His passage through literature left a trail of blood and several questions posed by a mute. It also left one or two silent replies.
Rather than sinking into oblivion with the passing years, he became a mythic figure and his ideas found a wider following. His traces petered out in South Africa, Germany, Italy; some even went so far as to claim that he had gone to Japan, as if to be Gary Snyder’s dark double. His silence was absolute. Yet the winds of change blowing through the world were favorable to him and his work, and some came to see him as a precursor. Young, enthusiastic writers set out from Chile in search of him. They returned from their long pilgrimages broke and empty-handed. Ramírez Hoffman’s father, presumably the one person who knew his whereabouts, died in 1990.
As the years went by, it was gradually supposed in Chilean literary circles that Ramírez Hoffman was dead too, a reassuring thought for many.
In 1992, his name appeared prominently in a judicial report on torture and the disappearance of prisoners. In 1993 he was linked to an “independent operational group” responsible for the deaths of various students in and around Concepción and Santiago. In 1995, Zabaleta published his book, one chapter of which described the photographic exhibition. In 1996, a small press in Santiago published Cecilio Macaduck’s lengthy study of Fascist magazines in Chile and Argentina between 1972 and 1992, in which the brightest and most enigmatic star, without a doubt, is Ramírez Hoffman. Naturally there were people who spoke out in his defense. A sergeant from Military Intelligence declared that Lieutenant Ramírez Hoffman was a little strange, slightly unhinged and prone to unexpected outbursts, but exemplary in his commitment to the fight against Communism. An army officer who had taken part in a number of counter-subversive operations with Ramírez Hoffman in Santiago went further still and affirmed that he had been absolutely right to say that no prisoner who had been tortured should be left alive: “His vision of History, you understand, was, how can I put it, cosmic, in perpetual motion, with Nature in the midst of it all, devouring itself and being reborn, repugnant but nothing short of brilliant. . . .”
Ramírez Hoffman was called as a witness in a number of trials, although no one expected him to show up. In other cases he was indicted. A judge in Concepción tried to obtain a warrant for his arrest, unsuccessfully. The few trials that went ahead were conducted in his absence. And soon they were forgotten. The Republic had too many problems to concern itself for long with the fading figure of a serial killer who had disappeared years ago.
Chile forgot him.
This is where Abel Romero appears on the scene and I make my reappearance. Chile had forgotten us as well. During the time of Allende, Romero had been something of a celebrity in the police force. I vaguely remembered his name in connection with a murder in Viña del Mar, a “classic locked-room murder,” as he put it himself, neatly and elegantly solved. And although he always worked in homicide, he was the one who went into the Las Carmenes estate to “rescue” a colonel who had staged his own kidnapping, and was being protected by several thugs from the right-wing group Patria y Libertad. This operation earned Romero the Medal of Valor, awarded by Allende in person: the high point of his professional life. After the coup, he was imprisoned for three years, and when he got out he went to Paris. Now he was on Ramírez Hoffman’s trail. Cecilio Macaduck had given him my address in Barcelona. How can I help you, I asked him. By advising me on poetic matters, he said. This was his reasoning: Ramírez Hoffman was a poet, I was a poet, he was not. To find a poet, he needed the help of another poet. I told him that in my opinion Ramírez Hoffman was a criminal, not a poet. All right, all right, maybe in Ramírez Hoffman’s opinion, or anyone else’s for that matter, you’re not a poet, or a bad one, and he’s the real thing. It all depends, don’t you think? How much are you going to pay me? I asked. That’s the way, he said, straight to the point. Quite a bit: my client isn’t short of money. We became friends. The next day he came to my apartment with a suitcase full of literary magazines. What makes you think he’s in Europe? I know his profile, he said. Four days later he turned up with a television and a VCR. These are for you, he said. I don’t watch television, I said. Well you should, you don’t know what you’re missing. I read books and I write, I said. And it shows, said Romero. I don’t mean that as an insult, he added immediately, I’ve always respected priests and writers who own nothing. You can’t have known many, I said. You’re the first. Then he explained that he couldn’t really set up the television in the boarding house where he was staying, in the Calle Pintor Fortuny. Do you think Ramírez Hoffman writes in French or German, I asked. Maybe, he said, he was an educated man.
Among the many magazines that Romero left me were two in which I thought I could see the hand of Ramírez Hoffman. One was French and the other was published in Madrid by a group of Argentineans. The French one, no more than a fanzine, was the official organ of a movement known as “barbaric writing” whose major exponent was a retired Parisian concierge. One of the movement’s activities was to hold black masses in which classic books were mistreated. The ex-concierge began his career in May 1968. While the students were building barricades, he shut himself in his cubicle-like caretaker’s apartment and devoted himself to masturbating onto books by Victor Hugo and Balzac, urinating onto Stendhal novels, smearing shit over pages of Chateaubriand, cutting various parts of his body and spattering the blood over handsome editions of Flaubert, Lamartine or Musset. That, so he claimed, was how he learned to write. The group of “barbaric writers” was made up of sales assistants, butchers, security guards, locksmiths, lowly bureaucrats, nursing aides and movie extras. The Madrid magazine, by contrast, was of a higher standard and its contributors could not be lumped together under a specific tendency or school. In its pages I found texts on psychoanalysis, studies of the New Christianity, and poems written by prisoners in the Carabanchel jail, preceded by an ingenious and at times extravagant sociological introduction. One of those poems, clearly the best, and the longest, was entitled “The Photographer of Death” and was dedicated, mysteriously, To the explorer.
In the French magazine the works of the “barbarians” were accompanied by a few enthusiastic critical texts, in one of which I thought I could see the shadow of Ramírez Hoffman. It was signed by a certain Jules Defoe and argued, in a jerky and ferocious style, that literature should be written by non-literary people (just as politics should be and indeed was being taken over by non-politicians, as the author was delighted to observe). The impending revolution in writing would, in a sense, abolish literature itself. When poetry is written by non-poets and read by non-readers. Anyone could have written that text, I knew, anyone determined to set the world alight; but something told me that this particular apostle of the Parisian ex-concierge was Ramírez Hoffman.
The poem by the prisoner from Carabanchel cast a different light on the matter. In the Madrid magazine there were no texts by Ramírez Hoffman, but there was one about him, although it did not mention his name. I thought the title, “The Photographer of Death,” might have been borrowed from an old film by Powell or Pressburger, I couldn’t remember which, but it might also have been an allusion to Ramírez Hoffman’s onetime hobby. Essentially, in spite of the subjectivity clogging its lines, the poem was simple: it was about a photographer roaming the world, the crimes retained forever in the photographer’s mechanical eye, the planet’s sudden emptiness, the photographer’s boredom, his ideals (the absolute) and wanderings through unknown lands, his experiences with women, and interminable evenings and nights given over to the observation of love in all its varied configurations: pairs, threesomes, groups.
After I told Romero about this, he asked me to watch four movies on the VCR he had brought. I think we have located Mr. Ramírez, he said. At that moment I felt scared. We started watching the movies together. They were low-budget porn. Halfway through the second one, I told Romero I couldn’t take four porn movies in a row. Watch them tonight, he said on his way out. Am I supposed to recognize Ramírez
Hoffman? Is he one of the actors? He smiled enigmatically and left, after noting down the addresses of the magazines I had singled out for him. I didn’t see him again until five days later. In the meantime I watched all the movies, and I watched them all more than once. Ramírez Hoffman didn’t appear in any of them. But I could feel his presence in them all. It’s very simple, Romero said when we met again, the lieutenant is behind the camera. Then he told me the story of a crew that used to make pornographic films in a villa on the Gulf of Tarento. One morning they were all found dead. Six people in all. Three actresses, two actors and the cameraman. The prime suspect was the director-producer, who was taken into custody. They also arrested the owner of the villa, a lawyer from Corigliano who was associated with the underworld of violent hard-core: porn showing real criminal acts. Both had alibis and had to be released. And what did Ramírez Hoffman have to do with all this? There was a second cameraman. A certain R. P. English. And he had never been tracked down.
Would you be able to recognize Ramírez Hoffman if you saw him again? asked Romero. I don’t know, I replied.
Two months went by before I saw Romero again. I’ve tracked down Jules Defoe, he said: Let’s go. I followed him without saying a word. I hadn’t ventured out of Barcelona for a long time. To my surprise, we took the train that runs along the coast. Who’s paying you? I asked him. A Chilean, said Romero, looking out at the Mediterranean appearing in flashes between empty factories and then behind the first building sites of the Maresme. A lot? A fair bit; he’s made a fortune, he sighed. Apparently quite a few people are getting rich in Chile these days. And what are you going to do with the money? I’m going back; it’ll help me to start over. Your client wouldn’t be Cecilio Macaduck by any chance? (For a moment I thought that Cecilio Macaduck, who had stayed in Chile, and now published a book every two years, contributed to magazines all over the continent and occasionally gave guest lectures at small North American universities—for a moment, as I say, I thought that Macaduck, as well as becoming an established writer, had become wealthy. It was a moment of idiocy and justifiable envy.) No way, said Romero. And when we find him, what are you going to do? I asked. Ah, Bolaño my friend, first you have to recognize him.
We got off the train in Blanes. At the station we took a bus to Lloret. Spring had only just begun but already there were groups of tourists gathered around the doors of the hotels and sauntering along the main streets of the village. We walked towards a neighborhood full of apartment buildings. In one of them lived Ramírez Hoffman. Are you going to kill him? I asked as we walked down a spectral street. The tourist shops wouldn’t open for another month yet. Don’t ask me questions like that, said Romero, his face creased with pain or something similar. All right, I said, no more questions.
This is where Ramírez Hoffman lives, said Romero, as we walked past an apparently empty, eight-story building, without stopping. My stomach clenched. Hey, don’t look back, he scolded, and we kept walking. Two blocks further on there was a bar open. Romero came to the door with me. He’ll come here for a coffee in a while, I can’t say when exactly. Have a good look at him and then you can tell me. Yes, I said. See you soon, and remember, it’s more than twenty years ago.
From the front windows of the bar, there was a view of the sea, with a few fishing boats at work near the coast, under an intensely blue sky. I ordered a coffee with milk and tried to concentrate. The bar was almost empty: there was a woman sitting at a table reading a magazine and two men talking with the bartender. I opened my book, The Complete Works of Bruno Schulz, translated by Juan Carlos Vidal. I tried to read. After a few pages I realized I wasn’t understanding anything. I was reading, but the words went scuttling past like incomprehensible beetles. Nobody came into the bar; nobody moved. Time seemed to be standing still. I started to feel sick; the fishing boats on the sea had turned into yachts; the beach was uniformly grey and every once in a while someone walked or cycled past on the broad, empty pavement. I ordered a bottle of mineral water. Then Ramírez Hoffman came in and sat down by the front window, three tables away. He had aged. Like me, I suppose. But no, much more than me. He was fatter, more wrinkled; he looked at least ten years older than I did, although in fact there was a difference of only three years between us. He was staring at the sea and smoking. Just like me, I realized with a fright, stubbing out my cigarette and pretending to read. But Bruno Schulz’s words had taken on a monstrous character that was almost intolerable. When I looked again at Ramírez Hoffman, he had turned sideways. It struck me that he had a hard look peculiar to certain Latin Americans over the age of forty. A sad, irreparable sort of hardness. But Ramírez Hoffman did not appear to be sad, and that is precisely where the infinite sadness lay. He seemed adult. But he wasn’t adult, I knew that straight away. He seemed self-possessed. And in his own way, on his own terms, whatever they were, he was more self-possessed than the rest of us in that sleepy bar, or most of the people walking through the streets of Lloret or working to get ready for the imminent tourist season. He was hard, he had nothing or very little, and it didn’t seem to bother him much. He seemed to be going through a rough patch. He had the face of a man who knows how to wait without losing his nerve or letting his imagination run wild. He didn’t look like a poet. He didn’t look like he had been an officer in the Chilean Air Force. He didn’t look like an infamous killer. He didn’t look like a man who had flown to Antarctica to write a poem in the sky. Not at all.
As it was starting to get dark, he left. Suddenly I felt light-hearted and hungry. I ordered bread with tomato and ham, and a non-alcoholic beer.
Romero arrived shortly and we left together. At first we seemed to be going away from Ramírez Hoffman’s building, but in fact we just circled around to it. Is it him? asked Romero. Yes, I said. Are you certain? I’m certain. I was going to say something more, but Romero quickened his pace. Ramírez Hoffman’s building loomed against the sky, lit by the moon. It was somehow different from the buildings around it, which seemed to be losing definition, fading, as if under a magic spell dating back to 1973. Romero pointed to a park bench. Wait for me here, he said. Are you going to kill him? The bench was tucked away in a shadowy corner. I couldn’t see the expression on Romero’s face. Wait for me here or go to the station in Blanes and take the first train. Please don’t kill him, he’s not going to do any more harm now, I said. You don’t know that, said Romero, nor do I. He can’t hurt anyone now, I said. But I didn’t really believe it. Of course he could. We all could. I’ll be right back, said Romero.
As the sound of his footfalls grew fainter, I sat there looking at the dark shrubs. Twenty minutes later he returned with a folder under his arm. Let’s go, he said. We took the bus from Lloret back to Blanes and then the train to Barcelona. We didn’t talk until we reached the Plaza Cataluña station. Romero came back to my apartment. There he gave me an envelope. For your trouble, he said. What are you going to do? I’m going back to Paris tonight, he said, I’ve got a flight at midnight. I sighed or snorted. What an ugly business, I said, for something to say. Naturally, said Romero, it was Chilean business. I looked at him standing there in the entranceway; he was smiling. He must have been going on sixty. Look after yourself, Bolaño, he said, and off he went.
EPILOGUE FOR MONSTERS
1. SECONDARY FIGURES
Marcos Ricardo Alarcón Chamiso. Arequipa, 1910–Arequipa, 1977. Poet, musician, painter, sculptor and amateur mathematician.
Susy D’Amato. Buenos Aires, 1935–Paris, 2001. Argentinean poet and friend of Luz Mendiluce. She ended her days selling Latin American handcrafts in the French capital.
Duchess of Bahamontes. Cordoba, 1893–Madrid, 1957. Duchess and Cordoban. Period. Her (platonic) lovers numbered in the hundreds. Urinary problems and anorgasmia. A fine gardener in her old age.
Pedro Barbero. Móstoles, 1934–Madrid, 1998. Secretary, lover and confidant of Luz Mendiluce. The Miguel Hernández of the populist right. Author of proletarian sonnets.
Gabino Barreda. Herm
osillo, 1908–Los Angeles, 1989. Renowned architect. He began as a Stalinist and ended as a Salinist, supporting Carlos Salinas de Gortari.