Roberto Bolaño - The Secret of Evil

Also by Roberto Bolao

Available from New Directions

Amulet

Antwerp

Between Parentheses

By Night in Chile

Distant Star

The Insufferable Gaucho

Last Evenings on Earth

Monsieur Pain

Nazi Literature in the Americas

Th eReturn

Th e RomanticDogs

The Secret of Evil

Th e SkatingRink

Tres

Copyright 2007 by the Heirs of Roberto Bolao

Copyright 2007 by Editorial Anagrama

Translation copyright 2012 by Chris Andrews

Translation copyright 2011 by Natasha Wimmer

Originally published as El secreto del mal by Editorial Anagrama, Barcelona, Spain. Published by arrangement with the Heirs of Roberto Bolao and Carmen Balcells Agencia Literaria, Barcelona.

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the magazines where some of these pieces originally appeared: Granta , Harpers , and Th e New Yorker .

Publishers Note : Th ree pieces, Vagaries of the Literature of Doom, Beach, and Sevilla Kills Me, appeared in Roberto Bolaos Between Parentheses (New Directions, 2011), and are included here in Natasha Wimmers translations. Th ese pieces appeared in the original Spanish editions of both El secreto del mal and Entre parentesis .

Manufactured in the United States of America

Published simultaneously in Canada by Penguin Books Canada, Ltd.

First published as a New Directions Book in 2012

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bolao, Roberto, 19532003.

[Secreto del mal. English]

Th e secret of evil / Roberto Bolao ; translated by Chris Andrews and Natasha Wimmer. 1st American cloth ed.

p. cm.

Originally published as El secreto del mal by Editorial Anagrama, Barcelona, SpainT.p. verso.

A New Directions Book.

Texts Bolano was working on before he died: completed stories, sketches for larger works, essays, and fragments.

eISBN 978-0-8112-2058-3

1. Bolao, Roberto, 19532003Translations into English. I. Andrews, Chris, 1962
I I . Wim m er, Natasha. III. Title.

PQ8098.12.O38S4313 2012

863.64dc23

2011048681

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

by New Directions Publishing Corporation

80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011

ndbooks.com

Roberto Bolao

The Secret
of Evil

Translated by CHRIS ANDREWS
with NATASHA WIMMER

A NEW DIRECTIONS BOOK

Contents

for my children Lautaro and Alexandra

THE SECRET OF EVIL

PRELIMINARY NOTE

This volume gathers a handful of stories and narrativesketches gleaned from the more than fifty files found on Roberto Bolaoscomputer after his death. Many of those files contain poems, stories, novels,articles, talks and interviews that Bolao had published during his lifetime orhad prepared for publication. Other files contain poems and narrative sketchesor fragments in various states of completion, sometimes on their own, but moreoften grouped and inventoried in what appear to be drafts of books, to whichBolao himself, from a very early stage, would usually give a provisional title,and sometimes even a dedication. Such is the case with the file entitledBAIRES, which has served as the basis for the composition of this volume.There are multiple indications that Bolao was working on this file in themonths immediately preceding his death, although there is no record of the dateson which the various files were created or modified. The conviction that thiswas one of the last documents on which Bolao worked motivated the editorsdecision to preserve the dedication that figured at the beginning of the file,after the title New Stories. The possibility of keeping that title wasalso considered, but in the end we chose to borrow the title of one of thestories in the file, which opens with a declaration that is apposite to many ofthe pieces collected here: This story is very simple, although it could havebeen very complicated. Also, its incomplete, because stories like this donthave an ending.

Bolaos work as a whole remains suspended over the abysses that itdares to sound. All his narratives, not just The Secret of Evil, seemto be governed by a poetics of inconclusiveness. The eruption of horror seems todetermine the interruption of the storytelling; or perhaps it is the other wayaround: the interruption of the telling suggests the imminence of horror. In anycase, the inconclusive nature of Bolaos novels and stories makes it difficultto decide which of the unpublished narrative texts should be regarded asfinished and which are simply sketches. The task is further complicated byBolaos progressive radicalization of what I have called his poetics ofinconclusiveness. And to make the distinction more difficult still, Bolaorarely began to write a story without giving it a title and immediatelyestablishing a definite tone and atmosphere; his writing, which is alwayscaptivating, virtually never stumbles or hesitates. Kafkas notebooks andposthumous papers place the reader in a similar situation: one is continuallycoming across marvelous narrative openings, which then break off abruptly.Decisions as to the wholeness and self-sufficiency of particular pieces can onlybe based on judgments that, although grounded, are inevitably subjective, andlittle would be gained by explaining them here.

Almost half the pieces in this volume come from the file mentionedabove, specifically: The Troublemaker, The Tour, The Room Next Door,Vagaries of the Literature of Doom, The Colonels Son, Scholars of Sodom,The Secret of Evil, and Sevilla Kills Me (in that order in the file). Thereis evidence to suggest that some of these pieces are unfinished. But we thoughtit better to let the reader form his or her own opinion on that matter.Vagaries of the Literature of Doom and Sevilla Kills Me are the texts of twoaddresses given by Bolao (the second is clearly unfinished) and have beenpublished in the posthumous volume Between Parentheses (Barcelona:Anagrama, 2004; New York: New Directions, 2011), despite which they arereproduced here in order to respect and continue a marked tendency, in Bolaoslate collections, to include non-narrative pieces, with the obvious intention ofenriching the genre of the short story by blurring its boundaries.

The remaining pieces in this volume I Cant Read, Labyrinth,Daniela, Death of Ulises, Suntan, Colonia Lindavista, Beach, The OldMan of the Mountain, The Days of Chaos and Crimes come from a filelabeled STORIX. The text entitled Beach, first published in the newspaperEl Mundo on August 17, 2000, appeared in BetweenParentheses, but is republished here in what we consider to be a moreappropriate context. As to I Cant Read, which is clearly unfinished, itscontent is wholly autobiographical and the narrator is, without doubt, RobertoBolao himself; nevertheless, he refers to the text, in the first line, as astory a clear indication of his increasingly open idea of the genre.

The piece entitled Scholars of Sodom, which is no doubt incomplete,comes from a file labeled STOREC, and is in fact composed of two texts with thesame title, the second, written some years later, taking the first as itsstarting point. In this volume, the two versions are given one after another, soas to form a sequence. Incidentally, Bolao toyed with the idea of using thetitle Scholars of Sodom for a collection of stories very similar to the onethat was finally published as Murdering Whores (Putasasesinas, Barcelona, Anagrama, 2001).