Requena told me."

"A poet who's won the Laura Damián prize! That takes some nerve, it really does! And I don't say so because she's my daughter!"

"Why don't we go for a walk?" said Lupe.

"Quiet, Lupita, I'm thinking."

"Don't be a pain in the ass, Joaquín, you can't tell me to be quiet. I'm not your daughter, remember?"

Quim laughed softly. It was a rabbity laugh that hardly disturbed the muscles of his face.

"Of course you're not my daughter. You can't write three words without making a spelling mistake."

"What? You think I'm illiterate, you asshole? Of course I can."

"No, you can't," said Quim, making a disproportionate effort to think. A scowl of pain etched itself on his face, reminding me of the expression on Pancho Rodríguez's face at Café Amarillo.

"Come on, test me."

"They shouldn't have done that to Angélica. It disgusts me the way those bastards are toying with people's feelings. We should eat something. I feel sick to my stomach," said Quim.