Free Distant Star by Roberto Bolaño Page A

letter “e,” which he managed (with a limited degree of success) to render into Spanish, following in the footsteps of Jardiel Poncela, who, half a century earlier, had written a story in which the aforementioned vowel was conspicuous by its absence. But it is one thing to
write
without using “e” and quite another to
translate
without it.
    For a while, Soto and I were both living in Paris, but I never saw him. At the time I had no desire to look up old friends. Also, from what I’d been told, Soto’s financial situation had improved; he had married a French woman. Later I heard that they had a child (for what it’s worth, by then I was living in Spain). He regularly attended the meetings of Chilean writersheld in Amsterdam, and contributed to poetry magazines in Mexico, Argentina and Chile. I think he even had a book published in Buenos Aires or Madrid. Then I heard from a friend that Soto was lecturing at a university, which meant financial stability and time for writing and research, and by that stage he had two children, a boy and a girl. He had no plans to return to Chile. He must have been happy, reasonably happy. I could imagine his comfortable flat in Paris, or a house perhaps, in a village not far from the city. I could see him reading in the silence of his soundproof study, while the children watched television and his wife cooked or ironed, because, well, someone has to do the cooking, but of course it could have been a maid, yes, a Portuguese or an African maid, so Soto could read in his soundproof study, or write perhaps, although he was never very prolific, without feeling guilty, while his wife was busy in her own study, near the children’s room, or sitting at a nineteenth-century desk in a corner of the living room, correcting exam papers or planning a summer holiday or idly casting an eye over the cinema listings to decide which film they would go and see that night.
    According to Bibiano (who exchanged letters with him quite regularly), it wasn’t so much that Soto had become middle-class: he had never been anything else. If books and reading are what count, you have to lead a sedentary, middle-class life to some degree, said Bibiano. Take me, for example: working in the shoe shop – which gets more depressing every year, or more amusing, I can’t really tell – living in the same old boarding house … in a way, on a different scale, I’m doing thesame thing as Soto (or letting the same thing happen to me).
    In a word, Soto was happy. He thought he had escaped the curse (or we thought he had, anyway; Soto, I suspect, never believed in curses).
    Then he received an invitation to participate in a conference on literature and criticism in Latin America, to be held in Alicante.
    It was winter. Soto hated flying; he had done it only once in his life, at the end of 1973, when he flew from Santiago to Berlin. So after a whole night in the train he stepped off in Alicante. It was a weekend conference, but instead of going back to Paris on Sunday night, Soto stayed on. It is not known why. On Monday morning he bought a ticket for Perpignan. The trip was uneventful. When he arrived at the station in Perpignan he inquired about departures for Paris that night and bought a ticket for the 1:00 a.m. train. He spent the rest of the afternoon walking around the city, stopping in bars. He visited a second-hand bookshop where he bought a book by Guerau de Carrera, an avant-garde Franco-Catalan poet who died during the Second World War, but to pass the time he read a detective novel he had picked up that morning in Alicante (Vásquez Montalbán? Juan Madrid?) but didn’t have time to finish (the folded corner of page 155 seemed to indicate that he read no further) despite having devoured the first part with the voracity of an adolescent during the train journey.
    In Perpignan he ate in a pizzeria. It is odd that he didn’t go to a good restaurant to sample the renowned cuisine of Rousillon, but for whatever