Roberto Bolaño - The Savage Detectives

So I was able to come to Mexico and I settled in Mexico City and a little while later I get a call from this kid telling me that he wants to interview me or something, I thought he said interview. And of course I said yes. To tell the truth, I was pretty lonely and lost. I didn't know any young Mexican poets and an interview or whatever seemed like a fantastic idea. So we met that same day and when I got to the place we were supposed to meet it turned out that instead of just one poet, there were four poets waiting for me, and what they wanted wasn't an interview but a discussion, a three-way conversation to be published in one of the top Mexican magazines. The participants would be a Mexican (one of them), a Chilean (also one of them), and an Argentinian, me. The other two tagging along were just there to listen. The topic: the state of new Latin American poetry. An excellent topic. So I said great, I'm ready whenever you are, and we found a more or less quiet coffee shop and started to talk.

They'd come with a tape recorder all ready to go, but at the crucial moment the machine conked out. Back to step one. This went on for half an hour, and I had two cups of coffee, paid for by them. It was clear they weren't used to this kind of thing: I mean the tape recorder, I mean talking about poetry in front of a tape recorder, I mean organizing their thoughts and expressing themselves clearly. Anyway, we tried it a few more times, but it didn't work. We decided that it would be better if each of us wrote whatever came to mind and then we put together what we'd written. In the end it was just the Chilean and I who had the discussion. I don't know what happened to the Mexican.

We spent the rest of the afternoon walking. And a funny thing happened to me with those kids, or the coffee they bought me, I noticed something strange about them, it was as if they were there but at the same time they weren't there, I'm not sure how to explain it, they were the first young Mexican poets I'd met and maybe that was why they seemed odd, but in the previous few months I'd met young Peruvian poets, young Colombian poets, young poets from Panama and Costa Rica, and I hadn't felt the same thing. I was an expert in young poets and something was off here, something was missing: the camaraderie, the strong sense of shared ideals, the frankness that always prevails at any gathering of Latin American poets. And at one point during the afternoon, I remember it like a mysterious drunkenness, I started to talk about my book and my own poems, and I don't know why but I told them about the Daniel Cohn-Bendit poem, a poem that was neither better nor worse than any of the others in the collection that had won the Cuban prize, but that ultimately wasn't included in the book, we were probably talking about length, about page count, because those two (the Chilean and the Mexican) wrote extremely long poems, or so they said, I hadn't read them yet, and I think they even had a theory about long poems, they called them poem-novels, I think it was some French poets who came up with the idea, though I can't remember exactly, and so I'm telling them about the Cohn-Bendit poem, why in the world I honestly don't know, and one of them asks me why isn't it in your book and I tell them that what happened was that the Casa de las Américas people decided to take it out and the Mexican says but they asked your permission, didn't they, and I tell him no, they didn't ask my permission, and the Mexican says they took it out of the book without letting you know? and I say yes, the truth is that I couldn't be located, and the Chilean asks why did they take it out? and I tell him what the people at Casa de las Américas told me, which was that Cohn-Bendit had just issued some statements against the Cuban Revolution, and the Chilean says was that the only reason? and like a dickhead I tell him I guess so, but the poem wasn't very good anyway (what had those guys given me to drink to make me talk that way?), definitely long, but not very good, and the Mexican says bastards, but he says it sweetly, he really does, not bitterly at all, as if deep down he understood everything the Cubans had been through before they mutilated my book, as if deep down he couldn't be bothered to despise me or our comrades in Havana.

Literature isn't innocent. I've known that since I was fifteen. And I remember thinking that then, but I can't remember whether I said it or not, and if I did, what the context was. And then the walk (but here I have to clarify that it wasn't five of us anymore but three, the Mexican, the Chilean, and me, the other two Mexicans having vanished at the gates of purgatory) turned into a kind of stroll on the fringes of hell.

The three of us were quiet, as if we'd been struck dumb, but our bodies moved to a beat, as if something was propelling us through that strange land and making us dance, a silent, syncopated kind of walking, if I can call it that, and then I had a vision, not the first that day, as it happened, or the last: the park we were walking through opened up into a kind of lake and the lake opened up into a kind of waterfall and the waterfall became a river that flowed through a kind of cemetery, and all of it, lake, waterfall, river, cemetery, was deep green and silent. And then I thought it's one of two things: either I'm going crazy, which is unlikely since I've always had my head on straight, or these guys have doped me. And then I said stop, stop for a minute, I feel sick, I have to rest, and they said something but I couldn't hear them, I could only see them coming closer, and I realized, I became conscious, that I was looking all around trying to find someone, some witness, but there was no one, we were in the middle of a forest, and I remember I said what forest is this, and they said it's Chapultepec and then they led me to a bench and we sat there for a while, and one of them asked me what hurt (the word hurt , so right, so fitting) and I should have told them that what hurt was my whole body, my whole being, but instead I told them that the problem was probably that I wasn't used to the altitude yet, that it was the altitude that was getting to me and making me see things.

Luis Sebastián Rosado, La Rama Dorada coffee shop, Colonia Coyoacán, Mexico City DF, April 1976. Monsiváis said it first: disciples of Marinetti and Tzara, their noisy, outrageous, overwrought poems did battle in the realm of simple typographic arrangement, never rising above the level of childish entertainment. Monsi was talking about the stridentists, but the same goes for the visceral realists. No one paid attention to them and they opted for indiscriminate assault. In December of '75, just before Christmas, I was unlucky enough to run into some of them here at La Rama Dorada. The owner, Don Néstor Pesqueira, will back me up: it was extremely unpleasant. One of them, the one in charge, was Ulises Lima; the second was a big fat dark guy called Moctezuma or Cuauhtémoc; the third went by the name Luscious Skin. I was sitting right here, waiting for Alberto Moore and his sister, and all of a sudden these three nuts surround me, sitting down one on each side of me, and they say Luisito, let's talk poetry, let's analyze the future of Mexican poetry, something like that. I'm not a violent person and of course I got nervous. I thought: what are they doing here? how did they find me? what scores have they come to settle? This country is a disgrace, it must be said, and so is Mexican literature, it must also be said. Anyway, we were talking for twenty minutes (I've never been so annoyed by the lateness of Albertito and his snotty sister) and finally we even managed to agree on several points. When it came down to it, ninety percent of the time we hated the same things. Of course I always stood up for what Octavio Paz was doing on the literary scene. And of course all they seemed to like was what they were doing themselves. Thank goodness. That being a lesser evil, I mean, since it would've been worse if they'd declared themselves disciples of the peasant poets or followers of poor Rosario Castellanos or disciples of Jaime Sabines (one Jaime is enough, in my opinion). And then Alberto got here and I was still alive, there'd been a little bit of shouting, some unpleasant language, a certain kind of behavior that was inappropriate in a place like La Rama Dorada, Don Néstor Pesqueira will back me up here, but that was all. And when Alberto arrived I thought I'd handled the situation well. But then Julia Moore comes right out and asks them who they are and what they plan to do that night. And the one called Luscious Skin is quick to say that they're not doing anything, that if she has any ideas she should say so, he's up for anything. And then Julita, oblivious of the looks her brother and I are shooting her, says that we could go dancing at Priapo's, an insanely vulgar place in Colonia 10 de Mayo or Tepito, I've only been there once and I've always done my best to forget it, and since neither Alberto nor I can say no to Julita, off we go in Alberto's car, with Alberto, Ulises Lima, and me in the front seat and Julita, Luscious Skin, and the guy called Cuauhtémoc or Moctezuma in the backseat. Honestly, I feared the worst, these people weren't trustworthy, somebody told me once that they cornered Monsi in Sanborn's, at the Casa Borda, but since Monsi did agree to have coffee with them, granted them an audience, you might say, it was partly his fault, because everybody knows the visceral realists are just like the stridentists and everybody knows what Monsi thinks about the stridentists, so he really couldn't complain about what happened, and anyway nobody or almost nobody knows what did happen, though occasionally I've been tempted to ask him, but I haven't, not wanting to pry or open old wounds, still, something happened to him during his meeting with the visceral realists, and everybody knows it, everybody who secretly loves or hates Monsi, and there were all kinds of hypotheses and theories, but anyway, that's what I was wondering as Alberto's car shot like lightning or crawled like a cockroach, depending on the traffic, toward Priapo's, and in the backseat Julita Moore kept talking and talking and talking to the two visceral realist bums. I'll spare you a description of the club itself. I swear to God I thought we wouldn't get out of there alive. All I'll say is that the furnishings and human specimens adorning its interior seemed arbitrarily plucked from Lizardi's The Mangy Parrot , Mariano Azuela's The Underdogs , del Paso's José Trigo , the worst novels of the Onda, and the worst fifties porn (more than one woman looked like Tongolele, who incidentally I don't think was making movies in the fifties, but should have been). So as I was saying, we went into Priapo's and sat at a table close to the dance floor and as Julita danced the cha-cha or a bolero or a danzón , I'm not exactly up on the annals of popular music, Alberto and I started to talk about something (what it was I swear I can't remember), and a waiter brought us a bottle of tequila or rat poison that we accepted without a murmur, that's how desperate we were. And suddenly, in less time than it takes to say "otherness," we were drunk and Ulises Lima was reciting a poem in French, what in the world for I don't know, but he was reciting it, I didn't realize he spoke French, English, maybe, I think I'd seen a translation of his somewhere of Richard Brautigan, a terrible poet, or John Giorno, whoever he is, maybe a stand-in for Lima himself, but French? that surprised me a little. Good enunciation, passable pronunciation, and the poem, how to put it, sounded familiar, very familiar, but because of my increasing drunkenness or the relentless boleros I couldn't identify it. I thought of Claudel, but none of us can imagine Lima reciting Claudel, can we? I thought of Baudelaire, I thought of Catulle Mendès (some of whose texts I translated for a university journal), I thought of Nerval. Ashamed as I am to admit it, those were the names that came to mind. In my defense I should say that soon, through the haze of alcohol, I asked myself what Nerval could possibly have in common with Mendès, and then I thought of Mallarmé. Alberto, who must have been playing the same game, said: Baudelaire. It wasn't Baudelaire, of course. Here's the poem. Let's see if you can guess: