Roberto Bolaño: Os detectives selvagens

"Há uma literatura para quando se está aborrecido. Abunda. Há uma literatura para quando se está calmo. Esta é a melhor literatura, acho eu. Também há uma literatura para quando se está triste. E há uma literatura para quando se está alegre. Há uma literatura para quando se está ávido de conhecimento. E há uma literatura para quando se está desesperado. Esta última é a que quiseram fazer Ulisses Lima e Belano. Grave erro, como se verá a seguir. Tomemos, por exemplo, um leitor médio, um tipo tranquilo, culto, de vida mais ou menos sã, maduro. Um homem que compra livros e revistas de literatura. Bem, aí está. Esse homem pode ler o que se escreve para quando se está sereno, para quando se está calmo, mas também pode ler qualquer outro tipo de literatura, com olho crítico, sem cumplicidades absurdas ou lamentáveis, desapaixonadamente. É o que eu acho. Não quero ofender ninguém.

Agora tomemos o leitor desesperado, aquele a quem presumivelmente é dirigida a literatura dos desesperados. O que é que vêem? Primeiro: trata-se de um leitor adolescente ou de um adulto imaturo, acobardado, com os nervos à flor da pele. É o típico parvajola (perdoem-me a expressão) que se suicidava depois de ler Werther. Segundo: é um leitor limitado. Porquê limitado? Elementar, porque não consegue ler senão literatura desesperada ou para desesperados, tanto importa, importa tanto, um tipo ou um estafermo incapaz de ler de uma assentada "Em busca do tempo perdido" ou "A montanha mágica" (em minha modesta opinião um paradigma da literatura tranquila, serena, total), ou, se quisermos, "Os miseráveis" ou "Guerra e Paz". Acho que falei claro, não? Bem, falei claro. 

Assim lhes falei a eles, disse-lhes, adverti-os, pu-los em guarda contra os perigos que enfrentavam. Foi a mesma coisa que falar com uma pedra. E também: os leitores desesperados são como as minas de ouro da Califórnia. Mais cedo ou mais tarde, esgotam-se. Porquê? É bem evidente! Não se pode viver desesperado toda uma vida, o corpo acaba por dar de si, a dor acaba por se tornar insuportável, a lucidez escapa-se em grandes jorros frios. O leitor desesperado (ainda que o leitor de poesia desesperado, esse é insuportável, acreditem-me) acaba por se antagonizar com os livros, acaba inelutavelmente por se transformar num desesperado sem apelo nem agravo. Ou cura-se! E então, como parte do seu processo de regeneração, volta lentamente, como que entre algodões, como que sob uma chuva de comprimidos tranquilizantes fundidos, volta, como ia dizendo, a uma literatura escrita para leitores serenos, repousados, com a mente bem centrada. A isso se chama (e, se ninguém lhe chama assim, eu chamo-lhe assim) a passagem da adolescência à idade adulta. E com isto não quero dizer que quando nos convertemos nem leitor tranquilo se deixe de ler livros para desesperados. Claro que se lê! Sobretudo se são bons, ou passáveis, ou se um amigo os recomendou. Mas, no fundo, chateiam-no! No fundo, essa literatura amarga, cheia de armas brancas e de Messias enforcados, não consegue penetrá-lo até ao coraçao como, por outro lado, o consegue uma página serena, uma página meditada, uma página tecnicamente perfeita!E eu disse-lhes. Eu adverti-os. Mostrei-lhes a página tecnicamente perfeita. Avisei-os dos perigos. Não esgotar o filão! Humildade! Buscar, perder-se em terras desconhecidas! Mas com guia, com migalhas de pão ou pedrinhas brancas! E, vejam lá, eu estava louco, estava louco por culpa das minhas filhas, por culpa deles, por culpa de Laura Damián, e não me ligaram nenhuma."

[Se não tivesse morrido por não lhe ter sido feito um transplante de fígado, o escritor chileno faria este mês 61 anos. Morreu em Barcelona, a 14 de Julho de 2003, depois de dez dias em coma. Tinha 50 anos. Este livro, a que estupidamente resisti tantos anos, é o que ele chamou "uma carta de amor à minha geração".]

Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003)

Summer 2012, Paris Review

Roberto Bolaño: Exiles

To be exiled is not to disappear but to shrink, to slowly or quickly get smaller and smaller until we reach our real height, the true height of the self. Swift, master of exile, knew this. For him exile was the secret word for journey. Many of the exiled, freighted with more suffering than reasons to leave, would reject this statement. All literature carries exile within it, whether the writer has had to pick up and go at the age of twenty or has never left home.

Probably the first exiles on record were Adam and Eve. This is indisputable and it raises a few questions: can it be that we’re all exiles? Is it possible that all of us are wandering strange lands? The concept of “strange lands” (like that of “home ground”) has some holes in it, presents new questions. Are “strange lands” an objective geographic reality, or a mental construct in constant flux? Let’s recall Alonso de Ercilla.

After a few trips through Europe, Ercilla, soldier and nobleman, travels to Chile and fights the Araucanians under Alderete. In 1561, when he’s not yet thirty, he returns and settles in Madrid. Twenty years later he publishes La Araucana, the best epic poem of his age, in which he relates the clash between Araucanians and Spaniards, with clear sympathy for the former. Was Ercilla in exile during his American ramblings through the lands of Chile and Peru? Or did he feel exiled when he returned to court, and is La Araucana the fruit of that morbus melancholicus, of his keen awareness of a kingdom lost? And if this is so, which I can’t say for sure, what has Ercilla lost in 1589, just five years before his death, but youth? And with his youth, the arduous journeys, the human experience of being exposed to the elements of an enormous and unknown continent, the long rides on horseback, the skirmishes with the Indians, the battles, the shadows of Lautaro and Caupolicán that, as time passes, loom large and speak to him, to Ercilla, the only poet and the only survivor of something that, when set down on paper, will be a poem, but that in the memory of the old poet is just a life or many lives, which amounts to the same thing.

And what is Ercilla left with before he writes La Araucana and dies? Ercilla is left with something—if in its most extreme and bizarre form—that all great poets possess. He’s left with courage. A courage worth nothing in old age, just as, incidentally, it’s worth nothing in youth, but that keeps poets from throwing themselves off a cliff or shooting themselves in the head, and that, in the presence of a blank page, serves the humble purpose of writing.

Exile is courage. True exile is the true measure of each writer.

At this point I should say that at least where literature is concerned, I don’t believe in exile. Exile is a question of tastes, personalities, likes, dislikes. For some writers exile means leaving the family home; for others, leaving the childhood town or city; for others, more radically, growing up. There are exiles that last a lifetime and others that last a weekend. Bartleby, who prefers not to, is an absolute exile, an alien on planet Earth. Melville, who was always leaving, didn’t experience—or wasn’t adversely affected by—the chilliness of the word exile. Philip K. Dick knew better than anyone how to recognize the disturbances of exile. William Burroughs was the incarnation of every one of those disturbances.

Probably all of us, writers and readers alike, set out into exile, or at least a certain kind of exile, when we leave childhood behind. Which would lead to the conclusion that the exiled person or the category of exile doesn’t exist, especially in regards to literature. The immigrant, the nomad, the traveler, the sleepwalker all exist, but not the exile, since every writer becomes an exile simply by venturing into literature, and every reader becomes an exile simply by opening a book.

Almost all Chilean writers, at some point in their lives, have gone into exile. Many have been followed doggedly by the ghost of Chile, have been caught and returned to the fold. Others have managed to shake the ghost and gone into hiding; still others have changed their names and their ways and Chile has luckily forgotten them. When I was fifteen, in 1968, I left Chile for Mexico. For me, back then, Mexico City was like the Border, that vast nonexistent territory where freedom and metamorphosis are common currency. Despite it all, the shadow of my native land wasn’t erased and in the depths of my stupid heart the certainty persisted that it was there that my destiny lay.

I returned to Chile when I was twenty to take part in the Revolution, with such bad luck that a few days after I got to Santiago the coup came and the army seized power. My trip to Chile was long, and sometimes I’ve thought that if I’d spent more time in Honduras, for example, or waited a little before shipping out from Panama, the coup would’ve come before I got to Chile and my fate would have been different. In any case, and despite the collective misfortunes and my small personal misfortunes, I remember the days after the coup as full days, crammed with energy, crammed with eroticism, days and nights in which anything could happen. There’s no way I’d wish a twentieth year like that on my son, but I should also acknowledge that it was an unforgettable year. The experience of love, black humor, friendship, prison, and the threat of death were condensed into no more than five interminable months that I lived in a state of amazement and urgency. During that time, I wrote one poem, which wasn’t just bad like the other poems I wrote back then, but excruciatingly bad. When those five months were up I left Chile again and I haven’t been back since.

That was the beginning of my exile, or what is commonly known as exile, although the truth is I didn’t see it that way. Sometimes exile simply means that Chileans tell me I talk like a Spaniard, Mexicans tell me I talk like a Chilean, and Spaniards tell me I talk like an Argentinean: it’s a question of accents.

The fates chosen by those who go into exile are often strange. After the Chilean coup in 1973, I remember that few political refugees made their way to the embassies of Bulgaria or Romania, for example, with France or Italy preferred by many, although as I recall, top honors went to Mexico, and also Sweden, two very different countries that in the Chilean collective unconscious must have stood for two opposite manifestations of desire, although it’s true that in time the balance tilted toward the Mexican side and many of those who went into exile in Sweden began to turn up in Mexico. Many others, however, remained in Stockholm or Göteborg, and when I was living in Spain I ran into them every summer on vacation, speaking a Spanish that to me, at least, was startling, because it was the Spanish that was spoken in Chile in 1973, and that now is spoken nowhere but in Sweden.

Exile, in most cases, is a voluntary decision. No one forced Thomas Mann to go into exile. No one forced James Joyce to go into exile. Back in Joyce’s day, the Irish probably couldn’t have cared less whether he stayed in Dublin or left, whether he became a priest or killed himself. In the best of cases, exile is a literary option, similar to the option of writing. No one forces you to write. The writer enters the labyrinth voluntarily—for many reasons, of course: because he doesn’t want to die, because he wants to be loved, etc.—but he isn’t forced into it. In the final instance he’s no more forced than a politician is forced into politics or a lawyer is forced into law school. With the great advantage for the writer that the lawyer or politician, outside his country of origin, tends to flounder like a fish out of water, at least for a while. Whereas a writer outside his native country seems to grow wings. The same thing applies to other situations. What does a politician do in prison? What does a lawyer do in the hospital? Anything but work.


What, on the other hand, does a writer do in prison or in the hospital? He works. Sometimes he even works a lot. And that’s not even to mention poets. Of course the claim can be made that in prison the libraries are no good and that in hospitals there are often are no libraries. It can be argued that in most cases exile means the loss of the writer’s books, among other material losses, and in some cases even the loss of his papers, unfinished manuscripts, projects, letters. It doesn’t matter. Better to lose manuscripts than to lose your life. In any case, the point is that the writer works wherever he is, even while he sleeps, which isn’t true of those in other professions. Actors, it can be said, are always working, but it isn’t the same: the writer writes and is conscious of writing, whereas the actor, under great duress, only howls. Policemen are always policemen, but that isn’t the same either, because it’s one thing to be and another to work. The writer is and works in any situation. The policeman only is. The same is true of the professional assassin, the soldier, the banker. Whores, perhaps, come closest in the exercise of their profession to the practice of literature.


Continua aqui: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/apr/13/exiles/


[This essay is drawn from Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches (1998–2003) by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Natasha Wimmer, forthcoming from New Directions on May 30. All translations from Archilochus are by Guy Davenport, from Archilochus, Sappho, Alkman: Three Lyric Poets of the Late Greek Bronze Age (University of California Press, 1980]

Bolañomania

[Veneza by Alex Majoli in NYbooks]

The books that I remember best are the ones I stole in Mexico City, between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, and the ones I bought in Chile when I was twenty, during the first few months of the coup. In Mexico there was an incredible bookstore. It was called the Glass Bookstore and it was on the Alameda. Its walls, even the ceiling, were glass. Glass and iron beams. From the outside, it seemed an impossible place to steal from. And yet prudence was overcome by the temptation to try and after a while I made the attempt.

The first book to fall into my hands was a small volume by [the nineteenth century erotic poet] Pierre Louÿs, with pages as thin as Bible paper, I can’t remember now whether it was Aphrodite or Songs of Bilitis. I know that I was sixteen and that for a while Louÿs became my guide. Then I stole books by Max Beerbohm (The Happy Hypocrite), Champfleury, Samuel Pepys, the Goncourt brothers, Alphonse Daudet, and Rulfo and Arreola, Mexican writers who at the time were still more or less practicing, and whom I might therefore meet some morning on Avenida Niño Perdido, a teeming street that my maps of Mexico City hide from me today, as if Niño Perdido could only have existed in my imagination, or as if the street, with its underground stores and street performers had really been lost, just as I got lost at the age of sixteen.

From the mists of that era, from those stealthy assaults, I remember many books of poetry. Books by Amado Nervo, Alfonso Reyes, Renato Leduc, Gilberto Owen, Heruta and Tablada, and by American poets, like General William Booth Enters Into Heaven, by the great Vachel Lindsay. But it was a novel that saved me from hell and plummeted me straight back down again. The novel was The Fall, by Camus, and everything that has to do with it I remember as if frozen in a ghostly light, the still light of evening, although I read it, devoured it, by the light of those exceptional Mexico City mornings that shine—or shone—with a red and green radiance ringed by noise, on a bench in the Alameda, with no money and the whole day ahead of me, in fact my whole life ahead of me. After Camus, everything changed.

I remember the edition: it was a book with very large print, like a primary school reader, slim, cloth-covered, with a horrendous drawing on the jacket, a hard book to steal and one that I didn’t know whether to hide under my arm or in my belt, because it showed under my truant student blazer, and in the end I carried it out in plain sight of all the clerks at the Glass Bookstore, which is one of the best ways to steal and which I had learned from an Edgar Allan Poe story.

After that, after I stole that book and read it, I went from being a prudent reader to being a voracious reader and from being a book thief to being a book hijacker. I wanted to read everything, which in my innocence was the same as wanting to uncover or trying to uncover the hidden workings of chance that had induced Camus’s character to accept his hideous fate. Despite what might have been predicted, my career as a book hijacker was long and fruitful, but one day I was caught. Luckily, it wasn’t at the Glass Bookstore but at the Cellar Bookstore, which is—or was—across from the Alameda, on Avenida Juárez, and which, as its name indicates, was a big cellar where the latest books from Buenos Aires and Barcelona sat piled in gleaming stacks. My arrest was ignominious. It was as if the bookstore samurais had put a price on my head. They threatened to have me thrown out of the country, to give me a beating in the cellar of the Cellar Bookstore, which to me sounded like a discussion among neo-philosophers about the destruction of destruction, and in the end, after lengthy deliberations, they let me go, though not before confiscating all the books I had on me, among them The Fall, none of which I’d stolen there.

Soon afterwards I left for Chile. If in Mexico I might have bumped into Rulfo and Arreola, in Chile the same was true of Nicanor Parra and Enrique Lihn, but I think the only writer I saw was Rodrigo Lira, walking fast on a night that smelled of tear gas. Then came the coup and after that I spent my time visiting the bookstores of Santiago as a cheap way of staving off boredom and madness. Unlike the Mexican bookstores, the bookstores of Santiago had no clerks and were run by a single person, almost always the owner. There I bought Nicanor Parra’s Obra gruesa [Complete Works] and the Artefactos, and books by Enrique Lihn and Jorge Teillier that I would soon lose and that were essential reading for me; although essential isn’t the word: those books helped me breathe. But breathe isn’t the right word either.

What I remember best about my visits to those bookstores are the eyes of the booksellers, which sometimes looked like the eyes of a hanged man and sometimes were veiled by a kind of film of sleep, which I now know was something else. I don’t remember ever seeing lonelier bookstores. I didn’t steal any books in Santiago. They were cheap and I bought them. At the last bookstore I visited, as I was going through a row of old French novels, the bookseller, a tall, thin man of about forty, suddenly asked whether I thought it was right for an author to recommend his own works to a man who’s been sentenced to death.

The bookseller was standing in a corner, wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows and he had a prominent Adam’s apple that quivered as he spoke. I said it didn’t seem right. What condemned men are we talking about? I asked. The bookseller looked at me and said that he knew for certain of more than one novelist capable of recommending his own books to a man on the verge of death. Then he said that we were talking about desperate readers. I’m hardly qualified to judge, he said, but if I don’t, no one will.

What book would you give to a condemned man? he asked me. I don’t know, I said. I don’t know either, said the bookseller, and I think it’s terrible. What books do desperate men read? What books do they like? How do you imagine the reading room of a condemned man? he asked. I have no idea, I said. You’re young, I’m not surprised, he said. And then: it’s like Antarctica. Not like the North Pole, but like Antarctica. I was reminded of the last days of [Edgar Allan Poe’s] Arthur Gordon Pym, but I decided not to say anything. Let’s see, said the bookseller, what brave man would drop this novel on the lap of a man sentenced to death? He picked up a book that had done fairly well and then he tossed it on a pile. I paid him and left. When I turned to leave, the bookseller might have laughed or sobbed. As I stepped out I heard him say: What kind of arrogant bastard would dare to do such a thing? And then he said something else, but I couldn’t hear what it was.

[This essay is drawn from Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches (1998–2003) by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Natasha Wimmer, forthcoming from New Directions on May 30]

BI de um bolañista-borgiano

Cuando Borges se muere, se acaba de golpe todo. Es como si muriera Merlín, aunque los cenáculos literaros de Buenos Aires no eran ciertamente Camelot. Se acaba, sobre todo, el reino del equilibrio. La inteligencia apolínea deja su lugar a la desesperación dionisiaca. El sueño, un sueño muchas veces hipócrita, falso, acomodaticio, cobarde, se convierte en pesadilla, una pesadilla muchas veces honesta, leal, valiente, que actúa sin red de protección, pero pesadilla al fin y al cabo, y, lo que es peor, literariamente pesadillesca, literariamente suicida, literariamente callejón sin salida. (...) La literatura argentina actual, lamentablemente, tiene tres puntos de referencia. Dos de ellos son públicos. El tercero es secreto. Los tres, de alguna manera, son reacciones antiborgeanas. Los tres, en el fondo, representan un retroceso, son conservadores y no revolucionarios, aunque los tres, o al menos dos de ellos, se postulen como alternativas de un pensamiento de izquierda.

Roberto Bolaño, El secreto del mal

Bolaño para coleccionadores

"O Terceiro Reich", reinterpretação da Segunda Guerra Mundial escrita pelo chileno Roberto Bolaño, foi publicado em Portugal no ano passado, pela Quetzal, numa edição particularmente feia, como é timbre da maioria das editoras portuguesas. Este mês, a Paris Review apresenta o mesmo livro, mas com ilustrações originais do novelista gráfico canadiano Leanne Shapton. É uma edição inédita, para coleccionadores.

"Playa" by Roberto Bolaño

[Foto: JMG]

Dejé la heroína y volví a mi pueblo y empecé con el tratamiento de metadona que me suministraban en el ambulatorio y poca cosa más tenía que hacer salvo levantarme cada mañana y ver la tele y tratar de dormir por la noche, pero no podía, algo me impedía cerrar los ojos y descansar, y ésa era mi rutina, hasta que un día ya no pude más y me compré un trajebaño negro en una tienda del centro del pueblo y me fui a la playa, con el trajebaño puesto y una toalla y una revista, y puse mi toalla no demasiado cerca del agua y luego me estiré y estuve un rato pensando si darme un baño o no dármelo, se me ocurrían muchas razones para hacerlo, pero también se me ocurrían algunas razones para no hacerlo (los niños que se bañaban en la orilla, por ejemplo), así que al final se me pasó el tiempo y volví a casa, y a la mañana siguiente compré una crema de protección solar y me fui a la playa otra vez, y a eso de las 12 me marché al ambulatorio y me tomé mi dosis de metadona y saludé a algunas caras conocidas, ningún amigo o amiga, sólo caras conocidas de la cola de la metadona que se extrañaron de verme en trajebaño, pero yo como si nada, y luego volví caminando a la playa y esta vez me di el primer chapuzón e intenté nadar, aunque no pude, pero eso ya fue suficiente para mí,

y al día siguiente volví a la playa y me volví a untar el cuerpo con protección solar y luego me quedé dormido sobre la arena, y cuando desperté me sentía muy descansado, y no me había quemado la espalda ni nada de nada, y así pasó una semana o tal vez dos semanas, no lo recuerdo, lo único cierto es que cada día yo estaba más moreno y aunque no hablaba con nadie cada día me sentía mejor, o diferente, que no es lo mismo pero que en mi caso se le parecía,

y un día apareció en la playa una pareja de viejos, de eso me acuerdo con claridad, se veía que llevaban mucho tiempo juntos, ella era gorda, o rellenita, y debía de andar por los 70 años aproximadamente, y él era flaco, o más que flaco, un esqueleto que caminaba, yo creo que eso fue lo que me llamó la atención, porque por regla general apenas me fijaba en la gente que iba a la playa, pero en éstos me fijé y la causa fue la delgadez del tipo, lo vi y me asusté, coño, es la muerte que viene a por mí, pensé, pero no venía a por mí, sólo era un matrimonio viejo, él de unos 75 y ella de unos 70, o al revés, y ella parecía gozar de buena salud, y él hacía pinta de que iba a palmarla en cualquier momento o de que ése era su último verano,

al principio, pasado el primer susto, me costó alejar mi mirada de la cara del viejo, de su calavera apenas recubierta por una delgada capa de piel, pero luego me acostumbré a mirarlos con disimulo, tirado en la arena, bocabajo, con la cara cubierta por los brazos, o desde el paseo, sentado en un banco frente a la playa, mientras fingía que me quitaba la arena del cuerpo, y me acuerdo que la vieja siempre llegaba a la playa con un parasol bajo cuya sombra se metía presurosa, sin bañador, aunque a veces la vi con bañador, pero más usualmente con un vestido de verano, muy amplio, que la hacía parecer menos gorda de lo que era, y bajo el parasol la vieja se pasaba las horas leyendo, llevaba un libro muy grueso, mientras el esqueleto que era su marido se tiraba sobre la arena, vestido únicamente con un trajebaño diminuto, casi un tanga, y absorbía el sol con una voracidad que a mí me traía recuerdos lejanos, de yonquis disfrutando inmóviles, de yonquis concentrados en lo que hacían, en lo único que podían hacer, y entonces a mí me dolía la cabeza y me iba de la playa, comía en el Paseo Marítimo, una tapa de anchoas y una cerveza, y después me ponía a fumar y a mirar la playa a través de los ventanales del bar,

y luego volvía y allí seguía el viejo y la vieja, ella debajo de la sombrilla, él expuesto a los rayos del sol, y entonces, de manera irreflexiva, a mí me daban ganas de llorar y me metía en el agua y nadaba, y cuando ya me había alejado bastante de la orilla miraba el sol y me parecía extraño que estuviera allí, esa cosa grande y tan distinta de nosotros, y luego me ponía a nadar hasta la orilla (en dos ocasiones estuve a punto de ahogarme) y cuando llegaba me dejaba caer junto a mi toalla y me quedaba mucho rato respirando con dificultad, pero siempre mirando hacia donde estaban los viejos, y luego tal vez me quedaba dormido tirado en la arena, y cuando me despertaba la playa ya empezaba a desocuparse, pero los viejos seguían allí, ella con su novela bajo la sombrilla y él bocarriba, en la zona sin sombra, con los ojos cerrados y una expresión rara en su calavera, como si sintiera cada segundo que pasaba y lo disfrutara, aunque los rayos del sol fueran débiles, aunque el sol ya estuviera al otro lado de los edificios de la primera línea de mar, al otro lado de las colinas, pero eso a él parecía no importarle,

y entonces, en el momento de despertarme yo lo miraba y miraba el sol, y a veces sentía en la espalda un ligero dolor, como si aquella tarde me hubiera quemado más de la cuenta, y luego los miraba a ellos y luego me levantaba, me ponía la toalla como capa y me iba a sentar en uno de los bancos del Paseo Marítimo, en donde fingía quitarme la arena que no tenía de las piernas, y desde allí, desde esa altura, la visión de la pareja era distinta, me decía a mí mismo que tal vez él no estuviera a punto de morir, me decía a mí mismo que el tiempo tal vez no existía tal como yo creía que existía, reflexionaba sobre el tiempo mientras la lejanía del sol alargaba las sombras de los edificios, y luego me iba a casa y me daba una ducha y miraba mi espalda roja, una espalda que no parecía mía sino de otro tipo, un tipo al que aún tardaría muchos años en conocer, y luego encendía la tele y veía programas que no entendía en absoluto, hasta que me quedaba dormido en el sillón,

y al día siguiente vuelta a lo mismo, la playa, el ambulatorio, otra vez la playa, los viejos, una rutina que a veces interrumpía la aparición de otros seres que aparecían en la playa, una mujer, por ejemplo, que siempre estaba de pie, que jamás se recostaba en la arena, que iba vestida con la parte de abajo de un bikini y con una camiseta azul, y que cuando entraba en el mar sólo se mojaba hasta las rodillas, y que leía un libro, como la vieja, pero estaba mujer lo leía de pie, y a veces se agachaba, aunque de una manera muy rara, y cogía una botella de pepsi de litro y medio y bebía, de pie, claro, y luego dejaba la botella sobre la toalla, que no sé para qué la había traído si no se tendía nunca sobre ella y tampoco se metía en el agua,

y a veces esta mujer me daba miedo, me parecía excesivamente rara, pero la mayoría de las veces sólo me daba pena, y también vi otras cosas extrañas, en la playa siempre pasan cosas así, tal vez porque es el único sitio en donde todos estamos medio desnudos, pero que no tenían demasiada importancia, una vez creí ver a un ex yonqui como yo, mientras caminaba por la orilla, sentado en un montículo de arena con un niño de meses sobre las piernas, y otra vez vi a unas chicas rusas, tres chicas rusas, que probablemente eran putas y que hablaban, las tres, por un teléfono móvil y se reían, pero la verdad es que lo que más me interesaba era la pareja de viejos, en parte porque tenía la impresión de que el viejo se iba a morir en cualquier instante, y cuando pensaba esto, o cuando me daba cuenta de que estaba pensando esto, el resultado era que se me ocurrían ideas disparatadas, como que tras la muerte del viejo iba a ocurrir un maremoto, el pueblo destruido por una ola gigantesca, o como que iba a ponerse a temblar, un terremoto de gran magnitud que haría desaparecer el pueblo entero en medio de una ola de polvo,

y cuando pensaba lo que acabo de decir ocultaba la cabeza entre las manos y me ponía a llorar, y mientras lloraba soñaba (o imaginaba) que era de noche, digamos las tres de la mañana, y que yo salía de mi casa y me iba a la playa, y en la playa encontraba al viejo tendido sobre la arena, y en el cielo, junto a las otras estrellas, pero más cerca de la Tierra que las otras estrellas, brillaba un sol negro, un enorme sol negro y silencioso, y yo bajaba a la playa y me tendía también sobre la arena, las dos únicas personas en la playa éramos el viejo y yo, y cuando volvía a abrir los ojos me daba cuenta de que las putas rusas y la chica que siempre estaba de pie y el ex yonqui con el niño en brazos me contemplaban con curiosidad, preguntándose acaso quién podía ser aquel tipo tan raro, el tipo que tenía los hombros y la espalda quemados, y hasta la vieja me observaba desde la frescura de su sombrilla, interrumpida la lectura de su libro interminable por unos segundos, preguntándose tal vez quién era aquel joven que lloraba en silencio, un joven de 35 años que no tenía nada, pero que estaba recobrando la voluntad y el valor y que sabía que aún iba a vivir un tiempo más.

El peor verano de mi vida:
[http://www.elmundo.es/elmundolibro/2000/08/17/anticuario/966450468.html]

Roberto Bolaño: Putas assassinas

"Tú no sabes nada de pintura, Max, pero intuyo que sabes mucho de soledad. Te gustam mis Reys Católicos, te gusta la cerveza, te gusta tu patria, te gusta el respeto, te gusta tu equipo de fútbol, te gustan tus amigos o compañeros o camaradas, la banda o grupo o pandilla, el pelotón que te vio quedarte rezagado hablando con una tía buena a la que no conocías, y no te gusta la desorden, no te gusta los negros, no te gusta los maricas, no te gusta que te falten al respeto, no te gusta que te quiten el sitio. En fin, son tantas las cosas que no te gustan que en el fondo te pareces a mí. Nos acercamos, tú y yo, desde los extremos del túnel, y aunque lo único que vemos son nuestras siluetas seguimos caminando resueltamente hace nuestro encuentro. En la mitad del túnel por fin podrán nuestros brazos entrelazarse, y aunque allí la oscuridad es tan grande que no podremos contemplar nuestros rostos, sé que avanzaremos sin temor y que nos tocaremos la cara (tú lo primero que me tocarás será el culo, pero eso también es parte de tu deseo de conocer mi rosto), palparemos nuestros ojos y pronunciaremos acaso una o dos palabras de reconocimiento. Entoces me daré cuenta de que nos sabes nada de pintura, pero sí de soledad, que es casi lo mismo."