A number of enigmas are still floating in the air like ectoplasm. If Pe went to eat in a cheap restaurant, why didn’t she end up with a case of gastroenteritis? And why did Pe, who isn’t short of money, go to a cheap restaurant in the first place? To save money?
We’re lousy in bed, lousy at braving the elements, but good at saving. We hoard everything. As if we knew the asylum was going to burn down. We hide everything. The treasures that Pizarro will return to rob over and over again, but also utterly useless things: junk, loose threads, letters, buttons, which we stash in places that are then wiped from our memories, because our memories are weak. And yet we like to keep, to hoard, to save. If we could, we’d save ourselves for better times. We’re lost without mom and dad. Although we suspect that mom and dad made us ugly and stupid and bad so they could shine by contrast in the eyes of posterity. Saving, for mom and dad, meant permanence, work and a pantheon, while for us, saving is about success, money and respectability. We’re only interested in success, money and respectability. We are the middle-class generation.
Permanence has been swept aside by the rapidity of empty images. The pantheon, we discover to our astonishment, is the doghouse of the burning asylum.
If we could crucify Borges, we would. We are the fearful killers, the careful killers. We think our brain is a marble mausoleum, when in fact it’s a house made of cardboard boxes, a shack stranded between an empty field and an endless dusk. (And, anyway, who’s to say that we didn’t crucify Borges? Borges said as much by dying in Geneva.)
And so let us do as García Márquez bids and read Alexandre Dumas. Let us follow the advice of Pérez Dragó or García Conte and read Pérez Reverte. The reader (and by the same token the publishing industry) will find salvation in the bestseller. Who would have thought. All that carrying on about Proust, all those hours spent examining pages of Joyce suspended on a wire, and the answer was there all along, in the bestseller. Ah, the bestseller. But we’re lousy in bed and we’ll probably put our foot in it again. Everything suggests that there is no way out of this.
Copyright © 2003 by The Heirs of Roberto Bolaño
Translation copyright © 2010 by Chris Andrews
Originally published in 2003 by Editorial Anagrama, Barcelona, Spain, as El gaucho insufrible, published by arrangement with The Heirs of Roberto Bolaño and Carmen Balcells Agencia Literaria, Barcelona.
All rights reserved. Except for a brief passage quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
Translator’s Note: The epigraph to the book is taken from Edwin and Willa Muir’s translation of Franz Kafka’s “Josephine the Singer, or The Mouse People” (in Selected Stories of Franz Kafka, Modern Library, New York, 1952). The translation of “Brise Marine” (“Sea Breeze”) by Stéphane Mallarmé in “Literature + Illness = Illness” is by E. H. and A. M. Blackmore, and is quoted from Six French Poets of the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000). The translation of “Le Voyage” (“Travelers”) by Charles Baudelaire in “Literature + Illness = Illness” is by Richard Howard, and is quoted from Les Fleurs du mal: The Complete Text of The Flowers of Evil (London, Picador, 1987). In “The Myths of Cthulhu,” “Hear this. To the right hand side of the routine signpost (coming—of course—from north-northwest), right where a bored skeleton yawns” is a slightly modified version of Andrew Hurley’s translation of some lines of poetry in Jorge Luis Borges’s story “The Aleph” (in Collected Fictions, Viking, New York, 1998).
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Harper’s, The New Yorker, and Zoetrope, where some of this material first appeared.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bolaño, Roberto, 1953–2003.
[Gaucho insufrible. English]
The insufferable gaucho / Roberto Bolaño ; translated by Chris Andrews.
Chris Andrews
p. cm.
Originally published in Spain in 2003 as El gaucho insufrible.
Includes five stories, two essays.
eISBN 978-0-8112-2053-8
I. Andrews, Chris, 1962– II. Title.
PQ8098.12.O38G3813 2010
863'.64—dc22 2010021112
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation
80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011
Also by Roberto Bolaño
available from New Directions
Amulet
Antwerp
Between Parentheses
By Night in Chile
Distant Star
Last Evenings on Earth
Monsieur Pain
Nazi Literature in the Americas
The Return
The Romantic Dogs
The Secret of Evil
The Skating Rink
Tres