Free Distant Star by Roberto Bolaño

spent a whole day looking for the grave of that tall, fair-haired Juan Stein who never left Chile, but despite his efforts he couldn’t find it.

5
    At the end of 1973 or the beginning of 1974, Diego Soto, Juan Steins best friend and rival, also disappeared.
    They were always together (except at their respective workshops) and always talking about poetry. If the sky over Chile had begun to crumble and fall, they would have gone on talking about poetry: the tall, fair-haired Stein and the short, dark Soto; one strong and well built, the other’s fine-boned body hinting at future plumpness. Stein was mainly interested in Latin American poetry, while Soto was translating French poets who were at the time (and many of whom, I fear, still are) unknown in Chile and this, of course, infuriated a lot of people. How could that ugly little Indian presume to translate and correspond with Alain Jouffroy, Denis Roche and Marcelin Pleynet? Michel Bulteau, Mathieu Messagier, Claude Pelieu, Franck Venaille, Pierre Tilman, Daniel Biga … who
were
these people, for God’s sake? And what was so special about this Georges Perec character, published by Denoël, whose books Soto was always toting around, pretentious bastard. When he was no longer to be seen walking the streets of Concepción with books under hisarm, always neatly dressed (as opposed to Stein, who looked like a tramp), heading off to the Faculty of Medicine or standing in a line outside some cinema or theater, when he disappeared into thin air, nobody missed him. Many would have been glad to hear of his death, for reasons that were not so much political (Soto was a socialist sympathizer, but that was all, he wasn’t even a faithful socialist voter; I would have described him as a left-wing pessimist) as aesthetic in nature: the pleasure of knowing you’re finally rid of someone who is more intelligent than you are and more knowledgeable and who lacks the social grace to hide it. Writing this now it seems hard to believe. But that’s how it was. Soto’s enemies would have been able to forgive his biting wit, but they could never forgive his indifference. His indifference and his intelligence.
    Soto, however, like Stein (whom he no doubt never saw again), reappeared in exile. First he went to East Germany, but left as soon as he could after several unpleasant experiences. According to the melancholy folklore of exile – made up of stories that, as often as not, are fabrications or pale copies of what really happened – one night another Chilean gave him such a terrible beating that he ended up in a Berlin hospital with head injuries and two broken ribs. He moved to France where he scraped together a living teaching Spanish and English, and translating for small presses, mainly books by eccentric, early twentieth-century Latin American writers with a bent for fantasy or pornography, or both, as in the case of Pedro Pereda, an obscure novelist from Valparaiso, the author of a startling story in which a woman finds vaginas and anuses growing, or rather opening,all over her anatomy, to the understandable horror of her friends and family (the story is set in the ’20s, but I don’t suppose it would have been any less shocking in the ’70s or the ’90s), and who ends up confined to a brothel for miners in northern Chile, where she remains, shut up in a room without windows, until in the end she becomes a great amorphous, uncontrollable
in-and-out
, finishes off the old pimp who runs the brothel along with the rest of the whores and the terrified clients, goes out onto the patio, and sets off into the desert (walking or flying, Pereda doesn’t say), finally disappearing into thin air.
    Soto also tried (unsuccessfully) to translate Sophie Podolski, the Belgian poet who committed suicide at the age of twenty-one, and Pierre Guyotat, the author of
Eden, Eden, Eden
and
Prostitution
(again he gave up), and
La Disparition
by Georges Perec, a detective story written without using the