Cowboy Graves by Roberto Bolaño

Author:Roberto Bolaño [Bolaño, Roberto]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

FATHERLAND

Fatherland

My father was a boxing champion: the bravest, the fiercest, the smartest, the best . . .

When he gave up boxing, Police Commissioner Carner of Concepción offered him a job in Investigations. My father laughed and said no, where the hell did he get an idea like that. The chief replied that he could smell an officer of the law from a distance. His nose never failed him. My father said he didn’t give a shit for the law and also, no offense, he didn’t see himself as a freeloader. I like to work, he said, don’t take it the wrong way. The chief realized that my father might be drunk but he was serious. No offense taken, he said, it’s just strange, because I can smell a cop ten miles off. The good kind, of course. Don’t give me that shit, Carner, what you want is a heavyweight to beat up purse snatchers, said my father. Never, said the commissioner, I’m a modern lawman. Modern or not, Carner read the Rosicrucians and he was a follower (in a casual way) of John William Burr, the now-forgotten promoter of metempsychosis. At home, we still have pamphlets by Burr, published by El Círculo in Valparaiso and the Gustavo Peña Association in Lima, which my father, predictably, never read.

As far as I can remember, my father only read the sports news. He had an album of clippings and pictures that he meticulously maintained, tracking his pugilistic journey from the ranks of amateur boxing to the bronze belt in the South American heavyweight championships. (He also liked football and horse races and tejo—the Columbian version of lawn bowls, played with explosives—and cocaine and swimming and cowboy movies . . .)

My father never joined the police force, of course. When he retired, he opened a soda fountain and married my mother, who was three months pregnant. Soon after, I was born, the poet of the family.

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