Roberto Bolaño - The Savage Detectives

Later, after I'd come to terms with Don Giovanni over a piece about a painter buddy of mine and gone out with two guys from the paper, all ready to start drinking early, I saw them through the windows of a café, I think it was La Estrella Errante, but I can't remember. Verónica Volkow was with them. They'd caught up with her and asked her out for a drink. I watched them for a while, standing on the sidewalk while the guys I was with decided where to go. They seemed happy: Belano, Lima, Müller, and Trotsky's great-granddaughter. Through the windows I watched them laugh, watched them fall all over the place laughing. They were probably never going to see her again. The Volkow girl was clearly a society type and those guys were going to end up at Lecumberri or Alcatraz, it was written all over them. I don't know what was wrong with me, I swear. I felt tenderhearted and Zopilote Colina never goes soft like that. The bastards were laughing with Verónica Volkow, but they were laughing with Leon Trotsky too. It was the closest they would ever get to the Bolsheviks. It was probably the closest they would ever want to get. I thought about Don Ivan Rejanovich, and I felt my chest swell with sadness. But with happiness too, goddamn it. The strangest things happened at La Nacional on payday.

Verónica Volkow, with a female friend and two male friends, International Departures, Mexico City DF airport, April 1981. Mr. José Colinas was mistaken when he said that I would never see the Chilean citizens Arturo Belano and Felipe Müller and their friend, my fellow Mexican citizen Ulises Lima, again. If the incidents he describes, with scant regard for the truth, occurred in 1975, it was probably a year later that I saw the young men in question again. If I'm not mistaken, it was in May or June 1976, on what must have been a clear night, even a bright night, the kind of night that year after year makes Mexicans and bewildered foreign visitors move slowly, with great caution, and that I personally find stimulating but decidedly sad.

There isn't much to tell. It was outside a movie theater on Reforma, the day of the opening of some film, American or European, I can't remember.

It might even have been by a Mexican director.

I was with friends and suddenly, I don't know how, I saw them. They were sitting on the stairs, smoking and talking. They had already seen me, but they hadn't come over to say hello. The truth is that they looked like bums, glaringly out of place there, at the entrance to the theater, among well-dressed, clean-shaven people who edged away as they climbed the stairs. It was as if they were afraid that one of them might reach out his hand and grope them. At least one of them seemed to me to be under the influence of some kind of drug. I think it was Belano. The other one, Ulises Lima, I think, was reading and writing in the margins of a book, singing softly to himself. The third one (no, it definitely wasn't Müller, Müller was tall and blond and this person was short and dark) looked at me and smiled as if he knew me. I had no choice but to nod in return, and when my friends were distracted I went over and said hello. Ulises Lima said hello back, although he didn't get up from the stairs. Belano did get up, like a robot, but he looked at me as if he didn't recognize me. The third one said you're Verónica Volkow and he mentioned some poems of mine that had recently been published in a magazine. He was the only one who seemed to feel like talking. Please God, I thought, don't let him talk to me about Trotsky, but he didn't talk about Trotsky, he talked about poetry, saying something about a magazine he was publishing with a mutual friend (a mutual friend? horrible!) and then he said other things that I didn't understand.

As I was about to go-I was only with them for a minute-Belano looked at me more carefully and recognized me. Ah, Verónica Volkow, he said, and what seemed to me like an enigmatic smile appeared on his face. How's the poetry going? he said. I didn't know how to answer such a stupid question and I shrugged my shoulders. I heard one of my friends calling me and I said I had to go. Belano held out his hand and I shook it. The third one gave me a kiss on the cheek. For a moment I thought he'd have been perfectly capable of leaving his friends there on the stairs and joining my group. See you later, Verónica, he said. Ulises Lima didn't get up. As I was going into the theater I saw them for the last time. A fourth person had arrived and was talking to them. I think it was the painter Pérez Camarga, but I can't say for sure. In any case, he was nicely dressed, well groomed, and he seemed nervous about something. Later, on my way out of the theater, I saw Pérez Camarga or the person who looked like him, but I didn't see the three poets, by which I deduced that they'd been there on the stairs waiting for that fourth person and that after their brief encounter they'd left.

Alfonso Pérez Camarga, Calle Toledo, Mexico City DF, June 1981. Belano and Lima weren't revolutionaries. They weren't writers. Sometimes they wrote poetry, but I don't think they were poets either. They sold drugs. Marijuana, mostly, although they also had a stock of shrooms in glass jars, little baby-food jars, and although at first it looked disgusting, like a tiny turd floating in amniotic fluid in a glass container, we ended up getting used to those fucking shrooms and that's what we usually ordered, shrooms from Oaxaca, shrooms from Tamaulipas, shrooms from La Huasteca in Veracruz or Potosí, or wherever they were from. Shrooms to do at our parties or in petit comité . Who were we? Painters like me, architects like poor Quim Font (in fact, he was the one who introduced them to us, never suspecting the relationship we would soon strike up, or at least that's what I'd like to think). Because beneath it all those kids were shrewd businessmen. When I met them (at poor Quim's house), we talked about poetry and painting. Mexican poetry and painting, I mean (is there any other kind?). But before long, we were talking about drugs. And from drugs we moved on to business. And after a few minutes they had taken me out into the garden, and I was under a poplar tree, sampling their marijuana. First-class? Was it ever. Like nothing I'd tasted for a long time. And that was how I became their client. And meanwhile I talked them up to various painter and architect friends of mine for free, and they became clients of Lima and Belano too. Well, from a certain point of view, it was an improvement, even a relief. They were at least clean , I guess. And you could talk to them about art while you were doing the deal. And we trusted them not to blackmail us or set us up. You know, none of the shit that small-time dealers pull. And they were more or less discreet (or so we thought) and punctual, and they had connections, you could call them and say I need fifty grams of Acapulco Gold for tomorrow because I'm throwing a surprise party, and all they would ask you was where and when, they didn't even mention money, although of course they never had anything to complain about in that regard, we paid what they asked without argument, which is always nice in a customer, don't you think? And everything went perfectly smoothly. Sometimes, of course, we had disagreements. It was mostly our fault. We were too trusting, and as everybody knows, some people are better kept at arm's length. But our democratic spirit got the best of us, and when there was a party or an especially boring meeting, for example, we would invite them in, pour them drinks, ask them to tell us more about where exactly the stuff that we were about to ingest or smoke came from, that kind of thing, innocent questions, in no way meant to be offensive, and they drank our liquor and ate our food, but-how to put it?-in an absent way, maybe, or a cold way, as if they were there but not there, or as if we were insects or cows that they bled each night and that it made sense to keep comfortably alive but without the slightest hint of closeness, warmth, or affection. And even though we were usually drunk or high, we noticed, and sometimes, to annoy them, we forced them to listen to what we had to say, our opinions, what we really thought about them. Of course, we never considered them to be real poets. Much less revolutionaries. They were salesmen, and that was all. We respected Octavio Paz, for example, and they held him in utter contempt, willfully ignorant. That's just unacceptable, don't you think? Once, I don't know why, they said something about Tamayo, something negative about Tamayo, and that was the last straw, I can't remember the context, and in fact I don't even know where it was, maybe at my house, maybe not, it doesn't matter, but someone was talking about Tamayo and José Luis Cuevas, and one of us praised José Luis's toughness, the power and courage that each and every one of his works radiates, saying how lucky we were to be his fellow citizens and contemporaries, and then Lima or Belano (the two of them were sitting in a corner, that's how I remember them, in a corner waiting for their money) said that Cuevas's courage, or his toughness, or his energy, I don't know which, was all bluff, and that declaration cast a sudden chill over us, made a cold indignation rise in us, if you know what I mean. We almost ate them alive. I mean, sometimes it was funny to hear them talk. They really seemed like two extraterrestrials. But as they got more comfortable, as you got to know them or started to listen to them more carefully, their pose seemed more sad than anything else, off-putting. They weren't poets, certainly, and they weren't revolutionaries. I don't even think they were sexualized. What do I mean by that? Just that sex didn't seem to interest them (the only thing that interested them was the money they could squeeze out of us), nor did poetry or politics, although their look seemed modeled on the hackneyed archetype of the young leftist poet. But sex didn't interest them, I know that for a fact. How do I know? From a friend, an architect friend who tried to have sex with one of them. Belano, probably. And at the moment of truth nothing happened. Limp dicks.