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Authors: Roberto Bolaño
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with trophies and photographs of cowboys, casting sidelong glances at the canvases on the walls at each pass. Certified Larry Rivers. And then he imagined himself strolling around Castillo’s nearly empty studio, naked like Frank O’Hara, a cup of coffee in his right hand and a whiskey in his left, his heart untroubled, at peace with himself, moving trustingly into the arms of his new lover. And superimposed on this image again were the fake Larry Rivers paintings scattered across a flat expanse, with big houses set far from one another, and in the middle, in the geometric and artificial yards, art, shaky and fragile as a forgery; Larry Rivers’s Chinese horsemen riding across a field of roiling white horsemen. Fuck, thought Amalfitano in excitement, this is the center of the world. The place where things really happen.
But then he came back down to earth and cast a skeptical eye over Castillo’s paintings and was assailed by doubt: either he had forgotten how Larry Rivers painted or the Texas art buyers were a bunch of blind raving lunatics. He thought, too, about the loathsome Tom Castro and said to himself that yes, maybe the authenticity of the canvases resided precisely in their failure to exactly replicate the Larry Rivers paintings, allowing them, paradoxically, to pass for originals. Through an act of faith. Because those Texans needed paintings and because faith is comforting.
Then he imagined Castillo painting—with such effort, such dedication—a beautiful boy blithely asleep on the university campus or wherever, dreaming about mixed-race exhibitions in which the authentic and the fake, the serious and the playful, the real work and the shadow, embraced and marched together toward destruction. And he thought about Castillo’s smiling eyes, his laugh, his big white teeth, about his hands showing him the strange city, and despite everything he felt happy, lucky, and he even managed to appreciate the camels.
7
Once, after discussing the curious nature of art with Castillo, Amalfitano told him a story he had heard in Barcelona. The story was about a recruit in Spain’s Blue Division who had fought on the Russian front in World War II, the northern front, to be precise, in an area near Novgorod. The recruit was a little man from Sevilla, thin and blue-eyed, who by some trick of fate (he was no Dionisio Ridruejo or Tomás Salvador and when he had to give the Roman salute he saluted, but he wasn’t a real fascist, or even a Falangist) had ended up in Russia. In Russia, someone said hey, sorche , hey, recruit, come here, do this, do that, and the word recruit stuck with the Sevillan, but in the dark recesses of his mind and in that vast place, with the passage of time and the daily terrors, it turned into the word chantre , or cantor. So the Andalusian thought of himself in terms of a cantor, with all the duties and obligations of a cantor, though he didn’t have any conscious idea what the word meant, which was choir director at some cathedrals. And yet somehow, by thinking of himself as a cantor he became one: during the terrible Christmas of ’41 he directed the choir that sang carols while the Russians pounded the 250th Regiment. In general, he bore himself with courage, though as time went by he began to lose his sense of humor. Soon enough he was wounded. For two weeks he was at the hospital in Riga under the care of the sturdy, smiling nurses of the Reich and some incredibly ugly Spanish volunteer nurses, probably sisters, sisters-in-law, and distant cousins of José Antonio. When he was released, something happened that would have serious consequences for the Sevillan: instead of being given a billet with the correct destination, he was given one that sent him to the quarters of an SS battalion stationed some two hundred miles from his regiment. There, surrounded by Germans, Austrians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes, all much taller and stronger than he, he tried to explain the
But then he came back down to earth and cast a skeptical eye over Castillo’s paintings and was assailed by doubt: either he had forgotten how Larry Rivers painted or the Texas art buyers were a bunch of blind raving lunatics. He thought, too, about the loathsome Tom Castro and said to himself that yes, maybe the authenticity of the canvases resided precisely in their failure to exactly replicate the Larry Rivers paintings, allowing them, paradoxically, to pass for originals. Through an act of faith. Because those Texans needed paintings and because faith is comforting.
Then he imagined Castillo painting—with such effort, such dedication—a beautiful boy blithely asleep on the university campus or wherever, dreaming about mixed-race exhibitions in which the authentic and the fake, the serious and the playful, the real work and the shadow, embraced and marched together toward destruction. And he thought about Castillo’s smiling eyes, his laugh, his big white teeth, about his hands showing him the strange city, and despite everything he felt happy, lucky, and he even managed to appreciate the camels.
7
Once, after discussing the curious nature of art with Castillo, Amalfitano told him a story he had heard in Barcelona. The story was about a recruit in Spain’s Blue Division who had fought on the Russian front in World War II, the northern front, to be precise, in an area near Novgorod. The recruit was a little man from Sevilla, thin and blue-eyed, who by some trick of fate (he was no Dionisio Ridruejo or Tomás Salvador and when he had to give the Roman salute he saluted, but he wasn’t a real fascist, or even a Falangist) had ended up in Russia. In Russia, someone said hey, sorche , hey, recruit, come here, do this, do that, and the word recruit stuck with the Sevillan, but in the dark recesses of his mind and in that vast place, with the passage of time and the daily terrors, it turned into the word chantre , or cantor. So the Andalusian thought of himself in terms of a cantor, with all the duties and obligations of a cantor, though he didn’t have any conscious idea what the word meant, which was choir director at some cathedrals. And yet somehow, by thinking of himself as a cantor he became one: during the terrible Christmas of ’41 he directed the choir that sang carols while the Russians pounded the 250th Regiment. In general, he bore himself with courage, though as time went by he began to lose his sense of humor. Soon enough he was wounded. For two weeks he was at the hospital in Riga under the care of the sturdy, smiling nurses of the Reich and some incredibly ugly Spanish volunteer nurses, probably sisters, sisters-in-law, and distant cousins of José Antonio. When he was released, something happened that would have serious consequences for the Sevillan: instead of being given a billet with the correct destination, he was given one that sent him to the quarters of an SS battalion stationed some two hundred miles from his regiment. There, surrounded by Germans, Austrians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes, all much taller and stronger than he, he tried to explain the
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