Roberto Bolaño - The Savage Detectives

A month later my mother married the engineer. The wedding was in Laguna Beach and the engineer's children were there, as well as one of my brothers and the friends my mother had made in California. They lived in Silverado for a while and then my mother sold the shop in Laguna Beach and they went to live in Guadalajara. For a while, I didn't want to leave Silverado. Without my mother, the house seemed much bigger and quieter and cooler than before. Mrs. Schwartz's house was empty for a while. In the afternoons I would get in the Nissan and go to a bar in town and have a coffee or a whiskey and reread some old novels whose plot I'd forgotten. At the bar I met a guy who worked for the Forest Service and we slept together. His name was Perry and he knew a few words of Spanish. One night Perry told me that my vagina had an unusual smell. I didn't answer and he thought he'd offended me. Have I offended you? he said, I'm sorry if I have. But I was thinking about other things, other faces (if it's possible to think about a face), and he hadn't offended me. Most of the time, however, I was alone. Each month there was a check for me from my mother at the bank and I spent my days cleaning the house, sweeping, mopping, going to the supermarket, cooking, washing the dishes, taking care of the yard. I didn't call anyone and the only calls I got were from my mother, and, once a week, from my father or one of my brothers. When I was in the mood, I would go to a bar in the afternoon, and when I wasn't in the mood I would stay home reading beside the window. If I raised my eyes I could see the Schwartzes' empty house from where I sat. One afternoon a car stopped in front of it and a man in a jacket and tie got out. He had keys. He went in and ten minutes later he came out again. He didn't look like a relative of the Schwartzes. A few days later two women and a man came back to visit the house again. When they left, one of the women put a sign out saying that the house was for sale. Then many days went by before anyone came to visit it, but one day at noon, while I was busy in the yard, I heard children shouting and I saw a couple in their thirties going into the house led by one of the women who'd been there before. I knew immediately that they would buy the house and right there in the yard, without taking off my gloves, standing there like a pillar of salt, I decided that the time had come for me to leave too. That night I listened to Debussy and thought about Mexico and then, I don't know why, I thought about my cat Zia and I ended up calling my mother and asking her to get me a job in Mexico City, any job. I told her I'd be leaving soon. A week later my mother and her new husband were in Silverado, and two days later, one Sunday night, I flew to Mexico City. My first job was at a gallery in the Zona Rosa. It didn't pay much, but the work wasn't hard. Then I started to work at a publishing house, the Fondo de Cultura Economica, in the English Philosophy division, and my work life was finally settled.

Felipe Müller, sitting on a bench in Plaza Martorell, Barcelona, October 1991. I'm almost sure it was Arturo Belano who told me this story, because he was the only one of us who liked to read science fiction. It's by Theodore Sturgeon, or so Arturo said, although it might be by some other author or even Arturo himself; the name Theodore Sturgeon means nothing to me.

The story, a love story, is about a hugely rich and extremely intelligent girl who one day falls in love with her gardener or her gardener's son or a young tramp who just happens to end up on one of the estates she owns and becomes her gardener. The girl, who's not only rich and smart but also headstrong and a little impulsive, lures him into bed the first chance she gets, and without quite knowing how, falls madly in love with him. The tramp, who's nowhere near as smart as she is and who doesn't have a high school degree but who makes up for it by being angelically pure, falls in love with her too, though naturally not without a few complications. In the first phase of the romance, they live in her palatial mansion, where they spend their time looking at art books, eating exquisite delicacies, watching old movies, and mostly making love all day. Then they live for a while in the gardener's cottage and then on a boat (maybe the kind that cruises the rivers of France, like in the Jean Vigo film) and then they roam the vast expanse of the United States on a couple of Harleys, which was one of the tramp's long-cherished dreams.

As the girl lives out her love, her interests continue to prosper, and since money begets money, she gets richer by the day. Of course, the tramp, who's generally clueless, is decent enough to convince her to devote part of her fortune to good works or charity (which is something the girl has always done anyway, through lawyers and a network of various foundations, though she doesn't tell him so, in order to make him think she's doing it on his account) and then he forgets about it all, because ultimately the tramp has only the vaguest idea of the mass of money that trails like a shadow behind his beloved. Anyway, for a while, months, maybe a year or two, the girl millionaire and her lover are indescribably happy. But one day (or one evening), the tramp falls ill and although the best doctors in the world come to examine him, there's nothing to be done. His health has been ruined by an unhappy childhood, an adolescence plagued with hardships, a troubled life that the short time he's spent with the girl has barely managed to ease or sweeten. Despite all the efforts of science, he dies of cancer.

For a few days the girl seems to lose her mind. She travels all over the globe, takes lovers, immerses herself in dark pursuits. But she ends up coming home, and soon, when it becomes clear that she's more obsessed than ever, she decides to embark on a project that in some way had already begun to take root in her mind just before the tramp's death. A team of scientists moves into the mansion. In record time, the house is doubly transformed, the inside into a sophisticated laboratory, and the outside, the lawns and the gardener's cottage, into a replica of Eden. To shield it all from the gaze of strangers, an extremely high wall is erected around the grounds. Then the work begins. Soon the scientists implant a clone of the tramp in the womb of a whore, who will be generously compensated. Nine months later the whore has a boy, hands him over to the girl, and disappears.

For five years the girl and a team of specialists care for the boy. Then the scientists implant a clone of the girl in her own womb. Nine months later the girl has a child. The laboratory in the mansion is dismantled and the scientists disappear, replaced by teachers, the tutor-specialists who will keep watch from a distance as both children are raised according to a plan previously drawn up by the girl. When everything is set in motion the girl disappears. She travels, she attends society parties again, she plunges headfirst into perilous adventures, takes lovers: her name shines like a star's. But every once in a while, cloaked in the greatest secrecy, she returns to the mansion and observes the children's progress, unseen by them. The clone of the tramp is an exact replica of the man she fell in love with, his purity and innocence intact. Except that now all his needs are met and his childhood is a peaceful succession of games and teachers who instruct him in all he needs to know. The female clone is an exact replica of the girl herself, and her teachers repeat the same successes and failures, the same actions of the past.

The girl, of course, hardly ever lets herself be seen by the children, although occasionally the clone of the tramp, who is never tired of playing and is a bold child, spots her through the lace curtains of the mansion's upper floors and goes running after her, always in vain.