Free The Secret of Evil by Roberto Bolaño Page A

to
destroy the world; they will be walking westward along this long, deserted
beach, bounded by rocks and black cliffs, and suddenly Sollers will realize that
the scientist (who is talking and explaining) is himself and that the man
walking beside him is a murderer; this will dawn on him when he looks down at
the wet sand (with its soup-like consistency) and the crabs skittering away to
hide and the prints the two of them are leaving on the beach (there is a certain
logic to this: identifying the murderer by his footprints), and Julia Kristeva
will dream of a little village in Germany where years ago she participated in a
seminar, and she’ll see the streets of the village, clean and empty, and sit
down in a square that’s tiny but full of plants and trees, and close her eyes
and listen to the distant cheeping of a single bird and wonder if the bird is in
a cage or free, and she’ll feel a breeze on her neck and her face, neither cold
nor warm, a perfect breeze, perfumed with lavender and orange blossom, and then
she’ll remember her seminar and look at her watch, but it will have stopped.
    So the Central American is outside the frame of the photograph,
sharing that pristine and deceptive territory with the object of Guyotat’s gaze:
an unknown woman armed only, for the moment, with her beauty. Their eyes will
not meet. They will pass each other by like shadows, briefly sharing the same
hazardous ambit: the itinerant theater of Paris. The Central American could
quite easily become a murderer. Perhaps, back in his country, he will, but not
here, where the only blood he could possibly shed is his own. This Pol Pot won’t
kill anyone in Paris. And actually, back in Tegucigalpa or San Salvador, he’ll
probably end up teaching in a university. As for the unknown woman, she will not
be captured by Guyotat’s asbestos nets. She’s at the bar, waiting for the
boyfriend she’ll marry before long (him or the next one), and their marriage
will be disastrous, though not without its moments of comfort. Literature
brushes past these literary creatures and kisses them on the lips, but they
don’t even notice.
    The section of restaurant or café that contains the photo’s nest of
smoke continues imperturbably on its voyage through nothingness. Behind Sollers,
for instance, we can make out the fragmentary figures of three men. None of the
faces can be seen in its entirety. The man on the left, in profile: a forehead,
one eyebrow, the back part of his ear, the top of his head. The man on the
right: a little piece of his forehead, his cheekbone, strands of dark hair. The
man in the middle, who seems to be calling the tune: most of his forehead,
traversed by two clearly visible wrinkles, his eyebrows, the bridge of his nose,
and a discreet quiff. Behind them, there is a pane of glass and behind the glass
many people walking about curiously among stalls or exhibition stands,
bookstands perhaps, mostly facing away from our characters (who have their backs
to them in turn), except for a child with a round face and straight bangs,
wearing a jacket that may be too small for him, looking sideways toward the
café, as if from that distance he could observe everything going on inside,
which, on the face of it, seems rather unlikely.
    And in a corner, to the right: the waiting man, the listening man. His
face appears just above Marc Devade’s blond hair. His hair is dark and abundant,
his eyebrows are thick, he is thin. In one hand (a hand resting listlessly
against his right temple), he is holding a cigarette. A spiral of smoke is
rising from the cigarette toward the ceiling, and the camera has captured it
almost as if it were the image of a ghost. Telekinesis. An expert could identify
the brand of cigarette that he’s smoking in half a second just by the solid look
of that smoke. Gauloises, no doubt. He’s gazing off toward the photo’s
right-hand side — that is, he’s pretending not to know that the photo is being
taken, but in a way