Cowboy Graves: Three Novellas

AFTERWORD: PERPETUAL MOTION Juan Antonio Masoliver Ródenas

To speak of Roberto Bolaño’s novels and stories as fragmentary—I’ve done so myself, I admit—is inexact, since each fragment relies on a whole in constant motion, on a genuine process of creation that at the same time is the consolidation of a universe. And precisely because these fragments (like Bolaño’s characters) are in constant motion and because they always lead us back to the larger body of his work, we must speak of puzzle pieces rather than fragments. Like a painter in his studio, Bolaño works simultaneously on several pieces, and if he abandons one to begin another, he never forgets what’s come before. Each new book is therefore very familiar to us, with characters or situations that we’ve previously encountered; proof that they are in no way abandoned or forgotten. Bolaño, in his itinerant writing, is more interested in the journey than its conclusion. We’re still inheritors of the nineteenth-century or traditional novel, which demanded linear exposition with an unambiguous ending, as if everything in life had a denouement or anticlimax. In Bolaño, the future is utopian. What interests him is the intimate relationship between the present and a past seen not as nostalgic, but as part of a unique time, transformed into the immediate moment.

Which leads us to another signature aspect of his writing: this is fiction with a marked biographical element. By following the meticulously recorded dates, we can reconstruct Bolaño’s own story: his birth in Chile in 1953; his residence in Mexico from 1968 to 1977, the year he moved to Barcelona; his trip to Chile in 1973 to support the government of Salvador Allende; his diagnosis of liver disease in 1992, which would set the rhythm for his writing until his death in 2003. Hence the succession of unpublished books, among them 2666, perhaps Bolaño’s most powerful work (though less accessible than The Savage Detectives, which is also masterful). The books Bolaño reads figure into his biography, too. As in the case of Enrique Vila-Matas, they form an integral part of the writer’s narrative essence. And as in the work of Vila-Matas, in this biography it’s the character rather than the author who’s the most interesting figure: the ubiquitous Arturo Belano.

All of these traits are present in Cowboy Graves, a disconcerting book even within the disconcerting Bolañoesque universe. As always, there’s no point in trying to decide whether we’re faced with three independent sections or a work with the unity of a novel. In the first section, which lends its title to the volume, there is a story—“The Grub”—that also appears in the story collection Last Evenings on Earth, with some significant changes, evidence that Bolaño never relinquished his texts. As in Distant Star, or, implicitly, in Between Parentheses, there are frequent references to Gabriela Mistral, Nicanor Parra, Pablo de Rokha, and Pablo Neruda, mystery player in By Night in Chile. The second section, “French Comedy of Horrors,” the most structurally immediate, displays a special ability to carry us smoothly through a series of unfolding events, with more narrative tension and a much more marked narrative integrity. And “Fatherland,” the final section, consists of twenty texts. It offers the greatest diversity, and nevertheless there are strong links among the texts, as well as to other stories or novels: the Messerschmitt, the Third Reich plane that was the crown jewel of the Luftwaffe, with its pilot Hans Marseille or Lieutenant Ramírez Hoffman, from Distant Star.

The dating of the three sections is significant. “Cowboy Graves” and “Fatherland” were written in the 1990s and “French Comedy of Horrors” in 2002–2003, thus concurrently with other books, which underscores the simultaneity that I’ve noted. The dominant geographic space is Concepción, but of special interest is the dichotomy or juxtaposition of Chile and Mexico, “my new country.” In Chile, in addition to Concepción, we visit Santiago and places familiar to readers of Neruda, like Bío-Bío or the province of Temuco. In Mexico, the province of Sonora—home to Santa Teresa, dramatically immortalized in 2666—merits special attention. Another significant moment in Bolaño’s biography is the military coup to topple Allende, which looms over the whole book as the source of the violence present in most of the texts.

Bolaño’s biography is literary, too, not just because of the books he read, but because many of his stories feature poet protagonists. The apotheosis of this is reached in “French Comedy of Horrors,” in which young Diodorus Pilon, unpublished poet, receives a mysterious phone call. Thus begins an outrageous conversation in a story full of surprises. There is a clear homage to surrealism, especially in the hilarious scene in which Breton leads his young followers into the sewers of Paris—an upside-down Paris—and founds the Clandestine Surrealist Group, which inevitably reminds us of the Infrarealists with Bolaño at their head, as well as of The Unknown University (also posthumous), and, of course, The Savage Detectives. And it is startling that, at a certain moment, mention is made of the “overvalued paintbrush of Roberto Antonio Matta,” which was such an inspiration to the group, at least early on. The statement exemplifies Bolaño’s frequent ambiguity, which reaches its zenith in the portrayal of Neruda in By Night in Chile.

This ambiguity is heightened by Bolaño’s frequent inconsistencies. Regarding characters, for example, we have Arturo Belano, who is later Rigoberto Belano; Iván Cherniakovski, who here appears as a poet; and Dr. (Mrs.) Amalfitano, presumed author of The Chaste Secrets, whose last name appears in a very different context in 2666 and also in Woes of the True Policeman. The lapses create a strange sensation, like the inconsistencies of the chroniclers of Don Quixote, Cide Hamete Benengeli included. It’s as if Bolaño weren’t in control of his stories. First, he isn’t sure whether he’s Chilean or Mexican (though all of his work is at once Chilean and Mexican); he doesn’t know how to interpret his mother’s words; his memories are always confused (“what happened next is hazy”). The effect is to leave the reader up in the air or to oblige him to invent things for himself. These inconsistencies paradoxically give the narrator greater freedom, permitting him to take all kinds of liberties and break with the logic of nineteenth-century tradition, a rebellious gesture in evidence in “Fatherland,” when the protagonist’s father—supposing that there are real protagonists or a hierarchy of characters—refuses to work for Commissioner Carner because “he [doesn’t] give a shit for the law.”

These liberties generally involve the interjection of strange or unexpected remarks, departing from the “normality” of the story. It’s the same freedom that poets are permitted. “Urns plain and simple: the flowerpots of hell”; beggars who wear Ray-Bans; Fernando screamed terrible screams and “he seemed to be asking for water. He seemed to be calling cattle. He seemed to be whistling a song”; “a guy in a sweater that looked like it was knit out of hair”; or “my college future was as bleak as a hopeless old bolero.” This freedom is rooted in humor and is never gratuitous, never a simple demonstration of brilliance. So too the frequent manifestations of horror, testament to an era and omnipresent in Latin America: like the net of traffickers who send children off to the slaughterhouse and who remind us of the women killed in Santa Teresa in 2666; or the natives of Villaviciosa who “[work] as hired killers and bodyguards.” In “Cowboy Graves”—the title is significant—this violence reaches its maximum expression in the military coup against Allende and the recurrent presence of the Nazis, inevitably taking us back to Nazi Literature in the Americas.

I won’t note here the succession of brilliant scenes and stories throughout the book, because the reader needs no guidance in that regard. Nor have I paused to point out the obvious differences between the three sections or to mention individual titles. The reason is very simple: I’m interested in highlighting the story dynamic, the narrative arc that leads nowhere—or rather, that leads to the whole of Bolaño’s oeuvre. Any attempt to bring order to chaos or to impose a logic having little to do with his own conception of his writing would be to diminish and even distort the aims of his project. In any case, the book—consisting of texts at once reliant on and independent of any idea of a whole—is full of allusions to this radical break. The protagonist of “The Grub,” like those of so many other stories, “devoted the first half of the morning to books and walking around and the second half to movies and sex.” In “The Trip,” we are told that the science fiction tale about the invasion of extraterrestrial ants is unfinished. But it is in “French Comedy of Horrors,” the most dementedly “bookish,” where the writer’s bold vision of writing is summed up: “It’s a novel (like all novels, really) that doesn’t begin in the novel, in the book-object that contains it, understand? Its first pages are in some other book.” Some other book by Bolaño himself or by the writers he mentions; his fellow travelers—because this is a trip we’re talking about. Suffice it to say that unbounded imagination, intensity of feeling, incisive criticism, feverish activity, and strange characters make Cowboy Graves a hugely attractive and original book within a Book.