The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

"It occurred to me that I'd had too much to drink and hadn’t eaten in hours, and I wondered whether the alcohol and hunger must be starting to disconnect me from reality. But then I decided it didn't matter. If I'm remembering right (though I wouldn't stake my life on it), it so happens that one of the visceral realists' basic poetry-writing tenets is a momentary disconnection from a certain kind of reality."

                                                                                                                                                                   

"I finished Aphrodite, the book by Louys, and now I'm reading the dead Mexican poets, my future colleagues." 

"Anyway, I thought that some poetry evoking lands that are the diametric opposite of hers (assuming she is from Veracruz, which seems more and more unlikely) would be more promising, at least as far as my intentions are concerned. After that, whatever happens will happen."

"Are you telling me that your pimp cuts himself on the penis for fun?" said Maria.
"That's right."
"I can't believe it."
It's the truth. Just every once in a while, it's not like he does it every day. Only when he's nervous. Or fucked up. But the measureing thing he does all the time. He says it's good for his manhood. He says it's a habit he learned inside."

"Even the young people, who in theory are our hope for change, are turning into potheads and sluts. There's no way to solve the problem; revolution is the only answer."

"At a certain point you need to steep yourself in reality, no? I think it was Alfonso Reyes who said that. Maybe not. It doesn't matter. But sometime Maria goes overboard, wouldn't you say? And I'm not cirticizing her for that, for steeping herself in reality, but she should steep herself, not expose herself, don't you think? Because if one steeps oneself too thoroughly, one is at risk of becoming a victim. I don't know whether you follow me. [...] A victim of reality, especially if one has friends who are- how to put it- magnetic, wouldn't you say? People who innocently attract trouble or who attract bullies."

“Then everything turned into a succession of concrete acts and proper nouns and verbs, or pages from an anatomy manual scattered like flower petals, chaotically linked.” 

 "Oh coincidence," said Quim, sucking air into his lungs like the titan of Calle Revillagigedo. "There's no such thing as coincidence. When it comes down to it, everything is ordained. The goddamn Greeks called it destiny." 

"I guess I couldn't bear his happiness." 

"A person could be immensely happy reading only him or the writers he loved. But that would be too easy." 

"I imagined him lost in a white space, a virgin space that kept getting dirtier and more soiled despite his best efforts, and even the face I remembered grew distorted, as if while I was talking to his sister his features melded with what she was describing, ridiculous tests of strength terrifying, pointless rites of passage into adulthood [...]"

"Or maybe we were silent for a while, me sitting at the foot of his bed, him stertched out with his book, the two of us sneaking looks at each other, listening to the sound the elevator made, as if we were in a dark room or lost in the country at night, just listening to the sound of horses. I could've sat there like that for the rest of the day, for the rest of my life." 

"Then I told him that I thought poets were hermaphrodites and that they could only be understood by each other. Poets, I said. What I would have liked to say was: we poets." 

Haven't you ever seen those ridiculous birds that practically dance themselves to death to woo the female?

That's what Aruro Belano was like, a stupid, conceited peacock. And visceral realism was his exhausting dance of love for me. The thing was, I didn't love him anymore. You can woo a girl with a poem, but you can't hold on to her with a poem. Not even a poetry movement." 

"[...] the sight of Luscious Skin alone, writing almost sprawled on the table, made a great warmth suddenly spread through my chest, which until then was icy, numb." 

"It must have been the nerves, or the gusts of wind that sometimes sweep along Insurgentes (we were talking on the sidewalk) and sow the most outrageous ideas in pedestrians and drivers."

"The rest of the details I'd rather not disclose; I'm still a romantic." 

"He told me he loved me. He said he would make me the happiest woman in the world. I looked him in the face and for a second I thought he'd gone crazy. Then I realized that he was actually afraid, afraid of me, and that made me sad. I'd never seen him look so small, and that made me sad too." 

 "Always reading Sor Juana, and then you act like a slut." 

"If he comes back to see me, I thought, I'll be justified. if he shows up here one day, without calling first, to talk to me, to listen to me tell my old stories, to submit his poems for my consideration, I'll be justified. All poets, even the most avant-garde, need a father. But these poets were meant to be orphans. He never came back." 

“Ah, what a shame they don’t make Los Suicidas mescal anymore, what a shame that time passes, don’t you think? what a shame that we die, and get old, and everything goes galloping away from us.”

 "He wrote constantly, that's what I remember most about him, in the margins of books that he stole and on pieces of scrap paper that he was always losing, and he never wrote poems, he wrote stray lines that he'd assemlbe into long, strange poems later on if he was lucky..." 

"Lumpenism: the childhood syndrome of intellectuals." 

"[...] still watching the semideserted streets and the door of the bus shit tight, like the door of a crematorium oven." 

"But I got a hold of myself, the way I always do, and in the end nothing happened." 

"No, I talked about poetry, just as I did every night, about the creative act and about visceral realism, a literary movmenet that was a perfect match for my inner self and my sense of reality." 

"[...] I don't know how long I was there, the tables around me emptied and were filled again, the man in white never took off his hat and his plate of enchiladas seemed eternal, everything began to tangle in my head, as if the words I had to say were plants and all of a sudden they'd begun to wither, fade, and die."

 "There are books for when you’re calm. The best kind, in my opinion. There are also books for when you’re sad. and there are books for when you’re happy. There are books for when you’re thirsty for knowledge. And there are books for when you’re desperate.”

“Now let’s take the desperate reader, who is presumably the audience or literature of desperation. What do we see? First: the reader is an adolescent or an immature adult, insecure, all nerves. He’s the kind of fucking idiot pardon my language) who committed suicide after reading Werther. Second: he’s a limited reader. Why limited? That’s easy: because he can only read the literature of desperation, or books for the desperate, which amounts to the same thing, the kind of person or freak who’s unable to read all the way through In search of lost time, for example, or the magic mountain (a paradigm, of calm, serene, complete literature, in my humble opinion), or for that matter, Les Miserables or War and Peace.”

“One can’t live one’s whole life in desperation. I the end the boy rebels, the pain becomes unbearable, lucidity gushes out in great cold spurts. The desperate reader (and especially the desperate poetry reader, who is insufferable, believe me) ends up by turning away from books. Inevitably he ends up becoming just plain desperate. Or he’s cured! And then, as part of the regenerative process, he returns slowly- as if wrapped in swaddling cloths, as if under a rain of dissolved sedatives- he returns, as I was saying, to a literature written for cool, serene readers, with their heads set firmly on their shoulders. This is what’s called (by me, if nobody else) the passage from adolescence to adulthood.[…] Ultimately, that literature of resentment, full of sharp instruments and lynched messiahs, doesn’t pierce his heart the way a calm page, a carefully thought-out page, a technically perfect page does.”

“Don’t exhaust the vein! Humility! Seek oneself, lose oneself in strange lands! But with a guiding line, with bread crumbs or white pebbles!”

“And a moment came when there were just five of us aimlessly wandering the streets of Mexico City, possibly in the deepest silence, a Poundian silence, although he maestro is the furthest thing from silent, isn’t he? His words are the words of a tribe that never stops delving into things, investigating, telling every story. And they they’re circumscribed by silence, eroded minute by minute by silence, aren’t they?

“How's it going, Belano, he said, and the young Chilean looked at him and then looked at me, and an idiotic smile lit up his face, the smile of someone mentally impaired, of someone who’d been lobotomized, for God's sake.”

“[...] and he said the sky was the same everywhere, cities changed but the sky was the same, and I said he was wrong, I told him I didn’t believe it”

“My face was burning, but what I felt was less pain than humiliation. It was if those two blows had wounded my pride, my dignity as a woman.

“Sometimes I think about Laura Damian. Not often. Four or five times a day. Eight or sixteen times of I can’t sleep, which makes sense since there’s room for a lot of memories in a twenty-four-hour day. But usually I only think of her four or five times, and each memory, each memory capsule, is approximately two minutes long, although I can’t say for sure because a little while ago someone stole my watch, and keeping time on one’s own is risky.”

“When I was young I had a friend called Dolores. Dolores Pacheco. She really did know how to keep time. I wanted to go to bed with her. I want you to make me see stars, Dolores, I said to her one day. How long do you think stars last? she said. What do you mean? I asked. How long does one of your orgasms last? she said.”

“And I closed my eyes and at first I imagined myself screwing Dolores, but then I didn’t imagine myself with anyone. instead, I was in a riverboat, in a white, sterile room very much like the one I’m in now, and from the walls, from a hidden megaphone, Dolores’ count came dripping down: one Mississippi, two Mississippi, as if someone was radioing me from shore and I couldn’t reply, although deep in my heart all I wanted was to answer, to say: do you read me? I’m fine, I’m alive, I want to come back.”

He was having an out of body experience.

“I exert all the young poets, painters, and sculptors of Mexico, ,whose who have yet to be tainted by the coffered gold of government sinecures, those who have yet to be corrupted by the crooked praise of official criticism and the applause of a crass and concupiscent public, those who have yet to lick the plates at the culinary celebrations of Enrique Gonzalez Martinez, I exert all of them to make art with the steady drip of their intellectual menses. All those of good faith, all those who haven’t yet crumbled in the sad, mephitic efflorescence of our nationalist media with its stink of pulquerias and the dying embers of fried food, all are exerted in the name of the Mexican actualist avant-garde to come and fight alongside us in the resplendent ranks of the decouvert…”

“I had my only copy of Caborca under my arm, the Actual no. 1 in my left hand, and in my right my glass of Los Suicidas mescal, and as I drank I read to them from that distant year of 1921 and we discussed it all, the passages and the mescal, what a lovely way to read and drink, at leisure and among friends (young people have always been my friends), and when there was only a little bit left I poured a last round of Los Suicidas, saying a mental goodbye to that old elixir of mine, and I read the last part of the Actual…”

“[…] while occasionally unintelligible English the Mexican reeled off a story that I had trouble following, a story of lost poets and lost magazines and works no one had ever heard of, in the middle of a landscape that might have been California or Rizona or some Mexican region bordering those states, a real or imaginary place, bleached by the sun and lost in the past, forgotten, or at least no longer of the slightest importance here, in Paris, in the 1970s. A story from the edge of civilization, I said.”

“And then one of them opened the bottle and poured forth the nectar of the gods into our respective glasses, the same one we’d been drinking from before, which some consider a sign of slovenliness and others the ultimate refinement, since when the glass is, shall we say, glazed with mescal, the tequila is more at lease, like a naked woman in a fur coat. Salud, then! I said. Salud, they said.”

These poets were translating foreign literature.

"I was literally scaring myself. Then it seemed completely pathetic. And later, when I was finally able to get a little distance from it and judge it more coolly (though only in a manner of speaking, of course), it struck me as noble and sad, and I seriously feared for my mental well-being.”

“At the time I was reading Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, and everything I saw or did only heightened my sense of vulnerability. I remember that I got sick and spent a few days in bed and Claudia, always so perceptive, took the Tractatus away and hid it in Danie’s room, giving me instead of the novels that she liked to read, the endless Rose, by a Frenchman called J.M. G. Arcimboldi.”

“I went for the dancing in some sense I went for Cesarea, or rather for Cesarea’s ghost, which was still dancing around those places that always seemed to be on their last legs.”

“[…] and the honest truth by then I was walking as if I were doing that heel-toe dance step, touching the heel of the left foot to the toe of the right and then the heel of the right foot to the toe of the left, a ridiculous step but one that had its day,, don’t ask me when, Miguel Aleman was president, I danced it at some point, we’ve all done foolish things, and then I heard the door slam and then voices and I said to myself Amadeo stop being an ass and make your way toward the voices, part the mists of this river with your rust-eaten prow and return to your friends, and that’s what I did […] Ah, what a relief to come into the light, even when it’s a shadowy half-light, what a relief to come where it’s clear.”

“You have to live your life, that’s all there is to it. A drunk I met the other day on my way out of the bar La Mala Senda told me so. Literature is crap.”

“Because I’ve run out of money, he said, I’ve lost everything.’

Easy come, easy go, I would have liked to say (I’ve always been a staunch anti-capitalist), but I didn’t say anything because the poor man looked tired and his face was so sad.”

“The bastards were laughing with Veronica Volker, but they were laughing with Leon Trotsky too. It was the closest thing they would ever get to the Bolsheviks. It was probably the closest they would ever want to get. I thought about Don Ivan Rejanovich, and I felt my chest swell with sadness. But with happiness too, goddamn it. The strangest things happen at La Nacional on pay day.”

“The truth is that they looked like bums, glaring out of place there, at the entrance to the theater, among well-dressed, clean-shaven people who edged away as they climbed the stairs. As if they were afraid that one of them might reach out his hand and grope them. At least one of them seemed to be under the influence of some kind of drug. I think it was Belano. The other one, Ulises Lima, I think, was reading and writing in the margins of a book, singing softly to himself.

“Alamo took out his pack of Delicados and offered it around. Labarca and I each took one, but the inspector waved them away and lit a Cuban cigarette. These are stronger, he said with a clear hint of irony. It was as if he were saying: we revolutionaries smoke strong tobacco, real men smoke strong tobacco, those of us with a stake in objective reality smoke real tobacco.

“Jacinto, you know Ulises, you’re his friend, you know what he’s like, but Jacinto said he’d disappeared, end of story, just like Ambrose Bierce and the English poets who died in the Spanish Civil War and Pushkin, except that in Pushkin’s case his wife, I mean, was Reality, the Frenchman who killed Pushkin was the Contras, the snows of St. Petersburg were the empty spaces Ulises Lima left in his wake, his lethargy, I mean, and his laziness and lack of common sense, and the seconds in the duel were Mexican Poetry or Latin American Poetry, which, in the form of the Solidarity Delegation, were silent witnesses to the death of one of the best poets of our day.

“I heard the last coin fall into the bowels of the public phone, the sound of leaves, the wind whipping dead leaves, a sound like cables tangling and untangling and then slipping apart in the void. Poetic misery.”

“In the end I was spooked by the powers that I myself had called up.”

“But what scared me even more, I swear, was poking into the nature of my luck.”

“All I know is that she was alone when she laid them and that the place they were being laid- I apologize if I sound pedantic- was like Plato’s cave, a kind of hell or heaven where there are only shadows (lately I’ve been reading the Greek philosophers).”

“I’d start to read, and many times I’d fall asleep in a chair (as Chileans also have a tendency to do), and wake up early in the morning, when the sky in Barcelona is an almost purplish blue, almost violet, a sky that makes you want to sing and cry just to look at it, and after looking up at the sky I would keep reading, without letting myself rest, as if I were about to die and I didn’t want to die before I’d understood what was going on around me and over my head and under my feet.”

SIMILAR TO THE NORTHERN ISLAND (Russia)

“Have you ever heard the theory of Easter Island? According to the theory, Chile is the real Easter Island […] We were born on Easter Island and our moai are ourselves, the Chileans, looking in bewilderment toward the four points of the compass.”

“but I was speaking in a voice I didn’t recognize, a voice that scared me, to tell the truth, and I couldn’t open my eyes, but with my Mighty Mouse ears I heard you, Belano, washing dishes in the kitchen of my bar, and then I said to myself for fuck’s sake, Andres, you can’t go off the rails now, if you’re dreaming, just keep dreaming, you bastard, and if you aren’t dreaming, open your eyes and don’t be afraid.”

“Then I would start to feel sick and get hotter and hotter and lose my sense of things, my sense of stability, and all I wanted was to go back to the straight line. And yet, nine times out of ten, after the wavy line would come the jagged line, and at that point the best way to describe how I felt was as if I were being torn apart, not from outside but from the inside, a tearing that began in the belly but that I soon felt in my head and my throat too, and the only way I could escape the pain was by waking up, although waking up wasn’t exactly easy.”

“Back then I was fat or I thought I was fat and I was a nervous wreck. I cried at night and I had an iron will. I was also leading two lives, or a life that was like two lives. On the one hand, I was a philosophy student and I worked temporary jobs like the one at the Mario Morillo gallery. On the other hand, I was a militant in a Trotskyite party with a clandestine existence that in some confused way I knew served my interests well, although I didn’t know what my interests were. One afternoon, when we were handing out leaflets to cars stopped in traffic, I suddenly found myself in front of my mother’s Chrysler. Poor thing, the shock almost killed her. And I got so nervous that I handed her the mimeographed sheet and said read this and turned around and left, although as I walked away I heard her say that we would talk at home. We always talked at home. Endless discussions that ended with recommendations, about doctors, movies, books, money, politics.”

“That night I stayed at a cheap hotel in Montparnasse and I spent hours thinking about my life so far and when my body couldn’t take it anymore I stopped thinking and lay down in bed, staring at the ceiling, and then I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, but I couldn’t, and I was like that for days, unable to sleep. Holed up in the hotel, only going out in the morning, eating almost nothing, hardly washing, constipated, with terrible headaches, basically wanting to die.”

“Another problem was my smell, the smell of my vagina, the smell when we had sex. I’d always been ashamed of it. Back then it was very strong, and it made its way into every corner of the room where we were fucking. And Arturo’s apartment was so small and we made love so often that my smell wasn’t confined to the bedroom but seeped into the living room, which was only separated from the bedroom by a curtain, and into the kitchen, a tiny room that didn’t even have a door. And the worst of it was that the apartment was in the center of Barcelona, in the old city, and Arturo’s friends would stop by every day without calling first, most of them Chileans, although there were Mexicans too, Daniel among them, and I didn’t know whether I was more embarrassed by the smell when it was the Chileans, who hardly knew me, or the Mexicans, who in some sense were our mutual friends. Either way, I hated my smell.”

“And we kept making love, although each night I distanced myself a little more, involuntarily, without meaning to, without knowing where I was going. It was the same thing that had already happened to me with Abraham, more or less, except now it was a little worse, now that I didn’t have anything.”

“One night, while we were making love, I told him. I told him that I thought I was going crazy, that I kept having the same symptoms. I talked for a long time. His response surprised me (it was the last time he surprised me). He said that if I was going crazy then he would go crazy too, that he didn’t mind going crazy with me. Do you like to tempt fate? I said. It’s not fate I’m tempting, he said. I searched for his eyes in the dark and asked whether he was serious. Of course I’m serious, he said, and he pressed his body close to mine. That night I slept peacefully. The next morning I knew I had to leave him, the sooner the better…”

“I did read a lot, but when I try to remember what I read a kind of hot, quivery wall gets in the way. Maybe I read Dante in Italian. Maybe Gadda. I don’t know.”

“I was reading and taking notes and amassing knowledge. Otium sine litteris mors est et homini vivi sepulture. Although that may be an exaggeration. In short (and to be honest): I was dying of boredom.”

“And that was what I thought as behind me human passions roiled and my eyes counted the stars: that the story I was living was just like Baroja’s story and that Spain was still Baroja’s Spain, on other words a Spain where chasms weren’t barricaded and children were still careless and fell into them, where people smoked and fainted in a rather excessive way, and where the Guardia Civil never showed up when it was needed.”

“I don’t know why, since it didn’t suit my mood- with a toothless mouth, a mouth full of teeth, a fixed smile, a young girl’s gaping sex, an eye watching me from the depths of the earth. The eye was, in some dark sense, innocent, since I knew that it thought no one could see it as long as it couldn’t see anyone- absurdly, since it was inevitable that as it kept watch, giants or ex-giants like me were watching it too.”

“[…] and the strong flesh and the weak mind went from right to left and the weak flesh and the strong mind went from left to right, and each time they crossed paths they acknowledged each other but didn’t stop, out of politeness or because they knew each other from other walks, if only slightly, and I thought: my God, talk, talk, speak to each other, dialogue is the key to any door, ex abundatia cordis os loquitur, but the weak mind and the strong mind only nodded”

“What’s more, it’s a Galician joke. Maybe you’ve heard it before. A man goes walking in the forest. Like me, for example, walking in a forest like the Parco di Traiano or the Terme di Traiano, but a hundred times bigger and more unspoiled. And the man goes walking, I go walking, through the forest and I run into five hundred thousand Galicians who’re walking and crying. And then I stop (a kindly giant, an interested giant for the last time) and I ask them why they’re crying. And one of the Galicians stops and says: because we’re all alone and we’re lost.”

“Hypostasis of romantic love. Threshold space. No-man’s-land.”

“After the last show, the apartment would be plunged into a deep silence, as if the building had suddenly dropped into a mine shaft, except that the shaft was liquid somehow, an underwater world, because soon afterward I started to imagine fish, those flat, blind deep-sea fish.”

***************************************************************************

“In a brief moment of lucidity, I was sure that we’d all gone crazy. But then that moment of lucidity was displaced by a super-second of super-lucidity (if I can put it that way), in which I realized that this scene was the logical outcome of our ridiculous lives. It wasn’t a punishment but a new wrinkle. It gave us a glimpse of ourselves in our common humanity. It wasn’t proof our idle guilt but a sign of our miraculous and pointless innocence. But that’s not it. that’s not it. we were still and they were in motion and the sand on the beach was moving, not because of the wind but because of what they were doing and what we were doing, which was nothing, which was watching, and all of that together was the wrinkle, the moment of super-lucidity. Then, nothing.”

******************************************************************************

“[…] and Quima sighed and I sighed and blew smoke rings into the tainted air of that hideous beach and the wind whipped the rings away instantly, before there was time for anything”

“And of course poetry and prison have always been neighbors.”

“Pallor x iceberg = a lonely hallway slowly peopled by our own fear, peopled with those who wander the feria of the hallway, looking not for any book but for some certainty to shore up the void of our certainties. Thus we interpret life at moments of the deepest desperation.”

“Yesterday was sacrificed a young South American writer on the town altar. As his blood dripped over the bas-relief of our ambitions I thought about my books and oblivion, and that, at last, made sense.”

“And we can wander and greet each other (I, at least, greet everyone, the juries and the hangmen, the benefactors and the students), and we can praise the faggot for his unbridled heterosexuality and the impotent man for his virility and the cuckold for his spotless honor.”

“We’re guided by fate, though we’ve left nothing to chance.”

“If we didn’t have to read too our wok would be a point suspended in nothingness, a mandala pared down to a minimum of meaning, our silence, our certainty of standing with one foot dangling on the far side of death. Fantasies. Fantasies. In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we’re no more than castrated cats. Castrated cats wedded to cats with slit throats. Everything that begins as comedy ends as a cryptographic exercise.”

“But over the literary chatter I kept hearing the sound of my girlfriend’s sensible shoes as she quietly made her rounds, toting her yellow bag or pulling her yellow cart after her, depending on how much mail she had to deliver that day, and then I’d lose my concentration, and my tongue, which seconds before had been sharp and clever, would turn clumsy, and I’d fall into a sullen, helpless silence that the others, including our maestro, would luckily take as evidence of my pensive, introspective, philosophical nature.”

“Some nights, though, when I’m in my office putting the final touches on my column or revising a few pages of my novel, I hear footsteps in the street, and I think, I could almost swear, that it’s the mailwoman out delivering mail at the wrong time of day.”

“It’s just a manner of speaking. Actually, sometimes I dream I’m being inducted into hell.”

“I pay for my relationship with the mailwoman with a few nightmares, a few auditory hallucinations.”

“I settle for hearing her footsteps, fainter and fainter. I settle for thinking about the hugeness of the Universe. Everything that begins as comedy ends as a horror movie.”

“Only Belano was talking, as he had been at the beginning, and surprisingly, he was telling his own story, a story that made no sense, telling it over and over, with the difference each time he told it he condensed it a little more, until at last all he was saying was: I wanted to die, but I realized it was better not to.”

“Yes, you could say I’m the foremost scholar in the field, the definite authority, but that’s not saying much. I’m probably the only person who cares. Hardly anyone even remembers the visceral realists anymore.”

“And then I looked at the walls of my front room, my books, my photographs, the stains on the ceiling, and then I looked at them and I saw as if through a window, one of them with his eyes open and the other with his eyes shut, but both of them looking, looking out? looking in? I didn’t know, all I knew is that their facts had turned pale, as if they were at the North Pole, and I told them so, and the one who was sleeping breathed noisily and said: it’s more as if the North Pole had descended on Mexico City, Amadeo”

*****************************************************************************

“Today I realized that what I wrote yesterday I really wrote today: everything from December 31 I wrote on January 1, i.e., today, and what I wrote on December 30 I wrote on the 31^st, i.e., yesterday. What I wrote today I’m really writing tomorrow, which for me will be today and yesterday, and also, in some sense, tomorrow: an invisible day. But enough of that.”

**************************************************************************

“Without closing my eyes, and at the same time I was seeing everyone, I saw the car speeding like an arrow along the roads leading out of Mexico City. I felt as if we were floating on air.”

“And then I started to dream about someone crossing a field of bones, and the person in question had no face, or at least I couldn’t see his face because I was watching him from a distance. I was at the foot of a hill and there was hardly any air in the valley. The person was naked and had long hair and at first I thought it was Archilochus but it really could have been anyone. when I opened my eyes it was still night and we had left Mexico City.”

“[…] I don’t know why but I kept thinking about Augustus and Horace and listening with my left ear to the soap opera that was on TV and with my right ear to Lupe and the old ladies talking, and suddenly my memory went plumph, like a soft wall collapsing, and I saw Horace fighting against Augustus or Octavian and for Brutus and Cassius, who had murdered Caesar and wanted to bring back the Republic, shit, it couldn’t have been weirder if I had dropped acid”

“Hello, Garcia Madero, he said in Latin, although I don’t understand a fucking word of Latin, I’m Horace, born in Venusia in 65 B.C., son of a freed slave (the most loving father anyone could as for), appointed tribune under Brutus, ready to march into battle, the Battle of Philippi, which we’ll lose but which I’m destined to fight, the Battle of Philippi, where the fate of mankind is a stake, and then one of the old ladies touched my arm”

“Her short black hair was a mess and she seemed thinner than before, as if she were turning invisible, as if the mornings were painlessly dissolving her, but at the same time she seemed more beautiful than ever.”

“Once she asked her what she was writing about and Cesarea said a Greek woman. The Greek woman’s name was Hypatia. Sometime later the teacher looked up the name in the encyclopedia and learned that Hypatia was an Alexandrian philosopher killed by Christians in 415.”

“The room was painful proof of the nearly impossible distance between her and her friend. it wasn’t that it was untidy or smelled bad (as Belano wondered), or that Cesarea’s poverty had surpassed the limits of gentility, or that the filth of Calle Ruben Dario extended into every corner, but something subtler, as if reality were skewed inside that lot room, or even worse, as if over time someone (who but Cesarea?) had imperceptivity turned her back on reality. Or worst of all, had twisted it on purpose.”

Roberto Bolaño has opened up a whole new world for me- magic realism. 

My favorite characters were: Edith Oster, Julio Martinez Morales, and the narrator Garcia Madero.

-----

Pub:
Picador 2008, Translator: Natasha Wimmer