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Who Would
Dare? Roberto
Bolaño
A bookshop
in Venice, 2010 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 Areola, 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. March 22,
2011 12:15 p.m. |
