Roberto Bolaño - Antwerp

I wrote this book for myself, and even that I can't be sure of. For a long time these were just loose pages that I reread and maybe tinkered with, convinced I had no time. But time for what? I couldn't say exactly. I wrote this book for the ghosts, who, because they're outside of time, are the only ones with time. After the last rereading (just now), I realize that time isn't the only thing that matters, time isn't the only source of terror. Pleasure can be terrifying too, and so can courage. In those days, if memory serves, I lived exposed to the elements, without my papers, the way other people live in castles. I never brought this novel to any publishing house, of course. They would've slammed the door in my face and I'd have lost the copy. I didn't even make what's technically termed a clean copy. The original manuscript has more pages: the text tended to multiply itself, spreading like a sickness. My sickness, back then, was pride, rage, and violence. Those things (rage, violence) are exhausting and I spent my days uselessly tired. I worked at night. During the day I wrote and read. I never slept. To keep awake, I drank coffee and smoked. Naturally, I met interesting people, some of them the product of my own hallucinations. I think it was my last year in Barcelona. The scorn I felt for so-called official literature was great, though only a little greater than my scorn for marginal literature. But

believed in literature: or rather, I didn't believe in arrivisme or opportunism or the whispering of sycophants. I did believe in vain gestures, I did believe in fate. I didn't have children yet. I was still reading more poetry than prose. In those years (or months), I was drawn to certain science fiction writers and certain pornographers, sometimes antithetical authors, as if the cave and the electric light were mutually exclusive. I read Norman Spinrad, James Tiptree, Jr. (whose real name was Alice Sheldon), Restif de la Bretonne, and de Sade. I also read Cervantes and the archaic Greek poets. When I got sick I reread Manrique. One night I came up with a scheme to make money outside the law. A small criminal enterprise. The basic idea was not to get rich too fast. My first accomplice or attempt at an accomplice, a terribly sad Argentinean friend, responded to my scheme with a saying that went something like this: if you have to be in prison or in the hospital, then the best place to be is your own country, for the visitors, I guess. His response didn't have the slightest effect on me, because I felt equally distant from all the countries in the world. Later I gave up my plan when I discovered that it was worse than working in a brick factory. Tacked up over my bed was a piece of paper on which I'd asked a friend from Poland to write, in Polish, Total Anarchy. I didn't think I was going to live past thirty-five. I was happy. Then came 1981, and before I knew it, everything had changed.

BLANES, 2002

Whe n I consider the brief span of my life absorbed into the eternity which comes before and aftermemoriahospitisuniusdieipraetereuntisthe small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there: there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who put me here? By whose command and act were this place and time allotted to me?

PASCAL