Роберто Боланьо - The Spirit of Science Fiction

“No, go on, go on. This is a nice break for me. You wouldn’t believe all the interviews I had in Mexico City this morning. They work us like slaves at the paper.”

“All right. On the second floor, reached by stairs without a handrail, there are two more rooms, each of the same size. In one of them, there are a few mismatched chairs, a desk, a blackboard, and other items that give the room the vague feel of a classroom. In the other room, there’s nothing but rusty old farm equipment. Finally, on the third floor, which is reached from the tool room, we find a ham radio set and a profusion of maps scattered on the floor, a small FM transmitter, some semiprofessional recording equipment, a set of Japanese amplifiers, et cetera. I say et cetera because anything that I haven’t mentioned either isn’t important or else will be described later in full detail.”

“My dear friend, the suspense is killing me.”

“Spare me the ironic commentary. As I was saying, the third floor, which is actually a huge single attic room, is scattered with all of these modern or quasi-modern communication devices. The ham radio set is the only surviving piece of a collection of equipment that the academy once used for teaching purposes but that had to be sold due to general neglect by the UU and because the caretaker needed to eat. The room is a complete mess; it looks as if no one has bothered to sweep or mop for months. There are a couple of windows with wooden shutters, too few for the size of the room. From the eastward-facing one, you see the mountains. From the other, the view is of an endless forest and the beginning or the end of a path.”

“An idyllic landscape.”

“Idyllic or terrifying, depending how you look at it.”

“Hmm…”

“The academy is surrounded by a yard. In the old days, it was full of carts and trucks. Now the only vehicle in the yard is a BMX bike belonging to the caretaker, a man in his sixties; he’s a health nut, hence the bicycle. Around the yard is a wooden-and-wire fence. There are only two entrances. The main gate is big and heavy, and on the front of it is a yellowish metal sign stamped with black letters reading POTATO ACADEMY—ALIMENTARY RESEARCH 3, and beneath, in tiny print, the street name and number: 800 GALVARINO. The other door is in what a normal visitor would call the backyard. This door is small, and instead of opening onto the street it leads into a vacant lot and beyond to the woods and the path.”

“The same path you can see from the attic?”

“Yes, the tail end of it.”

“It must be nice to live in an attic, even a tiny one.”

“I lived in a rooftop room for centuries. I don’t recommend it.”

“I didn’t say a rooftop room, I said an attic.”

“Same thing. The view is the same. A view of the gallows, but with depth. With sunrises and sunsets.”

It was the ideal scene on which to pin images or desires, I thought—a young man, five foot eight, in jeans and a blue T-shirt, standing in the sun on the curb of the longest street in the Americas.

This meant that we were in Mexico at last and that the sun shining down on me between buildings was the sun of the Mexico City I’d dreamed of for so long. I lit a cigarette and searched for our window. The building where we lived was greenish gray, like the uniform of the Wehrmacht, Jan had said three days ago, when we found the room. There were flowers on the apartment balconies. Higher up—smaller than some flowerpots—were the windows of the rooftop rooms. I was tempted to call Jan to come to the window and see our future. And then what? Skip out of there, say, Jan, I’m off, I’ll pick up avocados for lunch (and milk, though Jan hated milk), and good news, super queer, perfect poise, eternal faggot in the antechambers of greatness, I’ll be star reporter of the poetry section, every telephone at my disposal.

Then my heart began to hammer strangely. I thought, I’m a statue frozen between the road and the sidewalk . I didn’t scream. I walked on. Seconds later, when I had yet to emerge from the shadow of our building or the weave of shadows that covered this stretch, my reflection appeared in the windows of Sanborns, strange mental duplication—a young man with long hair in a ripped blue T-shirt who bowed, genuflecting strangely before the jewels and the crimes (but what jewels and what crimes I forgot immediately) with rolls and avocados in my arms, and a liter of Lala milk, and the eyes, not my eyes but eyes lost in the black hole of the window, narrowed as if they had suddenly seen the desert.

I turned around slowly. I knew it. Jan was watching me from the window. I waved my arms in the air. Jan shouted something unintelligible and leaned farther out. I jumped. Jan responded by moving his head back to front and then in circles, faster and faster. I was afraid that he would throw himself out the window. I started to laugh. The passersby stared at me, and then they looked up and saw Jan, who was lifting his leg, pretending to kick a cloud. He’s my friend, I said. We just moved here a few days ago. He’s wishing me luck. I’m on my way out to look for work. Oh, well, that’s nice, what a good friend, someone said, and walked on, smiling.

I believed that nothing bad would ever happen to us in that welcoming city. How near and how far from what fate had in store for me! How sad and transparent that first Mexican smile appears now in memory!

“Idreamed about a Russian guy…. What do you think of that?”

“I don’t know…. I dreamed about a blond girl…. It was getting dark…. Like on the outskirts of Los Ángeles, but pretty soon it wasn’t Los Ángeles anymore. It was Mexico City, and the girl was walking in clear plastic tunnels…. She had sad eyes…. But that was yesterday, on the bus.”

“In my dream, the Russian was happy. Somehow I could tell that he was going to go up in a spaceship.”

“Then it was Yuri Gagarin.”

“More tequila?”

“ Ándele, pal, simonel. ”

“At first I thought it was Yuri Gagarin, too, but you won’t believe what happened next…. In the dream, it made my hair stand on end.”

“You were sleeping soundly, though. I was writing until late, and you looked fine.”

“Well, then the Russian got into his space suit and turned his back on me. He left. I wanted to go after him, but I don’t know what was wrong with me; I couldn’t walk. Then the Russian turned and waved good-bye…. And you know what he looked like, what he was?”

“No…”

“A dolphin… there was a dolphin inside the suit…. My hair bristled, and I wanted to cry…”

“But you weren’t even snoring.”

“It was terrible…. It doesn’t seem like it now, but in the dream it was awful, like a knot in my throat. It wasn’t death, you know? It was more like erasure.”

“The dolphin of Leningrad.”

“I think it was an omen…. You didn’t sleep?”

“No, I wrote all night.”

“Are you cold?”

“Extremely. Fuck, I thought it would never be cold here.”

“The sun is coming up.”

Our heads barely fit in the window frame. Jan said he’d thought about Boris. He said it in an offhand way.

The sunrise said: I’m out of this world. Get used to it. Once every three days, you’ll be seeing me.

“Jesus, what a sunrise,” said Jan, his eyes wide and his hands in fists.

Istarted to do work for the arts supplement of the newspaper La Nación. The supplement’s editor, Rodríguez, an old Andalusian poet who had been a friend of Miguel Hernández, let me write something for each issue. Once a week, in other words. With what I made on four pieces a month, we could get by for eight or nine days. The other twenty-one days, we lived off the articles I wrote for a magazine of pseudohistory run by an Argentinean just as old as Rodríguez, though he had the smoothest, most flawless skin I’d ever seen. People called him “the Doll,” for obvious reasons. The rest was put up by my parents or Jan’s parents. It worked out more or less like this: 30 percent of the money came from La Nación, another 30 percent from our parents, and 40 percent from History and Society, which was the name of the Doll’s misbegotten creation. I could turn out the four assignments for La Nación in a couple of days; they were reviews of poetry books, a few novels, and the occasional essay collection. Rodríguez gave me the books on Saturday mornings, which was when everyone, or almost everyone, who wrote for the supplement gathered in the tiny cubicle that served as the old man’s office, handing in assignments, picking up checks, and proposing ideas that must have been really bad, or if not, maybe Rodríguez had rejected them, because the supplement was always the worst rag. The real reason people came on Saturdays was to talk to their friends and bad-mouth their enemies. They were all poets, they all drank, they were all older than me. It wasn’t much fun, but I never missed a Saturday. When Rodríguez wrapped things up, we went to the cafés and talked until, one by one, the poets went back to their jobs and I was left alone at the table, legs crossed, watching the view through the window: the boys and girls of Mexico City, ecstatic policemen, and a sun that seemed to keep watch over the planet from the rooftops. With the Doll, things were different. First of all, pride—it makes me blush now—led me to refuse to publish any pieces under my own name. When I told the Doll this, he blinked, hurt, but agreed. What do you want to call yourself, kid? He grunted. Without hesitation, I said, Antonio Pérez. I see, said the Doll. You have literary ambitions. No, I swear I don’t, I said, lying. Whether you do or not, I’m going to demand quality work from you, he said. And then, more sadly, to think of all the pretty stories you can write on these topics. My first piece was on Dillinger. The second was on the Naples Camorra. (Antonio Pérez went so far as to quote entire paragraphs from a Conrad story!) Then came the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, the life of a poisoner from Walla Walla, the Lindbergh kidnapping, et cetera. The offices of History and Society were in an old building in Colonia Lindavista, and the entire time I was bringing in work, I never saw anyone but the Doll. Our meetings were short: I turned in the pieces, and he gave me new assignments and loaned me reference material, photocopies of magazines that he had published in his native Buenos Aires and photocopies of sister magazines from Spain and Venezuela that I used as sources but also sometimes shamelessly plagiarized. Occasionally the Doll asked about Jan’s parents—they were old friends—and then he sighed. How is the Schrellas’ son? Fine. What’s he doing? Nothing, he’s in school. Ah. And that was all. Jan, it goes without saying, wasn’t in school, though we fed the lie to his parents to keep them quiet. Actually, Jan never left the room. He spent all day there doing God knows what. He did go out to the toilet or the shower that we shared with the other roof tenants, and sometimes he went down to take a walk along Insurgentes, two blocks at most, moving slowly and seeming to sniff around for something, and very soon he was back. Meanwhile I was lonely; I needed to meet other people. The solution came from a poet at La Nación who worked on the sports section. He said: go to the poetry workshop at the Faculty of Literature. He said: you’ll find young people there, people your own age, not shitty drunks and has-beens who just want to be on a payroll somewhere. I smiled. Now the old bastard is going to cry, I thought. He said: poetesses, there are poetesses there, kid, get in on the action. Ah.