Free The Secret of Evil by Roberto Bolaño Page B

he too is posing.
    And there is yet another person: careful examination reveals
something protruding from Guyotat’s neck like a cancerous growth, which turns
out to be made up of a nose, a withered forehead, the outline of an upper lip,
the profile of a man who is looking, with a certain gravity, in the same
direction as the smoking man, although their gazes could not be more
different.
    And then the photo is occluded and all that is left is the smoke of a
Gauloise floating in the air, as if the viewfinder had suddenly swung to the
right, toward the black hole of chance, and Sollers comes to a sudden halt in
the street, a street near the Place Wagram, and feels in his pockets as if he
had left his address book behind or lost it, and Marie-Thérèse Réveillé is
driving on the Boulevard Malesherbes, near the Place Wagram, and J.-J. Goux is
talking on the phone with Marc Devade (J.-J.’s voice is unsteady, Devade isn’t
saying a word), and Guyotat and Henric are walking on Rue Saint-André des Arts,
heading for Rue Dauphine, and by chance they run into Carla Devade who says
hello and joins them, and Julia Kristeva is coming out of class surrounded by a
retinue of students, quite a few of whom are foreign (two Spaniards, a Mexican,
an Italian, two Germans), and once more the photo dissolves into
nothingness.
    Aurora borealis. Terrible dawn. As they open their eyes, they
are almost transparent. Marc Devade, alone in bed, snug in gray pajamas,
dreaming of the Académie Goncourt. J.-J. Goux at his window, watching clouds
float through the sky over Paris and comparing them unfavorably to certain
clouds in paintings by Pisarro or the clouds in his nightmare. Julia Kristeva is
sleeping and her calm face seems an Assyrian mask until, with a very slight
wince of discomfort, she wakes. Philippe Sollers is in the kitchen, leaning on
the edge of the sink, and blood is dripping from his right index finger. Carla
Devade is climbing the stairs to her apartment after having spent the night with
Guyotat. Marie-Thérèse Réveillé is making coffee and reading a book.
    Jacques Henric is walking through a dark parking garage, which echoes
to the sound of his boots on the cement.
    A world of forms is unfolding before his eyes, a world of distant
noises. The possibility of fear is approaching the way wind approaches a
provincial capital. Henric stops, his heart speeds up, he tries to orient
himself. Before, he could at least glimpse shadows and silhouettes at the far
end of the parking lot; now it seems hermetically black, like the darkness in an
empty coffin at the bottom of a crypt. So he decides to keep still. In that
stillness, his heartbeat gradually slows and memory brings back images of the
day. He remembers Guyotat, whom he secretly admires, openly pursuing little
Carla. Once again, he sees them smiling and then he sees them walking away down
a street where yellow lights scatter and regroup sporadically, without any
obvious pattern, although Henric knows deep down that everything is determined
in some way, everything is causally linked to something else, and human nature
leaves very little room for the truly gratuitous. He touches his crotch. He is
startled by this movement, the first he has made for some time. He has an
erection and yet he doesn’t feel sexually aroused in any way.

T HE V AGARIES OF THE
L ITERATURE OF D OOM
    It’s odd that it was bourgeois writers who transported José
Hernández’s
Martín Fierro
to the center of the Argentine canon. The
point is debatable, of course, but the truth is that Fierro, the gaucho,
paradigm of the dispossessed, of the brave man (but also of the thug), presides
over a canon, the Argentine canon, that only keeps getting stranger. As a poem,
Martín Fierro
is nothing out of this world. As a novel, however,
it’s alive, full of meanings to explore, which means that the wind still gusts
(or blasts) through it, it still smells of the out-of-doors, it still cheerfully
accepts the blows of