Authors: Roberto Bolaño
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary Collections, #Mystery & Detective, #Mexico, #Caribbean & Latin American, #Cold Cases (Criminal Investigation), #Crime, #Literary, #Young Women, #Missing Persons, #General, #Women
At some point, thought the
one-legged man as he watched his son move clumsily along the edges of the
neighboring gardens, the Prussian regiment found itself face-to-face with a
similar Russian regiment, peasants five foot ten or six feet tall, clad in the
green jackets of the Russian Imperial Guard, and they clashed and the carnage
was terrible. Even when both armies had retreated, the two regiments of giants
remained locked in hand-to-hand combat that ceased only when the top generals
sent unconditional orders to retreat to new positions.
Before Hans Reiter's father
went off to war, he was five foot five. When he came back, perhaps because he
was missing a leg, he was only five foot four. A regiment of giants is madness,
he thought. Hans's one-eyed mother was five foot two and she believed that men
could never be too tall.
At six Hans Reiter was taller
than all the other six-year-olds, taller than all the seven-year-olds, taller
than all the eight-year-olds, taller than all the nine-year-olds, and taller than
half the ten-year-olds. At age six, too, he stole his first book. The book was
called
Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region.
He hid it
under his bed although no one at school ever noticed it was missing. Around the
same time he began to dive. This was in 1926. He had been swimming since he was
four and he would put his head underwater and open his eyes and then his mother
scolded him because his eyes were red all day and she was afraid that when
people saw him they would think he was always crying. But until he was six, he
didn't learn to dive. He would duck underwater, swim down a few feet, and open
his eyes and look around. That much he did. But he didn't dive. At six he
decided that a few feet wasn't enough and he plunged toward the bottom of the
sea.
The book
Animals and Plants
of the European Coastal Region
was stamped on his brain, and while he dove
he would slowly page through it. This was how he discovered
Laminaria
digitata,
a giant seaweed with a sturdy stem and broad leaves, as the book
said, shaped like a fan with numerous sections of strands that really did look
like fingers.
Laminaria digitata
is native to cold waters like the
Baltic, the North Sea, and the
found in large masses, at low tide, and off rocky shores. The tide often
uncovers forests of this seaweed. When Hans Reiter saw a seaweed forest for the
first time he was so moved that he began to cry underwater. It may be hard to
believe that a human being could cry while diving with his eyes open, but let
us not forget that Hans was only six at the time and in a sense he was a
singular child.
Laminaria digitata
is light brown and resembles
Laminaria
hyperborea,
which has a rougher stalk, and
Saccorhiza polyschides,
which
has a stem with bulbous protuberances. The latter two, however, live in deep
waters, and although sometimes, on summer afternoons, Hans Reiter would swim
far from the beach or the rocks where he had left his clothes and then dive
down, he could never spot them, only fantasize that he'd seen them there in the
depths, a still and silent forest.
Around this time he began to draw all
kinds of seaweed in a notebook. He drew
Chorda filum,
made up of thin
strands that could nevertheless grow to be twenty-five feet long. It had no
branches and looked delicate but was really very strong. It grew below the
low-tide mark. He also drew
Leathesia difformis,
rounded bulbs of olive
brown that grew on rocks and other seaweed. A strange-looking plant. He never
saw it, but he often dreamed about it. He drew
Ascophyllum nodosum,
a
dun-colored, irregularly patterned seaweed with oval blisters along its
branches. There were male and female varieties of
Ascophyllum nodosum,
which
produced fruitlike growths akin to raisins. In the male, they were yellow. In
the female, they were a greenish color. He drew
Laminaria saccharina,
a
single long frond in the shape of a belt. When it was dry, crystals of a sweet
substance called mannitol were visible on its surface. It grew on rocky coasts,
clinging to various solid objects, though it was often washed out to sea. He
drew
Padina pavonia,
an uncommon seaweed, small and fan shaped. It was a
warm-water species found from the southern coasts of
Britain
There were no related species. He drew
Sargassum vulgare,
a seaweed that
lived on the stony beaches of the
found in shallow water as well as in the deepest seas. He drew
Porphyra
umbilicalis,
a particularly lovely seaweed, nearly eight inches long and
reddish purple in color. It grew in the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, the
English Channel, and the
various species of
Porphyra
and all of them were edible. The Welsh, in
particular, were fond of them.
"The Welsh are
swine," said the one-legged man in reply to a question from his son.
"Absolute swine. The English are swine, too, but not as bad as the Welsh.
Though really they're the same, but they make an effort not to seem it, and
since they know how to pretend, they succeed. The Scots are bigger swine than
the English and only a little better than the Welsh. The French are as bad as
the Scots. The Italians are little swine. Little swine ready and willing to
gobble up their own swine mother. The same can be said of the Austrians: swine,
swine, swine. Never trust a Hungarian. Never trust a Bohemian. They'll lick
your hand while they devour your little finger. Never trust a Jew: he'll eat
your thumb and leave your hand covered in slobber. The Bavarians are also
swine. When you talk to a Bavarian, son, make sure you keep your belt fastened
tight. Better not to talk to Rhinelanders at all: before the cock crows they'll
try to saw off your leg. The Poles look like chickens, but pluck four feathers
and you'll see they've got the skin of swine. Same with the Russians. They look
like starving dogs but they're really starving swine, swine that'll eat anyone,
without a second thought, without the slightest remorse. The Serbs are the same
as the Russians, but miniature. They're like swine disguised as
live in the north of
Canadians are big ruthless swine, although the worst swine from
worst swine from
like the Saxons and the Westphalians. All I can say about the Greeks is that
they're the same as the Turks: bald, sodomitic swine. The only people who
aren't swine are the Prussians. But
see it? I don't. Sometimes I imagine that while I was in the hospital, that
filthy swine hospital, there was a mass migration of Prussians to some faraway
place. Sometimes I go out to the rocks and gaze at the Baltic and try to guess
where the Prussian ships sailed.
are swine lands. Where, then?
Where are the Prussians, then? I climb up on the rocks and search for them on
the gray horizon. A churning gray like pus. And I don't mean once a year. Once
a month! Every two weeks! But I never see them, I can never guess what point on
the horizon they set sail to. All I see is you, your head in the waves as they
wash back and forth, and then I have a seat on a rock and for a long time I
don't move, watching you, as if I've become another rock, and even though
sometimes I lose sight of you, or your head comes up far away from where you
went under, I'm never afraid, because I know you'll come up again, there's no
danger in the water for you. Sometimes I actually fall asleep, sitting on a
rock, and when I wake up I'm so cold I don't so much as look up to make sure
you're still there. What do I do then? Why, I get up and come back to town,
teeth chattering. And as I turn down the first streets I start to sing so that
the neighbors tell themselves I've been out drinking down at Krebs's."
Young Hans Reiter also liked to
walk, like a diver, but he didn't like to sing, for divers never sing.
Sometimes he would walk east out of town, along a dirt road through the forest,
and he would come to the
they did was sell peat. If he walked farther east, there was the
dried up in the summer. Both places looked like ghost towns, inhabited by the
dead. Beyond the
Town of the Fat. It smelled bad there, like blood and rotting meat, a dense,
heavy smell very different from the smell of his own town, which smelled of
dirty clothes, sweat clinging to the skin, pissed-upon earth, which is a thin
smell, a smell like
Chorda filum.
In the Town of the Fat, as was
to be expected, there were many animals and several butcher shops. Sometimes,
on his way home, moving like a diver, he watched the Town of the Fat citizens
wander the streets of the Village of Blue Women or the Village of Red Men and
he thought that maybe the villagers, those who were ghosts now, had died at the
hands of the inhabitants of the Town of the Fat, who were surely fearsome and
relentless practitioners of the art of killing, no matter that they never
bothered him, among other reasons because he was a diver, which is to say he
didn't belong to their world, where he came only as an explorer or a visitor.
On other occasions his steps
took him west, and he walked down the main street of Egg Village, which each
year was farther and farther from the rocks, as if the houses could move on
their own and chose to seek a safer place near the dells and forests. It wasn't
far from Egg Village to Pig Village, a village he imagined his father never
visited, where there were many pigstys and the happiest herds of pigs for miles
around, pigs that seemed to greet the passerby regardless of his social
standing or age or marital status, with friendly grunts, almost musical, or in
fact entirely musical, while the villagers stood frozen with their hats in
their hands or covering their faces, whether out of modesty or shame it wasn't
clear.
And farther on was the Town of
Chattering Girls, girls who went to parties and dances in even bigger towns
whose names the young Hans Reiter heard and immediately forgot, girls who
smoked in the streets and talked about sailors at a big port who served on this
or that ship, the names of which the young Hans Reiter immediately forgot,
girls who went to the movies and saw the most thrilling films, with actors who
were the handsomest men on the planet and actresses who, if one wanted to be
fashionable, one had to imitate, and whose names the young Hans Reiter
immediately forgot. When he got home, like a night diver, his mother asked him
where he'd spent the day and the young Hans Reiter told her the first thing
that came to mind, anything but the truth.
Then his mother stared at him
with her blue eye and the boy held her gaze with his two blue eyes, and from
the corner near the hearth, the one-legged man watched them both with his two
blue eyes and for three or four seconds the island of Prussia seemed to rise
from the depths.
At eight Hans Reiter lost
interest in school. By then he had twice come close to drowning. The first time
was during the summer and he was saved by a young tourist from
young tourist saw a boy near some rocks, his head bobbing up and down, and
after confirming that it was in fact a boy, since the tourist was shortsighted
and at first glance thought it was a clump of seaweed, he removed his jacket,
in which he was carrying some important papers, climbed down the rocks as far
as he could go, and plunged into the water. In four strokes he was beside the
boy, and once he'd scanned the shore for the best place to make for land, he
began to swim toward a spot some thirty yards from where he'd gone in.
The tourist's name was Vogel
and he was a man of incredible optimism. Though perhaps he wasn't optimistic so
much as mad, and he was on holiday in the Town of Chattering Girls on the
orders of his doctor, who, concerned about his health, endeavored to get him
out of Berlin on the slightest pretext. If one was on anything like intimate
terms with Vogel, his presence soon became unbearable. He believed in the
intrinsic goodness of humankind, he claimed that a person who was pure of heart
could walk from Moscow to Madrid without being accosted by anyone, whether
beast or police officer, to say nothing of a customs official, because the
traveler would take the necessary precautions, among them leaving the road from
time to time and striking off across country. He was easily smitten and
awkward, with the result that he didn't have a girl. Sometimes he talked, not
caring who might be listening, about the healing properties of masturbation (he
cited Kant as an example), to be practiced from the earliest years to the most
advanced age, which mostly tended to provoke laughter in the girls from the
Town of Chattering Girls who happened to hear him, and which exceedingly bored
and disgusted his acquaintances in Berlin, who were already overfamiliar with
this theory and who thought that Vogel, in explaining it with such stubborn
zeal, was really masturbating in front of them or using them as masturbation
aids.