Antwerp Read online

  Antwerp

  Antwerp by Roberto Bolaño

  •

  ROBERTO BOLAÑO

  Translated by Natasha Wimmer a new directions book Roberto Bolaño

  Antwerp

  Also by Roberto Bolaño

  FROM NEW DIRECTIONS Amulet By Night in Chile Distant Star Last Evenings on Earth Monsieur Pain Nazi Literature in the Americas The Romantic Dogs The Skating Rink

  Antwerp .

  ROBERTO BOLAÑO

  Translated by Natasha Wimmer

  A NEW DIRECTIONS BOOK

  Copyright © 2002 by Roberto Bolaño

  Translation copyright © 2002 by Natasha Wimmer

  Originally published by Anagrama Barcelona Spain as Amberes in 2002; published by arrangement with the Heirs of Roberto Bolaño and Carmen Balcells Agencia Literaria, Barcelona

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, or television review, no part of this book maybe re produced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, in cluding photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  Publisher's Note: The Pascal epigraph is taken from A. J. Krailsheimer's translation for the Penguin Classics edition, slightly altered.

  Manufactured in the United States of America New Directions Books are printed on acidfree paper. First published clothbound by New Directions in 2010 Published simultaneously in Canada by Penguin Books Canada Limited Design by Erik Rieselbach

  Library of Congress Catalogingin Publication Data

  Bolaño, Roberto, 19532003. [Amberes. English] Antwerp / Roberto Bolaño; translated by Natasha Wimmer. p. cm. "A New Directions book." "Originally published by Anagrama Barcelona Spain, as Amberes in 2002 ..."—T.p. verso. ISBN 9780811217170 (hardcover: alk. paper)

  I. Wimmer, Natasha. II. Title. PQ8098.12.038A6313 2010 863—dc22

  2009042903

  New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin by New Directions Publishing Corporation, 80 Eighth Avenue, New York, NY 10011

  for Alexandra Bolaño and Lautaro Bolaño

  Total Anarchy: TwentyTwo Years Later

  I wrote this book for myself, and even that I can't be sure of. For a long time these were just loose pages that I reread and maybe tinkered with, convinced I had no time. But time for what? I couldn't say exactly. I wrote this book for the ghosts, who, because they're outside of time, are the only ones with time. After the last rereading (just now), I realize that time isn't the only thing that matters, time isn't the only source of terror. Pleasure can be terrifying too, and so can courage. In those days, if memory serves, I lived exposed to the elements, without my papers, the way other people live in castles. I never brought this novel to any publishing house, of course. They would've slammed the door in my face and I'd have lost the copy. I didn't even make what's technically termed a clean copy. The original manuscript has more pages: the text tended to multiply itself, spreading like a sickness. My sickness, back then, was pride, rage, and violence. Those things (rage, violence) are exhausting and I spent my days uselessly tired. I worked at night. During the day I wrote and read. I never slept. To keep awake, I drank coffee and smoked. Naturally, I met interesting people, some of them the product of my own hallucinations. I think it was my last year in Barcelona. The scorn I felt for so-called official literature was great, though only a little greater than my scorn for marginal literature. But

  believed in literature: or rather, I didn't believe in arrivisme or opportunism or the whispering of sycophants. I did believe in vain gestures, I did believe in fate. I didn't have children yet. I was still reading more poetry than prose. In those years (or months), I was drawn to certain science fiction writers and certain pornographers, sometimes antithetical authors, as if the cave and the electric light were mutually exclusive. I read Norman Spinrad, James Tiptree, Jr. (whose real name was Alice Sheldon), Restif de la Bretonne, and de Sade. I also read Cervantes and the archaic Greek poets. When I got sick I reread Manrique. One night I came up with a scheme to make money outside the law. A small criminal enterprise. The basic idea was not to get rich too fast. My first accomplice or attempt at an accomplice, a terribly sad Argentinean friend, responded to my scheme with a saying that went something like this: if you have to be in prison or in the hospital, then the best place to be is your own country, for the visitors, I guess. His response didn't have the slightest effect on me, because I felt equally distant from all the countries in the world. Later I gave up my plan when I discovered that it was worse than working in a brick factory. Tacked up over my bed was a piece of paper on which I'd asked a friend from Poland to write, in Polish, Total Anarchy. I didn't think I was going to live past thirty-five. I was happy. Then came 1981, and before I knew it, everything had changed.

  BLANES, 2002

  When I consider the brief span of my life absorbed into the eternity which comes before and after—memoria hospitis unius diei praetereuntis—the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there: there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who put me here? By whose command and act were this place and time allotted to me?

  —PASCAL

  Antwerp

  1. FAÇADE

  Once photographed, life here is ended. It is almost symbolic of Hollywood. Tara has no rooms inside. It was just a façade.

  —David O. Selznick

  The kid heads toward the house. Alley of larches. The Fronde. Necklace of tears. Love is a mix of sentimentality and sex (Burroughs). The mansion is just a façade— dismantled, to be erected in Atlanta. 1959. Everything looks worn. Not a recent phenomenon. From a long time back, everything wrecked. And the Spaniards imitate the way you talk. The South American lilt. An alley of palms. Everything slow and asthmatic. Bored biologists watch the rain from the windows of their corporations. It’s no good singing with feeling. My darling, wherever you are: it’s too late, forget the gesture that never came. “It was just a façade.” The kid walks toward the house.

  2. THE FULLNESS OF THE WIND

  Twin highways flung across the evening, when everything seems to indicate that memory and finer feelings are kaput, like the rental car of a tourist who unknowingly ventures into war zones and never returns, at least not by car, a man who speeds down highways strung across a zone that his mind refuses to accept as a barrier, vanishing point (the transparent dragon), and in the news Sophie Podolski is kaput in Belgium, the girl from the Montfaucon Research Center (a smell unbefitting a woman), and the spent lips say “I see waiters, hired for the summer, walking along a deserted beach at eight o’clock at night” … “Slow movements, real or unreal I don’t know” … “A sandswept group” … “For an instant, a fat elevenyearold girl lit up the public pool” … “So is Colan Yar after you too?” … “The highway, a blacktopped strip of prarie?” … The man sits at one of the cafes in the hypothetical ghetto. He writes postcards because breathing prevents him from writing the poems he’d like to write. I mean: free poems, no extra tax. His eyes retain a vision of naked bodies coming slowly out of the sea. Then all that’s left is emptiness. “Waiters walking along the beach” … “The evening light dismantles our sense of the wind” …

  3. GREEN, RED, AND WHITE CHECKS

  Now he, or half of him, rises up on a tide. The tide is white. He has taken a train going in the wrong direction. He’s the only one in the compartment, the curtains are open, and the dusk clings to the dirty glass. Swift, dark, intense colors unfurl across the black leather of the seats. We’ve created a silent space so that he can work somehow. He lights a cigarette. The box of mat
ches is sepiacolored. On the lid is a drawing of a hexagon made of twelve matches. It’s labeled “Playing with Matches,” and, as indicated by a 2 in the upper lefthand corner, it’s the second game in a series. This game is called “The Great Triangle Escape.” Now his attention comes to rest on a pale object. After a while he realizes that it’s a square that’s beginning to disintegrate. What he at first imagined was a screen becomes a white tide, white words, panes whose transparency is replaced by a blind and permanent whiteness. Suddenly a shout focuses his attention. The brief sound is like a color swallowed by a crack. But what color? The phrase “The train stopped in a northern town” distracts him from a shifting of shadows in the next seat. He covers his face with his fingers, spread wide enough so that he can spot any object coming at him. He searches for cigarettes in the pockets of his jacket. With the first puff, it occurs to him that monogamy moves with the same rigidity as the train. A cloud of opaline smoke covers his face. It occurs to him that the word “face” creates its own blue eyes. Someone shouts. He looks at his feet planted on the floor. The word “shoes” will never levitate. He sighs, turning his face to the window. A darker light seems to have settled over the land. Like the light in my head, he thinks. The train is running along the edge of a forest. In some spots, traces of recent fires are visible. He isn’t surprised not to see anyone on the edge of the forest. But this is where the little hunchback lives, down a bicycle path, a few miles deeper in. I told him I’d heard enough. There are rabbits and rats here that look like squirrels. The forest is bordered by the highway to the west and the railroad tracks to the east. Nearby there are gardens and tilled fields, and, closer to the city, a polluted river lined with junkyards and gypsy camps. Beyond that is the sea. The hunchback opens a can of food, resting his hump against a small, rotted pine. Someone shouted at the other end of the car, possibly a woman, he said to himself as he stubbed the cigarette out against the sole of his shoe. His shirt is longsleeved, cotton, with green, red, and white checks. The hunchback holds a can of sardines in tomato sauce in his left hand.

  He’s eating. His eyes scan the foliage. He hears the train go by.

  4. I’M MY OWN BEWITCHMENT

  The ghosts of the Plaza Real are on the stairs. Blankets pulled up to my ears, motionless in bed, sweating and repeating meaningless words to myself, I hear them moving around, turning the lights on and off, climbing up toward the roof with unbearable slowness. I’m the moon, someone ventures. But I used to be in a gang and I had the Arab in my sights and I pulled the trigger at the worst possible moment. Narrow streets in the heart of Distrito V, and no way to escape or alter the fate that slid like a djellaba over my greasy hair. Words that drift away from one another. Urban games played from time immemorial . . . “Frankfurt” . . . “A blond girl at the biggest window of the boarding house” . . . “There’s nothing I can do now” . . . I’m my own bewitchment. My hands move over a mural in which someone, eight inches taller than me, stands in the shadows, hands in the pockets of his jacket, preparing for death and his subsequent transparency. The language of others is unintelligible to me. “Tired after being up for days” . . . “A blond girl came down the stairs” . . . “My name is Roberto Bolaño” . . . “I opened my arms” . . .

  5. BLUE

  The Calabria Commune campground, according to a sensationalistic article in PEN. Harassed by the townspeople: inside, the campers walked around naked. Six kids dead in the surrounding area. “They were campers” . . . “Not from around here, that’s for sure” . . . Months before, the AntiTerrorist Brigade paid them a visit. “They were out of control, I mean, screwing all over the place: they screwed in groups and wherever they felt like it” . . . “At first they kept to themselves, they only did it at the campground, but this year they had orgies on the beach and right outside town” . . . The police questioning the locals: “I didn’t do it,” says one, “if somebody had set fire to that place, you could blame me, it’s crossed my mind more than once, but I don’t have the heart to shoot six kids” . . . Maybe it was the mafia. Maybe they committed suicide. Maybe it was all a dream. The wind in the rocks. The Mediterranean. Blue.

  6. REASONABLE PEOPLE VS. UNREASONABLE PEOPLE

  “They suspected me from the beginning” . . . “Pale men could see what was hidden in the landscape” . . . “A campground, a forest, a tennis club, a riding school — the road will take you far away if you want to go far away” . . . “They suspected I was a spy but what kind of fucking spy” . . . “Reasonable people vs. unreasonable people” . . . “That guy running around here doesn’t exist” . . . “He’s the real ringleader of all this” . . . “But I also dreamed of girls” . . . “People we know, the same faces from last summer” . . . “The same kindness” . . . “Now time erases all that” . . . “The perfect girl suspected me from the very beginning” . . . “Something I made up” . . . “There was no spying or any shit like that” . . . “It was so obvious that they refused to believe it” . . .

  7. THE NILE

  The hell to come . . . Sophie Podolski killed

  herself years ago . . . She would’ve been

  twentyseven now, like me . . . Egyptian

  designs on the ceiling, the workers slowly

  approach, dusty fields, it’s the end of April and they’re paid in heroin . . . I’ve turned on the radio, an impersonal voice gives the citybycity count of those arrested today . . . “Midnight, nothing to report” . . . A girl who wrote dragons, completely fucking sick of it all in some corner of Brussels . . . “Assault rifles, guns, old grenades” . . . I’m alone, all the literary shit gradually falling by the wayside — poetry journals, limited editions, the whole dreary joke behind me now . . . The door opened at the first kick and the guy jammed the gun under your chin . . . Abandoned buildings in Barcelona, almost an invitation to kill yourself in peace . . . The sun on the Nile behind the curtain of dust at sunset . . . The boss pays in heroin and the farm workers snort it in the furrows, on blankets, under scrawled palm trees that someone edits away . . . A Belgian girl who wrote like a star . . . “She would’ve been twentyseven now, like me” . . .

  8. CLEANING UTENSILS

  All praise to the highways and to these moments. Umbrellas abandoned by bums in shopping plazas with white supermarkets rising at the far ends. It’s summer and the policemen are drinking at the back of the bar. Next to the jukebox a girl listens to the latest hits. Around the same time, someone is walking, far from here, away from here, with no plans to come back. A naked boy sitting outside his tent in the woods? The girl stumbled into the bathroom and began to vomit. When you think about it, we’re not allotted much time here on Earth to make lives for ourselves: I mean, to scrape something together, get married, wait for death. Her eyes in the mirror like letters fanned out in a dark room; the huddled breathing shape burrowed into bed with her. The men talk about dead smalltime crooks, the pride of houses on the coast, extra paychecks. One day I’ll die of cancer. Cleaning utensils begin to levitate in her head. She says: I could go on and on. The kid came into the room and grabbed her by the shoulders. The two of them wept like characters from different movies projected on the same screen. Red scene of bodies turning on the gas. The bony beautiful hand turned on the gas. Choose just one of these phrases: “I escaped torture” … “An unknown hotel” … “No more roads” …

  9. A MONKEY

  To name is to praise, said the girl (eighteen, a poet, long hair). The hour of the ambulance parked in the alley. The medic stubbed out his cigarette on his shoe, then lumbered forward like a bear. I wish those miserable people in the windows would turn out the lights and go to sleep. Who was the first human being to look out a window? (Applause.) People are tired, it wouldn't surprise me if one of these days they greeted us with a hail of bullets. I guess a monkey. I can't string two words together. I can't express myself coherently or write what I want. I should probably give up everything and go away, isn't that what Teresa of Avila did? (Applause and laughter.) A monkey looking out a pu
trid window, watching the daylight fade. The medic came over to where the sergeant was smoking; they gave each other a slight nod without making eye contact. It was clear at a glance that he hadn't died of a heart attack. He was face down and you could see the bullet holes in his back, in his brown sweater. They emptied a machine gun into him, said a dwarf who was standing to the left of the sergeant and whom the medic hadn't seen. In the distance they heard the muted sounds of a protest march. We'd better go before they block the street, said the dwarf. The sergeant didn't seem to hear him, sunk in contemplation of the dark windows from which people were watching the spectacle. Let's hurry. But where do we go? There aren't any police stations. To name is to praise, said the girl, laughing. The same passion, taken to infinity. Cars stop between potholes and garbage cans. Doors that open and then close for no apparent reason. Engines, streetlights, the ambulance reverses away. The hour swells, bursts. I guess it was a monkey at the top of a tree.

  10. THERE WAS NOTHING

  There are no police stations, no hospitals, nothing. At least there’s nothing money can buy. “We act on instantaneous impulses” … “This is the kind of thing that destroys the unconscious, and then we’ll be left hanging” … “Remember that joke about the bullfighter who steps out into the ring and then there’s no bull, no ring, nothing?” … The policeman drank anarchic breezes. Someone started to clap.

  11. AMONG THE HORSES

  I dreamed of a woman with no mouth, says the man in bed. I couldn’t help smiling. The piston forces the images up again. Look, he tells her, I know another story that’s just as sad. He’s a writer who lives on the edge of town. He makes a living working a riding school. He’s never asked for much, all he needs is a room and time to read. But one day he meets a girl who lives in another city and he falls in love. They decide to get married. The girl will come to live with him. The first problem arises: finding a place big enough for the two of them. The second problem is where to get the money to pay for it. Then one thing leads to another: a job with a steady income (at the stables he works on commission, plus room, board, and a small monthly stipend), getting his papers in order, registering with social security, etc. But for now, he needs money to get to the city where his fianceé lives. A friend suggests the possibility of writing articles for a magazine. He calculates that the first four would pay for the bus trip there and back and maybe a few days at a cheap hotel. He writes his girlfriend to tell her he’s coming. But he can’t finish a single article. He spends the evenings sitting outdoors at the bar of the riding school where he works, trying to write, but he can’t. Nothing comes out, as they say in common parlance. The man realizes that he’s finished. All he writes are short crime stories. The trip recedes from his future, is lost, and he remains listless, inert, going automatically about his work among the horses.