In the beginning, Carlos Wieder was called Carlos Ramírez Hoffman and, according to his obituary, he was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1950 and died in Lloret de Mar in 1998, the year Roberto Bolaño won the Herralde Novel Prize with Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives). Two years earlier, “Ramírez Hoffman, the infamous”—according to the story of the same name that forms part of Nazi Literature in the Americas—had received a visit from a messenger—or perhaps better, a killer disguised as a messenger—who cordially took from him “a folder with papers” to give to Bolaño.
The anecdote varies in nuance when we reach the final pages of Estrella distante (Distant Star), a novel also published around that time—now Ramírez Hoffman is Wieder, Carlos always. The killer—both times named Romero—appears to Bolaño “as if Edward G. Robinson had entered a meat grinder and come out transformed: thinner, darker skin, more hair, but with the same lips, the same nose, and above all, the same eyes.” And immediately after that description of such a friendly messenger, the decisive details: “Eyes that know. Eyes that believe in all possibilities but at the same time knowthat nothing can be remedied.” Such an assertion is the best for Bolaño and his destiny: the gaze of a savage detective peering into the edge of the black hole in which the great mass of literature is concentrated.
Both moments—the opening story and the concluding novel—do not revolve solely around the same events and characters—a dandy who is a novice in literary workshops and a smooth-talking seducer, but also, in the shadows, a soldier who does his job writing poems in the sky with smoke from a fighter plane, a confidant and torturer of the Chilean dictatorship—but they can also be read in the manner of Roberto Bolaño’s very personal Pierre Menard. He himself warns in the preface to Distant Star—and in relation to his predecessor in Nazi Literature in the Americas—that his alter ego Arturo Belano “wanted a longer story, not a mirror or explosion of other stories, but a mirror and explosion in itself.”
Pierre Menard’s Quixote becomes Carlos twice over: Ramírez Hoffman rewritten as Wieder. Or also, putting ourselves in the realm of the atrocious without barriers, Stevenson’s pleasure à la Borges—Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—taken to the very ardent space of a reading in the garden of diverging readings. In this sense, both moments reveal the core of Bolaño’s writing, rooted in a response that, in The Savage Detectives, Amadeo Salvatierra gives to Cesárea Tinajero: “And where do we want to go?” she said. “To modernity, Cesárea,” I said, “to fucking modernity.”
That fucking modernity becomes the touchstone that nestles in the compass rose when it comes to Bolaño and his journeys. But it is never a modernity in the usual sense of gradations in pursuit of passive bibliographies and their adjacents, but rather a belligerent and unique modernity to be resolved on the battlefield. In this regard, it is the author himself who best defines his reasons: “Literature is very similar to samurai fights, but a samurai does not fight another samurai: he fights a monster.” And he immediately elaborates: “He also generally knows that he will be defeated. Having the courage, knowing in advance that you are going to be defeated, and going out to fight: that is literature.”
A bellicose reality that admits no restrictions is one in which the novelist takes a chance on the risks of a stubborn and eager dream, or rather, the narrator; or better still, the poet, if we stick to the view that underpins Bolaño’s architecture, explicitly stated by himself as the key to Resurrection in the poem of the same name: “Poetry enters the dream / like a diver into a lake. Poetry, braver than anyone, enters and falls like a lead weight into a lake as infinite as Loch Ness or as murky and ominous as Lake Balaton.” There is no doubt for those who have traveled through all his pages: the novelist enters like a diver, and the lake can be eternal and dark like 2666. That is when he prepares to meet the monster: there goes a samurai with a diving suit and a shining katana so that the author can fulfill the ritual of Bushido. There is a warrior named Roberto Bolaño.
And that warrior—the critic Ignacio Echevarría was, as usual, more than clear when, one day in the spring of 1996, reviewing Nazi Literature in the Americas for the cultural supplement Babelia, he called on readers to follow and not miss the path that began there—had his refuge on the Costa Brava, in the village of Blanes. Many years ago, I walked around the place and asked about Bolaño, but he wasn’t there that day. In my backpack I carried his most recent title, Putas asesinas (Killer Whores)—which, as is well known, together with Llamadas telefónicas (Phone Calls), El gaucho insufrible (The Insufferable Gaucho), and El secreto del mal (The Secret of Evil), not only forms his quartet of books in terms of short stories, but also his consistency in a discipline that was very dear to him, a reader of Borges in situ in this regard. There is a story there that is exemplary, intertwining uncertainty and the precipice, a story of such precise and disturbing perfection, Últimos atardeceres en la tierra (Last Sunsets on Earth): a father and son somewhere off the coast of the Mexican Pacific, two Chileans living in Mexico City who take a few days away from the noise of the capital and end up in that other noise that weaves its way into their move in a bar. I was in Blanes and had just read the story, and the Mediterranean seemed to me to be a negative of the Pacific in Bolaño’s fragment, more ghostly than usual, I would say, like the darkroom of the photographer in Blow Up, that is, Las babas del diablo.
And from the marine settings of the story, I went to architectural sites that, in the town where the writer lived, have the magnificent enhancement of Catalan Gothic: the Church of Santa María de Blanes, for example, the door framed with curves set in an elegant gradient, a stained-glass window above and, at the top, the battlements: ah, the battlements… Then I saw Bolaño as a warrior who guards the chapel, or rather the castle, built by his ingenuity, a samurai in the fields of Catalonia, a samurai who waits for the monster, shielded by the construction that his words make possible, who presumes he will be defeated, but will put up a fight.
And what a tremendous fight, my God, the one fought in The Savage Detectives and 2666, a battle for the novel—and again the metaphors of bellicosity in Bolaño’s style—to enter like a squadron—in the manner of samurai in Kurosawa’s epic—into the unexplored regions of the 21st century, global regions for a multiform gaze with “eyes that believe in all possibilities but at the same time know that nothing can be remedied,” the only valid way for the novelist to establish his voice in—Bolaño dixit—“the Latin American wilderness, which is the greatest wilderness because it is the most divided and the most desperate.” There, I tell myself, on the battlements of the church of Santa María de Blanes, where I come to glimpse the starkness of such a great contingency: Bolaño or the art of war when it comes to storytelling, a passion for strategy that seeks the most effective configuration; reordering the inherited literary canon and turning it into an assault troop because, according to Bolaño himself, “life (or its mirage) constantly challenges us with acts we have never performed, sometimes with acts that have never even crossed our minds.”
In a passage from Amuleto, a feverish monologue between the cries of fear and visions of hell, in a Mexican closet in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters while outside the night of the massacre in Tlatelolco unfolds, Auxilio Lacouture perceives, with her gift of prophecy, the possibility of “a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under a dead or unborn eyelid.” How to write what is seen beneath that eyelid? In Un paseo por la literatura, Bolaño states, with no small amount of melancholy: “I dreamed I was an old and sick detective looking for people long lost.” And in Monsieur Pain, the stubborn circle of mesmerists seeking to save César Vallejo himself in a Parisian hospital in the spring of 1938, guided by the character who gives the novel its title, is aware that “the old man is wise, very wise, but don’t expect him to know everything.” That is how a savage detective peered into the year 2666.
