Seeking the Ghost of Roberto Bolaño in Blanes

 

 

 

1. The Endless Reading of 2666

 

“So what did Amalfitano’s students learn?  . . .  They learned that a book was a labyrinth and a desert. That there was nothing more important than ceaseless reading and traveling, perhaps one and the same thing. . . . That all writing systems are frauds. That true poetry resides between the abyss and misfortune . . . That the main lesson of literature was courage . . . That reading wasn’t more comfortable than writing. That by reading one learned to question and remember. That memory was love.”

                  —Woes of the True Policeman

 

The night I finished Roberto Bolaño’s masterpiece 2666 for the first time, I turned it over and began it again. I had this unaccountable need to read that book forever, to privilege its reading over meeting friends in bars, writing emails home, going to the doctor, sleeping, preparing nutritious dinners . . .  At the time, I was working long, manic shifts at a café in the red-light district of Amsterdam, serving crepes and waffles to stoned tourists and sweet-toothed prostitutes. I was broke and angry and I didn’t want to be in Amsterdam, but I wasn’t sure where I wished I was instead. By then I’d been traveling intermittently for six years, and one city was starting to look as good (or as bad) as another.

 

             The discovery of 2666 wasn’t antidotal in that it obliged me to change this attitude, exactly; rather, the voice and vision of that novel became layered on top of my unhappy reality, so that I began to hear Bolaño in my head, transforming me into a character in a foreign, fictional landscape I navigated like a dream: Once, I made crepes for two angelically beautiful whores, who ate them in the watchful company of the men who’d paid. The girl I worked with most was a conspiracy theorist who lived in an illegal squat and believed the cops were spying on her. Another coworker and I slept together in an alcove in the tiny flat he shared with his mother and brother, after drinking a Hungarian brandy he’d brought back from his grandmother’s village in a coke bottle. My landlord, an aging control freak masquerading as a chill hippie, read my star chart and told me that my passion and destiny were exactly the same. It took me two weeks to finish 2666, mostly working in the daytime and reading at night. I remember looking up after finishing the fourth section, “The Part About the Crimes,” at four a.m., and seeing that my closet door was wide open, my shoes upright as if an invisible person stood in them, and a bolt of horror shot straight through me like a cleansing light. Through intoxication with this book, everything that was sordid about my life then had become sublime. And so, when 2666 ended, I read it again immediately, this time more slowly, as I left the Netherlands at last and drifted through Germany. 

 

            People tend to react powerfully to Bolaño—to his work and biography alike. I suspect that this is because he chose an uncompromising existence (living in poverty, never accepting writers’ grants, publicly cutting down literary figures he considered undeserving of regard), the justification for which he derived from his endless reading. It’s the way of a devout monk—hard to fathom or follow, but worthy of respect regardless. And the more monkishly I read Bolaño (because I kept reading him, always with the feeling that whatever he’d written was exactly what I most wanted or needed to read), the more I began to notice his tendency to link reading (into which writing is often subsumed) to eroticism and, especially, travel. As he writes in “Illness + Literature = Illness” (a phenomenal essay composed shortly before his death): “[To travel is] an affirmation of life, but also a constant game with death, and the first rung on the ladder; the first step in a kind of poetic apprenticeship. The second step is sex, and the third, books.”

 

            In this essay and elsewhere, travel is lauded at face value (literally, it’s the act of voyaging around the world), but it’s also a metaphor for reading, for voyages of the mind. Bolaño acknowledges the threat of discovering that “every book we read and every act of carnal knowledge is a repetition,” but the real terror lies in travel as a closed circuit—that the act of escape or of pursuing new adventures might be only an illusion, and really we’re trapped. What we’re trapped in, Bolaño says, is boredom. Finding recourse from this vast expanse of boredom in Baudelairean “oases of horror” is, according to Bolaño, “the illness of modern humanity”; the only way to refute this illness is to keep traveling and reading and fucking, a course of action which is, collectively, a roadmap to the abyss wherein the cure to this insidious illness might be found. And the cure isn’t pills or therapy, but a metaphysical or artistic discovery Bolaño phrases as “the new.” Bolaño took his cues on the abyss from Pascal and nineteenth-century French poets like Baudelaire and Mallarmé, for whom the abyss operated paradoxically: by definition, you should avoid it at all costs, however only by looking at it directly, tossing yourself into it, can you circumvent the repetitive nature of existence and discover newness. Because the abyss is most resonant as a literary construct (and not a literal one) sex alone can’t really take you there, nor can writing, and nor can travel.

 

            And here, I think, is a great and surprising argument for literature’s relevance in an age that constantly insists that the novel is dead or ineffectual: while reading is a passive activity, writing, sex, and travel are not. To appreciate the metaphysical dimensions of writing, sex, and travel is to accept literature as their animating factor, their breath of life. There’s a fierce, hopeless conviction at the heart of everything Bolaño produced that reading is the most transformative act on the planet; you could argue that Bolaño was perhaps the most idealistic skeptic who ever lived, and that his writing is heavily invested with this strange faith. It’s no wonder readers fall under the spell of his symbols, his style, and his values, which all seem to revolve around the will to face horror (real horror, the horror of history and lived experience) head-on, and to seek the requisite battle armor through reading. He was, as a writer, actively seeking the cure.

 

            There are strong echoes of Cervantes in this, and it’s not entirely in the service of character-building that Oscar Amalfitano, the invented Chilean literary professor and one of Bolaño’s most compelling mouthpieces, thinks: “At least . . . I’ve read thousands of books. At least I’ve become acquainted with the Poets and read the Novels. (The Poets, in Amalfitano’s view, were those beings who flashed like lightning bolts, and the Novels were those stories that sprang from Don Quixote.)”

 

            When Don Quixote charges the windmills, he’s gravely wounded. His belief that he’s a knight challenging giants, spurred on by a devotion to chivalric tales, leads him to shed real blood. Bolaño lived and wrote in this vein: he read about travel as a metaphor for mental journeying, and then embarked on a career of wandering which cost him his health. Valerie Miles, the chief archivist behind the 2013 exhibition of Bolaño’s papers and personal effects at the Center of Contemporary Culture in Barcelona, writes of a moment when she encountered in an unpublished journal the following passage: “She opens a drawer in the bookshelf. It’s full of manuscript pages. She picks up one page at random: ‘Sometimes I am immensely happy.’ The writing is small. She has a sip of beer and keeps reading . . .”

 

            And of course, I felt it too, those two weeks in Amsterdam when I became Bolaño’s invention. Bolaño’s Cervantean heritage is clear, here, in his ability to effect in others that same blurred distinction between the real and the fictional which he felt as a reader, and in his faith that reading could cross a threshold more forbidding than the one that bars the living from the dead. That the simple, passive act of reading could be interchangeable with sex, travel, and writing—and achieve tangible consequences through this transformation. Though to truly effect it, you have to read, read endlessly, read at the expense of health, reason, and good manners.

 

            So say you make this commitment, and you follow it through as far as you can—but finally you’ll reach a point where the poetic blurring of the real and the fictional ceases its wishful whispering and becomes a matter of life and death. In Bolaño’s case, this challenge was the occasion of his writing “Illness + Literature = Illness.” Then dying of a rare liver disease, he chronicles his latest hospital visit, in which a petite doctor has him hold his fingers erect before her: “I asked her what the hell that test was about. Her reply was that at a more advanced stage of my illness, I wouldn’t be able to hold my fingers in that position. They would, inevitably, curve toward her.”

 

Meditating on Kafka, Bolaño writes, paraphrasing Elias Canetti, “Kafka understood that the dice had been rolled and nothing could come between him and his writing the day he spat blood for the first time.” This reflection ends his essay. Effectively, it’s saying, as soon as Kafka received his fatal prognosis, he stared down the abyss; Kafka too prized the cure to a different illness above the one that might treat what was killing him.

 

            Bolaño, on the test the doctor gave him: “I think I said: Christ Almighty. Maybe I laughed. In any case, every day since then, wherever I happen to be, I take that test.”

 

 

 

2. Literature as Homeland

 

“Writing is obviously the same as reading, and sometimes it’s quite similar to traveling, and it can even, on special occasions, resemble sex, but all that, Rimbaud tells us, is a mirage: there is only the desert and from time to time, the remote, degrading lights of an oasis. And then along comes Mallarmé, the least innocent of all the great poets, who says that we must travel, we must set off traveling again.”

                        —“Illness + Literature = Illness”

 

Last year, visiting friends in Barcelona, I took an overnight trip to Blanes, the last place Roberto Bolaño lived—the town he devoted fifteen years to, raising a family and putting down roots.

 

            Blanes is the final stop on the train from Barcelona, a route which hugs the Costa Brava for an hour and a half. Along the way I kept trying to predict what the weather would be like. It was a month or so before the tourist season, and when people entered the train they’d be dressed in jeans and windbreakers, their hair whipping their faces. But then, not fifteen feet from the windows, I’d catch repeated glimpses of bodies gleaming oiled and naked on beach towels before the ocean, as if the train I rode in bisected two rival dimensions of the Catalonian spring.

 

            The train station in Blanes is unremarkable; when I arrived, there were no buses or taxis waiting, so I walked for an hour until I reached the town center. It was sunny and chilly at the same time, so that every couple of minutes I pulled my sweater on or off, and as I looked around I found it hard to believe that Bolaño had chosen to live surrounded by car dealerships and factories. An ugly white lint danced in the air; I had the feeling that I’d made a mistake and come to a different Blanes, a Potemkin Blanes that had spontaneously generated in order to mock my awkward pilgrimage. But the further I walked the prettier the city became, the streets more steep and winding, the houses more colorful. It was the siesta hour, the stores and restaurants I passed shut and quiet.

 

            My hotel was close to the water. I stood at the reception desk—which doubled as a bar—and handed my passport to the receptionist (or bartender), who glanced at me, then clocked my details: a Jew with an Irish passport who spoke Spanish like a Latin American. He then wished me a happy birthday, which surprised me, because although my birthday had been two days before I’d already forgotten it completely. Removing my sunglasses, I thanked him, feeling that I might have struck him as a very mysterious and possibly dangerous woman.

 

            My room was small and neat and smelled of cigarettes. I put on tights and went down to ask where I could have a tasty meal, and the barman told me that around the corner was a restaurant called “La Epoca” where I could have a three-course lunch with a small discount if I showed my room card. That there was an agreement between my hotel and La Epoca should have stopped me from going there, but by this time I was too hungry and tired to search for anything else. It was minutes away and I asked to sit outside, under the pavilion all Blanes beachfront restaurants have (but that don't quite look upon the sea). A middle-aged waiter with the menacing haircut of Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men came out and greeted me with a look so pitiful that I was prevented from complaining, later, about the terrible food, or even caring much. 

 

            Also in the pavilion were two women in the opposite corner eating pizza and sharing a pitcher of sangria. One of the women kept leaving to take lengthy calls while the other stared into space. In the middle of the pavilion, a French family more or less fluent in Spanish sat eating crema catalan with long spoons. The man looked over curiously several times, and smiled at me when he left with his wife and son. I sat in a corner reading Moby-Dick, as I was then writing a dissertation on literary madness. The waiter brought me bread, a dish of green olives, and a carafe of wine the same size as the one the two women opposite were sharing between them.

 

            The starter was asparagus and mayonnaise. I'd ordered it because it sounded exotic, but it was actually four pale, canned stalks of asparagus, garnished with cheap salad and a dish of mayonnaise. I got more of it down that I would've normally, due to outrageous hunger. As soon as the dish appeared I’d realized that the meal wasn't going to be good, but the wine appeased me somewhat. The main course was fish, chips, and salad, and the fish at least was fresh. The pitiful waiter was replaced by a surlier one, who cleared my plates and then came back to recite the desserts. I explained that I couldn't have anything with milk or butter, and he replied that my only choice was sliced strawberries in either muscatel ("vino típico de la región") or orange juice. He mentioned orange juice as if insinuating that this is what I should go for, perhaps because he'd noticed how much wine was missing from the carafe. Throughout my solitary lunch, Moby-Dick splayed open in my lap, I'd managed to effectively hide the wine's effects, except for one instance where my fork leapt unexpectedly from my hand and struck my glass with a ping that rang loudly in what had been complete silence. I told him to bring me whichever was better (this is the kind of thing my dad tells waiters) and he brought the strawberries in muscatel.

 

            After I’d finished and paid I stayed and read for a while, my eyes swimming. I was exhausted, and the booze combined with the heavy three-course lunch was putting me to sleep. Finally I left the pavilion and wandered down to the beach. Whenever I see the ocean, I hear a refrain in my head which is simply—“The sea, the sea, the sea, the sea”—as if it were the symbolic end of a poem I've read but forgotten (perhaps it really is). I looked out at the blue ocean and the graffitied sea wall and the boulders jutting out of the water and the big, square hotels along the far coast—my first view I was sure had also been Bolaño's, not once in passing but many times under scrutiny (it’s alleged that the town in The Skating Rink is based on Blanes, and so perhaps is the one in The Third Reich), and my thoughts sung out "The sea, the sea, the sea, the sea!" and I sunk down into the sand and slept there, for all the world like a washed-up corpse, for a good hour.

 

            Later, in Barcelona, I’d go to the CCCB exhibition on Bolaño’s archive and discover that my hotel annexed the street where Bolaño's writing studio had been. I’d assumed I was nowhere near where he’d lived or worked, that his house was hidden somewhere in the mazy streets I'd picked through on my way from the train station. I refused to ask anyone I met for landmarks, either; I wanted the purpose of my visit to remain entirely secret. After I woke up, I fled the beach and ended up buying Putas Asesinas in a glass-fronted bookstore. I’d chosen it out of a stack of books by Bolaño, but they weren't prominently featured. Dan Brown was in the window, and the woman who rang up my purchase did so without ceremony.

 

            After I bought the book I walked up to the Botanic Gardens, because I was under the impression I could listen to live music there, but it was closed. I got lost and sat down on a sidewalk for ten minutes to pet a friendly cat. Finally I went back to my hotel and read Putas Asesinas for several hours. In Putas Asesinas, there’s a story in which the narrator, B, spends a strange and fruitless day in a small Belgian town formerly home to an obscure poet he admires. I hadn’t read that story before, but I was encouraged to read it then—if Bolaño had anticipated the peculiar emptiness of pilgrimages like mine, then that was enough. I read until I fell asleep. The room was silent and I slept perfectly.

 

            In the morning I had a continental breakfast provided by the hotel in the deserted dining area. The barman said I could leave my bag there after I checked out if I wanted to wander around some more, so I did. I can't remember now where I went; nothing much happened. I passed two old men sifting something that looked like herbs or seeds into barrels with massive sieves. As they were very friendly I asked them what they were doing, and they said they were preparing for an upcoming holiday, which they told me was related to the church in some way, and that whatever they were sifting (still a mystery) would be used to dye the streets in mosaic patterns, and that the children would walk through them barefoot and carrying flowers, and that I could come back in a week and walk through the dyed streets with flowers too. I said I wouldn't be in Catalonia then and we agreed this was a shame. They said the holiday was celebrated in all the towns of the region and that I'd have to come back one day to see it. Eventually I retrieved my bag, followed a different route to the train station, and returned to Barcelona.

            Although Bolaño fled his native Chile after the 1973 Pinochet coup, he didn’t think much of exile, declaring that “Literature is the homeland of the true writer.” Given his confluent positioning of traveling, writing and reading, it follows that literature is the homeland of the true reader as well. When I went to Blanes, I was seeking Bolaño’s ghost—not because I hoped to find him, but because I wanted to see for myself that it was impossible. Bolaño is already in my house, wherever that may be; I have already found him on my bookshelves, with lovers, and in my travels. And I might do this again and again and again.

            Had I paid closer attention, I could’ve learned this sooner. By all accounts, the last story Kafka ever wrote was “Josephine the Singer,” concerning a musical mouse who holds an ambiguous position in her community, and interpreted by many as an allegory for Kafka’s take on the artistic calling. Bolaño’s last story, “Police Rat,” taps into his fascination with detectives as symbolic readers of the highest, bravest order, a trope that runs through much of his oeuvre. “Police Rat” features a nephew of Josephine’s, who plunges unstoppably into the darkest, dankest sewers of his people’s dominion, rooting out the evil that lurks there. It is, among other things, the perfect corollary to Kafka’s story, and an allegory of Bolaño’s take on the calling of the reader.