Am I going crazy? I wondered. Is this the madness and the fear of Arthur Gordon Pym? Or am I recovering my sanity so quickly it's making me dizzy? The words exploded in my head, as if a giant were shouting inside me, but outside the silence was total. To the west, the sun was setting; the shadows down in the valley were lengthening. What had been green before was now dark green, and what had been brown was dark gray or black.
Then, at the eastern end of the valley, I saw a different shadow, like that of a cloud sweeping across a broad field, but no cloud was throwing this shadow. What is it? I wondered. I looked at the sky. Then I looked at the tree and saw that the quetzal and the sparrow had returned and, sitting still on the same branch, were enjoying the quietness of the valley. Then I looked at the abyss. My heart clenched. The valley led straight into the abyss. I couldn't remember having seen a landform like that before. In fact, at that moment, I felt as if I were on a plateau rather than in a valley. But no. It wasn't a plateau. Plateaus, by their very nature, are not enclosed by natural walls. Valleys, on the other hand, I thought, do not plunge into bottomless abysses. Although perhaps some do. Then I looked at the shadow that was spreading and advancing the other. Flouting the laws of physics, the mountain peaks seemed to form a kind of mirror, with two sides: I had come out one side and they had come out the other.
They were walking toward the abyss. I think I realized that as soon as I saw them. A shadow or a mass of children, walking unstoppably toward the abyss.
Then I heard a murmur that rose through the cold air of evening in the valley toward the mountainsides and crags, and I was astonished.
They were singing.
The children, the young people, were singing and heading for the abyss. I raised a hand to my mouth, as if to stifle a shout, and held the other hand out in front of me, fingers extended and trembling, as if trying to touch them. My mind endeavored to remember a text about children intoning canticles as they marched to war. But it was no use. My mind was inside out. The journey through the snow had turned me into skin. Perhaps that is how I had always been. Intelligence has never been my strength.
I held out both hands, as if imploring the sky to let me embrace them, and I shouted, but my shout was lost among the heights and did not reach down into the valley. Thin, wrinkled, gravely wounded, my mind bleeding and my eyes full of tears, I looked for the birds as if those poor creatures could be of any help to me when the whole world was facing extinction.
They were not on the branch.
I presumed that the birds were a symbol or an emblem and that everything in that part of the story was simple and straightforward. I presumed that the birds stood for the children. I don't know what else I presumed.
And I heard them sing. I hear them singing still, faintly, even now that I am no longer in the valley, a barely audible murmur, the prettiest children of Latin America, the ill-fed and the well-fed children, those who had everything and those who had nothing, such a beautiful song it is, issuing from their lips, and how beautiful they were, such beauty, although they were marching deathward, shoulder to shoulder. I heard them sing and I went mad; I heard them sing and there was nothing I could do to make them stop, I was too far away and I didn't have the strength to go down into the valley, to stand in the middle of that field and tell them to stop, tell them they were marching toward certain death. The only thing I could do was to stand up, trembling, and listen to their song, go on listening to their song right up to the last breath, because, although they were swallowed by the abyss, the song remained in the air of the valley, in the mist of the valley rising toward the mountainsides and the crags as evening drew on.
So the ghost-children marched down the valley and fell into the abyss. Their passage was brief. And their ghost-song or its echo, which is almost to say the echo of nothingness, went on marching, I could hear it marching on at the same pace, the pace of courage and generosity. A barely audible song, a song of war and love, because although the children were clearly marching to war, the way they marched recalled the superb, theatrical attitudes of love.
But what kind of love could they have known, I wondered when they were gone from the valley, leaving only their song resonating in my ears. The love of their parents, the love of their dogs and cats, the love of their toys, but above all the love, the desire and the pleasure they shared with one another.
And although the song that I heard was about war, about the heroic deeds of a whole generation of young Latin Americans led to sacrifice, I knew that above and beyond all, it was about courage and mirrors, desire and pleasure.
And that song is our amulet.
Roberto Bolaño
Bolaño was born in Santiago, the son of a truck driver (who was also a boxer) and a teacher. He and his sister spent their early years in southern and coastal Chile. By his own account he was a skinny, nearsighted and bookish but unpromising child. He was dyslexic, and was often bullied at school, where he felt an outsider.
In 1968 he moved with his family to Mexico City, dropped out of school, worked as a journalist and became active in left-wing political causes.
A key episode in Bolaño's life, mentioned in different forms in several of his works, occurred in 1973, when he left Mexico for Chile to "help build the revolution" by supporting the socialist regime of Salvador Allende. After Augusto Pinochet's coup against Allende, Bolaño was arrested on suspicion of being a terrorist and spent eight days in custody. He was rescued by two former classmates who had become prison guards. Bolaño describes his experience in the story "Dance Card." According to the version of events he provides in this story, he was neither tortured nor killed, as he had expected, but "in the small hours I could hear them torturing others; I couldn't sleep and there was nothing to read except a magazine in English that someone had left behind. The only interesting article in it was about a house that had once belonged to Dylan Thomas… I got out of that hole thanks to a pair of detectives who had been at high school with me in Los Ángeles."
For most of his early adulthood, Bolaño was a vagabond, living at one time or another in Chile, Mexico, El Salvador, France and Spain.
In the 1970s, Bolaño became a Trotskyist and a founding member of infrarrealismo, a minor poetic movement. He affectionately parodied aspects of the movement in The Savage Detectives.
After an interlude in El Salvador, spent in the company of the poet Roque Dalton and the guerrillas of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, he returned to Mexico, living as a bohemian poet and literary enfant terrible – "a professional provocateur feared at all the publishing houses even though he was a nobody, bursting into literary presentations and readings", his editor, Jorge Herralde, recalled. His erratic behaviour had as much to do with his leftist ideology as with his chaotic (and, possibly, heroin-addicted) lifestyle.
Bolaño moved to Europe in 1977, and finally made his way to Spain, where he married and settled on the Mediterranean coast near Barcelona, working as a dishwasher, a campground custodian, bellhop and garbage collector – working during the day and writing at night. From the early 1980s he lived in the small Catalan beach town of Blanes.
He continued with poetry, before shifting to fiction in his early forties. In an interview Bolaño stated that he made this decision because he felt responsible for the future financial well-being of his family, which he knew he could never secure from the earnings of a poet. This was confirmed by Jorge Herralde, who explained that Bolaño "abandoned his parsimonious beatnik existence" because the birth of his son in 1990 made him "decide that he was responsible for his family's future and that it would be easier to earn a living by writing fiction." However, he continued to think of himself primarily as a poet, and a collection of his verse, spanning 20 years, was published in 2000 under the title The Romantic Dogs.