Bolaño in Girona: A Friendship

I have written about this before, but I want to tell the story again. It happened, I figure, around 1981 or ’82, outside the doors of the Bistrot, a bar in the historic center of Girona, Spain. I was walking up to the university with my classmate Xavier Coromina when he stopped to say hi to a guy who was a bit older than us, looked like a hippie peddler, and had a Latin American accent, Mexican or Argentine or Chilean (back then I was unable to distinguish one from the other). They talked. At some point Coromina asked the guy how things were going with the novel he was writing. He made a skeptical face and answered: “It’s going, it’s going, but who knows where it’s really headed.” That was it, and the phrase remained etched in my mind, maybe because, although secretly I wanted to be a writer, at nineteen I had yet to summon up the courage to admit it, and I was impressed by how naturally that guy—the first real or pretend novelist I’d ever crossed paths with in my life—spoke of his projected novel. Of course, I was sure I would never hear of him again, that he would never be a proper novelist or would only be one of so many Latin American novelists of his generation, thwarted by displacement, bohemianism, and poverty, but seven or eight years later, while I was writing my second novel in the United States, I included a scene in which one character asks another how his doctoral thesis is going, and the other one answers, “It’s going, it’s going, but who knows where it’s really headed.”

Time passes, and now the gap is not seven or eight years but fifteen or sixteen. We are in December of 1997. I’m living in Barcelona, but I’ve gone to Girona to write an article for El País about an exhibition of work by a childhood friend, David Sanmiguel. At the same time as the opening, in Llibreria 22—right across the street from the art gallery—Ponç Puigdevall is presenting the book Last Evenings on Earth, by Roberto Bolaño. By now, Bolaño has in quick succession published Nazi Literature in the Americas and Distant Star, and his name is beginning to resonate in certain literary circles. But I, who am totally outside these circles despite having published three novels, have not yet read him, and have heard of him only from Enrique Vila-Matas, who is a mutual friend. Before the exhibition opens, I have a coffee with Bolaño and Puigdevall. Bolaño tells me he lives in Blanes, that all he does is write, that he makes a living—“a very modest one,” he emphasizes—through literature. Suddenly, while listening to him talk, I have a hunch. I ask Bolaño if he was living in Girona in the early eighties; he says he was. I ask him if he knew Xavier Coromina; he says yes. Then I tell him of our fleeting encounter outside the Bistrot and, once inside the Llibreria 22, I show him the passage in my second novel where a character says his thesis is going, but who knows where it’s really headed. Bolaño laughs; I laugh too.

That evening ends at five in the morning, after I spend the night yelling “Viva Bolaño!” as if trying to shout from the rooftops that, against all odds, the hippie peddler I’d met at nineteen had not been thwarted but had become a real writer. A few days later a copy of Distant Star arrives at my house; Bolaño had sent it. On one of the blank pages before the title page he had written some overly generous words about my second novel; they ended with: “Viva Cercas!”

Our friendship lasted three and a half years and one day, or one night. It was not a long friendship, but it was an intense one. We saw each other often, in Barcelona or in Girona or in Blanes, in public places or at my house or at his house or at friends’ houses, alone or with our families or with A. G. Porta or Vila-Matas and their wives. That said, we talked on the phone much more often than we saw each other. And how we talked on the phone, God Almighty! At first, when I still lived in Barcelona, we spoke only occasionally, but when I moved back to Girona, we called each other daily. The truth is we seemed like boyfriends. Our phone calls were normally nocturnal, conversations that went on for hours and were mostly about literature, or the literary life, which for Bolaño was almost as interesting as literature, inasmuch as it was the fuel for his own literature. This could seem strange, but it was not: when I met him, Bolaño was a perfect outsider, and although the success of his final years led him to spend time with well-known writers and critics, I think in his way he carried on being an outsider to the end. After all, only an outsider can discuss the literary community with the humor and ferocity with which Bolaño did. He loved talking about his literary friends, very few according to him, and also his enemies, so many according to him, and he even loved inventing enemies for me, who didn’t have any. (In 1997, an anthology was published in Spain called The Yellow Pages, which, as its name suggests, featured practically every Spanish fiction writer of my generation; all except me, and Bolaño preferred to attribute my absence from those pages to an imaginary sinister corruption rather than the verifiable fact that, back then, he and my mother were practically the only people who read my books.) Whatever the case, I have a lot of precise memories of those telephone conversations. I remember conversations about terrible writers and conversations about wonderful writers. I remember conversations about Julio Cortázar, about Nicanor Parra, about Adolfo Bioy Casares, Juan Carlos Onetti, and Juan Rulfo. I have a very clear memory of a conversation about Malcolm Lowry and Louis-Ferdinand Céline, from which the former came out unexpectedly better than the latter, because—this was the conclusion Bolaño reached, or we reached—he wanted to escape from hell, while the other felt comfortable there. I remember long conversations about English- and French-language poets, about Eliot and Baudelaire, and about North American fiction writers, about Poe, Hemingway, Philip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut, and John Irving, who he didn’t like but I did. I remember endless conversations about Borges that almost always ended with Bolaño’s laughter as we recited those memorable lines from Carlos Argentino Daneri’s topographical epic:

Know ye. To the right of the routinary post
(Coming, of course, from the North-northwest)
One wearies out a skeleton—Color? White-celeste—
Which gives the sheep run an ossuary cast.

I also remember him talking to me about the structure of 2666 and a novel about bullfighters that he never finished (as far as I know), and which, he said, would be called Corrida. I remember him reading me a long poem about his father, which I don’t think I’ve read in any of his books. I don’t remember, however, him talking to me about his illness (in fact, I don’t remember him talking about that with anybody, except for my sister Blanca, who suffered from a similar illness), but I remember very well that on the early morning of November 22, 2000, after we’d been talking for a long time, the phone rang and it was him again. He’d just seen on television that the Basque separatist group ETA had killed Ernest Lluch, and, shocked, called me to talk about that news, which prolonged our conversation until two or three in the morning.

Of course, I remember him talking about what I was writing, or what I was trying to write. Earlier I mentioned, in passing, Bolaño’s generosity; at least as far as I’m concerned, that word comes up short. From 1997 to 2001, while Bolaño was writing his great books at an unstoppable rhythm—the rhythm of a man slugging it out in a struggle against death—and winning a reputation as a great writer in the Spanish-speaking world (though still incomparable to what was to come all over the world after his death), I was going through a hard time. I had moved back to Girona and for some reason was sure that, despite having desired it forever, I would now never be a real writer. Bolaño did everything possible to convince me I was wrong: first, he published a column in Diari de Girona in which he claimed that I had returned to Girona to write the great books I had inside me (I knew that Bolaño knew that was false, or I thought I knew, but that only added value to his gesture); then he became my constant supporter, a permanent source of encouragement, a persuasion machine determined to get it into my head that, as much as I felt like a failure, I was a real writer, and that only by writing could I achieve some form of personal fulfillment. I admired Bolaño for his books, but I admired him even more for his attitude, for the furious radicalism with which, ever since he was a teenager, he had taken on his vocation as a writer; for my part, I had the impression (or certainty) of not having done so, of having gone around looking for subterfuges and excuses, of having delayed my obligation. Bolaño reminded me of it, made me face it, assured me there was still time. I don’t know if I ever managed to thank him enough.

It is true, at least, that I tried. To thank him, I mean. In Soldiers of Salamis, a book I published in 2001, there is a character who, although of course not the real Roberto Bolaño (as the real Roberto Bolaño took care to remind readers in one of the first articles ever written about that book), is an attempt to portray the profound affection I felt for Bolaño and the friendship that connected us. Surprisingly, not everyone has interpreted it that way, and there have even been those who claim that Bolaño was annoyed by the fictional portrait I made of him. It’s not true, and the best proof I have that it’s not true is the aforementioned article. But it is true that, shortly after the publication of Soldiers of Salamis, Bolaño and I grew apart. Nobody was to blame, or if somebody was, it was me, or rather the cause was simply what Jaime Gil de Biedma calls “the writer’s brittleness.” The truth is that Bolaño and I stopped speaking to each other.

That silence lasted almost two years, until that day or night arrived—that’s to say, the final night or day of the three and a half years and one night or one day that our friendship lasted. It happened at the end of June or the beginning of July 2003. That Sunday afternoon I’d had lunch with my family out in the countryside. In two days I would be leaving for a trip to Mexico, and during lunch, I don’t know why, my wife brought up Bolaño; she talked about him the way she always had, almost as if he were a member of the family, and I suddenly realized how totally absurd our rift was. So, as soon as I got home, I called my friend in Blanes, told him I thought it was idiotic that we hadn’t spoken for two years, suggested we see each other. I don’t think Bolaño even paused to consider his reply. “Come over right now,” he said immediately.

That’s how we saw each other for the last time. We arranged to meet at a patio bar on the Blanes promenade, facing the sea, and we sat there talking until we got hungry and then went to a Chinese restaurant where we’d eaten more than once before. Bolaño seemed sad or tired, although the euphoria of the reunion meant that I took too long to notice; at some point he told me he’d stopped writing, but I suspect I didn’t believe him, or didn’t want to or wasn’t able to believe him, undoubtedly because I was unable to imagine Bolaño not writing. When we left the restaurant, it was way past midnight. We wandered around looking for an open bar but didn’t find any and eventually ended up at his new place, a desolate, half-empty apartment with white walls, where he told me he was living alone, although, he also told me, he still saw his wife and kids in the house they’d always lived in, on Carrer Ample. I barely remember anything about that apartment, except that we were there for a long time and that there was a copy of Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon in the bathroom, open to a page on Pablo Neruda. I also remember that around four or five in the morning, when I said I had to get going, he said it was very late and asked why I didn’t just stay and sleep at his place. I said I couldn’t, that my wife would be worried if she woke up in the morning and I wasn’t home. To my surprise, Bolaño insisted several times that I should stay. I didn’t let him convince me.

In the end he walked me back to the parking lot by the promenade, where I’d left my car. By this time I had a strange sensation, as if I could tell that my friend didn’t want to go to sleep and was thinking of staying awake all night, overwhelmed by his sadness and his exhaustion. I drove him back home, and we said goodbye as we had so many times, or that’s how it seemed to me. Before he got out of the car, I told him I’d call as soon as I got back from Mexico. He nodded, but all he said was, “Take care of yourself, Javier.”

I didn’t have time to call him again, or to see him again. Bolaño died a couple of days after I got back from Mexico. Weeks later, his wife, Carolina, told me it was true that in his last months Bolaño wasn’t writing anymore, that he didn’t have the energy, that he sensed the end was near; she also told me that that night, the last time I saw him, Bolaño had ended up sleeping at home on Carrer Ample, with his children and with her. It was the best place he could have spent the night, but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t regretted ever since not understanding his insistence, and not having kept him company in his sorrow to the end.

Javier Cercas, the author of Soldiers of Salamis, Anatomy of a Moment, and many other works of fiction and nonfiction, was interviewed in the Fall issue of The Paris Review. 

This essay was translated from Spanish by Anne McLean. She has been translating Javier Cercas, and other Spanish and Latin American authors, since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Most recently, she translated Until August by Gabriel García Márquez.

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