đ Book: 2666
Author:: Roberto Bolaño
LANGUAGE:: en
Notes and Highlights
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and what Norton had taken for depression was just theItalianâs natural state
The first conversation began awkwardly,although Espinoza had been expecting Pelletierâs call, as if both men found itdifficult to say what sooner or later they would have to say. The first twentyminutes were tragic in tone, with the word fateused ten times and the wordfriendship twenty-four times. Liz Nortonâs name was spoken fifty times,nine of them in vain. The word Paris wassaid seven times,Madrid, eight. The word love was spoken twice, once by each man. The word horror was spoken six times and the wordhappiness once (by Espinoza). Theword solution was said twelve times.The word solipsism seven times. Theword euphemism ten times. The word category, in the singular and theplural, nine times. The word structuralismonce (Pelletier). The term Americanliterature three times. The words dinneror eating or breakfast or sandwich nineteentimes. The words eyes or hands or hair fourteen times. Then the conversation proceeded more smoothly.Pelletier told Espinoza a joke in German and Espinoza laughed. In fact, theyboth laughed, wrapped up in the waves or whatever it was that linked theirvoices and ears across the dark fields and the wind and the snow of thePyrenees and the rivers and the lonely roads and the separate and interminablesuburbs surrounding Paris andMadrid.
what theyâdassumed all along, which was that they were civilized beings, beings capable ofnoble sentiments, not two dumb beasts debased by routine and regular sedentarywork, no, that night Pelletier and Espinoza discovered that they were generous,so generous that if theyâd been together theyâd have felt the need to go outand celebrate, dazzled by the shine of their own virtue, a shine that might notlast (since virtue, once recognized in a flash, has no shine and makes its homein a dark cave amid cave dwellers, some dangerous indeed), and for lack ofcelebration or revelry they hailed this virtue with an unspoken promise ofeternal friendship, and sealed the vow, after they hung up their respectivephones in their respective apartments crammed with books, by sipping whiskeywith supreme slowness and watching the night outside their windows, maybeseeking unconsciously what the Swabian had sought outside the widowâs window invain.
Iâd love her until the end of time, hethought. An hour later heâd already forgotten the matter completely.
Morini read the letter three times. With aheavy heart, he thought now wrong Norton was when she said her love and herex-husband and everything theyâd been through were behind her. Nothing is everbehind us.
, which was what Pelletier and Espinoza believed would happen toMorini, not in a conscious way, of course, but in a kind of disjointed orinstinctual way, a dark thought in the form of a microscopic sign throbbing ina dark and microscopic part of the two friendsâ souls.
He heard the sentence not with his earsbut in his head.
It was a very pleasant afternoon. From hisarmchair, Morini admired Nortonâs sitting roomâher books and her framed printshanging on white walls, her mysterious photographs and souvenirs, herpreferences expressed in things as simple as the choice of furniture, which wastasteful, comfortable, and modest, and even in the sliver of tree-lined streetthat she surely saw each morning before she left the apartmentâand he began tofeel good
Espinoza was late. Life is shit, thought Pelletierin astonishment, all shit! - And then: if we hadnât teamed up, she would bemine now. And then: if there hadnât been mutual understanding and friendshipand affinity and alliance, she would be mine now. And a little later: if therehadnât been anything, I wouldnât even have met her. And: I might have met her,since each of us has an independent interest in Archimboldi that doesnât springfrom our mutual friendship. And: itâs possible, too, that she might have hatedme, found me pedantic, cold, arrogant, narcissistic, an intellectual elitist.The term intellectual elitist amusedhim. Espinoza was late. Norton seemed very calm. Actually, Pelletier seemedvery calm too, but that was far from how he felt.
Espinozaâs plane has crashed, saidPelletier, this time not raising his voice, and Norton, instead of looking atthe television screen, looked at him. It took her only a few seconds to realizethat the plane in flames wasnât a Spanish plane. In addition to the firemen andrescue teams, passengers could be seen walking away, some limping, otherswrapped in blankets, their faces contorted in fear or shock, but apparentlyunharmed.
Pelletier insisted on sitting in back, until he saw a sarcastic flash inNortonâs eyes, and then he said he would sit anywhere, which happened to be thebackseat.
On the plane back toParis, Pelletier began to think,inexplicably, about the Berthe Morisot book heâd wanted to slam against thewall the night before.
Why? Pelletier asked himself. Was it that he didnât likeBerthe Morisot or something she stood for in some momentary way? Actually, heliked Berthe Morisot. All at once it struck him that Norton hadnât bought thebook, that heâd been the one who traveled from Paris to London with thegift-wrapped volume, that the first Berthe Morisot reproductions Norton hadever seen were the ones in that book, with Pelletier next to her, massaging theback of her neck and walking her through each painting. Did he regret havinggiven her the book now? No, of course not.
but in truth neither Pelletier nor Espinoza had astrong sense of any such virtue. Both of them paid it lip service, of course.But in practice, neither believed in friendship or loyalty. They believed inpassion, they believed in a hybrid form of social or public happiness (both votedSocialist, albeit with the occasional abstention), they believed in thepossibility of self-realization.
âA badulaque,â said Espinoza, âis someone of no consequence.Itâs a word that can also be applied to fools, but there are fools ofconsequence, and badulaque appliesonly to fools of no consequence.â
Sex, they agreed, was too wonderful(although almost immediately they regretted the adjective) to get in the way ofa friendship based as much on emotional as intellectual affinities. Pelletierand Espinoza took pains, however, to make it clear there in front of each otherthat the ideal thing for them, and they imagined for Norton too, was that sheultimately and in a nontraumatic way (try to make it a soft landing, saidPelletier) choose one of them, or neither of them, said Espinoza, either waythe decision was in her hands, Nortonâs hands, and it was a decision she couldmake whenever she wanted, whenever was most convenient for her, or never make,put off, defer, postpone, draw out, delay, adjourn until her deathbed, theydidnât care, because they were as in love with her now, while Liz was keepingthem in limbo, as they had been before, when they were her active lovers orcolovers, as in love with her as they would be when she chose one of them orthe other, or when she (in a possible future that was only slightly morebitter, a future of shared bitterness, of somehow mitigated bitterness), ifsuch was her wish, chose neither of them. To which Norton replied with aquestion, no doubt partly rhetorical, but a plausible question all the same:what would happen if, while she took her time considering the options, one ofthem, Pelletier for example, suddenly fell in love with a student who wasyounger and prettier than she, and richer, too, and more charming? Should sheconsider the pact broken and automatically give up on Espinoza? Or should shetake the Spaniard, since he was the only one left? To which Pelletier andEspinoza responded that the real possibility of such a thing happening wasextremely remote, and anyway she could do as she liked, even become a nun ifshe so desired.
That morning, while he was at theuniversity, he spent his idle moments thinking about Vanessa. When he saw heragain they didnât make love, though he paid her as if they had, and they talkedfor hours. Before he fell asleep, Pelletier had come to some conclusions.Vanessa was perfectly suited to live in the Middle Ages, emotionally as well asphysically for her, the concept of âmodern lifeâ was meaningless. Shehad much more faith in what she could see than in the media. She wasmistrustful and brave, although paradoxically her bravery made her trust peopleâwaiters, train conductors, friends in trouble, for exampleâwho almost alwayslet her down or betrayed her trust. These betrayals drove her wild and couldlead her into unthinkably violent situations. She held grudges, too, and sheboasted of saying things to peopleâs faces without beating around the bush. Sheconsidered herself a free woman and had an answer for everything. Whatever shedidnât understand didnât interest her. She never thought about the future, evenher sonâs future, but only the present, a perpetual present. She was pretty butdidnât consider herself pretty. More than half her friends were Moroccanimmigrants, but she, who never got around to voting for Le Pen, saw immigrationas a danger toFrance.âWhores are there to be fucked,âEspinoza said the night Pelletier talked to him about Vanessa, ânotpsychoanalyzed.âEspinoza, unlike his friend, didnâtremember any of their names. On one side were the bodies and faces, and on theother side, flowing in a kind of ventilation tube, the Lorenas, the Eolas, theMartas, the Paulas, the Susanas, names without bodies, faces without names.
He never dreamed of her again, and finally hemanaged to forget her.
Then he began to reflect. But his thoughts only returned to what had justhappened, the strict past, the past that seems deceptively like the present.
âJohns who?â asked Norton.âEdwin Johns, the painter you told meabout,â said Morini.âOh, Edwin Johns,â said Norton.âWhy?ââFor money,â said Morini.âMoney?ââBecause he believed in investments,the flow of capital, one has to play the game to win, that kind of thing.â
What if Archimboldi were fleeing? What if Archimboldihad suddenly found a new reason to flee?
On the ride back to the hotel,they lost the sense of being in a hostile environment, although hostile wasnâtthe word, an environment whose language they refused to recognize, anenvironment that existed on some parallel plane where they couldnât make theirpresence felt, imprint themselves, unless they raised their voices, unless theyargued, something they had no intention of doing.
Well, because heâs a typical Mexican intellectual,his main concern is getting by,â
who offers them a better job, better pay, something theintellectual thinks he deserves, and intellectuals always think theydeserve better.
The intellectuals retire for the night. Themoon is fat and the night air is so pure it seems edible. Songs can be heard insome bars, the notes reaching the street. Sometimes an intellectual wanders offcourse and goes into one of these places and drinks mezcal. Then he thinks whatwould happen if one day he. But no. He doesnât think anything. He just drinksand sings. Sometimes he thinks he sees a legendary German writer. But all heâsreally seen is a shadow, sometimes all heâs seen is his own shadow,which comes home every night so that the intellectual wonât burst or hanghimself from the lintel. But he swears heâs seen a German writer and his ownhappiness, his sense of order, his bustle, his spirit of revelry rest on thatconviction. The next morning itâs nice out. The sun shoots sparks but doesnâtburn. A person can go out reasonably relaxed, with his shadow on his heels, andstop in a park and read a few pages of Valery. And so on until the end.â
Later they called the remaining hotels and motels andArchimboldi wasnât at any of them. For a few hours they thought Amalfitano wasright, that Almendroâs tip was probably the product of an overheated imagination,that Archimboldiâs trip to Mexicoexisted only in the recesses of El Cerdoâs brain.
Someone tells you something about ⊠the natural beautyof Iceland⊠people bathing in thermal springs, among geysers ⊠in fact youâve seenit in pictures, but still you say you canât believe it⊠Although obviouslyyou believe it⊠Exaggeration is a form of polite admiration ⊠You set itup so the person youâre talking to can say: itâs true ⊠And then you say:incredible. First you canât believe it and then you think itâs incredible.
A person could even get used to silence like this, thought Espinoza, andbe happy. But he would never get used to it, he knew that too.
âArchimboldi is here,â said Pelletier, âandweâre here, and this is the closest weâll ever be to him.â
I donât know what Iâm doing in Santa Teresa, Amalfitanosaid to himself after heâd been living in the city for a week. Donât you? Donâtyou really? he asked himself. Really I donât, he said to himself, and that wasas eloquent as he could be.He had a little single-story house, three bedrooms, a fullbathroom and a half bathroom, a combined kitchenâliving roomâdining room withwindows that faced west, a small brick porch where there was a wooden benchworn by the wind that came down from the mountains and the sea, the wind fromthe north, the wind through the gaps, the wind that smelled like smoke and camefrom the south. He had books heâd kept for more than twenty-five years. Notmany. All of them old. He had books heâd bought in the last ten years, books hedidnât mind lending, books that couldâve been lost or stolen for all he cared.He had books that he sometimes received neatly packaged and with unfamiliarreturn addresses, books he didnât even open anymore. He had a yard perfect forgrowing grass and planting flowers, but he didnât know what flowers would dobest thereâflowers, as opposed to cacti or succulents. There would be time (sohe thought) for gardening. He had a wooden gate that needed a coat of paint. Hehad a monthly salary.
She went to Mondragon once every three days now, instead of oncea day, and she looked through the fence with no hope at all of seeing the poet,seeking at most some sign, a sign that she knew beforehand she would neverunderstand or that she would understand only many years later, when none of itmattered anymore.
TheUniversity ofSanta Teresa was likea cemetery that suddenly begins to think, in vain. It also was like an emptydance club.
I mean, saidAmalfitano, I didnât hang it out because it got sprayed with the hose ordropped in the water, I hung it there just because, to see how it survives theassault of nature, to see how it survives this desert climate.
. As if I were in Trendelenburgâs study, he thought, as if I were followingin Whiteheadâs footsteps along the edge of a canal, as if I were approachingGuyauâs sickbed and asking him for advice. What would his response have been? Behappy. Live in the moment. Be good. Or rather: Who are you? What are you doinghere? Go away.
Rosa and Rafael spoke only to exchange sandwiches.Professor Perez seemed lost in her own thoughts. And Amalfitano felt tired andoverwhelmed by the landscape, a landscape that seemed best suited to the youngor the old, imbecilic or insensitive or evil and old who meant to imposeimpossible tasks on themselves and others until they breathed their last.
People see what they want to see and what people want to see neverhas anything to do with the truth. People are cowards to the last breath. Iâmtelling you between you and me: the human being, broadly speaking, is theclosest thing there is to a rat.
Georg Trakl is one of my favorites.
What a sad paradox,thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on thegreat, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown.They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to thesame thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have nointerest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against thatsomething, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows usand spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.
Honey,âshe said, âEdnaâs dead.âHeasked when sheâd died. He heard the woman sobbing at the other end of the line,and other voices, probably other women. He asked how. No one said anything andhe hung up. He dialed his motherâs number.âWho isthis?â he heard a woman say angrily.Hethought: my mother is in hell. He hung up again.
And let me explain something. When I say confusion, I also mean awe.
USEFULNESS. But the sun has its uses, as any fool knows,said Seaman. From up close itâs hell, but from far away youâd have to be avampire not to see how useful it is, how beautiful. Then he began to talk aboutthings that were useful back in the day, things once generally appreciated butnow distrusted instead, like smiles. In the fifties, for example, he said, asmile opened doors for you. I donât know if it could get you places, but itcould definitely open doors. Now nobody trusts a smile. Before, if you were asalesman and you went in somewhere, youâd better have a big smile on your face.It was the same thing no matter whether you were a waiter or a businessman, asecretary, a doctor, a scriptwriter, a gardener. The only folks who neversmiled were cops and prison guards. That hasnât changed. But everybody else,they all did their best to smile. It was a golden age for dentists in America.
Reading is like thinking, likepraying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listeningto other peopleâs ideas, like listening to music (oh yes), like looking at theview, like taking a walk on the beach.
This he blamed on poverty, because according to Jones, poverty didnâtcause only illness and resentment, it caused bad temper.
And the funny thing is, the archetypesof human madness and cruelty werenât invented by the men of our day but by ourforebears. The Greeks, you might say, invented evil, the Greeks saw the evilinside us all, but testimonies or proofs of this evil no longer move us. Theystrike us as futile, senseless.
But in Mexico heavyweights are few and farbetween, and he won all his fights. This is a country with good bantamweights,good flyweights, good featherweights, even the occasional welterweight, but noheavyweights or light heavyweights. It has to do with tradition and nutrition.Morphology. Now Mexico has apresident whoâs taller than the president of the United States. This is the firsttime itâs ever happened. Gradually, the presidents here are getting taller. Itused to be unthinkable. A Mexican president would come up to the Americanpresidentâs shoulder, at most. Sometimes the Mexican presidentâs head would bebarely an inch or two above our presidents belly button. Thatâs just how itwas. But now the Mexican upper class is changing. Theyâre getting richer andthey go looking for wives north of the border. Thatâs what you call improvingthe race. A short Mexican sends his short son to college in California. The kid hasmoney and does whatever he wants and that impresses some girls. Thereâs noplace on earth with more dumb girls per square foot than a college in California.
practicalexperiences, thought Fate. An emptiness to be filled, a hunger to be satisfied,people to talk to so I can finish my article and get paid.
âItsounds like the title of a David Lynch film,â said Fate.Theclerk shrugged and said that all of Mexico was a collage of diverse andwide-ranging homages.âEverysingle thing in this country is an homage to everything in the world, even thethings that havenât happened yet,â he said.
From a distance, he thought, maybe all madmen look alike.
But the worst phobias, in my opinion, are pantophobia, which is fear of everything, and phobophobia, fear of fear itself.If you had to suffer from one of the two, which would you choose? Phobophobia, said Juan de Dios Martinez.Think carefully, it has its drawbacks, said the director. Between being afraid of everything and being afraid of my own fear, Iâd take the latter. Donât forget Iâm a policeman and if I was scared of everything I couldnât work. But if youâre afraid of your own fears, youâre forced to live in constant contemplation of them, and if they materialize, what you have is a system that feeds on itself, a vicious cycle, said the director.
That night Epifanio dreamed about the female coyote left by the side of the road. In the dream he was sitting a few yards away, on a chunk of basalt, staring alertly into the dark and listening to the whimpering of the coyote, whose insides were torn up. She probably already knows she lost her pup, thought Epifanio, but instead of getting up and putting a bullet in her brain he sat there and did nothing. Then he saw himself driving Pedro Negreteâs car along a long track that came to an end on the slopes of a mountain bristling with sharp rocks. There were no passengers in the car. He couldnât tell whether he had stolen the car or the chief had loaned it to him. The track was straight and he could easily get up to ninety miles an hour, although whenever he hit the accelerator he heard a strange noise from under the chassis, like something jumping. Behind him rose a giant plume of dust, like the tail of a hallucinogenic coyote. But the mountains still looked just as far away, so Epifanio braked and got out to inspect the car. At first glance everything looked all right. The suspension, the engine, the battery, the axles. Suddenly, with the car stopped, he heard the knocks again and turned around. He opened the trunk. There was a body inside. Its hands and feet were tied. A black cloth was wrapped around its head. What the fuck is this? shouted Epifanio in the dream. When he had checked that the body was still alive (its chest was rising and falling, though perhaps too violently), he closed the trunk without daring to remove the black cloth and see who it was. He got back in the car, which leaped forward at the first thrust. On the horizon the mountains seemed to be burning or crumbling, but he kept driving toward them.
One night a drunken neighbor was hitting his wife. Everyone who lived on the alley heard her screams, which rose or fell in intensity as time passed, as if the battered woman was in the throes of a difficult childbirth, the kind that often ends in the death of the mother and the little angel. But the woman wasnât giving birth, she was just being beaten.
La Vaca stopped and stood there. Listening. Just then the screams werenât very loud, but after a few minutes the volume rose again and during all that time, the old woman said to the police with a smile, La Vaca stood motionless, waiting, like someone who walks down a random street and suddenly hears her favorite song, the saddest song in the world, coming from a window.
Luckily for him, ever since heâd met Demetrio Aguila he no longer stayed at a boardinghouse or hotel or spent sleepless nights wandering from dive bar to dive bar and drinking. Instead, he slept at the house on Calle Luciernaga, in Colonia Rubeân Dario, owned by his friend, who had given him a key. The little house, despite what a person might expect, was always clean, but its cleanliness, its neatness, lacked any feminine touch: it was a stoic cleanliness, utterly graceless, like the cleanliness of a prison or monastery cell, a cleanliness that tended toward sparseness, not abundance.
Everyone was free to mess with their own heads.
Every hundred feet the world changes, said Florita Almada.
Around this time, Lalo Cura found some books at the precinct, books no one read that seemed destined to be rat food, on top of shelves of forgotten reports and files.
Have you ever listened carefully to a child cry, Harry? No, he said, I donât have children. True, said Ramirez, forgive me, Iâm sorry. Why is he apologizing? wondered Harry. A decent woman, a good woman. A woman you treat badly, without meaning to. Out of habit. We become blind (or at least partly blind) out of habit, Harry, until suddenly, when thereâs no turning back, this woman falls ill in our arms. A woman who took care of everyone, except herself, and she begins to fade away in our arms. And even then we donât realize, said Ramirez. Did I tell him my story? wondered Harry Magana. Have I sunk that low? Things arenât the way they seem, whispered Ramirez. Do you think things are the way they seem, as simple as that, no complicating factors, no questions asked?
And she said: after these visions I canât sleep. No matter what I take for my nerves, nothing helps. The shoemakerâs son always goes barefoot.
The other bathroom was so dirty that it might have been abandoned, even though the water was running and the toilet worked, but instead it seemed set there on purpose to illustrate an asymmetrical and incomprehensible phenomenon.
The silence, Epifanio would tell Lalo Cura that night, was total.
Every life, Epifanio said that night to Lalo Cura, no matter how happy it is, ends in pain and suffering.
Despondent, she went back to her house, to the other neighbor woman and the girls, and for a while the four of them experienced what it was like to be in purgatory, a long, helpless wait, a wait that begins and ends in neglect, a very Latin American experience, as it happened, and all too familiar, something that once you thought about it you realized you experienced daily, minus the despair, minus the shadow of death sweeping over the neighborhood like a flock of vultures and casting its pall, upsetting all routines, leaving everything overturned.
moment he turned off the light, or maybe seconds before he turned off the light, and when that happened he simply couldnât turn off the light and then he got out of bed and went over to the window and looked out at the street, an ordinary, ugly, silent, dimly lit street, and then he went into the kitchen and put water on to boil and made himself coffee, and sometimes, as he drank the hot coffee with no sugar, shitty coffee, he turned on the TV and watched late-night shows broadcast across the desert from the four cardinal points, at that late hour he could get Mexican channels and American channels, channels with crippled madmen who galloped under the stars and uttered unintelligible greetings, in Spanish or English or Spanglish, every last fucking word unintelligible, and then Juan de Dios Martinez set his coffee cup on the table and covered his face with his hands and a faint and precise sob escaped his lips, as if he were weeping or trying to weep, but when finally he removed his hands, all that appeared, lit by the TV screen, was his old face, his old skin, stripped and dry, and not the slightest trace of a tear.
Everything you might see today in a film from theNetherlands or a collection of photographs or a dirty book had already been set before the year 1789, and for the most part was a repetition, a filip on an already-gazing gaze.
Some people hold grudges for a long time, observed Macario Lopez Santos. True, Macario, said the general, inMexico we donât know how to be good sports. Of course, if you lose you die and if you win sometimes you die too, which makes it hard to keep up a sporting attitude, but still, the general reflected, some of us try to fight the good fight.
In New York he tried in vain to forget her. The first few days were tinged with melancholy and regret and JTthought he would never recover. Anyway: recover what? And yet, with the passage of time, in his heart he understood that heâd gained much more than heâd lost.At least, he said to himself, Iâve met the woman of my dreams. Other people, most people, glimpse something in films, the shadow of great actresses, the gaze of true love. But I saw her in the flesh, heard her voice, saw her silhouetted against the endless pampa. I talked to her and she talked back. What do I have to complain about?
The three medical examiners of Santa Teresa bore no resemblance to one another. The oldest of them, Emilio Garibay, was big and fat and suffered from asthma.Sometimes he had an asthma attack at the morgue, while he was performing an autopsy, and he ignored it. If Dona Isabel, his assistant, was nearby, she would get his inhaler out of his jacket, hanging on the coatrack, and Garibay would open his mouth, like a baby bird, and let himself be given a spurt. But when he was alone he ignored it and kept working.
His apartment was small but tastefully furnished. He had many books and almost no friends. Outside of class he hardly ever talked to his students, and he had no social life, at least not in university circles.
They ate, it might be said, hunched over in anguish and doubt. Hunched over in contemplation of essential questions, which doesnât get you anywhere.
Numb with sleep: in other words with their backs turned to the laughter that invited a different kind of sleep.
and he asked about the Bisontes and all the dead women who had been springing up in the Santa Teresa desert since his arrest. Haas replied listlessly, with a smile, and Sergio thought that even if he hadnât been guilty of the most recent killings, he was guilty of something.
Then, when he left, he asked himself how he could size someone up by his smile or his eyes. Who was he to judge?
He liked to imagine that God didnât exist. For three minutes, at least. He also liked to think about the insignificance of human beings. Five minutes.
If pain didnât exist, he thought, we would be perfect. Insignificant and ignorant of pain. Fucking perfect. But there was pain to fuck everything up. Finally he would think about luxury. The luxury of memory, the luxury of knowing a language or several languages, the luxury of thinking and not running away.
The driver asked where he was from.Mexico City, said Sergio. Crazy city, said the driver. Once I was attacked seven times in the same day. The only thing they didnât do was rape me, said the driver, laughing in the rearview mirror.Things have changed, said Sergio, now itâs the taxi drivers who attack people.So I hear, said the driver, and about time, too.
but the sad thing is we notice it only at the worst of times, when we can scarcely enjoy it.
God willing, the man said, so long as he was in good health he would never give up on the idea of living in the United States.
that lump of coal who in some other reincarnation could have been a diamond,
When a person speaks, his joys and sorrows shine through, even if only in part, wouldnât you say? Thatâs Godâs truth
United States military police or army intelligence, which is almost an oxymoron, since the word intelligence rarely sits comfortably with the word army, said ProfessorGarcia Correa
it takes frighteningly little to dazzle us. It makes me cringe when I see or hear or read certain adjectives in the press, certain praise that seems to have been spouted by a tribe of deranged monkeys, but thereâs nothing to be done,
Did he know her or didnât he? He knew her, of course he did, it was just that sometimes reality, the same little reality that served to anchor reality, seemed to fade around the edges, as if the passage of time had a porous effect on things, and blurred and made more insubstantial what was itself already, by its very nature, insubstantial and satisfactory and real.
there was a sweeping view of the Sonora desert in all its grandeur and solitude.
No one knew what she was doing in ColoniaHidalgo, although it was most likely, according to the police, that sheâd been taking a walk and had come upon death purely by chance.
And do you know what it means to have class? To be, in the final instance, a sovereign entity.
Not to owe anything to anyone. Not to have to make explanations to anyone. An
I have just one child, a son, she said.Heâs in school in theUnited States. Sometimes I hope he never comes back toMexico.I think that would be best for him.
Not much chance a forensic scientist can ever be an ordinary citizen, said Garibay, too many bodies.
A good-looking woman, in her own way, thought the photographer: nice posture, tall, proud looking, what is it that drives a woman like that to spend her life at trials and visiting clients in prison?
t wasnât in my nature, as you might suppose, to languish or expire.I liked life too much. I liked what life had to offer me, and me alone, and I was convinced I deserved every bit of it. At college I started to change. I met different kinds of people. The young sharks of the PRI in the law department, the bird dogs of Mexican politics in the journalism department. Everybody taught me something. My professors loved me. At first that disconcerted me. Why me, someone who seemed to have stepped off a country estate anchored in the early nineteenth century? Was there something special about me?
What twisted people we are.How simple we seem, or pretend to be in front of others, and how twisted we are deep down. How paltry we are and how spectacularly we contort ourselves before our own eyes and the eyes of others, we Mexicans. And all for what? To hide what? To make people believe what?
Juan de Dios rested his head on the steering wheel and tried to cry but couldnât.
There are people who think our names are our destiny. I donât believe that. But if they are, when Kelly chose that name she somehow took the first step into invisibility, into a nightmare.
All names are ordinary, theyâre all vulgar. Whether your name is Kelly or Luz Maria, it makes no difference in the end. All names disappear. Children should be taught that in elementary school. But weâre afraid to teach them.
Some reporters who had known me for years stopped talking to me.Others, the worst, still talked, but mostly behind my back
Once I stopped by the agency with Kelly and was struck by its state of abandonment.
At seven a taxi took me to the airport. As I passed through different parts of the city, I thought about Kelly, about what Kelly had thought as she gazed at the same things I was gazing at now, and then I knew Iâd be back.
Fuck it all, of course Ioverestimate myself, if I didnât I wouldnât be where I am, I said.
The ones he wrote and published. He wouldnât have left those behind even if the world was coming to an end.
The one-legged man saw her too, looking out the window, and he raised a hand in a formalsalute, even a stiff salute, though it could also have been interpreted as a way of saying such is life.
He didnât like the sea either, or what ordinary mortals call the sea, which is really only the surface of the sea, waves kicked up by the wind that have gradually become the metaphor for defeat and madness. What he
The boy told him it was Hans Reiter, pronouncing the name clearly, and then they shook hands and each went his separate way. All of this Vogel recalled as he tossed and turned in bed, reluctant to turn on the light and unable to sleep. What was it about the boy that made him look like seaweed? he asked himself. Was it his thinness, his sun-bleached hair, his long, placid face? And he wondered: should I return to Berlin, should I take mydoctor more seriously, should I embark on a course of self-examination? Finally he grew tired of all the questions and jerked off, and fell asleep.
a man who put on lordly airs (this must be stressed, because his companions certainly didnât put on lordly airs, they were ordinary men, happy to drink beer and eat fish and sausages and fart and laugh and sing, and they didnât put on airs, which is only fair to say and bears repeating because in fact they were like villagers, salesmen who traveled from village to village and sprang from the common herd and lived as part of the common herd, and who, when they died, would fade from common memory
which meant the baronâs nephew loved history or found it interesting, which at first struck the young Reiter as repulsive. Nights spent drinking cognac and smoking and readinghistory books. Repulsive. Which led him to wonder: all that silence for this?
Then, in turn, he wanted the young Hans Reiter to talk about his own life, what did he do? what did he want to do? what were his dreams? what did he think the future held for him?
About his father, the painter who lived in France,Halder never spoke, but at the same time he liked to hear about other peopleâs parents. He was amused by young Reiterâs response to his questions on thesubject. Hans said he didnât know anything about his father. âTrue,â said Halder, âone never knows anything about oneâs father.â
Halder said the difference lay in beauty, in the beauty of the story and the beauty of the language in which the story was told. Immediately he began to cite examples. He talked about Goethe and Schiller, he talked about Holderlin and Kleist, he raved about Novalis.
That sense of time, ah, the diseasedmanâs sense of time, what treasure hidden in a desert cave.
The fourth dimension, he likedto say, encompasses the three dimensions and consequently puts them in theirplace, that is, it obliterates the dictatorship of the three dimensions andthereby obliterates the three-dimensional world we know and live in. The fourthdimension, he said, is the full richness of the senses and the (capital S)Spirit, itâs the (capital E) Eye, in other words the open Eye that obliteratesthe eyes, which compared to the Eye are just poor orifices of mud, absorbed incontemplation or the equation birth-training-work-death, whereas the Eye sailsup the river of philosophy, the river of existence, the (fast-flowing) river offate.
an untrained, powerful mind, irrational, illogical,capable of exploding at the moment least expected.
Daily life, despite everything, was once again peaceful,uneventful.
wonderful, wonderful, yet again thesword of fate severs the head from the hydra of chance.
When the visitors returned to thesurface, anyone, even the least astute observer, could have seen that they weredivided into two groups, those who were pale when they emerged, as if they hadglimpsed something momentous down below, and those who appeared with a halfsmile sketched on their faces, as if they had just been reapprised of thenaivete of the human race.
That night, during dinner, theytalked about the crypt, but they also talked about other things. They talkedabout death. Hoensch said that death itself was only an illusion underpermanent construction, that in reality it didnât exist. The SS officersaid death was a necessity: no one in his right mind, he said, would stand fora world full of turtles or giraffes. Death, he concluded, served a regulatoryfunction. The young scholar Popescu said that death, in the Eastern tradition,was only a passage. What wasnât clear, he said, or at least not to him, wastoward what place, what reality, that passage led.âThe question,â hesaid, âis where. The answer,â he answered himself, âis wherevermy merits take me.âGeneral Entrescu was of theopinion that this hardly mattered, the important thing was to keep moving, thedynamic of motion, which made men and all living beings, including cockroaches,equal to the great stars.
General Entrescu confessed thathis childhood heroes were always murderers and criminals, for whom, he said, hefelt a great respect. The young scholar Popescu reminded the guests thatmurderers and heroes resembled each other in their solitariness, and, at leastinitially, in the publicâs lack of understanding of their actions.
Hoensch said that culture was achain of links composed of heroic art and superstitious interpretations. Theyoung scholar Popescu said culture was a symbol in the shape of a life buoy.The Baroness Von Zumpe said culture was essentially pleasure, anything thatprovided or bestowed pleasure, and the rest was just charlatanry. The SSofficer said culture was the call of the blood, a call better heard by nightthan by day, and also, he said, a decoder of fate. General Von Berenberg saidculture was Bach and that was enough for him. One of his general staff officerssaid culture was Wagner and that was enough for him too. The other generalstaff officer said culture was Goethe, and as the general had said, that wasenough for him, sometimes more than enough. The life of a man is comparableonly to the life of another man. The life of a man, he said, is only longenough to fully enjoy the works of another man.
General Entrescu, who was highly amused bythe general staff officerâs claim, said that for him, on the contrary, culturewas life, not the life of a single man or the work of a single man, but life ingeneral, any manifestation of it, even the most vulgar, and then he talkedabout the backdrops of some Renaissance paintings and he said those landscapescould be seen anywhere in Romania, and he talked about Madonnas and said that atthat precise instant he was gazing on the face of a Madonna more beautiful thanany Italian Renaissance painterâs Madonna (Baroness Von Zumpe flushed), andfinally he talked about cubism and modern painting and said that any abandonedwall or bombed-out wall was more interesting than the most famous cubistpainting, never mind surrealism, he said, which couldnât hold a candle to thedream of a single illiterate Romanian peasant.
âI steal into theirdreams,â he said. âI steal into their most shameful thoughts, Iâm inevery shiver, every spasm of their souls, I steal into their hearts, Iscrutinize their most fundamental beliefs, I scan their irrational impulses,their unspeakable emotions, I sleep in their lungs during the summer and theirmuscles during the winter, and all of this I do without the least effort,without intending to, without asking or seeking it out, without constraints,driven only by love and devotion.â
âmysterious numbersâhidden in a part of the vast landscape visible to man, though the numbersthemselves were invisible and could live between rocks or between one room andanother or even between one number and another, call it a kind of alternativemathematics camouflaged between seven and eight, just waiting for the mancapable of seeing it and deciphering it. The only problem was that to decipherit one had to see it and to see it one had to decipher it.
âI swear,â saidReiter.âWho do you swear by? Yourmother, your father, God?â asked the girl.âI swear by God,âsaid Reiter.âI donât believe inGod,â said the girl.âThen I swear by my motherand father,â said Reiter.âAn oath like that is nogood,â said the girl, âparents are no good, people are always tryingto forget they have parents.ââNot me,â saidReiter.âYes, you,â said thegirl, âand me, and everyone.ââThen I swear to you bywhatever you want,â said Reiter.âDo you swear by yourdivision?â asked the girl.âI swear by my divisionand regiment and battalion,â said Reiter, and then he added that he alsoswore by his corps and his army group.âDonât tell anyone,âsaid the girl, âbut to be honest, I donât believe in the army.ââWhat do you believein?â asked Reiter.âNot much,â said thegirl after pondering her reply for a second. âSometimes I even forget whatI believe in. There are so few things, and so many things I donât believe in,such a huge number of things, that they hide what I do believe in. Right now,for example, I canât remember anything.ââDo you believe inlove?â asked Reiter.âFrankly, no,â saidthe girl.âWhat about honesty?âasked Reiter.âUgh, thatâs worse thanlove,â said the girl
before returning to Moscow and attending to otheraffairs.Andthose affairs were reading and visiting museums, reading and walks in the park,reading and the almost obsessive attendance at all kinds of concerts,theatrical evenings, literary and political lectures, from which he drew manyvaluable lessons that he was able to apply to the freight of lived experiencehe had accumulated.
immersingourselves in the unknown until we found something else.
Ivanov had been aparty member since 1902. Back then he had tried to write stories in the mannerof Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorky, or rather he had tried to plagiarize them withoutmuch success, which led him, after long reflection (a whole summer night), tothe astute decision that he should write in the manner of Odoevsky andLazhechnikov. Fifty percent Odoevsky and fifty percent Lazhechnikov.
The first to be surprised, it must be said, was the writerhimself.
Inside, however, Ivanov feltthat something was missing. The decisive step, the bold stroke. The moment atwhich the larva, with a reckless smile, turns into a butterfly.
On the surface he was a happy man, a bachelor with a big, comfortableroom in a house in a nice Moscow neighborhood, a man who slept every so oftenwith prostitutes who were no longer young and with whom he ended up singing andweeping, a man who ate at least four times a week at the writersâ and poetsârestaurant.
ForIvanov, a real writer, a real artist and creator, was basically a responsibleperson with a certain level of maturity. A real writer had to know when tolisten and when to act. He had to be reasonably enterprising and reasonablylearned. Excessive learning aroused jealousy and resentment. Excessiveenterprise aroused suspicion. A real writer had to be someone relativelycool-headed, a man with common sense
Whatâs the first thing a man does when he comes into a church?Efraim Ivanov asked himself. He takes off his hat. Maybe he doesnât crosshimself. All right, thatâs allowed. Weâre modern. But the least he can do isbare his head! Adolescent writers, meanwhile, come into a church and donât takeoff their hats even when theyâre beaten with sticks, which is, regrettably,what happens in the end. And not only do they not take off their hats: theylaugh, yawn, play the fool, pass gas. Some even applaud.
He wrote an essay on the future of literature,which began and ended with the word nothing.
It sets out problems that perhaps willonly be solved ⊠tomorrow.
If Stendhal, as it is said, danced when he read Balzacâs critiqueof The Charterhouse of Parma, Ivanov spilled countless tears of joy uponreceivingGorkyâsletter.
Thenthe boy and the Mexican detective set off west in search of the hypnotist. Theyfind her inKansas City.The boy asks her to hypnotize him and send him back to the battlefield where heshould have died, or accept his love and stop fleeing. The hypnotist answersthat neither is possible. The Mexican detective shows an interest in the art ofhypnosis. As the detective begins to tell the hypnotist a story, the boy leavesthe roadside bar and goes walking under the night sky. After a while he stopscrying.
How were the stars created? Who are we in the middleof the boundless universe? What trace of us will remain?
Instead it was like a claw that pounces and floats in the middleof the room, like a helium balloon, a self-conscious claw, a claw-beast thatwonders what in Godâs name itâs doing in this rather untidy room, who that oldman is sitting at the table, who that young man is standing with tousled hair,then falls to the floor, deflated, returned once more to nothing.
Ah, love. And the sentimentalside of things, a side he could only imagine and not touch, made him rememberthat he was naked, not sitting there at the table, where in fact he was wrappedin a red robe, a robe or a dressing gown, to be precise, with the emblem of theCommunist Party of the Russian Federation embroidered on the lapel, and a silkhandkerchief around his neck, the gift of a faggoty French writer heâd met at aconference and whose work heâd never read, but naked in the figurative sense,naked on every other front, political, literary, economic, and this awarenessmade him lapse again into melancholy.
Where everything has come to a halt, and it comes to a haltbecause it knows itâs lost.
He mentions names Reiter has never heard before. Then,a few pages on, he mentions them again. As if he were afraid of forgetting them.Names, names, names. Those who made revolution and those who were devoured bythat same revolution, though it wasnât the same but another, not the dream butthe nightmare that hides behind the eyelids of the dream.
When Iâm sad or in low spirits, writes Ansky, I close my eyes and think ofArcimboldoâs paintings and the sadness and gloom evaporate, as if a strongwind, a mentholated wind, were suddenly blowing along the streets ofMoscow.
And Anskyâs mother, who opens thedoor and doesnât recognize him.
In one of his last notes he mentionsthe chaos of the universe and says that only in chaos are we conceivable. Inanother, he wonders what will be left when the universe dies and time and spacedie with it. Zero, nothing. But the idea makes him laugh. Behind every answerlies a question, Ansky remembers the peasants of Kostekino say. Behind everyindisputable answer lies an even more complex question. Complexity, however,makes him laugh, and sometimes his mother hears him laugh in the attic, likethe ten-year-old boy he once was. Ansky ponders parallel universes. Around thistime Hitler invadesPolandand World War II begins. Warsaw falls, Paris falls, theSoviet Unionis attacked. Only in chaos are we conceivable. One night Ansky dreams the skyis a great ocean of blood. On the last page of his notebook he sketches a mapto join the guerrillas.
Reiter went off alone. Sometimes he saw squadrons of Soviet planespass overhead, and sometimes the sky, a blinding blue the minute before, grewovercast and a storm that lasted hours was suddenly unleashed. From a hill hesaw a column of German tanks moving east. They looked like the coffins of anextraterrestrial civilization.He walked at night. During the day he found shelter as best hecould and passed the time reading Anskyâs notebook and sleeping and watchingthings grow or burn around him. Sometimes he remembered the seaweed forests ofthe Baltic and smiled. Sometimes he thought about his little sister and thatmade him smile too. It had been a long time since he had news of his family. Hehad never gotten a letter from his father and Reiter suspected it was becausehis father didnât know how to write very well. His mother had written. What didshe say in her letters? Reiter couldnât remember, they werenât very long, buthe couldnât remember anything she said, all he remembered was her handwriting,shaky and sprawling, her grammar mistakes, her nakedness. Mothers should neverwrite letters, he thought. His sisterâs letters, however, he rememberedperfectly, and that made him smile, flat on his stomach, hidden in the grass,as sleep overtook him. They were letters in which she talked about the thingsthat had happened to her, about the village, school, the dresses she wore, him.
Hethought about how far he would have to walk that day. Before he left thefarmhouse he returned Anskyâs notebook carefully to the chimney hiding place.Let someone else find it now, he thought.
âMyson-in-law died too, not in the raid, but days later, from sorrow at the deathof his wife and children.â
During the day things were different. Zeller once again radiateddignity and decorum, and although he didnât associate with anyone except hisold comrades from the Volkssturm, almost everyone respected him and believedhim to be a decent person. For Reiter, however, who had to endure his nightlydisquisitions, Zellerâs countenance betrayed a progressive deterioration, as ifinside of him a merciless struggle were being waged between diametricallyopposed forces. What forces were these? Reiter didnât know, but he sensed thatboth sprang from a single source, which was madness.
Iconfess: I was lonely, very lonely. I couldnât rely on my wife. The only timethe poor thing left her dark room was to beg me on her knees to let her returnto Germany, toBavaria, to join hersister. My son had died. My daughter lived inMunich, happily married and far removed frommy troubles. Work piled up and my fellow workers were losing heart. The warwasnât going well and anyway it no longer interested me. How can someone whoâs losta son care about the war? My life, in short, unfolded under permanent blackclouds.
When I was alone I started to think about my poor wife, confinedto her bed with the curtains drawn, and the thought made me so upset that Ibegan to pace my office, because if I sat still I ran the risk of suffering astroke. Then I saw the brigade of sweepers come back along the quite cleanstreet and I was suddenly paralyzed by the sense that time was repeatingitself.
Luck and death gohand in hand, he said. And he gave us a sad-eyed look as if the rest of usshould take pity on him.
BeforeI left for home I got a call from the station. The train still hadnât arrived.Patience, I said. Inside I knew it would never come. On my way home it startedto snow.
Defeated,I hung my head and stared at myself for a few seconds in the calm, dark surfaceof my coffee.
Ilet two days go by without coming to any decision. No Jews died and one of mysecretaries organized three gardening brigades, in addition to the fivesweeping brigades. Each brigade was made up of ten Jews and, besides tidyingthe town squares, they cleared a strip of land along the road, land the Poleshad never cultivated and that we, for lack of time and manpower, hadnât either.Little else happened, as I recall.Anenormous sense of boredom overtook me. At night, when I got home, I ate alonein the kitchen, shivering with cold, staring at some vague point on the whitewalls. I didnât even think anymore about my son killed inKursk, or put on the radio to listen to thenews or light music. In the mornings I played dice at the station bar and Ilistened to the lewd jokes of the peasants who gathered there to pass the time,without entirely understanding them. Thus two days of inactivity passed,dreamlike, and then two more.
Standing motionless there, they seemed less like children than like theskeletons of children, abandoned sketches, pure will and bone.
But problems resurfaced when it snowed again. According to one ofmy secretaries, there was no way to dig new graves in the hollow. I told himthat must be impossible. In the end, the problem lay in the way the graves hadbeen dug, horizontally rather than vertically, all across the hollow, and notvery deep. I organized a group and resolved to fix the problem that same day.The snow had erased any trace of the Jews. We began to dig. After a littlewhile, I heard an old farmer called Barz shout that there was something there.I went to look. Yes, there was something.âDoI keep digging?â asked Barz.âDonâtbe stupid,â I answered, âcover it up again, leave it as it was.â
Eachtime someone found something I repeated the same thing. Leave it alone. Coverit up. Go dig somewhere else. Remember the idea isnât to find things, itâs to notfind them. But all my men, one after the other, kept finding something andin fact, as my secretary had said, it seemed there was no room left at thebottom of the hollow.
Andyet in the end my tenacity won out. We found an empty space and I put all mymen to work there. I told them to dig deep, always down, farther down, as if wewere trying to dig all the way to hell, and I also made sure the pit was aswide as a swimming pool. That night, working by flashlight, we managed tofinish the job and then we left. The next day the weather was so bad we wereable to bring only twenty Jews to the hollow. The boys got drunker than ever.Some couldnât stand up, others vomited on the way back. The truck left them inthe main square, not far from my offices, and many stayed there, under theeaves of the gazebo, huddled together as the snow kept falling and they dreamedabout liquor-fueled soccer matches.
That afternoon he disposed of eight Jews. It struck meas a paltry number, and I said as much. There were eight of them, the policechief answered, but it was as if there were eight hundred. I gazed at him inthe eyes and understood.
âImust look very ugly,â she said, âbut if you were still a Germansoldier, you would try to pretend I wasnât.âReiterexamined her carefully but no matter how he tried he couldnât remember who shewas.âWar is oftenlinked to amnesia,â said the girl. Then she said:âAmnesia iswhen you lose your memory and you donât remember anything, even your name oryour girlfriendâs name.â And she added:âThereâsalso such a thing as selective amnesia, which is when you remember everythingor think you remember everything and forget only a single thing, the oneimportant thing in your life.â
âIwas sure,â she said to Reiter, âthat I would find you here, orsomeone very like you.â
ââAnarticle of faith,â said the old woman, âan assumption you can sum up in oneword: the killer always returns to the scene of the crime.â
This typewriter was a gift from my father. An affectionate andcultured man who lived to the age of ninety-three. An essentially good man. Aman who believed in progress, it goes without saying. My poor father. Hebelieved in progress and of course he believed in the intrinsic goodness ofhuman beings.
âMypoor father. I was a writer, I was a writer, but my indolent, voracious braingnawed at my own entrails. Vulture of my Prometheus self or Prometheus of myvulture self, one day I understood that I might go so far as to publishexcellent articles in magazines and newspapers, and even books that werenâtunworthy of the paper on which they were printed. But I also understood that Iwould never manage to create anything like a masterpiece. You may say thatliterature doesnât consist solely of masterpieces, but rather is populated byso-called minor works. I believed that, too. Literature is a vast forest andthe masterpieces are the lakes, the towering trees or strange trees, thelovely, eloquent flowers, the hidden caves, but a forest is also made up ofordinary trees, patches of grass, puddles, clinging vines, mushrooms, andlittle wild-flowers. I was wrong. Thereâs actually no such thing as a minorwork.
âInearlier days this reply would have outraged me, but thanks God I was living anew life. I remarked that working at the morgue must surely prompt wise or atleast original reflections on human fate. He looked at me as if I were mockinghim or speaking French. I insisted. These surroundings, I said, with a gesturethat encompassed the whole morgue, are in a certain way the ideal place tocontemplate the brevity of life, the unfathomable fate of mankind, the futilityof earthly strife.
And his reply: I donât havemuch time. How many doors it opened! How many paths were suddenly cleared,revealed to me!âIdonât have much time, I have to haul corpses. I donât have much time, I have tobreathe, eat, drink, sleep. I donât have much time, I have to keep the gearsmeshing. I donât have much time, Iâm busy living. I donât have much time, Iâmbusy dying. As you can imagine, there were no more questions. I helped him openthe locker. I wanted to help him slide the corpse in, but my clumsiness wassuch that the sheet slipped and then I saw the face of the corpse and I closedmy eyes and bowed my head and let him work in peace.
âJesusis the masterpiece. The thieves are minor works. Why are they there? Not toframe the crucifixion, as some innocent souls believe, but to hide it.â
drink schnapps, drink cognac, drink brandy, drink grappa, drink whiskey,drink any kind of strong drink, even wine if thatâs all there is, to escape thenoises, or to confuse the noises with the throbbing and spinning of oneâs head.
Outside it was darkand although he knew perfectly well where he was going, he still stumbled intothe pits and potholes that dotted the streets in that neighborhood.
âYouâresure youâll be famous!âUntil that moment Archimboldihad never thought about fame. Hitler was famous. Goring was famous. The peoplehe loved or remembered fondly werenât famous, they just satisfied certainneeds. Doblin was his consolation. Ansky was his strength. Ingeborg was hisjoy. The disappeared Hugo Halder was lightheartedness and fun. His sister,about whom he had no news, was his own innocence. Of course, they were otherthings too. Sometimes they were even everything all together, but not fame,which was rooted in delusion and lies, if not ambition. Also, fame wasreductive. Everything that ended in fame and everything that issued from famewas inevitably diminished. Fameâs message was unadorned. Fame and literaturewere irreconcilable enemies.
destiny, ungraspable until it becameinevitable, was each personâs notion of his own destiny.
Rainer Maria, the storeroom attendant, who, despitehis youth, had already been an expressionist poet, a symbolist, and a decadent.
Thereâssomething so simple and restorative about a sandwich like this,
During this time, Archimboldiâs finances improved slightly, butonly slightly. TheCologneCulturalCenterpaid him for two public readings in two different city bookshops, whose owners,it must be said, knew Mr. Bubis personally. Neither reading aroused markedinterest. Only fifteen people, counting Ingeborg, came to the first, at whichthe author read selections from his novel LĂŒdicke, and at the end onlythree dared to buy the book. At the second reading, of selections from TheEndless Rose, there were nine, again counting Ingeborg, and at the end onlythree people were left in the room, the small size of which went some waytoward softening the blow. Among them, of course, was Ingeborg, who hours laterconfessed to Archimboldi that at a certain point she too had consideredleaving.
because itwas common knowledge that lovers often began to resemble each other
usually intheir smiles, their opinions, their points of view, in short, the superficialtrappings that all human beings are obliged to bear until their deaths
d for this deed, after his death, he wascondemned in hell to push a stone to the top of a hill only to watch it rolldown to the bottom and then push it back up to the top of the hill and watch itroll again to the bottom
nd so on eternally, a bitter punishm
Jungeâsface turned as red as the sunset swelling behind the hill and then as green asthe needles of the pines in the forest.
This time the advance he sentArchimboldi was bigger than any previous advance, in fact so large that Martha,the secretary, before mailing the check to Cologne, brought it into Mr. Bubisâsoffice and asked (not once but twice) whether the sum was correct, to which Mr.Bubis answered yes, it was, or it wasnât, what did it matter, a sum, he thoughtwhen he was alone again, is always approximate, there is no such thing as acorrect sum, only the Nazis and teachers of elementary mathematics believed incorrect sums, only sectarians, madmen, tax collectors (God rot them),numerologists who read oneâs fortune for next to nothing believed in correctsums. Scientists, meanwhile, knew that all numbers were only approximate.
ts and a wool cap. At the first bend the villagedisappeared from sight and all she could see was a row of pines and themountains multiplying in the night, all white, like nuns with no worldlyambitions.Tenminutes later Archimboldi woke with a start and realized that Ingeborg wasnâtin bed. He got dressed, looked for her in the bathroom, the kitchen, and thefront room,
Halfway up his flashlight died and he put itin one of his pockets, although he would happily have tossed it onto thesnow-covered slopes. Anyway, the road was bathed in moonlight and a flashlightwasnât necessary. Thoughts of suicide and accidents passed through his mind. Hestepped off the road and tested the firmness of the snow. In some spots he sankalmost up to his knees. In others, closest to the cliffs, he sank nearly to hiswaist. He imagined Ingeborg walking with a vacant gaze. He imagined her comingclose to one of the ravines. Stumbling. Falling. He too went up to the edge ofa ravine. But the moonlight illuminated only the road: the bottom of the gorgewas still black, a formless black, in which one could glimpse indistinct shapesand outlines.
âAllthis light is dead,â said Ingeborg. âAll this light was emittedthousands and millions of years ago. Itâs the past, do you see? When thesestars cast their light, we didnât exist, life on Earth didnât exist, even Earthdidnât exist. This light was cast a long time ago. Itâs the past, weâresurrounded by the past, everything that no longer exists or exists only inmemory or guesswork is there now, above us, shining on the mountains and thesnow and we canât do anything to stop it.â
watched as the snow fell onVenice.
When he had finished reading a book, he gave it away or left it on a table. Fora long time, he wouldnât buy a computer. Sometimes he went into stores thatsold computers and asked the salespeople how they worked. But at the lastminute he always balked, like a peasant reluctant to part with his savings.Until laptop computers appeared. Then he did buy one and after a little whilehe became skilled in its use. When laptops began to come with modems,Archimboldi exchanged his old computer for a new one and sometimes he spenthours on the Internet, searching for odd bits of news, names no one rememberedanymore, forgotten occurrences. What did he do with the typewriter Bubis hadgiven him? He flung it off a cliff onto the rocks!
âThereI was,â said the crippled captain, âand we were all following GeneralEntrescu, we were all waiting for an idea, a sermon, a mountain, a shininggrotto, a lightning bolt in the cloudless sky, a sudden flash of lightning, akind word.â
âSo,a kind word,â said Popescu, âand you were there waiting for this kindword?ââLikea man waiting for manna from heaven,â said the crippled captain, âIwas waiting and the colonels were waiting and the generals who were still withus were waiting and the callow lieutenants were waiting and so were the madmen,the sergeants and the madmen, those who would desert in half an hour and thosewho were already on their way, dragging their rifles over the parched earth,those who left without knowing very well whether they were heading west oreast, north or south, and those who stayed behind, writing posthumous poems ingood Romanian, letters to their mothers, notes dampened with tears to the girlsthey would never see again.â
Thewar, in any case, was endless, and her brotherâs visits grew farther andfarther apart until he stopped coming. One night her mother and father began totalk about him, not knowing that she, in bed, the dun-colored blanket pulled upto her chin, was awake and could hear them, and they talked about him as if hewere already dead. But Lotte knew her brother hadnât died, because giants neverdie, she thought, or they die only when theyâre very old, so old one doesnâteven notice theyâve died, they just sit at the door to their houses or under atree and fall asleep and then theyâre dead.
himswimming in the Dnieper and then drowning, as he well deserved, or theyâd seenhim on the Kalmuk Steppe, gulping water as if he were dying of thirst, ortheyâd seen him crouching in a forest in Hungary, wondering how to shoothimself with his own rifle, or theyâd seen him on the edge of a cemetery, thestupid bastard, not daring to go in, pacing back and forth until night fell andthe cemetery emptied of relatives and only then, the faggot, did he stop pacingand climb the walls, digging his hobnailed boots into the red, crumbling bricksand poking his nose and blue eyes over the edge, peering down at where the deadlay, the Grotes and the Kruses, the Neitzkes and the Kunzes, the Barzes and theWilkes, the Lemkes and the Noacks, discreet Ladenthin and brave Voss, and then,emboldened, he climbed to the top of the wall and sat there for a while, hislong legs dangling, and then he stuck out his tongue at the dead, and then hetook off his helmet and pressed both hands to his temples, and then he closed hiseyes and howled, that was what the specters told Lotte, as they laughed andmarched behind the column of the living.
Anothertime Klaus asked Werner about his uncle and Werner said he was a nice man,quiet and very observant, although according to Lotte her brother hadnât alwaysbeen like that, it was the artillery, the mortars, the bursts of machine gunfire during the war that had made him quiet.
She shouted something to him, she said stop,thereâs nowhere to go, but Archimboldi kept moving farther away, as if hewanted to lose himself forever in that unfathomable and hostile land.
That long silence, meanwhile, seemed to Lotte fraught withquestions, because the lawyer didnât put down the phone to go and find thenotebook where she had written Klausâs number, but rather remained silent onthe other end of the line, perhaps lost in thought, as she decided whether tooffer it. In any case, Lotte heard her breathe in the middle of thesilence, almost as if she could hear her weigh the two possibilities.
âAnd isnât ittoo hard for you to bear?â asked Lotte. âNo harder than it is foryou,â said Isabel Santolaya. âI donât understand,â said Lotte,âIâm his mother but youâre free to choose.ââNo oneâs freeto choose in love,â said Isabel Santolaya.
Asthe passengers slept, Lotte began to read the novel over again, skipping theparts that werenât about her family or her house or her neighbors or hergarden, and when she had finished she had no doubt that the author, this Bennovon Archimboldi, was her brother, although there was also the possibility theauthor had talked to her brother, a possibility Lotte immediately rejectedbecause in her judgment there were things in the book that her brother wouldnever have told to anyone, though she didnât stop to think that by writing themhe was telling the whole world.
Thatsame day she visited the prison and felt happy when a little old womanrecognized her.âBless youreyes, youâre back, maâam,â said the old woman.âOh, Monchita,how are you?â said Lotte as she gave her a long hug.âAsyou can see, dear, still barely holding on,â answered the old woman.âA sonâs ason,â Lotte pronounced, and they hugged again.
Thenthe sluice gates opened and Lotte said it had been a long time since she sawher brother, that her son was in prison in Mexico, that her husband was dead,that she had never remarried, that necessity and desperation had driven her tolearn Spanish, that she still had trouble with the language, that her motherhad died and her brother probably didnât even know it, that she planned to sellthe shop, that she had read a book by her brother on the plane, that the shockhad almost killed her, that as she crossed the desert all she could do wasthink of him.
âI donât know what to do anymore,â said Lotte after along silence. âI donât have the strength. I donât understand anything andthe little I do understand frightens me. Nothing makes sense,â said Lotte.
âThereare so many things I donât remember anymore,â said Lotte. âGoodthings, bad things, worse things. But I never forget nice people. And thatwoman was very nice,â said Lotte, âeven though my son is rotting in aMexican prison. And who will look after him? Who will remember him when Iâmdead?â asked Lotte. âMy son has no children, no friends, he doesnâthave anyone,â said Lotte. âLook, the sun is coming up. Would you likesome tea, coffee, a glass of water?â
I think he had little interest in knowingwhere the soul goes when the body dies, although he wrote about that too. Hewas interested in dignity and he was interested in plants. About happiness hesaid not a word, I suppose because he considered it something strictly privateand perhaps, how shall I say, treacherous or elusive.