Roberto Bolaño - The Savage Detectives

But anyway, first I met César, and Laura & César started dating, or something like that. Poor César. He had light brown hair and he was tall. He lived with his grandmother (his parents lived in Michoacán) and I had my first adult sexual experiences with him. Or actually, my last adolescent sexual experiences. Or second to last, now that I think about it. We would go to the movies and a few times we went to the theater. It was around then that I enrolled at the dance school and sometimes César would go there with me. The rest of the time we spent taking long walks, talking about books we were reading, and doing nothing together. And this went on for months, three or four months or even nine months, and one day I broke up with him. That I know for sure, I was the one who told him it was over, although I can't remember exactly why, and I remember that César took it very well, he agreed that I was right, he was in his second year of medical school then and I had just started at the university, studying literature. That afternoon I didn't go to class, I went to María's house, I had to talk to a friend, I mean in person, not on the phone, and when I got to Colima, to María's house, the gate was open and that surprised me a little, because it was always closed, María's mother was paranoid about it, and I went in and rang the bell and the door opened and a guy I'd never seen before asked me who I was looking for. It was Arturo Belano. He was twenty-one then, skinny and longhaired, and he wore glasses, horrible glasses, although his eyes weren't especially bad, he was just a little bit nearsighted, but the glasses were still horrible. We only exchanged a few words. He was with María and a poet called Aníbal who was crazy about María back then, but they were on their way out when I got there.

That same day I saw him again. I spent all afternoon talking to María and then we went downtown to buy a scarf, I think, and we kept talking (first about César & Laura, then about everything in existence) and we ended up having cappuccinos at Café Quito, where María was supposed to meet Aníbal. And Arturo showed up around nine. This time he was with a seventeen-year-old Chilean called Felipe Müller, his best friend, a tall blond kid who almost never spoke and followed Arturo everywhere. And they sat down with us, of course. And then other poets turned up, poets a little older than Arturo, none of them visceral realists, among other reasons because visceral realism didn't exist yet, poets like Aníbal who had been friends with Arturo before he left for Chile and so had known him since he was seventeen. They were actually journalists and government officials, the kind of sad people who never leave downtown, or certain downtown neighborhoods, sovereigns of sadness in the area bounded by Avenida Chapultepec, to the south, and Reforma, to the north, staffers at El Nacional , proofreaders at the Excelsior , pencil pushers at the Secretaría de Gobernación who headed to Bucareli when they left work and sent out their tentacles or their little green slips. And even though, as I say, they were sad, that night we laughed a lot. In fact we never stopped laughing. And then we went walking to the bus stop, María, Aníbal, Felipe Müller, Gonzalo Müller (Felipe's brother who was leaving Mexico soon), Arturo, and I. And somehow all of us felt incredibly happy, I had forgotten all about César, María was looking up at the stars that had miraculously appeared in the sky of Mexico City like holographic projections, and even the way we were walking was graceful, our progress incredibly slow, as if we were advancing and retreating to put off the moment at which we would inevitably have to reach the bus stop, all of us walking and looking up at the sky (María was naming the stars). Much later Arturo told me that he hadn't been looking at the stars but at the lights in some apartments, tiny rooftop apartments on Calle Versalles or Lucerna or Calle Londres, and that was the moment he realized nothing would make him happier than being with me in one of those apartments, eating a few sandwiches with sour cream from a certain street stall on Bucareli. But he didn't tell me that at the time (I would've thought he was crazy). He told me that he'd like to read some of my poems, he told me that he loved the stars of both hemispheres, north and south, and he asked me for my number.

I gave him my number and the next day he called me. And we made a date to meet, but not downtown, I told him I couldn't leave Tlalpan, where I lived, that I had to study, and he said perfect, I'll come visit you, that way I'll get to see Tlalpan, and I said that there was nothing to see, you'll have to take the metro and then a bus and then another bus, and then I don't know why but I was sure he'd get lost and I said wait for me at the metro stop and when I went to meet him I found him sitting on some crates of fruit, leaning against a tree, really, the best place possible. You're lucky, I said. Yes, he said, I'm extremely lucky. And that afternoon he talked to me about Chile, I don't know whether it was because he wanted to or because I asked him about it, although the things he said were mostly incoherent, and he also talked about Guatemala and El Salvador, he'd been all over Latin America, or at least to every country along the Pacific coast, and we kissed for the first time, and then we were together for several months and we moved in together and then what happened happened, or in other words we broke up and I went back to living at my mother's house and I began to study biology (I hope to be a good biologist someday, I want to specialize in biogenetics), and strange things started to happen to Arturo. That was when visceral realism was born. At first we all thought it was a joke, but then we realized it wasn't. And when we realized it wasn't a joke, some of us went along with him and became visceral realists, out of inertia, I think, or because it was so crazy that it seemed plausible, or for the sake of friendship, so as not to lose a whole circle of friends, but deep down no one took it seriously. Not deep down.

At the time I was beginning to make new friends at the university and I saw Arturo and his friends less and less. I think the only one I called or went out with occasionally was María, but even my friendship with María began to cool. Still, I always more or less kept track of what Arturo was doing, and I thought: of all the stupid things to come up with, how can he believe this junk, and suddenly, one night when I couldn't sleep, it occurred to me that it was all a message for me. It was a way of saying don't leave me, see what I'm capable of, stay with me. And then I realized that deep down the guy was a creep. Because it's one thing to fool yourself and another thing entirely to fool everybody else. The whole visceral realism thing was a love letter, the demented strutting of a dumb bird in the moonlight, something essentially cheap and meaningless.

But that wasn't what I meant to say.

Fabio Ernesto Logiacomo, editorial offices of the magazine La Chispa , Calle Independencia and Luis Moya, Mexico City DF, March 1976. I came to Mexico in November of 1975. This was after I'd been through a few other Latin American countries, living pretty much hand to mouth. I was twenty-four and my luck was starting to change. That's the way things happen in Latin America, which is as far as I'm willing to try to explain it. There I was moldering in Panama when I found out that I'd won the Casa de las Américas poetry prize. I was thrilled. I didn't have a cent, and the prize money got me a ticket to Mexico and food to eat. But the funny thing is, I hadn't entered the Casa de las Américas competition that year. Honest to God. The year before, I'd sent them a book and the book didn't even get so much as an honorable mention. And this year, out of the blue, I hear that I've won the prize and the prize money. When I first got the news I thought I was hallucinating. I hadn't been eating enough, to tell the truth, and when you don't eat enough it can have that effect. Then I thought it might be some other Logiacomo, but that would've been too much of a coincidence: another Argentinian Logiacomo, another twenty-four-year-old Logiacomo, another Logiacomo who'd written a book of poetry with the same title as mine. Well. In Latin America these things happen and there's no point giving yourself a headache trying to come up with a logical answer when sometimes there is none. Fortunately I really had won the prize, and that was that. Later the people at Casa told me that the book from the year before had gotten misplaced, that kind of thing.