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
"We've gotten
used to death," he heard the young man say.
"It's always
been that way," said the white-haired man, "always."
In the nineteenth century, toward the middle or the end of
the nineteenth century, said the white-haired man, society tended to filter
death through the fabric of words. Reading news stories from back then you
might get the idea that there was hardly any crime, or that a single murder
could throw a whole country into tumult. We didn't want death in the home, or
in our dreams and fantasies, and yet it was a fact that terrible crimes were
committed, mutilations, all kinds of rape, even serial killings. Of course,
most of the serial killers were never caught. Take the most famous case of the
day. No one knew who Jack the Ripper was. Everything was passed through the
filter of words, everything trimmed to fit our fear. What does a child do when
he's afraid? He closes his eyes. What does a child do when he's about to be
raped and murdered? He closes his eyes. And he screams, too, but first he
closes his eyes. Words served that purpose. And the funny thing is, the archetypes
of human madness and cruelty weren't invented by the men of our day but by our
forebears. The Greeks, you might say, invented evil, the Greeks saw the evil
inside us all, but testimonies or proofs of this evil no longer move us. They
strike us as futile, senseless. You could say the same about madness. It was
the Greeks who showed us the range of possibilities and yet now they mean
nothing to us. Everything changes, you say. Of course everything changes, but
not the archetypes of crime, not any more than human nature changes. Maybe it's
because polite society was so small back then. I'm talking about the nineteenth
century, eighteenth century, seventeenth century. No doubt about it, society
was small. Most human beings existed on the outer fringes of society. In the
seventeenth century, for example, at least twenty percent of the merchandise on
every slave ship died. By that I mean the dark-skinned people who were being
transported for sale, to
say. And that didn't get anyone upset or make headlines in the
anyone go out and call for the ship captain to be hanged. But if a plantation
owner went crazy and killed his neighbor and then went galloping back home,
dismounted, and promptly killed his wife, two deaths in total, Virginia society
spent the next six months in fear, and the legend of the murderer on horseback
might linger for generations. Or look at the French. During the Paris Commune
of 1871, thousands of people were killed and no one batted an eye. Around the same
time a knife sharpener killed his wife and his elderly mother and then he was
shot and killed by the police. The story didn't just make all the French
newspapers, it was written up in papers across Europe, and even got a mention
in the
How come? The ones killed in the Commune weren't part of
society, the dark-skinned people who died on the ship weren't part of society,
whereas the woman killed in a French provincial capital and the murderer on
horseback in
That said, words back then were mostly used in the art of avoidance, not of
revelation. Maybe they revealed something all the same. I couldn't tell you.
The
young man covered his face with his hands.
"This
isn't your first trip to
he said, uncovering his face and smiling a catlike smile.
"No,"
said the white-haired man. "I was there for a while a few years ago and I
tried to help, but the situation was impossible."
"And
why did you come back this time?"
"To
have a look, I guess," said the white-haired man. "I was staying at a
friend's house, a friend I made last time. The Mexicans are a hospitable
people."
"It wasn't an
official trip?"
"Oh, no,"
said the white-haired man.
"And what's
your unofficial opinion about what's going on there?"
"I
have several opinions, Edward, and I'd prefer that none of them be published
without my consent."
The young man
covered his face with his hands and said:
"Professor
Kessler, my lips are sealed."
"All
right, then," said the white-haired man. "I'll tell you three things
I'm sure of: (a) everyone living in that city is outside of society, and
everyone, I mean everyone, is like the ancient Christians in the Roman circus;
(b) the crimes have different signatures; (c) the city seems to be booming, it
seems to be moving ahead in some ineffable way, but the best thing would be for
every last one of the people there to head out into the desert some night and
cross the border."
When
the sun began to set in a blaze of red, and the twins, the Indians, and the men
at the next table had been gone for a long time, Fate decided to ask for the
check. A chubby, dark-skinned girl who wasn't the waitress he'd had before
brought it and asked whether everything had been to his liking.
"Everything,"
said Fate, as he felt in his pocket for money.
Then
he went back to watching the sunset. He thought about his mother, about his
mother's neighbor, about the magazine, about the streets of
and weariness. He opened the book by the former
Many captains of slave ships
looked on their task as, as a rule, complete, when they had delivered their
slaves to the
impossible to realize the proceeds of the sale of slaves fast enough to provide
the ship concerned with a return cargo of sugar. Merchants and captains could
not he certain of the prices which they would receive at home for goods taken
on their own account. Planters might take several years to pay for the slaves.
Sometimes the European merchant preferred to have remittances from the West
Indies in bills of exchange than to have sugar, indigo, cotton, or ginger in
exchange for the slaves, because the prices of these goods in
What
pretty names, he thought. Indigo, sugar, ginger, cotton. The reddish flowers of
the indigo bush. The dark blue paste, with copper glints. A woman painted
indigo, washing herself in the shower.
When he got up, the chubby waitress came over and asked him where
he was headed. To
said Fate.
"I
guessed that," said the waitress, "but where in
Leaning
on the counter, a cook smoked a cigarette and watched them, waiting for his
answer.
"To
Santa Teresa," said Fate.
"It isn't a very nice place," said the waitress,
"but it's big and there are lots of clubs and places to have fun."
Fate looked at the ground, smiling, and realized that the desert
sunset had tinted the tiles a soft red.
"I'm a
reporter," he said.
"You're
going to write about the crimes," said the cook.
"I
don't know what you're talking about. I'm going to cover the boxing match this
Saturday," said Fate.
"Who's
fighting?" asked the cook.
"Count
Pickett, the
"I
used to follow the fights," said the cook. "I'd bet and check out the
boxing digests, but one day I made up my mind to give it up. Now I don't know
the names. Do you want a drink? It's on the house."
Fate
sat at the counter and asked for a glass of water. The cook smiled and said he
knew for a fact all reporters drank.
"I do, too," said Fate, "but I think there's
something wrong with my stomach."
After
bringing him a glass of water the cook wanted to know who was up against Count
Pickett.
"I
don't remember the name," said Fate. "I have it written down
somewhere, a Mexican, I think."
"Strange,"
said the cook. "There're never any good Mexican light heavyweights. Once
every twenty years you get a heavyweight, who usually winds up crazy or shot
dead, but never a light heavyweight."
"I could be
wrong, maybe it's not a Mexican," admitted Fate.
"Maybe
he's Cuban or Colombian," said the cook, "although the Colombians
don't have a tradition of light heavyweights either."
Fate
drank the water and got up and stretched. It's time for me to go, he said,
though in fact he was happy at the restaurant.
"How far is it
to Santa Teresa?" he asked.
"That
depends," said the cook. "Sometimes there are lots of trucks at the
border and you can spend half an hour waiting. Say three hours from here to
Santa Teresa and then half an hour or forty-five minutes at the border, four
hours all together."
"From
here to Santa Teresa it's only an hour and a half," said the waitress.
The
cook looked at her and said that depended on the car and how well the driver
knew the terrain.
"Have you ever
driven in the desert?"
"No,"
said Fate.
"Well,
it isn't easy. It looks easy. It looks like the simplest thing in the world,
but there's nothing simple about it," said the cook.
"You're
right about that," said the waitress, "especially at night, driving
at night in the desert scares me."
"Make
a mistake, take a wrong turn, and you're liable to go thirty miles in the wrong
direction," said the cook.
"Maybe I
should go now while it's still light out," said Fate.
"It
won't do you much good," said the cook, "it'll be dark in five
minutes. Sunsets in the desert seem like they'll never end, until suddenly,
before you know it, they're done. It's like someone just turned out the
lights," said the cook.
Fate
asked for another glass of water and went to drink it by the window. Don't you
want something else to eat before you go? he heard the cook say. He didn't
answer. The desert began to disappear.
He drove for two hours along dark roads, with the radio on,
listening to a
yards with white flowers and crookedly parked cars, but there were no lights on
in the houses, as if the inhabitants had died that very night and a breath of
blood still lingered in the air. He made out the shapes of hills silhouetted
against the moon and the shapes of low clouds sitting motionless or speeding
west at a given moment as if driven by a sudden, fitful wind that lifted dust
clouds, clouds adorned in fabulous human garb by the car's headlights or the
shadows created by the headlights, as if the dust clouds were tramps or ghosts
looming up alongside the road.
He got lost twice. Once he was tempted to turn back, toward the
restaurant or
The other time he came to a town called
On his way out of
When the headlights swept over it the horse lifted its head and looked at him.
Fate stopped the car and waited. The horse was black and after a moment it
moved and vanished into the dark. He passed a mesa, or what he took to be a
mesa. It was huge, completely flat on top, and from one end of the base to the
other it must have been at least three miles long. There was a gully next to
the road. He got out of the car, leaving the lights on, and urinated at length,
breathing the cool night air. Then the road sloped down into a kind of valley
that at first glimpse struck him as gigantic. In the farthest corner of the valley
he thought he saw a glow. But it could have been anything. A convoy of trucks
moving very slowly, the first lights of a town. Or maybe just his desire to
escape the darkness, which in some way reminded him of his childhood and
adolescence. At some point in between childhood and adolescence, he thought, he
had dreamed of this landscape or one like it, less dark, less desertlike. He
was in a bus with his mother and one of his mother's sisters and they were
taking a short trip, from
near
He was next to the window and the view never changed, just buildings and
highways, until suddenly they were in the country. At that exact moment, or
maybe earlier, the sun had begun to set and he watched the trees, a small wood,
though in his eyes it looked bigger. And then he thought he saw a man walking
along the edge of the little wood. In great strides, as if he didn't want night
to overtake him. He wondered who the man was. The only way he could tell it was
a man and not a shadow was because he wore a shirt and swung his arms as he
walked. The man's loneliness was so great, Fate remembered, that he wanted to
look away and cling to his mother, but instead he kept his eyes open until the
bus was out of the woods, and buildings, factories, and warehouses once again
lined the sides of the road.