The Return (22 page)

After a while I reached the conclusion that
something was wrong.
If the floor of Lihn’s apartment was glass and so was the
roof of the bar, what about all the stories from the second to the sixth?
Were
they made of glass too?
Then I looked down again and realized that between the
first floor and the seventh floor there was nothing but empty space.
This
discovery distressed me.
Jesus, Lihn, where have you brought me, I thought,
though soon I was thinking, Jesus, Lihn, where have they brought you?
I got to
my feet carefully, because I knew that in that place, as opposed to the normal
world, objects were more fragile than people, and I went looking for Lihn (who
had disappeared) in the various rooms of the apartment, which didn’t seem small
any more, like a European writer’s apartment, but spacious, enormous, like a
writer’s apartment in Chile, in the Third World, with cheap domestic help, and
expensive, fragile objects, an apartment full of shifting shadows and rooms in
semidarkness, in which I found two books, one a classic, like a smooth stone,
the other modern, timeless, like shit, and gradually, as I looked for Lihn, I
too began to grow cold, increasingly manic and cold, I started feeling ill, as
if the apartment were turning on an imaginary axis, but then a door opened and I
saw a swimming pool, and there was Lihn, swimming, and before I could open my
mouth and say something about entropy, Lihn said that the bad thing about his
medicine, the medicine he was taking to keep him alive, was that in a way it was
turning him into a guinea pig for the drug company, words that I somehow
expected to hear, as if the whole thing were a play and I had suddenly
remembered my lines and the lines of my fellow actors, and then Lihn got out of
the swimming pool and we went down to the ground floor, and we made our way
through the crowded bar, and Lihn said: The tigers are finished, and: It was
sweet while it lasted, and: You’re not going to believe this, Bolaño, but in
this neighborhood, only the dead go out for a walk.
And by then we had reached
the front of the bar and were standing at a window, looking at the streets and
the façades of the buildings in that peculiar neighborhood where the only people
out walking were dead.
And we looked and looked, and the façades were clearly
the façades of another time, like the sidewalks covered with parked cars, which
also belonged to another time, a time that was silent yet mobile (Lihn was
watching it move), a terrible time that endured for no reason other than sheer
inertia.

Also by Roberto Bolaño

Available from New Directions

Amulet

Antwerp

Between Parentheses

By Night in Chile

Distant Star

The Insufferable Gaucho

Last Evenings on Earth

Monsieur Pain

Nazi Literature in the Americas

The Return

The Romantic Dogs

The Secret of Evil

The Skating Rink

Tres