Roberto Bolaño - The Savage Detectives

That night, during dinner, we all got drunk. I was drunk too, but not as drunk as everyone else. I remember that Hugh was shouting Dionysius, Dionysius. I remember that Erica, who was sitting next to me at the long table, grabbed me by the chin and kissed me on the mouth.

I was sure something bad was going to happen.

I told the night watchman we should go to bed. He ignored me. He was talking, in his terrible English mixed with French, about a friend who had disappeared in the Roussillon. Nice way to look for your friend, said Hugh, drinking with strangers. You aren't strangers, the night watchman said. Then they all started to sing, Hugh, Erica, Steve, and the night watchman, a Rolling Stones song, I think. A little later the two Spaniards who worked with us turned up. I don't know who had gone to get them. And all this time I was thinking: something bad is going to happen, something bad is going to happen, but I didn't know what it would be or what I could do to prevent it, except drag the night watchman to my room and make love with him or convince him to go to sleep.

Then Hans came out of his room (he and Monique had gone to bed early, soon after dinner) and asked us not to make so much noise. I remember this happened several times. Hans would open the door, look at us one by one, and tell us that it was late, that the noise was keeping him up, that we had to work the next day. And I remember that no one paid the slightest bit of attention. When he came out they would say yes, yes, Hans, we'll be quiet now, but when the door closed behind him they would immediately start shouting and laughing again. And then Hans opened the door, his nakedness covered only by a pair of white briefs, his long blond hair wild, and he said that the party was over, that we should get out that instant and go to our rooms. And the night watchman stood up and said: look, Hans, stop being an idiot, or something like that. I remember that Hugh and Steve laughed, whether at the look on Hans's face or at how awkward the sentence was in English. And Hans stopped for an instant, confused, and then roared: how dare you? that was all, and rushed at the night watchman. There was quite a distance between them, and we were all able to watch him in great detail, a seminaked colossus crossing the room at a near run, coming straight at my poor friend.

But then something happened that no one expected. The watchman didn't move from where he was sitting, remaining calm as the mass of flesh hurtled across the room toward him, and when Hans was just a few inches away a knife appeared in his right hand (in his delicate right hand, so different from a grape cutter's hand) and the knife rose until it was just under Hans's beard, in fact just barely embedded in its outer fringes, which stopped Hans cold, and Hans said, what is this? What kind of joke is this? in German, and Erica screamed, and the door, the door that Monique and little Udo were behind, opened a crack and Monique's head appeared chastely, Monique herself possibly naked. And then the night watchman started to walk forward in the direction from which Hans had come barreling, and the knife, I could see clearly since I was only a few feet away, slid into Hans's beard, and Hans began to retreat, and although to me it seemed as if they crossed the whole room back to the door behind which Monique was hiding, they actually only took three steps, maybe two, and then they stopped and the night watchman lowered the knife, looked Hans in the eye, and turned his back on him.

According to Hugh, that was the moment when Hans should have tackled him and overpowered him, but the truth is he stood still, not even noticing that Steve had come up to him and offered him a glass of wine, although he drank it like someone gulping air.

And then the night watchman turned and insulted him. He called him a Nazi, saying what were you trying to do to me, Nazi? And Hans looked him in the eye and muttered something and balled his fists and then we all thought he would lunge at the night watchman, this time nothing would stop him, but he controlled himself, Monique said something, he turned and answered her, Hugh went over to the night watchman and dragged him to a chair, probably poured him more wine.

The next thing I remember is that we all left the house and started to walk the streets of Planèzes in search of the moon. We were looking up at the sky: the moon was hidden by big black clouds. But the wind pushed the clouds eastward and the moon appeared (we screamed) and then disappeared again. At some point I thought we seemed like ghosts. I said to the night watchman: let's go home, I want to sleep, I'm tired, but he ignored me.

He was talking about someone who had disappeared and he was laughing and making jokes that no one understood. When the last houses were behind us, I thought it was time to go back, that if I didn't go back I wouldn't be able to get up the next day. I went over to the night watchman and gave him a kiss. A good-night kiss.

When I got back to the house all the lights were out and it was completely silent. I went over to a window and opened it. No one made a sound. Then I went up to my room, undressed, and got into bed.

When I woke up, the night watchman was sleeping beside me. I said goodbye and went to work with everyone else. He didn't respond, lying there as if he were dead. A smell of vomit floated in the room. By the time we got back, at noon, he was gone. I found a note on my bed, in which he apologized for his behavior the night before and said that I should come to Barcelona whenever I wanted, that he would be there waiting for me.

That morning Hugh told me what had happened the night before. According to him, after I left, the night watchman went crazy. They were close to the river and he kept saying someone was calling him, a voice on the other side of the river. And no matter how many times Hugh told him no one was there, that the only sound was the noise of the water, and even that was faint, he kept insisting there was someone down below, on the other side of the river, waiting for him. I thought he was joking, said Hugh, but when I wasn't paying attention he went running downhill, in the pitch darkness, toward what he thought was the river, plunging blindly through scrub and brambles. According to Hugh, by then only he and the two Spaniards we had invited to our party were left from the original group. And when he took off downhill all three went after him, but much more slowly, because it was very dark and the slope was so steep that stumbling would have meant a fall and broken bones, so he soon disappeared from sight.

Hugh thought he intended to throw himself into the river. But the likeliest thing, he said, was that he would pitch headfirst onto a stone, plentiful as they were, or trip over a fallen branch, or end up tangled in a thornbush. When they reached the bottom they found him sitting in the grass, waiting for them. And here comes the strangest part, said Hugh, as I came up behind him he whirled around and in less than a second I was on the ground, he was on top of me and his hands were around my throat. According to him, it all happened so fast that he didn't even have time to be afraid, but the night watchman really was strangling him and the two Spaniards had gone off somewhere and couldn't see or hear him and anyway, with his hands around his neck (hands so unlike our hands at the time, which were all full of cuts), Hugh couldn't make a sound, wasn't even able to shout for help, was struck dumb.

He could've killed me, said Hugh, but the night watchman suddenly realized what he was doing and let him go, saying he was sorry. Hugh could see his face (the moon had come out again) and he realized that it was, in his words, bathed in tears. And here comes the strangest part of his story: when the night watchman let him go and said he was sorry, Hugh started to cry too, because, according to him, he suddenly remembered the girl who had left him, the Scottish girl; he suddenly realized that no one was waiting for him in England (except for his parents); he suddenly understood something he wasn't able to explain to me, or could only explain poorly.