Roberto Bolaño - The Savage Detectives

Simone Darrieux, Rue des Petites Écuries, Paris, July 1977. When Ulises Lima got to Paris, the only people he knew were a Peruvian poet who'd been living in exile in Mexico and me. I'd only met him once, at Café Quito, one night when I had a date with Arturo Belano. The three of us talked for a while, the time it took us to drink our coffee, and then Arturo and I left.

I did know Arturo well, though I haven't seen him since then and I'll probably never see him again. What was I doing in Mexico? Studying anthropology, in theory. In practice I was traveling, seeing the country. I went to lots of parties too. It's incredible how much free time Mexicans have. Of course, the money didn't stretch far enough for my purposes (I was on scholarship), so I got a job with a photographer, Jimmy Cetina, whom I met at a party at a hotel, the Vasco de Quiroga on Calle Londres, I think. My finances improved considerably. Jimmy did artistic nudes, as he called them, though they were really soft porn, full frontals and provocative poses, or strip-tease sequences, all in his studio at the top of a building on Bucareli.

I can't remember now how I met Arturo, maybe it was after a photo session in Jimmy Cetina's building, maybe at a bar, maybe it was a party. It might have been at the pizza place run by an American whom everybody called Jerry Lewis. In Mexico people meet in the most unlikely places. Anyway, we met and we hit it off, although it was almost a year before we slept together.

He was interested in all things French. In that sense, he was a little naïve. For example, he thought that I, who was studying anthropology, must necessarily know the work of Max Jacob (the name rang a bell, but that was all), and when I told him no, when I told him French girls read other things (in my case, Agatha Christie), he simply didn't believe me. He thought I was kidding. But he was considerate, I mean, he always seemed to be thinking in terms of literature, but he wasn't a fanatic, he didn't look down on you if you'd never in your life read Jacques Rigaut, he even liked Agatha Christie too, and sometimes we would spend hours talking about one of her novels, going over the puzzles (I have a terrible memory, but his was excellent), reconstructing those impossible murders.

I don't know what it was that attracted me to him. One day I brought him with me to the apartment where I lived with three other anthropology students, an American from Colorado and two French girls, and finally, at four in the morning, we ended up in bed. I'd warned him earlier about one of my quirks. I told him, half serious, half joking (we were laughing in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art, where the sculptures are, horrible sculptures): Arturo, never sleep with me, because I'm a masochist. What do you mean by that? he said. That I like to be hit when I'm making love, that's all. Then Arturo stopped laughing. Are you serious? he said. Completely serious, I said. And how do you like to be hit? he said. I like to be slapped, I said, hit in the face, spanked, that kind of thing. Hard? he said. No, not very hard, I said. You must not screw much in Mexico, he said, after thinking awhile. I asked what made him say that. The bruises, Miss Marple, he said, I've never seen a mark on you. Of course I have sex, I replied, I'm a masochist, not an animal. Arturo laughed. I think he thought I was joking. So that night, or that morning, actually, when we ended up in my bed, he was very gentle with me and I couldn't bring myself to stop him, if he wanted to lick me all over and kiss me softly, let him, but soon I noticed that he wasn't getting hard, and I took him in my hand and stroked him for a while, but nothing happened, and then I asked him, whispering in his ear, whether something was bothering him, and he said no, he was fine, and we kept touching each other for a while longer, but it was clear that he wasn't going to get it up, and then I said this is no good, stop trying, that's enough, if you're not in the mood, you're not in the mood, and he lit a cigarette (he smoked a kind called Bali, such a funny name) and then he started to talk about the last movie he'd seen, and then he got up and paced around the room naked, smoking and looking at my things, and then he sat on the floor, beside the bed, and started to look through my pictures, some of Jimmy Cetina's artistic shots that I don't know why I'd kept, because I'm stupid, probably, and I asked him whether they turned him on, and he said no but that they were all right, that I looked all right , you're very beautiful, Simone, he said, and it was then, I don't know why, that it occurred to me to tell him to get in bed, to get on top of me and slap me on the cheeks or the ass a little, and he looked at me and said I can't do that, Simone, and then he corrected himself and said: that's another thing I can't do, Simone, but I said come on, be brave, get in bed, and he got in, and I turned over and raised my buttocks and said: just take it slowly, pretend it's a game, and he gave me the first blow and I buried my face in the pillow, I haven't read Rigaut, I said, or Max Jacob, or boring Banville, Baudelaire, Catulle Mendès, or Corbiere, required reading, but I have read the Marquis de Sade. Oh really? he said. Yes, I said, stroking his dick. He had started slapping me on the ass as if he meant it. What have you read by the Marquis de Sade? Philosophy in the Boudoir , I said. And Justine ? Naturally, I said. And Juliette ? Of course. By then I was wet and moaning and Arturo's dick was as stiff as a rod, so I turned around, spread my legs and told him to put it in, but no more, not to move until I told him to. It was delicious to feel him inside of me. Hit me, I said. On the face, on the cheeks. Put your fingers in my mouth. He hit me. Harder! I said. He hit me harder. Now start to move, I said. For a few seconds the only sounds in the room were my moans and the blows. Then he started to moan too.

We made love until dawn. When we were done he lit a Bali and asked me whether I'd read the Marquis de Sade's plays. I said I hadn't, that it was the first I'd heard that de Sade wrote plays. Not only did he write plays, said Arturo, he wrote lots of letters to theater impresarios urging them to stage what he'd written. But of course, no one dared to put on anything by him, since they would have ended up in prison (we laughed), although the incredible thing is that the marquis persisted, making all kinds of calculations in his letters, down to how much should be spent on wardrobe, and the saddest thing of all is that his figures add up, they're good! the plays would have made money. But were they pornographic? I asked. No, said Arturo, they were philosophical, with some sex.

We were lovers for a while. Three months, to be exact, the time I had left before I went back to Paris. We didn't make love every night. We didn't see each other every night. But we did it every way possible. He tied me up, hit me, sodomized me. He never left a mark, except a reddened ass, which says something about how gentle he was. A little bit longer and I would have ended up getting used to him. Needing him, in other words, and he would've ended up getting used to me. But we didn't give ourselves time. We were just friends. We talked about the Marquis de Sade, Agatha Christie, life in general. When I met him he was a Mexican like any other Mexican, but toward the end he felt more and more like a foreigner. Once I said: you Mexicans are like this or that, and he said I'm not Mexican, Simone, I'm Chilean, a little sadly, it's true, but like he meant it.

So when Ulises Lima showed up at my place and said I'm a friend of Arturo Belano's, I felt a rush of happiness, although later, when I found out that Arturo was in Europe too and hadn't even had the courtesy to send me a postcard, I was annoyed. By then I had an essentially boring, bureaucratic job at the anthropology department at the Université Paris-Nord, and with Ulises there at least I could practice my Spanish, which was getting a little rusty.