Roberto Bolaño - The Savage Detectives

Perla Avilés, Calle Leonardo da Vinci, Colonia Mixcoac, Mexico City DF, January 1976. I'm going to talk about 1970. I met him in 1970, at Porvenir, a high school in Talismán. The two of us were students there for a while. He started in 1968, which was when he came to Mexico, and I started in '69, although we didn't meet until 1970. For reasons that are beside the point we both quit school for a while. Financial reasons in his case, I think, and inner turmoil in mine. But then I went back and he did too, or his parents made him go back, and then we met. This was 1970 and by then I was older than anyone in my class, I was eighteen, and I should have been in college, not high school, but there I was at Porvenir, and one morning, after the school year had already begun, he showed up, I noticed him right away, he wasn't a new student, he had friends, and he was a year younger than me, although he'd repeated a grade. At the time, he lived in Colonia Lindavista, but after a few months he and his parents moved to Colonia Nápoles. I became his friend. In the beginning, as I was getting up the courage to talk to him, I watched him play soccer in the yard. He loved to play. I watched him from the stairs and I thought he was the most beautiful boy I'd ever seen. Long hair was forbidden in high school, but he had long hair and when he played soccer he took off his shirt and played bare-chested. I thought he looked just like a Greek god from those magazines with tales of the Greek myths and at other times (in class, when he seemed to be asleep), a Catholic saint. I watched him and that was enough for me. He didn't have many friends. He knew lots of people, sure, he kidded around with everybody (he was always laughing), making jokes, but he had very few friends, maybe none at all. He didn't do well at school. In chemistry and physics he was lost. That surprised me because neither one was really hard. All you had to do to pass was pay the tiniest bit of attention, study a little, but obviously he hardly ever studied, or maybe never studied at all, and in class his mind was elsewhere. One day he came up to me, I was on the stairs reading Lautréamont, and asked me whether I knew who owned Porvenir. I was so startled that I didn't know what to say, I think I opened my mouth but nothing came out, my face crumpled, and I might even have started to shake. He was shirtless, carrying his shirt in one hand and a backpack, a dusty backpack full of notebooks, in the other, and he looked at me with a smile on his lips and I looked at the sweat on his chest that was drying fast in the wind or the late afternoon air (which aren't the same thing), and most classes were over, I don't know what I was doing at school, maybe waiting for someone, some friend, though that's unlikely since I didn't have many friends either, maybe I'd just stayed to watch him play soccer. I remember that the sky was a bright, damp gray and that it was cold or that I felt cold at the time. I also remember that the only sounds were of distant footsteps, muted laughter, the empty school. He probably thought I hadn't heard him the first time and he repeated the question. I don't know who it belongs to, I said, I don't know whether it has an owner. Of course it has an owner, he said, it's owned by Opus Dei. He must have thought I was a complete idiot, because I told him that I didn't know what Opus Dei was. A Catholic sect in league with the devil, he said, laughing. Then I understood and I told him that I didn't care much about religion and that I already knew that Porvenir was owned by the church. No, he said, what's important is which part of the church it's owned by: Opus Dei. And what kind of people belong to Opus Dei? I asked. Then he sat down beside me on the stairs and we talked for a long time and it bothered me that he wasn't putting his shirt on and it kept getting colder and colder. I remember what he said in that first conversation about his parents: he said they were naïve and that he was naïve too and he probably said they were stupid (he and his parents) and gullible for not having realized until now that the school belonged to Opus Dei. Do your parents know who's in charge here? he asked me. My mother is dead, I said, and my father doesn't know or care. I don't care either, I added, all I want is to finish high school and go to college. What will you study there? he said. Literature, I said. That's when he told me he was a writer too. What a coincidence, I said, I'm a writer. Or something like that. Not making a big deal out of it. I thought he was kidding, of course. That's how we became friends. I was eighteen and he had just turned seventeen. He'd been living in Mexico since he was fifteen. Once I invited him to go riding with me. My father had some land in Tlaxcala and had bought a horse. He said he was a good rider and I said this Sunday I'm going to Tlaxcala with my father, you can come with us if you want. What bleak country that was. My father had built a thatched adobe hut and that was all there was, the rest was scrub and dirt. When we got there he looked around with a smile, as if to say, I knew this wasn't going to be a fancy ranch or a big spread, but this is too much. Even I was a little bit ashamed of my father's land. Among other things, there was no saddle, and some neighbors kept the horse for us. For a while, as my father was off getting the horse, we wandered the flats. I tried to talk about books I'd read that I knew he hadn't read, but he hardly listened to me. He walked and smoked, walked and smoked, and the scenery was always the same. Until we heard the horn of my father's car and then the man who kept the horse came, not riding the horse but leading it by the bridle. By the time we got back to the hut my father and the man had gone off in the car to settle some business and the horse was tied up waiting for us. You go first, I said. No, he said (it was clear his mind was on other things), you go. Not wanting to argue, I mounted the horse and broke straight into a gallop. When I got back he was sitting on the ground, against the wall of the hut, smoking. You ride well, he said. Then he got up and went over to the horse, saying that he wasn't used to riding bareback, but he vaulted up anyway, and I showed him which way to go, telling him that over in that direction there was a river or actually a riverbed that was dry now but that filled up when it rained and was pretty, then he galloped off. He rode well. I'm a good horsewoman, but he was as good as I was or maybe better, I don't know. At the time I thought he was better. Galloping without stirrups is hard and he galloped clinging to the horse's back until he was out of sight. As I waited I counted the cigarette butts that he had stubbed out beside the hut and they made me want to learn to smoke. Hours later, as we were on our way back in my father's car, him in front and me in back, he said that there was probably some pyramid lying buried under our land. I remember that my father turned his eyes from the road to look at him. Pyramids? Yes, he said, deep underground there must be lots of pyramids. My father didn't say anything. From the darkness of the backseat, I asked him why he thought that. He didn't answer. Then we started to talk about other things but I kept wondering why he'd said that about the pyramids. I kept thinking about pyramids. I kept thinking about my father's stony plot of land and much later, when I'd lost touch with him, each time I went back to that barren place I thought about the buried pyramids, about the one time I'd seen him riding over the tops of the pyramids, and I imagined him in the hut, when he was left alone and sat there smoking.

Laura Jáuregui, Tlalpan, Mexico City DF, January 1976. Before I met him I was dating César, César Arriaga, and I was introduced to César in the poetry workshop at the Torre de Rectoría at UNAM. That was where I met María Font and Rafael Barrios. That's also where I met Ulises Lima. His name wasn't Ulises Lima back then, or I don't know, maybe it already was but we called him by his real name, Alfredo something or other, and I met César too and we fell in love or we thought we'd fallen in love and the two of us wrote poems for Ulises Lima's magazine. This was at the end of 1973, I can't say exactly when. It was at a time when it was raining a lot, I remember, because we were always coming in wet to meetings. And then we put together the magazine, Lee Harvey Oswald , what a name, at the architecture studio where María's father worked. Those were gorgeous afternoons, we would drink wine and one of us always brought sandwiches, Sofía or María or I. The boys never brought anything, although actually they did, at first they did, but then the ones who brought things, the politer ones, quit the magazine, or at least stopped coming to the meetings, and then Pancho Rodríguez showed up and everything was spoiled, at least as far as I was concerned, but I kept working on the magazine, or anyway I still hung around in that crowd, mostly because César was part of it and mostly because I liked María and Sofía (I was never friends with Angélica, not real friends), not because I wanted my poems to be published, none were published in the first issue, though there was supposed to be a poem of mine in the second issue, "Lilith" it was called, but in the end I don't know what happened and it wasn't published after all. It was César who had a poem in Lee Harvey Oswald , a poem called "Laura and César," very sweet, but Ulises changed the title (or convinced César to change it) and in the end it was called "Laura & César." That was the kind of thing Ulises Lima did.