...of cutting in

Memory of my blue bedroom wall: on which, next to the P. M. 's letter, the Boy Raleigh hung for many years, gazing rapturously at an old fisherman in what looked like a red dhoti, who sat on - what? - driftwood? - and pointed out to sea as he told his fishy tales... and the Boy Aadam, my grandfather-to-be, fell in love with the boatman Tai precisely because of the endless verbiage which made others think him cracked. It was magical talk, words pouring from him like fool's money, past his two gold teeth, laced with hiccups and brandy, soaring up to the most remote Himalayas of the past, then swooping shrewdly on some present detail, Aadam's nose for instance, to vivisect its meaning like a mouse. This friendship had plunged Aadam into hot water with great regularity. (Boiling water. Literally. While his mother said, 'We'll kill that boatman's bugs if it kills you.') But still the old soliloquist would dawdle in his boat at the garden's lakeside toes and Aziz would sit at his feet until voices summoned him indoors to be lectured on Tai's filthiness and warned about the pillaging armies of germs his mother envisaged leaping from that hospitably ancient body on to her son's starched white loose-pajamas. But always Aadam returned to the water's edge to scan the mists for the ragged reprobate's hunched-up frame steering its magical boat through the enchanted waters of the morning.
'But how old are you really, Taiji?' (Doctor Aziz, adult, red bearded, slanting towards the future, remembers the day he asked the unaskable question.) For an instant, silence, noisier than a waterfall. The monologue, interrupted. Slap of oar in water. He was riding in the shikara with Tai, squatting amongst goats, on a pile of straw, in full knowledge of the stick and bathtub waiting for him at home. He had come for stories - and with one question had silenced the storyteller.

[Midnight's Children, Rushdie, S.]

...of an elephant in the room

Not to mention sex, my sex life, which was shot from the day he came through the door of our apartment. I just couldn't do it. Or I mean I could, but I didn't want to. The first time we tried, on the third night, I think, Claudia asked me what was wrong with me. Nothing's wrong, I said, why do you ask? Because you're as silent as the dead, she said. And that was how I felt, not like the dead but like a reluctant guest in the world of the dead. I had to stay quiet. Not moan, not cry out, not pant, come with extreme circumspection. And even Claudia's moans, which used to arouse me so much, became unbearable. They made me frantic (although I was always careful not to let her know), they grated in my ears, and I tried to muffle them by coring her mouth with my hand or my lips. In a word, making love became torture, something that by the third or fourth time I would do anything to avoid or postpone. I was always the last to go to bed. I would stay up with Ulises (who never seemed to get tired anyway) and we would talk about anything. I would ask him to read me what he'd written that day, not caring whether it was poems in which his love for Claudia was painfully obvious. I liked them anyway. Of course, I preferred the other ones, the ones in which he talked about the new things he saw each day when he was left alone and went out to wander Tel Aviv, Giv'at Rokach, Har Shalom, the alleyways of the old port city of Jaffa, the university campus, or Yarkson Park, or the ones in which he remembered Mexico, Mexico City, so far away, or the ones that were formal experiments, or seemed to me like formal experiments. Any of them, except the one's about Claudia. Not for my sake, not because they might hurt me, or her, but because I was trying to avoid the proximity of his pain, his mulish stubbornness, his profound stupidity. One night I told him. I said: Ulises, why are you doing this to yourself? He pretended not to hear me, giving me a sidelong look (which made me remember, as at least a hundred other thoughts flashed through my mind, the look of a dog I'd had when I was a boy in Colonia Polanco, the dog my parents put to sleep when suddenly it started to bite), and then he kept on talking as if I hadn't said a word.

[The Savage Detectives, Bolano, R.]

...of Pound

I put my money back in my wallet and one of them paid the bill and then we went out. It was a beautiful night, without the daytime crush of cars and crowds, and for a while we walked toward my hotel, almost as if we were drifting along, we might just as easily have been getting farther away, and as we proceeded (but towards where?), some of the kids said goodbye, shaking my hand and heading off (the way they said goodbye to their friends was different, or so it seemed to me), and little by little the group began to dwindle, and meanwhile we kept talking, and we talked and we talked, or now that I think about it, maybe we didn't talk that much, I would say instead that we thought and we thought, but I can't believe it, at that time of night no one thinks much, the body is begging for rest. And a moment came when there were just five of us aimlessly wandering the streets of Mexico City, possibly in the deepest silence, a Poundian silence, although the maestro is the furthest thing from silence, isn't he? His words are the words of a tribe that never stops delving into things, investigating, telling every story. And yet they're words circumscribed by silence, eroded minute by minute by silence, aren't they? And then I decided that it was time to go to bed, and I hailed a taxi and said goodbye.

[The Savage Detectives, Bolano, R.]

...of a poet

I told them that I abhorred tape recorders for the same reason that my friend Borges abhorred mirrors. Were you friends with Borges? Arturo Belano asked in a tone of astonishment that I found slightly offensive. We were quite good friends, I answered, close friends, you might say, in the far-off days of our youth. The American wanted to know why Borges abhorred tape recorders. Because he's blind, I suppose, I told her in English. What does blindness have to do with tape recorders? she said. It reminds him of the perils of hearing, I replied. Listening to one's own voice, one's own footsteps, the footsteps of the enemy. The American looked me in the eyes and nodded. I don't think she knew much about Borges. I don't think she knew my work at all, although I was translated by John Dos Passos. I don't think she knew much about John Dos Passos either.

But I've lost my train of thought. Where was I? I told Arturo Belano that I would prefer that he not use the tape recorder and that it would be better if he left me a list of questions. He agreed. He pulled out a sheet of paper and wrote the questions while I showed his companions some of the rooms in the house. Then, when he had finished the list, I had drinks brought in and we talked for a while. They had already interviewed Arqueles Vela and German List Arzubide. Do you think anyone is interested in stridentism these days? I asked Arturo Belano. Of course, maestro, he answered, or words to that effect. My opinion is that stridentism is history now and as such it can only be interesting to literary historians, I said. It interests me and I'm not a historian, he said. Well, then.

Before bed that night I read the list. Just the kind of questions an ignorant, zealous young man might ask. That same night I drafted my answers. The next day I made a clean copy. Three days later, as we had arranged, he came to pick up the list. The maid let him in, but following my express instructions, she told him I wasn't there. Then she handed him the package I had prepared for him: the list of questions with my answers and two books of mine that I was afraid to inscribe to him (I think young people today scorn such sentimentalism). The books were Andamios interiores and Urbe. I was on the other side of the door, listening. The maid said: Mr. Maples left this for you. Silence. Arturo Belano must have taken the package and looked at it. He must have leafed through the books. Two books published so long ago, their pages (excellent paper) uncut. Silence. He must have looked over the questions. Then I heard him thank the maid and leave. If he comes back to see me, I thought, I'll be justified, if he shows up here one day, without calling first, to talk to me, to listen to me tell my old stories, to submit his poems for my consideration, I'll be justified. All poets, even the most avant-garde, need a father. But these poets were meant to be orphans. He never came back.

[The Savage Detectives, Bolano, R.]

...of narcotics

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 were 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 all of it, lake, waterfall, river, cemetery, was deep green and silent. And then I thought 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 realised, 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 they led me to a bench and we sat there for a while, and one of them asked me what hurt (the word hurt, so right, so fitting) and I should have told them that what hurt was my whole body, my whole being, but instead I 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, Bolano, R.]

...of an enigma

With that, Pancho and the taxi driver started to argue about religion and politics, and meanwhile I stared out the window, watching the scenery (the storefronts of Juarez and Roma Norte) rolling monotonously past, and I also started to think about Maria and what separated me from her, which wasn't class but experience, and about Rosario and our tenement room and the wonderful nights I'd spent there with her, though I was prepared to give them up for a few seconds with Maria, a word from Maria, a smile from Maria. And I also started to think about my aunt and uncle and I even thought I saw them, walking arm in arm down one of the streets that we were passing, never turning to look at the taxi as it zigzagged perilously away down other streets, the two of them immersed in their solitude just as Pancho, the taxi driver, and I were immersed in ours. And then I realised that something had gone wrong in the last few days, something had gone wrong in my relationship with the new Mexican poets or with the new women in my life, but no matter how much I thought about it I couldn't figure out what the problem was, the abyss that opened up behind me if I looked over my shoulder. All the same, it didn't frighten me. It was an abyss without monsters, holding only darkness, silence, and emptiness, three extremes that caused me pain, a lesser pain, true, a flutter in the stomach, but a pain that sometimes felt like fear. And then, with my face glued to the window, we turned into Calle Colima, and Pancho and the taxi driver stopped talking, or maybe only Pancho stopped, as if he'd given up trying to win his argument, and my silence and Pancho's silence clutched at my heart.

[The Savage Detectives, Bolano, R.]

...of a motion picture

We watched as the light dimmed in the cabin. Basile installed a makeshift screen and asked us to pull our window curtains closed. Without my beautiful bus altering its course or delaying its progress along its fastidious route, we watched, more than once, a film that played without sound, since we didn't have headphones to plug into the armrests of our seats.
The camera (just like the projector) is set in the bus, and rolls down the road through the opening credits. But soon it decides to liberate itself from the rectilinear road, from the smooth surface packed down by steamrollers, cambered by engineers, and repaved by public road-maintenance crews. My beautiful bus, light as can be, drifts off the pavement. Using my jacket as a makeshift drop-cloth, I block the light, which might overexpose the film, from coming through the window. We have taken a dirt trail, a shortcut, which will itself need to be abandoned, in turn, for a path. The bus no longer has windowpanes. The wind whips one side of your face through the openings. We move forward over a cushion of grass. The movie is in colour. I see nothing but green while we're in the temperate climates. Soon I see yellow. If I were a painter, I would pour out a lot of yellow on this twisting and turning course. The wilderness is empty, uninhabited. My beautiful bus has slowed down. It glides silently along in the unmoving forest. Not a soul stirs; no forest ranger's cabin is in sight, and not a single farm.

[My Beautiful Bus, Jouet, J.]