The Spirit of Science Fiction Read online

  ALSO BY ROBERTO BOLAÑO

  A Little Lumpen Novelita

  The Unknown University

  Woes of the True Policeman

  The Secret of Evil

  The Third Reich

  Tres

  The Insufferable Gaucho

  The Return

  Antwerp

  Monsieur Pain

  The Skating Rink

  2666

  The Romantic Dogs

  Nazi Literature in the Americas

  The Savage Detectives

  Last Evenings on Earth

  Amulet

  Distant Star

  By Night in Chile

  PENGUIN PRESS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Originally published in Spanish under the title El espíritu de la ciencia-ficción by Alfaguara, Madrid.

  Copyright © 2016 by the heirs of Roberto Bolaño

  Translation copyright © 2018 by Natasha Wimmer

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Bolano, Roberto, 1953-2003, author. | Wimmer, Natasha, translator.

  Title: The spirit of science fiction / Roberto Bolano ; translated by Natasha Wimmer.

  Other titles: Espiritu de la ciencia-ficciâon. English

  Description: New York : Penguin Press, 2018. | “Originally published in Spanish under the title El espiritu de la ciencia-ficcion by Alfaguara, Madrid.” |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018006213 (print) | LCCN 2018008859 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735222861 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735222854 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781984877918 (export)

  Subjects: LCSH: Authorship--Fiction. | Authors, Chilean--Fiction. | Chileans--Mexico--Fiction. | Mexico City (Mexico)--Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PQ8098.12.O38 (ebook) | LCC PQ8098.12.O38 E7713 2018 (print) | DDC 863/.64--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018006213

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For Carolina López

  Contents

  Also by Roberto Bolaño

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part 1Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Letter

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Letter

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Letter

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Letter

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Letter

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Letter

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Letter

  Chapter 21

  Part 2Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Letter

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Letter

  Mexican ManifestoChapter 27

  About the Author and Translator

  1

  Do you mind if I interview you?”

  “Go ahead, but keep it brief.”

  “Do you realize that you’re the youngest writer ever to win this prize?”

  “Is that so?”

  “I’ve just spoken to one of the organizers. I got the sense that they were moved.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you. . . . It’s an honor. . . . I’m very happy.”

  “It seems everyone is happy. What are you drinking?”

  “Tequila.”

  “Vodka here. Vodka is a strange drink, isn’t it? It’s not what most women would choose. Vodka neat.”

  “I don’t know what women drink.”

  “Oh, no? Anyway, it doesn’t matter. A woman’s drink is always secret. Her true drink, I mean. Her infinite pour. But never mind. It’s such a clear night, isn’t it? From here we can see the farthest towns and the most distant stars.”

  “That’s an optical illusion, miss. If you look carefully, you’ll observe that the windows are oddly fogged. Go out on the terrace. I believe we’re in the middle of the woods. Practically all we can see are tree branches.”

  “Then those are paper stars, of course. But what about the town lights?”

  “Phosphorescent sand.”

  “You’re so clever. Please, tell me about your work. Yourself and your work.”

  “I feel a little nervous, you know? All these people singing and dancing nonstop, I’m not . . .”

  “Don’t you like the party?”

  “I think everyone is drunk.”

  “They’re the winners and runners-up of all the previous prizes.”

  “Good God.”

  “They’re celebrating the end of another contest. It’s . . . natural.”

  Ghosts and ghostly days passed through Jan’s mind. I think it was quick, a sigh, and then there was Jan on the floor, sweating and howling in pain. Worth mentioning, too, are the signs he was making, the frozen flurry of gestures, as if to show me that there was something on the ceiling, what? I asked as his index finger rose and fell with exasperating slowness, oh, shit, said Jan, it hurts, rats, mountain-climbing rats, you dumbfuck, and then he said, ah, ah, ah, and I grabbed him by the arms, or I pulled him up, which is when I realized that he wasn’t just sweating rivers but cold rivers. I know I should have run for a doctor, but I got the sense that he didn’t want to be left alone. Or maybe I was afraid to go out. (This was the night I realized that the night is really big.) Actually, from a certain perspective I think Jan didn’t care whether I stayed or left. But he didn’t want a doctor. So I said, don’t die, you’re like the prince from The Idiot. I’d bring you a mirror if we had a mirror, but since we don’t, trust me and try to calm down, don’t die on me. Then, after he had sweated a Norwegian river, he said that the roof of our room was plagued with mutant rats, can’t you hear them? he whispered, my hand was on his forehead, and I said, yes, it was the first time I’d heard rats shrieking on the roof of an eighth-floor room. Ah, said Jan. Poor Posadas, he said. His body was so long and thin that I promised myself that from now on I would do a better job of keeping him fed. Then he seemed to fall asleep, his eyes half closed, his face turned to the wall. I lit a cigarette. Through our only window, the first rays of dawn began to appear. The street below was still dark and deserted, but cars went by with some regularity. Suddenly, behind me, I heard Jan’s
snores. I looked at him. He was asleep, naked on his bare mattress, a lock of blond hair drying slowly on his forehead. I slumped against the wall and let myself slide down until I was sitting in a corner. Through the window, I saw an airplane go by: red, green, blue, yellow lights, the kernel of a rainbow. I closed my eyes and thought about the past few days, the big sad scenes, what I could see and touch, and then I got undressed and lay down on my mattress and tried to imagine Jan’s nightmares, and suddenly, before I fell asleep, I was as certain as if it was being dictated to me that Jan had felt many things that night, but not fear.

  Dear Alice Sheldon:

  I just want to tell you that I admire you deeply. . . . I’m a devoted reader. . . . When I had to get rid of my books (I never had a lot, but I had some), I couldn’t bring myself to give away all of yours. . . . So I still have Up the Walls of the World, and sometimes I recite a little from memory . . . just for myself. . . . I’ve read your stories, too, but I gradually lost those, unfortunately. . . . Here they were published in anthologies and magazines, and some made their way to the city where I live. . . . There was a guy who loaned me rare stuff. . . . And I met a science fiction writer. . . . People say he’s our only science fiction writer, but I don’t believe it. . . . Remo tells me that his mother met another one, ten or fifteen years ago at least. . . . His name was González, or that’s how my friend remembers it, and he worked in the records department at Valparaíso Hospital. . . . He gave money to Remo’s mother and the other girls to buy his novel. . . . He published it himself with his own money. . . . González waited outside the bookstore, and Remo’s mother went in and bought the book. . . . And of course the only books the store sold were the ones bought by the kids from the records department. . . . Remo remembers their names: Maite, Doña Lucía, Rabanales, Pereira. . . . But not the title of the book . . . Martian Invasion . . . Flight to the Andromeda Nebula . . . The Secret of the Andes. . . . I can’t think what it was. . . . Maybe someday I’ll find a copy. . . . After I read it, I’ll send it to you as a small token of gratitude for the hours of pleasure you’ve given me . . .

  Yours,

  Jan Schrella

  Then let’s talk about the winning book.”

  “There isn’t much to say. Do you want me to tell you what it’s about?”

  “I’d be delighted.”

  “It begins in Santa Bárbara, a town near the Andes, in the south of Chile. It’s a horrible place, or at least that’s how I see it, nothing like these charming Mexican villages. But there’s one thing that gives it class: the houses are all built of wood. I have to confess that I’ve never been there, but this is how I imagine it: wooden houses in every shade of brown, unpaved streets, nonexistent sidewalks—or, actually, rickety wooden ramps like in westerns, so that when it rains, mud isn’t tracked inside. It’s in this nightmarish, hellish Santa Bárbara that the story begins. To be precise, it begins at the Potato Academy, a kind of three-story grain shed with an iron weather vane on the roof, probably the bleakest building on Calle Galvarino and one of the many secret faculties of the Unknown University that are scattered around the world.”

  “Truly fascinating. Tell me more.”

  “On the first floor, there are just two rooms. One of them is so huge that tractors used to be kept there; the other is tiny, tucked away in a corner. In the big room, there are tables, chairs, filing cabinets, even sleeping bags and mattresses. Tacked to the walls are posters and drawings of different kinds of tubers. The small room is empty. It’s a room with a floor, a ceiling, wooden walls—not old wood from when the grain shed was built but new wood, neatly cut and polished, nearly jet-black. I’m not boring you, am I?”

  “No, go on, go on. This is a nice break for me. You wouldn’t believe all the interviews I had in Mexico City this morning. They work us like slaves at the paper.”

  “All right. On the second floor, reached by stairs without a handrail, there are two more rooms, each of the same size. In one of them, there are a few mismatched chairs, a desk, a blackboard, and other items that give the room the vague feel of a classroom. In the other room, there’s nothing but rusty old farm equipment. Finally, on the third floor, which is reached from the tool room, we find a ham radio set and a profusion of maps scattered on the floor, a small FM transmitter, some semiprofessional recording equipment, a set of Japanese amplifiers, et cetera. I say et cetera because anything that I haven’t mentioned either isn’t important or else will be described later in full detail.”

  “My dear friend, the suspense is killing me.”

  “Spare me the ironic commentary. As I was saying, the third floor, which is actually a huge single attic room, is scattered with all of these modern or quasi-modern communication devices. The ham radio set is the only surviving piece of a collection of equipment that the academy once used for teaching purposes but that had to be sold due to general neglect by the UU and because the caretaker needed to eat. The room is a complete mess; it looks as if no one has bothered to sweep or mop for months. There are a couple of windows with wooden shutters, too few for the size of the room. From the eastward-facing one, you see the mountains. From the other, the view is of an endless forest and the beginning or the end of a path.”

  “An idyllic landscape.”

  “Idyllic or terrifying, depending how you look at it.”

  “Hmm . . .”

  “The academy is surrounded by a yard. In the old days, it was full of carts and trucks. Now the only vehicle in the yard is a BMX bike belonging to the caretaker, a man in his sixties; he’s a health nut, hence the bicycle. Around the yard is a wooden-and-wire fence. There are only two entrances. The main gate is big and heavy, and on the front of it is a yellowish metal sign stamped with black letters reading POTATO ACADEMY—ALIMENTARY RESEARCH 3, and beneath, in tiny print, the street name and number: 800 GALVARINO. The other door is in what a normal visitor would call the backyard. This door is small, and instead of opening onto the street it leads into a vacant lot and beyond to the woods and the path.”

  “The same path you can see from the attic?”

  “Yes, the tail end of it.”

  “It must be nice to live in an attic, even a tiny one.”

  “I lived in a rooftop room for centuries. I don’t recommend it.”

  “I didn’t say a rooftop room, I said an attic.”

  “Same thing. The view is the same. A view of the gallows, but with depth. With sunrises and sunsets.”

  It was the ideal scene on which to pin images or desires, I thought—a young man, five foot eight, in jeans and a blue T-shirt, standing in the sun on the curb of the longest street in the Americas.

  This meant that we were in Mexico at last and that the sun shining down on me between buildings was the sun of the Mexico City I’d dreamed of for so long. I lit a cigarette and searched for our window. The building where we lived was greenish gray, like the uniform of the Wehrmacht, Jan had said three days ago, when we found the room. There were flowers on the apartment balconies. Higher up—smaller than some flowerpots—were the windows of the rooftop rooms. I was tempted to call Jan to come to the window and see our future. And then what? Skip out of there, say, Jan, I’m off, I’ll pick up avocados for lunch (and milk, though Jan hated milk), and good news, super queer, perfect poise, eternal faggot in the antechambers of greatness, I’ll be star reporter of the poetry section, every telephone at my disposal.

  Then my heart began to hammer strangely. I thought, I’m a statue frozen between the road and the sidewalk. I didn’t scream. I walked on. Seconds later, when I had yet to emerge from the shadow of our building or the weave of shadows that covered this stretch, my reflection appeared in the windows of Sanborns, strange mental duplication—a young man with long hair in a ripped blue T-shirt who bowed, genuflecting strangely before the jewels and the crimes (but what jewels and what crimes I forgot immediately) with rolls and avocados in my arms, and a liter of Lala milk, and the ey
es, not my eyes but eyes lost in the black hole of the window, narrowed as if they had suddenly seen the desert.

  I turned around slowly. I knew it. Jan was watching me from the window. I waved my arms in the air. Jan shouted something unintelligible and leaned farther out. I jumped. Jan responded by moving his head back to front and then in circles, faster and faster. I was afraid that he would throw himself out the window. I started to laugh. The passersby stared at me, and then they looked up and saw Jan, who was lifting his leg, pretending to kick a cloud. He’s my friend, I said. We just moved here a few days ago. He’s wishing me luck. I’m on my way out to look for work. Oh, well, that’s nice, what a good friend, someone said, and walked on, smiling.

  I believed that nothing bad would ever happen to us in that welcoming city. How near and how far from what fate had in store for me! How sad and transparent that first Mexican smile appears now in memory!

  I dreamed about a Russian guy. . . . What do you think of that?”

  “I don’t know. . . . I dreamed about a blond girl. . . . It was getting dark. . . . Like on the outskirts of Los Ángeles, but pretty soon it wasn’t Los Ángeles anymore. It was Mexico City, and the girl was walking in clear plastic tunnels. . . . She had sad eyes. . . . But that was yesterday, on the bus.”

  “In my dream, the Russian was happy. Somehow I could tell that he was going to go up in a spaceship.”

  “Then it was Yuri Gagarin.”

  “More tequila?”

  “Ándele, pal, simonel.”

  “At first I thought it was Yuri Gagarin, too, but you won’t believe what happened next. . . . In the dream, it made my hair stand on end.”

  “You were sleeping soundly, though. I was writing until late, and you looked fine.”

  “Well, then the Russian got into his space suit and turned his back on me. He left. I wanted to go after him, but I don’t know what was wrong with me; I couldn’t walk. Then the Russian turned and waved good-bye. . . . And you know what he looked like, what he was?”