Roberto Bolaño - The Savage Detectives

It was a few years before I saw Arturo Belano again. The first time was in 1976, the second in-1979? 1980? Dates aren't my forte. It was in Barcelona. There's no way I could forget that. I had gone there to live with the painter Abraham Manzur, my partner, boyfriend, friend, fiancé. Before that, I'd lived in Italy, London, and Tel Aviv. One day Abraham called me from Mexico City and told me that he loved me, that he was moving to Barcelona and he wanted me to live with him. I was in Rome then and I wasn't well. I told him yes. We would have a romantic meeting at the airport in Paris and then we would take the train to Barcelona. Abraham had a grant, or something like that, probably his parents had decided it would be good for him to spend a while in Europe and they were bankrolling him. I'm not sure about any of this. Abraham's face is lost to me in a cloud of fog that just keeps getting bigger. Things were going well for Abraham. They'd always gone well for him, actually. He was exactly the same age as me (we were born in the same month of the same year), but while I went back and forth not knowing what I wanted to do, he was completely sure of himself and he had an enormous capacity for work, energy like Picasso, he said, and although sometimes he might be unhappy, or sick and in pain, he would paint every day for five hours straight, eight hours straight, including Saturday and Sunday. He was the first person I made love with. We were both sixteen. Then we were together on and off, we kept breaking up, he never supported my political militancy, I don't mean he was right-wing, just that he wasn't interested in militancy, he probably didn't have time for it, I had other lovers, and he started to go out with a girl called Nora Castro Bilenfeld, and when it looked like they were about to move in together, they broke up, I was in the hospital a few times, my body changed. So I took the train to Paris and waited for Abraham at the airport. After ten hours I realized that he wasn't coming and I left the airport crying, although it was only later that I fully realized I'd been crying. That night I stayed at a cheap hotel in Montparnasse and I spent hours thinking about my life so far and when my body couldn't take it anymore I stopped thinking and lay down in bed, staring at the ceiling, and then I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, but I couldn't, and I was like that for days, unable to sleep, holed up in the hotel, only going out in the morning, eating almost nothing, hardly washing, constipated, with terrible headaches, basically wanting to die.

Until I fell asleep. Then I dreamed that I was traveling to Barcelona and that the trip, in a mysterious, vital way, was like starting my life over from scratch. When I woke up I paid the bill and took the first train to Spain. For the first few days I lived in a boardinghouse on Rambla Capuchinos. I was happy. I bought a canary, two pots of geraniums, and some books. But I needed money and I had to call my mother. When I talked to her I found out that Abraham had been looking for me like crazy all over Paris and that my family had assumed I'd disappeared. My mother asked me whether I'd lost my mind. Then I explained my long wait at the airport and being stood up by Abraham. No one stood you up, darling, my mother said, what happened is that you got the date wrong. It seemed strange that my mother would say that. It sounded like Abraham Manzur's official version of the story. Tell me where you are and Abraham will come get you right away, said my mother. I gave her my address, told her to wire me money, and hung up.

Two days later Abraham showed up at my boardinghouse. Our meeting was cold. I thought he had just come from Paris, but actually he had been living in Barcelona about as long as I had. We ate at a restaurant in the Barri Gótic, and then he brought me to his place, a few blocks away, near the Plaza Sant Jaume, the apartment of the well-known Catalan-Mexican art dealer Sofía Trompadull, where Abraham could stay as long as he wanted since La Trompadull hardly ever came to Barcelona anymore. The next day we went to get my things at the boardinghouse and I moved in. But there was still a coldness between us. I didn't bear Abraham any grudge about being stood up in Paris, which might have been my fault, but I felt distanced from him, as if I'd agreed to be his wife and share his bed, and go to exhibitions and museums and have dinners with Barcelona friends, but nothing else. Months went by like that. One day Daniel Grossman showed up in Barcelona. He knew where Arturo Belano was living and he visited him almost every day. One afternoon I went with him. We talked. He remembered me perfectly. The next day I went back to his apartment, but this time I was alone. He took me out to eat at a cheap restaurant and we talked for hours. I think I told him my whole life story. He talked too and told me things I've forgotten now, but still, I did most of the talking.

After that we began to see each other at least twice a week. Once I invited him to my house, if you could call La Trompadull's Barcelona apartment my house, and just before he left, Abraham showed up. I could see that Abraham was jealous. He greeted us, gave me a kiss on the forehead, and then shut himself in his studio, as if that way he would teach Arturo a lesson. When Arturo left I went into his studio and asked him what was wrong. He didn't answer but that night we made love much more violently than usual. I thought for once things might be different. But in the end I didn't feel anything. My relationship with Abraham, I realized suddenly, was over. I decided to go back to Mexico, study film, reenroll at the university. I talked to my mother and the next day she sent me a ticket for Mexico City. When I told Arturo I was leaving I could see the sadness in his eyes. I thought: he's the only person who'll care that I'm gone. Once (but this happened before I decided to leave Abraham), I told him I was a dancer. He thought I danced in clubs or was a stripper. That struck me as really funny. No, I said, I wish I could dance like that, but modern dance is my thing. Actually, I'd never even imagined myself dancing in a club, doing one of those pathetic little numbers and living with shady people, in unsavory places, but when Arturo got the wrong idea and said that, for the first time in my life I thought about it and the (imaginary) vistas of the life of a professional dancer seemed attractive to me, even painfully attractive, although then I stopped thinking about it because my life was already complicated enough. I still had two weeks left in Barcelona and I saw him every day. We talked a lot, almost always about me. I talked about my parents and their separation, about my grandfather, the Mexican underwear king, about my mother, who had inherited his empire, and about my father, who had studied medicine and whom I adored. I talked to him about my weight problems when I was an adolescent (he couldn't believe it because by then I was really skinny), my militancy in the Trotskyite party, the lovers I'd had, my psychoanalysis.

One morning we went to a riding school in Castelldefels whose owner was a friend of Arturo's, and he let us have two horses all day without charging us anything. I had learned to ride at a club in Mexico City, and he'd learned on his own in the south of Chile when he was a boy. The first few feet we rode in step, then I said that we should race. The path was straight and narrow, and then it went up a ridge bordered with pine trees, and down again to a dry riverbed. Past the river was a tunnel and beyond the tunnel was the sea. We galloped. At first he kept his horse close beside mine, but then, I don't know what got into me, I merged with the horse and started to gallop as fast as I could, leaving Arturo behind. At that moment I wouldn't have cared if I died. I knew, I was conscious of the fact, that there were many things I hadn't told him that I probably needed to tell him or should tell him, and I thought that if I died riding or if the horse threw me or if a branch in the pine forest knocked me to the ground, Arturo would know everything I hadn't told him and would understand it without needing to hear it from my lips. But when I crossed the ridge and left the pine forest behind, my desire to die turned into happiness, happiness that I was riding and galloping, happiness that I was feeling the wind on my cheeks. A little later I even felt afraid of falling, because the slope was much steeper than I'd thought, and then I didn't want to die anymore, it wasn't a game and I didn't want to die, at least not just then, and I began to slow down. Then something surprising happened. I saw Arturo shoot past me like an arrow, not stopping, and I saw him look at me and smile, a Cheshire cat smile, although he'd lost a few molars living the crazy life he lived, but it didn't matter, his smile hung there as he and his horse shot toward the dry riverbed, so fast that I thought that both of them, horse and rider, would go tumbling onto the dusty stones, and that when I dismounted and came through the cloud raised by the fall I would find the horse with a broken leg and Arturo next to him with his head a bloody mess, dead, his eyes open, and then I was afraid, and I spurred my horse on, riding down toward the river, but I couldn't see through the dust at first, and when the dust had cleared there was no horse or rider in the riverbed, nothing, just the sound of cars going by on the highway in the distance, hidden behind a patch of trees, and the sun beating down on the dry stones of the riverbed, and everything was like a magic trick, one minute I was with Arturo and the next I was alone again, and then I really was scared, so scared that I didn't dare get off the horse or say anything, all I did was look around and I didn't see any sign of him, as if the earth or air had swallowed him up, and when I was almost about to cry, I saw him, at the entrance to the tunnel, in the shadows, like an evil spirit, watching me without saying anything, and I spurred the horse on toward him and I said you fucking scared me, Arturo, you jerk, and he looked at me in a sad way and although later he laughed to cover it up, it was then, and only then, that I knew he'd fallen in love with me.