Roberto Bolaño - The Savage Detectives

Every day we went to the post office. We took walks that ended at Esterhazy Platz or the Stiftskaserne. Sometimes my friends followed us. Always at a distance! One night we found a man in the Schadekgasse and followed him. He went into the park. He was an old man, well dressed. My good friend Ulises came up beside him and I punched him in the back of the neck. We went through his pockets. That night we ate at a bar close to home. Then I got up from the table and made a phone call. My inheritance, my money, I said, and from the other end of the line someone said: no, no, no. Then the police came and took us to the Bandgasse station. They took off our handcuffs and interrogated us. Questions, questions. I said: I have nothing to say. When they took me to the cell Ulises wasn't there. The next morning my lawyer came. I said: Mr. Lawyer, you look like a statue abandoned in the forest, and he laughed. When he stopped laughing, he said: no more joking from now on, Heimito. Where is my good friend Ulises? I said. Your accomplice is under arrest, Heimito, said my lawyer. Is he alone? I said. Of course, said my lawyer, and then I stopped shaking. If my good friend Ulises was alone, nothing could happen to him.

That night I dreamed about a yellow rock and a black rock. The next day I saw my good friend Ulises in the courtyard. We talked. He asked me how I was. Fine, I said, I exercise, I do push-ups, sit-ups, I shadow-box. Don't shadowbox, he said. How are you, I said. Fine, he said, they treat me well, the food is good. The food is good! I said. Then they interrogated me again. Questions, questions. I don't know anything, I said. Heimito, tell us what you know, they said. Then I told them about the Jews who were working to build an atomic bomb in Beersheba and about the scorpions that only came out at night. And they said that they would show me pictures and when I saw the pictures I said: they're dead, these are pictures of dead people! and I wouldn't talk to them anymore. That night I saw my good friend Ulises in the corridor. My lawyer said: nothing bad will happen to you, Heimito, nothing bad can happen to you, that's the law, you'll go live in the country. And my good friend Ulises? I said. He'll stay here for a while longer. Until his situation is resolved. That night I dreamed about a white rock and the sky of Beersheba, dazzling as a crystal goblet. The next day I saw my good friend Ulises in the courtyard. The courtyard was covered in a green film but neither one of us seemed to care. We were both wearing new clothes. We could have been brothers. He said: everything is working out, Heimito. Your father is going to take charge of you. And what about you? I said. I'm going back to France, said my good friend Ulises. The Austrian police are paying for my ticket to the border. And when will you come back? I said. I can't come back until 1984, he said. The year of Big Brother. But we don't have brothers, I said. So it would seem, he said. Is the devil's spit green? I asked all of a sudden. It might be, Heimito, he answered, but I'd guess it's colorless. Then he sat on the ground and I started to do my exercises. I ran, I did push-ups, I did squats. When I was done my good friend Ulises had gotten up and was talking to another prisoner. For a minute I thought we were in Beersheba and that the cloudy sky was just a trick of the Jewish engineers. But then I slapped my face and said to myself no, we're in Vienna and my good friend Ulises is leaving tomorrow and he won't be able to come back for a long time and maybe soon I'll see my father. When I went back over to him the other prisoner left. We talked for a while. Take care of yourself, he said when they came to get him, stay in shape, Heimito. See you soon, I said, and then I never saw him again.

María Font, Calle Montes, near the Monumento a la Revolución, Mexico City DF, February 1981. When Ulises came back to Mexico, I had just moved in here. I was in love with a guy who taught high school math. Things between us had been rocky at first because he was married and I thought he would never leave his wife, but one day he called me at my parents' house and told me to find a place where we could live together. He couldn't stand his wife anymore and they were about to separate. He was married and had two children, and he said his wife used the children to blackmail him. The conversation we had wasn't especially reassuring-in fact quite the contrary-but the next morning I really did start looking for a place where the two of us could live, even if it was only temporary.

Of course, money was a problem. He had his salary but he had to keep paying rent on the house where his children lived and contribute money each month to pay for their keep, tuition, etc. And I didn't have a job and all I could count on was an allowance that one of my mother's sisters was giving me to finish my studies in dance and painting. So I had to dip into my savings, borrow from my mother, and not look for anything too expensive. After three days, Xóchitl told me that there was a vacant room in the hotel where she and Requena lived. I moved in right away.

The room was big, with a bathroom and a kitchen, and it was right above Xóchitl and Requena's room.

That very night the math teacher came to see me and we made love until dawn. The next day, however, he didn't show up, and even when I tried calling him a few times at school, I couldn't reach him. Two days later I saw him again and I accepted all the explanations he was willing to give me. That was more or less how things went during the first and then the second week of my new life on Calle Montes. The math teacher would show up every four days, more or less, and we would be together until dawn and the start of a new workday. Then he would disappear.

Naturally, we didn't only make love. We talked too. He would tell me things about his children. Once, talking to me about the littlest girl, he started to cry, and finally he said that he didn't understand any of it. What's to understand? I said. He looked at me as if I'd said something idiotic, as if I were too young to know what he meant, and didn't answer. Otherwise, my life was more or less the same as it had always been. I went to class, found a (miserably paid) job as a proofreader at a publishing house, saw my friends, and took long walks around the city. Xóchitl and I grew closer, in large part because we were now neighbors. In the evenings, when the math teacher wasn't around, I would go down to her room and we would talk or play with the little boy. Requena was almost never there (although he, at least, came home every night) and Xóchitl and I would talk about the things that mattered to us, women's things, unconstrained by the presence of men. As was only natural, the subject of our first conversations was the math teacher and his strange ideas about how a new relationship should work. According to Xóchitl, the guy was ultimately a gutless jerk who was afraid to leave his wife. In my opinion, it had much more to do with his sensitivity, his desire not to hurt anyone unnecessarily, than with real fear. Privately, I was surprised how firmly Xóchitl took my side, and not the side of the math teacher's wife.

Sometimes we would go to the park with little Franz. One night when the math teacher was there, I invited them to dinner. The math teacher wanted us to be alone, but Xóchitl had asked to be introduced to him, and I thought this was the perfect occasion. It was the first dinner I had given in what I now thought of as my new home, and although the meal itself was simple, a big salad, cheeses, and wine, Requena and Xóchitl showed up punctually and Xóchitl was wearing her best dress. The math teacher was trying to be nice, which I appreciated, but I don't know whether it was the meagerness of the food (in those days I was into low-calorie eating) or the abundance of wine, but the dinner was a disaster. When my friends left, the math teacher called them parasites, saying that they were the kind of element that paralyzes society and keeps a country from ever making any progress. I said that I was just like them and he replied that it wasn't true, that I studied and worked whereas they didn't do anything. They're poets, I argued. The math teacher looked me in the eyes and repeated the word poet several times. Lazy slobs is what they are, he said, and bad parents. Who goes out to eat and leaves their child alone at home? That night, as we were making love, I thought about little Franz sleeping in the room downstairs as his parents drank wine and ate cheese in my room, and I felt empty and irresponsible. Not much later, maybe a day or two afterward, Requena told me that Ulises Lima had come back to Mexico.