Roberto Bolaño - The Savage Detectives

Luis Sebastián Rosado, a dark office, Calle Cravioto, Colonia Coyoacán, Mexico City DF, March 1983. One afternoon, he called me. How did you get my number? I asked. I had just moved out of my parents' house and it had been a long time since I'd seen him. A moment came when I thought that our relationship was killing me and I decided to make a clean break. I stopped seeing him, I stopped showing up when we were supposed to meet, and it didn't take him long to disappear. He lost interest, he went in search of new adventures, but still, deep down (as I always knew I would), I yearned for him to call, to come looking for me, to miss me. But Luscious Skin didn't come looking for me and for a while, a year or so, we were completely out of touch. So it was a pleasant surprise when he called. How did you get my number? I asked. I called your parents and they gave it to me, he said, I've been trying to call you all day, you're never home. I sighed. I would've preferred it if he'd had a harder time finding me. But Luscious Skin was talking as if we'd just seen each other last week, so that was that. We talked for a while. He asked how I'd been, he mentioned that he'd seen a poem of mine in Espejo de México and a story in an anthology of young Mexican writers that had just come out. I asked whether he'd liked the story. I had only recently taken up the difficult art of storytelling and my steps were still unsure. He told me he hadn't read it. I took a look at the book when I saw your name, but I didn't read it, I don't have any money, he said. Then he stopped talking, I stopped talking, and for a while we were both silent, listening to the muted humming and crackling of Mexico City's public telephones. I remember that I was quiet, smiling and thinking about Luscious Skin's face, also smiling, imagining him standing on some sidewalk in the Zona Rosa or Reforma, with his little black knapsack hanging over his shoulder, brushing his ass sheathed in worn, tight denim, a full-lipped smile sketched with surgical precision on an angular face without an ounce of fat, like a young Maya priest, and then I couldn't bear it anymore (I felt tears come to my eyes) and before he could ask for it I gave him my address (which he must have already had) and told him to come right away, and he laughed, a happy laugh, and he said it would take him more than two hours from where he was, and I said it didn't matter, I would make some dinner in the meantime, and I'd be waiting for him. Narratively speaking, that was the moment to hang up and dance for joy, but Luscious Skin always waited until the coins ran out, and he didn't hang up. Luis Sebastián, he said, I have something very important to tell you. You can tell me when you get here, I said. It's something I wanted to tell you a long time ago, he said. His voice sounded unusually forlorn. At that moment I began to suspect that something was going on, that Luscious Skin hadn't called me just because he wanted to see me, or because he needed money. What is it? I said, what's wrong? I heard the last coin fall into the bowels of the public phone, the sound of leaves, the wind whipping dead leaves, a sound like cables tangling and untangling and then slipping apart in the void. Poetic misery. Remember there was something I wanted to tell you and in the end I didn't? he said, his voice sounding perfectly normal. When? I heard myself ask stupidly. A while ago, said Luscious Skin. I told him I didn't remember and then I argued that it didn't matter, he could tell me when he got there. I'm going out to do some shopping, I'll see you soon, I said, but Luscious Skin didn't hang up. And if he wasn't going to hang up, how could I? So I waited and listened and even encouraged him to talk. And then he brought up Ulises Lima, saying that Lima had gotten lost somewhere in Managua (I wasn't surprised, half the world was going to Managua), but that actually he wasn't lost, he was hiding, or in other words, everyone thought (who was everyone ? I wanted to ask, his friends , his readers , the critics who've been assiduously following his work?) that he was lost, but that he knew he wasn't lost, he was really hiding. Why would Ulises Lima want to hide? I asked. That's what it all comes down to, said Luscious Skin. I talked to you about this a while ago, remember? No, I said in a tiny voice. When? Years ago, the first time we slept together, he said. I felt shivers, a twisting in my gut; my testicles contracted. It was an effort to speak. How do you expect me to remember? I whispered. Now I was even more eager to see him. I suggested that he take a taxi. He said that he didn't have any money. I promised that I would pay, that I would be waiting for him outside. Luscious Skin was about to say something else when the line went dead.

I thought about taking a shower but decided to save it for when he got there. I spent a while straightening things up, and then I changed my shirt and went outside to wait. It was more than half an hour, and all I did the entire time was try to remember the first time we made love.

When he got out of the taxi he looked much thinner than he had the last time I'd seen him, vastly thinner and more worn down than in my memories, but he was still Luscious Skin and I was happy to see him. I held out my hand but he didn't take it, instead he hurled himself at me and hugged me. The rest was more or less the way I'd imagined it, the way I'd wished. There was nothing disappointing about it.

At three in the morning we got up and I made us a second supper, this time a cold one, and I poured us some whiskey. We were both hungry and thirsty. Then, as we were eating, Luscious Skin started to talk more about Ulises Lima's disappearance. He had a wild theory that didn't stand up to the slightest scrutiny. According to him, Ulises was fleeing from an organization (or that's the way it sounded at first) that wanted to kill him, so when he ended up in Managua he decided not to come back. No matter how you looked at it, it was an unlikely story. Everything had begun, according to Luscious Skin, with a trip that Lima and his friend Belano took up north, at the beginning of 1976. After that trip they both went on the run. First they fled to Mexico City together, and then to Europe, separately. When I asked him what the founders of visceral realism were doing in Sonora, Luscious Skin said they'd gone to look for Cesárea Tinajero. After he'd spent several years in Europe, Lima had returned to Mexico. Maybe he thought the whole thing had been forgotten, but the killers showed up one night after a meeting where Lima had been trying to reunite the visceral realists, and he had to run away again. When I asked Luscious Skin why anyone would want to kill Lima, he said he didn't know. You didn't travel with him, did you? Luscious Skin said he hadn't. Then how do you know all this? Who told you this story? Lima? Luscious Skin said no, it was María Font who'd told him (he explained who María Font was), and she'd gotten it from her father. Then he told me that María Font's father was in an insane asylum. Under ordinary circumstances, I would have started to laugh right there, but when Luscious Skin told me that the person who'd started the rumor was a madman, a shiver ran up my spine. And I felt pity too, and I knew I was in love.

That night we talked until dawn. At eight in the morning I had to go to the university. I left Luscious Skin copies of the keys to the house and I asked him to wait till I came back. From the university I called Albertito Moore and asked him whether he remembered Ulises Lima. His reply was vague. He did and he didn't. Who was Ulises Lima? A lost lover? I said goodbye and hung up. Next I called Zarco and asked him the same question. This time the reply was much more emphatic: a lunatic, said Ismael Humberto. He's a poet, I said. More or less, said Zarco. He traveled to Managua with a delegation of Mexican writers and got lost, I said. It must have been the delegation of peasant poets, said Zarco. And he didn't come back with them, he disappeared, I said. That's the kind of thing that happens to these people, said Zarco. That's it? I said. Sure, said Zarco, there's nothing else to it. When I got home, Luscious Skin was sleeping. My latest book of poetry was open next to him. That night, as we ate dinner, I suggested that he stay with me for a few days. That's what I was planning to do, said Luscious Skin, but I wanted you to be the one who asked. A little later he brought over a suitcase with all his belongings in it. He had nothing: two shirts, a serape that he'd stolen from a musician, some socks, a portable radio, a notebook he used to keep a kind of diary, and not much else. So I gave him an old pair of pants that were maybe a little tight on him but that he loved, plus three new shirts that my mother had just bought me, and one night, on my way home from work, I went to a shoe store and bought him some boots.