The Savage Detectives: A Novel by Roberto Bolaño

Author:Roberto Bolaño
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2013-07-09T04:00:00+00:00

María Font, Calle Montes, near the Monumento a la Revolución, Mexico City DF, February 1981. When Ulises came back to Mexico, I had just moved in here. I was in love with a guy who taught high school math. Things between us had been rocky at first because he was married and I thought he would never leave his wife, but one day he called me at my parents’ house and told me to find a place where we could live together. He couldn’t stand his wife anymore and they were about to separate. He was married and had two children, and he said his wife used the children to blackmail him. The conversation we had wasn’t especially reassuring—in fact quite the contrary—but the next morning I really did start looking for a place where the two of us could live, even if it was only temporary.

Of course, money was a problem. He had his salary but he had to keep paying rent on the house where his children lived and contribute money each month to pay for their keep, tuition, etc. And I didn’t have a job and all I could count on was an allowance that one of my mother’s sisters was giving me to finish my studies in dance and painting. So I had to dip into my savings, borrow from my mother, and not look for anything too expensive. After three days, Xóchitl told me that there was a vacant room in the hotel where she and Requena lived. I moved in right away.

The room was big, with a bathroom and a kitchen, and it was right above Xóchitl and Requena’s room.

That very night the math teacher came to see me and we made love until dawn. The next day, however, he didn’t show up, and even when I tried calling him a few times at school, I couldn’t reach him. Two days later I saw him again and I accepted all the explanations he was willing to give me. That was more or less how things went during the first and then the second week of my new life on Calle Montes. The math teacher would show up every four days, more or less, and we would be together until dawn and the start of a new workday. Then he would disappear.

Naturally, we didn’t only make love. We talked too. He would tell me things about his children. Once, talking to me about the littlest girl, he started to cry, and finally he said that he didn’t understand any of it. What’s to understand? I said. He looked at me as if I’d said something idiotic, as if I were too young to know what he meant, and didn’t answer. Otherwise, my life was more or less the same as it had always been. I went to class, found a (miserably paid) job as a proofreader at a publishing house, saw my friends, and took long walks around the city. Xóchitl and I grew closer, in large part because we were now neighbors.

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