Read Online Antwerp by Roberto Bolaño - Free Book Online Page B

lined with junkyards and gypsy camps. Beyond that is the sea. The hunchback opens a can of food, resting his hump against a small, rotted pine. Someone shouted at the other end of the car, possibly a woman, he said to himself as he stubbed the cigarette out against the sole of his shoe. His shirt is longsleeved, cotton, with green, red, and white checks. The hunchback holds a can of sardines in tomato sauce in his left hand. He’s eating. His eyes scan the foliage. He hears the train go by.

4. I’M MY OWN BEWITCHMENT
    The ghosts of the Plaza Real are on the stairs. Blankets pulled up to my ears, motionless in bed, sweating and repeating meaningless words to myself, I hear them moving around, turning the lights on and off, climbing up toward the roof with unbearable slowness. I’m the moon, someone ventures. But I used to be in a gang and I had the Arab in my sights and I pulled the trigger at the worst possible moment. Narrow streets in the heart of Distrito V, and no way to escape or alter the fate that slid like a djellaba over my greasy hair. Words that drift away from one another. Urban games played from time immemorial . . . “Frankfurt” . . . “A blond girl at the biggest window of the boarding house” . . . “There’s nothing I can do now” . . . I’m my own bewitchment. My hands move over a mural in which someone, eight inches taller than me, stands in the shadows, hands in the pockets of his jacket, preparing for death and his subsequent transparency. The language of others is unintelligible to me. “Tired after being up for days” . . . “A blond girl came down the stairs” . . . “My name is Roberto Bolaño” . . . “I opened my arms” . . .

5. BLUE
    The Calabria Commune campground, according to a sensationalistic article in PEN. Harassed by the townspeople: inside, the campers walked around naked. Six kids dead in the surrounding area. “They were campers” . . . “Not from around here, that’s for sure” . . . Months before, the AntiTerrorist Brigade paid them a visit. “They were out of control, I mean, screwing all over the place: they screwed in groups and wherever they felt like it” . . . “At first they kept to themselves, they only did it at the campground, but this year they had orgies on the beach and right outside town” . . . The police questioning the locals: “I didn’t do it,” says one, “if somebody had set fire to that place, you could blame me, it’s crossed my mind more than once, but I don’t have the heart to shoot six kids” . . . Maybe it was the mafia. Maybe they committed suicide. Maybe it was all a dream. The wind in the rocks. The Mediterranean. Blue.

6. REASONABLE PEOPLE VS. UNREASONABLE PEOPLE
    “They suspected me from the beginning” . . . “Pale men could see what was hidden in the landscape” . . . “A campground, a forest, a tennis club, a riding school — the road will take you far away if you want to go far away” . . . “They suspected I was a spy but what kind of fucking spy” . . . “Reasonable people vs. unreasonable people” . . . “That guy running around here doesn’t exist” . . . “He’s the real ringleader of all this” . . . “But I also dreamed of girls” . . . “People we know, the same faces from last summer” . . . “The same kindness” . . . “Now time erases all that” . . . “The perfect girl suspected me from the very beginning” . . . “Something I made up” . . . “There was no spying or any shit like that” . . . “It was so obvious that they refused to believe it” . . .

7. THE NILE
    The hell to come . . . Sophie Podolski killed herself years ago . . . She would’ve been twentyseven now, like me . . . Egyptian designs on the ceiling, the workers slowly approach, dusty fields, it’s the end of April and they’re paid in heroin . . . I’ve turned on the radio, an impersonal voice gives the citybycity count of those arrested today . . . “Midnight, nothing to report” . . . A girl