A Little Lumpen Novelita Read online

  Roberto Bolaño

  a little

  lumpen

  novelita

  Translated by NATASHA WIMMER

  A NEW DIRECTIONS BOOK

  for Lautaro and Alexandra Bolaño

  All writing is garbage.

  People who come out of nowhere to try and put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs.

  All writers are pigs. Especially writers today.

  ANTONIN ARTAUD

  I

  Now I’m a mother and a married woman, but not long ago I led a life of crime. My brother and I had been orphaned. Somehow that justified everything. We didn’t have anyone. And it all happened overnight.

  Our parents died in a car accident on the first vacation they took without us, on a highway near Naples, I think, or some other horrible southern highway. Our car was a yellow Fiat, a used car, but it looked like new. After the accident it was just a tangle of gray steel. When I saw it at the police yard with the other wrecked cars, I asked my brother about the color.

  “Wasn’t it yellow?”

  My brother said yes, of course it had been yellow, but that was before. Before the accident. Collisions warp color or warp the way we see color. I didn’t know what he meant by that. I asked him. He said: Light . . . color . . . everything. Poor guy, I thought, he’s taking it harder than me.

  That night we slept at a hotel and the next day we took the train back to Rome, with what was left of our parents. We were escorted by a social worker, or a counselor, or a psychologist, I don’t know, my brother asked her what she was and I didn’t hear the answer because I was looking out the window.

  The only people at the burial were an aunt, my mother’s sister, along with her horrible daughters. I stared at my aunt the entire time (which wasn’t long) and more than once I thought I caught a half-smile on her lips, or sometimes a whole smile, and then I knew (though actually I’d known all along) that my brother and I were alone in the world. The ceremony was brief. Outside the cemetery we kissed our aunt and cousins and that was the last we saw of them. As we were walking to the nearest metro station I said to my brother that my aunt had smiled — meaning that she might as well have come right out and laughed — as the coffins were slid into their niches. He said that he had noticed it too.

  After that, the days were different. Or the passing of the days. Or the thing that joins one day and the next but at the same time marks the boundary between them. Suddenly the night stopped existing and everything was constant sun and light. At first I thought it was exhaustion, or the shock of our parents’ sudden disappearance, but when I told my brother about it he said that he had noticed the same thing. Sun and light and an explosion of windows.

  I began to think that we were going to die.

  But our life followed the same patterns as it had before our parents’ death. Each morning we went to school. We talked to the people we thought of as friends. We did our schoolwork. Not much, but some. After we filled out a few simple forms, our father’s pension was transferred to us. We thought we were going to get more and we filed a complaint. One morning, in front of a bureaucrat who was trying to explain that my father had earned X amount of money while he was alive and why we were due less than half of that after his death, my brother started to cry. He swore at the clerk and I had to drag him out of the office. It isn’t fair, he yelled. It’s the law, I heard the clerk say, sounding sorry for us.

  I looked for work. Each morning I bought the newspaper and read the Help Wanted columns in the schoolyard, underlining whatever looked interesting. In the afternoon, after eating any old thing, I left the house and didn’t come back until I had stopped at each place. The listings, whether they spelled it out or not, were mostly for escorts, but I’m no prostitute. I used to lead a life of crime, but I was never a prostitute.

  One day I found a job at a salon. I washed hair. I didn’t do any cutting, but I watched how the other girls did it and I prepared for the future. My brother said that it was stupid to work, that we could live happily on the pension we got from the government, on the income of our orphanhood. Orphanhood, ridiculous word. We started to add things up. We really could get by, but only by going without almost everything. My brother said that he could give up eating three meals a day. I looked at him and I couldn’t tell whether he was serious or not.

  “How many times a day do you eat?”

  “Three. Four.”

  “And how many times a day are you saying you’re willing to eat from now on?”

  “Once.”

  A week later my brother found a job at a gym. At night, when he got home, we talked and made plans. I dreamed about having my own hair salon. I had reason to think that the future was in small salons, small boutiques, small record stores, tiny exclusive bars. My brother said the future was in computers, but since he worked at a gym (sweeping floors and cleaning bathrooms), he’d started lifting weights and doing all the things people do to build their bodies.

  Gradually we gave up on getting an education. Sometimes I didn’t go to school in the mornings (the incessant light was unbearable). Other times it was my brother who didn’t go. As the days went by we both ended up staying home in the mornings, yearning for school but incapable of going out, getting on the bus, walking into our respective classrooms, and opening the books and notebooks from which we would learn nothing.

  We killed time watching TV, first the talk shows, then cartoons, and finally the morning shows with interviews and news about famous people. But more about that later. TV and videos play an important role in this story. Even today, when I turn on the TV, I seem to get a glimpse of my criminal younger self, but the vision doesn’t last long, no longer than the time it takes the TV to fully come on. For an instant, though, I can see the eyes of the person I used to be, my hair, my scornful lips, my cold-looking cheekbones, and my neck, cold too, like marble. The sight always gives me a shiver.

  Around this time, because of his job at the gym, my brother developed a strange habit.

  “Want to see how I’m doing?” he would ask.

  Then he would take off his shirt and show me his muscles. Even though it was cold and the apartment wasn’t heated, he’d take off his shirt or his T-shirt and show me the muscles that were timidly emerging from his body like tumors, protuberances that had nothing to do with him or with my image of him — of his scrawny adolescent body.

  Once he told me that he dreamed of being Mr. Rome and then Mr. Italy or Master of the Universe. I laughed in his face and gave him my frank opinion. To be Master of the Universe you have to train from the time you’re ten, I told him. I thought that bodybuilding was like chess. My brother said that if I could dream of owning a mini-salon, he had the right to dream of a better future too. That was the word he used: future. I went into the kitchen and got our dinner started. Spaghetti. Then I set out the plates and silverware. Still thinking. At last I said that I didn’t care about the future, that I had ideas, but those ideas, if I really thought about it, never extended into the future.

  “Where do they go, then?” howled my brother.

  “Nowhere.”

  Then we would watch TV until we fell asleep.

  Around four in the morning I usually woke with a start. I would get up from my chair, clear the dirty dishes from the table, wash them, straighten the living room, clean the kitchen, put another blanket over my brother, turn down the TV, go to the window and look out into the street with its double row of parked cars: I couldn’t believe that it was still night, that this incandescence was night. It made no difference whether I closed my eyes or kept them open.

  II

  One day my brother rented an X-rated movie and we watched it together. It was horrible an
d I said so. He agreed. We watched the whole thing and then we watched TV, first an American series and then a game show. The next day my brother returned the movie and rented another one. It was X-rated too. I said that we didn’t have enough money to rent movies every day. He didn’t answer. When I asked him why he’d rented the same kind of movie again, he said it was to learn.

  “Learn what?”

  “Learn how to make love,” said my brother without looking at me.

  “Watching dirty movies isn’t going to teach you anything,” I said.

  “Don’t be so sure,” he answered in a hoarse voice that I had never heard before.

  His eyes were bright. Then he started to do exercises on the floor, sit-ups and other things, and for a second I thought he was going crazy. I shouldn’t be so hard on him, I thought. I said that maybe he was right and I was wrong — maybe he was on the right track. “Are you still a virgin?” he asked me from the floor. “I am,” I said. “Me too,” he said. I said that was normal at his age.

  The next night there was a new X-rated movie in the house. As we were watching it I fell asleep. Before I closed my eyes, I thought: I’m going to dream about this filth, but instead I dreamed about the desert. I was walking in the desert, dying of thirst, and on my shoulder there was a white parrot, a parrot that kept saying: “I can’t fly, I’m sorry, please forgive me, but I can’t fly.” He was saying this because at some point in the dream I had asked him to fly. He weighed too much (ten pounds at least, he was a big parrot) to be carried for so long, but the parrot wouldn’t budge, and I could hardly walk, I was shaking, my knees hurt, my legs, my thighs, my stomach, my neck, it was like having cancer, but also like coming — coming endlessly and exhaustingly — or like swallowing my eyes, my own eyes, swallowing them and at the same time trying not to bite down on them, and every so often the white parrot tried to help, saying: “Courage, Bianca,” but mostly it kept its beak shut, and I knew that when I dropped on the hot sand and I was dying of thirst it would fly, fly away from this part of the desert to another part of the desert, fly away from my expiring flesh in search of other, less expiring flesh, fly away from my dead body forever, forever.

  When I woke up my brother was asleep in his chair and the screen was a gray sea, gray and black stripes, as if a storm was approaching Rome and only I could see it.

  Soon I was going along with my brother on his video store forays. In the mornings, during school hours, while kids our age were in class or shoplifting or getting high or having sex for money, I started to visit the video stores in our neighborhood and the surrounding neighborhoods, at first with my brother, who was trying to find the lost films of Tonya Waters, a porn star he had fallen in love with and whose adventures he was getting to know by heart, and then alone, though I didn’t rent X-rated movies except when my brother had a special request, say for something featuring Sean Rob Wayne, who had worked twice with Tonya Waters and whose film career had thereby acquired a particular significance for my brother, as if anything that came into contact with Waters became automatically worthy of his attention.

  Without surprise I discovered that I liked video stores. Not so much the ones in our neighborhood, but the stores in other neighborhoods. In that sense I was different from my brother, who only went to the video stores that were near home or on the way between our house and the gym where he worked. Familiarity was a source of comfort for my poor brother.

  I, on the other hand, liked to try new places, plasticky sanitized stores with lots of customers, or dubious establishments with a single Balkan or Asian clerk, where no one knew anything about me. In those days I felt something that wasn’t quite happiness but that did resemble enthusiasm, wandering streets I had hardly ever been down and that invariably ran into Via Tiburtina or Trajan’s Park. Sometimes I went into a video store and spent half an hour or more scanning the shelves of video cases and then I would leave without renting anything, not because I wouldn’t have liked to, but because I had no money.

  Other times, throwing caution to the wind, I’d rent two movies at once. I was omnivorous: I liked romance (which almost always made me laugh), classic horror, gore, psychological horror, crime horror, military horror. Sometimes I sat for a long time on Garibaldi Bridge or on a bench on Tiber Island, next to the old hospital, and I studied the video cases as if they were books.

  Some cars would slow down as they passed. I heard whispers, which I ignored. Usually people would roll down the window and say something, make some promise, and then keep going. There were cars that passed and didn’t stop. There were cars that passed with the windows already rolled down and kids inside yelling — “Fascism or barbarism!” — and they’d keep going too. I didn’t look at them. I stared at the river and my videos and tried to forget the few things I knew.

  III

  One evening my brother came home with two men.

  They weren’t his friends, though my brother chose to think they were. One was from Bologna, the other from Libya or Morocco. But they looked like twins. Same head, same nose, same eyes. They reminded me of a clay bust I had seen recently in a magazine at the salon. They spent the night.

  “But where will they sleep?” I said to my brother, “There’s no room,”

  He gave me a haughty look, as if to say he had the situation under control.

  “In our parents’ bedroom,” he said.

  He was right, there was room. The men slept there.

  I went to bed early. I didn’t feel like watching my favorite shows.

  I hardly slept a wink. When I got up at six in the morning, the kitchen was clean. The men had washed the pots, the dishes, and the silverware and left it all on the rack to dry. The ashtrays were empty and clean. I think they even swept before they went to bed. I thought about that as I ate breakfast and then I went to work, though it was very early and I spent almost two hours wandering around the neighborhood.

  When I got back they were still there. They had made a spinach purée and a spicy tomato sauce. The table was set. In the refrigerator were two big bottles of beer. It was only then, as we ate, that I learned their names. They introduced themselves. But I don’t remember the names anymore and I’d rather not make an effort to remember them. My brother looked nervous and happy. The two men looked relaxed. The Bolognan even pulled out a chair for me.

  That night I realized how alike they were, and that night, too, they told me that they weren’t brothers, though many people thought they were. The Libyan said something that at the time I found mysterious. In a way, he said, those people weren’t wrong. Silly as it may seem, people are never wrong. Even if we look down on them, and sometimes rightly so, people are never wrong. That’s our curse, he said.

  “Are you brothers or not?” I asked.

  The Libyan said that they were blood brothers.

  “Did you swear a blood oath, did you cut your palms and rub the blood together? Is that what you mean?”

  That’s what they meant. My brother thought it was great that there were still people who swore blood oaths. I thought it was childish. The Libyan said he agreed with me, but I think he only agreed to be polite, since if he thought it was childish, why had he done it? Unless they’d known each other since they were children, which they hadn’t.

  That night I watched TV with them for a while.

  My brother had met them at the gym, where they did some kind of work that was never clear to me. Sometimes I got the impression that they were trainers, a job with a certain prestige, and other times that they were just sweepers and errand boys, like my brother. Either way, they were always talking about the gym, like people who come home and can’t stop going on about work. They talked about the gym — and so did my brother, with a fervor new to me — and about protein diets and meals with names that had the ring of science fiction, like Fuel Tank 3000 or Weider energy bars (all the nutrients you need for the body of a champion!).

  This went on until I told them that if they wanted to keep talking they should do it in the
kitchen because I couldn’t hear my game show. I liked (I still like) to listen carefully to the questions and answers because that way while I’m being entertained I learn something that probably won’t help me in any way but that seems worth knowing. Sometimes I get an answer right. When that happens I start to think that maybe I could go on TV and be a contestant. But then more questions come and I don’t know any of the answers, which is when I realize that I’m better off here, on this side of the screen, because if I were there, in front of the cameras, I’d probably just make an ass of myself.

  The surprising thing, though, was that when I asked them to stop talking, they stopped. And then we were all quiet watching the show, which was at the most exciting part: there were only two contestants left, an older man, maybe forty or fifty, and a girl with little glasses and a face that was too serious, kind of scrunched up. She had incredible hair, shoulder-length and shiny, all silky black. For a minute I imagined her sitting in the salon. Ugly thoughts. I tried to wipe them from my mind.

  Then the girl was asked to define the word nimbus. And the Bolognan, next to me, said that it was a halo, the circle of light around a saint’s head. And before the girl could open her mouth, he added that it was also a low cloud formation, a cluster of cumulous clouds.

  I stared at the Bolognan and I stared at the TV. My brother smiled, as if he knew the answer too, though I knew he didn’t. And time ticked away and the girl lost her turn and it was the older man’s turn and he said that a nimbus was, in fact, a low cloud. And when the host, to give the old guy a hard time, asked “And what else, sir?,” the man was silent and couldn’t think of anything else.

  And then came more contestants and more questions and the Bolognan answered almost all of them, some of them wrong, admittedly, but most of them right, and my brother — and even I — said that he should try out for the show, he could make a shitload of money (though I didn’t use that word), and then my brother told me that his friend was always doing crossword puzzles and he actually finished them, unlike the average person, who would start a puzzle and leave it half-done, and it seemed to me that it was one thing to be able to finish crossword puzzles and another thing to be a game-show winner, but I kept my mouth shut, because clearly the Bolognan could win any quiz show he signed up for.