All roads lead to Santa Teresa: is that the “fate” of the “Part of Fate,” which inexorably leads us ever closer to “the killings in Sonora” first glimpsed by the critic Morini in an article in the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto. That article was written, we were told, “by an Italian reporter who had gone to Mexico to cover the Zapatista guerrillas.” On reading this, it had
struck [Morini] as odd that she had gone to Chiapas, which is at the southern tip of the country, and that she had ended up writing about events in Sonora, which, if he wasn’t mistaken, was in the north, the northwest, on the border with the United States. [. . .] He imagined her in the Mexican capital. Someone there must have told her what was happening in Sonora. And instead of getting on the next plane to Italy, she had decided to buy a bus ticket and set off on a long trip to Sonora. (64/43)
Something similar happens to Oscar Fate, the protagonist of this, the third part of Bolaño’s novel. He, too, finds himself waylaid (in fact, repeatedly so) and inexorably drawn towards the US/Mexico borderlands, and the terrible crimes that seem to have impregnated the entire landscape there. He, too, arrives in Mexico for another purpose but ends up equally fascinated and horrified by these killings that hide (we are told, almost at the end of this section) “the secret of the world” (439/348). Perhaps, as the novel proceeds, we will come to have a better idea of the nature of this secret.
In the meantime, we continue to fumble our way onwards. Fate is a New York journalist, who writes for a magazine called Black Dawn, based in Harlem. His normal beat is “political and social issues” (354/279)–we are told that the first story he had published in the magazine was the last Communist left in Brooklyn, a story which resonates with a dream that Amalfitano has had about the “last Communist philosopher” (290/227). This sense that it is the end of the line for a politics of liberation, or at least that the forms in which such a politics took in the twentieth century are now almost unimaginable, resonates with the vision with which Bolaño’s Amulet ends. Politics seems to be in abeyance. No wonder that the Italian journalist turned from covering the Zapatistas. Nor is it too surprising that Fate is shifted abruptly to covering sport, and sent to Mexico to report on a boxing match between a promising heavyweight from Harlem and a Mexican counterpart.
Once in Mexico, however, various sources tell Fate about the murdered women. Tired of pretending to be a sports reporter–and in any case, the fight turns out to be a dismal washout–Fate contacts his editor back home to pitch him the story: “This is more important,” he tells him. “The fight is just an anecdote. What I’m proposing is so much more. [. . .] A sketch of the industrial landscape in the third world [. . .] a piece of reportage about the current situation in Mexico, a panorama of the border, a serious crime story, for fuck’s sake” (373/294–95; translation modified). Yet the editor turns the proposal down, on the basis that this is a story about Mexicans rather than the Black men that are the magazine’s principal preoccupation. If there are no “brothers” involved, the editor is not interested.
Fate describes the boxing match as an “anecdote.” The irony is that 2666 itself often feels like a book of anecdotes, with its countless stories within stories. Here, for instance, we are reintroduced to Rosa Amalfitano, Oscar’s daughter, who meets Fate at a party and who subsequently tells him tales she herself has been told by a friend who was also at that same party, or recounts conversations between her father and her lover about a “magic disk” that, thanks to the brain’s habit of persistence of vision, can make two unrelated images appear to overlap. All these stories no doubt have some bearing on the novel’s broader theme (it is hardly a coincidence that the example given of a magic disk involves a “little old drunk [. . .] laughing because we think he’s in prison, [. . .] laughing at our credulity” [423/335]), but still they are surely anecdotal in nature, and they sometimes feel as though they were taking up time and space, postponing “the part of the crimes” that is yet to come.
At the end of this part, however, even though Oscar Fate has failed to convince his editor that he should be writing about more than a boxing match, he accompanies another (Mexican) reporter, who is writing about the killings, as she visits Santa Teresa’s jail to meet a putative author of the crimes, imprisoned awaiting trial. The suspect turns out to be a German-speaking “giant”–shades, in short, of the mysterious literary author, Archimboldi, of the “part of the critics”–who sits down in front of the journalist and tells her: “Ask whatever you want.” But as the very last words of this section recounts, “she couldn’t think what to ask” (440/349). All that suspense, but when we finally think we may be at the very heart of this Mexican darkness, words fail us.
Not that words fail Bolaño: by this point we have read plenty of them, and we are still not even halfway through the novel. (In fact, almost two thirds of it remains.) Elsewhere, when Fate first learns of the killings, he is told that “Every so often the numbers go up and it’s news again and the reporters talk about it. People talk about it too, and the story grows like a snowball until the sun comes out and the whole damn ball melts and everybody forgets about it and goes back to work” (362/285–86). Presumably therefore the question is how to produce words (sentences, pages, books) that will not simply melt once the sun comes out, words that will stick in the mind and perhaps even change something somehow. Does a longer book have more weight and heft? Or is it no more than a larger snowball, that will merely leave a bigger mess once it melts? And once it does, it flows back into what the novel elsewhere, in a critique of metaphor, calls a “sea of appearances” (322–23/254; translation modified). Is this every novel’s fate?
