Free The Third Reich by Roberto Bolaño Page B

rather mistrustful. A few steps away, the bodies of Ingeborg and Hanna shone, soaking in the sun’s rays. Then, suddenly, I said that I’d rather be back at the hotel. He glanced at me without curiosity and continued to watch the horizon, where his pedal boats were nearly indistinguishable from the pedal boats belonging to other stands. Far away I spotted a windsurfer who kept falling again and again. From the color of the sail I realized it wasn’t Charly. I said that mountains were my thing, not the sea. I liked the sea, but I liked mountains better. El Quemado made no comment.
    We were silent for a while again. The sun was scorching my shoulders but I didn’t move or do anything to protect myself. In profile, El Quemado looked like a different person. I don’t mean that he was less disfigured (actually, the side facing me was the more disfigured) but simply that he looked like someone else. More remote. Like a bust of pumice stone fringed with coarse, dark hairs.
    I can’t remember what made me confess that I wanted to be a writer. El Quemado turned around and, after hesitating, said that it was an interesting profession. I made him repeat what he’d said because at first I thought I’d misheard him.
    “But not of novels or plays,” I explained.
    El Quemado’s lips parted and he said something I couldn’t hear.
    “What?”
    “Poet?”
    Under his scars I seemed to glimpse a kind of monstrous smile. I thought the sun must be addling me.
    “No, no, definitely not a poet.”
    I explained, now that I had paved the way for it, that I in no way scorned poetry; I could have recited from memory lines by Klopstock or Schiller. But to write poetry in this day and age, unless it was for the love object, was a bit pointless, didn’t he agree?
    “Or grotesque,” said the poor wretch, nodding.
    How can someone so deformed say that something is grotesque without taking it personally? Strange. In any case, my sense that El Quemado was secretly smiling grew stronger. Maybe it was his eyes that conveyed the hint of a smile. He hardly ever looked at me, but when he did I caught in his gaze a spark of jubilation and strength.
    “Specialized writer,” I said. “Creative essayist.”
    On the spot, I sketched in broad strokes a picture of the world of war games, with all its magazines, competitions, local clubs, etc. In Barcelona, I explained, there were a few associations in operation, for example, and although as far as I knew no federation existed, Spanish players were beginning to be quite active in the field of European competitions. In Paris I had met a few.
    “It’s a sport on the rise,” I said.
    El Quemado mulled over my words, then he got up to retrieve a pedal boat that was coming in to shore; with no sign of effort he pulled it back into the roped-offarea.
    “I did read something about people who play with little lead soldiers,” he said. “It wasn’t too long ago, I think, at the beginning of the summer . . .”
    “Yes, it’s essentially the same thing. Like rugby and American football. But I’m not very interested in lead soldiers, although they’re all right . . . they look a little bit fussy.” I laughed. “I prefer board games.”
    “What do you write about?”
    “Anything. Give me any war or campaign and I’ll tell you how it can be won or lost, the flaws of the game, where the designer got it right or wrong, the correct scale, the original order of battle . . .”
    El Quemado watches the horizon. With his big toe he digs a little hole in the sand. Behind us Hanna has fallen asleep and Ingeborg is reading the last few pages of the Florian Linden novel; when our eyes meet she smiles and blows me a kiss.
    For a moment I wonder whether El Quemado has a girlfriend. Or whether he’s ever had one.
    What girl could kiss that terrible mask? But there’s someone for everyone, I know.
    After a while:
    “You must have lots of fun,” he said.
    I heard his voice as if it were coming from far away. The