2666 (19 page)
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
"Of course," said El Cerdo.
"I was at a party in
a cultural
charreada
with some German
editors, and we were introduced there."
What the hell is a cultural
charreada?
wrote Espinoza on a piece of
paper, the question seen by all but deciphered by Alatorre alone, for whom it
was intended.
"I must have given her my card,"
said El Cerdo from
"And your home phone number was on
your card."
"That's right," said El Cerdo.
"I must have given her my A card. The B card only has my office number.
And it's just my secretary's number on the C card."
"I understand," said Espinoza,
mustering patience.
"There's nothing on the
card, it's blank, just my name, that's
all," said El Cerdo, laughing.
"I see, I see," said Espinoza,
"just your name."
"Exactly," said El Cerdo.
"My name, period. No phone number or title or street where I live or
anything, you know what I'm saying?"
"I do," said Espinoza.
"So obviously I gave the A card to
Mrs. Bubis."
"And she must have given it to
Archimboldi," said Espinoza.
"Correct," said El Cerdo.
El Cerdo was with the German until five in
the morning. After they ate (the old man was hungry and ordered more tacos and
more tequila, while El Cerdo buried his head like an ostrich in reflections on
melancholy and power), they went for a walk around the Zocalo, visiting the
plaza and the Aztec ruins springing like lilacs from wasteland, as El Cerdo put
it, stone flowers among other stone flowers, a chaos that would surely lead
nowhere, only to further chaos, said El Cerdo, as he and the German walked the
streets around the Zocalo, toward the Plaza Santo Domingo, where, during the
day, under the arches, scribes with their typewriters set up shop to type
letters or legal claims. Then they went to see the Angel on Reforma, but that
night the Angel was dark and as they drove around the traffic circle, El Cerdo
could only describe it to the German, who looked up from his open window.
At five in the morning they returned to the hotel. El Cerdo
waited in the lobby, smoking a cigarette. When the old man emerged from the
elevator he was carrying a single suitcase and was dressed in the same gray
T-shirt and jeans. The streets leading to the airport were empty and El Cerdo
ran several red lights. He hunted around for a topic of conversation, but
couldn't come up with one. He had already asked the old man, as they were
eating, whether he had been to
European writer had been there at some time or other. But the old man said this
was his first time. Near the airport there were more cars and the traffic no
longer moved smoothly. When they drove into the parking lot, the old man tried
to say goodbye, but El Cerdo insisted on accompanying him.
"Give me your suitcase," he said.
The suitcase had wheels and hardly weighed a thing. The old
man was flying from
"
said Espinoza. "Where's that?"
"The state of
said El Cerdo. "It's the capital of
in northwestern
the border with the
States
"What are you going to do in
The old man hesitated a moment before answering, as if he'd
forgotten how to talk.
"I'm going to see what it's like," he said.
Although El Cerdo wasn't sure. Maybe what he actually said
was that he was going to learn something.
"
said El Cerdo.
"No, Santa Teresa," said the old man. "Do
you know it?"
"No," said El Cerdo. "I've been to
giving talks on literature, a while ago, but never to Santa Teresa."
"I think it's a big city," said the old man.
"It's big, yes," said El Cerdo. "There are
factories there, and problems too. I don't think it's a nice place."
El Cerdo pulled out his ID and was able to accompany the
old man to the departure gate. Before they parted he gave him a card. An A
card.
"In case you run into any trouble," he said.
"Many thanks," said the old man.
Then they shook hands and El Cerdo never saw him again.
•
They decided not to tell anyone else what they knew. By
keeping quiet, they reasoned, they weren't betraying anyone, merely behaving
with prudence and discretion, as the case merited. They soon convinced
themselves that it was best not to raise false hopes. According to Borchmeyer,
Archimboldi had come up again as a possible Nobel candidate this year. His name
had been in the prize pool the year before, too. False hopes.
According to Dieter Hellfeld, a member of the
the academy had been in touch with Archimboldi's publisher to get an idea how
the writer would respond if he were awarded the prize. What could a man past
eighty have to say? What could the Nobel mean to such a man, with no family, no
heirs, no public face? Mrs. Bubis said he would be delighted. Probably on her
own recognizance, thinking of sales. But did the baroness concern herself with
sales, with the books piling up in the warehouses of the Bubis publishing house
in
No,
surely not,
said
Dieter Hellfeld. The baroness was nearing ninety, and warehouses were of
no interest to her. She traveled a lot,
Sometimes she could be seen talking to Signora Sellerio at the Bubis stand in
in her retinue, declaiming on Bulgakov and the (incomparable) beauty of Russian
rivers in the fall, before the winter frosts. Sometimes, said Pelletier, it's
as if Mrs. Bubis has forgotten that Archimboldi even exists. That's the way it
always is in
said young Alatorre. In any case, according to Schwarz, Archimboldi was on the
short list, so the Nobel was within the realm of possibility. And maybe the
Swedish academicians wanted a change. A veteran, a World War II deserter still
on the run, a reminder of the past for
A person who didn't pretend to reconcile the irreconcilable, as was the fashion
these days. Imagine, said Pelletier, Archimboldi wins the Nobel and at that
very moment we appear, leading him by the hand.
They couldn't explain to themselves what Archimboldi was
doing in
Why would someone in his eighties travel to a country he had never visited
before? Sudden interest? Research for the setting of a novel in progress? It
was improbable, they thought, not least because the four believed there would
be no more books by Archimboldi.
Tacitly, they inclined toward the simplest but also the
most outlandish answer: Archimboldi had gone to
retired Germans and other Europeans. The explanation didn't hold water. They
imagined a misanthropic old Prussian waking up one morning, out of his head.
They weighed the possibilities of senile dementia. They discarded their hypotheses
and cleaved strictly to what El Cerdo
had said. What if Archimboldi were fleeing? What if Archimboldi
had suddenly found a new reason to flee?
At first Norton was least eager to go tracking him down.
The image of them returning to
Archimboldi by the hand seemed to her the image of a gang of kidnappers. Of
course, no one planned to kidnap Archimboldi. Or even barrage him with
questions. Espinoza would be satisfied just to see him. Pelletier would be
satisfied if he could ask him whose skin the leather mask was made of in his
homonymous novel. Morini would be satisfied if he could see the pictures they
took of him in
Alatorre, whose opinion no one had requested, would be
satisfied to strike up an epistolary friendship with Pelletier, Espinoza,
Morini, and Norton, and maybe, if it wasn't too much bother, visit them every
so often in their respective cities. Only Norton had reservations. But in the
end she decided to make the trip. I think Archimboldi lives in
Dieter Hellfeld, and the author we know by the name of Archimboldi is really
Mrs. Bubis.
"Yes, of course," said our four friends,
"Mrs. Bubis."
At the last minute, Morini decided not to travel. His ill
health, he said, made it impossible. Marcel Schwob, whose health was equally
fragile, had set off in 1901 on a more difficult trip to visit Stevenson's
grave on an island in the Pacific. Schwob's trip lasted many days, first on the
Ville de la Ciotat,
then on the
Polynesienne,
and then on the
Manapouri.
In January 1902 he fell ill with pneumonia and nearly died. Schwob was
traveling with his Chinese manservant, Ting, who got seasick at the drop of a
hat. Or maybe he got seasick only if the sea was rough. In any case the trip
was plagued by rough seas and seasickness. At one point, Schwob, in bed in his
stateroom and convinced he was on the verge of death, felt someone lie down
beside him. When he turned to see who the intruder was he discovered his
Oriental servant, his skin as green as grass. Only then did he realize what kind
of venture he had embarked on. When he got to
after many hardships, he didn't visit Stevenson's grave. Partly because he was
too sick, and partly because what's the point of visiting the grave of someone
who hasn't died? Stevenson—and Schwob owed this simple revelation to his
trip—lived inside him.
Morini, who admired Schwob (or, more precisely, felt a
great fondness for him), thought at first that his trip to Sonora could be a
kind of lesser homage to the French writer and also to the English writer whose
grave the French writer had gone to visit, but when he got back to Turin he saw
that travel was beyond him. So he called his friends and lied, saying the
doctor had strictly forbidden anything of the kind. Pelletier and Espinoza
accepted his explanation and promised they would call regularly to keep him
posted on the search they were undertaking, the definitive search this time.
With Norton it was different. Morini repeated that he
wasn't going. That the doctor had forbidden it. That he planned to write them
every day. He even laughed and indulged in a silly joke that Norton didn't
understand. A joke on Italians. An Italian, a Frenchman, and an Englishman are
in a plane with only two parachutes. Norton thought it was a political joke.
Actually, it was a children's joke, although because of the way Morini told it,
the Italian in the plane (which first lost one engine then the other and then
went into a tailspin) resembled Berlusconi. Norton hardly opened her mouth. She
said mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And then she said good night, Piero, in English
and very sweetly, or at least in a way that seemed to Morini unbearably sweet,
and then she hung up.
Norton felt somehow insulted by Morini's decision not to go
with them. They didn't call each other again. Morini might have called Norton,
but before his friends set off on their search for Archimboldi, he, in his own
way, like Schwob in Samoa, had already begun a voyage, a voyage that would end
not at the grave of a brave man but in a kind of resignation, what might be
called a new experience, since this wasn't resignation in any ordinary sense of
the word, or even patience or conformity, but rather a state of meekness, a
refined and incomprehensible humility that made him cry for no reason and in
which his own image, what Morini saw as Morini, gradually and helplessly
dissolved, like a river that stops being a river or a tree that burns on the
horizon, not knowing that it's burning.
Pelletier, Espinoza, and Norton traveled from
City
in a hotel, and the next morning they flew to
much of what was going on, was thrilled to play host to such distinguished
European academics even though, to his disappointment, they refused to give a
lecture at Bellas Artes or UNAM or the Colegio de Mexico.
The night they spent in
El Cerdo to the hotel where Archimboldi had stayed. The clerk had no problem
letting them see the computer. With the mouse, El Cerdo scrolled over the names
that appeared on the glowing screen under the date he'd met Archimboldi.
Pelletier noticed that his fingernails were dirty and understood why he'd been
given his nickname.