Category Archives: poetry

The Savage Detectives III: A Joke Covering Up Something More Serious

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A little over half-way through The Savage Detectives (on page 369 of 648), it feels as though things may be starting to come together. According to Luis Sebastián Rosado, it is Luscious Skin who at last outlines the structure of this “unlikely story”: “Everything had begun, according to Luscious Skin, with a trip that Lima and his friend Belano took up north, at the beginning of 1976. [. . .] they’d gone to look for Cesárea Tinajero” (369). This, of course, is the journey with which part I of the novel concludes. At last we understand why Lima and Belano were heading out of town. And our knowledge (or our knowledge of Lima and Belano’s knowledge) of Tinajero is bit by bit being filled in as we read Amadeo Salvatierra’s testimony (which opens most if not every chapter in part II) about his drunken night with the boys, digging into the archive of the Mexican poetic avant-garde. We may be beginning to see why Lima and Belano should be drawn to track down Tinajero. But it seems as though something must have gone wrong somewhere in the Sonora desert.

As Luscious Skin puts it, “After that trip they both went on the run. First they fled to Mexico City together, and then to Europe, separately.” This, too, we have seen, as reported through the various interviews or testimonies that comprise part II, and which relate the traces of the two friends as they pass through variously Paris and Barcelona, campsites and caves in rural Catalonia (which may turn out to be “the last time [they] see each other” [279]), then in Lima’s case Israel and Vienna before he is arrested and then returns to Mexico. In Luscious Skin’s account, Lima comes back home because he thinks the coast is finally clear: “Maybe he thought the whole thing had been forgotten, but the killers showed up one night after a meeting where Lima had been trying to reunite the visceral realists, and he had to run away again.” Hence it is that Lima takes a solidarity trip with other Mexican writers to revolutionary Nicaragua, only to disappear almost as soon as he gets there.

But can there really be “killers” on the trail of Lima and Belano as a result of whatever happened in their search for an aged avant-garde poet? Rosado doubts it, and pushes back on Luscious Skin’s convoluted and conspiratorial story: “When I asked Luscious Skin why anyone would want to kill Lima, he said he didn’t know. You didn’t travel with him, did you? Luscious Skin said he hadn’t. Then how do you know all this? Who told you this story? Lima? Luscious Skin said no, it was María Font who’d told him (he explained who María Font was), and she’d gotten it from her father. Then he told me that María Font’s father was in an insane asylum” (369). This is a much-mediated story whose original author, it turns out, is certified insane. This sends “a shiver up [Rosado’s] spine. And I felt pity too, and I know I was in love” (370).

But we of course know (as certainly as we can know anything in this book) that someone did indeed accompany Belano and Lima on their trip north: García Madero and Lupe, of whom we have still heard absolutely nothing in any of the proliferating accounts that have taken up now 250 pages (what would otherwise be a full novel in itself) of part II. If we could hear from them, perhaps more light would be shed on things.

What we do get, thanks again to Salvatierra’s accounts, is a better sense of Tinajero, as we finally read a visceral realist (at least, a first generation visceral realist) poem… “her only published poem” (397). Still, the fact that we can read her poem does not entirely dispel the suspicion, voiced also by Luscious Skin in an earlier passage from Rosado, that “Belano and Lima might have made her up” (373). For the poem, “Zion” (though the title here is untranslated: “Sión”), is wordless and looks rather more like a child’s drawing than a poem. It consists of three horizontal lines, in each case with a little rectangle attached. The first line is flat. The second is gently undulating. And the third is a zig-zag.

“It’s a joke,” the boys comment to Salvatierra. “The poem is a joke covering up something more serious.” “But what does it mean?” (398) insists Salvatierra, even though Belano and Lima have just told him that “a poem doesn’t necessarily have to mean anything, except that it’s a poem, although this one, Cesárea’s, might not even be that” (397). Readers push for significance even when they are warned not to.

Might similarly Bolaño’s novel also be “a joke covering up something more serious”? If so, what is it covering up? And might it, too, not “necessarily have to mean anything”? If not, what is it doing?

The Savage Detectives I

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The first part of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, just under 140 pages (in the Picador edition) and entitled “Mexicans Lost in Mexico (1975),” is presented as a series of diary entries written by one Juan García Madero between the beginning of November and the last day of December.

García Madero (almost everyone calls him by his last names, rather than his first name, somewhat to his chagrin) is a seventeen-year-old orphan, though what happened to his parents we are never told, who lives with his uncle and aunt while he studies law at the university in Mexico City.

Yet we hear very little of his studies–in any case, he “wanted to study literature, not law, but [his] uncle insisted” (3). Instead, he wants to be a poet: or perhaps he is a poet; he is frequently hailed as “poet García Madero” and he is endlessly writing poetry. By December 27 he tells us that “since it all began” (i.e. presumably over the course of these two months) he has written “55 poems,” coming to 76 pages and “Total lines: 2,453 / I could put together a book by now. My complete works” (121).

Not that we ever see any of this poetry. We are not treated to a single line. The closest we get is one of the poem’s titles: “15/3” (97), which seems to refer to the number of times that he and (one of) his lover(s) orgasm in a four-hour session of lovemaking: she fifteen times (“I was afraid she was going to have a heart attack”), he three. I’m not sure this is a poem I would want to read, and I thank Bolaño for sparing us it.

What we get instead, then, is the life of a poet, or at least the life of a poet in the making as García Madero imagines it should be. In addition to skipping class and ignoring his legal studies, this involves a lot of cafés and bars, quite a bit of drinking and smoking, a perhaps surprising amount of sex with an equally surprising number of lover (García Madero is a virgin at the start of November, but very much not so any longer by the end of the year), visiting bookshops to chat to booksellers and steal their books, and above all hanging out with other poets or would-be poets who spend their time similarly, either in their homes or in the streets and bars of Mexico City.

Despite the almost total lack of evidence, at least some of those with whom García Madero associates (notably the barmaids at one of his favorite bars) are apparently “convinced that someday [he]’d be an important person in Mexican literature” (104). Like most of the other young Bohemians, he is a member of a group of poets that style themselves the “visceral realists” (the novel opens with his invitation to the group) who are determined, it seems, to shake up and dislodge the Mexican poetic establishment, here represented above all by (future Nobel prize laureate) Octavio Paz. Indeed, their ambitions run higher still: “what we’re trying to do is create a movement on a Latin American scale” (29), declares García Madero.

Not that it is at all clear what “visceral realism” is. One of the booksellers tells the narrator that the phrase is a contradiction in terms: “realism is never visceral,” he declares; “the visceral belongs to the oneiric world” (113–14). The movement seems to be vaguely avant-garde, and run along the lines of the French Surrealists (right down to the gesture of periodic purges or expulsions, which may or may not be in jest) by two rather shadowy figures, who sporadically appear in and disappear from the text: Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano.

As throughout these 140 pages the book weaves its series of connections and tensions–encounters and disencounters–among an expansive series of characters that include poets and lovers, prostitutes and pimps, booksellers and architects, it can be hard to discern what really matters, and where this scattered set of stories is taking us. An avant-garde looks to the future, but the future here is decidedly murky.

Then all as once, in the final pages of the section, something happens. García Madero finds himself holed up on New Year’s Eve (a time of doing away with the old and welcoming the new), as 1975 gives way to 1976, in the middle-class house of a family with whom he has become entwined. For complicated reasons (which may or may not be worth explaining. . . again, it is not clear what “matters” and what does not), they have given refuge to a young prostitute named Lupe, while her pimp and a couple of heavies patrol the road outside.

Suddenly, unannounced, Lima and Belano turn up and agree to take Lupe away, thus relieving the siege. They will take her in the family car, which they propose to drive north, destination unknown. García Madero accompanies Lupe to the street and impulsively punches out her pimp. With trouble brewing (and there has been frequent reference throughout to a gathering storm) and the car engine gunning, he equally impulsively jumps into the car with Lupe, Lima, and Belano as they set off out of the city.

If this first part of the novel has been about “Mexicans lost,” we may wonder if they will find themselves (or be found by others) in the five hundred pages still to come.