Роберто Боланьо - Cowboy Graves - Three Novellas

“I have a vague idea, sir. Preparing the revolution? Laying the foundation for the literature of the future?” These must be the right questions to ask, I thought. I didn’t want to look like an idiot. I didn’t want this man who had called me from Paris to decide all of a sudden that I wasn’t a viable contender and hang up on me.

“Cold, cold, but also hot, hot.” The voice seemed to recede, as if all of a sudden doors were beginning to close between my interlocutor and me, one after the other, blown shut by a hurricane wind that not only made him shrink but also literally made my hearing dwindle, so that I put a hand up to my ear pressed to the telephone and felt it: it was still the same size, only much hotter than usual.

“I’ll tell you about our masterwork and what we expect you to do in the Clandestine Surrealist Group when you come to join us.”

“When will that be?” I gasped.

My interlocutor’s voice rasped. I heard him spit. I imagined him in an underground gallery, talking on a pirated phone line, his gaze fixed on the river flowing through the gallery toward an enormous treatment system resembling a mill with silver blades.

“In three months. We expect you on July 28, at precisely eight p.m., on the rue de la Réunion, at Père Lachaise Cemetery. Do you have paper and pencil?”

“I have a pen,” I said.

“Well, write this down. July 28. Eight p.m. Rue de la Réunion, Père Lachaise Cemetery. If anything goes wrong, head to the rue du Louvre. Walk from rue Saint-Honoré to rue d’Aboukir. A hunchbacked man will approach you and ask how to get to La Promenade de Vénus. Do you know what La Promenade de Vénus is?”

“No.”

“It’s a café. All right. Listen up. The man with the hunchback will come up to you and ask you where La Promenade de Vénus is. You don’t say anything, you raise a finger to your head and touch it, as if to say that the location of the café is a mental thing. Do you understand? Have you written it all down?”

“Yes.”

“Very well, Diodorus Pilon, that’s all for now.”

“But how will I get to Paris?” I asked.

“By plane or by ship, of course.”

“I don’t have any money,” I almost shouted.

For a few seconds, I couldn’t hear anything. I worried that the sharpness of my cry might have seemed rude.

“Are you still there, sir?” I asked.

“I’m thinking, Diodorus, and I don’t know what to tell you. We can’t send you the ticket from here. We can’t send you money, either. It would be a violation of our security measures. You’ll have to handle getting the ticket. When you’re in Paris, we can cover your costs, but you’ll have to pay for the trip yourself.”

“Don’t worry, sir, I’ll be at Père Lachaise Cemetery on July 28,” I said, somewhat recovered and without a clue where I would get money for the ticket.

“Not at the cemetery, Diodorus, on rue de la Réunion, on rue de la Réunion, for Christ’s sake, get it into your head.”

“On rue de la Réunion, no problem.”

“All right, you have a good life, goodbye.”

And he hung up.

I stood there without moving, not knowing whether to laugh or pinch myself, with the phone in my hand as day began to dawn around me. The light that came in through the glass walls of the phone booth had a tentative pallor, conjuring up the green of the hills and the pearly color of the sea first thing in the morning. It was as if I were inside a transparent submarine, a little submarine that had been down to the bottom of an ocean trench. Now, back on the surface again, I was afraid to open the door and emerge.

A man came out of one of the nearby houses. He was wearing a light-colored suit and carrying his jacket in one hand, in a jaunty yet fastidious way, with a leather briefcase in his other hand. He was wearing a short-sleeved white shirt. His arms were long and strong, like a professional swimmer’s. Maybe he was a college professor or a government official. He looked at me as if trying to place me and then he got in his car and started it. As he passed the phone booth, he turned to stare at me and I returned his gaze. When the car was gone I came out of the booth and set off for the Coves. By now my poor mother would be gone, but I felt like taking a walk before I went home.

As I headed downhill through the Old Hospital neighborhood, I saw a man I knew by sight—a big black man with a beaked nose who sometimes played guitar in the port bars or De Gaulle Park—standing in a phone booth, listening without saying a word, and sweating rivers.

All the beach stands were shut. The sand, which later in the day would be yellow, now looked as if it was covered by a white sheet or a shroud of ash, depending on the spot. I ran into a drunk, someone to whom my mother would give plates of fried fish. He had just woken up.

“Hey kid, what are you doing out so early in the morning?” he asked.

“I haven’t been to bed yet, Achille,” I said.

I sat down next to him on the seawall and listened to his stories for a while. He told me that the night before, as I was talking on the phone to Paris, a cat had gone crazy and had to be shot and killed. He said that the eclipse thing wasn’t such a big deal and that people were always getting excited about nothing. In his opinion, true and incredible things happened in the sky every day, but all a man needed was a good woman by his side. You could do without everything else, except that. As we talked, I saw three figures appear at the other end of the street, weaving along. I thought they must be drunks, maybe friends of Achille, in search of a bed or a hospital. As they got closer, I realized that it was the well-dressed guy who had danced at the House of the Sun during the eclipse, with the two women. He didn’t look as well-dressed as he had before. His suit was ripped in places and he had lost his tie. The older woman’s clothes were in more or less the same state. Only the girl looked as if she’d had a quiet night. When they reached us, the girl asked if we knew the address of a cheap boardinghouse where they could stay. Achille eyed them curiously and then asked the girl what had happened to the other two.

“They’ve gone blind,” she said.

“How did that happen?” asked Achille.

“They spent too long staring at the black sun,” she said.

“The black sun?”

“The eclipse,” I said.

“Oh, well, that makes sense, then,” said Achille, and he gave the girl an address on avenue Kennedy, where boardinghouses and cheap hostels followed one after the other. “Make sure you tell the owner that Achille sent you,” he said in farewell.

My father was a boxing champion: the bravest, the fiercest, the smartest, the best…

When he gave up boxing, Police Commissioner Carner of Concepción offered him a job in Investigations. My father laughed and said no, where the hell did he get an idea like that. The chief replied that he could smell an officer of the law from a distance. His nose never failed him. My father said he didn’t give a shit for the law and also, no offense, he didn’t see himself as a freeloader. I like to work, he said, don’t take it the wrong way. The chief realized that my father might be drunk but he was serious. No offense taken, he said, it’s just strange, because I can smell a cop ten miles off. The good kind, of course. Don’t give me that shit, Carner, what you want is a heavyweight to beat up purse snatchers, said my father. Never, said the commissioner, I’m a modern lawman. Modern or not, Carner read the Rosicrucians and he was a follower (in a casual way) of John William Burr, the now-forgotten promoter of metempsychosis. At home, we still have pamphlets by Burr, published by El Círculo in Valparaiso and the Gustavo Peña Association in Lima, which my father, predictably, never read.