The Return (21 page)

l’air torride, habituée aux chimères
, and a story about
Druses, Jews, Muslims and Christians, from which Nadia emerges at the age of
thirty-eight (the same age as Claude de Burine) with the hair of an Arab
princess, immaculate, perfectly serene, like the accidental muse of certain
poets, or their provisional muse, the one who says, Don’t worry, or who says,
Worry, but not too much, the one who doesn’t speak in dry and definite words but
whispers, whose parting gift is a kind look, and then Belano thinks of the age
the real Nadia Tuéni must be, in 1996, and he realizes that now she is
sixty-one, and he stops crying,
l’air torride
has dried his tears once
again, and he starts turning the pages, he returns to the mug shots of the
Francophone poets with an obstinacy worthy of a higher enterprise, like a
scavenging bird he returns to the face of Tchicaya U Tam’si, born in Mpili in
1931, the face of Matala Mukadi, born in Luiska in 1942, the face of
Samuel-Martin Eno Belinga, born in Ebolowa in 1935, the face of Elologué Epanya
Yondo, born in Douala in 1930, and so many other faces, faces of poets who write
in French, photogenic or not, the face of Michel Van Schendel, born in Asnières
in 1929, the face of Raoul Duguay (whom he has read), born in Val d’Or in 1939,
the face of Suzanne Paradis, born in Beaumont in 1936, the face of Daniel Biga
(whom he has read), born in Saint-Sylvestre in 1940, the face of Denise Jallais,
born in Saint-Nazaire in 1932 and almost as pretty as Nadia, Belano thinks with
a kind of comprehensive tremor, while evening keeps dragging the village
westward, and turkey buzzards start to appear in the tops of some small trees,
except that Denise is blonde and Nadia is dark, both very beautiful, sixty-one
and sixty-four respectively, I hope they’re alive, he thinks, his gaze fixed not
on the photos in the book but on the line of the treetops against the sky where
the birds are teetering, crows or vultures or turkey buzzards, and then Belano
remembers a poem by Gregory Corso, in which the hapless North American poet
spoke of his one true love, an Egyptian woman dead two thousand five hundred
years ago, and Belano remembers Corso’s street-kid face and a figure from
Egyptian art that he saw a long time ago on a matchbox, a girl getting out of a
bath or a river or a swimming pool, and the beat poet (the enthusiastic, hapless
Corso) is watching her from the other side of time, and the Egyptian girl with
long legs senses that she is being watched, and that’s all, her flirting with
Corso is as brief as a sigh in the immensity of time, but time itself and its
remote sovereignty can also pass like a sigh, thinks Belano as he watches the
birds up in the branches, silhouettes on the horizon, an electrocardiogram
agitated by the ruffling or spreading of wings as it waits for death, my death,
thinks Belano, and then he shuts his eyes for a long time, as if he were
thinking or crying with his eyes shut, and when he opens them again the crows
are there, the electroencephalogram trembling on the African horizon, and then
Belano shuts the book and stands up, still holding it, grateful, and begins to
walk westward, toward the coast, with the book of Francophone poets under his
arm, grateful, and his thought speeds ahead of his steps through the jungles and
deserts of Liberia, as it did when he was an adolescent in Mexico, and soon his
steps lead him away from the village.

Meeting with Enrique Lihn

for Celina Manzoni

In 1999, after returning from Venezuela, I dreamed that I was being
taken to Enrique Lihn’s apartment, in a country that could well have been Chile,
in a city that could well have been Santiago, bearing in mind that Chile and
Santiago once resembled Hell, a resemblance that, in some subterranean layer of
the real city and the imaginary city, will forever remain.
Of course I knew that
Lihn was dead, but when they offered to take me to meet him I accepted without
hesitation.
Maybe I thought that the people I was with were playing a joke, or
that a miracle might be possible.
But probably I just wasn’t thinking, or had
misunderstood the invitation.
In any case we came to a seven-story building,
with a façade painted a faded yellow and a bar on the ground floor, a bar of
considerable dimensions, with a long counter and several booths, and my friends
(although it seems odd to describe them like that; let’s just say the
enthusiasts who had offered to take me to meet the poet) led me to a booth, and
there was Lihn.
At first I could hardly recognize him, it wasn’t the face I had
seen on his books; he’d grown thinner and younger, he’d become more handsome,
and his eyes looked much brighter than the black-and-white eyes in the
back-cover photographs.
In fact, Lihn didn’t look like Lihn at all, he looked
like a Hollywood actor, a B-list actor, the kind who stars in TV movies or films
that are never shown in European cinemas and go straight to video.
But at the
same time he was Lihn, although he no longer looked like him; I was in no doubt
about that.
The enthusiasts greeted him, calling him Enrique with a
fake-sounding familiarity and asked him questions I couldn’t understand, and
then they introduced us, although to tell the truth I didn’t need to be
introduced, because for a time, a short time, I had corresponded with him, and
his letters had, in a way, kept me going; I’m talking about 1981 or 1982, when I
was living like a recluse in a house outside Gerona with practically no money
and no prospects of ever getting any, and literature was a vast minefield
occupied by enemies, except for a few classic authors (just a few), and every
day I had to walk through that minefield, with only the poems of Archilocus to
guide me, and any false move could have been fatal.
It’s like that for all young
writers.
There comes a time when you have no support, not even from friends,
forget about mentors, and there’s no one to give you a hand; publication, prizes
and grants are reserved for the others, the ones who said “Yes, sir,” over and
over, or those who praised the literary mandarins, a never-ending horde
distinguished only by their aptitude for discipline and punishment—nothing
escapes them and they forgive nothing.
Anyway, as I was saying, all young
writers feel like that at some point or other in their lives.
But at the time I
was twenty-eight years old and in no sense could I consider myself a young
writer.
I was adrift.
I wasn’t the typical Latin American writer living in
Europe thanks to some government sinecure.
I was a nobody and not inclined to
show any mercy or beg for it.
Then I started corresponding with Enrique Lihn.
Naturally I was the one who initiated the correspondence.
I didn’t have to wait
long for his reply.
A long, crotchety letter, as we might say in Chile: gloomy
and irritable.
In my reply I told him about my life, my house in the country, on
one of the hills outside Gerona, the medieval city before it, the countryside or
the void behind.
I also told him about my dog, Laika, and said that in my
opinion Chilean literature, with one or two exceptions, was shit.
It was evident
from his next letter that we were already friends.
What followed was what
typically happens when a famous poet befriends an unknown.
He read my poems and
included some of them in a kind of reading he organized to present the work of
the younger generation at the Chilean-North American Institute of Culture.
In his letter he identified a set of hopefuls destined, so he thought, to be the
six tigers of Chilean poetry in the year 2000.
The six tigers were Bertoni, Maquieira, Gonzalo Muñoz,
Martínez, Rodrigo Lira and myself.
I think.
Maybe there were seven tigers.
But I
think there were only six.
And it would have been hard for the six of us to be
anything much in 2000, because by
then Rodrigo Lira, the best of the lot, had killed himself and what was left of
him had been rotting for years in some cemetery, or else was ash, blowing around
the streets mingled with the filth of Santiago.
Cats would have been more
appropriate than tigers.
Bertoni, as far as I know, is a kind of hippie who
lives by the sea, collecting shells and seaweed.
Maquieira made a careful study
of Cardenal and Coronel Urtecho’s anthology of North American poetry, published
two books and then settled down to drinking.
Gonzalo Muñoz went to Mexico, so I
heard, where he disappeared, not into ethylic oblivion like Lowry’s consul, but
into the advertising industry.
Martínez made a careful study of
Duchamp du signe
and then died.
As for
Rodrigo Lira, well, I already explained what became of him.
Not so much tigers
as cats, whichever way you look at it.
The kittens of a far-flung province.
Anyway, what I wanted to say is that I knew Lihn, so no introduction was
necessary.
Nevertheless the enthusiasts proceeded to introduce me and neither I
nor Lihn objected.
So there we were, in a booth, and voices were saying, This is
Roberto Bolaño, and I held out my hand, my arm was enveloped by the darkness of
the booth, and I grasped Lihn’s hand, a slightly cold hand, which squeezed
mine for a few seconds—the hand of a sad person, I thought, a hand
and a handshake that corresponded perfectly to the face that was scrutinizing me
without showing any sign of recognition.
The correspondence was gestural,
bodily, and opened onto an opaque eloquence that had nothing to say, or at least
not to me.
Once that moment was past, the enthusiasts started talking again and
the silence receded; they were all asking Lihn for his opinions on the most
disparate issues and events, and at that point my disdain evaporated at once,
because I realized that they were just like I had once been: young poets with no
support, kids who’d been shut out by the new center-left Chilean government
and didn’t have any backing or patronage, all they had was Lihn, a Lihn who
looked much more handsome and prepossessing than the real Enrique Lihn as he
appeared in the author photos, a Lihn who resembled his poems, who had adopted
their age, who lived in a building similar to his poems, and who could
disappear, as his poems sometimes did, with a characteristic elegance and poise.
When I realized this, I remember I felt better.
I mean I began to make sense of
the situation and find it amusing.
I had nothing to fear: I was at home, with
friends, with a writer I had always admired.
It wasn’t a horror movie.
Or not an
out-and-out horror movie, but a horror movie leavened with large doses
of black humor.
And just as I thought of black humor, Lihn extracted a little
bottle of pills from his pocket.
I have to take one every three hours, he said.
The enthusiasts fell silent once again.
A waiter brought a glass of water.
The
pill was big.
That’s what I thought when I saw it fall into the glass of water.
But in fact it wasn’t big.
It was dense.
Lihn began to break it up with a spoon
and I realized that the pill looked like an onion with countless layers.
I
leaned forward and peered into the glass.
For a moment I was quite sure that it
was an infinite pill.
The curved glass had a magnifying effect, like a lens:
inside, the pale pink pill was disintegrating as if giving birth to a galaxy or
the universe.
But galaxies are born or die (I forget which) suddenly, and what I
could see through the curved side of that glass was unfolding in slow motion,
each incomprehensible stage drawn out as I watched, every retraction and
shudder.
Then, feeling exhausted, I sat back, and my gaze, detached from the
medicinal solution, rose to meet Lihn’s eyes, which seemed to be saying: No
comment, it’s bad enough having to swallow this concoction every three hours,
don’t go looking for symbolic meanings—the water, the onion, the slow march
of the stars.
The enthusiasts had moved away from our table.
Some were at the
bar.
I couldn’t see the others.
But when I looked at Lihn again, there was an
enthusiast with him, whispering something in his ear, before leaving the booth
to find his friends, who were scattered around the establishment.
And at that
moment I knew that Lihn knew he was dead.
My heart’s given up on me, he said.
It
doesn’t exist any more.
Something’s not right here, I thought.
Lihn died of
cancer, not a heart attack.
An enormous heaviness was coming over me.
So I got
up and went to stretch my legs, but not in the bar; I went out into the street.
The sidewalks were gray and uneven and the sky looked like a mirror without a
tain, the place where everything should have been reflected but where, in the
end, nothing was.
Nevertheless a feeling of normality prevailed and pervaded all
vision.
When I felt I’d had enough fresh air and it was time to get back to the
bar, as I was climbing the three steps up to the door (stone steps, single
blocks of a stone that had a granite-like consistency and the sheen of a
gem), I ran into a guy who was shorter than me and dressed like a fifties
gangster, a guy who had something of the caricature about him, the classic
affable killer, who got me mixed up with someone he knew and greeted me, and I
replied to his greeting although from the start I was sure that I didn’t know
him and that he was mistaken, but I behaved as if I knew him, as if I, too, had
mixed him up with someone else, so the two of us greeted each other as we
attempted ineffectively to climb those shining (yet lowly) stone steps, but the
hit man’s confusion lasted no more than a few seconds, he soon realized that he
was mistaken, and then he looked at me in a different way, as if he were asking
himself if I was confused too or if, on the contrary, I had been pulling his leg
from the start, and since he was thick and suspicious (though sharp in his own
paradoxical way), he asked me who I was, I remember, he asked me with a
malicious smile on his lips, and I said, Shit, Jara, it’s me, Bolaño, and it
would have been clear to anyone from his smile that he wasn’t Jara, but he
played the game, as if suddenly, struck by a lightning bolt (and no, I’m not
quoting one of Lihn’s poems, much less one of mine), he fancied the idea of
living the life of that unknown Jara for a minute or two, the Jara he would
never be, except right there, stalled on the highest of those radiant steps, and
he asked me about my life, he asked me (thick as a plank) who I was, admitting
de facto that he was Jara, but a Jara who had forgotten the very existence of
Bolaño, which is perfectly understandable after all, so I explained to him who I
was, and, while I was at it, who he was too, thereby creating a Jara to suit me
and him, that is, to suit that moment—an improbable, intelligent,
courageous, rich, generous, daring Jara, in love with a beautiful woman and
loved by her in return—and then the gangster smiled, more and more deeply
convinced that I was making fun of him on but unable to bring the episode to a
close and proceed to teach me a lesson, as if he had suddenly fallen in love
with the image I was constructing for him, encouraging me to go on telling him
not just about Jara but also about Jara’s friends and finally the world, a world
which seemed too wide even for Jara, a world in which even the great Jara was an
ant whose death on a shining step would not have mattered at all to anyone, and
then, at last, his friends appeared, two taller hit men wearing
light-colored double-breasted suits, who looked at me and at the false
Jara as if to ask him who I was, and he had no choice but to say it’s Bolaño,
and the two hit men greeted me, I shook their hands (rings, expensive watches,
gold bracelets), and when they invited me to have a drink with them, I said, I
can’t, I’m with a friend, and pushed past Jara through the door and disappeared
inside.
Lihn was still in the booth.
But now there were no enthusiasts to be
seen in his vicinity.
The glass was empty.
He had taken the medicine and was
waiting.
Without saying a word we went up to his apartment.
He lived on the
seventh floor and we took the elevator, a very large elevator into which more
than thirty people could have fitted.
His apartment was rather small, especially
for a Chilean writer, and there were no books.
To a question from me he replied
that he hardly needed to read any more.
But there are always books, he added.
You could see the bar from his apartment.
As if the floor were made of glass.
I
spent a while on my knees, watching the people down there, looking for the
enthusiasts, or the three gangsters, but I could see only unfamiliar people,
eating or drinking, but mostly moving from one table or booth to another, or up
and down the bar, all seized by a feverish excitement, like characters in an
early twentieth-century novel.