Roberto Bolano (7 page)

EA:
Your family left for Mexico when you were fifteen-years old. Why?

RB:
Basically, my mother had been to Mexico a couple of times and was familiar with the country and she convinced my father. My mother has always been an anxious person. She convinced my father that the best thing to do was to leave Chile and to go to Mexico. My parents were always separating and getting back together. Their relationship was stormy throughout my childhood and in a way Mexico was a small paradise, a place where they could start over. It was fun for them at first, although no fun at all for me. On the first day of school in Mexico, some guy challenged me to a fight just because I happened to be Chilean; we hadn’t said a word to each other. He was a Mexican kid who didn’t know how to fight very well and was short besides. I was certain that with two punches I could knock him to the ground, but I realized that if I knocked him down all the others would come after me and that’s when I got smart: I grasped the situation in the act,
and I directed the fight to a tie. I came off very well and he made good friends with me and no one ever wanted to fight me again. It was like a baptism in Aztec thought, quite disagreeable, but I realized where the shots were heading and the underlying message of the fight.

EA:
Mexico was as dynamic as Chile was on its way to being when you arrived.

RB:
Mexico was of a different dynamism. Look, in that era, Mexico City had 14 million inhabitants and it was a separate planet, it was the city where everything was possible. For me, because I came from a small town in Chile, a southern town besides, I exchanged a small town for a metropolis. I was never a resident of Santiago; I was born in Santiago, but I never lived in Santiago. I knew Santiago only from visiting.

EA:
What were the strongest differences? The ones that cost you the most to get used to.

RB:
Very few. Mexicans are really very hospitable. Since I was only fifteen-years old, I quickly Mexicanized myself. I felt totally Mexican. I never felt like a stranger in Mexico, except for that first day in school. There wasn’t anything I had trouble getting used to.

EA:
How did you arrive at Trotskyism?

RB:
Just by being a contrarian I think. I did not like the priestly, clerical unanimity of the Communists. I’ve always been a leftist and I wasn’t going to turn right just because I didn’t like the Communist clergymen, so I became a Trotskyite. The problem is, once among the Trotskyites, I didn’t like their clerical unanimity either, so I ended up being an anarchist. I was the only anarchist I knew and thank God, because otherwise I would have stopped being an anarchist. Unanimity pisses me off immensely. Whenever I realize that the whole world agrees on something, whenever I see that the whole world is cursing something in chorus, something rises to the surface of my skin that makes me reject it. They’re probably infantile traumas. I don’t see it as something that makes me proud.

EA:
That’s curious, because from what you’re saying, unanimity is what was missing from your home.

RB:
There was never any unanimity in my home. Not ever.

EA:
How did you see the experiment with the socialism of the Chilean way?

RB:
When I returned to Chile, shortly before the
coup, I believed in armed resistance, I believed in permanent revolution. I believed it existed then. I came back ready to fight in Chile and to continue fighting in Peru, in Bolivia.

EA:
Allende must have seemed like a conservative grandpa to you guys.

RB:
To us, in those years, Allende was a conservative. What happened is that his figure, in what concerns me, has changed vastly over time. I remember September 11, 1973: in one moment, I’m waiting to receive weapons to go and fight and I hear Allende say, in his speech no less, “Go forward knowing that, sooner rather than later, the great avenues will open again and free men will walk through them to construct a better society.” In that moment, it seemed terrible to me, almost like a betrayal committed by Allende against those of us young people who were willing to fight for him. With time, that’s one of the things that has ennobled Allende: saving us from death, accepting death for himself but saving us from it. I think that has made him huge in an immense way.

EA:
But they detained you.

RB:
I was detained, but a month and a half later in the south. The other thing happened in Santiago.

EA:
And friends from school helped you escape.

RB:
Friends from high school. I was detained for eight days, although a little while ago in Italy, I was asked, “What happened to you? Can you tell us a little about your half a year in prison?” That’s due to a misunderstanding in a German book where they had me in prison for half a year. At first they sentenced me to less time. It’s the typical Latin American tango. In the first book edited for me in Germany, they give me one month in prison; in the second book—seeing that the first one hadn’t sold so well—they raise it to three months; in the third book I’m up to four months; in the fourth book it’s five. The way it’s going, I should still be a prisoner now.

EA:
Did you have doubts about being able to make a living as a writer?

RB:
I had many doubts. In fact I worked at other things. Economic doubts for many years, always economic; never vocational. What interested me, at twenty years old, more than writing poetry, because I also wrote poetry (in reality, I only wrote poetry), what I wanted was to live like a poet, even though today I wouldn’t be able to specify what it meant to me to live like a poet. Anyway my basic interest was to live like a poet. For me, being a poet meant being revolutionary and completely open to all cultural manifestations, all sexual expressions, in the end, being open to every
experience with drugs. Tolerance meant—much more than tolerance, a word we didn’t much like—universal brotherhood, something totally utopian.

EA:
Doesn’t prose make that sensibility more profound?

RB:
Prose has always demanded more work. We were against work. Among other things, we were tirelessly lazy. There wasn’t a single person who could make us work. I worked only when I didn’t have any other choice. Also, we accepted living life with very little. We were complete Spartans, with meager means, but at the same time we were Athenians and sodomites enjoying all aspects of life, poor but luxurious. This was all related to the hippies, the North American model, May of ’68 in Europe, to many things in the end.

EA:
Do you owe your sentimental education to Mexico?

RB:
More than anything I owe Mexico my intellectual education. My sentimental education? I owe that more to Spain, I think. When I came to Spain, I was twenty-three or twenty-four years old. I arrived thinking I was already a man—through and through—and that I knew everything there was to know about sex, and for me a sentimental education is almost synonymous with a sexual education. In reality, I knew nothing, which I quickly realized
with the first girl I met. I knew many positions, but positions are positions and sex is sex.

EA:
It’s one thing to know methodology—

RB:
Exactly. My sentimental education begins at age twenty-three in Europe.

EA:
Have you not wanted to return to Mexico for fear of finding a completely different country from the one you left and having lost your connection?

RB:
Yes, that’s true. But it’s also true that, although I’ve traveled a lot, I don’t recognize many countries from afar, and between getting to know a new country and returning to Mexico, a country I love but which is swarmed by ghosts, among them the ghost of my dead best friend, and where I believe I would have a very bad time, I prefer to go to other places. I’ve gotten too comfortable to go around choosing to spend a bad time in a particular place. I used to love to go to places where I knew I’d have a bad time. But, now, for what?

EA:
Were you an anarchist when you arrived in Spain?

RB:
Yes. I found many fellow anarchists and I started to cease being one myself. How did it occur to them? What kind of anarchy was that?

EA:
In Spain, the people were coming out from under a dictatorship, and they had the power.

RB:
Yes. The trouble is that in Barcelona I didn’t just find Catalan people, who I found to be magnificent, but also people from everywhere in Spain and Europe and South America too. There were people who had come from all over the world, above all from the West, to understand us. One lived very well. There was work. In 1977 and ’78 there were jobs that paid very little but that allowed you to subsist. State pressures had started to relax. Spain had begun to be a democratic country and there were wide margins of liberty. For a foreigner like me, that was a gift for which I will endlessly be grateful.

EA:
Did you already believe that Chilean literature revolved around Pablo Neruda?

RB:
I thought that even before. The problem is that this isn’t exactly how it is. For me, Chile’s great poet is Nicanor Parra and after Nicanor Parra there are several others. Neruda is one of them, without a doubt. Neruda is what I pretended to be at age twenty: living like a poet without writing. Neruda wrote three very good books; the rest—the great majority—are very bad, some truly infected. But he already lived like a poet and not just like a poet: he performed like a sun poet, like a poet king.

EA:
The thing that happened with Neruda—the type of man who appeared to be against the establishment but then lives off the state—hasn’t that happened with many Mexican writers? Let’s use
Octavio Paz
and
Carlos Fuentes
as examples.

RB:
It’s because in literature, the only country where this doesn’t happen, at least from what I can tell, is Argentina. What happens in Mexico happens in all of the other countries in Latin America; in Chile a little bit less but it happens there as well. In Argentina, there is a level of professionalism expected of writers and that the state tries to ignore, but in other countries it is asked of writers that they be independent yet also that they charge the state, which reminds one of a phrase from Mexico’s President Echeverría, who said, “neither to the right, nor to the left, nor in a static center, but onward and upward.” If the writer can’t ask the state for money, he gets mad and will protest the lack of help using his platform like the profoundly independent writer that he is. Besides, that type of direct help translates into all kinds of cultural advances, including jobs.

EA:
Are you more on the side of the Mexicanness of Paz or the universalism of Fuentes?

RB:
I think Octavio Paz is more universal. The truth is, until the moment I lived in Mexico, Fuentes and
Paz were, as one would say in Spain,
“a partir un piñon,”
intimate friends. One was the tsar and the other the tsarevitch; they were very fond of one another. I would guess that Fuentes even loved Paz, if it’s possible for Fuentes to love someone, which is another topic; and Paz probably loved Fuentes, if Paz has ever loved anyone, which is again another topic. Evidently, I don’t side with either of them.

EA:
This thing with intellectuals saying things to one another, it’s quite Mexican.

RB:
It depends on what’s being said. Yes, it’s not unusual in Mexico. Intellectual life—artistic life—in Mexico is very active, as are all aspects of life in Mexico. Mexico is a tremendously vital country, despite the fact that, paradoxically, it’s the country where death is the most present. Perhaps being that vital is what keeps death so close. I feel as distant from Fuentes as I do from Paz. I recognize the writer in Paz, above all, in his essays. He is more interesting as a prose writer than Fuentes is as a prose writer. As a poet, there are four poems by Paz that I could still reread without losing interest, there’s even one I still like a lot. The truth is, in general, Mexican poetry tends toward pride, toward starchiness, although there are notable exceptions evidently. There is Mexican poetry I like very much. I like
López Velarde
a lot, I like
Tablada;
among the modern writers I like Mario Santiago, who was my friend. But, look, back to your question, if I had to sit near one of them, I’d sit closer to Octavio Paz than to Fuentes.