If Bolaño lifted his head and saw the unanimous enthusiasm his work and his character evoked, he would emerge from the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea only to utter a loud, “How disgusting” ejaculation. He responded to the ovations, the enthusiasm and every single compliment. Also these lines and everything that will come next, but the liver that we owe him will prevent that, and from here, following the best Bolañesque tradition, we allow ourselves to respond to his answer and him along with some to call his acquaintances again and to remind friends that 20 years ago today this famous Latin American who broke the codes of literature in Spanish died.
The work of Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) grows with each reading, and some of his relatives and followers have made full use of this joyful work in these days of licking their wounds. “I’ve reread quite a few poems these past few weeks and, wow, I’m a writer for whom time doesn’t fly, like he had his Mexico City and his Mexico preserved in amber,” says Mauricio Montiel, a Mexican writer and friend of Bolaño, who recalls how the Chilean had told him more than once that he would not return to Mexico “not even feet first”. His body kept the promise, but his gaze was always on the left side of the cards as an incorrigible deviation.
“I prefer to keep the smells, the colors, the sensations of my Mexico and regain them through writing,” Montiel Bolaño sums up. “The millimeter memory he had of Mexican popular culture was fascinating. He didn’t have to come here to compare his Mexico to the current one,” he reflects. And also the Argentine journalist Mónica Maristain, to whom Bolaño gave his last interview today, adds an irreplaceable gift to this reflection: “In the distance he begins to remember and he hits the nail on the head with many things”. In 2666 resigned he took on the later famous drug war, which he could not have imagined. However, it is in the novel.”
Bolaño’s legacy is that it encompasses a reality he didn’t live, but divined with clarity and imagination. His literature is about travel, the memory of a lost youth, wild humour, perpetual uprooting and an exile that is not only physical but also spiritual. I was twenty years old then / and I was crazy. / He had lost a country but gained a dream. / And if he had that dream / the rest didn’t matter, he wrote in Romantic Dogs (1994). It was reflected in a legion of readers who continue to add people to their ranks and keep coming back to him in hopes of finding new answers.
Mauricio Montiel and Roberto Bolaño, in Blanes (Catalonia), September 2001. Mauricio Montiel (Courtesy)
Despite everything, the Bolaño poet found a place on the podium next to the Bolaño narrator only later. “When Rómulo Gallego won with Los Detectives Salvajes, everyone, including the critics, said that he wasn’t a good poet but a good storyteller and we started to accept that. Now, when you re-read his beautiful poetry, you realize how closely his poetry is tied to the narrative,” says Maristain, whose friendship with Bolaño was forged between emails. Then they joked that after the surgery he would sing like Camilo Sesto, who also had liver problems and received a transplant.
For the same reason as Maristain, his colleague below, also a poet, Bruno Montané, recommends always reading his novels with his poems. They shared, in their words, “the time of poets and poetry, and later the purgatory of narrative”. Echoes of this “critical and surreal impulse” survive from this period. The expression does not come from Montané, but from the Mexican reporter Diego Enrique Osorno, who transferred to journalism the essence of this movement, which he fell in love with as soon as he read the universal Chilean text. “What moved me is the so, so, so radical and so deep devotion he felt for the poet’s figure in such unpoetic times. “It got me thinking about the need for a utopian thought, a creation based on the search for beauty,” he stresses.
The news of his death reached him in the mail from a very dear friend who was staying in Barcelona. When he read it, he was traveling through the cities of Tamaulipa trying to report on the massacres of those years. “He sent me a poem of his that I love, called El burro, that we read at a party once,” he fondly recalls. Bolaño reminds him of his best friend, the poet Mario Papasquiaro: sometimes I dream that Mario / arrives in the middle of a nightmare on his black motorbike / […] And as the dream transports me / From one continent to another / Through a shower of cold and painless stars, / I see the black motorcycle, like a donkey from another planet, / Splitting the land of Coahuila in two.
Osorno attributes the revival of his poetic output to the “childhood of so many readers, eager to seek more things” and “digging” where they can to find them. 2666 is the “most important” novel he has ever read, a dedication Maristan and Montiel join. “If you’ve already written a play like this, what are you going to do next?” The latter asks, “What Roberto did was die.”
Roberto Bolaño with his daughter Alexandra photographed by Montiel at his home in Blanes in September 2001. Mauricio Montiel (Courtesy)
In fact, the Latin American’s work has been prolific since his death. He had wanted to be a writer since he was 17, but didn’t start publishing until he was 43. From this long period of silence, enforced by the refusal of the editor, almost 15,000 pages, 84 notebooks and about a thousand letters have survived which are not yet known. Another reader who does not belong to his close family, heiress to some copyrights that have led to heated disputes with Anagrama, the publisher with which they have decided to break up.
However, for the writer, who replaced the Latin American name with the national name, his children Lautaro and Alexandra were always home. “There is absolutely nothing more powerful than having a child. And if it’s a daughter, it has to be the host,” he wrote in a congratulatory email to Montiel on the birth of his daughter. It was September 2000 and he still hadn’t gotten his. “When Lautaro was born I thought I had experienced everything and it didn’t take more than thirty minutes to realize that I had experienced nothing,” he concluded.
Osorno is moved by this paternal vocation, which he kept to the end and which distinguishes him from so many other geniuses in the world. The human bolaño is perhaps not so far removed from the poet, the narrator and the myth. Any or all of these three simultaneously defined poetry in their famous interview in La belleza de pensar as “a gesture of the fragile adolescent who stakes what little he has on something he is not quite sure what it is, and that , In general, he loses. With this gesture, Bolaño left his liver and eventually his life. But he didn’t lose everything there either. There is still an ocean of readers who would give anything for another page, another line, or even just one last word.
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