Roberto Bolaño - The Savage Detectives

The first night I slept in the living room. I put a blanket on the sofa, lay down, and closed my eyes. The noises were the same as ever. But no, I was wrong. There was something that made them different and prevented me from sleeping, so I spent my nights sitting on the sofa with the television on and my eyes half shut. Then I moved into my son's old room and that cheered me up. I suppose it was because the room still retained a certain air of happy, carefree adolescence. I don't know. In any case, after three days the room only smelled like me, in other words, like old age and madness, and everything went back to the way it was before. I got depressed and didn't know what to do. Silently, I waited in that empty house for the hours to go by until one of my children would come back from work and we could exchange a few words. Sometimes someone would call and I would answer. Hello? Who is this? No one knew me and I didn't know anyone.

A week after I came home I started to take walks around the neighborhood. At first they were short walks: once around the block and that was it. Little by little, though, I grew more daring, and my outings, at first tentative, took me farther and farther afield. The neighborhood had changed. I was mugged two different times. The first time, it was kids with kitchen knives, and the second time, some older guys who beat me up when they didn't find any money in my pockets. But I don't feel pain anymore and I didn't care. That's one of the things I learned at La Fortaleza. That night, Lola, my son's girlfriend, put iodine on my cuts and scrapes and warned me that there were certain places I shouldn't go. I told her that I didn't care whether I got beaten up every so often. Do you like it? she said. I don't, I said. If I were beaten up every day I wouldn't like it.

One night the theater director said that the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes was going to give him a grant. We celebrated. My son and his girlfriend went out to buy a bottle of tequila and my daughter and the director made a gala dinner, although the truth is neither of them knew how to cook. I don't remember what they made. Food. I ate everything. But it wasn't very good. The person who did that kind of thing well was my wife, but she was living somewhere else now and she wasn't interested in impromptu dinners like this. I sat at the table and started to shake. I remember that my daughter looked at me and asked whether I felt sick. I'm just cold, I said, and it was true. With the years I've become the kind of person who's always cold. A little glass of tequila would have helped, but I can't drink tequila or any kind of alcohol. So I shivered and ate and listened to what they were saying. They were talking about a better future. They were talking about silly things, but what they were really talking about was a better future, and although that future didn't include my son and his girlfriend or me, we smiled too and talked and made our plans.

A week later the department that was supposed to award the grant was closed because of budget cuts and the theater director ended up with nothing.

I realized that it was time for me to take action. I took action. I called a few old friends. At first no one remembered me. Where have you been? they said. Where have you come from? What kind of life have you been leading? I told them that I'd just returned from abroad. I've been traveling around the Mediterranean, I've lived in Italy and in Istanbul. I've been looking at buildings in Cairo, so suggestive architecturally. Suggestive? Yes, of hell. Like the Tlatelolco towers, but with less green space. Like Ciudad Satélite, but without running water. Like Netzahualcóyotl. All of us architects deserve to be shot. I've been in Tunis and Marrakech. In Marseille. In Venice. In Florence. In Naples. Lucky you, Quim, but why did you come back? Mexico is going straight to hell. You've probably been following the news. Yes, I've been keeping up, I told them. There's been no shortage of reports. My daughters sent Mexican newspapers to the hotels where I was living. But Mexico is my country, and I missed it. There's no place like this. Don't fuck with me, Quim, you can't be serious. I'm completely serious. Completely serious? I swear, completely serious. Some mornings, as I ate my breakfast watching the Mediterranean and those little sailboats that Europeans like to sail, I'd get tears in my eyes thinking of Mexico City, thinking about breakfast in Mexico City, and I knew that sooner or later I'd have to return. And one of my friends might say: but wait, weren't you in a mental hospital? And I would say yes, but that was years ago. In fact, it was when I left the mental hospital that I went abroad. Doctor's orders. And my friends would laugh at this or at other quips, since I told the story differently each time and they would say oh, Quim, and then I would seize my chance and ask them whether they knew of any work for me, a little job at some architecture firm, anything at all, a part-time job, to help me get used to the idea that I had to find something full-time, and then they would answer that the employment situation was terrible, that firms were closing one after another, that Andrés del Toro had left town for Miami and that Refugio Ortiz de Montesinos had set up shop in Houston, just to give me some idea, they said, and I got the idea, but I kept calling and abusing their patience and telling the story of my adventures in happier parts of the world.

All of this persistence finally landed me a job as a draftsman in the studio of an architect I didn't know. He was a kid who was just starting out, and when he discovered that I was an architect, not a draftsman, he took a liking to me. At night, when we closed the little office, we would go to a bar in Ampliación Popocatépetl, near Calle Cabrera. The bar was called El Destino and we would sit there talking about architecture and politics (the kid was a Trotskyite) and travel and women. His name was Juan Arenas. He had a partner I hardly ever saw, a fat guy in his forties who was an architect too but he looked more like he belonged to the secret police and hardly ever showed up at the studio. So the firm essentially consisted of Juan Arenas and me, and since we had hardly anything to do and we liked to talk, we spent most of the day talking. At night he would give me a ride home and as we crossed a Mexico City like a fading nightmare, I would sometimes think that Juan Arenas was my happier reincarnation.

One day I invited him to the house for lunch. It was a Sunday. No one was home and I made him soup and an omelet. We ate in the kitchen. It was nice to be there, listening to the birds that came to peck in the garden and watching Juan Arenas, a simple, unpretentious boy who ate with a hearty appetite. He lived alone. He wasn't from Mexico City but Ciudad Madero, and sometimes he felt lost in the capital. Later my daughter and her partner came home and found us watching TV and playing cards. I think that Juan Arenas liked my daughter from the start, and after that he visited often. Sometimes I would dream that we were all living together in the house on Calle Colima, my two daughters, my son, the theater director, Lola, and Juan Arenas. Not my wife. I didn't see her living with us. But things never turn out the way you see them in dreams, and one day Juan Arenas and his partner closed the office and vanished without saying where they were going.

Once again I had to call my old friends and ask for favors. I'd learned from experience that it was better to look for a job as a draftsman than as an architect, and so I soon found myself working hard again. This time it was at a firm in Coyoacán. One night, my bosses invited me to a party. The alternative was to head for the nearest metro stop and return to what would surely be an empty house, so I accepted and went. The party was at a house not far from mine. For a few minutes it seemed familiar to me and I thought I'd been there before, but then I realized I hadn't, that it was just that all houses of a certain period in a certain neighborhood were as alike as two peas in a pod, and then I relaxed and went straight into the kitchen to find something to eat because I hadn't had a bite since breakfast. I don't know what came over me, but all of a sudden I felt very hungry, which was unusual for me. Very hungry and very much like crying and very happy.