Roberto Bolaño - The Savage Detectives

And then I rushed into the kitchen and in the kitchen were two men and a woman, who were talking animatedly about someone who had died. And I took a ham sandwich and ate it and then I had two gulps of Coca-Cola to wash it down. The bread was somehow dry. But the sandwich was delicious, so I took another one, this time a cheese sandwich, and I ate it little by little, not all at once, chewing carefully and smiling the way I used to smile so many years ago. And the trio who were talking, the two men and the woman, looked at me and saw my smile and smiled at me, and then I moved a little closer to them and I heard what they were saying: they were talking about a corpse and a burial, about a friend of mine, an architect, who had died, and at that moment it seemed appropriate for me to say that I'd known him. That was all. They were talking about a dead man whom I'd known, and then they started to talk about other things, I guess, because I didn't stay but went out into the garden, a garden of rosebushes and fir trees, and I went over to the wrought-iron gate and began to watch the traffic. And then I saw my old '74 Impala go by, looking worse for the wear, its paint peeling and with dents on the fender and doors, moving very slowly, at a crawl, as if it were looking for me along the night streets of Mexico City, and it had such an effect on me that then I did start to shake, grabbing the rails of the gate so I wouldn't fall, and sure enough, I didn't fall, but my glasses fell off, my glasses slipped off my nose and dropped onto a shrub or a plant or a rosebush, I don't know, I just heard the noise and I knew they hadn't broken, and then I thought that if I bent down to get them, by the time I got up the Impala would be gone, but if I didn't I wouldn't be able to see who was driving that ghost car, the car I'd lost in the final hours of 1975, the early hours of 1976. And if I couldn't see who was driving it, what good would it do to have seen it? And then something even more surprising occurred to me. I thought: my glasses have fallen off. I thought: until a moment ago I didn't know I wore glasses. I thought: now I can perceive change. And knowing that now I knew I needed glasses to see, I was afraid, and I bent down and found my glasses (what a difference between having them on and not having them on!) and I stood up and the Impala was still there, which makes me think that I must have moved as fast as only certain madmen can, and I saw the Impala, and with my glasses, the glasses that until just then I hadn't known I possessed, I peered into the darkness, searching for the driver's face, half eager and half afraid, because I thought that I would see Cesárea Tinajero, the lost poet, at the wheel of my lost Impala, I thought that Cesárea Tinajero was emerging from the past to bring me back the car I'd loved most in my life, the car that had meant the most to me and that I'd had the least time to enjoy. But it wasn't Cesárea who was driving it. In fact, no one was driving my ghost Impala! Or so I thought. But then I realized that cars don't drive themselves and that some poor, short, severely depressed little man was probably driving that beat-up Impala, and I returned to the party bowed down by an enormous weight.

When I was halfway there, though, I had an idea and I turned around, but the Impala was no longer in the street, visible or invisible, now you see it, now you don't. The street had become a jigsaw of shadows with several pieces missing, and one of the pieces missing, oddly enough, was me. My Impala was gone. And in some sense that I couldn't quite understand, I was gone too. My Impala was back inside my head again. I was back inside my head again.

Then, humbled and confused and in a burst of utter Mexicanness, I knew that we were ruled by fate and that we would all drown in the storm, and I knew that only the cleverest, myself certainly not included, would stay afloat much longer.

Andrés Ramírez, Bar El Cuerno de Oro, Calle Avenir, Barcelona, December 1988. I was destined to be a failure, Belano, take my word for it. I left Chile on a long-ago day of 1975, on March 5 at eight p.m., to be precise, hidden in the hold of the cargo ship Napoli . In other words, as a common stowaway, with no idea of my final destination. I'll spare you the variously unpleasant details of the crossing. Put it this way: I was thirteen years younger than I am now and in my neighborhood in Santiago (La Cisterna, that is), my friends knew me as Mighty Mouse, after the funny, crime-fighting little animal that did so much to brighten the afternoons when we were children. In short, the man you see before you was prepared to put up with every hardship of such a voyage. At least physically, as they say. Never mind the hunger, the fear, the seasickness, the uncertainty of what lay ahead, alternately dim or terrifying. There was always some charitable soul who would venture down to the bilge with a piece of bread, a bottle of wine, a little bowl of spaghetti Bolognese. Besides, I had all the time in the world to think, something nearly impossible in my previous life, since as we all know, in modern cities it doesn't pay to be idle. And so I was able to examine my childhood (when you're stuck in the bottom of a boat it's best to do these things in an organized way) in more or less the time it took us to reach the Panama Canal. From then on, or in other words as long as it took us to cross the Atlantic ( ay , already so far from my beloved country and even my continent, not that I'd seen much of it, but I felt a deep affection for it all the same), I set out to dissect what had become of my youth. And I concluded that everything had to change, even if I wasn't sure just then how to go about it or what path to take. Really, though, I was only killing time, keeping up my strength and my spirits, since I was already near the end of my rope after so many days in that damp, echoing darkness, which I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. Then one morning we docked in Lisbon and my thoughts took a new tack. Naturally, my first impulse was to disembark then and there, but one of the Italian sailors who sometimes fed me explained that a person in my position would have trouble at the Portuguese borders, by sea or by land. So I had to sit tight, and for two days that seemed like two weeks, all I could do was listen to the voices in the ship's hold, which hung open like the jaws of a whale. There, in my barrel, I got sicker and more impatient with each passing moment, shaking with chills that struck at random intervals. Then finally one night we set sail and left behind the industrious Portuguese capital that I envisioned, in my fever dreams, as a black city, with people dressed in black and houses built of mahogany or black marble or stone, maybe because while I was crouched there, burning up and half asleep, I thought of Eusebio, the Black Panther of the team that fought so valiantly in the England World Cup of ' 66, in which we Chileans were treated so unfairly.

Back on the open seas, we rounded the Iberian peninsula, and I was still sick, so sick that one night two Italians brought me up on deck so that I could get some air and I saw lights in the distance and I asked what they were, what part of the world those lights belonged to (the world that seemed so unfriendly), and the Italians said Africa-the way you might say beak , or the way you might say apple -and then I really started to shake, my fever felt like an epileptic seizure, but it was only a fever, and then the Italians left me sitting on the deck and moved to one side, like people leaving a sickroom to smoke a cigarette, and I heard one Italian say to the other: if he dies on us we'd better throw him overboard, and the other Italian answered: all right, all right, but he won't die. And although I didn't speak Italian I understood that clearly, since both of our languages were Romance languages, as a scholar would say. I know you've been in similar situations, Belano, so I won't go on too long. Fear or the will to live, the survival instinct, gave me strength that I didn't know I had, and I said to the Italians I'm all right, I'm not going to die, what's the next port? Then I dragged myself back down into the hold, curled up in my corner, and slept.