Free The Insufferable Gaucho by Roberto Bolaño Page A

and Pepe the Cop were waiting for him at the station. The adolescent
nodded and disappeared. Then the coroner and I went to the
morgue.
    Hector’s body was lying there and
his coat was beginning to lose its gloss. It was just another body now, one
among many. While the coroner was examining it, I took a nap in a corner. I
was woken by the commissioner’s voice and a couple of shoves. Get up, Pepe,
said the coroner. I followed them. The commissioner and the coroner scurried
down tunnels that were unfamiliar to me. I followed them, half asleep,
watching their tails, with an intense burning pain in my back. Soon we came
to an empty burrow. There, on a kind of throne, or maybe it was a cradle, I
saw a seething shadow. The commissioner and the coroner told me to go
forward.
    Tell me the story, said a voice
that was many voices, emerging from the darkness. At first I was terrified
and shrank away, but then I realized that it was a very old queen
rat—several rats, that is, whose tails had become knotted in early
childhood, which rendered them unfit for work, but endowed them, instead,
with the requisite wisdom to advise our people in critical situations. So I
told the story from beginning to end, and tried to make my words
dispassionate and objective, as if I were writing a report. When I finished,
the voice that was many voices emerging from the darkness asked me if I was
the nephew of Josephine the Singer. That’s correct, I said. We were born
when Josephine was still alive, said the queen rat, shifting herselves
laboriously. I could just make out a huge dark ball dotted with little eyes
dimmed by age. The queen rat, I conjectured, was fat, and a build-up of
filth had immobilized her hind paws. An anomaly, she said. It took me a
while to realize that she was referring to Hector. A poison that shall not
spell the end of life for us, she said: a kind of lunatic, an individualist.
There’s something I don’t understand, I said. The commissioner touched me on
the shoulder with his paw, as if to stop me from speaking, but the queen rat
asked me to explain what it was that I didn’t understand. Why did he let the
baby die of hunger, instead of ripping his throat open, as he did with the
other victims? For a few seconds all I could hear from the seething shadow
was a sound of sighing.
    Maybe, she said after a while, he
wanted to witness the process of death from beginning to end, without
intervening or intervening as little as possible. And, after another
interminable silence, she added: We must remember that he was insane, that
we are in the realm of the monstrous—rats do not kill rats.
    I hung my head and stayed there, I
don’t know for how long. I might even have fallen asleep. Suddenly I felt
the commissioner’s paw on my shoulder again, and heard his voice ordering me
to follow him. We went back the way we had come, in silence. Just as I had
feared, Hector’s body had disappeared from the morgue. I asked where it was.
In the belly of some predator, I hope, said the commissioner. Then I was
told what I had already guessed. It was strictly forbidden to talk about
Hector with anyone. The case was closed, and the best thing for me to do was
to forget about him and get on with my life and my work.
    I didn’t feel like sleeping at the
station that night, so I found myself a place in a burrow full of tough,
grimy rats, and when I woke up I was alone. That night I dreamed that an
unknown virus had infected our people. Rats are capable of killing rats. The
sentence echoed in my cranial cavity until I woke. I knew that nothing would
ever be the same again. I knew it was only a question of time. Our capacity
to adapt to the environment, our hard-working nature, our long collective
march toward a happiness that, deep down, we knew to be illusory, but which
had served as a pretext, a setting, a backdrop for our daily acts of
heroism, all these were condemned to disappear, which meant that we, as a
people, were condemned to disappear