Roberto Bolaño - The Savage Detectives

My life in Rome was a disaster. Everything went badly, and worst of all, or at least so I was told later, was that I refused to ask for help. All I had was Zia and all I cared about was taking care of Zia and feeding her. I did read a lot, but when I try to remember what I read a kind of hot, quivery wall gets in the way. Maybe I read Dante in Italian. Maybe Gadda. I don't know. I'd already read them both in Spanish. The only person who had more than a vague indication of my whereabouts was Daniel. I got some letters from him. In one of them he told me that Arturo was shattered by my leaving and each time he saw Daniel he asked about me. Don't give him my address, I said, because he's capable of following me to Rome. I won't give it to him, said Daniel in his next letter. I also heard from him that my mother and father were worried and that they kept calling Barcelona. Don't give them my address, I said, and Daniel promised he wouldn't. His letters were long. My letters were short, almost always postcards. My life in Rome was short and simple. I worked in a shoe store and lived in a boardinghouse on Via della Luce, in Trastevere. At night, when I got home, I would take Zia out for a walk. We usually went to a park behind the church of Sant'Egidio, and as the cat wandered among the plants I would open a book and try to read. I must have read Dante, I guess, or Guido Cavalcanti or Cecco Angiolieri or Cino da Pistoia, but all I remember of what I read is a hot curtain or maybe just a warm curtain fluttering in the slight breeze of Rome at dusk, and plants and trees and the sound of footsteps. One night I met the devil. That's all I remember. I met the devil and I knew I was going to die. The owner of the shoe store saw me come to work with bruises on my neck and watched me for a week. Then he wanted to sleep with me and I refused. One day Zia got lost in the park, not the one behind Sant'Egidio, but another one, on Via Garibaldi, with no trees or lights. Zia just strayed too far and the darkness swallowed her up.

I looked for her until seven in the morning. Until the sun came up and people started slowly heading to work. That day I didn't go to the shoe store. I went to bed, pulled the covers up to my chin, and slept. When I woke up I went out to look for my cat again. I couldn't find her. One night I dreamed of Arturo. The two of us were at the top of an office building, the kind built out of glass and steel, and we opened a window and looked down. It was nighttime. I wasn't planning to jump, but Arturo looked at me and said if you jump, I will too. I wanted to call him an idiot, but I didn't have the strength to insult him.

One day the door of my room opened and I saw my mother and younger brother come in, my brother who'd been a soldier in the Tsahal and who lived most of the year in Israel. They moved me to a hospital in Rome right away, and two days later I was flying back to Mexico. As I found out later, my mother had flown to Barcelona and between her and my brother they had managed to get my address in Rome out of Daniel, after he refused to give it to them at first.

In Mexico I was admitted to a private clinic in Cuernavaca, and the first thing the doctors told my mother was that there was nothing they could do if I didn't make an effort. By then I weighed ninety pounds and I could hardly walk. Then I got on a plane again and was admitted to a clinic in Los Angeles. There I met a Doctor Kalb and gradually we became friends. I weighed seventy-five pounds and in the afternoon I watched television and that was pretty much it. My mother moved into a hotel in downtown Los Angeles, on Sixth Street, and every day she would come to see me. After a month I had gained weight and I was back up to ninety pounds. My mother was very happy and decided to return to Mexico City, to take care of business. With my mother gone, Dr. Kalb and I established a friendship. We talked about food and tranquilizers and other kinds of drugs. We didn't talk much about books because Dr. Kalb only read bestsellers. We talked about film. He'd seen many more movies than I had and he loved movies from the fifties. In the afternoons I'd turn on the television and find some movie so I could discuss it with him later, but the medicine I was taking made me fall asleep halfway through. When I talked to Dr. Kalb he would tell me what had happened in the part I hadn't seen, although by then I'd usually forgotten the part I had seen. My memory of those movies is strange, images and scenes filtered through the lens of my doctor's simple enthusiasm. My mother came most weekends. She would arrive Friday night and return to Mexico City on Sunday night. Once she told me that she was thinking about moving permanently to Los Angeles. Not to the city itself, but to some nice place nearby, like Corona del Mar or Laguna Beach. Then what will happen to the factory? I said. Grandfather wouldn't have wanted you to sell it. Mexico is going to hell, said my mother, sooner or later it'll have to be sold. Sometimes she would show up with some friend of mine whom she'd invited along because, according to the doctors, including Dr. Kalb, it was good for my health to see my "old gang." One Saturday she showed up with Greta, a friend of mine from high school whom I hadn't seen since then. Another Saturday she showed up with a guy I didn't even recognize. You're the one who should be bringing friends and trying to have a good time, I told her one night. When I said things like that my mother would laugh, as if she couldn't believe what she was hearing, or start to cry. Aren't you dating anyone? Don't you have a boyfriend? I asked her. She admitted that she was seeing someone in Mexico City, a man who was divorced like she was, or a widower. I didn't try very hard to get it straight. I guess I didn't really care. After four months I weighed one hundred and five pounds and my mother started to prepare for my transfer to a Mexican clinic. The day before I left, Dr. Kalb came to say goodbye. I gave him my phone number and begged him to call me sometime. When I asked for his number, he claimed something about a move so he wouldn't have to give it to me. I didn't believe him, but I didn't call his bluff either.

We went back to Mexico City. This time I was admitted to a clinic in Colonia Buenos Aires. I had a big room with lots of light, a window overlooking a park, and a television with more than one hundred channels. In the morning I would sit in the park and read novels. In the afternoon I would shut myself in my room and sleep. One day Daniel, who had just gotten back from Barcelona, came to visit me. He wasn't going to be in Mexico for long and as soon as he found out that I was in the hospital he came to see me. I asked him how I looked. He said fine, but thin. The two of us laughed. By then it didn't hurt to laugh anymore, which was a good sign. Before he left I asked him about Arturo. Daniel said he didn't live in Barcelona anymore, or at least he didn't think so, but it had been a while since they stopped seeing each other. A month later I weighed one hundred and ten pounds and I was discharged from the hospital.

Still, my life changed very little. I lived with my mother and I never went out, not because I couldn't but because I didn't want to. My mother gave me her old car, a Mercedes, but the only time I drove it I almost had an accident. Any little thing made me cry. A house seen from the distance, traffic jams, people trapped inside their cars, the daily news. One night Abraham called me from Paris, where he had work in a group show of young Mexican painters. He wanted to talk about my health, but I wouldn't let him. He ended up talking about his painting, the progress he'd made, his successes. When we said goodbye I realized that I'd managed not to shed a single tear. Not long afterward, around the same time my mother decided to move to Los Angeles, I began to lose weight. One day, without having sold the factory, we got on a plane and settled in Laguna Beach. I spent the first two weeks at my old hospital in Los Angeles, undergoing exhaustive tests, and then I joined my mother in a little house on Lincoln Street, in Laguna Beach. My mother had been there before, but visiting was one thing and daily life something entirely different. For a while we would take the car out early in the morning and go looking for some other place we might like. We tried Dana Point, San Clemente, San Onofre, finally ending up in a town called Silverado, like in the movie, on the edge of the Cleveland National Forest, where we rented a two-story house with a yard and bought a police dog that my mother called Hugo, after the friend she'd just left behind in Mexico.