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
That night, maybe because of the barbecue and all they'd
had to drink, the three had nightmares, which they couldn't remember when they
woke, no matter how hard they tried. Pelletier dreamed of a page, a page that
he tried to read forward and backward, every which way, turning it and
sometimes turning his head, faster and faster, unable to decipher it at all-
Norton dreamed of a tree, an English oak that she picked up and moved from
place to place in the countryside, no spot entirely satisfying her. Sometimes
the oak had no roots, other times it trailed long roots like snakes or the
locks of a Gorgon. Espinoza dreamed about a girl who sold rugs. He wanted to
buy a rug, any rug, and the girl showed him lots of rugs, one after the other,
without stopping. Her thin, dark arms were never still and that prevented him
from speaking, prevented him from telling her something important, from seizing
her by the arm and getting her out of there.
The next morning Norton didn't come down for breakfast.
They called her, thinking she was sick, but Norton assured them she just felt
like sleeping in, and they should do without her. Gloomily, they waited for
Amalfitano and then drove out to the northeast of the city, where a circus was
setting up. According to Amalfitano, there was a German magician with the
circus who went by the name of Doktor Koenig. He'd heard about the circus the
night before, on his way back from the barbecue, when he saw leaflets that
someone had gone to the trouble of leaving in all the yards in the
neighborhood. The next day, on the corner where he waited for the bus to the
university, he saw a color poster pasted on a sky-blue wall that announced the
stars of the circus. Among them was the German magician, and Amalfitano thought
this Doktor Koenig might be Archimboldi in disguise. Examined coolly, it was a
stupid idea, he realized, but the critics were in such low spirits that he
thought it wouldn't hurt to suggest a visit to the circus. When he told them,
they looked at him the way students look at the class idiot.
"What would Archimboldi be doing in a circus?"
said Pelletier when they were in the car.
I don't know," said Amalfitano, "you're the
experts, all I know is this is the first German who's come our way."
The circus was called Circo Internacional and some men who
were raising the big top with a complicated system of cords and pulleys (or so
it seemed to the critics) directed them to the trailer where the owner lived.
The owner was a Chicano in his fifties who had worked a long time in European
circuses that crossed the continent from
middling success, until he decided to go back to
where he was from, and start a circus of his own. He called it Circo
Internacional because one of his original ideas was to have performers from all
over the world, although in the end they were mostly Mexican and American,
except that every so often some Central American came looking for work and once
he had a Canadian lion tamer in his seventies whom no other circus in the
United States would employ. His circus wasn't fancy, he said, but it was the
first circus owned by a Chicano.
When they weren't traveling they could be found in
Bakersfield, not far from Earlimart, where he had his winter quarters, although
sometimes he set up camp in Sinaloa, Mexico, not for long, just so he could
travel to Mexico City and sign deals for sites in the south, all the way to the
Guatemalan border, and from there they'd head back up to Bakersfield. When the
foreigners asked him about Doktor Koenig, the impresario wanted to know whether
they had some dispute or money problem with his magician, to which Amalfitano
was quick to reply that they didn't, certainly not, these gentlemen were highly
respected university professors from Spain and France respectively, and he
himself, not to put too fine a point on it and with all due respect, was a
professor at the University of Santa Teresa.
"Oh, well then," said the Chicano, "if
that's the way it is I'll take you to see Doktor Koenig. I think he used to be
a professor too."
The critics' hearts leaped at his words. Then they followed
the impresario past the circus trailers and cages on wheels until they came to
what was, for all intents and purposes, the edge of the camp. Farther out there
was only yellow earth and a black hut or two and the fence along the
Mexican-American border.
"He likes the quiet," said the impresario, though
they hadn't asked. He rapped with his knuckles on the door of the magician's
little trailer. Someone opened the door and a voice from the darkness asked
what he wanted. The impresario said it was him and he had some European friends
with him who wanted to say hello. Come in, then, said the voice, and they went
up the single step and into the trailer, where the curtains were drawn over the
only two windows, which were just a little bigger than portholes.
"I
don't know how we're all going to fit in
here," said the impresario, and immediately he pulled back the curtains.
Lying on the only bed they saw an olive-skinned bald man
wearing only a pair of enormous black shorts, who looked at them, blinking with
difficulty. He couldn't have been more than sixty, if that, which ruled him out
immediately, but they decided to stay for a while and at least thank him for
seeing them. Amalfitano, who was in a better mood than the other two, explained
that they were looking for a German friend, a writer, and they couldn't find
him.
"So you thought you'd find him in my circus?"
said the impresario.
"Not him, but someone who might know him," said
Amalfitano.
"I've never hired a writer," said the impresario.
"I'm not German," said Doktor Koenig. "I'm
American. My name is Andy Lopez."
With these words he pulled his wallet out of a bag hanging
on a hook and held out his driver's license.
"What's your magic act?" Pelletier asked him in
English.
"I start by making fleas disappear," said Doktor
Koenig, and the five of them laughed.
"It's the truth," said the impresario.
"Then I make pigeons disappear, then I make a cat
disappear, then a dog, and I end the act by disappearing a kid."
After they left the Circo Internacional, Amalfitano invited
them to his house for lunch.
Espinoza went out into the backyard and saw a book hanging
from a clothesline. He didn't want to go over and see what book it was, but
when he went back into the house he asked Amalfitano about it.
It's Rafael Dieste's
Testamento geometrico,"
said
Amalfitano.
Rafael Dieste, the Galician poet," said Espinoza.
That's right," said Amalfitano, "but this is a
book of geometry, not poetry, ideas that came to Dieste while he was a high
school teacher."
Espinoza translated what Amalfitano had said for Pelletier.
And it's hanging outside?" said Pelletier with a
smile.
Yes," said Espinoza as Amalfitano looked in the
refrigerator for something to eat, "like a shirt left out to dry."
Do you like beans?" asked Amalfitano.
Anything is fine. We're used to everything now," said
Espinoza.
Pelletier went over to the window and looked at the book,
its pages stirring almost imperceptibly in the slight afternoon breeze. Then he
went outside and spent a while examining it.
"Don't take it down," he heard Espinoza say
behind him.
"This book wasn't left out to dry, it's been here a
long time," said Pelletier.
"That's what I thought," said Espinoza, "but
we'd better leave it alone and go home."
Amalfitano watched them from the window, biting his lip,
although the look on his face (just then at least) wasn't of desperation or
impotence but of deep, boundless sadness.
When the critics showed the first sign of turning around,
Amalfitano retreated, returning rapidly to the kitchen, where he pretended to
be intent on making lunch.
When they got back to the hotel, Norton told them she was
leaving the next day and they received the news without surprise, as if they'd
been expecting it for a while. The flight Norton had found was out of
protests—she'd been planning to take a taxi—they decided to drive her to the
airport. That night they talked until late. They told Norton about their visit
to the circus and promised that if nothing changed, they would spend three more
days there at most. Then Norton got up to go to bed and Espinoza suggested they
spend their last night in Santa Teresa together. Norton misunderstood and said
that she was the only one who was leaving, they still had more nights in the
city.
"I mean the three of us together," said Espinoza.
"In bed?" asked Norton.
"Yes, in bed," said Espinoza.
"I don't think that's a good idea," said Norton,
"I'd rather sleep alone."
So they walked her to the elevator and then they went to
the bar and ordered two Bloody Marys and sat waiting for them in silence.
"I really put my foot in it this time," said
Espinoza when the bartender brought them their drinks.
"It seems that way," said Pelletier.
"Have you realized," said Espinoza, after another
silence, "that during this whole trip we've only been to bed with her
once?"
"Of course I've realized," said Pelletier.
"And whose fault is that," asked Espinoza,
"hers or ours?" "I don't know," said Pelletier, "the
truth is I haven't been much in the mood for making love these days. What about
you?" "I haven't either," said Espinoza. They were quiet again
for a while. "She probably feels more or less the same," said
Pelletier.
•
They left Santa Teresa very early. First they called
Amalfitano and told him they were going to the
be back all day. At the border the American customs officer wanted to see the
car's papers and then he let them pass. Following the instructions of the hotel
clerk, they took a dirt road and for a while they drove through a patch of
woods and streams, as if they'd stumbled into a dome with its own ecosystem.
For a while they thought they'd never get to the airport, or anywhere else. But
the dirt road ended in Sonoita and from there they took Route 83 to Interstate
10, which brought them straight to
At the airport there was still time for them to have coffee and talk about what
they'd do when they saw each other again in
Then Norton had to go to the boarding gate and half an hour later her plane
took off for
connecting flight to
To get back they took Interstate 19 to
although they turned off a little after Rio Rico and followed the border on the
They were hungry and thirsty but they didn't stop in any town. At five in the
afternoon they got back to the hotel and after they showered they went down to
have a sandwich and call Amalfitano. He told them not to leave the hotel, he'd
take a taxi and be there in ten minutes. We're in no hurry, they said.
•
After that moment, reality for Pelletier and Espinoza
seemed to tear like paper scenery, and when it was stripped away it revealed
what was behind it: a smoking landscape, as if someone, an angel, maybe, was
tending hundreds of barbecue pits for a crowd of invisible beings. They stopped
getting up early, they stopped eating at the hotel, among the American
tourists, and they moved to the center of the city, choosing dark bars for
breakfast (beer and fiery
chilaquiles)
and bars with big windows for
lunch, where the waiters wrote the specials in white ink on the glass. Dinner
they had wherever they happened to be.
They accepted the rector's offer and gave lectures on
contemporary French and Spanish literature, lectures that were more like
massacres and that at least had the virtue of striking fear into their
listeners, mostly young men, readers of Michon and Rolin or
von Archimboldi, feeling less like butchers than like gutters or disembowellers,
but something in them urged restraint, something undetectable at first, though
silently they sensed a fated encounter: in the audience, not counting Amalfitano,
there were three young readers of Archimboldi who almost brought them to tears.
One of them, who could speak French, even had one of the books translated by
Pelletier. So miracles were possible, after all. The Internet bookstores
worked. Culture, despite the disappearances and guilt, was still alive, in a
permanent state of transformation, as they soon discovered when, after the
lecture and at the express request of Pelletier and Espinoza, the young readers
of Archimboldi accompanied them to the university's reception hall, where there
was a love fest, or rather a cocktail hour, or maybe a cocktail half hour, or
possibly just a polite nod to the distinguished lecturers, and where, for lack
of a better subject, people talked about what good writers the Germans were,
all of them, and about the historic significance of universities like the
Sorbonne or the University of Salamanca, where, to the astonishment of the
critics, two of the professors (one who taught Roman law and another who taught
twentieth-century penal law) had studied. Later, Dean Guerra and one of the
administration secretaries took them aside and gave them their checks and a
little later, under cover of a fainting fit suffered by one of the professors'
wives, they slipped out.