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Authors: Roberto Bolaño

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BOOK: A Little Lumpen Novelita
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VIII

 

For a few days I lived on tiptoe, I think. I went back and forth from work to home trying not to call attention to myself, and at night I watched some TV, not much, since I was gradually losing interest in the shows I used to see.

Sometimes the house was empty when I got home. Then I would eat in the kitchen, sitting on a white stool, staring at the white-tiled wall, counting the tiles from top to bottom, then counting the rows, then losing my place and starting over. I can say without irony that I was bored.

Sometimes I went into my parents’ old bedroom. It still looked the same, and if by some miracle the ghosts (or zombies) of my parents had come through the door, they wouldn’t have found a thing out of place.

But a few items provided evidence to the contrary.

There was a suitcase half-hidden behind a chair, and the frame of a backpack just visible on top of the wardrobe. The suitcase was well made, of leather, and inside it were clean clothes that might have belonged to either the Bolognan or the Libyan. In the backpack were dirty clothes, just a small bundle, because if there was one thing that could be said about my brother’s friends, it was that they had an undeniable predilection for cleaning. I couldn’t find a single personal item among their belongings. Not a letter or an address book or a photocopy of their Social Security papers. I guessed that they always carried their important documents around with them. Or they didn’t have any. Or they didn’t exist.

Around this time I remember a conversation with one of my friends at work. She was the same age as me, but she had a boyfriend, and one evening before we closed up the salon she started to talk about her future. For a second I thought I was losing my mind. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

“Are you serious? Are you making this up?”

She was serious, but when she saw how upset I was she stopped talking and went over to the other end of the room, where she said something to a stylist who was taking a break, sitting in a chair, smoking a cigarette and watching the sunset. There was an expression of deep melancholy on the stylist’s face. But the look on the other girl’s face was malevolent, I thought. I was breathing hard, as if I’d run from one point to another in record time, and though the other girl laughed a few times, as if she couldn’t believe her own words, she seemed afraid. The stylist listened without getting up from her chair. It was as if the girl’s words were sliding off her face, a hard face without a hint of indulgence. That’s what I remember. And I remember the sunset, a sunset of rose and ocher that crept all the way to the back of the salon, but never touched me.

That night I didn’t cry on the way home, which was something I’d been doing for a while. It was as if when I left work I walked straight into a wind tunnel that made me cry for no reason. A tunnel that at first seemed to have only a physical effect, bringing on tears and nothing else, but rather than getting used to it, over the last few days I had been struck by a feeling of enormous sadness, a sadness that I could only handle by crying.

But that day, as if I glimpsed that my life was about to take a sharp turn, I didn’t cry. I put on my sunglasses, left the salon, stepped into the tunnel, and didn’t cry. Not a single tear.

My brother and the two men who lived in our house were waiting for me. I saw them from outside. The three of them were standing in the window, like fish in a fishbowl, watching the street. It took them a while to spot me there on the sidewalk, watching them.

I climbed slowly up the stairs. I closed the door and paused in the hallway. All of a sudden there they were, talking. I listened. What else could I do? Though I’ve forgotten what they said. They had a plan. That much I do remember. A hazy plan on which each of them, my brother included, had gambled his future, and to which each had added his bit, his personal touch, his vision of fate and the turns of fate.

I remember I listened to them and then I pushed past them into the living room and sat down, tired of taking in so much information at once. They followed me and were silent, expectant.

I said:

“Don’t stop, it’s a good idea, keep talking.”

Maybe I didn’t say it was a good idea. Maybe I said that I wanted to hear them out. (I thought we were all going to end up in jail, but I didn’t tell them that — I’m not a killjoy.)

They smiled and obeyed. My brother seemed the most enthusiastic, as if it had been his idea, though I knew it hadn’t. The Libyan seemed the most skeptical. But the three of them were committed to the plan and they clung to it like shipwrecked sailors, laying it all out for me and presenting it in the best possible light. It was something that would require only the tiniest sacrifice, a plan in which cleverness was key. It was the perfect coup, a scheme that would open the doors of a new life to us, that would get us a house on the beach, or a restaurant in Tangiers, or a gym up north.

When they were done talking I said that it sounded good to me. Then I got up and went to bed and fell asleep without eating dinner.

At five in the morning I woke up. I turned on the light, I leafed through old magazines, and for a while I mulled over what they had explained. So this is the life of crime, I thought without fear.

The next morning I didn’t go to work, I got up early, went out, bought bread, and called in sick from a payphone. I don’t know whether they believed me or not. I didn’t care.

At midday, the Libyan and the Bolognan brought me to Maciste’s house. That wasn’t his name, but it was what everyone called him. To some he was Maciste, to others Mr. Maciste or Mr. Bruno, to others Mr. Universe. It depended. Most didn’t call him anything because Maciste never left the house and no one knew him and many of those who had known him, personally or by name, had forgotten him.

The house was on Via Germanico. It was a two-story house, with a small, overgrown garden in front, flanked by two six- or seven-story buildings. There was a tall metal gate. The shutters were closed, as if no one lived there. The paint on the façade was peeling in places, which made the place look even more neglected, if possible. And yet as we walked up to the door, we didn’t see mail on the ground or trash in the garden, which meant that someone did come occasionally to clean. Sometimes Maciste made an appearance at a gym on Via Palladio, according to the Bolognan, and sometimes someone was sent from the gym to fix a piece of Maciste’s exercise equipment.

“In there,” said the Bolognan as we were leaving, “he has a huge private gym set up just for him. Once I came with another guy to fix a weight rack and we got to be friendly. I came back twice, but I couldn’t get past the door. Maciste doesn’t trust anybody.”

Then, as we talked that afternoon about what we would do, they told me that for a while, probably before my brother and I were born, Maciste had been a movie star and his movies were seen all over the world. Then he’d had the accident and retired, and after that he’d gradually been forgotten.

But Maciste wasn’t the kind of person who’s easy to forget. I, for one, know I’ll never forget him. No matter what happens, I’ll never forget him.

IX

 

His real name was Giovanni Dellacroce. This was something that neither the Bolognan nor the Libyan knew (let alone my brother, who because of his age and lack of skills plays a marginal role here, I’m afraid). His stage name was Franco Bruno. People called him Mr. Universe, because he had won the title twice in the early sixties, or Maciste, which was the name of the character he played in four or maybe five movies, all huge hits in Italy and around the world. He was born in Pescara, but had lived in Rome since he was fifteen, in Santa Loreto, a suburb that he thought of as home and for which he was sometimes nostalgic, though when luck was on his side, he bought the big house on Via Germanico where I met him the night I was brought there.

A night that was like high noon in August and was one of the strangest nights in my life.

The Bolognan rang the bell several times. A voice over an intercom asked who was there.

“Friends,” said the Bolognan. No answer. The intercom might as well have been broken. After a while he rang again and said the name of the gym and the name — or so I thought I understood — of a mutual friend, and as if this weren’t enough, he announced our full names, mine included.

Then the gate opened and we were let into the little garden where even at night the plants struggled for scarce living space. More than a garden, it was like a cemetery.

There were three stone steps up to the porch. For a long time we stood there waiting for someone to open the door.

The tension on the faces of my brother’s friends, the tension and at the same time the joy, a primordial joy, pure and unwavering, is one of the things that comes back to me whenever I remember that night, and each time it does I try to brush it away, because it’s a joy that I want neither for myself nor anywhere near me. It’s a joy that comes too close to beggarliness, an explosion of beggarliness, and also to cruelty, indifference.

Then the door opened and we got a glimpse of a dark threshold where I seemed to see a shadow move very quickly, and a foyer, also dark, into which we stepped and out of which we backed like frightened children entrusted with a mysterious responsibility, and into which we stepped again, sheepishly, and out of which we inevitably backed again, until I took three steps inside, this time alone, and bumped into a piece of furniture and asked whether anyone was there.

A voice — Maciste’s — told me to stay where I was, not to move forward or back, and then he greeted my brother’s friends, hello, how are you? And in that brief
how are you
I sensed an incredible fragility, a fragility like a manta ray falling from the ceiling, the dark foyer the bottom of the sea and the manta ray watching us from above, halfway between the sea floor and the surface.

Then I heard the Bolognan and the Libyan saying they were fine, and how are you, Mr. Bruno? and Maciste, who wasn’t up above anymore and whose voice no longer echoed with infinite shades of fragility, replied:

“Plagued by ailments, my friends, that’s the way of it.”

And he said this in a voice in which there wasn’t a hint of ailing, a voice that boomed in the darkness as if it, the darkness, was a muzzle, and he was straining at it furiously, itching to come out on the porch and gobble up my brother’s friends, who just then, the cowards, were saying that their business here was done, they hoped everything would go well, and then they left, wishing us goodnight, Maciste and me, and as they were backing away almost at a run to the garden gate, the door to the house closed and since I didn’t see any shadow cross the threshold, I deduced that Maciste had closed the door with some kind of remote control.

Then, for the first time in a long time, I was plunged into total darkness.

What happened next is hard to describe. Maciste’s voice guided me to a room on the second floor, lit by a dim bulb half-hidden in a corner. I know I went up some stairs, but I know I went down some stairs too. Maciste’s voice was always ahead of me, guiding me. I wasn’t afraid. I crossed a dark room with a wall of windows that overlooked the back garden and the tall ivy-covered walls separating the house from the building next door. I felt calm. I opened a door. It wasn’t Maciste’s room, as I had imagined it would be, but a kind of gym. His private gym, the one my brother’s friends had told me about.

I turned on the light. On a wooden table there were several bottles of liniment and various lotions. I took off my jacket and waited. After a while the lights went out. Only then did the door open and I saw Maciste.

 

All of this is hard to describe, as I’ve said. What happened, what I felt, what I saw. What might have happened, what I might have seen, and what I might have felt. What he felt, I don’t know. I’ll never know.

He was big and fat. But that wasn’t really Maciste. He was big, yes. Tall, broad. He was also fat. He had been a world bodybuilding champion and a tiny part of that glory still lived on somewhere, not in his body, maybe, but in the way he moved. His body was the pallid color of bodies that never see the sun. Either his head was shaved or he had gone totally bald. He was polite. He was wearing an old black robe that fell to his ankles, and sunglasses that looked small on his big face.

I remember that he advanced toward the middle of the gym, where I was standing, his steps so slow that I could tell he was nervous or uncomfortable too.

He asked me how I was, and how old I was. I lied to him, as we had agreed I would, and in turn I asked him why he was called Maciste.

“Are you comfortable?” he asked.

“I’m fine and I’m nineteen. Why do people call you Maciste?”

He felt for a chair and then I knew, without a doubt, that he was blind.

He murmured that in his day he’d played a character called Maciste in a few movies.

I didn’t know what to say, not because of his response, but because I realized that I had a blind man in front of me. My brother’s friends hadn’t warned me about this. Assholes, I thought angrily, and I moved to grab my jacket and go running out of the house. But then I thought: what if they didn’t know? Was I going to spoil an ambitious plan, ambitious by our lights, I mean, just because of a mistake? Would my brother be left wandering the streets of Rome just because of a misunderstanding of no consequence in the end, anyway? And what if no one knew that he was blind, or hardly anyone? Because Maciste’s life was a mystery, or so I’d been told, and neither the Bolognan nor the Libyan could be said to be part of his inner circle, if such a circle existed.

This was when Maciste said:

“My stage name was Franco Bruno.”

And I thought: what?

And he said:

“These days, bodybuilding is considered a sport but when I practiced it, it was an art . . . Like magic . . . There was a time when it was an art and magicians were artists . . . Now it’s just a part of the show.”

And after a long silence during which I thought about other things, I said:

“I know what you mean.” Though in fact I hadn’t understood a thing, because as far as I knew Maciste had been an actor and a top bodybuilder, not a magician. Maybe he just felt a kinship with magicians.

And when Maciste heard me he turned his face toward me and asked if I was naked. I said no, that I had only taken off my jacket.

“Did they explain to you? . . . I need company . . . I don’t know whether they explained to you.”

I said yes, that they had explained everything. “Don’t worry,” I said.

Then he took off his robe and I saw him naked for the first time. He said: “Come here and turn out the light.”

“The light isn’t on,” I said.

“Can you see in the dark?”

“More or less,” I said.

“Strange — have you always?”

No,” I said. “If this had happened to me when I was little, I would have gone crazy. It’s only been a little while. Since my parents died in a crash.”

“A car crash?”

“Yes. I don’t like to talk about it. They died.”

“I’m sorry,” said Maciste.

We were quiet, each of us sitting in our respective chairs. After a while he asked me whether I wanted something to drink. I said yes.

Maciste left the gym, walking just like anyone. For a few seconds I wondered whether I’d been mistaken, though everybody knows that blind people get around with no trouble in a familiar place.

He came back with a two-liter bottle of Coca-Cola and two mini-whiskey bottles, like the kind I knew people got on planes or in hotel minibars. I thought he had forgotten to bring glasses and I waited. When I saw him drink straight from the bottle, I did too.

“Were you driving the car when your parents died?”

It bothered me that he would ask a question like that. I told him that I didn’t know how to drive and that when my parents died I was in Rome, at home, with my brother.

“Interesting,” said Maciste. “And ever since then you can see in the dark?”

“Yes, ever since, or after the second or third day . . .”

“So it’s some kind of psychosomatic thing,” said Maciste.

“I don’t know whether it’s psychosomatic or supernatural, and I don’t care either,” I said.

Then, as I walked over to his chair, a ray of moonlight, fat as a wave, rolled into the gym. Maciste undressed me. He felt my face and my hips and my legs. Then he got up and went to get the bottles of lotion and liniment.

BOOK: A Little Lumpen Novelita
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