The strange things Bolaño did

When the Chilean author, Roberto Bolaño, died from liver failure at the young age of 50 in July 2003 he hadn’t even been published in English. However – in Spanish letters – he was already a star, having won the prestigious Rómulo Gallegos Prize in 1999 for his sprawling epic, The Savage Detectives. Since then, his reputation in the Anglophone sphere has increased commensurably with the publication of his works novels, novellas, short stories and poems. Today, he is rightfully seen as an equal to David Foster Wallace, whose similarly elliptical works also chart a new course for the novel in the 21st century. Another, less worthy factor in the explosion of interest in Bolaño’s work has been caused by his itinerant, beatnik lifestyle the details of which he often used as a rich source of material for his tales. As a result, there is a tendency amongst some critics to read his work as a way of solving the ‘mystery’ of who the ‘real’ Bolaño was, much to the detriment of his fiction.  As such, the appearance of Spanish journalist Mónica Maristain’s book, Bolaño: A Biography in Conversation, is timely. Dealing with his youth spent between Chile and Mexico, his return to his home country in 1973 to help “build the revolution” under Salvdore Allende, his flight following the coup led by Augustus Pinochet, and his subsequent life in Spain, it helps dispel the myths surrounding Bolaño’s life, and puts the focus back where it should be – on his novels. 

‘Bolaño’ Did Some Very Strange Things’

Jaime Rivera moves his arms when he speaks. It looks as though he’s dancing. He’s over sixty but all his energy is condensed into almost adolescent gestures, as if he were standing at the entrance to a club, trying to invite everyone passing by to the party.

       It’s a Saturday on the Rambla in Barcelona, and the Chilean artist is selling his work at one of the stalls. Next to him, his ex-wife and the mother of his child is selling colorful shirts.

       Together with the poet Bruno Montané, Jaime was one of Roberto’s closest friends in the first stage of the writer’s life in Barcelona. Rivera was also very close to Bolaño’s mother, Victoria Ávalos; he was practically part of the family.

Rivera studied art at the Faculty of Fine Art in Santiago de Chile. He was adjunct professor of painting at the School of Fine Arts in the Chilean capital until he had to leave his home country in 1974 “at the request” of Pinochet’s military junta. Since then, he has lived and worked in Barcelona.

       He met Roberto in the dark Barcelona of the pre-Olympics period. The city—he says—was very much like the one depicted by the director Bigas Luna in Bilbao, a film from 1978 starring the painter Ángel Jové and the Uruguayan actress Isabel Pisano.

       “In Gerona, Roberto made friends with Ángel Jové, he always spoke to me about him and said that he had to introduce me to him because he was a very good painter,” remembers Jaime.“When he got to Barcelona from Mexico, he was very young, very hopeful, and a lot of fun. He came to a friend’s house and was charming, he was always a very funny guy. We had similar senses of humor so we got on well.”

       During the forced exile of the 1970s, in a Spain far from achieving the prosperity that would make it one of the leading countries of Europe in the ’90s, solid friendships were forged quickly, within a few minutes of the parties meeting.

        Jaime Rivera’s voice has the tone of shared poverty, the humility of men who don’t discuss their dreams of success and fame perhaps because they don’t even dare to dream of them in secret.

       Rivera, who was also friends with Roberto’s mother, makes a face when Victoria is brought into the conversation. He thinks that Roberto loved his mother like a dutiful son, but wonders why he didn’t leave her more money.

       “Those are the kinds of things we don’t understand about Roberto. He did some very strange things,” he says remorsefully.

       “There were a lot of misunderstandings with Victoria,” he continues. “Maybe because Roberto had a very macho side. When his mother was in Barcelona, she met a guy who was much younger than her and they started seeing each other. Roberto couldn’t take that. The apartment on Gran Vía was very large and there was a hall, I remember that you had to greet Victoria first and then talk to Roberto; they had burned their bridges.”

       Jaime and Roberto met up in Barcelona a few days before the writer’s death. They spoke in a bar for hours. Bolaño drank his usual chamomile tea and the painter had coffee. “Victoria [his mother] told me that he fell apart in a week. It didn’t occur to me that he was going to die, he died suddenly.”

From Rivera’s point of view, Roberto Bolaño lived ironically, he was full of black humor and especially laughed at himself.

“Jaime and Roberto met up in Barcelona a few days before the writer’s death. They spoke in a bar for hours. Bolaño drank his usual chamomile tea and the painter had coffee. ‘Victoria [his mother] told me that he fell apart in a week. It didn’t occur to me that he was going to die, he died suddenly’” – Jaime Rivera

       “We spoke a lot, very similar things had happened to us,” He says.. “When he was stopped in Chile, he was on a bus from the south. The soldiers made him get off and took him away and the exact same thing happened to me. My mother was the headmistress at a school in the south, and when I was on my way to Barcelona I went to say goodbye, and as we were coming back they picked up everyone who was young with long hair. They let me go, but he was imprisoned for a week.”

       The two Chileans didn’t speak much about Chile. They were, he says, quite critical of their compatriots.

Roberto and Jaime found the Chileans who went to Barcelona “unpleasant people.”

       And as Bolaño told a Chilean television program: “One of the things that I said to myself the other day when I went to Chile was that it was very strange to be surrounded by Chileans. I’m used to being the only Chilean. To me, to be Chilean is to be the only one. I was very often called ‘The Chilean.’ Who’s the Chilean? Me. I’ve always lived over-seas. There might have been an Argentinian around, because Argentinians get everywhere.”1

       As for Rivera’s take on his countrymen and how Bolaño fit the mold: “It’s worth saying that you have to be careful with how you treat Chileans, they take offense over nothing. I have a group of painters, and they’re all Argentinians, it’s five Argentinians and me and I have a close relationship with them. With Chileans I have to watch my words, but with the Argentinians if something annoys me I’ll say so and they’ll understand, they’re more direct. Roberto was like that.”

      But, Aas you might expect, Bolaño didn’t really fit a type, national or otherwise. He was also one of those “special” guys who always carried a notebook around with him. He wrote in it all day but didn’t discuss what he had written. He was a “sponge,” according to Rivera. He asked a lot of questions, and the many anecdotes told to him by such friends as Rivera were scribbled down in a notebook and later appeared in his books.

       One such anecdote appears in Bolaño’s novella Distant Star, when Carlos Wieder organizes an exhibition of photographs of people murdered in a sinister guest room in Providencia.

Rivera: I’d told Roberto that many years ago I had gone to an apartment in Calle Seminario and remembered a fascist painter perfectly. I continued to go to classes for a year after the coup and there was a former soldier who studied fine art with me. So, one day he invited us to an exhibition he was holding in his apartment, he had set it up in his room, and there were paintings of people who had been murdered, but he had invented them; films he saw in his head. He was a very bad painter. I was extremely shaken by the experience. I don’t know when I told it to Roberto. I often see myself in his stories.

       This tendency to “fictionalize” real life came to Bolaño at a very early age, according to his friend from childhood in Mex-ico, one of the founders of Infrarealism, Rubén Medina. It also manifested in Roberto’s love for war and strategy games.

“One day he invited us to an exhibition he was holding in his apartment, he had set it up in his room, and there were paintings of people who had been murdered, but he had invented them; films he saw in his head. He was a very bad painter. I was extremely shaken by the experience” – Jaime Rivera

During the early period in Spain when Rivera and Bolaño were closest, Roberto was especially poor and didn’t eat well. As Rivera recalls, “I went to see him at the campsite [Bolaño worked as night watchman at a campsite in Castelldefels], and he always had two thermoses of coffee. He loved fried eggs with bread and spaghetti . . . simple food.”

       Their diet improved slightly when they got an apartment on Gran Vía: “We bought pizza or made rice with steak, a normal meal, but he wasn’t very interested in food. On the Rambla on Sunday nights, we went to have pizza at a place called Rivolta. It was an old pizzeria, something of a dive but very friendly.”

But even later, Roberto was miserly. At his house in Blanes, he would run out of gas for his stove, telling Rivera, “Listen, let’s go out for coffee, it’s cold in here.” Eventually, the question of food became moot: there wasn’t a movie he hadn’t seen or a book he hadn’t read.

       “One day, I went to Blanes and drank two coffees with milk and he had two teas,” River says. “He said that his liver had turned to dust and was having trouble with his gallbladder. I didn’t know he’d been in hospital. Victoria told me that he was going to die.”

Rivera: I spoke to Victoria on the telephone. She was in Gerona, very sick; she had cancer. It affected me very badly, I’m very paranoid about diseases. I didn’t go to see him in the hospital. Also, there was the whole fame aspect, which I’m not interested in. Bruno told me that not that many famous people came, that he could at least be with Victoria and her daughter and go for a coffee. It didn’t occur to me to go to his funeral.

     I always said that to be a good painter you have to spend a lot of hours in the studio. He said the same thing about being a writer, that you had to spend a lot of hours working. I didn’t meet the famous Roberto. When we were friends he called me Jaimbotas. We hugged when we saw each other. We laughed a lot.

        Jaime and Roberto would often go sit on the beach. Sometimes they would talk about all kinds of things, at others they would sit in absolute silence.

       With Roberto’s books, Jaime’s life expanded. “He was a master at developing things that I had experienced, which would have been lost if I hadn’t shared them with him. We liked each other very much. Our time together was wonderful.”

This excerpt is drawn from Bolaño: A Biography in Conversations by Mónica Maristain, translated by Kit Maude, to be published by Melville House Books on September 30, 2014.

Speaking from Spain, Maristain, the autohor of the biography, reveals more:

What inspired you to write this biography?

Monica Maristain: My inspiration was a documentary I made with the Chilean filmmaker Ricardo House, entitled: Bolaño, the future battle. I divided the interviews for the documentary into three geographic sections: Mexico, Spain and Chile. Without realizing it, I had collected a lot of material for a book.

What’s the most interesting fact you discovered about Bolaño while researching this biography?

Monica Maristain: Discovering a writer who followed a routine, who didn’t have any vices; I’d almost call him boring.

Rumours about unpublished works by Bolaño are always circulating, but do we have any definite proof of what his ambitions were after 2666?

Monica Maristain: Bolaño’s death was unexpected, even to him. I know that it’s hard to believe because he had a terminal illness, but he didn’t know he was going to die, and, also, he didn’t want to die.

Since Bolaño died, a cult of personality has grown around his life and times. Were you concerned that this book might contribute to it?

Monica Maristain: I do what I can in the best way I know how. I’m just a journalist and writer looking for Bolaño, just as the narrator of The Savage Detectives was looking for the poet Cesárea Tinajero. I have no control over the rest of it.