Роберто Боланьо - The Spirit of Science Fiction

“What about Jan, did he…?”

“That’s right, we both got thrashed. He was yelling as loud as me.”

“But Jan has normal erections,” said Laura. “I know that for a fact.”

Laura had never seemed so pretty and so terrible. For a second, I felt a wave of jealousy and fear. At what point had the hypocritical little satyr stolen my girlfriend?

“Really?” I said, with an icy smile.

Laura told me then that the night of the party in our room Jan and Angélica had made love. I must have been very drunk or high or depressed or immersed in López Velarde, because I didn’t notice. Angélica felt sick, and her sister and Jan took her to the bathroom. Really, it was very stuffy in our room. In one of the chicken coops where clothes were hung up to dry, Laura bumped into Lola Torrente, José Arco, and Pepe Colina. Angélica and Jan had vanished. César was pretty drunk, and he wanted to leave. He begged, pleaded, claimed he was about to vomit—poor César, but too bad for him. Laura absolutely refused. In a corner full of pails, buckets of water, and empty boxes of detergent, César tried to make love to her as she looked over the railing. He was out of luck. Laura kept wandering sleepily around the roof (like the princess, candle in hand, who roams the castle of the prince she is to marry!) until on one of her rounds she came to what Jan cheerfully called the latrines. There she hesitated, and soon she heard a muffled noise coming from one of them. She thought that Angélica might be sicker than she’d seemed and went to investigate. Nothing could be further from the truth. Jan was sitting on the toilet, his pants around his ankles, and in the fingers of his left hand he held a match. Kneeling over him, Angélica was mounted on his erect cock. Every so often, when the match burned the tips of his fingers, Jan dropped it and lit another one. Discreetly, Laura returned to the others. The next day, Angélica told her what she already knew, plus some additional details.

“Phew! That’s a relief.”

“What’s a relief? That your best buddy is still in working order, despite the beating?”

“Don’t be vulgar. I thought you had slept with Jan.”

“No, I went back with César to the place with the soap. A cozy spot—you’ll have to show it to me by daylight. There I forced him to penetrate me. We almost fell over the parapet. It was quick, really quick. César was drunk and depressed. I was thinking of you, I felt really good. It was like I couldn’t stop laughing inside, I think.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? That morning we talked for hours…”

“It was none of your business. Also, I was tired and I was having a good time with you, so why start an argument?”

“I wouldn’t have argued. I would have cried. Shit.”

“Silly, it was a kind of good-bye. I think I had already decided that we were done. Poor César.” She sighed wickedly. “I wasn’t even saying good-bye to him, but to his penis. Ten inches. I measured it myself with my mother’s measuring tape.”

“Shitshitshit. I’ll never let you come near me with a measuring tape.”

“I won’t, I swear.”

Dear Philip José Farmer:

Wars can be ended with sex or religion. Everything seems to indicate that there are no other citizen alternatives; these are dark days, heaven knows. We can set aside religion for now. That leaves sex. Let’s try to put it to good use. First question: what can you in particular and American science fiction writers in general do about it? I propose the immediate creation of a committee to centralize and coordinate all efforts. As a first step—call it preparing the terrain—the committee must select ten or twenty authors for inclusion in an anthology, choosing those who have written most radically and enthusiastically about carnal relations and the future. (The committee should be free to select who they like, but I would presume to suggest the indispensable inclusion of entries by Joanna Russ and Anne McCaffrey; maybe later I’ll explain why, in another letter.) This anthology, to be titled something like American Orgasms in Space or A Radiant Future, should focus the reader’s attention on pleasure and make frequent use of flashbacks—to our times, I mean—to chart the path of hard work and peace that it has been necessary to travel to reach this no-man’s-land of love. In each story, there should be at least one sexual act (or, lacking that, one episode of ardent and devoted camaraderie) between Latin Americans and North Americans. For example: legendary space pilot Jack Higgins, commander of the Fidel Castro, participates in interesting physical and spiritual encounters with Gloria Díaz, a navigation engineer from Colombia. Or: shipwrecked on Asteroid BM101, Demetrio Aguilar and Jennifer Brown spend ten years practicing the Kama Sutra. Stories with a happy ending. Desperate socialist realism in the service of alluring, mind-blowing happiness. Every ship with a mixed crew and every ship with its requisite overdose of amatory activity! At the same time, the committee should establish contact with the rest of American science fiction writers, those who’re left cold by sex or who won’t touch it for reasons of style, ethics, market appeal, personal preference, plot, aesthetics, philosophy, etc. They must be taught to see the importance of writing about the orgies that future citizens of Latin America and the U.S. can take part in if we take action now. If they flatly refuse, they must be convinced, at the very least, to write to the White House to ask for a cease in hostilities. Or to pray along with the bishops of Washington. To pray for peace. But that’s our backup plan, and we’ll keep it in under wraps for now. In closing, let me tell you how much I admire your work. I don’t read your novels; I devour them. I’m seventeen, and maybe someday I’ll write decent science fiction stories. A week ago, I lost my virginity.

Laura and I didn’t make love that afternoon. We tried, but it didn’t happen. Or at least that’s what I thought at the time. Now I’m not so sure. We probably did make love. That was what Laura said, and she was the one who introduced me to the world of public bathhouses, which, beginning that day and for a long time after, I would associate with pleasure and play.

The first was definitely the best. It was called the Gimnasio Moctezuma, and in the lobby some unknown artist had painted a mural of the Aztec emperor up to his neck in a pool. Around the edges of the pool, near the monarch but much smaller, smiling men and women washed. Everyone seemed cheerful, except for the king, who stared out of the mural as if pursuing the unlikely spectator with wide, dark eyes in which many times I thought I glimpsed terror. The water of the pool was green. The stones were gray. In the background, mountains and storm clouds were visible.

The attendant at the Gimnasio Moctezuma was an orphan, and that was his main topic of conversation. On our third or fourth visit, we became friends. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen; he wanted to buy a car, so he was saving everything he could, basically his tips, which were few and far between. According to Laura, he was half retarded. I liked him. At every public bathhouse, there’s a fight at some point. At this place, we never saw or heard a single one. The clients, conditioned by some unknown mechanism, followed the attendant’s instructions to the letter. And the truth is that few people came, which is something I’ll never be able to explain, because it was a clean, relatively modern place, with private cubicles for steam baths, and bar service to the cubicles, and, most important, it was cheap.