Roberto Bolañoâs board games by Patti Smith.
âLooking up from the hole I was perceptually burning, I spotted Ernest talking to JesĂșs, who seemed extremely agitated. Ernest rested his hand on his friendâs shoulder and JesĂșs calmed, crossed himself and abruptly left. Ernest sat down and filled me in. JesĂșs and the blonde were heading to the Greyhound station in downtown Los Angeles, two days and nineteen hours on a bus to Miami, then a rent-a-car to St. Petersburg.
âJesĂșs seemed out of sorts.
âMuriel has a lot of luggage.
âDid you return her lashes? I asked.
âA gull swooped down and took them, most likely theyâre part of a nest.
I avoided his gaze, so as not to catch him in a lie. In my mindâs eye, I could see them quite plainly, without the slightest effort, wrapped in the same blob of tissue atop an old bureau beneath a painting of a lighthouse engulfed in badly executed mist. I noticed the book heâd set on the table, Pascalâs Arithmetical Triangle.
âAre you reading that? I asked.
âYou donât read books like this, you absorb them.
It made perfect sense to me, and I was certain he had a whole line of regressions planned, if only to divert me from the subject of bonfires, but I impulsively threw out my own line, just to shift the angles.
âYou know, I was in Blanes some years back.
He looked at me quizzically: obviously he couldnât sense where I was going with this.
â Yeah. Itâs a sixties-style beach town in Catalonia where Bolaño lived till his death. Itâs where he wrote 2666.
Ernest was suddenly very serious. His love of Roberto Bolaño was something one could almost touch.
âItâs hard to imagine what it must have been like for him, racing toward the finish line. He mastered the capacity that few can attain, like Faulkner or Proust or Stephen King, the ability to write and think simultaneously. The daily practice, he called it.
âThe daily practice, I repeated.
âHe laid it out in the opening pages of The Third Reich. Have you read it?
âI stopped reading midway, it made me uneasy.
âWhy? he said, leaning in. What did you think was going to happen?
âI donât know, something bad, something bred of a misunderstanding about to go out of control, like in The Prince and the Pauper.
âYouâre talking dread.
He glanced at my open notebook.
âDoes your writing evoke that thing? That uneasiness?
âNo. Except for maybe a comic uneasiness.
âThe Third Reich. Itâs just the name of a board game. He was obsessed with them. A game is just a game.
âYeah, I guess. You know, I have seen his games.
Ernest lit up like a pinball machine when everything goes the playerâs way.
âYou have seen them? Bolañoâs games!
âYes, when I was in Blanes, I visited his family. The games were on a shelf in a closet. I took a photograph of them, though maybe I shouldnât have.
âCan I see the picture? he asked.
â Sure, I said. You can have it, but it may take me a while to find it.
He picked up his book, the one with a red and yellow cover heralding the triangle. He said he had somewhere to go, somewhere important. He wrote an address on the back of a napkin. We agreed to meet the following afternoon.
âAnd donât forget the picture.
Te Mana CafĂ© Voltaire Street. two oâclock. I folded the napkin and motioned for another coffee. Unfortunately, I had impulsively promised to give the picture to him in spite of the fact it was somewhere in Manhattan and I hadnât the slightest notion where I had put it, what book I may have slipped it into, or what archival box I may have tossed it in, among hundreds of inconsequential shots. Black-and-white Polaroids of streets and architecture and the façades of hotels I thought I would always remember yet now were impossible to identify.
I didnât tell Ernest, but in truth, Iâd had a sick feeling having accidently encountered Bolañoâs games. Not bad sick but time-fracture sick. The closet shelf had contained a world of energy, the concentration once invested in those stacks of games still potent, manifesting as a hyper-objectified sense, observing every move I made.â
âfrom Year of the Monkey, by Patti Smith
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