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
"Because
someone has to keep the cell operative."
Jones's
eyes were small and black as coal, and his eyelids were heavy with folds. He
had hardly any eyelashes. His eyebrows were sparse, and sometimes, when he and
Fate went out to take walks around the neighborhood, he put on big sunglasses
and picked up a cane, which he left by the door when they got back. He could go
whole days without eating. Once you get to be a certain age, he said, food is
no good. He wasn't in contact with any other Communists in the
corresponded occasionally. Until fifteen years ago I belonged to the Third
International, and Minski convinced me to join the Fourth, he said. Then he
said:
"Son,
I'm going to give you a book that will be of great use to you."
Fate
thought it would be
The Communist Manifesto,
maybe because in the living
room, piled in corners and under chairs, he had seen several copies published
by Antonio Jones himself—who knew where he'd gotten the money or how he'd
fast-talked the printers—but when the old man put the book in his hands he saw
with surprise that it wasn't the
Manifesto
but a fat volume titled
The
Slave Trade
by someone called Hugh Thomas, whose name he had never heard
before. At first he refused to take it.
"It's an
expensive book and this must be your only copy," he said.
Jones's
answer was that he shouldn't worry, that it had cost him only cunning, not
money, by which Fate deduced that Jones had stolen the book, though this also
struck him as unlikely, since the old man wasn't in any shape for such things,
though he might conceivably have an accomplice at the bookstore where he
pocketed his finds, a young black man who turned a blind eye when Jones slipped
a book under his jacket.
Flipping
through the book in his apartment hours later, he realized that the author was
white. A white Englishman who had also been a professor at Sandhurst, the
made him more or less the equivalent of a drill sergeant, an English
mother-fucking sergeant in short pants, so he put the book aside and didn't
read it. People responded to the interview with Antonio Ulises Jones. To most
of his colleagues, Fate noted, the story was little more than a venture into
the African-American picturesque. A loony preacher, a loony ex-jazz musician,
the loony last member of the Brooklyn Communist Party (Fourth International).
Sociological curiosities. But they liked it and soon afterward he became a
staff writer. He never saw Antonio Jones again, just as in all likelihood he
would never see Barry Seaman again.
When
he woke up it was still dark.
Before he left
went to the only decent bookstore in the city and bought
The Slave Trade
by
Hugh Thomas, the former professor at
Then he headed down
Avenue
of coffee and toast for breakfast at a Greektown diner. When he said he didn't
want anything else, the waitress, a blond woman in her forties, asked him if he
was sick. He said he had an upset stomach. Then the waitress took away the cup
of coffee she'd poured him and told him she had something better for him. A
little while later she came back with a tea brewed from anise and an herb
called boldo that Fate had never tasted and at first he was reluctant to try
it.
"This is what
you need, not coffee," said the waitress.
She
was a tall, thin woman, with very large breasts and nice hips. She was wearing
a black skirt and a white blouse and flat-heeled shoes. For a while neither of
them said anything, both waiting expectantly, until Fate shrugged and took a
sip of the tea. Then the waitress smiled and went to wait on other customers.
At
the hotel, as he was about to pay his bill, he discovered he had a phone
message from
A voice he didn't recognize asked him to get in touch with his editor or the
editor of the sports section as soon as possible. He made the call from the
lobby. He talked to the girl at the next desk and she told him to hold on while
she tried to find the editor. After a while an unfamiliar voice came on. The
speaker introduced himself as Jeff Roberts, editor of the sports section, and
he began to talk to Fate about a boxing match. Count Pickett is fighting, he
said, and we don't have anybody to cover the event. The editor called him Oscar
as if they had known each other for years, and he talked on and on about Count
Pickett, a promising Harlem light heavyweight.
"So what does
this have to do with me?" asked Fate.
"Well,
Oscar," said the sports editor, "you know Jimmy Lowell died and we
still haven't found anyone to replace him."
Fate
thought the fight must be in
few days away from
"You want me
to write up the fight?"
"That's
right, kid," said Roberts, "say five pages, a short profile of
Pickett, the match, and some local color."
"Where is the
fight?"
"In
said the sports editor, "and keep in mind that we give a bigger travel
allowance than they do in your section."
With his suitcase packed, Fate headed to Seaman's apartment
for the last time. He found the old man reading and taking notes. From the
kitchen came the smell of spices and frying onion and garlic.
"I'm
leaving," he said. "I just stopped to say goodbye."
Seaman asked if he
could give him something to eat first.
"No, I don't
have time," said Fate.
They
embraced and Fate headed down the stairs, taking them in threes as if he were
dashing for the street, like a boy heading out for a free afternoon with his
friends. As he drove toward the
thought about Seaman's strange books,
The Abridged French Encyclopedia
and
the one he hadn't seen but that Seaman had claimed to have read in prison,
The
Abridged Digest of the Complete Works of Voltaire,
which made him laugh out
loud.
At the airport he bought a ticket to
counter at a coffee place, he remembered the dream he'd had the night before
about Antonio Jones, who had been dead for several years now. As before, he
asked himself what Jones could have died of, and the one answer that occurred
to him was old age. One day, walking down some street in
Antonio Jones had felt tired, sat down on the sidewalk, and a second later
stopped existing. Maybe it happened that way for my mother, thought Fate, but
deep down he knew otherwise. When the airplane took off from
city.
Fate
opened the book by the white man who had been a professor at
Beyond the delta of the
turn south again and there, in the Cameroons, in the late eighteenth century,
Liverpool merchants from
the River
of
activity as a slave region in the 1780s. This area seemed to the Reverend John
Newton to possess "the most humane and moral people I ever met with in
Africa," perhaps "because they were the people who had least
intercourse with
But off the coast the Dutch had for a long time used the
center, though not specifically for slaves.
Then he saw an
illustration—there were quite a few in the book—showing a Portuguese fort on
the Gold Coast, called Elmina, captured by the Danes in 1637. For three hundred
and fifty years Elmina was a center of the slave trade. Over the fort, and over
a small nearby fort built at the top of a hill, flew a flag that Fate couldn't
identify. What kingdom did it belong to? he wondered before his eyes closed and
he fell asleep with the book on his lap.
At the
planned to stop at the first roadside diner he came to, because his appetite
seemed to have sharpened in the dry desert air. Two Camaros of the same model
and the same color passed him, honking. He thought they must be in a race. The
cars probably had souped-up engines, and their bodies shone in the
little ranch that sold oranges, but he didn't stop. The ranch was about three
hundred feet from the highway, and the orange stand, an old cart with an awning
and big wooden wheels, stood by the side of the road, tended by two Mexican
kids. A few miles down the road he saw a place called Cochise's Corner and he
parked in a big lot, next to a gas station. The two Camaros were parked next to
a flag with a red stripe on top and a black stripe on the bottom. In the middle
was a white circle emblazoned with the words Chiricahua Auto Club. For an
instant he thought the Camaro drivers must be two Indians, but then the idea
struck him as absurd. He sat in a corner of the restaurant next to a window,
where he could keep an eye on his car. There were two men at the next table.
One was tall and young and looked like a teacher of computer science. He had an
easy smile and sometimes he clapped his hands to his face in what might have
been astonishment or horror, or anything at all. Fate couldn't see the other
man's face, but he was clearly quite a bit older than his companion. His neck
was thick, his hair was white, and he wore glasses. Whether he was talking or
listening he remained impassive, without gesturing or moving.
The girl who came to wait on him was Mexican. He ordered
coffee and scanned the menu for a few minutes. He asked whether they had club
sandwiches. The waitress shook her head. A steak, said Fate. With salsa? asked
the waitress. What's in the salsa? asked Fate.
And we put some spices in, too. All right, he said, I'll try it. When the
waitress left he looked around the restaurant. At one table he saw two Indians,
one an adult and the other a teenager, maybe father and son. At another he saw
two white men with a Mexican woman. The men were exactly alike, identical twins
of about fifty. The Mexican woman must have been forty-five or so, and it was
clear the twins were crazy about her. They're the Camaro owners, thought Fate.
He also realized that no one in the whole restaurant was black except for him.
The young man at the next table said something about
inspiration. All Fate heard was: you've been an inspiration to us. The
white-haired man said it was really nothing. The young man raised his hands to
his face and said something about willpower, about the power to hold a gaze.
Then he removed his hands from his face and with shining eyes he said: I don't
mean a natural gaze, a gaze from the natural realm, I mean a gaze in the
abstract. The white-haired man said: of course. When you caught Jurevich, said
the young man, and then his voice was drowned out by the deafening roar of a
diesel engine. A semi was parking in the lot. The waitress brought Fate's
coffee and the steak with salsa. The young man was still talking about the
person called Jurevich who'd been caught by the white-haired man.
"It wasn't
hard," said the white-haired man.
"A
killer who's sloppy," said the young man, and he raised his hand to his
mouth as if he were about to sneeze.
"No,"
said the white-haired man, "a careful killer."
"Oh, I thought
he was sloppy," said the young man.
"No, no, he
was careful," said the white-haired man.
"Which is
worse?" asked the young man.
Fate
cut a piece of meat. It was thick and tender and it tasted good. The salsa was
tasty, especially once you got used to the heat.
"The
sloppy ones are worse," said the white-haired man. "It's harder to
establish a pattern of behavior."
"But can it it
be established?" asked the young man.
"Given
the means and the time, you can do anything," said the white-haired man.
Fate
beckoned for the waitress. The Mexican woman rested her head on the shoulder of
one of the twins and the other twin smiled as if this were a common occurrence.
Fate imagined that she was married to the twin who had his arm around her, but
that their marriage hadn't extinguished the other brother's love or dashed his
hopes. The Indian father asked for the check. Meanwhile, the young Indian had
pulled out a comic book from somewhere and was reading it. Out in the lot Fate
saw the truck driver who had just parked his truck. He was on his way back from
the gas station bathroom and he was combing his blond hair with a tiny comb.
The waitress asked him what he wanted. Another coffee and a big glass of water.