Роберто Боланьо - Cowboy Graves - Three Novellas

When I looked out the window again, the helicopters were heading back to their bases. In Concepción’s inflamed sky, the plane made a last pirouette and then it rose proudly and was lost in the clouds… Gaspar began to pull out clumps of hair. The gray words were left behind in the red sky, dissolving in the air.

It was the best plane in the world, in the darkness of the world, said Gaspar Yáñez, on all fours like a mythological beast at death’s door; his voice, the succession of syllables in my ear, woke me with a start. Everyone is asleep, said Gaspar Yáñez. The vowels fell petrified from his lips by the dark and by fear. A perpendicular movement made him rock from knees to wrists. It’s strange, don’t you think? Muted voices and laughter reached us; the sound of water flowing from a hose. What’s strange? I whispered even more softly than the madman, so softly that I was afraid he wouldn’t hear me, but he heard. The plane, he said. The fighter circling over our heads. I repeated what others had explained already, that the FACh kept a German plane as a museum piece, that it had been in Chile since approximately 1939, but as I was talking I realized that I didn’t believe the explanation either. Gaspar smiled (on the second day of his detention, they had broken most of his teeth) as if he could guess what I was thinking. I heard the laughter and the gush of water again, I imagined the snaking of the hose in the prison yard. They’re having fun, said Gaspar, as if he wanted to lay the subject to rest and move on to what was really important. Who? The cops. They never sleep, it must be their consciences, or a sixth sense warning them of Solitude. Those thugs have no conscience, I said. Gaspar sighed. His lungs made a very strange sound. I think the world is full of holes, he said, and that’s how the fighter planes get in. Have you heard me talk about Solitude? (Strange question.) Another hole, that’s all. I don’t believe in that kind of thing, I whispered. You don’t have to believe, said Gaspar, I’ve seen the planes flying at dawn and it’s not a matter of believing or not. When you see the silhouettes in the cabins, the face of Hans Marseille like a crumb of white bread, you realize that it’s the only consolation. Consolation for what? I stammered. My vocal cords were turning to stone too. It’s hard to admit, but consolation for everything, said Gaspar. Nothing but the crown jewel of the Luftwaffe up in the sky. The 109, and then all the prototypes, planes even better than the 109, I must confess, though it’s the number that makes all the difference. What? What? I whispered. The number of crewmen. Each of the others flies two, my friend, and that’s no good. The 109 has room for just one and you really do need balls for that. Take off from France, climb above the clouds, and reach England in time to fight for five minutes in a wind made of dreams. What are you talking about, man? I whispered. Weren’t you a radio host? Weren’t you on that show Bring in the Kids ? Are you so crazy that you’ve turned into a Nazi? Gaspar gave me a horrible smile, shaking his head. Then he raised one hand and patted me on the shoulder. Without getting up, he vanished on all fours into the darkness toward his mat. For a long time I lay awake. The next day, they brought me out into the courtyard, gave me a beating, and tossed me into the street.

Effects of the coup on the family unit. My mother lost her job as a math teacher at Liceo number 3 in Concepción. My father and my mother were on speaking terms again. My brother David was arrested and beaten: for fifteen days my parents searched for him at police stations and hospitals. He came home a month later and for the next thirty days he refused to say a word. My mother wept and cried out, asking what they’d done to her son. My father watched him, touched him, stared into his face, and declared that whatever it was, it wouldn’t kill him. My sister Elisenda was angry all of the time. Meals were scanty, but now at least the whole family sat down to eat together. My father came over from across the street and we all ate together at my mother’s house. Or my mother and the three of us crossed the street and we all ate together at my father’s house. My sister Elisenda stopped watching so much TV. My brother David started to train every morning in the yard. He was taking a martial arts correspondence course: karate, kung fu, judo. When my father was at my mother’s house, he spied on my brother through the kitchen window and smiled. In front of my mother, my sister, and me, my brother David said that he could drop my father with a single karate kick. Frankly, everyone in the family was on edge. More and more, my mother wondered why we still lived in this country. My father, who used to criticize the Allende government for its sports policies, stopped talking about sports for a while. My brother David became a Trotskyite. My sister Elisenda burned her childhood books and then cried bitterly. My father tried to make love to my mother five or six times, and the results, to judge by their faces, were not satisfactory. My mother got out her songbook and played the guitar. My father closed the soda fountain and sold it soon after to a retired navy sergeant. When my brother David was arrested for the second time and my sister saw her chances of enrolling in the university vanishing, my mother said that enough was enough. She sold the house and the furniture and bought tickets to Lima. She would have liked to get tickets to Madrid, but she didn’t have enough money. She cried when I refused to go with them. My brother David called me a faggot and a eunuch. I replied that I might be a faggot, you never know, but I definitely wasn’t a eunuch. Maliciously I added that, according to my father, it was people who practiced martial arts imported from the East who were eunuchs. My brother David tried to hit me. Don’t hit him in the head, my mother cried. The days before the departure were like the rosary of the dawn. My brother David made up with me. David, Elisenda, and I hugged. I promised my mother that I would save some money and come join them. I promised that I’d stay out of trouble. My father and I accompanied my mother and siblings to Santiago. As the plane took off, my father muttered to himself and bit his knuckles. I understood how he felt. I imagined my mother and my brother and sister in their seats, with their seat belts on, sad but full of energy, defying the future and what it held in store for them, no matter what. My father, however, seemed to be on the verge of death, his face shrunken, as if he had inner wrinkles now in addition to his outer ones. Never had he looked more like a famous boxer than he did then. We took the train back to Concepción. For the trip, my father bought a roast chicken and a bottle of wine. We ate and drank in fits and starts, I don’t know why. My father didn’t sleep a wink. Sometimes I was woken by the sound of him sucking on a wing. A very strange noise. He picked up the wing in his hand and sucked on it slowly, his gaze lost in the darkness of the car. I’ll never see them again, my father said. Two weeks later, the first postcards arrived. My mother’s postcard was fairly optimistic. My brother’s was more like a riddle or a puzzle. I could never figure out the clues, if there were any. My sister’s was the most idiotic, but at the same time I liked it best, maybe because it was so innocent. Basically, it described the trip from Santiago to Lima. The part she liked best was the movie she saw on the plane: Hitchcock’s Family Plot .

It was years after Patricia Arancibia’s death that I began to dream about the dark city… A kid, seventeen, walked the empty streets, flanked by tall buildings… His strides were long, almost feline… I can’t say why, but I’m sure he was seventeen… I’m also sure of his bravery… He was wearing a white shirt and loose black pants that flapped in the wind like a flag… He was wearing sneakers that had once been white but in the dream were an indeterminate color… He had long hair and though his face remained in shadow I glimpsed dark wolf or coyote eyes… The streets were vast, some paved, some cobbled, but vast and empty… The kid loped along, happy to be alive, happy that the warm wind was rippling his clothes… Then four or five people appeared… They all knew one another and they walked together for a while… Next the kid and his companions stopped at an overlook… Beneath them was a ravine, and, in the distance, the silhouettes of other buildings… Among the buildings rose the movie theater, imposing as four cathedrals and four soccer fields… The Diorama… The kid and his companions admired the dark landscape and produced bottles of beer and drugs from somewhere… Little by little their gestures became more disturbing… They gesticulated, argued… One of the guys, fat and wearing tight pants, grabbed the kid by the neck and hurled him into the middle of the street… The others laughed… Then a knife appeared in the kid’s hand and he stepped toward the fat guy… No one saw anything, but the laughter froze… The fat guy took the blow in the stomach… He could feel the tension in the kid’s arm… The kid’s determination, edged with disgust… Disgust conquered by the driving force of his arm… Then the storm began…