Antwerp (6 page)

She said she loved busy days. I looked up at the sky. "Busy days," and also insects and clouds that drift down to the bushes. This flower pot I leave in the country is proof of my love for you. Then I came back with my butterfly net in the fog. The girl said: "calamity," "horses," "rockets sliced open," and turned her back on me. Her back spoke. Like the chirping of crickets in the afternoons of lonely houses. I closed my eyes, the brakes squealed, and the policemen leaped out of their cars. . "Keep looking out the window." Without any explanation, two of them came to the door and said "police," the rest I could hardly hear. I closed my eyes, crickets chirped, the boys died on the beach. Bodies riddled with holes. The brakes squealed and the cops got out. There's something obscene about this, said the medic when nobody was listening. I'll probably never come back to the clearing in the woods, not with flowers, not with the net, not with a fucking book to spend the afternoon. His mouth opened but the author couldn't hear a thing. He thought about the silence and then he thought "there's no such thing," "horses," "waning August moon." Someone applauded from the void. I said I guessed this was happiness.

On the terrace of the bar only three girls are dancing. Two are thin and have long hair. The other is fat, with shorter hair, and she's retarded ... The guy being chased by Colan Yar vanished like a mosquito in winter ... Though really, I guess in the winter all that's left are the mosquito eggs ... Three happy, hardworking girls ... August 7, 1980 ... The guy opened the door to his room, turned on the light ... There was an expression of horror on his face ... He turned out the light ... Don't be afraid, though the only stories I have to tell you are sad, don't be afraid ...

Big mistakes. Nameless girl returning to the scene of the deserted campground. Deserted bar, deserted reception area, deserted plots. This is your Wild West ghost town. She said: in the end they'll destroy us all. (Even the pretty girls?) I laughed at her despondence. Doubly afraid of himself because he couldn't help falling in love once a year at least. Then a succession of portapotties, cheap reprints, kids puking, while a retarded girl dances on the silent terrace. All writing on the edge hides a white mask. That's all. There's always a fucking mask. The rest: poor Bolaño writing at a pit stop. "Police cars with their radios on: useless information raining down on them from all the neighborhoods they pass through." "Anonymous letters, subtle threats, the real wait." "My dear, now I live in a tourist town, the people are tan, it's sunny every day, etc." There are no rules. ("Tell that stupid Arnold Bennet that all his rules about plot only apply to novels that are copies of other novels.") And so on and so on. I, too, am fleeing Colan Yar. I've worked with retarded people, at a campground, picking pineapples, harvesting crops, unloading ships. Everything drove me toward this place, this vacant lot where nothing remains to be said ... "At least you're with beautiful girls"... "I'd say the only beautiful thing here is the language" ... "I mean it in the most literal way"... (Applause.)

(Everyone's Eaten More Than One Dish or One Dish Costing More Than zoo Pesetas, Except for Me!)

Dear Lisa, once I talked to you on the phone for more than an hour without realizing that you had hung up. I was at a public phone on Calle Bucareli, at the Reloj Chino corner. Now I'm in a bar on the Catalan coast, my throat hurts, and I'm close to broke. The Italian girl said she was going back to Milan to work, even if it made her sick. I don't know whether she was quoting Pavese or she really didn't feel like going back. I think I'll go to the campground nurse for some antibiotics. The scene breaks up geometrically. We see a deserted beach at eight o'clock, tall orange clouds; in the distance a group of five people walk away from the observer in Indian file. The wind lifts a curtain of sand and covers them.

In Antwerp a man was killed when his car was run over by a truck full of pigs. Lots of the pigs died too when the truck overturned, others had to be put out of their misery by the side of the road, and others took off as fast as they could ... "That's right, honey, he's dead, the pigs ran right over him"... "At night, on the dark highways of Belgium or Catalonia" ... "We talked for hours in a bar on Las Ramblas, it was summer and she talked as if she hadn't talked for a long time" ... "When she was done, she felt my face like a blind woman"... "The pigs squealed" ... "She said I want to be alone and even though I was drunk I understood"... "I don't know, it's something like the full moon, girls who are really like flies, though that's not what I mean"... "Pigs howling in the middle of the highway, wounded or rushing away from the smashedup truck" ... "Every word is useless, every sentence, every phone conversation" ... "She said she wanted to be alone" ... I wanted to be alone too. In Antwerp or Barcelona. The moon. Animals fleeing. Highway accident. Fear.

There's a secret sickness called Lisa. Like all sicknesses, it's miserable and it comes on at night. In the weave of a mysterious language whose words signify without exception that the foreigner "isn't well." And somehow I would like her to know that the foreigner is "struggling." "in strange lands," "without much chance of writing epic poetry," "without much chance of anything." The sickness takes me to strange and frozen bathrooms where the plumbing works according to an unexpected mechanism. Bathrooms, dreams, long hair flying out the window to the sea. The sickness is a wake. (The author appears shirtless, in black glasses, posing with a dog and a backpack in the summer somewhere.) "The summer somewhere," sentences lacking in tranquility, though the image they refract is motionless, like a coffin in the lens of a still camera. The writer is a dirty man, with his shirt sleeves rolled up and his short hair wet with sweat. hauling barrels of garbage. He's also a waiter who watches himself filming as he walks along a deserted beach, on his way back to the hotel... "The wind whips grains of sand"... "Without much chance"... The sickness is to sit at the base of the lighthouse staring into nothing. The lighthouse is black, the sea is black, the writer's jacket is also black.

You can't go back. This world of cops and robbers and foreigners without papers is too powerful for you. Powerful means it's comfortable, a featherweight world, without entropy, a world you know and from which you're never able to remove yourself. Like a tattoo. In exchange, however, you'd get back your native land, and the laws that protect you, and the right to meet a very beautiful girl with a dumb voice. A girl standing in the door to your room, the maid who's come to make your bed. I stopped at the word "bed" and closed the notebook. All I had the strength to do was turn out the light and fall into "bed." Immediately I began to dream about a window with a heavy wooden frame, carved like the ones in children's book illustrations. I shoved the window with my shoulder and it opened. Outside there was no one. A silent night in the blocks of bungalows. The policeman showed his badge, trying not to stutter. Car with a Madrid license plate. The man on the passenger side was wearing a Tshirt with the Barcelona colors, the stripes horizontal instead of vertical. An indelible tattoo on his left arm. Behind them gleamed a mass of fog and sleep. But the cop stuttered and I smiled. You cccan't gggo bbback. Go back.

That's the way it is, he said, a slight sense of failure that keeps growing stronger and the body gets used to it. You can't escape the void, just as you can't help crossing streets if you live in a city, with the added annoyance that sometimes the street is endlessly wide, the buildings look like warehouses out of gangster movies, and some people choose the worst moments to think about their mothers. "Gangsters" equals "mothers." At the golden hour, no one remembered the hunchback. "That's the Way It Is," the name of a piece by Monty Alexander recorded in the early 1960s at an L.A. club. Maybe "warehouses" equals "mothers," a wide margin of error is permissible when you're dealing with superimpositions. All thought is registered on the path through the woods along which the foreigner walked back and forth. If you saw him from above you'd think he was a solitary ant. Flash of doubt: there's always another ant that the camera doesn't see. What poems lack is characters who lie in wait for the reader. "Warehouses," "gangsters," "mothers," "forever." His voice was hard, he said, solid in timbre like the collapse of a cattle hoist or a hay bale in a cattle pond. He drooled as he spoke, some sentences were riddles that no one bothered to decipher. Ray Brown on bass, Milt Jackson on vibraphone, and two others on sax and drums. Monty Alexander himself played piano. ManneHole, 1961? The last thing he saw was the beach at nine o'clock. In July it got dark very late, at ninethirty it was still light out. A group of waiters moving away from the eye. (But the eye envisions "warehouses," not "waiters.") The wind lifts soft curtains of sand. From here, it looks like they'll try to come back.

The nameless girl wanders the workingclass neighborhoods of Barcelona. A girl born in France, to Spanish parents? The beach stretches in a straight line to the next town. She opened the window, it was overcast but hot. She went back into the bathroom. She gazed curiously at the buildings along the street. All of this is paranoia, she thought. She's eighteen but she doesn't exist. she was born in an industrial city of France and her name is Rosario or María Dolores, but she can't exist because I'm still here. The guard is asleep? She checked her watch. Returning to the window, she lit a cigarette. Through the curtains the boys dozed amid the shadows on the street. Intermittent forms, the sound of barely audible voices. She stared at the moon that hung over the building across the street. From the street came the words "ship," "Olympia," "restaurant." The girl sat on the terrace of a "restaurant" and asked for a glass of white wine. Over her head was the green awning, and, above that, the summer. Like the moon peeping over the building and her gazing at it, thinking about the motorcyclists and the name of the month: July. Born in France to Spanish parents, blond hair, very far away from the restaurant and the words with which they try to distract her. "I woke up because you were lost in the shadows of the bedroom"... "A powerful explosion—... "I was deaf for the rest of the day" ... She dreamed of empty cars in lots as black as coal. There are no more towns or workingclass neighborhoods for this actor. Eighteen years old, so far away. She goes back into the bathroom. Girl kaput.

Movies under the pines at the Estrella de Mar campground. The spectators watch the screen and slap at mosquitoes. A yellow face suddenly appears among the rocks and asks: are you, too, being chased by Colan Yar? (Yellow face crisscrossed with broad dark scars, burned trees, white plastic chairs left in front of the bungalows, a bicycle in the weeds.) Colan Yar, of course, and plaques faintly lit by the the moon. I left my post; with slow steps I headed to the restaurant, which was still open at this late hour. "Colan Yar after me, right on my heels," I heard people saying behind my back. When turned all I could see were the shapes of trees and dark tents. In the movie one of the actors said "we're being chased by a volcano." Another character, a woman, at some point observed: "it's no easy thing to become a major in the English army." Chased by the Nagas, diabolical warriors in black leather helmets, worshippers of the volcano, maybe priests, not warriors; in any case, soon wiped out. The actress: "I'm tired of fighting these awful creatures." An actor says: "Do you want me to carry you to the plane?" Five figures flee through a valley in flames. An Armada icebreaker waiting for them at 20:30 hours, not a minute later. The captain: "If we stay, we won't be able to get out later." The captain's hair is completely white and he's wearing a blue winter uniform. He enunciates slowly: "We won't be able to get out." I glanced away from the screen. From the distance the tennis court lights made it look like a secret airfield. Back there, the person fleeing Colan Yar writes a letter sitting on a bench outside. Secret airfield. Mirrors. Other elements.