Last Evenings on Earth

Last Evenings on Earth (1997)

Roberto Bolaño

We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain.

            I think I first heard about Bolaño on NPR, there was maybe a little piece on 2666, and something about the Pinochet dictatorship, or about Ciudad Juarez and her murders, maybe they talked about Bolaño’s life, a little inadequate biography of sorts, in between reports on the economy (generally poor) and violence burning somewhere. I was probably driving to work when I heard it, angry about having to work, and something about the radio story must have enticed me because I soon went out and bought a copy of 2666 and probably took it to a coffee shop somewhere (I was single at the time, barely employed, and my friends all moved away a long time before and so I had little or nothing better to do) and was crucified from the first page on. I think I read it faster than I’ve read any other book of that magnitude. Though there aren’t many books the same magnitude as 2666. I remember soon after I finished it I recommended it to a coworker and one afternoon at work he had it in his hand as he was leaving for his break, and this other coworker, this real creepy guy who used to work there, who was obsessed with antediluvian lifeforms and government conspiracies, who had a lot of really bad religious tattoos (ex: a gargoyle bleeding for Christ) and who once said he preferred Asian girls because they “have bodies like twelve-year-olds”, asked what it was about, not directed at me, and I blurted “what isn’t it about?"

            Bolaño had me hooked; I immediately reread it. There was so much mass, so much weight to that book. I’ve never read a book that captured me quite as completely as 2666 did. It’s like being trapped right on the event horizon of a supermassive black hole. I remember at one point I tracked down a Mexican restaurant that served Mexico City style food, as opposed to the northern Mexican food most restaurants serve, even though they aren’t substantially different, at least not to my hueta tongue, but it seemed pertinent at the time. Mole and nopales and huitlacoche instead of the usual gringo friendly beef taco and cheese enchilada plate. There’s a passage in Part 4, The Part About the Crimes, where one character tells another the story of pozole, a popular and delicious Mexican soup made with hominy and usually a meat, I think traditionally chicken, I’ve only had it with chicken and beef, although, according to the character who is speaking (and whose name escapes me, one of the cops, one of the corrupt cops though that doesn’t really narrow it down does it, he’s talking to Lalo Cura, the boy hitman, so maybe the speaker was Pedro Negrete, or Ernesto Galindo, but it’s hard to keep track of the characters, they’re all Mexican and so have a half-dozen different names) pozole began as a dish served only to the Aztec kings, and instead of being made with chicken or pork or what have you it was made with human flesh. I also noticed on the menu a drink called pulque, sort of a beer fermented from maguey sap, but which at the time I mistakenly believed had hallucinogenic properties (like maybe some sort of liquid ayahuasca) and was consumed by Aztec warriors before battle. It wasn’t, pulque is just a sort of an old-fashioned drink for rural Mexican peasants, but while sitting in the restaurant with my beer, a Negro Modelo, waiting for my pozole I had a brief and rather intense vision: I saw myself, after drinking pulque and eating human flesh, overcome by the jaguar spirit (or possessed by the black terror at the center of 2666) and running down the street shirtless and covered in blood with a knife in one hand and 2666 in the other, ambushing some poor stoned gas station attendant as he smokes a cigarette behind the Arco, sneaking around a dumpster like a panther to plunge my obsidian blade between his ribs, eating his liver and heart and streaking my face with his dark organ blood like a gruesome warpaint as I pant immortal and indestructible under August’s jaundiced orange sunset. So, needless to say I quickly went out and bought every other Bolaño book I could find.

            It’s been such a ride having Bolaño in my life. When I read him I feel more than I’ve ever felt that someone is speaking to me and for me. As if he somehow defines my time (1990s-2000s) and my place (Western Hemisphere), or maybe he just writes the obituary, the final review. In case I haven’t made it clear enough yet: he’s my favorite writer, more than any other, and I’ve read several of his books (and look forward to reading more). Last Evenings on Earth is the first of his short story collections. I bought it several years ago but haven’t got around to reading before now, before I just finished it like an hour ago. I don’t often read short stories, which is probably a big loss on my part, even though I keep on buying short story collections. I just never pick them off my shelf when the picking time comes.

            Last Evenings on Earth was well worth the wait. Bolaño is on fine display, he’s in top form. There are fourteen stories in here, eleven of which are solid bullets to the skull. There’s only three that I didn’t really care for (“A Literary Adventure”, “Phone Calls” and “Anne Moore’s Life”) and the best of the remainder are world-class. One thing I like about Bolaño is that he’s very consistent: he never contradicts himself. He’s not a fascist in one story and a communist in the next. He is unwavering, and I think this steadfast quality comes from his impending sense of mortality. He knew that he was going to die. Or, to put it another way: he didn’t give a fuck. Posterity only means something if you plan on living to 90. Bolaño didn’t give a fuck about anyone’s sensibilities, or their sensitivities, or the things they wanted to keep hidden under their bed. Fuck that. Bolaño goes for the throat.

            This book isn’t much different from any other Bolaño book. He has his pet themes: missing writers, hack writers, vague senses of impending malice, of generalized threat, poets and artists who have sold themselves to the state or to money (or who refuse to do so), people who are going insane, etc. I actually like that he sticks to the same themes. One, nobody else really does them like he does, two, he doesn’t stretch himself thin, make himself too diffuse, and three, what else is there worth writing about?  The narrator (or narrative anchor) in most of these stories is Arturo Belano (one of the main characters from The Savage Detectives, Bolaño’s other great novel, which might be even better than 2666) and who generally serves as Bolaño’s alter ego. I think he was the narrator in both Nazi Literature in the Americas and Distant Star, and in his notes for 2666 Bolaño intimated that Belano was the narrator for that one too. So, Arturo Belano, he’s a cat who gets around. Sort of the Henry Chinaski of Latin America, I guess.

            In “Sensini”, the opening story, Belano corresponds with a forgotten writer who encourages him to enter short story competitions to make money, the old man submits the same stories multiple times, changing only the titles, he goes back to Chile to find his dead son, looking probably in some mass grave out in the desert, and dies, and Belano talks to his daughter and wishes he was a young man again. In “Enrique Martín” (which is “Ricky Martin”, hah hah hah) Belano has a kind of adversarial relationship with a fellow Chilean exile living in Spain who goes crazy and hangs himself, and Belano watches his spiral downward far away from the action, very removed, and one night Belano opens a package of papers that the titular Ricky gives to him (gives him the papers suspiciously, in a midnight storm of paranoia) and expects to find the ramblings of a madman but instead finds a collection of mediocre, quaint, unremarkable poetry. Running through out all these stories are a sense of, I don’t know, pulling your car off the side of the road and looking out into the darkness just beyond your headlights and knowing that someone is waiting, invisible, with a gun, or walking beyond the cone of illumination and tripping over a dead body. Bolaño’s empty page is the empty weed-choked lots and garbage dumps of Latin America.

For my money the best stories here are: “Enrique Martín”, “The Grub”, “Mauricio (‘The Eye’) Silva”, “Last Evenings on Earth”, and “Dentist”. “Enrique Martín” I’ve already mentioned. “The Grub” and “Last Evenings” show us the teenaged Belano, who cuts class and reads (and steals) books. In “The Grub” he meets an old man, an old man who looks like a grub, who is from Villaviciosa, in Sonora, a dirt village in Sonora, where Belano, Ulises Lima, Garcia Madero and a teenaged prostitute go in search of Cesarea Tinajero (The Savage Detectives) and the hometown of Lalo Cura (la locura, “madness”) a teenaged bodyguard for the head of the Santa Teresa cartel, and later Santa Teresa’s only decent cop (2666). The old man gives Belano a knife, and then up and disappears. In “Last Evenings” Belano and his father go on a short vacation to Acapulco, driving there from Mexico City in the elder Belano’s Mustang. Belano lounges around the pool reading a book on the vanished French surrealist Gui Rosey, a probable suicide, who I gather was some sort of Antonin Artaud sort of figure, who vanished during World War II (didn’t we all?) and then later, Belano and his father get in a barfight, which we don’t see, but not before Belano gets a suckjob from a hooker. In “Mauricio (‘The Eye’) Silva” Belano meets the Eye, an old acquaintance and fellow Chilean exile, who recounts a hideous story: the Eye, a photojournalist, was on assignment in India, sent there to take photographs of squalor and filth, and one day finds himself in the Red Light District of an unnamed Indian city, taking pictures of the prostitutes there. A pimp attaches himself to the Eye and sensing the Eye is a homosexual takes him to a brothel with male prostitutes, which the Eye doesn’t partake in, and the pimp further infers (falsely) that the Eye is a pedophile, so he leads the Eye again to a third brothel, this one filled with young boys. The young boys are victims of an illegal and barbaric religious ceremony during which they are castrated. Once the ceremony is over there’s little use for them so the “doctor” who performs the castration forces them into sexual slavery at the brothel. The Eye probably kills the doctor and takes two of the boys with them, on the run, trying to flee police who aren’t following. Eventually he settles in a village with the two boys and tries to be a farmer. Then the plague comes to the village and both the boys die. The Eye returns to Europe, where he meets Belano and tells him what he’s been up to. Chit-chat. Catching up. My favorite out of all of them was “Dentist”. Belano goes to Irapuato for a little vacation after a painful break-up and spends time with a college friend, now a successful dentist. Belano’s a wreck but the Dentist is worse: he can’t get over the death of a woman with a cancerous gum, a death he feels responsible for; at a party he got into an altercation with a successful artist, who calls the Dentist a faggot and gets some gangsters to beat the Dentist up, and taunts him, what could a dentist know about art? The Dentist drags Belano to bar after bar. In one of the poorer bars the Dentist introduces Belano to a peasant boy, whom Belano discovers is the greatest living writer in Mexico, probably in the whole world. The Dentist takes Belano to the boy’s house late at night—to a shack in a miserable slum--and they read some of the boy’s stories, enraptured, disintegrated.

One thing that I absolutely adore about Bolaño is that he writes people and not characters. Is the difference clear? They live and breathe outside of the scope of these stories. They have beginnings and endings that don’t involve us. We just intersect briefly. These stories are like showing someone pictures taken at a party or graduation that occurred fifteen years ago, in the distant and hazy past, and they point to a unibrowed guy in the back and ask, “who’s that?”

The stories that I would rank in the middle are still worth reading. A mediocre Bolaño story is still better than most things any other writer could dream of writing. “Vagabond in France and Belgium” and “Gomez Palacio” are both good stories, they just didn’t mug and murder me the way “Dentist” did. In “Phone Calls” there’s a line: “the toilet with the lid up looked like a toothless mouth laughing at him.” It’s not even that brilliant an image but it stuck with me. Several years ago, something similar happened to me. I was hungover at work so on my break I walked over to a Wendy’s and got some food. I think I got a cup of chili and a baked potato. I finished my meal and immediately ran to the bathroom to throw it all up. At that moment I said to myself: self, other men go to the moon, get college degrees, conquer the unknown, create beautiful art, and yet here you are barfing your guts out at a Wendy’s, hungover on a Thursday. The horror of uselessness, of anonymity, of being forgotten and thrown away, and other such things, feelings that haunt the characters in Bolaño’s stories, overwhelmed me. It was difficult to return to work. In “Days of 1978” Belano explains the plot to Andrei Rublev to an attempted suicide (Ulises Lima?) and the pale daughter of an assassinated union leader. Listen, chief, get me drunk and I’ll summarize the plot to any Tarkovsky movie you want. Andrei Rublev is arguably the greatest movie ever made, and it’s interesting what parts of the plot he leaves out. He talks about the bell but skips the part where the boyar’s soldiers cut out peasant’s eyes. Anyway, it’s a great movie.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I could write a billion words about Bob Bolaño. I’ll never run out of things to say. I don’t even know enough words. He’s my favorite writer by a big margin, and I adore nearly everything about him: his humor, his honesty, his love of literature and hatred of injustice. I love that he doesn't talk down to me: he writes of things that are above my level while remaining on my level. I wish he were still alive. I think he'd have a lot to say about the world of today. Two disastrous, imperialistic wars, the vampire of capitalism, the upsurge in Mexican drug violence (the last few years make Tijuana of the early 1990s look like Mayberry), the deterioration of Europe... he'd have something to say. And, I think, if he were still alive he'd be a solid candidate for a big literary prize, thought that may just be my fixation speaking for me again.  This is already the most I’ve written about a book for this crummy book blog that nobody reads. By a thousand words. I suffer in anonymity. But it doesn’t matter if anyone reads this today. Bolaño impels me (through a beyond the grave power or emanation I don’t understand, some arcane form of astral projection or manifestation) in only the way that he can. He shatters my ability to stop or silence myself and I love him for it.

           

 P.S. If Bolaño were an electronic music artist he would be Bryn Jones, AKA Muslimgauze, also dead. Not some kind of druggy dance music (soundtracks to sexually transmitted infections) and definitely not some chill-out, inoffensive ambient (I love Boards of Canada but it’s probably the anti-Bolaño). Both Bolaño and Muslimgauze are dense, dark, noisy, repetitive and non-resolving. Political. They both are bloated from the ugly malice of the 20^th Century: in Bolaño it’s South American dictatorships and writers who work for the state, in Muslimgauze it’s Middle Eastern theocracies, suicide bombers, rocket-propelled grenades, and Israel. One of Bolaño’s favorite tricks is to list writers and their books (or artists and their art) as if listing them was some sort of magic incantation, the password into the realm of the immortal. It’s brilliant, because I don’t know if some Czech writer who only wrote one book in 1958 (a philosophic critique, or a slim volume of poetry) actually existed or not. You can do the same with the titles of Muslimgauze albums:  Kabul, Opaques, Hunting out with an Aerial Eye, Buddhist on Fire, Blinded Horses, Flajelata, Hajj, Jazirat-Ul-Arab, Abu Nidal, Coup d’Etat, The Rape of Palestine, Uzi, Intifaxa, United States of Islam, Zul’m, Vote Hezbollah, Hamas Arc, Satyagit Eye, Betrayal, Veiled Sisters, Emak Bakia, Citadel, Zealot, Blue Mosque, Al-Zulfiquar Shaheed, Salaam Alekum Bastard, Maroon, Silknoose, Izlamaphobia, Gun Aramaic, Gun Aramaic Part 2, Azzazin, Return of Black September, Occupied Territories, Uzbekistani Bizarre and Souk, Deceiver, Arab Quarter, Fatah Guerilla, Narcotic, City of Djinn, Jaal Ab Dullah, Sandtrafikar, Zuriff Moussa, Farouk Enjineer, Vampire of Tehran, Lahore & Marseille, Syrinjia, Mort Aux Vaches, Mazar-I-Sharif, Mullah Said, In Search of Ahmad Shah Masood, Fedayeen, Hussein Mahmood Jeeb Tehar Gass, Return to the City of Djinn, Observe with Sadiq Bey, Fakir Sind, Hand of Fatima, Azad, Lo-Fi India Abuse, Year Zero, Sufiz, Baghdad, New Soul, Jebel Tariq, Your Mines in Kabul, Abu-Dis, Kashmiri Queens, Eye for an Eye, Hummus, Hamas Cinema Gaza Strip, Sarin Israel Nes Ziona, Dar Es Salaam, Iranair Inflight Magazine, Arabbox, Dome of the Rock, Red Madrassa, Alms for Iraq, No Human Rights for Arabs in Israel: The Remix, Speaker of Turkish, Wish of the Flayed, Jah-Mearab, Sulaymaniyah, Sycophant of Purdah, Cobra Head Soup, Madrass Sitar Burner, Babylon Iz Iraq, Damascus, Lazhareem Ul Leper, Camel Through a Needle’s Eye, Beirut Transistor, Haraam and Halal, Online Jihad, Mujahideen, In Search of the Abraham Mosque, Souk Bou Saad, Fuck Israel. And BADA-BOOM, I just wrote a Bolaño short story! I should send it to The Paris Review. That is basically what they call a joke, there, one that did not take an insignificant amount of time for me to prepare, but you see why that trick is brilliant, right, what Bolaño does, his lists of things? One, eventually the individual items in the list stop being individual and start bleeding into each other until they become just one long bit of color, like a literary Rothko or Motherwell, very overwhelming and monolithic and bigger than you are or ever will be. Divorced of meaning and yet infused with tone, a heavy weight that feels like being crushed under a millstone. Sort of the literary version of persistence hunting. That is, humans aren't very fast compared to other animals, we can't fly, we don't have any fearsome talons or fangs, so before our invention of tools we had basically one trick to rely upon: we can run for longer periods at a steadier pace than almost any other animal. Think of marathon runners. Persistence hunting is essentially the art of running after an animal until it has to stop and rest and when it finally collapses springing on it and bashing its brains out with a rock. In this case, Bolaño is a cro-mag and you're a fucking deer. And two, you have no clue whether or not any of those things are real, and even if you did would it matter?

P.P.S While it was nice to read Bobby Bolaño, who is a friendly, familiar voice, I think up next I am going to tackle something big, something huge, someone’s magnum opus. I’ve had a long string of shitty books here, and the good ones have been far too short. Up next is something big and messy. I’m thinking Moby-Dick, The Recognitions, Gravity’s Rainbow, Underworld, Ulysses (or Finnegan’s Wake), or something of that caliber. Those are just the ones I have on my shelf that I can see from here. So that may take me a long time.

“Without turning, the pharmacist answered that he liked books like The Metamorphosis, Bartleby, A Simple Heart, A Christmas Carol. And then he said that he was reading Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. Leaving aside the fact that A Simple Heart and A Christmas Carol were stories, not books, there was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist, who in another life might have been Trakl or who in this life might still be writing poems as desperate as those of his distant Austrian counterpart, and who clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecouchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze a path 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 spar, but they have no interest in 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.”