THE RETURN
ROBERTO BOLAÑO
Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews
CONTENTS
Snow
Another Russian Tale
William Burns
Detectives
Cell Mates
Clara
Joanna Silvestri
Prefiguration of Lalo Cura
Murdering Whores
The Return
Buba
Photos
Meeting with Enrique Lihn
Snow
I met him in a bar on Calle Tallers, in Barcelona, it must be about five years ago now. When he found out I was Chilean, he came over to say hello; he too had been born in that faraway place.
He was more or less the same age as me, thirty-odd, and he drank quite a bit, though I never saw him drunk. His name was Rogelio Estrada. He was thin, shortish, and dark. His smile seemed to be permanently poised between wonder and mischief, but after a while I discovered that he was far more innocent than he made out. One night I went to the bar with a group of Catalan friends. We got talking about books. Rogelio came over to our table and said that the greatest writer of the century was, without a doubt, Mikhail Bulgakov. One of the Catalans had read The Master and Margarita and A Theatrical Novel, but Rogelio mentioned other works by the distinguished novelist, more than ten of them, if I remember correctly, and he gave their titles in Russian. My friends and I thought he was joking, and soon the talk moved on. One night he invited me back to his place and I went, I don’t know why. He lived in a street nearby, a few yards from a very decrepit movie theater known to the local kids as the Ghost Cinema. The apartment was old and full of furniture that wasn’t his. We sat down in the living room, Rogelio put on a record—some awful, emphatic music with an unrelenting crescendo—and then he filled two glasses with vodka. On a shelf, presiding over the room, was a silver-framed photo of a girl. The rest of the decor was nothing special: postcards from various European countries and some very old shabby-looking soccer pennants: Colo-Colo, University of Chile and Santiago Morning. Pretty, isn’t she? said Rogelio, pointing at the girl in the silver frame. Yes, very pretty, I replied. Then we sat down again and drank for a while in silence. When Rogelio eventually spoke, the bottle was almost empty. First you have to empty the bottle, he said, then your soul. I shrugged. Though, of course, I don’t believe in the soul, he added. It all comes down to time, though, doesn’t it? Do you have time to listen to my story? Depends on the story, I said, but I think so. It won’t take very long, said Rogelio. Then he stood up, took the silver-framed photo, sat down in front of me cradling it in his left arm while holding the glass of vodka in his right hand, and began:
My childhood was happy; it had nothing to do with the way my life turned out later. Things started going wrong when I was a teenager. I was living in Santiago with my family and according to my father I was well on the way to becoming a juvenile delinquent. My father, in case you don’t know (and I can’t see why you would), was José Estrada Martínez, aka Chubby Estrada, one of the big wheels in the Chilean Communist Party. And we were a proudly proletarian family, fighting the good fight, upstanding and righteous. At the age of thirteen I stole a bicycle. You can imagine, I don’t need to spell it out. I was caught two days later and got one hell of a thrashing. At fourteen I started smoking dope—some of my friends in the neighborhood used to grow it in the foothills of the Andes. At the time my father had a senior position in Allende’s government, and his biggest fear, poor old dad, was that the right-wing press would reveal the misdemeanors of his eldest son. At fifteen I stole a car. I wasn’t caught (though now I know that with a bit more time, the cops would have found me) because a few days later the coup happened and my whole family took refuge in the Soviet Embassy. I don’t need to tell you what the days I spent in there were like. It was awful. I slept in the corridor and kept trying to hit on the daughter of one of my father’s comrades, but all they did, that bunch, was sing The International or No pasarán. You get the picture, it was dismal, like party time at the Bible Hall.
We arrived in Moscow at the beginning of 1974. Personally, to be honest, I was glad to be going: a new city, blonde blue-eyed Russian girls, the plane trip, Europe, a new culture. The reality turned out quite differently. Moscow was like Santiago, but quieter, bigger and brutally cold in winter. At first they put me in a school where it was Spanish half the time, Russian the other half. Two years later I was at a regular school, speaking okay Russian, and bored out of my wits. I guess some strings were pulled to get me into the University, because I really didn’t study much. I enrolled in medicine, but dropped out after a semester; it wasn’t for me. Still, I have good memories of my time there: it’s where I made my first friend, I mean the first friend who wasn’t an exiled Chilean like me. His name was Jimmy Fodeba and he came from the Central African Republic, which as the name suggests, is in the middle of Africa. Jimmy’s father was a communist, like mine, and like my father, he’d been forced into exile. Jimmy was pretty smart, but underneath he was just like me. I mean, he liked to stay up late, he liked to drink and smoke the occasional joint, and he liked women. Before long we were joined at the hip. The best friend I’ve ever had, except for the gang back in Santiago, the guys who stayed—I’ll probably never see them again, but who knows? Anyway, what happened was that Jimmy and I combined our forces, and our desires, and, while we were at it, our needs as well, and from then on, instead of being two separate exiles, feeling lost and lonely, we were a pair of wolves roaming the streets of Moscow, and whenever one of us was scared, the other one dared, and so, little by little (because sometimes Jimmy had to study, he was a good student, unlike me), we started to get a general idea of the city where both of us would probably be living for a fair while. I won’t go on about our youthful adventures, all I’ll say is that after a year we knew where to find a bit of weed, which may not seem like much of a feat now, in Barcelona, but in Moscow, back in those days, it was truly heroic. By then I’d tried studying Latin American literature, Russian literature, radio broadcasting, food science, just about everything really, and whether it was because I got bored, or didn’t pay attention in class, or just didn’t turn up, which is basically what happened most of the time, I failed everything, and eventually my father threatened to send me to work in a factory in Siberia, poor old guy, that’s the way he was.
And that was how I came to enroll in the School of Physical Education, which some optimistic Russians used to call the Advanced School of Physical Education, and this time I managed to keep it together until I got my diploma. That’s right, my friend, you’re looking at a qualified gymnastics instructor. Not a good one, of course, especially not compared with some of the Russians, but qualified all the same. When I handed my father the diploma, the old man was moved to tears. I’d say that’s when my adolescence came to an end.
At the time I used to call myself Roger Strada. I was always getting into trouble; my friends weren’t what you’d call good, upstanding citizens and I was thoroughly bad. It was like I was full of rage and didn’t know how to get it out of my system. I worked as a trainer’s assistant for a man of dubious and disconcerting moral character (it was a true meeting of minds); he specialized in recruiting new athletes from secondary schools, and I spent most of my time at parties, making deals and doing shady busi
ness to supplement my salary. My boss was called Pultakov. He was divorced and lived in a tiny apartment in Leliushenko Street, near Rogachev Square. As I said, I was a bad boy and Jimmy Fodeba was bad too, and anyone who knew us well knew that we were bad (I think I chose to call myself Roger, at least for a start, because it went with Jimmy, and because I secretly thought of myself as a kind of Italian-American gangster), but Pultakov was seriously bad and working with him every day, I gradually came to discover all his tricks, depravities and vices. My father lived in a Moscow of papers and memoranda, a bureaucrats’ Moscow, with its commands and countermands, its current issues, its factions and infighting: an ideal Moscow. I lived in a Moscow of drugs and prostitution, black marketeering and living it up, threats and crimes. In certain circles the two Moscows would occasionally come into contact and even intermingle, but as a rule they were two distinct cities, each unaware of the other’s existence. Pultakov initiated me into the world of sports betting. We gambled with other people’s money of course, but also with our own. Soccer, hockey, basketball, boxing, even championship skiing, a sport I’ve never really seen the attraction of: we dabbled in everything. I met people. All sorts of people. Nice enough guys, in general, small-time crooks like me, though sometimes I did come across real criminals, the sort who’d stop at nothing, or at least you could tell that in certain circumstances they’d stop at nothing. An instinct for survival prevented me from getting too close to those people. Prison-fodder, sewer-food. People who could intimidate Pultakov and terrify me and Jimmy. With one exception, a guy our age, who for some reason took a shine to me. His name was Misha Semionovich Pavlov and he was like the whiz kid of the Moscow underworld. Pultakov and I provided him with information about various sports for his gambling, and from time to time this Misha Pavlov invited us to his apartment, or one of his apartments, never the same one, all of them dingier than Pultakov’s or mine, usually out in the old northeastern suburbs, where the workers lived: Poluboyarov, Viktoria and Old Market. Pultakov didn’t like Pavlov (he didn’t like anyone much) and tried to keep his dealings with him to a minimum, but I’ve always been naïve; Pavlov’s reputation as the underworld’s child prodigy and the thoughtful way he treated me—occasionally giving me a chicken or a bottle of vodka or a pair of shoes—finally won me over, and I succumbed completely, body and soul, as they say.
The years went by and my family returned to Chile, except for my younger sister, who married a Russian; my father died in Santiago and had a beautiful funeral, or so they told me in the letters; Jimmy Fodeba went on living in Moscow and working in a hospital (his father went back to the Central African Republic, where he was killed), while Pultakov and I went scurrying like a pair of rats around the gyms and sports complexes. With the arrival of democracy and the end of the Soviet Union (not that I’ve ever been interested in politics) came freedom and the mafias. Moscow became a charming, exuberant city, buzzing with that fierce, typically Russian sort of exuberance. I can’t explain it, you have to understand the Slavic soul, and I don’t think you do, however many books you’ve read. Suddenly it all got too big for us. Pultakov, who was a Stalinist at heart (I still don’t get that, because under Stalin he would have ended up in Siberia for sure), was nostalgic for the old days. But I adapted to the new situation, and decided to save some money, now that it was possible, so I could get out of there for good and start exploring the world, Europe to begin with, then Africa, which, in spite of my age—by then I was over thirty and old enough to know better—I imagined as the kingdom of adventure, an endless frontier, a new story book where I could begin again, be happy, and find myself, as we used to say when we were kids back in Santiago in 1973. And that was how I joined Misha Pavlov’s staff, almost without realizing it. At the time his nickname was Billy the Kid. Don’t ask me why. Billy the Kid was quick on the draw; Misha never did anything quickly, not even pulling out his credit card. Billy the Kid was brave and, at least in the movies I’ve seen, agile and thin; Misha was brave too, but built like a Buddha, obese even by Russian standards, and allergic to all forms of physical exercise. I went on being a bookmaker, but soon I began to do other kinds of work for him. Sometimes he’d give me a bundle of cash and send me to see a player I knew to get him to throw a game. On one occasion I managed to bribe half a soccer team, one by one, flattering the more cooperative players and using veiled threats on the others. Sometimes he sent me to persuade other gamblers to withdraw their bets or not to make waves. But most of the time my work consisted of providing reports on athletes, one after another, without any evident rhyme or reason, which Pavlov’s IT expert would tirelessly key into his computer.
There was, however, something else I used to do for him. Most of the Moscow gangsters’ girls were nightclub hostesses or striptease artists, actresses or wannabes. No surprises there; that’s the way it’s always been. But Pavlov’s taste in women was for athletes: long jumpers, sprinters, middle-distance runners, triple jumpers . . . he fell in love with the occasional javelin thrower, but his real favorites were the high jumpers. He said they were like gazelles, ideal women, and he wasn’t wrong. I was the one who organized it all. I went to the training camps and set up dates for him. Some of the girls were delighted at the prospect of spending a weekend with Misha Pavlov, poor things, but others, most of them, weren’t. Still, I always got him the girls he wanted, even if it meant spending my own money or resorting to threats. And so it happened that one afternoon he told me he wanted Natalia Mijailovna Chuikova, an eighteen-year-old from the Volgograd region, who had just arrived n Moscow, hoping to get a place on the Olympic team. I don’t know what it was exactly, but right from the start I realized that there was something different in the way Pavlov was talking about this Chuikova girl. When he told me to get her, he was with two of his buddies, and they winked at me as if to say: Make sure you do exactly what he’s telling you, Roger Strada, because this time Billy the Kid is serious.
Two days later I got to talk to Natalia Chuikova. It was at the Spartanovka indoor track, on the Boulevard of Sport, at nine a.m., and I’m definitely not a morning person, but it was the only time I could meet her there. First I saw her in the distance: she was about to start running to the high jump, and she was concentrating, clenching her fists and looking up, as if she was praying or watching for an angel. Then I went over to her and introduced myself. Roger Strada? she said, So you must be Italian. I didn’t have the courage to destroy her illusions altogether: I said I was Chilean and that there were lots of Italians in Chile. She was five-foot-ten and can’t have weighed more than 120 pounds. She had long brown hair, and her simple ponytail gathered all the grace in the world. Her eyes were almost jet black and she had, I swear, the longest, most beautiful legs I have ever seen.
I couldn’t bring myself to tell her the reason for my visit. I bought her a Pepsi, told her I liked her technique and left. That night I didn’t know what I was going to say to Pavlov, what lie I was going to invent. In the end I decided to keep it simple. I said we’d have to give Natalia Chuikova a little time, she wasn’t like his usual kind of girl. Misha looked at me with that face of his, somewhere between a seal and a spoiled child, and said OK, I’ll give you three days. When Misha gave you three days, you had to fix it in three days, not one day more. So I spent a few hours thinking it over, asking myself what my problem was, what was holding me back, and eventually I decided to settle the matter as quickly as possible. Very early the next morning, I saw Natalia again. I was one of the first to arrive at the track. I spent a lo
ng time watching the athletes coming and going, all half asleep like me, chatting and arguing, though all I could hear of their voices was a senseless murmur, or shouts in an incomprehensible Russian, as if I’d forgotten the language, until Natalia appeared in the group and started doing warm-up exercises. Her trainer was taking notes in a little book. There were two other high jumpers talking with her. Sometimes they laughed. Sometimes, after jumping, they’d sit down and put on blue and red tracksuits, which they soon took off again. Sometimes they drank water. After half an hour of happiness I realized I was in love. It was the first time it had happened to me. Before that, I’d loved a couple of whores. I’d treated them wrong, or right, it didn’t matter. Now I was really in love. I spoke to her. I explained the situation with Misha Pavlov, who he was, what he wanted. Natalia was shocked, then she thought it was funny. She agreed to see him, against my advice. I made the date for as late as I could. In the meantime, I took her to see a Bruce Willis movie—he was one of her favorite actors—and then to dinner at a good restaurant. We talked and talked. Her life, with its hardships and disappointments, was a model of perseverance and willpower, just the opposite of mine. Her tastes were simple; it was happiness she wanted, not wealth. Her attitude to sex, which is what I was really hoping to get out of her, was broad-minded. That depressed me at first: I thought Natalia would be easy game for Pavlov, I imagined her sleeping with all his bodyguards, one by one, and I couldn’t bear the thought of it. But then I understood that Natalia was talking about a kind of sexuality that I just didn’t understand (and still don’t), and it didn’t mean she had to go to bed with all the gang. I also understood that in spite of everything, I had to protect her.