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
In
addition to Mr. Bubis, who did everything, the publishing house employed a copy
editor, a bookkeeper who also handled press relations, a secretary, who often
assisted the copy editor and the bookkeeper, and a storeroom attendant, who was
hardly ever in the storeroom, which was in the building's cellar and was
constantly under repair because it was periodically flooded by rainwater and
occasionally even by groundwater, as the attendant explained, which rose and
settled in the cellar in big damp patches, very damaging for the books and the
health of those who worked there.
As well as these four employees, there was often a
respectable-looking woman on the premises, more or less the same age as Mr.
Bubis, if not a bit older, who had worked at the house until 1933, Mrs.
Marianne Gottlieb, Bubis's most faithful employee, to the extent, or so it was
said, that she had driven the car that carried the publisher and his wife to
the Dutch border, from where they had continued on to Amsterdam after the car
was searched by the border police, who didn't find anything.
How had Bubis and his wife managed to get past the border control?
No one knew, but in every version of the story the feat was credited to Mrs.
Gottlieb.
When Bubis returned to
in September 1945, Mrs. Gottlieb was living in the direst poverty, and Bubis,
who by then had lost his wife, brought her to live with him. Little by little
Mrs. Gottlieb recovered. First she regained her sanity. One morning she looked
at Bubis and recognized him as her old employer, but said nothing. That night,
when Bubis got back from city hall, because at the time he was engaged in
political matters, he found supper made and Mrs. Gottlieb standing by the table,
waiting for him. That was a happy night for Mr. Bubis and Mrs. Gottlieb,
although supper ended with the story of Mr. Bubis's exile and Mrs. Bubis's
death, and with a flood of tears for Mrs. Bubis's lonely grave in
Then
Mrs. Gottlieb's health improved somewhat, so that she was able to move into a
small flat with a view of a ravaged park that nevertheless came to life in the
spring, renewed by the forces of nature, generally indifferent to human deeds,
don't you think, said Mr. Bubis, the skeptic, who accepted but didn't share
Mrs. Gottlieb's yearning for independence. Soon afterward she asked him for
help finding a job, because Mrs. Gottlieb was incapable of being idle. Then
Bubis made her his secretary. But Mrs. Gottlieb, who never spoke of these
things, had also had her share of nightmarish times, and sometimes, for no
apparent reason, her health failed and she fell ill as quickly as she then
recovered. Other times it was her mind that faltered. On occasion, Bubis had to
meet with the English authorities in a particular place and Mrs. Gottlieb sent
him to the other end of the city. Or she scheduled appointments for him with
hypocritical and unrepentant Nazis who wanted to offer their services to the
city of
Or she fell asleep, nodding off in her office with her head resting on the
blotter.
Which
is why Mr. Bubis found her a new job in the
have to handle books and files, all papers, that is, to which she was more
accustomed, or so Mr. Bubis supposed. And yet even in the archives, where
outrageous behavior was more easily accommodated, Mrs. Gottlieb's bouts of
erratic and pragmatic activity persisted in equal measure. And she also
continued to visit Mr. Bubis, in hours stolen from sleep, in case her presence
might be of any use to him. Until at last Mr. Bubis got bored with politics and
city affairs and decided to focus his efforts on what had after all brought him
back to
reviving his publishing house.
Often,
when he was asked why he had returned, he quoted Tacitus:
Then, besides the
dangers of a boisterous and unknown sea, who would relinquish Asia, Africa, or
surface, rigorous in its climate, cheerless to every beholder and cultivator,
except a native?
Those who heard him nodded and smiled and commented among
themselves: Bubis is one of us. Bubis hasn't forgotten us. Bubis bears us no
grudge. Some patted him on the back and understood nothing. Others assumed
stricken expressions and said what truth there was in the Roman's words. A
great man, Tacitus, as is our dear Bubis, on a different level, of course!
The
truth is that when Bubis quoted the Latin, he meant it literally. The Channel
crossing was something he had always dreaded. Bubis got seasick on boats and
vomited and was mostly confined to his stateroom, so that when Tacitus referred
to a boisterous and unknown sea, even though what he meant was the Baltic or
the
Channel crossing and how disastrous it proved for his sensitive stomach and his
health in general. Similarly, when Tacitus talked about relinquishing Italy,
Bubis thought about the United States, New York in particular, where he had
received several highly respectable offers of work at publishing houses in the
Big Apple, and when Tacitus mentioned Asia and Africa, Bubis was put in mind of
the emerging state of Israel, where he was sure there were all sorts of things
he could do, in the publishing field, of course, not to mention that it was
home to many of his old friends, whom he would have liked to see again.
And yet he had chosen
cheerless to every
beholder and cultivator.
Why? Certainly not out of any loyalty to his
homeland, because although Mr. Bubis felt himself to be German, he despised
national pride, which to his mind was one of the causes of the death of more
than fifty million people, but because Germany was home to his publishing house
or to the idea he had of a publishing house, a German publishing house, a
publishing house with its headquarters in Hamburg, and its networks, in the
form of book orders, linking old bookshops all over Germany, some of whose
owners he knew personally and with whom, when he traveled for business, he
drank tea or coffee, sitting in a corner of the bookshop, always complaining
about hard times, bemoaning the public's indifference, sighing over the
middlemen and paper salesmen, grieving for the future of a country that didn't
read, in a word, utterly enjoying himself as they nibbled biscuits or little
slices of kuchen until at last Mr. Bubis rose and shook hands with the elderly
owner of, say, Iserlohn, and then went off to Bochum, to visit the elderly
owner of Bochum, who kept certain books with the Bubis logo like relics (relics
for sale, of course), books published in 1930 or 1927, that by law, Schwarzwald
law, naturally, he should have burned in 1935 at the latest, but that the old
bookseller had chosen to hide, out of pure love, which was something Bubis
understood (and few others could understand, not excluding the book's author)
and for which he showed his gratitude with a gesture of respect that went
beyond literature, a gesture, somehow, of honorable tradesmen, of tradesmen in
possession of a secret that went back possibly as far as the dawn of Europe, a
gesture that was a mythology or else opened the door to a mythology, its two
central pillars the bookseller and the editor, not the writer embarked on his
unpredictable course or hostage to ghostly imponderables, but the bookseller,
the editor, and a long, winding road sketched by a painter of the Flemish
school.
•
So
it was no real surprise that Mr. Bubis soon tired of politics and decided to
reopen his publishing house, because deep down all he really cared about was
the adventure of printing books and selling them.
Around
this time, however, just before he returned to the building that justice had
restored to him, Mr. Bubis was in
in the American zone, when he met a young refugee in her early thirties, of
good family and remarkable beauty, and though no one could say how, because Mr.
Bubis was hardly a ladies' man, they became lovers. The change this affair
wrought in him was plain. His energy, already prodigious considering his age,
tripled. His zest for life became overpowering. His faith in the success of his
new publishing enterprise (although Bubis would correct anyone who spoke to him
of a "new enterprise," since to him it was the same old enterprise,
reappearing now after a lengthy and unwelcome hiatus) was contagious.
At
the publishing house's opening ceremony, with all of Hamburg's officials and
artists and politicians invited, as well as a delegation of book-loving English
officers (though regrettably most were enthusiasts of the whodunit or the
foxhunting novel in its Georgian incarnation, or the philatelic novel), and not
only the German press but also the French, English, Dutch, Swiss, and even
American press, his lady friend, as he called her fondly, made her first public
appearance, and displays of respect were coupled with perplexity, because
everyone expected a woman of forty or fifty, someone more intellectual, and
some had thought she would be Jewish, as was the tradition in the Bubis family,
while others, judging by experience, imagined that this was just another of Mr.
Bubis's pranks, since he was a great one for practical jokes. But the thing was
in earnest, as became evident during the party. The woman wasn't Jewish but one
hundred percent Aryan, nor was she forty but just over thirty, although she
looked twenty-seven at most, and two months later, Bubis's prank or little joke
became a fait accompli when he got married, with every honor and flanked by a
municipal who's who, at the venerable city hall in the midst of reconstruction,
in an unforgettable civil ceremony presided over by the very mayor of Hamburg,
who seized the occasion to shower Bubis with flattery, declaring him a prodigal
son and model citizen.
When
Archimboldi arrived in Hamburg, the publishing house hadn't yet attained the
high level that Mr. Bubis had set as a second goal (the first was to maintain a
constant supply of paper and keep up distribution throughout Germany; the
remaining eight were known only to Mr. Bubis), but it was moving ahead at an
acceptable pace and its owner and master was satisfied and weary.
Writers
had begun to appear in Germany who interested Mr. Bubis, though not much, or at
least nowhere near as much as the writers in the Germany of his early days, to
whom he remained commendably loyal, but some of the new ones weren't bad, even
if among them no glimpse could be seen (or Mr. Bubis was incapable of catching
a glimpse, as he himself acknowledged) of a new Doblin, a new Musil, a new
Kafka (although if a new Kafka appeared, said Mr. Bubis, laughing, but with a
look of profound sadness in his eyes, I would quake in my boots), a new Thomas
Mann. The bulk of the catalog was still the house's inexhaustible backlist, but
new writers also began to crop up under Bubis's nose from the bottomless quarry
of German literature, as well as translations of French and English literature,
which in those days, after the long Nazi drought, gained enough loyal readers
to guarantee success, or at least prevent losses.
The rate of work, in any case, was steady, if not frenetic, and
when Archimboldi arrived at the house his first thought was that Mr. Bubis,
busy as he seemed, would have no time for him. But Mr. Bubis, after making him
wait ten minutes, ushered him into his office, an office Archimboldi would
never forget, because with every shelf crammed full, books and manuscripts
collected on the floor in stacks and towers, some so precarious that they in
turn spilled over, a chaos that was a reflection of the world, rich and
magnificent despite war and injustice, a library of glorious books that Archimboldi
would have given anything to read, first editions of the works of great writers
with handwritten dedications to Mr. Bubis, books of degenerate art that other
publishing houses were once again issuing in Germany, books published in France
and England, paperbacks from New York and Boston and San Francisco, as well as
American magazines with mythical names that for an impecunious young writer
were a treasure trove, the ultimate display of wealth, and turned Bubis's
office into something like Ali Baba's cave.
Nor
would Archimboldi forget the first question Bubis asked him after the standard
introductions:
"What's
your real name? Because it can't be the name you've given me, of course."
"That's my
name," answered Archimboldi.
"Do
you think the years I spent in
von Archimboldi. To be called Benno, in the first place, is suspicious."
"Why?"
Archimboldi wanted to know.
"You
don't know? You really don't?"
"I swear I
don't," said Archimboldi.
"Why, because
of Benito Mussolini, man! Where's your head?"
At
that point Archimboldi thought the money and time he had spent traveling to
on the night train back to
With luck, he'd be home by the next morning.
"They
called me Benno after Benito Juarez," said Archimboldi, "I suppose
you know who Benito Juarez was."