My reading of 2666 was radically different from my reading of The Savage Detectives. When I came to Estonia, 2666 was the only book that came with me in my hand luggage and I started it all over again. The trip was extremely long, 33 hours, more than half of it just waiting time in airports, so, by the time I arrived in Tallinn, I was already halfway through it. It was, as opposed to The Savage Detectives, a solitary reading.

And I think that’s just fine because, there where The Savage Detectives is a choral novel overflowing with camaraderie, 2666 is a solitary novel. Solitude wanders through its more than a thousand pages, quiet but impassive as the hot desert wind. The sole chapter in the book where we encounter something similar to the group feeling in The Savage Detectives is The part about the critics, where Pelletier, Espinoza, Morini and Norton discover Benno von Archimboldi and rescue his literary figure from oblivion, to then enter a quest to find him in person. Although even in this chapter, we start to see how that camaraderie starts to fall apart, slowly, without any violence, as all things that crumble under intense heat. We see how Morini starts to drift apart in unaccountable silence. And we see, also, how Pelletier and Espinoza, although friends until the end, seem to be alone too: two friends who share their unalterable loneliness.

In the following chapters loneliness is more evident. The part about Amalfitano is, for me, the saddest of them all. A Chekhovian kind of sadness. Amalfitano is a Chilean emigrate who is teaching literature in Santa Teresa’s University. Left by his wife along with their daughter. Her wife, however, is portrayed as possessed by a beautiful folly and not as a villain. In The part about Fate we come to know Fate (obviously), a young black journalist from Chicago, who travels to Santa Teresa to report on a box match. The chapter starts with the death of Fate’s mother, with his pain and with him “surrounded by ghosts”, and pain and ghosts never abandon him. The part about the crimes is the most sordid, the most difficult to read, the longest and the most bone-chillingly similar to reality. There, we don’t meet any protagonist. The protagonist is evil, it’s poverty, it’s misoginy, it’s indifference, it’s deathly silence. We meet the victims, hundreds of women who are raped and murdered, and a series of people: cops, prosecutors, journalists, private investigators, politicians and just citizens who live and deal, to a greater or lesser extent, with the crimes. In this part is also where solitude is most unbearable. I think there’s one significant relationship, that of judicial police officer Juan de Dios Martínez, one of the few officers on the cases who actually tries to solve them, and Elvira Campos, a psychiatrist. Their relationship, as demanded by her, remains strictly sexual. Sometimes, after sex, she lies in bed and talks to him about her escape dreams, about a life in Paris, about a youth extended by costly surgeries; she talks to him as if she was talking with the air, to herself, and he listens, half moved and half gloomy, and is only capable of saying: “You drive me crazy just as you are”. But, of course, the most devastating loneliness in this chapter is that of the victims who are alone when murdered and whose loneliness follows them to the grave – more often than not a mass grave – since no one finds, or no one wants to find, answers.

At last there’s The part about Archimboldi where we come to know Hans Reiter, Archimboldi’s birth name (I wonder if Bolaño chose this last name because the German pronunciation is similar to Writer) and we follow him, very much in XIXth Century novel-fashion, from before he was born to his old age, in an epic that extends from the World War One, lingers in the Eastern front during WWII and ends well after the fall of the USSR and in the beginning of the new millennium. Archimboldi has no one but his own soul, and it seems at times that’s all he needs.

There are similarities with The Savage Detectives, yes. Ambition and breadth, to begin with. Bolaño´s absolutely Spartan understanding of writing. The fascinating digressions that have nothing to do with the central plot, but that either reinforce, or reverberate, or contradict, or battle with the central themes. An invincible romanticism tied in a lethal vortex with cynicism and disenchantment. His male heroes, all seeming reiterations, reformulations and paraphrasis of one another: Pelletier, Espinoza, Belano, Lima, Lalo Cura, Archimboldi, Ansky, etc. All of them seem to me like projections of Bolaño himself. Brave men anxious to live. Men who look at the world and discover the skeletons behind the appearances. Is as if Bolaño saw himself in a crushed mirror and the many slightly deformed reflections casted by this mirror were his characters. But these deformed reflections, unlike the reflections in broken mirrors that abound in literature, are neither grotesque nor unsettling, but rather melancholic. The broken mirror in which Bolaño looks at himself is, almost every time, a mirror of nostalgia. The images in it are the lives he did not live and misses nonetheless. They are reflections possessed by an un flickering dignity and an unwavering sadness, which is, after all, the light that shines on all heroes.

Another similarity, this one crucial, is Bolaño’s obsession with evil, which is present, but not so evident, in The Savage Detectives. It is front and center in Nazi literature in the Americas and in Distant Star. This obsession is taken to the extreme in 2666, where Bolaño jumps into the horror of the femicides in Ciudad Juárez, researching tirelessly, both on his own and with the help of Sergio González Rodríguez, who, around the same time, was publishing weekly coverage of the crimes which were later compiled in his book: Bones In the Desert. As a way of thanking him for his help, Bolaño paid homage to González Rodríguez by including him in the novel and adding: “With Sergio González Rodríguez I would go to war”.

Sergio González Rodríguez, journalist and ficion writer. Passed away in 2017.

What Bolaño did in The part about the crimes is exceptional, but moreover, it’s important. Along the 350 pages that this chapter takes, Bolaño tells hundreds of femicides between 1993 and December 1997. He narrates them with a language clearly mirroring the cold and clinical tone of forensic’s and police’s reports; but in each of those narratives, his own voice starts leaking, as drops in a cavern, and he begins to talk to us not only about the morbid murders and the state of the bodies, but about the lives of the victims, about their names, their mothers, their siblings, about what they did, where did they work or study, what were their fantasies. The result is almost beyond all bearing. As González Rodríguez pointed out (which is notable, given that González Rodríguez researched the crimes exhaustively and in situ):

“Bolaño’s master novel adds a tragic density that allows a close reading of reality in a way that the facts, because of their traumatic effect, sometimes hide. What is documented as a fact, becomes unbearable as fiction”.

With 2666, Bolaño sets himself apart, at least in my opinion, from the modern and postmodern literature that is only interested in experimentation, in structural razzle-dazzle, in the deployment of overwhelming talent, and in the meta-look-I-know-you know clever cynicism, and throws himself into the abyss (a very bolañesque image) of the open wounds that are unpleasant to look at both because they’re terrifying and because they accuse. It is not by coincidence that Amalfitano’s disappointed when encountering an illustrated pharmacist who prefers The Metamorphosis over The Trial, Bartleby over Moby Dick, A Simple Heart over Bouvard et Pécuchet and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or over The Pickwick Papers:

“What a sad paradox. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters during fencing training, but they want to know nothing about real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench”.

2666 was the last and fiercest combat Bolaño went into. The savage detective died in July 2003 and his last novel saw the light in October 2004.

As he wrote, Bolaño was conscious that he didn’t have much time left. I think that’s noticeable when reading 2666. Death is a clear presence in it. Not only literally, I mean rather that one can sense Death siting across Bolaño’s desk, patiently waiting the moment when the last key was struck. It’s interesting in this sense the reiteration of Sisyphus myth in the last part of the book. There, Bolaño is not interested in Sisyphus punishment, but on how Sisyphus eludes Thanatos, his death. What’s curious is that, the first time he retells the myth, it is only to the point where Thanatos is freed by Zeus and Sisyphus dies. But later in the novel, Archimboldi sends a puzzling letter to Mr. Bubis, his editor, where he says that Sisyphus, by means of a clever ‘legal’ move, manages to cheat death at the last minute and live a long and happy life, dying an old man. Moreover, Archimboldi avers that the stone punishment was only a trick laid by the gods to prevent Sisyphus from thinking about new ways to escape. “But on the least expected day, Sisyphus is going to come up with something and he’s going to come back again”, Archimboldi says. Bolaño wanted to escape death. He wanted to live.

Jorge Volpi remembers that in a young writers gathering in Seville, 2003, a kid came to Bolaño as a missionary to a saint and asked, “what advice would you give to young writers everywhere?”, to which Bolaño replied: “I recommend you live. Live and be happy”. This response, according to Volpi, has been disappointing to almost every writer apprentice who has listened to it referred, apprentices who expect The Tablets of Stone in literature’s Mount Sinai, but rather received a quote that could have been shared by their aunts in Facebook. But the thing is, Bolaño was on his last days. That gathering was, in fact, his last public appearance. Life was everything he hoped for and the only thing he couldn’t get.

That sadness is manifest in the novel. And now, when I’ve been thinking about 2666 in contrast to The Savage Detectives, I feel this is the crucial difference between them. The Savage Detectives is a novel that’s on fire, that’s young and anxious. It’s not, or at least I think it could not be labelled a ‘happy’ novel. There’s sadness in it, there’s horror, there’s disenchantment, but it’s all burning in the flames of youth, of a life that still seems limitless and free. It even ends with a mysterious incomplete square, that, to me, always signified the barriers of something being overflowed. It ends, as I’ve said before, with García Madero, the youngest of them all, willing to go further, who knows where the hell to, but further.

In 2666, all five books that integrate it, always end with a tinge of sadness. The same tinge of those half-broken smiles of people who just can’t take it anymore. It is still a limitless novel, but it’s not the vastness of a sea that one is eager to sail anymore. It’s the vastness of a sea we know it’s too big and too deep, while we are too small, so very small.

The selection of characters, I believe, is eloquent. In The Savage Detectives, everyone is a poet. In 2666 there is not a single poet. There’s a group of critics, that, to me are the furthest you can get from a poet in the literary fauna; a poet (a good poet, an authentic poet) writes and lives poetry, is right there at the front line; the critic, on the other hand, writes about, reflects, studies, comments, is far, far away from the battlefield. There’s also a novelist, about whom we come to care because of his life, his work is just mentioned.

It’s also evident that here, Bolaño faces the specter haunting all artists: posterity, legacy, prestige, a work that survives him. Over and over, through many different characters, he seems to tell us and beware himself that posterity, legacy, prestige, the survival of a body of work, it’s all apparent, an illusion. Not too far away from fame. In an interview for Chilean TV, when asked about literature as a way of living, he responded literature was a miserable place filled with fools who were sure about the transcendence of their own work, and stated: “In 400 million years, not even Shakespeare will be someone”. The last two pages of 2666 are a master final strike I won’t ruin for anyone.

Somewhere in the book, very close to the ending, we read about sweet Lotte’s life. Lotte is Archimboldi’s younger sister. When she’s already old and alone, we are told that sometimes she goes to the beach and that, in the evenings, she looks at the sunset on the terrace of some hotel, looking distant, with a touch of elegance and a certain something of sadness; but that when an old widower or divorced man comes and asks her to dance or walk on the beach, she smiles and says “no, thank you”, and at that moment, “only sadness remains”. This is the feeling 2666 has left me. It’s an impressive torrent of a novel, one of the highest and most prodigious narrative buildings of contemporary Latin American fiction; an unabated book that carries on and on long after we have closed it. However, when finishing it and after some days have passed, it seems only sadness remains. But a sadness full of dignity. As González Rodríguez said about Bolaño’s fiction, there abound moments “when tears are congregated around an intimate defeat that tastes like victory”. That’s 2666, the most intimate defeat and Roberto Bolaño’s final victory.

Juan Villoro reminisces that, soon before the fateful day, Bolaño called him to comment on a sentence he found in a novel by Leonardo Sciaca. A priest in the novel, after having been witness to all the misery and splendor of human experience, says: “there’s only one baptism left for me: the baptism of death”. On July 15, 2003, Thanatos finally found Sisyphus. In Bolaño’s notes for 2666, a note was found that read: “2666 narrator is Arturo Belano” – his loyal alter ego along his work – and in another note, under what appears to be an instruction: “for 2666’s ending”, it says: “And that’s all, folks. I’ve done it all, I’ve lived it all. If I had any strength left, I would cry. Goodbye to you all. Arturo Belano”. The last baptism had arrived.

Homage paid to him by the wonderful Chilean poet, Nicanor Parra. Also deceased in 2017, at 103 years of age.

What is 2666, then? Why that weird title? Bolaño said the title was the key to understand the novel, but it’s impossible to know if he was being earnest or joking, or a bit of both. Many have attempted to decipher it’s meaning. Ignacio Echeverría says it’s only a date, the vanishing point that orders and gives perspective to the novel. Alan Pauls has also posited it’s a date, but rather the date when the novel was written and from when is coming to us: a novel that comes from the future. Jorge Volpi argues the book is a ticking bomb that is programmed to blow in 2666. Bolaño himself seems to drop hints. In Amuleto, Auxilio Lacouture, the protagonist of that novel, describes a street in Mexico City, late at night, as a cemetery, “but not a cemetery from 1974, nor a cemetery from 1968, nor a cemetery from 1975, but a cemetery from 2666”. On the other hand, in The Savage Detectives, Amadeo Salvatierra says that Césarea Tinajero (the poet that our protagonists are trying to find) spoke of a revolution that would arrive in the XXIIth Century, a prediction that is later adjusted; according to a professor who speaks with García Madero, the revolution, Tinajero clarified to her, would really arrive in 2600, 2600 and something. In 2666, in some pages devoted to the family history of Lalo Cura (one of the central characters in The part about the crimes) we are told that her mother met and slept with two young men who were driving across Sonora (could they be Belano and Lima?), as if running away from something, and both of them speaking of “an invisible revolution that was developing but that would only come to the streets in at least fifty years. Or five hundred. Or five thousand”.

So, what is 2666? Is it the year when the revolution starts? Is it the year where the novel is written? Is it the year when the bomb goes off? Or maybe the year when the crimes are solved? When women stop being murdered? When evil recedes? Or the year when poets and writers and critics and literature stop existing? Or is it all just a date so far away that it is equivalent to say: none of this will ever change?

In my opinion, 2666 is the year in which there’s no meaning anymore, when names have been forgotten. The date when an unlikely archeologist tries to recover some of the meaning lost to the merciless erosion of time past, when, piece by piece, stone by stone, something is rebuilt but it’s nothing more than a skeleton, or maybe not even that, merely a ghost of our XXth century (because our century is still the XXth and not the XXIst, we have not yet been able to invent a new century, we are nothing but the envious, anemic shadow of the XXth century). 2666 is the year when Roberto Bolaño tells us this ancient history, monumental but somber as pyramid sleeping in the belly of a dense jungle, imposing but mute and undaunted as the ruins of Babylon, distant but still dangerous, as those statues whose features are blurred but still touch, move, send a chill down the spine.

There are and will be many exegetes of Bolaño’s work, particularly of his two masterpieces. I won’t be one of them. I’d rather remain his reader. And as a reader, what I have to thank him the most, what amazes me the most, what is the most blazed into my memory, are all those episodes which abound in his fiction, where he seems to recover, like almost no other living writer, something I don’t quite know how to put into words, but I guess that is the mystery of living.

So, almost a year went by before I finished the novel. My masters turned out to be far more demanding than I expected, and I couldn’t read anything other than academic stuff for months. But finally, there I was, in a book shop in central Tallinn, with F. mute and trembling, uncapable of escaping the novel.

And then an old friend came to my mind.

After the dissolution of the 132 movement, David’s path and mine distanced significantly. He left Leon and went to Mexico City. Then he moved to Hidalgo. I don’t remember if he later moved to Chihuaha. He got a job that required him to be on the move all the time, which was pretty ad hoc with his nomad personality. Sometimes he visited León and he always did it without any sort of notification, as if phones, e-mails, letters, telegrams, were not a thing in his world. He came wrapped in a mystery he sought and protected, and he left in the same way. He came, we gathered, chatted for hours, and then, when he was leaving, he always told me we should meet the next day for lunch. The next day, by lunch time, he was already in another city. With time I understood that this was his bizarre way of saying goodbye. The time between visits became longer and longer.

We met in the summer of 2015. I had just started dating F. At that time, I remember it well, his visit felt like a possible and lasting reunion. But then two years passed in which we knew nothing about each other.

With this I don’t mean to say that David forgot about me. Borges already said somewhere that friendship dos not require frequency. In May 2017, my family went through a rough patch. A very bad financial situation, the death of my uncle, my dad’s younger brother, and, in my case, the denial of a scholarship which, at the time, seemed like the tombstone on my attempt to come to Europe. David, who carries the nickname of ‘The cat’ with justice, appearing and disappearing without being noticed, sent me a letter asking me what he could do for me, how could he help me, what was needed for me to get to the old continent. When I answered that I just needed all the good thoughts he could send, he said:

“In spite of it all, brother, try not to loose your smile. Be with your father who will surely need to find a friend in you, a support through this. Have something concrete, human, at hand to tell him. The good thoughts I send them every day, Poet. Sometimes they might get stuck on the way, but I send them, never doubt it”.

A little after that, when I already had my plain tickets to come, we spoke on the phone. He asked me when I would leave Mexico and he said we might be able to make a road trip to Veracruz. I said yes, it would be nice, let me know. I knew it wouldn’t happen.

The truth is by this time I already felt our friendship, though alive, was a friendship doomed to live like that, virtually, in memory and in the future road trips and lunches that were meant to not happen. A friendship very much like that of Belano and Lima, or, in other words, like that of Bolaño and Papasquiaro. Our Café La Habana was closed.

– García Madero?

I Heard David’s voice on the cellphone. We spoke briefly. I explained to him I was already on the bus to Mexico City and my flight left on the next day by noon. I would sleep at my cousin’s house. He said it was ok, perfect, we would meet that night for dinner then. We hang up and I had no doubt that dinner would be, as lunch, symbolic.

Indeed, that evening he called to cancel. I wasn’t surprised. I said to him, don’t worry. He said that, tomorrow we would meet, this time for sure, at the airport. “Ok, brother, see you there”. I was very certain I would not see him.

On the next day, at the airport, sitting on a table in the fast food section, with a vacant stare, I was waiting. Suddenly, a call entered. It was him. I imagined what he would say: “Brother, I won’t be able to go”. I picked up:

– García Madero, where are you?

I saw him from afar, with his head held above the crowd, looking for me. He had the same IT glasses on, but with a black long coat, as if he had been promoted from technician to the chosen one by the Matrix.

We bought a coffee and we sat down. We talked about our lives. He was still in the same work, though now in a higher position. He continued to support his mom and nephews. He was still talking as if writing. I was about to leave to a far corner of the world, to study something no one knows. I was still mumbling and stuttering. He asked me if I had received a scholarship. I said no. I came with my savings and a loan, but even that would only do for the first semester. Then, I would have to find something else.

• How much do you need per semester?

• About 80 thousand pesos, give or take.

He was quiet, and we changed the topic. We went out for a smoke and we kept talking about this and that, as friends who chat daily.

When I had to go through security, he stopped me and told me that, if by the end of the semester, I did not find support, I called him. He had some savings and he could help me. We didn’t speak about Bolaño. We didn’t speak about literature. I felt, all of a sudden, that we had both, unknowingly and unwillingly, became adults, and that it wasn’t all that bad.

We said goodbye and, as he did every single time he said goodbye back when we were in the 132 movement, he raised his left fist and smiled as the older brother I thought I’d lost. My older brother lifting offering his hand from his horizon, but no longer saying “Don’t fall behind”. Maybe he had never said that, but I misheard. Maybe he always said that there were no steps, no stairs, that there was only a road, sometimes levelled and flat and easy, but most of the time winding and steep and difficult, and that no one knows where the hell that road leads to or how it should be walked, but that all we can ask for is a group of people to walk along with. Maybe he always just said “Let’s go together, brother”.

Now, after finishing 2666, I find him again. I look back, years back. And as I cannot comment this with you live, since we cannot speak about this extraordinary book as we smoke the last cigarette and walk into the night, I write this.

David, you always asked me, when we had to throw ourselves into something, when we had to take a risk: “Are you a poet?”, and then there was nothing but to accept the challenge. Today I know I am not. I am not a poet. Maybe neither of us is one. You are not Belano and I am not García Madero. We are not savage detectives. We won’t undertake a journey to find a Mexican poet or a German novelist. But as Roberto Bolaño said to Juan Villoro:

“What matters is we have memory. What matters is we can laugh without staining anyone with our blood. What matters is we are still standing, and we haven’t become cowards nor cannibals”.

Let’s go together, brother.

Mi lectura de 2666 fue radicalmente distinta de mi lectura de Los detectives salvajes. Al venir a Estonia fue el único libro que me acompañó en mi equipaje de mano y volví a comenzarlo. Mi viaje fue sumamente largo, 33 horas sólo de vuelos y tiempos de espera en aeropuertos, de manera que cuando llegué a Tallin, ya iba casi por la mitad. Fue, al contrario de Los detectives salvajes, una lectura que hice en soledad.

Y pienso que eso está muy bien pues, si Los detectives salvajes es una novela coral y de camaradería, 2666 es una novela solitaria. La soledad recorre sus más de mil páginas silenciosa pero impasible, igual que el viento caliente del desierto de Sonora. El único capítulo en donde nos encontramos con algo similar a la sensación de grupo de Los detectives salvajes es La parte de los críticos, en donde Pelletier, Espinoza, Morini y Norton descubren y rescatan la figura casi olvidada de Benno von Archimboldi para luego buscarlo en persona. Mas incluso en este capítulo, vamos viendo cómo la camaradería se desgrana sin violencia, lentamente, como las cosas que se deshacen en el calor intenso. Vemos cómo Morini comienza a alejarse, a desaparecer en un silencio inexplicable, y vemos, también, cómo Pelletier y Espinoza, aunque amigos hasta la muerte, parecen también estar solos: dos amigos que comparten su inalienable soledad. En los capítulos siguientes la soledad es más evidente. La parte de Amalfitano es, para mí, la más triste. De esa tristeza callada de los personajes de Chéjov. Amalfitano es un chileno emigrado a México, profesor de literatura en la Universidad de Santa Teresa. Abandonado junto con su niña por su esposa. Una esposa que, sin embargo, Bolaño muestra como una mujer poseída por una locura bella, nunca como una villana. La parte de Fate nos hace conocer (obviamente) a Fate, un joven periodista negro de Chicago, quien viaja a Santa Teresa para cubrir una pelea de box. El capítulo comienza con la muerte de su madre, comienza con dolor y con Fate “rodeado de fantasmas” y el dolor y los fantasmas no lo abandonan nunca. La parte de los crímenes es la más sórdida, la más difícil de leer, la más extensa y la más escalofriantemente parecida a la realidad. Allí, no conocemos a ningún protagonista. El protagonista es el mal, es la pobreza, es la misoginia, es la desidia, el silencio sepulcral, son los crímenes, y en medio de todo ello conocemos a cientos de mujeres que son violadas y asesinadas y a una serie de personas, policías, judiciales, políticos, periodistas y demás ciudadanos que viven y lidian, en mayor o menor medida, directamente con eso. En este capítulo es también donde la soledad es más intensa. Me parece significativa la figura del judicial Juan de Dios Martínez, uno de los pocos que sí se esfuerza por resolver los feminicidios, y su relación con Elvira Campos, una psiquiatra; una relación, por deseo expreso de ella, exclusivamente sexual. Ella le habla de sus sueños de fuga a París, y de sus sueños de una juventud prolongada mediante costosas operaciones, hablándole como quien le habla al aire, a sí misma, y él la escucha encandilado y afligido y sólo atina a decir: “Tú a mí me vuelves loco tal como eres”. Por supuesto la soledad más terrible de este capítulo, sin embargo, es la de las víctimas, víctimas que están solas al ser asesinadas, y solas aún en la muerte pues nadie encuentra, o nadie quiere encontrar, respuestas. Por último está la parte de Archimboldi, donde conocemos a Hans Reiter, nombre de nacimiento de Archimboldi (me pregunto si Bolaño eligió este apellido porque la pronunciación alemana se asemeja a Writer) y lo acompañamos, muy al estilo decimonónico, desde antes de su nacimiento hasta su vejez, en una épica que va del final de la Primera Guerra Mundial, se demora en el frente ruso durante la segunda, y termina en algo que no revelaré, pero ya tiempo después de la caída de la URSS y ante las puertas del “nuevo” milenio. Archimboldi, por supuesto, también está solo con su alma, aunque pareciera que su alma le basta.

Hay parecidos con Los detectives salvajes, claro. La ambición y el aliento, para empezar. Su entender, absolutamente espartano, de la escritura. Las digresiones fascinantes que no tienen nada que ver con la historia central pero que repiten o refuerzan, o contradicen, o enfrentan los temas centrales. Un romanticismo imbatible enredado en un vórtice letal con el cinismo y el desencanto. Sus héroes masculinos, que parecen todos reiteraciones, reformulaciones, paráfrasis: Pelletier y Espinoza, Belano y Lima, Lalo Cura, Archimboldi, Ansky, etc. A mí me parecen todos proyecciones del mismo Bolaño. Hombres valientes y con ansias de vivir. Hombres que miran al mundo y descubren los esqueletos detrás de las apariencias. Es como si Bolaño se mirara en un espejo trizado y los muchos reflejos, levemente deformes, arrojados por ese espejo, fueran sus personajes. Pero estos reflejos deformes, a diferencia de los reflejos en espejos rotos en la literatura de terror, no son ni grotescos, ni inquietantes. Más bien son melancólicos. El espejo roto en que Bolaño se mira y se narra es casi siempre un espejo de nostalgia. Las imágenes son las vidas que no tuvo y que sin embargo extraña. Son reflejos poseídos por una tristeza y una dignidad imperturbables, que al fin y al cabo suele ser el aura que recubre a todos los héroes.

Otra similitud, ésta central, es la obsesión de Bolaño con el mal, presente, pero no tan visible en Los detectives salvajes, que sí en La literatura nazi en América y Estrella distante. Una obsesión llevada a su extremo en 2666, donde Bolaño se internó en el horror de los feminicidios de Ciudad Juárez, investigando por cuenta propia, pero también con la ayuda de Sergio González Rodríguez, quien por esos años publicaba reportajes sobre los crímenes que acabarían reunidos en su libro Huesos en el desierto. En agradecimiento, Bolaño homenajeó a Rodríguez incluyéndolo en la novela, y declarando: “Con Sergio González Rodríguez sí iría a la guerra”.

Sergio González Rodríguez

Lo que Bolaño hace en el capítulo La parte de los crímenes es excepcional, pero además, es importante. En las 350 páginas que ocupa este capítulo, Bolaño narra cientos de feminicidios entre enero de 1993 y diciembre de 1997. Los narra con un lenguaje que claramente trata de copiar el acento frío y clínico de los forenses y de las investigaciones policiales, aunque en cada uno de ellos comienza a filtrarse su voz como gotas en una caverna, y entonces nos narra ya no sólo los mórbidos asesinatos y el estado de los cuerpos, sino también las vidas de las víctimas, quiénes eran, qué hacían, con qué soñaban. El resultado es casi insoportable. Como dijo el propio González Rodríguez (lo que es notable, pues González Rodríguez investigó exhaustivamente los crímenes in situ):

“La magistral novela de Bolaño añade una densidad trágica que permite leer la realidad desde una cercanía que los hechos, por su efecto traumático, a veces esconden. Lo que se registra como hecho, resulta insoportable como ficción”.

Bolaño se aleja así, desde mi punto de vista, de la literatura posmoderna que busca simplemente la experimentación, el deslumbramiento narrativo, el despliegue vistoso de su talento, y se arroja (figura muy bolañesca) al abismo de las heridas de la vida real que duelen – y que además acusan –.

No es casual que Amalfitano piense hacia el final de su capítulo, al rememorar decepcionado una conversación con un farmacéutico lector en Barcelona:

“Escogía La metamorfosis en lugar de El proceso, escogía Bartleby en lugar de Moby Dick, escogía Un corazón simple en lugar de Bouvard y Pécuchet, y Un cuento de Navidad en lugar de Historia de dos ciudades o de El Club Pickwick. Qué triste paradoja, pensó Amalfitano. Ya ni los farmacéuticos ilustrados se atreven con las grandes obras, imperfectas, torrenciales, las que abren camino en lo desconocido. Escogen los ejercicios perfectos de los grandes maestros. O lo que es lo mismo: quieren ver a los grandes maestros en sesiones de esgrima de entrenamiento, pero no quieren saber nada de los combates de verdad, en donde los grandes maestros luchan contra aquello, ese aquello que nos atemoriza a todos, ese aquello que acoquina y encacha y hay sangre y heridas mortales y fetidez”.

2666 fue la última y más feroz batalla de Bolaño. El detective salvaje murió en julio de 2003 y su última novela vio la imprenta en octubre de 2004.

Mientras escribía, Bolaño estaba consciente de que le quedaba poco tiempo. Y creo que eso se lee en 2666. La muerte es una presencia clara en la novela. No sólo literalmente, sino que es notorio que la muerte estaba sentada cerca de Bolaño mientras tecleaba, que parecía decirle: “te espero”. Es elocuente la reiteración del mito de Sísifo en la última parte del libro. Ahí, Bolaño no se concentra en el castigo de Sísifo, sino en cómo Sísifo trataba de evadir a Tánatos, a su muerte. Lo curioso es que en la primera ocasión, sólo narra la historia de Sísifo hasta el punto en que Tánatos es liberado y Sísifo muere. Más adelante, sin embargo, Archimboldi cuenta cómo Sísifo logró escapar de esa muerte y vivir una vida feliz hasta su vejez. Más importante aún: Archimboldi dice que el castigo de la piedra es sólo una artimaña de los dioses para impedir que Sísifo piense en formas de escapar a la muerte. “Pero el día menos pensado a Sísifo se le va a ocurrir algo y va a volver a subir a la tierra”, concluye Archimboldi. Bolaño quería escapar a la muerte. Y mejor dicho, Bolaño quería vivir.

Cuenta Jorge Volpi que en un congreso de jóvenes escritores en Sevilla en 2003, un muchacho se le acercó a Bolaño como un misionero a un santo y le preguntó qué consejo podía dar a los jóvenes escritores. Bolaño respondió: “les recomiendo que vivan. Que vivan y sean felices”. Esa respuesta, según Volpi, ha sido decepcionante para quienes la han escuchado referida, aprendices de escritor que esperan recibir las tablas de la ley en el monte Sinaí de la literatura, y en cambio obtienen una frase que podría haber sido compartida por sus tías en su muro de Facebook. Ellos no sabían que Roberto Bolaño estaba cerca de la muerte y que vida era lo único que deseaba y lo único que ya no podía tener.

Esa tristeza de quien no se va, sino que se lo llevan, es clara en el libro. Y ahora que he estado pensando 2666 en contraste con Los detectives salvajes, me parece que ésa es la distinción crucial. Los detectives salvajes es una novela que se siente bullente de vida y juventud. No es, o creo que difícilmente podría calificarse como, una novela feliz. Hay tristeza en ella, hay horror, hay resignación, hay desencanto, pero todo está envuelto en las llamas de la vida que apenas comienza. Inclusive termina con un misterioso cuadrado incompleto, que a mí siempre se me antojó como un cuadrado del cual se desborda lo que hay dentro, y termina, como había dicho, con García Madero, el más joven de la tribu, decidido a seguir a quién sabe dónde. 2666, los cinco capítulos o libros que lo integran, siempre termina con un dejo de tristeza. Como esas sonrisas quebradas de quien ya no puede más.

Es sintomático el cambio en elección de personajes, por ejemplo. En Los detectives salvajes todos son poetas. En 2666 no hay ni un solo poeta. Hay un grupo de críticos – que a mí se me figuran como la especie más lejana de un poeta en la fauna literaria – y un novelista a quien conocemos siempre como hombre y no como escritor.

También es evidente que Bolaño aquí vuelve a enfrentarse al espectro que acosa a todos los artistas: la posteridad, el legado, el prestigio, que su obra le sobreviva. Y una y otra vez y a partir de muchos personajes distintos, parece decirse a sí mismo y advertir a otros que quieran tomar esa senda: la posteridad, el legado, el prestigio y la obra son apariencias. No muy distantes de la apariencia de la fama. Que perdurar es un deseo de lo más extraño si se le piensa bien. En una entrevista para televisión chilena, cuando se le preguntó al respecto de la supervivencia de su obra, él dijo: “En 400 millones de años ni siquiera Shakespeare será alguien”. Las últimas dos páginas del libro son en esto el golpe maestro, un golpe que no arruinaré pues espero que algunos de los que aquí leen, lo reciban en su momento.

En el último aliento del libro conocemos la vida de la dulce Lotte, la hermana menor de Archimboldi. Cuando ya está vieja y sola, leemos cómo algunas veces va de vacaciones a la playa y, por las tardes se recarga en una terraza a ver el ocaso y se le ve distante, con un toque de elegancia y un no sé qué de tristeza; pero que cuando se le acerca un caballero viudo o divorciado a invitarla a bailar o a dar un paseo por la playa, ella dice que no gracias, y entonces “sólo quedaba la tristeza”. Ésa es la sensación que a mí me ha dejado esta novela. Es un torrente impresionante, uno de los edificios narrativos más altos y prodigiosos de la literatura latinoamericana actual, un libro inabarcable que parece seguir y seguir aunque lo hayamos ya cerrado… pero al terminar de leerlo y después de unos días, sólo queda la tristeza. Pero una tristeza, eso sí, plena de dignidad. Como dijo González Rodríguez, en las historias de Bolaño abundan momentos a los que “acuden las lágrimas de la derrota íntima que sabe a victoria”. Eso es 2666, la derrota más íntima de Roberto Bolaño y su mayor victoria.

Juan Villoro cuenta que, muy poco antes de la fecha fatídica, Bolaño le llamó para comentarle una frase de un personaje en una novela de Leonardo Sciaca: “sólo me falta un último bautizo, el de la muerte”. El 15 de julio del 2003, Tánato al fin encontró a Sísifo. En notas de Bolaño se encontró una que leía: “El narrador de 2666 es Arturo Belano” – su fiel alter ego a lo largo de su obra – y en otra, con la instrucción “para el final de 2666”, dice: “Y esto es todo, amigos. Todo lo he hecho, todo lo he vivido. Si tuviera fuerzas, me pondría a llorar. Se despide de ustedes, Arturo Belano”. El último bautizo había llegado.

Artefacto del buen Nicanor Parra a su discípulo y amigo

¿Qué es pues, 2666? ¿Por qué ese título tan raro? Bolaño decía que era la clave para entender la novela, quién sabe si seriamente o jugando o ambas. Muchos han intentado descifrarlo. Ignacio Echeverría sólo dice que es una fecha, el punto de fuga de la novela. Alan Pauls ha propuesto que es el año del cual nos llega la novela. Una novela que viene del futuro. Jorge Volpi aventura que el libro es una bomba de tiempo que estallará en ese año, en 2666. Bolaño mismo parece dar claves. En Amuleto, Auxilio Lacouture, la protagonista, describe que camina en una calle de la Ciudad de México, de madrugada, que a esa hora se parece a un cementerio, “pero no a un cementerio de 1974, ni a un cementerio de 1968, ni a un cementerio de 1975, sino a un cementerio de 2666”. Por otra parte, en Los detectives salvajes, Amadeo Salvatierra cuenta que Césarea Tinajero (la poeta a la que buscan los protagonistas) hablaba de una revolución que sucedería en el siglo XXII, augurio que más adelante se ajusta: según una maestra que habla con García Madero, la revolución, de acuerdo con Tinajero, en realidad llegaría en 2600 y pico. En 2666, en unas páginas dedicadas a la saga de la familia de Lalo Cura (uno de los personajes centrales en La parte de los crímenes) se nos cuenta que su madre conoció a dos jóvenes que iban por Sonora en un auto (¿podrían ser Belano y Lima?), como huyendo de algo, y que ambos hablaban de “una revolución invisible que ya se estaba gestando pero que tardaría en salir a las calles al menos cincuenta años más. O quinientos. O cinco mil”.

¿Entonces qué es 2666? ¿El año de esa revolución? ¿El año en que se escribe la novela? ¿El año en que explotará la bomba de tiempo? ¿O quizás es el año en que los crímenes al fin se resuelvan? ¿El año en que finalmente deje de asesinarse a mujeres? ¿El año en que deje de haber guerras mundiales? ¿El año en que deje de haber escritores? ¿O es sólo una fecha lo suficientemente lejana que equivale a decir: esto nunca pasará, esto nunca se resolverá, todas las cosas sólo pasan?

En mi opinión 2666 es quizá el año en que ya nada tiene sentido. En que se han borrado los nombres. En que algún arqueólogo improbable intenta recobrar algo del significado perdido por la erosión inclemente del tiempo. En que, pieza a pieza, piedra a piedra, reconstruye algo que es sólo esqueleto o menos aún, sólo fantasma de nuestro siglo XX (y es que nuestro siglo sigue siendo el XX, no el XXI, no hemos logrado inventar aún un nuevo siglo, somos sólo la sombra envidiosa, crédula y anémica del siglo XX). 2666 es el año desde el que Roberto Bolaño nos narra esta historia pretérita, monumental pero fúnebre como una pirámide antigua reposando en las entrañas de una selva cerrada, imponente pero muda e impertérrita como las ruinas de Babilonia, lejana pero peligrosa, como las estatuas cuyos rasgos ya no se ven, pero conmueven, tocan, hielan la sangre.

Hay y habrá muchos exégetas de la obra de Bolaño, particularmente de sus dos grandes novelas. Yo no seré, ni quiero ser uno de ellos. Prefiero quedarme como su lector. Y como lector, lo que más le agradezco, lo que más me asombra y lo que más me queda en la memoria, son los episodios, abundantes en su obra narrativa, en que parece recobrar como casi ningún otro escritor algo que no sé nombrar, pero que supongo que es el misterio de vivir.

Pasó casi un año más para que pudiera terminal la novela. La maestría resultó mucho más difícil de lo que esperaba y prácticamente no pude leer nada que no fuera académico durante meses. Pero finalmente, ahí estaba, en una librería de Tallin, con F., mudo y temblando, incapaz de salir de la novela todavía.

Y un viejo amigo me vino a la mente.

Tras la disolución del 132, el destino de David y el mío se distanciaron significativamente. Él se fue a vivir a México, luego se fue a Hidalgo, no recuerdo si a Chihuaha. Obtuvo un trabajo que demandaba que se moviera por el país, algo muy ad hoc con su personalidad nómada. En ocasiones visitaba León y siempre lo hacía sin avisar, como si no existiesen los teléfonos ni los correos ni las cartas ni los telegramas. Llegaba envuelto en un misterio que él procuraba y se iba igual. Venía, nos reuníamos, platicábamos un buen rato y cuando tenía que irse me decía que al día siguiente nos juntáramos para almorzar. A la hora del almuerzo al día siguiente generalmente él ya estaba en otra ciudad. Con el tiempo comprendí que era su manera extraña de despedirse por meses. Cada vez las visitas se espaciaron más. Cada vez los silencios se hicieron más largos.

Nos vimos en el verano de 2015. Yo acababa de empezar a salir con F. En esa ocasión, lo recuerdo bien, su visita se sintió como una posible reconexión. Pero después hubo dos años en que no supimos nada uno del otro.

Con esto no quiero decir que David se olvidara de mí. Ya Borges había dicho que la amistad no precisa la frecuencia. En mayo del 2017 mi familia pasó por un momento difícil: Un problema económico grave, el fallecimiento de mi tío, hermano menor de mi papá, y en lo personal, la pérdida de una beca que parecía mi única posibilidad de venir a Europa. David, quien lleva el sobrenombre de ‘El gato’ con justicia y aparece y desaparece a voluntad, una noche me envió una misiva para preguntarme qué podía hacer por mí, cómo me apoyaba, qué se requería para enviarme al viejo continente. Cuando le respondí que sólo necesitaba buenas vibras dijo, y que esto al menos sirva de ejemplo de su pluma:

“Pese a todo, trate de no deslavar la sonrisa ni el ánimo. Procure estar al lado de su padre que, seguro, requerirá descubrir un amigo, un soporte en usted en este momento. Tenga a la mano algo concreto, humano que comentarle. Las buenas vibras las mando todos los días, Poeta. A veces se atoran, pero no dude que las mando”.

Poco tiempo después, cuando ya tenía mis boletos de avión, hablamos por teléfono. Me preguntó cuándo dejaría México y me dijo que tal vez podríamos hacer un viaje en carretera juntos a Veracruz. Le dije que sí, que estaría muy bien, que me avisara. Sabía que no sucedería.

Lo cierto es que a esas alturas yo sentía que, aunque nuestra amistad estaba viva, era una amistad que estaba también condenada a vivir así, virtualmente, en la memoria, en los viajes futuros que no se harían, en los almuerzos omitidos. Una amistad como la de Arturo Belano y Ulises Lima, o lo que es lo mismo, como la de Roberto Bolaño y Mario Santiago Papasquiaro. Nuestro Café La Habana ya estaba cerrado.

– ¿García Madero?

Escuché la voz de David en el celular. Hablamos brevemente. Le expliqué que ya iba en camión a México y al día siguiente saldría mi vuelo a medio día. Me quedaría a dormir en casa de mis primos. Él dijo que estaba muy bien, que entonces en la noche nos veíamos para cenar. Colgamos. Yo pensé que la cena, como los almuerzos, sería simbólica.

En efecto, esa noche me llamó para decirme que no podía ir. No me sorprendió. Le dije que no se apurara. Respondió que al día siguiente, seguro segurísimo, me vería en el aeropuerto. Como una seña de que iba en serio me preguntó en qué terminal y por qué puerta. “Muy bien, hermano, ahí nos vemos”. Tenía toda la certeza de que no lo vería.

Al día siguiente, en el aeropuerto, en el área de comida rápida, mientras esperaba con la mirada perdida, entró una llamada suya. Me imaginé el contenido de la llamada: “Hermano, no podré ir”. Respondí:

– ¿García Madero, dónde está?

Lo vi a lo lejos, alzando la cabeza, buscándome. Iba con los mismos lentes de técnico en computación, pero con una gabardina negra que hacía pensar que había sido promovido de técnico a elegido por la Matrix.

Compramos un café y nos sentamos en una mesa con restos de gorditas La Tía Tota. Nos pusimos al corriente de nuestras vidas. Él seguía en su trabajo, probablemente lo ascenderían. Seguía apoyando a su mamá y a sus sobrinos. Seguía hablando como si escribiera. Yo estaba a punto de irme al otro lado del mundo a estudiar algo que nadie conoce y seguía tropezándome al hablar. Me preguntó si tenía una beca. Le respondí que no, que me venía con mis ahorros y un préstamo y que eso sólo me alcanzaría para el primer año, pero ya vería qué hacer luego.

– ¿Cuánto necesitas por año?

– 80 mil pesos, más o menos.

Se quedó serio y cambiamos de tema. Salimos a fumar y seguimos hablando de todo y de nada, como amigos que se ven a diario.

Cuando ya tenía que cruzar las puertas de seguridad, me detuvo y me dijo que, si al terminar ese año no encontraba cómo seguirme financiando, le llamara. Me dijo que tenía ahorros y podía ayudarme. No hablamos de Bolaño. No hablamos de literatura. Sentí, de pronto, con una mezcla de tristeza, pero también de madurez, que quizás, sin quererlo y sin fijarnos cómo o cuándo, nos habíamos hecho adultos. Y que eso, tal vez, no era tan malo.

Nos despedimos y, como cuando estábamos en el 132, se despidió alzando el puño izquierdo y sonrió como el hermano mayor que creía perdido y que recobré. Mi hermano mayor extendiendo la mano desde su horizonte, pero ya no diciendo “No te quedes atrás”. Quizá nunca fue eso lo que dijo, pero yo escuché mal. Quizá siempre quiso decirme que no había ningunas escaleras, que sólo había camino, a veces plano planito pero casi siempre sinuoso o escarpado, y que nadie tiene idea de a dónde diablos llega o cómo se recorre, y que todo lo que se puede hacer es pedir a un puñado de personas con las cuales andarlo. Quizá siempre dijo: “Vamos juntos, hermano”.

Ahora vuelvo a verlo al terminar 2666. Vuelvo a ver años atrás. Y como no podemos comentar esto en vivo, como no podemos hablar de este libro extraordinario mientras fumamos el último cigarro y nos alejamos en la noche, escribo esto.

David siempre me preguntabas, cuando había que lanzarse, cuando había que atreverse ¿Eres poeta? Y entonces sólo quedaba aceptar el reto. Hoy sé que no, que no soy poeta. Quizá ninguno de los dos lo somos. Tú no eres Belano ni yo soy García Madero. No somos detectives salvajes. No partiremos en busca ni de una poeta mexicana ni de un novelista alemán. Pero como dijo Roberto Bolaño de Juan Villoro:

“Lo importante es que tenemos memoria. Lo importante es que podemos reírnos sin manchar a nadie con nuestra sangre. Lo importante es que seguimos en pie y no nos hemos vuelto ni cobardes ni caníbales”.

Vamos juntos, hermano.

Back then I had almost no free time. Between university and 132 I barely had enough time to sleep 6 hours a day. So, I began to read The Savage Detectives in every minute I could squeeze from the day. I read it on the bus, I read it while walking, I read it before I slept and right after I woke up; inspired by one of the book character’s voracious reading, I even started reading it while I showered: with one hand I kept the book away from the running water and with the other I soaped myself.

I think I don’t exaggerate if I say that I was inebriated by the book. That I was under its powerful spell. This bookish alienation is not unusual with Bolaño and specially not unusual with The Savage Detectives. There are many who draw the comparison between it and Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar precisely because of its impact in young readers. Readers who entered these novels in search of a challenge, a joy, or even an epiphany and came out of them having found a modus vivendi and a code of honor. And the thing is that The Savage Detectives is a novel that trespasses its margins, jumps out of the pages, occupies everything, colonizes. That’s why Alan Pauls has called Bolaño a conquistador who does not write, but rather populates. He populates his dense paragraphs with characters, anecdotes, nightmares, cities, sensations; but above all he populates the world beyond, the reader’s world, with his voice. How many young readers only came to understand what ailed Alonso Quijano until we read The Savage Detectives?

But this colonization is paradoxical and cruel, since, though the book begins to take hold of the reader’s life, at the same time, more than a few readers will find – I wasn’t the exception -, with a mixture of intense melancholy and burning fascination, that the life emanating from the book is far more a life than the life one’s living. That the blood running through the veins of the men and women meandering inside the book is hotter and redder than the blood in one’s veins. And that those desperate starving poets understand poetry way better than us because they know poetry does not need to be written down to be poetry; and that those savage detectives have come closer than anyone to finding the answer because they know a detective is not one because he finds, but because he doesn’t stop searching. Life is the highest poem and the final inquest.

In my case, however, the quixotic/bolañesque germ found an ideal breeding soil to expand given that at that moment in time (so I believed), my life was drawing up lines that either ran parallel or intersected the lines laid out in The Savage Detectives. Many of the episodes I remember most vividly about my time in the 132 movement are, precisely, episodes that, in my mind, could have been apocryphal gospels – too big a kindness, more like fan fictions – of The Savage Detectives.

That’s how I remember a brief visit to Temacapulín, Jalisco, where we went to support, however we could, the resistance movement trying to impede the flooding of their town for a dam construction project. I remember the cool night in Temaca, a dark, preterit night almost from a time without electricity; the paranoid and tautological monologue of an old, white-bearded, straw-hat wearing carpenter who kept repeating over and over that the paramilitary would come after us with chainsaws; the visit, very late into the evening, to a pond of natural thermal waters, of a muddy appearance compensated by the beauty of a huge glowing moon reflected in it; a pond where we came to unwind and where we found three Spanish young hippies, two guys and a girl; and the fight that luckily didn’t started after the girl, naked and deep in a marijuana half-dream, confessed while laughing that she had just peed in the pond we were all bathing at, which cracked up her two friends even though one local had just said, in front of everyone, that pond was sacred to them, which in turn caused David and another guy named César to start calling those Spanish gachupines[1] while also speaking about the tearing down of the Aztec Major Temple ordered by Hernán Cortés, references the Spanish did not understand at all, but what they did understand was the tone and they decided to leave.

That’s how I remember the long and anxious-filled night in which we waited for our friends to be pulled out of jail: David, two girls named Mata and Siboney, and other supporters of the movement who were all arrested during a march with no other reason than the gross ineptness of the city’s authorities, not accustomed to protests in a usually acquiescent city. I remember the pale light coming from the prison’s gate, barely illuminating the hill, while we delivered, through the fence, food and blankets for those who would spend the night inside.

That’s how I remember a reunion among many 132 state cells in the state’s capital. I remember the way to the reunion, going up the hill through the narrow alleys of Guanajuato, up to that area of the city not touched, not even by mistake, by tourists. I remember the palpable nervousness, the cement rooftop, the night closing above us, the order to turn off cellphones and take batteries out, the speeches which, at times, dived into the apocalyptic hyperbole and augur a revolution in which we would be the first martyrs.

I also remember the sleepless night we spent on the streets in León to take pictures of the electoral sheets, with Denisse, a friend, begging me not to fall asleep while we were going into Chapalita[2] at 3 in the morning.

And I remember, of course, the moments of joy, because there were many. A festival in Guanajuato, at the footsteps of the Alhóndiga de Granaditas[3], where David and I improvised some rhymes for the Leones de la Sierra de Xichú[4], a homage the maestros responded to with another set of rhymes, calling us “rappers”, as if at once thanking us but also telling us: “Well, here is where the big boys play, don’t get yourselves hurt”. Or a party in David’s house my cousins from Mexico City attended to, where we drank Tonayan, as is it was mezcal ‘Los Suicidas’ that Amadeo Salvatierra drinks religiously in the book; a party where I, already intoxicated, tried to argue that Jesus Christ was the first hipster to then propose a parkour amateur demonstration on the rooftop, a feat my cousins performed with elegance and skill, David without skill, but with dignity, and I, very much in my style, bumping into every hard surface/object present and waking up the next day with huge bruises all around my body.

I remember, to put it briefly, the shared music, the dances, the camaraderie, the hope, the endless meetings that became, almost by accident, into parties. The feeling of being part of a tribe where every single one of us, I felt, was a carbon copy of the poets that pulsated in the novel I was reading.

But above all I remember, under that savage light, my long talks with David. Talks that seemed all just one, one pouring dialogue coming from the same inexhaustible quarry. More often than not we were the las tones to leave the meetings. More often than not we went out into the night, sometimes without saying anything anymore, smoking one last cigarette and walking away on the dark and lonely streets downtown.

David was also under Bolaño´s influence. When he gave me the novel, he reread his own edition. So, at times we talked about it. We reminisced our favorite parts and, when I finally finished it, we discussed for long hours, in my Kitchen, drinking coffee, about out interpretation of the novel’s enigmatic ending, where García Madero, the youngest poet of the tribe, seems to be the only one left and he gazes, nonchalantly, into the future.

David used to call me that: García Madero.

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But it all comes to an end. The novel ended and, not much after, the 132 movement also ended. I realized, with deep grief, that my life was not written by Roberto Bolaño. From that moment something important changed within me. It was as if the last card of hope up my sleeve had been insufficient to win the game. I am under the impression that, back then I was burning and since then I am just crackling. In other words, I think an important part of my youth died there.

In November 2012, David and I were published in the same number from a short-lived magazine called Dédalo. We were happy. We both knew Juan Villoro and Roberto Bolaño, who were close friends, had been published in the same Punto de Partida edition when they were still nobodies. We wanted to see a good sign in that. We talked about it afterwards, during one of the last meetings, this already a pure friendship gathering. It was also then when, for the first time, David told me about 2666.

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[1] It’s a pejorative term used in Hispanic America, especially in Mexico, to describe Spanish people who come to establish in Hispanic American soil and act superior to the natives. It’s origin, it’s believed, it’s a Spanish family name, ‘Cachopín’, a noble family name from Cantabria, Spain. It became a nick-name for Spanish noblemen who owned land and slaves in Hispanic America.

[2] One of the most dangerous neighborhoods in León, Guanajuato, a.k.a, my hometown.

[3] An architectonic and historic landmark in Guanajuato, a historically charged place since it was taken by the independentist army in 1810 in a crucial victory at the beginning of the campaign; and also the place where the heads of four of the independentist army’s commanders were hung for everyone to see just one year later. It was a place picked by the 132 movement in Guanajuato to organize the biggest 132-related event in the state.

[4] An iconic Mexican folk music group, famous for improvising complex lyrics on the spot. These lyrics do not only rhyme, they do so in a strict formula: ABBAACCDDC, also involving an 11 syllable metric. So, like a rap battle meets Spanish baroque poetry.

En ese entonces, yo tenía poco, poquísimo tiempo libre. Entre la universidad y el 132 apenas y me quedaba tiempo para dormir 6 horas diarias. Entonces empecé a leer Los detectives salvajes en todos los minutos que podía arrancarle al día. Lo leía en el camión, lo leía caminando, lo leía antes de dormir y al despertar, incluso, inspirado por la lectura voraz de uno de los protagonistas del libro, comencé a leerlo mientras me bañaba: con una mano sostenía el libro fuera del alcance de la regadera y con la otra me enjabonaba.

Creo que no exagero si digo que el libro me embriagó. Que estaba bajo su influjo poderoso. Esta alienación libresca no es inusual con Bolaño y en particular con Los detectives salvajes. Son muchos quienes han comparado esta novela con Rayuela de Cortázar precisamente por su impacto en los jóvenes. Jóvenes que llegaron a estas novelas como lectores comunes en busca de un reto, de una alegría, quizás hasta de una epifanía, y salieron de ellas como discípulos, habiendo encontrado un modus vivendi y un código de honor. Y es que Los detectives salvajes es una novela que se escapa de sus márgenes, de sus páginas, que lo va ocupando todo, que coloniza. Es por eso que Alan Pauls llamó a Bolaño un conquistador que no escribe, sino que puebla. Puebla sus densas páginas de personajes, anécdotas, pesadillas, ciudades, sensaciones, pero sobre todo puebla el mundo allá fuera, el mundo del lector, con su voz. ¿Cuántos lectores jóvenes no habremos comprendido por vez primera el mal que aquejó a Alonso Quijano hasta que leímos Los detectives salvajes?

Pero esta colonización es paradójica y cruel, ya que, aunque el libro empieza a apoderarse de la vida del lector, al mismo tiempo no son pocos los lectores que descubren – yo no fui la excepción –, con una mezcla de intensa melancolía y quemante fascinación, que la vida que emana ese libro es más vida que la vida propia. Que a los hombres y las mujeres que se pasean en los renglones les corre una sangre más roja y más caliente. Y que esos poetas alucinantes, son más poetas que cualquiera de nosotros porque han comprendido que la poesía no necesariamente tiene que escribirse para ser poesía. Esos detectives salvajes se han acercado como nadie a la respuesta porque saben que el detective es detective no porque resuelva, sino porque no para de buscar. La vida es el poema mayor y la pesquisa final.

En mi caso, sin embargo, el mal quijotesco/bolañesco se encontró con un caldo de cultivo idóneo para esparcirse ya que en ese momento (yo así lo creía) mi vida trazaba líneas que, o bien corrían paralelas a, o bien intersecaban las líneas de Los detectives salvajes. Muchos de los episodios que recuerdo vivamente de mi tiempo en el 132 son, precisamente, episodios que en mi mente podrían haber sido evangelios apócrifos – una bondad desmedida, quizá más bien fan fictions – de Los detectives salvajes.

Queda así en mi memoria una breve estancia en Temacapulín, Jalisco, a donde fuimos a apoyar como pudimos al grupo de resistencia que sigue tratando de evitar el hundimiento de su pueblo para la construcción de una presa. Recuerdo la noche fresca de Temaca, de una oscuridad casi pretérita, de un tiempo sin electricidad; el paranoide y tautológico monólogo de un carpintero viejo y de barba muy blanca y sombrero de caña que repetía una y otra vez que los paramilitares vendrían por nosotros con motosierras; la visita, ya en la madrugada, a un estanque de aguas termales, de apariencia fangosa compensada por la belleza de la luna que brillaba a sus anchas, en donde nos reunimos para relajarnos y nos encontramos con un trío de españoles, dos hombres y una mujer, todos jóvenes y medio hippies; la pelea que por suerte no estalló cuando la chica, desnuda y sumergida en un semisueño de marihuana, confesó entre risas haberse orinado en el estanque que todos ocupábamos,cosa que a sus compañeros les causó mucha risa a pesar de que un local acababa de decir minutos antes, con ellos presentes, que consideraban sagrado ese lugar; todo lo cual hizo que David y otro muchacho llamado César comenzaran a llamarlos gachupines y a citar la demolición del Templo Mayor bajo las órdenes de Cortés, cosas que los españoles no entendieron para nada, pero comprendieron el tono y, acto seguido, optaron por irse.

Queda así en mi memoria una noche larga y llena de ansiedad en que esperábamos que sacaran de la cárcel a David, a dos chicas del grupo llamadas Mata y Siboney, y a otros simpatizantes que habían sido detenidos durante una marcha, sin más motivo que una grosera ineptitud de la autoridad leonesa, apabullada por una marcha enorme en una ciudad hasta entonces más bien aquiescente. Recuerdo la luz pálida que salía de CEPOL e iluminaba muy apenas el cerro, mientras entregábamos, a través de las rejas, comida y cobijas para los que dormirían dentro.

Queda así en mi memoria una reunión de varias células del estado en Guanajuato capital. Recuerdo el camino hacia el sitio de la reunión, subiendo por callejones hasta esas zonas guanajuatenses que ya no son tocadas, ni por error, por turistas; recuerdo el nerviosismo palpable, la azotea de cemento, la noche que se cernía, la orden de apagar celulares y quitarles las pilas, los discursos que, en ocasiones, se echaban un clavado en la hipérbole apocalíptica y auguraban una revolución en la que los primeros caídos seríamos nosotros. Recuerdo también la noche que pasamos en vela recorriendo las calles de León para tomarle fotos a las mantas electorales, con una amiga llamada Denisse rogándome que no me quedara dormido mientras nos adentrábamos en Chapalita a las tres de la mañana.

Y recuerdo, claro, los momentos de alegría, que sí los hubo. Un festival por la democracia a los pies de las escaleras de la Alhóndiga de Granaditas, donde David y yo improvisamos unos versos para los Leones de la Sierra de Xichú, versos que los maestros respondieron con otros, llamándonos “raperos”, agradeciendo nuestras buenas intenciones, pero también diciendo entre líneas: “Aquí es donde juegan los grandes, niños, no se vayan a lastimar”. O una fiesta en casa de David a la que vinieron primos míos de México, en donde bebimos Tonayán como si fuera el mezcal ‘Los suicidas’ de Amadeo Salvatierra; fiesta en donde yo, ya reducido por el alcohol, traté de defender que Jesucristo había sido el primer hípster para luego proponer hacer parkour en la azotea, cosa que mis primos hicieron con gracia y habilidad, David sin habilidad pero con dignidad, y que yo hice muy a mi estilo, estrellándome con todo y despertando con moretones enormes en el cuerpo. Recuerdo, en breve, la música compartida, los bailes, el compañerismo, la esperanza, las interminables juntas que devenían, casi sin querer, en tertulias. Esa sensación de una tribu en donde yo nos veía a todos como trasuntos de los y las poetas que palpitaban en la novela que leía.

Pero sobre todo recuerdo, en esa tonalidad novelada, mis charlas con David. Charlas que parecían una sola, un diálogo torrencial que salía de una misma cantera inagotable. No fueron pocas las oportunidades en que los últimos en dejar las reuniones éramos él y yo. No fueron pocas tampoco las ocasiones en que salíamos hacia la noche, a veces ya sin decir nada, fumando un último cigarro y alejándonos por las calles oscuras del centro antes del boom de la Madero.

David no era ajeno tampoco al influjo Bolaño. Al regalarme la novela decidió releer su edición. Así que a ratos platicábamos al respecto. Discutíamos nuestras partes preferidas y, cuando por fin la terminé, platicamos un buen rato en mi cocina, tomando café, sobre nuestra interpretación del enigmático final en donde García Madero, el poeta más joven del grupo, parece ser el único que queda en pie y mira al futuro incierto con aplomo.

David solía llamarme así: García Madero.

Pero todo termina. Terminó la novela y no mucho después también terminó el 132. Y yo me di cuenta, con una tristeza muy honda, que mi vida no estaba escrita por Roberto Bolaño. A partir de ese momento algo importante cambió en mí. Fue como si la última carta de esperanza que tenía bajo la manga hubiera resultado ser insuficiente para ganar la partida. Tengo la impresión de que en aquel momento ardía y desde entonces sólo crepito. En otras palabras, creo que algo importante de mi juventud murió allí.

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En noviembre del 2012 David y yo fuimos publicados en un mismo número de una revista de breve existencia llamada Dédalo. Estábamos contentos. Ambos sabíamos que Juan Villoro y Roberto Bolaño, quienes eran amigos, habían sido publicados también en un mismo número de Punto de Partida cuando aún no eran nadie. Quisimos ver en aquello un buen presagio. Platicamos al respecto un mes después, durante una de las últimas reuniones, ésta ya de pura amistad. Fue entonces cuando, por vez primera, David me habló de 2666.

This story is about the experience of reading a book. It’s also about the memories of reading another book. And it’s a story about the life around those readings. And a story about youth and about friendship.

Last Friday, in a coffee shop in central Tallinn, I finished reading 2666, by Roberto Bolaño. As I turned the last few pages, I felt a tightness in my gut, the same kind of tension that grips the body as one goes up a roller coaster, through the metallic whirring, aware of the final drop that awaits ahead. I stood up as I read, and I started walking in circles around the table, without considering for even a second what the other diners might think of me.

Once I finished, I became silent. Very silent. F., who was in the same table with me, working, asked: “So? Did you like it?”. I stared at her disoriented, not knowing what to respond. She couldn’t know, but I thought such a question did not apply to this book. Is a massive book, a 1119 pages novel, a many-headed monster that, I felt, still had its claws around my neck. I mumbled: “I feel as if I had just had ran a marathon and as if I had been hit by a car”.

But we shall go back a bit in time.

I bought my edition of 2666 in my hometown’s book fair in April 2014. For months it stayed on my shelf, unopened, as most of the books I buy. But in this case, it wasn’t because my interest in it diluted – it has happened to most of us, being in a bookstore and finding a title (or many) and thinking we want it, want it with a desire that is unpostponable and that is born out of an intimate and urgent necessity, only to later arrive home, place it on a shelf and slowly begin to forget about it – but because I really wanted to read it, to read it on tenterhooks, to read it as if possessed, to read it as I read when I was a child, and for that I needed time. Finally, in December that year, I went to the beach with some friends. I decided to take the book with me. So, as they acted as sane young men, playing beach volleyball, I laid on a deck-chair and read. Early in the morning, as my friends still dreamt, I sat at the beach, reading. I did not finish it, however. Far from it. I managed only to finish the first part, about four young literary critics, friends obsessed with Benno von Archimboldi, an elusive writer in the way of Thomas Pynchon. Let’s say these were new savage detectives, just as young and anxious, but exquisite and European. A more or less brief inquest of epic breadth that runs across the old continent and ends, incredibly, in a city in northern Mexico. I was both impressed and satisfied.

Unfortunately, the trip was short and the following months tumultuous. I, freshly out of University, was bumping into adult life, getting dozens of little jobs that consumed most of my time. The rest of my time I had to invest it in my thesis. And so, the book was soon forgotten, and a minuscule layer of dust rendered its cover pale.

Time passed as it usually does, unmerciful and fast, but especially it passed unnoticed. As one of those people who leaves a party without saying goodbye and whose absence is only brought into attention much later when someone asks: “Hey, where did so-and-so leave?”. Just like that, before I knew it it was August 2017, I was already 25 and I was packing to come to Estonia.

All of my close friends suggested I brought with me three books tops. A professor and friend advice was to get a Kindle and leave all the paper books. All of them knew in advance I wouldn’t listen. I brought fourteen books. Among them I brought two books over the 1000 pages. One of them, the complete works by Borges, which is like my Bible. The other one was 2666.

One or two days before coming, I posted a goodbye message on Facebook for all those people I didn’t have a chance to see. When I was already on the bus to Mexico City, I got a phone call. The name on the screen shook me since it was someone I hadn’t seen in at least two years. Even before I answered, I could listen two words:

– ¿García Madero?

But we shall go back a bit in time.

It was May 2012. I was leaving campus and I saw a group of young people with a large piece of cloth on the floor. I don’t remember all that was written on the cloth, but I remember the number 132. It was, and I hope you can forgive the corniness, fate. Around those days, maybe just a couple of days before, I had seen the video of the 131 students from Ibero México [1]. It could be said that up ‘til then, I was like a match. Indignation was there, the flammable matter needed for combustion, but only that. That video had been the sandpaper which ignited the flame. A minute and restrained flame, yes, but eager to start a fire. However, not knowing how to, it would have probably had the same death all wasted matches have. I remember I was very uneasy, anxious to do something, to start something, but I had no clue as to what. And then I stumble into these guys at the University gates. The most passionate among them, a guy with long hair and beard and the name Abdiel, handed me a piece of paper with a time and a place to meet. That was how the fire got started.

That same evening, I went to the Cultural Forum down town, to the tiny amphitheater in the middle of the Arts Esplanade. There were, probably, around ten people and I’m being generous. But the lack of quorum was compensated with enthusiasm. Particularly Abdiel’s enthusiasm who spoke with the passion of someone who still believed words can change the world. I listened, quiet. A little later someone else joined the group. It was a young man with a short beard, glasses, denim pants and a black jacket and backpack. I don’t know why, but it seemed to me like an IT guy. It might have been because of the backpack and the glasses. At some point, Abdiel dictated we should divide into groups to delegate responsibilities. As it goes, the moment that stopped being just an illusion and the shadow of commitment was cast, nervous looks loomed up, already signaling those who would leave the group before it was even formed. They asked who had skill as a writer. I raised a shy and shaking hand. The guy in black raised a confident one. He also noticed my own hand in the air and gave me a look I did not know how to decipher. Then, like an elementary school teacher, Abdiel told us to work in our teams. Our writing team (I have forgotten if there was someone else there) had the task of writing a press release about the first 132 meeting in León and the official constitution of a Leon 132 cell. I have completely forgotten what the content of our first collaboration was, but I remember that, following some of my suggestions, the guy in black, who by this point had already introduced himself as David, gazed at me. The meaning of that gaze was becoming clearer: it was the gaze of an experienced boxer who, seeing a rooky move on the ring, distinguishes some isolated punches and thinks to himself: “hmm”.

That evening was the beginning of the most intense and earnest period of my life. But contrary to what it’s usually said about periods like these, it wasn’t burned into my memory. It rather seems a distant dream of which I can only recover disorderly shreds. The events followed one another like an avalanche. The organizing period lasted a second and the next we were already in deep in the logistics of a cultural fair at the City’s House of Culture. The content of the fair was entrusted upon me, an assignment I accepted in the same way Forest Gump accepted all the enormous responsibilities in his life: without a clue of what the hell was happening. We began to meet daily. Slowly, the steady members of the group were defined as well as the meeting points. These places were: El Kino Bar, at that point in the heart of the city center, sometimes a reggae and ska bar next to El Kino Bar (this one was closed short after), David’s house and, from some point on, my house which would practically become the head quarters for the 132 movement in León.

Meetings and reunions tended to extend deep into the night. We were all either studying or working or both, but by means of an alchemy, very much in the tone of “I come here to offer my heart”, we turned our exhaustion into an incentive to carry on. We were working on full steam with unwavering passion. We felt what we were doing was important. We felt we were a small part of a bigger change. We organized marches, protests, installations and happenings; we delivered fliers with important information to cast a vote[2], we designed and facilitated workshops for children and youngsters, we communicated constantly with other cells across the country.

During these excessive times, of course, we became friends. Many of the most selfless, brave, authentic, and also strange people I’ve met were in that group. To this date they remain dear friends who, in spite of time passed and physical distance, come at the first call if needed.

But a book could be written about that and neither my memory nor my talent would be sufficient for such a task. This is the more modest story of that guy with a short bard, denim pants and black jacket who gazed like a boxer hardened on the boxing canvas. This is David’s story.

My friendship with David was different. It was different because it was marked by literature. In what I believe was our second meeting, we gathered at his place, a small apartment on Panorama avenue. When I came in, the first thing I noticed was: a stencil of Pablo Neruda’s silhouette with a fragment of one of his poems. On that afternoon, David made a deep impression in me. With remarkable confidence and presence, he spoke as if he was writing. Every sentence he uttered, it seemed he had pulled it out of a 70’s Latin American novel. But there was something more, something beyond that. Rhetoric ability is not that common, but it’s not that rare either. It was something in his demeanor, in the form that revealed the content, a certain air of challenge that did cast an unusual light on him. The guy who had seemed before like an IT technician, suddenly appeared as something far more interesting and far more tragic: a poet.

Soon thereafter, during dead times or whenever we needed to clear our heads and rest, David and I would smoke and talk at length about novels, short stories, writers, poets and poetry, about our literary ambitions. We also spoke about our childhoods, so dramatically different, his with his mother and brother, with difficulties in a chaotic Mexico City; mine, quiet and only slightly lonesome, in the suburbs of León. Childhoods, nonetheless, dramatically similar in other aspects because childhood is, almost always, the same geography of innocence and expectations. He always spoke exuberantly, with enviable metaphors that came to him as naturally as “like’s” and “so’s” and “ehhh’s” come to the rest of us. That’s how I remember him: threading literary imagery amidst scrolling smoke. I, on the other hand, have always been a terrible speaker. I stumble with words with the same noteworthy frequency as I stumble walking. I stammer and I mumble as I wait for a cutting simile, for a musical anaphora, for at least a random alliteration, but the sole things that arrive are platitudes.

Even so, in the writing field, he saw something in me. We exchanged publications. I gave him a short-story that was published by the Municipal Institute of Culture in 2011. He gave me a Punto de partida[3]number in which a wonderful chronicle about a Real de Catorce concert by him was published. I recall that, when I read it, I discovered, with a heavy heart, that David was being too nice with me, but he was in another league. I felt ashamed of my short story. A cocky kid showing off his circle of fifths to a gifted guitarist.

But the friendship kept growing. Because of the significant gap in age (9 years if I recall correctly) and because of the even more significant gap in experience, our friendship became more like the relationship between a younger brother and an older brother. That’s how I loved and admired him. As the older brother who is many, many steps ahead on the staircase, and who turns around constantly from his horizon, comes back stretching his hand and smiles as if saying: “What’s the matter? Don’t fall behind!”.

On June the 25th 2012, on my 20th birthday, the 132 group in León threw a party for me with cake, music and dancing. By the end of it, David gave me a book. It was a bulky novel with a bright-red cover, with the silhouettes of three slim men with hats in that cover, all slightly blurred on the edges, as if they were walking across the burning heat of the desert. The title was The Savage Detectives and it was written by Roberto Bolaño.

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[1] On May 12, 2012, during his presidential election campaign, Enrique Peña Nieto visited the Iberoamericana University in Mexico City. He expected to find a compliant audience since the majority of students there come from affluent families. However, when the Q&A session came, a large group of students, who had researched in depth into the history of repression and human rights violations during Peña Nieto’s period as Estado de México’s government, put him in the corner. Peña Nieto and his team were booed out of stage and he was so diminished, he hid in a bathroom. Students recorded this and uploaded it in social media. The news, however, told another story. They said those were not students, but actors hired by the opposing party. As a reaction, 131 students from the University, edited a video showing their ID’s confirming them as students. This video became viral and it sprung a series of videos of more students around the country saying: “I am the student 132” in support. This became the largest student movement in Mexico since the student movement of 1968, which we all know, ended in a massacre.

[2] Unofrtunately, a large percentage of the population in Mexico does not know even the minimum of their rights to vote. Moreover, most of them only received political information from the two controlling TV networks which have historically been allied with the PRI (Revolutionary Institutional Party in English). In addition, the massive purchase and/or cooptation of votes is common practice. So, these fliers contained both the due process to vote, the rights and obligations of the voters, ways to protect their votes and information about the candidates and their promises extracted from diverse national and international media.

[3] Prestigious literary magazine edited by the National Autonomous University, UNAM, where the best short-stories, essays, chronicles, poems and literary translations by students of the university are published once a year.