Roberto Bolaño - The Savage Detectives

Roberto Rosas, Rue de Passy, Paris, September 1977. There were twelve rooms in our attic apartment. Eight of them were occupied by Latin Americans: one Chilean, Ricardito Barrientos; one Argentinian couple, Sofía Pellegrini and Miguelito Sabotinski; and the rest of us Peruvians, all poets, all at war with one another.

We liked to call our attic the Passy Commune or Passy Shanty-town.

We were always arguing and our favorite topics, or pretty much our only topics, were politics and literature. Ricardito Barrientos's room had been rented before by Polito Garcés, who was Peruvian and a poet too, but one day, after an emergency meeting, we decided to give him an ultimatum: Either you leave here this very week motherfucker or we'll kick you down the stairs, take a shit in your bed, put rat poison in your wine, or come up with something worse. Luckily Polito listened to us. If he hadn't I don't know what would've happened.

One day he came by, though, shuffling along as always, going into one room after another asking to borrow money (money he would never return), getting somebody to offer him a little coffee here, a drop of maté there (Sofía Pellegrini hated him like the plague), asking to borrow books, saying that he'd seen Bryce Echenique that week, or Julio Ramón Ribeyro, or that he'd had tea with Hinostroza. The first time you might believe him, the second time you might laugh, but after you'd heard the same lies over and over all you felt was disgust, pity, and alarm because it was clear that Polito wasn't right in the head. Who is, when you get right down to it? Still, none of us is as crazy as Polito.

Anyway, one day he came by, some evening when almost all of us happened to be around (I know because I heard him knock on other doors, I heard that voice of his, that unmistakable "how's it, causita "), and after a while his shadow fell across the threshold of my room, like he was afraid to come in without being asked, and then I said-and maybe I said it too abruptly-what do you want, motherfucker? and he laughed his little jackass laugh and said ay , Robertito, it's been a long time, man, I'm glad to see you haven't changed, look, I've got a poet here with me who I want you to meet, a buddy from Mexico.

Only then did I realize that there was someone beside him. A dark, strong, Indian-looking guy. A guy with eyes that seemed sort of liquefied and blurry at the same time, and a doctor's smile, an unusual smile at the Passy Commune, where we all tended to have the smiles of folk musicians or lawyers.

It was Ulises Lima. That's how I met him. We became friends. Paris friends. He was nothing like Polito, of course. If he had been, we couldn't have been friends.

I don't remember how long he lived in Paris. I know we saw a lot of each other, even though we had very different personalities. But one day he told me he was leaving. How come, man? I asked, because as far as I knew he loved the city. I think I'm not well, he said, smiling. But is it anything serious? No, nothing serious, he said, just a nuisance. Well, I said, then that's all right, let's have a drink to celebrate. To Mexico! I said, raising my glass. I'm not going back to Mexico, he said, I'm going to Barcelona. What do you mean, man? I said. I have a friend there, and I'll stay at his place for a while. That was all he said and I didn't ask any more questions. Then we went out for more wine and sat drinking near the Porte de Bir Hakeim while I told him about my latest romantic adventures. But his mind was elsewhere, so we started to talk about poetry for a change, a subject I enjoy less and less these days.

I remember Ulises liked the young French poets. I can testify to that. We, the Passy Shantytown, thought they were disgusting. Spoiled brats or drug addicts. You have to understand, Ulises, I would say to him, we're revolutionaries, we've seen the insides of the jails of Latin America. So how can we care about poetry like that? And the bastard didn't say anything, just laughed. Once he took me to meet Michel Bulteau. Ulises spoke terrible French, so I had to do most of the talking. Then I met Mathieu Messagier, Jean-Jacques Faussot, and Adeline, Bulteau's companion.

I didn't hit it off with any of them. I asked Faussot whether he could get one of my articles published in the magazine where he worked, this shitty little pop magazine, and he said he'd have to read the article first. A few days later I brought it to him and he didn't like it. I asked Messagier for the address of a French poet, a "grand old man of French letters" who had supposedly met Martín Adán on a trip he took to Lima in the forties, but Messagier wouldn't give it to me. He tried to tell me that the poet was wary of visitors. I'm not going to borrow money from him, I said, I just want to interview him, but it made no difference, it was out of the question. Finally I told Bulteau that I was going to translate him. He liked that and made no objection. I was joking, of course. But then I thought maybe it wasn't such a bad idea. And in fact, I set to work a few nights later. The poem I chose was "Sang de satin." It had never occurred to me before to translate poetry, although I'm a poet and poets are supposed to translate other poets. But no one had translated me, so why should I translate anyone else? Well, so it goes. This time it didn't seem like such a bad idea. Maybe it was because of Ulises, whose influence was making me question old assumptions. Maybe it just seemed like time to do something I'd never done before. I don't know. All I know is that I told Bulteau that I planned to translate him and I planned to publish my translation ( publish is the key word) in a nonexistent Peruvian magazine (I made up the name), a magazine that counted Westphalen among its contributors, that's what I told him, and he was happy to agree, although I think he had no idea who Westphalen was, I might as well have said that the magazine published Huamán Poma, or Salazar Bondy. Anyway, I set to work.

I don't remember whether Ulises had already left or was still around. "Sang de satin." From the start I had trouble with that shitty poem. How to translate the title? "Satin Blood" or "Blood of Satin"? I thought about it for more than a week. And it was then that I was suddenly overcome by the full horror of Paris, the full horror of the French language, the poetry scene, our state as unwanted guests, the sad, hopeless state of South Americans lost in Europe, lost in the world, and then I realized that I wasn't going to be able to finish translating "Satin Blood" or "Blood of Satin," I knew that if I did I would end up murdering Bulteau in his study on the Rue de Téhéran and then fleeing Paris like an outlaw. So in the end I decided not to go through with it and when Ulises Lima left (I can't remember exactly when), that was the end of my dealings with the French poets.

Simone Darrieux, Rue des Petites Écuries, Paris, September 1977. He never found anything remotely resembling a job. Honestly, I don't know what he lived on. He had money when he got here, that I know for a fact. The first few times we met he was always the one to pay, for coffee, calvados, a few glasses of wine, but he ran out of money fast and as far as I know he had no source of income.

Once he told me that he'd found a five-thousand-franc note in the street. After that, he said, he walked with his eyes on the ground.

After a while he found another bill.

He had some Peruvian friends who gave him work occasionally, a group of Peruvian poets, probably poets in name only, since as everyone knows living in Paris wears you down and erodes your vocation if it isn't ironclad. It coarsens you, it pushes you into oblivion. At least that happens to a lot of the Latin Americans I know. I'm not trying to say it was true of Ulises, but it was definitely true of the Peruvians. They had a kind of cleaning cooperative. They waxed office floors, washed windows, that kind of thing, and Ulises helped them out when one of the cooperative was sick or away from the city. Mostly he filled in when someone was sick, since the Peruvians didn't travel much, although in the summer some of them went off to harvest grapes in the Roussillon. They would leave in groups of two or three, sometimes they traveled alone, and before they left they would say they were off to the Costa Brava for a vacation. I saw them three times. They were miserable human beings. More than one of them tried to get me into bed.