#latin american literature
Deep green and silent…
Literature isn’t innocent. I’ve known that since i was fifteen. And i remember thinking that then, but I can’t remember whether I said it or not, and if I did, what the context was. And then the walk (but here I have to clarify that it wasn’t five of us anymore but three, the Mexican, the Chilean, and me, the other two Mexicans having vanished at the gates of purgatory) turned into a kind of stroll on the fringes of hell.
The three of us were quiet, as if we’d been struck dumb, but our bodies moved to a beat, as if something was propelling us through that strange land and making us dance, a silent, syncopated kind of walking, if I can call it that, and then I had a vision, not the first that day, as it happened, or the last: the park we were walking through opened up into a kind of lake and the lake opened up into a kind of waterfall and the waterfall became a river that flowed through a kind of cemetery, and al of it, lake, waterfall, river, cemetery, was deep green and silent. And then I thought it’s one of two things: either I’m going crazy, which is unlikely since I’ve always had my head on straight, or these guys have doped me. And then I said stop, stop for a minute, I feel sick, I have to rest, and they said something but I couldn’t hear them, I could only see them coming closer, and I realized, I became conscious, that I was looking all around trying to find someone, some witness, but there was no one, we were in the middle of a forest, and I remember I said what forest is this, and they said it’s Chapultepec and then they led me to a bench and we sat there for a while, and one of them asked me what hurt (and the word hurt, so right, so fitting) and I should have told them that the problem was probably that I wasn’t used to the altitude yet, that it was the altitude that was getting to me and making me see things.
~The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolano, page 154-155
“…a kind of stroll on the fringes of hell.”
(“Untitled” [2002] by Just Loomis)
To celebrate the relaunch of its website, The New Yorker is opening up its archives for free this summer. Take a half hour and read this beautiful Bolaño story, “Clara,” from an August 2008 issue.
One night I dreamed of an angel: I walked into a huge, empty bar and saw him sitting in a corner with his elbows on the table and a cup of milky coffee in front of him. She’s the love of your life, he said, looking up at me, and the force of his gaze, the fire in his eyes, threw me right across the room. I started shouting, Waiter, waiter, then opened my eyes and escaped from that miserable dream. Other nights I didn’t dream of anyone, but I woke up in tears. Meanwhile, Clara and I were writing to each other. Her letters were brief. Hi, how are you, it’s raining, I love you, bye. At first, those letters scared me. It’s all over, I thought. Nevertheless, after inspecting them more carefully, I reached the conclusion that her epistolary concision was motivated by a desire to avoid grammatical errors. Clara was proud. She couldn’t write well, and she didn’t want to let it show, even if it meant hurting me by seeming cold.
There’s plenty more where this came from. Check it out.
-Hal-