Roberto Bolaño - The Savage Detectives

We did it a few more times. It didn't hurt anymore, but it didn't feel good either. Pancho saw that our relationship was flickering out as fast as-as what?-something that blinks out very quickly, the lights of a factory at the end of the day. No, more like the lights of an office building eager to blend into the anonymity of night. It's a contrived image, but it's what Pancho would've chosen. A contrived image with two or three dirty words tacked on. One night after a poetry reading I realized that Pancho had realized what was happening, and that same night I told him we were finished. He didn't take it badly. For a week, I think, he tried unsuccessfully to get me back into bed. Then he tried to sleep with my sister. I don't know whether he succeeded. One night I woke up and María and some shadowy figure were screwing. That's enough, I said, I want to sleep in peace. Always reading Sor Juana, and then you act like a slut. When I turned on the light I saw that the person with her was Luscious Skin. I told him to leave that instant if he didn't want me to call the police. María, oddly enough, didn't complain. As he put on his pants, Luscious Skin asked me to forgive him for waking me up. My sister isn't a slut, I told him. I know my behavior was a little contradictory. Well, not my behavior, my words. Whatever. When Luscious Skin had gone I got in bed with my sister and hugged her and started to cry. A little while later I started to work for a university theater company. I had a manuscript that my father wanted to send to a few publishing houses, but I wouldn't let him. I wasn't involved in the activities of the visceral realists. I didn't want to have anything to do with them. Later María told me that Pancho wasn't part of the group anymore either. I don't know whether he was expelled (whether Arturo Belano expelled him) or whether he left on his own, whether he just didn't have the heart for anything anymore. Poor Pancho. His brother Moctezuma was still in the group. I think I saw one of his poems in an anthology. Anyway, they didn't hang around our house anymore. I heard that Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima had disappeared up north; my father and mother discussed it once. My mother laughed. I remember she said: they'll show up someday. My father seemed worried. María was worried too. Not me. By then the only friend I had left from the group was Ernesto San Epifanio.

Manuel Maples Arce, walking along the Calzada del Cerro, Chapultepec Park, Mexico City DF, August 1976. This young man, Arturo Belano, came to interview me. I only saw him once. He was with two boys and a girl, I don't know their names, they hardly said a word. The girl was American.

I told them that I abhorred tape recorders for the same reason that my friend Borges abhorred mirrors. Were you friends with Borges? Arturo Belano asked in a tone of astonishment that I found slightly offensive. We were quite good friends, I answered, close friends, you might say, in the far-off days of our youth. The American wanted to know why Borges abhorred tape recorders. Because he's blind, I suppose, I told her in English. What does blindness have to do with tape recorders? she said. It reminds him of the perils of hearing, I replied. Listening to one's own voice, one's own footsteps, the footsteps of the enemy. The American looked me in the eyes and nodded. I don't think she knew much about Borges. I don't think she knew my work at all, although I was translated by John Dos Passos. I don't think she knew much about John Dos Passos either.

But I've lost my train of thought. Where was I? I told Arturo Belano that I would prefer that he not use the tape recorder and that it would be better if he left me a list of questions. He agreed. He pulled out a sheet of paper and wrote the questions while I showed his companions some of the rooms in the house. Then, when he had finished the list, I had drinks brought in and we talked for a while. They had already interviewed Arqueles Vela and Germán List Arzubide. Do you think anyone is interested in stridentism these days? I asked Arturo Belano. Of course, maestro, he answered, or words to that effect. My opinion is that stridentism is history now and as such it can only be interesting to literary historians, I said. It interests me and I'm not a historian, he said. Well, then.

Before bed that night I read the list. Just the kind of questions an ignorant, zealous young man might ask. That same night I drafted my answers. The next day I made a clean copy. Three days later, as we had arranged, he came to pick up the list. The maid let him in, but following my express instructions, she told him I wasn't there. Then she handed him the package I had prepared for him: the list of questions with my answers and two books of mine that I was afraid to inscribe to him (I think young people today scorn such sentimentalism). The books were Andamios interiores and Urbe . I was on the other side of the door, listening. The maid said: Mr. Maples left this for you. Silence. Arturo Belano must have taken the package and looked at it. He must have leafed through the books. Two books published so long ago, their pages (excellent paper) uncut. Silence. He must have looked over the questions. Then I heard him thank the maid and leave. If he comes back to see me, I thought, I'll be justified, if he shows up here one day, without calling first, to talk to me, to listen to me tell my old stories, to submit his poems for my consideration, I'll be justified. All poets, even the most avant-garde, need a father. But these poets were meant to be orphans. He never came back.

Barbara Patterson, in a room at the Hotel Los Claveles, Avenida Niño Perdido and Juan de Dios Peza, Mexico City DF, September 1976. Motherfucking hemorrhoid-licking old bastard, I saw the distrust in his pale, bored little monkey eyes right from the start, and I said to myself this asshole will take every chance he gets to spit on me, the motherfucking son of a bitch. But I'm dumb, I've always been dumb and naïve, and I let down my guard. And the same thing happened that always happens. Borges. John Dos Passos. Vomit carelessly soaking Barbara Patterson's hair. And on top of it all the dumbfuck looks at me like he's sorry for me, as if to say these kids have brought me this pale-eyed gringa just so I can shit on her, and Rafael looked at me too and the fucking dwarf didn't even blink, like he was used to me being insulted by any old fart-breath, any constipated grand old man of Mexican literature who got the urge. And then the old bastard comes right out and says he doesn't like tape recorders, never mind how hard it was for me to get this one, and the ass kissers say okay, no problem, we'll write up a question sheet right here, Mr. Great Poet of the Pleistocene, yes sir, instead of pulling down his pants and shoving the tape recorder up his ass. And the old guy struts around listing his friends (all of them dead or practically dead), and he keeps calling me miss, as if that could make up for the puke, the vomit all over my shirt and jeans, and what can I say, I didn't even have the strength to answer him when he started talking to me in English, just yes, no, or I don't know, mostly I don't know, and when we left his house, which was a mansion, I said so where did the money come from, you dead-rat-fucking bastard, where did you get the money to buy this house? I told Rafael we had to talk, but Rafael said that he wanted to hang out with Arturo Belano, and I said you goddamn bastard I need to talk to you, and he said later, Barbarita, later, like I was some girl he fucked up the ass every night and not a woman who's three inches taller and at least thirty pounds heavier than he is (I have to go on a diet but who can diet with all this fucking Mexican food), and then I said I need to talk to you now , and the lousy prick, acting like the cocksucker he is, turns around and stares at me and says hey baby, what's wrong? some unexpected problem? and luckily Belano and Requena had gone on ahead and didn't hear him. It's especially lucky they didn't see me, because I guess my martyred face must have just collapsed, I could actually feel it changing. At any rate, I felt my eyes flare up with a lethal dose of hatred, and then I said go screw your mother, asshole, so I wouldn't say anything worse, and turned and left. I spent the afternoon in tears. I was supposedly in Mexico to do a postgraduate course on Juan Rulfo, but I met Rafael at a poetry reading at the Casa del Lago and we fell in love at first sight. Or at least that's how it was for me. I'm not so sure about Rafael. That very night I dragged him to the Hotel Los Claveles, where I still live, and we fucked until we dropped. Actually, Rafael doesn't have much stamina, but I do, and I kept him going until daylight came down along Niño Perdido, like something swooning or struck by lightning, dawn is so weird in this fucking city. The next day I stopped going to class and I spent my time having these endless conversations with the visceral realists, who back then were still more or less normal, more or less sick kids, and weren't calling themselves visceral realists yet. I liked them. They reminded me of the beats. I liked Ulises Lima, Belano, María Font. I liked that conceited bastard Ernesto San Epifanio a little less. Anyway, I liked them. I wanted to have a good time, and around them things were always lively. I met lots of people, people who gradually began to drift away from the group. I met an American, from Kansas (I'm from California), the painter Catalina O'Hara, but we never hit it off. A stuck-up bitch who thought she invented the wheel and acted like she was a revolutionary just because she'd been in Chile during the coup. Anyway, I got to know her a little after she separated from her husband and all the poets were dying to fuck her. Even Belano and Ulises Lima, who were obviously asexual and secretly got it on together (you know, I'll suck you, you suck me, just for a minute and then we'll stop), seemed to be wild for the fucking cowgirl. Rafael too. But I grabbed Rafael and said: if I find out you're sleeping with that bitch I'll cut your balls off. And Rafael laughed and said but baby, why would you cut my balls off? You're the only one I love. But even his eyes (which were the best thing about Rafael, Arab eyes, tents and oases) were saying the exact opposite. I'm with you because you give me money to pay the bills. I'm with you because you put up the cash. I'm with you because right now I don't have anyone better to be with or fuck. And I said: Rafael, you bastard, you stupid prick, you son of a bitch, when your friends disappear I'll still be with you, I know it , when you're left all alone and helpless, I'm the one who'll be by your side and who'll help you. Not some old bastard festering in his memories and literary quotations. And definitely not your second-rate gurus (Arturo and Ulises? he said, they aren't my gurus, you dumb gringa, they're my friends), who the way I see it are going to vanish one of these days. Why would they vanish? he said. I don't know, I said, out of fucking embarrassment? shame? mortification? insecurity? indecision? evasiveness? spinelessness? and then I had to stop because my Spanish wasn't good enough. Then he laughed at me and said you're a witch, Barbara, go on, get back to work on Rulfo, I'm leaving now but I'll be back soon, and instead of listening to him I threw myself on the bed and started to cry. They're all going to leave you, Rafael, I shouted from the window of my room at the Hotel Los Claveles as Rafael disappeared in the crowd, except me, asshole, except me.