Amulet (15 page)

So the ghost-children marched down the valley and fell into the abyss. Their passage was brief. And their ghost-song or its echo, which is almost to say the echo of nothingness, went on marching, I could hear it marching on at the same pace, the pace of courage and generosity. A barely audible song, a song of war and love, because although the children were clearly marching to war, the way they marched recalled the superb, theatrical attitudes of love.

But what kind of love could they have known, I wondered when they were gone from the valley, leaving only their song resonating in my ears. The love of their parents, the love of their dogs and cats, the love of their toys, but above all the love, the desire and the pleasure they shared with one another.

And although the song that I heard was about war, about the heroic deeds of a whole generation of young Latin Americans led to sacrifice, I knew that above and beyond all, it was about courage and mirrors, desire and pleasure.

And that song is our amulet.

Bolaño was born in Santiago, the son of a truck driver (who was also a boxer) and a teacher. He and his sister spent their early years in southern and coastal Chile. By his own account he was a skinny, nearsighted and bookish but unpromising child. He was dyslexic, and was often bullied at school, where he felt an outsider.

In 1968 he moved with his family to Mexico City, dropped out of school, worked as a journalist and became active in left-wing political causes.

A key episode in Bolaño's life, mentioned in different forms in several of his works, occurred in 1973, when he left Mexico for Chile to "help build the revolution" by supporting the socialist regime of Salvador Allende. After Augusto Pinochet's coup against Allende, Bolaño was arrested on suspicion of being a terrorist and spent eight days in custody. He was rescued by two former classmates who had become prison guards. Bolaño describes his experience in the story "Dance Card." According to the version of events he provides in this story, he was neither tortured nor killed, as he had expected, but "in the small hours I could hear them torturing others; I couldn't sleep and there was nothing to read except a magazine in English that someone had left behind. The only interesting article in it was about a house that had once belonged to Dylan Thomas… I got out of that hole thanks to a pair of detectives who had been at high school with me in Los Ángeles."

For most of his early adulthood, Bolaño was a vagabond, living at one time or another in Chile, Mexico, El Salvador, France and Spain.

In the 1970s, Bolaño became a Trotskyist and a founding member of
infrarrealismo
, a minor poetic movement. He affectionately parodied aspects of the movement in
The Savage Detectives
.

After an interlude in El Salvador, spent in the company of the poet Roque Dalton and the guerrillas of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, he returned to Mexico, living as a bohemian poet and literary enfant terrible – "a professional provocateur feared at all the publishing houses even though he was a nobody, bursting into literary presentations and readings", his editor, Jorge Herralde, recalled. His erratic behaviour had as much to do with his leftist ideology as with his chaotic (and, possibly, heroin-addicted) lifestyle.

Bolaño moved to Europe in 1977, and finally made his way to Spain, where he married and settled on the Mediterranean coast near Barcelona, working as a dishwasher, a campground custodian, bellhop and garbage collector – working during the day and writing at night. From the early 1980s he lived in the small Catalan beach town of Blanes.

He continued with poetry, before shifting to fiction in his early forties. In an interview Bolaño stated that he made this decision because he felt responsible for the future financial well-being of his family, which he knew he could never secure from the earnings of a poet. This was confirmed by Jorge Herralde, who explained that Bolaño "abandoned his parsimonious beatnik existence" because the birth of his son in 1990 made him "decide that he was responsible for his family's future and that it would be easier to earn a living by writing fiction." However, he continued to think of himself primarily as a poet, and a collection of his verse, spanning 20 years, was published in 2000 under the title
The Romantic Dogs.

Regarding his native country, which he visited just once after going into voluntary exile, Bolaño had conflicted feelings. He was notorious in Chile for his fierce attacks on Isabel Allende and other members of the literary establishment. "He didn't fit into Chile, and the rejection that he experienced left him free to say whatever he wanted, which can be a good thing for a writer", commented the Chilean novelist and playwright Ariel Dorfman.

In 2003, after a long period of declining health, Bolaño died. It has been suggested that he was at one time a heroin addict and that the cause of his death was a liver illness resulting from Hepatitis C, with which he was infected as a result of sharing needles during his "mainlining" days. However, the accuracy of this has been called into question. It is true that he suffered from liver failure and was close to the top of a transplant list at the time of his death.

Six weeks before he died, Bolaño's fellow Latin American novelists hailed him as the most important figure of his generation at an international conference he attended in Seville. Among his closest friends were the novelists Rodrigo Fresán and Enrique Vila-Matas, and Fresán's tribute included the statement that "Roberto emerged as a writer at a time when Latin America no longer believed in utopias, when paradise had become hell, and that sense of monstrousness and waking nightmares and constant flight from something horrid permeates
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and all his work." "His books are political", Fresán also observed, "but in a way that is more personal than militant or demagogic, that is closer to the mystique of the beatniks than the
Boom.
" In Fresán's view he "was one of a kind, a writer who worked without a net, who went all out, with no brakes, and in doing so, created a new way to be a great Latin American writer." Larry Rohter of the New York Times, said "Bolaño joked about the 'posthumous', saying the word 'sounds like the name of a Roman gladiator, one who is undefeated', and he would no doubt be amused to see how his stock has risen now that he is dead."

Bolaño was survived by his Spanish wife and their two children, whom he once called "my only motherland." (In his last interview, published by the Mexican edition of Playboy magazine, Bolaño said he regarded himself as a Latin American, adding that "my only country is my two children and perhaps, though in second place, some moments, streets, faces or books that are in me…") Bolaño named his only son Lautaro, after the Mapuche leader Lautaro, who resisted the Spanish conquest of Chile, as related in the sixteenth-century epic
La araucana
. His other child, a daughter, was named Alexandra.