2666 (149 page)

"I don't know
what to think," said Archimboldi.

"No
one remembers the botanist Fürst Pückler now, no one remembers the model
gardener, no one has read the writer. But everyone at some moment has tasted a
Fürst Pückler, which is best and most pleasing in spring and fall."

"Why not in
summer?" asked Archimboldi.

"Because
in summer it can be cloying. Ices are best in summer, not ice cream."

Suddenly
the park lights came on, although there was a second of total darkness, as if
someone had tossed a black blanket over parts of
Hamburg
.

The
gentleman sighed, he must have been about seventy, and then he said:

"A
mysterious legacy, don't you think?"

"You're
right, I do," said Archimboldi as he got up and took his leave of the
descendant of Fürst Pückler.

Soon afterward he left the park
and the next morning he was on his way to
Mexico
.

NOTE TO
THE FIRST EDITION

2666 was published
posthumously, more than a year after the author's death. It is reasonable,
then, to ask how closely the text in the reader's hands corresponds to what
Roberto Bolaño would have given us had he lived long enough. The answer is
reassuring: the novel as it was left at Bolaño's death is very nearly what he
intended it to be. There is no doubt that Bolaño would have worked longer on
the book, but only a few months longer; he himself declared that he was near
the end, long past the date when he had planned for it to be finished. In any
case, not just the foundations but the whole edifice of the novel had already
been raised, and its shape, its dimensions, its general content would by no means
have been very different from what they are now.

Upon
Bolaño's death it was said that the grand project of 2666 had been transformed
into a series of five novels corresponding to the five parts into which the
work was divided. In fact, in the last months of his life Bolaño insisted on
this idea, as he grew less and less certain that he would be able to complete
his initial project. It must be said, however, that practical considerations
(never Bolaño's strong point, incidentally) figured into this plan: faced with
the increasing likelihood of his imminent death, Bolaño thought it would be
less of a burden and more profitable, both for his publisher and for his heirs,
to deal with five separate novels, short or medium-length, than with a single
massive, sprawling work, one not even entirely finished.

After
reading the text, however, it seems preferable to keep the novel whole.
Although the five parts that make up 2666 can be read independently, they not
only share many elements (a subtle web of recurring motifs), they also serve a
common end. There is no point attempting to justify the relatively
"open" structure that contains them, especially considering the
precedent of
The Savage Detectives.
If that novel had been published
posthumously, would it not have given rise to all kinds of speculation about
its unfinished state?

One other consideration underlies the decision to publish the five
parts of 2666 in a single volume, leaving open the possibility that once the
essential framework is established, the parts might be published singly, which
would allow combinations that the open structure of the novel permits, even
suggests. Bolaño, an excellent short story writer and author of several
masterly novellas, also boasted, once he had begun 2666, that he had embarked
on a colossal project, far surpassing
The Savage Detectives
in ambition
and length. The sheer size of 2666 is inseparable from the original conception
of all its parts, as well as from the spirit of risk that drives it and its
rash totalizing zeal. On this point, it is worth recalling the passage from
2666 in which, after his conversation with a book-loving pharmacist,
Amalfitano, one of the novel's protagonists, reflects with undisguised
disappointment on the growing prestige of short, neatly shaped novels (citing
titles like
Bartleby the Scrivener
and
The Metamorphosis)
to the
exclusion of longer, more ambitious and daring works (like
Moby-Dick
or
The
Trial):

What
a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to
take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the
unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what
amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they
have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that
something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us
and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

And then there is the title. That
enigmatic number, 2666—a date, really—that functions as a vanishing point
around which the different parts of the novel fall into place. Without this
vanishing point, the perspective of the whole would be lopsided, incomplete,
suspended in nothingness.

In one of his many notes for 2666, Bolaño indicates the existence
in the work of a "hidden center," concealed beneath what might be
considered the novel's "physical center." There is reason to think
that this physical center is the city of
Santa Teresa
,
faithful reflection of
Ciudad Juarez
,
on the Mexican-U.S. border. There the five parts of the novel ultimately
converge; there the crimes are committed that comprise its spectacular backdrop
(and that are said by one of the novel's characters to contain "the secret
of the world"). As for the "hidden center" . . . might it not
represent 2666 itself, the date upon which the whole novel rests?

The
writing of 2666 occupied Bolaño for the last years of his life. But the
conception and design of the novel came much earlier, and its stirrings may
retrospectively be detected in various other books by the author, especially
those published after
The Savage Detectives
(1998), which not
coincidentally ends in the
Sonora
desert. The time will come to catalog these stirrings thoroughly. For now, it
may suffice to note one very eloquent example, from
Amulet
(1999).
Rereading that novel offers a single unmistakable clue to the meaning of the
date 2666. The protagonist
of Amulet,
Auxilio Lacouture (a character who
is herself prefigured in
The Savage Detectives),
tells how one night she
follows Arturo Belano and Ernesto San Epifanio on a walk to Colonia Guerrero,
in Mexico City, where the two go in search of the so-called King of the Rent
Boys. This is what she says:

I
followed them: I saw them go down Bucareli to Reforma with a spring in their
step and then cross Reforma without waiting for the lights to change, their
long hair blowing in the excess wind that funnels down Reforma at that hour of
the night, turning it into a transparent tube or an elongated lung exhaling the
city's imaginary breath. Then we walked down the Avenida Guerrero; they weren't
stepping so lightly any more, and I wasn't feeling too enthusiastic either.
Guerrero, at that time of night, is more like a cemetery than an avenue, not a
cemetery in 1974 or in 1968, or 1975, but a cemetery in the year 2666, a
forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in
the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular
thing that it ended up forgetting everything else.

The
text in the reader's possession corresponds to the latest version of the
different "parts" of the novel. Bolaño indicated very clearly which
of his work files should be considered definitive. Even so, earlier drafts were
reviewed with the aim of filling in possible gaps or correcting errors, as well
as for anything they might reveal about Bolaño's final intentions. The results
of this scrutiny failed to cast much new light on the text and to leave very
little room for doubt that it is indeed definitive.

Bolaño
was a conscientious writer. He made many drafts of his texts, which he
generally wrote quickly but later carefully polished. In all but a few places,
the final version of 2666 is clear and clean: deliberately composed, in other
words. There has been only the rare need to make minor changes and to correct
some obvious errors, with the editors confident in their handling—diligent and
expert but above all complicit—of the writer's "weaknesses" and
"obsessions."

A
final observation is perhaps in order here. Among Bolaño's notes for 2666 there
appears the single line: "The narrator of 2666 is Arturo Belano." And
elsewhere Bolaño adds, with the indication "for the end of 2666":
"And that's it, friends. I've done it all, I've lived it all. If I had the
strength, I'd cry. I bid you all goodbye, Arturo Belano."

And so farewell.

IGNACIO
  
ECHEVARRIA September 2004