Las obras de Roberto Bolaño

“So what are we going to do? What can we do?”—Rosa Amalfitano

Fate is often the answer to the question Why me? For the women of Santa Teresa (and Juarez), the question might be more “Why us?” but the answer is the same: it just is, it’s fate, what can you do? No one knows how to stop the killings—they barely even receive press coverage anymore—they have become part of the landscape. “A sketch of the industrial landscape in the third world,” Fate calls his proposed piece of reportage. “The problem is bad luck,” said Rosa. From the stands of the arena, Fate can her them singing “the battle hymn of a lost war sung in the dark.” The fate of the city and the fate of the women are intertwined. Maria Bustillos asked earlier about why Amalfitano allows Rosa to go out into the city alone at night. What motivates a woman living in Santa Teresa to keep living there and venture out alone at night? Part of it must be the surreal nature of murder and kidnapping. They are such grand, cinematic concepts that they seemingly don’t apply to real world people—until they do. The difference between living in the shadow of constant murder and death is a pale illusion, a dream of never awaking. “You have to listen to women. You should never ignore a woman’s fears.”

The issue of machismo also arises in this section—not just because it is based around the boxing match, but because Fate is in some ways an intruder. His masculinity operates on a different frequency. He is aware that he can be easily perceived as a big black American dude, a scary presence to the shorter, somewhat homogeneous Mexicans, but the only time he tries on that persona, it doesn’t work on the form of machismo he encounters. What he perceives as sexual jealousy on the part of Chucho Flores and Corona (towards Rosa Amalfitano) turns out to be indifference on Chucho’s part (“I’m not jealous, amigo”) and sheer violence on Corona’s part (a gun? a murder? what did Fate do besides barge in on your little cocaine session?). Bolano shows us how bizarre interactions between people can escalate into violence and then not fit neatly into explainable categories. If Corona does shoot Fate in that situation, how would you summarize it? A group of friends (former lovers?) were having a “party” at a house and the foreigner threatened a woman? Is it classified as a “domestic” situation? Of course, Chucho’s indifference in the house is contrasted by his violent jealousy earlier in the coffee shop when he calls Rosa a whore for kissing a classmate. Is his “indifference” in the house really just cowardice? Chucho comes off looking like the weakest sort of macho man. Are women in Santa Teresa being killed not because of predators but because of the weakness of men? As Amalfitano says, “They’re all mixed up in it.”

The instant that Rosa Amalfitano takes Fate’s hand and chooses him over the Mexicans, it saves Fate’s life. It is the end of his three days and nights in the belly of the whale. It is the sign that the two of them both have been granted a reprieve. So much of this section reminded me of Pulp Fiction (the boxing match, the girl doing drugs, the gun, the rush to leave the motel, etc.) that I thought that moment of Fate and Rosa finally connecting was the equivalent of Vincent Vega giving Mia Wallace an adrenaline shot to the heart.

Other topics we need to discuss: the end of the sacred (Daryl mentions it here), the end of the old-style movie theaters, the history of film in general, hexagons, the murals (Daryl has a great post on the Virgin here), TV shows.

“We all know things we think nobody else knows,” said Fate.

The Part About Fate

Before officially moving away from Amalfitano’s section, we have a couple of pieces of unfinished business that will be posted today. Below is a recap and a few questions about the first part of this week’s reading (up until Fate goes to Mexico). A lot of people hate this section or call it their least favorite in the novel. After the critics and Amalfitano, Bolano throws a complete curveball with this section. What to make of it? Did it make you want to put the book down? I’ve heard people say that about The Part About the Crimes, but I know that Fate is not the most likable character. Here is Naptime Writing‘s take on this Part.

On the first few pages we get a short story about Quincy Williams and his mother dying. And then suddenly a paragraph opens “At work everybody called him Oscar Fate.” What? And then we get another 24 pages of Fate in Detroit with Barry Seaman before we get any connection at all to Sonora or Mexico or the previous plotlines of the novel. But Oscar “Fate”, really? Isn’t that a bit like naming your love interest Jane Love? I wonder if it’s not some sort of double-reverse red herring that doesn’t refer to fate per se, but rather something like Fatima prayers or the Fates of Greek myth or some specific philosopher of fatalism, just because Bolano is sneaky like that. But Bolano does seem to have a fascination with Greek mythology: “The Greeks, you might say, invented evil” (p. 266).

Barry Seaman preaches from the pulpit on five topics:

DANGER

MONEY

FOOD

STARS

USEFULNESS

He recites whole recipes verbatim. He talks in extended metaphors. In fact, I think mostly Bolano is using the characters and situations in this section as metaphors for the scenario in Mexico, reflections of the same mirror. Mentions of money and poverty grapple with some of the root causes of the horror in the Sonoran desert. When Antonio Jones (Scottsboro Boy) tells fate that “poverty didn’t cause only illness and resentment, it caused bad temper,” it recalls the poverty of the Mexican factory workers or Rebeca selling rugs in the market, surrounded by poor macho men, certainly some with bad tempers. (And yet the upper class Marco Antonio Guerra is the “ticking time bomb”, constantly exploring the limits of his temper, his violence, feeling stifled by the atmosphere around him.) The poor of Detroit are no different than the poor of Santa Teresa.

Antonio Jones’ full name is Antonio Ulises Jones. For readers of The Savage Detectives, I wonder if your ears perked up at the sight of that word on the page. Ulises Lima.

Page 245: “How does rap lead to suicide?” asked Fate.

Page 249: I had to circle this beautiful line:

And he waves his hand toward the sea, because he’s incapable of expressing what he feels in words. And then I’m afraid, even though it’s my brother there beside me, and I think: the danger is the sea.

Page 254: Seaman’s talk about how nobody smiles anymore and everyone is just trying to sell you something reminded me of David Foster Wallace and the attempt at a new sincerity in American fiction. “They want us to look at them, that’s all” sounds as much like a rebuke of Twitter, Facebook, and oversharing bloggers as it does of smiling.