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
Five years after she left, Amalfitano heard from Lola
again. The letter was short and came from
In it Lola told him that she had a job cleaning big office buildings. It was a
night job that started at ten and ended at four or five or six in the morning.
like all big cities when everyone is asleep. She would take the metro home. The
metro at that hour was the saddest thing in the world. She'd had another child,
a son, named Benoit, with whom she lived. She'd also been in the hospital. She
didn't say why, or whether she was still sick. She didn't mention any man. She
didn't ask about
struck him that this might not be the case at all. He cried for a while with
the letter in his hands. It was only as he was drying his eyes that he noticed
the letter was typed. He knew, without a doubt, that Lola had written it from
one of the offices she said she cleaned. For a second he thought it was all a
lie, that Lola was working as an administrative assistant or secretary in some
big company. Then he saw it clearly. He saw the vacuum cleaner parked between
two rows of desks, saw the floor waxer like a cross between a mastiff and a pig
sitting next to a plant, he saw an enormous window through which the lights of
Paris blinked, he saw Lola in the cleaning company's smock, a worn blue smock,
sitting writing the letter and maybe taking slow drags on a cigarette, he saw
Lola's fingers, Lola's wrists, Lola's blank eyes, he saw another Lola reflected
in the quicksilver of the window, floating weightless in the skies of Paris,
like a trick photograph that isn't a trick, floating, floating pensively in the
skies of Paris, weary, sending messages from the coldest, iciest realm of
passion.
Two years after she sent this last letter, seven years
after she'd abandoned Amalfitano and her daughter, Lola came home and found
them gone. She spent three weeks asking around at old addresses for her husband's
whereabouts. Some people didn't let her in, because they couldn't figure out
who she was or they had forgotten her long ago. Others kept her standing in the
doorway, because they didn't trust her or because Lola had simply got the
address wrong. A few asked her in and offered her a cup of coffee or tea that
Lola never accepted, since she was apparently in a hurry to see her daughter
and Amalfitano. At first the search was discouraging and unreal. She talked to
people even she had forgotten. At night she slept in a boardinghouse near Las
Ramblas, where foreign workers crammed into tiny rooms. She found the city
changed but she couldn't say what exactly was different. In the afternoons,
after walking all day, she would sit on the steps of a church to rest and
listen to the conversations of the people going in and out, mostly tourists.
She read books in French about
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, wandering in disguise through
the masses, the killer whose mind no one understands, not even the FBI special
agents or the charitable people who dropped coins in her hands. Other times she
saw herself as the mother of Medon and Strophius, a happy mother who watches
her children play from the window while behind them the blue sky struggles in
the white arms of the
whispered: Pylades, Orestes, and those two names stood in her mind for the
faces of many men, except Amalfitano's, the face of the man she was looking for
now. One night she met an ex-student of her husband's, who recognized her at
once, as if in his university days he had been in love with her. The ex-student
took her home, told her she could stay as long as she wanted, fixed up the
guest room for her exclusive use. The second night, as they were having dinner
together, the ex-student embraced her and she let him embrace her for a few
seconds, as if she needed him too, and then she said something into his ear and
the ex-student moved away and went to sit on the floor in a corner of the
living room. They were like that for hours, she sitting in her chair and he
sitting on the floor, which was a very odd parquet, dark yellow, so that it
looked more like a tightly woven straw rug. The candles on the table went out
and only then did she go and sit in the living room, in the opposite corner. In
the dark she thought she heard faint sobs. She supposed the young man was
crying and she fell asleep, lulled by his weeping. For the next few days she
and the ex-student redoubled their efforts. When she saw Amalfitano at last she
didn't recognize him. He was fatter than before and he'd lost some of his hair.
She spotted him from a distance and didn't hesitate for a second as she
approached him. Amalfitano was sitting under a larch and smoking with an absent
look on his face. You've changed a lot, she said. Amalfitano recognized her
instantly. You haven't, he said. Thank you, she said. Then Amalfitano stood up
and they left.
In
those days, Amalfitano was living in Sant
Cugat and teaching philosophy classes at
Universidad Autonoma, not far away.
to a public elementary school in town and left at eight-thirty in the morning
and didn't come home until five. Lola saw
and hugged her and then almost immediately ran away to hide in her bedroom.
That night, after showering and making up her bed on the sofa, Lola told
Amalfitano that she was very sick, she would probably die, and she had wanted
to see
to take her to the hospital the next day, but Lola refused, saying French
doctors had always been better than Spanish doctors, and she took some papers
out of her bag that stated in no uncertain terms and in French that she had
AIDS. The next day, when he got back from the university, Amalfitano spotted
Lola and Rosa walking near the station holding hands. He didn't want to disturb
them and he followed them from a distance. When he got home they were sitting
together watching TV. Later, when
asleep, he asked Lola about her son Benoit. For a while she was silent,
recalling with near photographic memory each part of her son's body, each
gesture, each expression of astonishment or surprise, then she said that Benoit
was an intelligent and sensitive boy, and that he had been the first to know
she was going to die. Amalfitano asked her who had told him, although he
thought, with resignation, that he knew the answer. He realized it without
anyone telling him, said Lola, just by looking. It's terrible for a child to
know his mother is going to die, said Amalfitano. It's worse to lie to them,
children should never be lied to, said Lola. On her fifth morning with them,
when the medicine she had brought with her from
told them she had to leave. Benoit is little and he needs me, she said.
Actually, he doesn't need me, but that doesn't mean he isn't little, she said.
I don't know who needs who, she said at last, but the fact is I have to go see
how he is. Amalfitano left a note on the table and an envelope containing a
good part of his savings. When he got back from work he thought Lola would be
gone. He picked
walked home. When they got there Lola was sitting in front of the TV, which was
on but with the sound off, reading her book on
her bedroom, undressed her, and tucked her in. Lola was waiting for him in the
living room, with her suitcase packed. You should stay the night, said
Amalfitano. It's too late to go. There aren't any more trains to
not taking the train, said Lola. I'm going to hitchhike. Amalfitano bowed his head
and said she could go whenever she wanted. Lola gave him a kiss on the cheek
and left. The next day Amalfitano got up at six and turned on the radio, to
make sure no hitchhiker on any highway nearby had been murdered or raped.
Nothing.
And yet this vision of Lola lingered in his mind for many
years, like a memory rising up from glacial seas, although in fact he hadn't
seen anything, which meant there was nothing to remember, only the shadow of
his ex-wife projected on the neighboring buildings in the beam of the
streetlights, and then the dream: Lola walking off down one of the highways out
of Sant Cugat, walking along the side of the road, an almost deserted road
since most cars took the new toll highway to save time, a woman bowed by the
weight of her suitcase, fearless, walking fearlessly along the side of the
road.
The
a cemetery that suddenly begins to think, in vain. It also was like an empty
dance club.
One afternoon Amalfitano went into the yard in his
shirtsleeves, like a feudal lord riding out on horseback to survey his lands.
The moment before, he'd been sitting on the floor of his study opening boxes of
books with a kitchen knife, and in one of the boxes he'd found a strange book,
a book he didn't remember ever buying or receiving as a gift. The book was
Rafael Dieste's
Testamento geometrico,
published by Ediciones del Castro
in La Coruna, in 1975, a book evidently about geometry, a subject that meant
next to nothing to Amalfitano, divided into three parts, the first an
"Introduction to Euclid, Lobachevsky and Riemann," the second
concerning "The Geometry of Motion," and the third titled "Three
Proofs of the V Postulate." This last was the most enigmatic by far since
Amalfitano had no idea what the V Postulate was or what it consisted of, nor
did he mean to find out, although this was probably owing not to a lack of
curiosity, of which he possessed an ample supply, but to the heat that swept
Santa Teresa in the afternoons, the dry, dusty heat of a bitter sun, inescapable
unless you lived in a new apartment with air-conditioning, which Amalfitano
didn't. The publication of the book had been made possible thanks to the
support of some friends of the author, friends who'd been immortalized, in a
photograph that looked as if it was taken at the end of a party, on page 4,
where the publisher's information usually appears. What it said there was:
The
present edition is offered as a tribute to Rafael Dieste by: Ramon BALTAR
DOMINGUEZ,
Isaac DIAZ PARDO, Felipe FERNANDEZ ARMESTO, Francisco FERNANDEZ DEL RIEGO,
Alvaro GIL VARELA, Domingo GARCIA-SABELL, Valentin PAZ-ANDRADE and Luis SEOANE
LOPEZ.
It struck Amalfitano as odd, to say the least, that the friends'
last names had been printed in capitals while the name of the man being honored
was in small letters. On the front flap, the reader was informed that the
Testamento
geometrico
was really three books, "each independent, but functionally
correlated by the sweep of the whole," and then it said "this work
representing the final distillation of Dieste's reflections and research on
Space, the notion of which is involved in any methodical discussion of the
fundamentals of Geometry." At that moment, Amalfitano thought he
remembered that Rafael Dieste was a poet. A Galician poet, of course, or long
settled in
And his friends and patrons were also Galician, naturally, or long settled in
Galicia, where Dieste probably gave classes at the University of La Coruna or
Santiago de Compostela, or maybe he was a high school teacher, teaching
geometry to kids of fifteen or sixteen and looking out the window at the
permanently overcast winter sky of Galicia and the pouring rain. And on the
back flap there was more about Dieste. It said: "Of the books that make up
Dieste's varied but in no way uneven body of work, which always cleaves to the
demands of a personal process in which poetic creation and speculative creation
are focused on a single object, the closest forerunners of the present book are
Nuevo tratado del paralelismo
(Buenos Aires, 1958) and more recent
works:
Variaciones sobre Zenon de Elea
and
¿Que es un axioma?
this
followed by
Movilidad y Semejanza
together in one volume." So,
thought Amalfitano, his face running with sweat to which microscopic particles
of dust adhered, Dieste's passion for geometry wasn't something new. And his
patrons, in this new light, were no longer friends who got together every night
at the club to drink and talk politics or football or mistresses. Instead, in a
flash, they became distinguished university colleagues, some doubtless retired
but others fully active, and all well-to-do or relatively well-to-do, which of
course didn't mean that they didn't meet up every so often like provincial
intellectuals, or in other words like deeply self-sufficient men, at the La
Coruna club to drink good cognac or whiskey and talk about intrigues and
mistresses while their wives, or in the case of the widowers, their
housekeepers, were sitting in front of the TV or preparing supper. But the
question for Amalfitano was how this book had ended up in one of his boxes. For
half an hour he searched his memory, leafing distractedly through Dieste's
book. Finally he concluded that for the moment it was a mystery beyond his
powers to solve, but he didn't give up. He asked Rosa, who was in the bathroom
putting on makeup, if the book was hers.
sure whether it was hers or not.
him if he was feeling all right. I feel fine, said Amalfitano, but this book
isn't mine and it showed up in one of the boxes of books I sent from
on her makeup. How can I not worry, said Amalfitano, also in Catalan, when it
feels like I'm losing my memory.
at the book again and said: it might be mine. Are you sure? asked Amalfitano.
No, it isn't mine, said
isn't, in fact, I've never seen it before. Amalfitano left his daughter in
front of the bathroom mirror and went back out into the desolate yard, where
everything was a dusty brown, as if the desert had settled around his new
house, with the book dangling from his hand. He thought back on the bookstores
where he might have bought it. He looked at the first page and the last page
and the back cover for some sign, and on the first page he found a stamp
reading Libreria Follas Novas, S.L., Montero Rios 37, phone 981-59-44-06 and
981-59-44-18,
Clearly it wasn't Santiago de Chile, the only place in the world where
Amalfitano could see himself in a state of total catatonia, walking into a
bookstore, choosing some book without even looking at the cover, paying for it,
and leaving. Obviously, it was Santiago de Compostela, in
instant Amalfitano envisioned a pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago. He
walked to the back of the yard, where his wooden fence met the cement wall
surrounding the house behind his. He had never really looked at it. Glass
shards, he thought, the owners' fear of unwanted guests. The edges of the
shards were reflecting the afternoon sun when Amalfitano resumed his walk
around the desolate yard. The wall of the house next door was also bristling
with glass, here mostly green and brown glass from beer and liquor bottles.
Never, even in dreams, had he been in Santiago de Compostela, Amalfitano had to
acknowledge, halting in the shadow of the left-hand wall. But that hardly
mattered. Some of the bookstores he frequented in
bookstores that were selling off their inventories or closing, or, in a few
cases, that functioned as both bookstore and distributor. I probably picked it
up at Laie, he thought, or maybe at La Central, the time I stopped in to buy
some philosophy book and the clerk was excited because Pere Gimferrer, Rodrigo
Rey Rosa, and Juan Villoro were all there, arguing about whether it was a good
idea to fly, and plane accidents, and which was more dangerous, taking off or
landing, and she mistakenly put this book in my bag. La Central, that makes
sense. But if that was the way it happened I'd have discovered the book when I
got home and opened the bag or the package or whatever it was, unless, of
course, something terrible or upsetting happened to me on the walk home that
eliminated any desire or curiosity I had to examine my new book or books. It's
even possible that I might have opened the package like a zombie and left the
new book on the night table and Dieste's book on the bookshelf, shaken by something
I'd just seen on the street, maybe a car accident, maybe a mugging, maybe a
suicide in the subway, although if I had seen something like that, thought
Amalfitano, I would surely remember it now or at least retain a vague memory of
it. I wouldn't remember the
Testamento geometrico,
but I would remember
whatever had made me forget the
Testamento geometrico.
And as if this
wasn't enough, the biggest problem wasn't really where the book had come from
but how it had ended up in Santa Teresa in one of Amalfitano's boxes of books,
books he had chosen in
could he have packed a book without noticing what he was doing? Had he planned
to read it when he got to the north of
the starting point for a desultory study of geometry? And if that was his plan,
why had he forgotten the moment he arrived in this city rising up in the middle
of nowhere? Had the book disappeared from his memory while he and his daughter
were flying east to west? Or had it disappeared from his memory as he was
waiting for his boxes of books to arrive, once he was in Santa Teresa? Had
Dieste's book vanished as a side effect of jet lag?