Comment on the final section of the Testimonios in The Savage Detectives

 Comment on the final sections of the Testimonios in The Savage Detectives

1.

“The Savage Detectives” testimonios occupy about 400 pages of the novel’s 610 page length in Natasha Wimmer’s English translation.  The scope of this polyphonic section allows Bolano to orchestrate Proustian effects as to time and memory.  Characters are imagined as evolving or developing over a period of twenty years.  Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, whose adventures provide the narrative scaffolding for the novel, age as the book progresses – around 22 or 23, at the outset of events portrayed in the book, we see them entering early middle-age by the end of this section.  Due to the expansive nature of Bolano’s storytelling and the detailed descriptions that characterize this part of the novel, the passage of time is not merely indicated or shown, but, in fact, rendered experientially – that is, the reader experiences time as an accumulation of events that congests our understanding and complicates our interpretation of the various stories presented, and, further, bathes everything in effects relating to both the persistence and dissolution of memory.  The “common reader” is never entirely sure what he or she recalls about past appearances of the many secondary characters who appear in this part of the book.  One reads by flipping back and forth between passages, searching for earlier references, and speculating as to events that may have occurred in the lacunae between narratives.  This type of reading simulates the passage of time and its erosive effects.  

Indeed, the passage of time is thematic.  The Savage Detectives is about disillusion, how youthful ambition sours into middle-aged compromise or despair.  The bright-eyed young poets who we meet in Juan Garcia Madero’s diary age: someone says “youth is a scam.”  Idealism doesn’t last and the dreams of revolution, both political and esthetic, evaporate.  Accordingly, time’s debilitating and corrosive effect is integral to the book’s development, most particularly in the witness testimony adduced over four-hundred pages at the center of the novel.

During the two decades narrated through the testimonios, of course, losses occur.  The flamboyant Ernesto San Epifanio, the gay writer who expounds at length on his theory that all poets are somehow homosexual (he distinguishes between maricons and maritas – that is, faggots and queers or “Nancy-boys”) suffers a brain aneurysm, almost dies, and, then, lingers in a much diminished state, ultimately dying in the home of his parents. San Epifanio’s mother believes that her son’s brain trauma has “cured” him of his homosexuality; “he’s no longer a fairy,” his mother says.  “Luscious Skin,” the gorgeous bisexual who claims to have “slept with every poet in Mexico” is caught in the crossfire during a narcotics raid and shot to death.  His friends and lovers search for his corpse desperately in the morgues in the D.F.  Renowned for his glamor and handsomeness – he’s said to look like “slender Mayan priest” – Luscious Skin’s body is “ashen” and half of his face has been shot away.

Norman Bolzman is a gentle, empathetic Jewish intellectual.  He is living in Tel Aviv where he is attending a graduate program in philosophy.  (The study of philosophy makes him “brain-sick,” we are told.)  Bolzman’s girlfriend is the ravishing, but fickle Claudia.  The couple lives in Tel Aviv with a roommate Daniel Grossman.  Ulise Lima shows up in Tel Aviv.  Lima has conceived an obsessive love for Claudia and hopes to win her affections, but, in vain.  A hundred pages later, Daniel Grossman tells the reader that Bolzman and Claudia have separated.  Bolzman is teaching at UNAM.  He retreats to a remote village on the sea-coast for a vacation where Grossman visits him.  Bolzman is writing an article about Nietzsche but with reservations – some of Nietzsche’s ideas seem to Bolzman to be uncomfortably intimate with Nazi ideology.  After an idyllic holiday, Bolzman drives back to Mexico City in his sports car.  Grossman is riding in the car as his passenger.  As Bolzman drives at high speed  cross-country, he recounts how he observed Lima sobbing with unrequited desire (or masturbating).  Bolzman has a sudden epiphany:  Ulises Lima’s love for Claudia far surpassed his affection for her; invoking the Nietzschean concept of the “eternal reoccurrence of the same”, Bolzman imagines Lima endlessly presenting his romantic suit to Claudia and she endlessly rejecting him.  The notion is disturbing and, when a truck veers across the center-line, a crash occurs.  Bolzman dies; Grossman is badly injured.  When he recovers, Grossman searches for Lima in Mexico City, walking the length and breadth of the megalopolis (where he is mugged three times), but never encountering the poet.  Lima seems to have simply vanished.  (One of the themes of the novel is Latin America’s desaparecidos – or “disappeared” men and women; Lima has previously gone missing in Managua in Nicaragua; Belano frequently vanishes as well.)

2.

I don’t think it can be denied that The Savage Detectives decays a bit toward the end of the testimonios sections.  The urgency, almost breathless, quality of events in the two-thirds of the book has calmed.  There are longueurs and obscure passages that can’t be readily interpreted except as evidence of the narrator’s madness.  (A notable example is the esoteric passage that doesn’t make much sense – how is that 7 x 3 = 22 as maintained by Julio Martinez Morales at the Feria del Libro? – at pp. 514 -516.)  The dull melancholy that descends over the narration, enlivened by farcical episodes, traces the dying fall, the diminution in significance and meaning that afflicts the characters.  As the protagonists experience their midlife crises, the book also suffers from a similar crisis – the prose becomes exhausted or strains for effects that it doesn’t quite achieve.  The effect is similar to “Ithaca”, the penultimate sequence in Joyce’s Ulysses, an important source for Bolano, in which Leopold Bloom’s return home after his peregrinations in Dublin is expressed in worn-out cliches, advertising slogans, a lackluster catechism that expresses the hero’s exhaustion in language that is similarly exhausted and drained of its meaning.  The ecstatic sexual episodes of the first third of Bolano’s book are notably absent from the latter part of the testimonios.  The dreams of youth, full of ardor and ambition, have dissolved into ever-increasing disillusion.  No one imagines themselves capable of being the mother of all Mexican poets, or their wise father; no one thinks he can make love to all of the poets in the country.  The hope of establishing a community of bold, revolutionary Latin American poets has evaporated.  Sexual and esthetic revolutionaries have become middle-aged members of the establishment. The dictators and strongmen are in command; even the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua (where Ulises goes missing) seems to be in some kind of trouble, the struggle devolving into a venue for a field trip by “peasant poets” from Mexico City.  Simply stated, the energy leaches out of the lives of the characters and drains out of the book as well.  Keats argued that poets were “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”.  But Keats died as a young man.  Bolano’s poets and writers are no longer even the “legislators” of their own lives.   

Viewed in this light, Norman Bolzman’s death behind the wheel of his late model sports car seems to be the fatal outcome of a mid-life crisis.  Two emblematic episodes, mirroring one another, define the anomie and malaise afflicting both characters and the novel.  In the first, Belano fights an idiotic duel with the pompous critic Inaki Eschevarne.  The subject of the duel is a review, not yet written let alone published, of one of Belano’s books – Belano now seems to have eschewed poetry for novels.  Belano’s logic underlying his challenge to the critic is grotesque and contorted.  Inaki has published an essay critical of an unnamed friend of a mainstay of Spanish letters, another pompous figure Aurelio Baca.  Baca responds with a venomous attack, mounted on behalf of his protegee against Inaki.  It’s obvious that this war of words will escalate and, for some reason, Belano thinks that Inaki intends to exercise his critical vitriol on Belano’s new book – he imagines that Inaki will “warm up” as it were preparatory to the main event that will be a direct attack on Baca, by maliciously savaging Belano’s novel.  (The proximate cause for Belano’s anxiety and preemptive strike on Inaki is that the critic doesn’t say “hello” to Belano when he calls his publisher when Inaki happens to be in the same room when the man takes the call.)  The rationale for the duel is ludicrous but, strangely enough, Belano’s friends support the challenge and one of them even agrees to serve as the writer’s “second” in the sword-fight.  The impression on the reader is of a literary milieu vexed with petty quarrels, afflicted with destructive arrogance, and moronically obsessed with “honor” – in fact, Bolano provides us with an entire chapter at the Feria del Libro (“Book Fair”) in Madrid on the subject of “the honor of the poet.”  (As the examples in this chapter, the so-called “honor of the poet” is, more or less, illusory and non-existent – the testimonios show poets who are disloyal, backstabbing, and petty.)  Belano’s comical pursuit of the duel verifies Xose Lendoiro’s assertion that the poet is “a third rate Julien Sorel” – that is, a vainglorious seducer and duelist like the protagonist of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black.  Early in the testimonios, one of Belano’s first girlfriend, Laura Jauregui, also a vain and frivolous person, asserts that the entire Visceral Realist movement was merely a device to impress girls.  There’s more than a little merit to this assertion since Belano is anxious to have a female admirer (or former admirer) observe the duel remotely, from a car parked on a hill above the beach where the fight occurs.  Inaki and his second are, also, anxious to have a woman present on their behalf to watch the fray and cheer on the combatants.  The duel is particularly stupid and pointless because by this point in the novel, apparently early 1994, Belano is about forty and has acquired an ex-wife and son. (Bolano exercises his typical craft in this context, rendering occult (hidden) the circumstances that led to his surrogate, Belano’s marriage – we never see his ex-wife or child.  This is a central narrative strategy in the novel – key events are not described and left obscure: for instance, we don’t know why Ulises Lima goes missing in Managua or what events occur in his odyssey along a symbolic river of migrants, goods, influences and poetry that links the nations in central America. We’re not told what happened to Belano when he returned to Chile in 1974 to fight against Pinochet. This tendency to conceal motivations or events of signal importance is integral to Bolano’s narrative art.  A tiny example is Heimito’s remark in Vienna:  “Sometimes we saw cardboard boxes floating on the water.  Which brought back terrible memories for me.” cf. 325.  What memories?  Why?)  Similarly, several of Bolano’s characters encounter the devil (Edith Oster in the park in Rome, Belano in the chasm).  What is the devil like?  What is the outcome of these encounters?  The duel on the beach frequented by nudists, near the bar and grill Los Calamares Felices (“The Merry or Happy Squids”?) follows this same pattern.  The sword fight goes on and on until Bolano tires of it and simply ends the chapter – we don’t know the outcome of the duel.  (The effect is similar to the great duel scene in Michael Powell’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp in which the film’s two protagonists fight a similarly meaningless duel and the camera, disinterested in the combat simply drifts away to focus on snow falling outside the theater of combat.)

The duel scene is echoed in the testimony of Clara Cabeza, Don Octavio Paz’s personal secretary at Chapter 24 (pp. 531 - 540).  As if by appointment, Octavio Paz and Ulises Lima meet three times in the decrepit Parque Hundido.  (Hundido Park is in the Benito Juarez neighborhood of south Mexico City, a “sunken” park landscaped as an arboretum in terrain that was excavated by a brick company now long defunct.)  The two men engage in an elaborate pas de deux, ritualistically circling one another like the combatants in the duel on the beach.  (The imagery also suggests dogs sniffing one another.)  At one point, the Visceral Realists threatened to kidnap their great adversary, the renowned formalist poet Octavio Paz and, so, there is an undercurrent of animosity between the two men.  Of course, Octavio Paz, a world-famous figure is instantly recognized by everyone.  Paz seems to think that he recognizes Ulises Lima but, obviously, is uncertain as to his enemy’s identity.  As with the duel on the beach near the Calamares Felices, Clara Cabeza, a loyal female secretary, witnesses the weird, stylized confrontation between the two men.  They circle the park on a path that requires them to pass one another face to face.  Paz demands that Clara Cabeza prepare a list of all Mexican poets active since 1950 – using, as it happens, “the famous Zarco anthology” that is the subject of much discussion two hundred pages earlier: Sebastien Luis Rosado conspires to get a poem by his lover “Luscious Skin” into the anthology but we know that neither Belano nor Lima nor any of their “Visceral Realist” compatriots were published in the book.)  Lima’s name, of course, is not on any lists.  Ultimately, Lima and Paz converse and Lima introduces himself as the “second-to-last Visceral Realist in Mexico.”  Paz isn’t sure about the movement and confuses Visceral Realism with Stridentism (sometimes called Infrarealism in the novel).  It is interesting that Paz recalls that the obsessional object of desire in this book, Cesarea Tinajera, was a member of the Visceral Realist movement – of course, with Manual Maples Arce, Tinajera was a “Stridentist”, one of the utopian poets who planned to build “Stridentopolis” as its capitol probably in the Sonoran desert.  But Lima’s identity baffles Paz: How can a much younger man have been a member of the Visceral Realist movement that Paz mistakenly believes was contemporaneous to Cesarea Tinajera?: “I would have been ten years old,” Paz muses, back in the days of the Visceral Realists, “this was around 1924".  In fact on the third day of these encounters, Paz and Lima converse and, in fact, shake hands cordially. A duel is averted.  But Lima, like Belano, has been lost to Mexican literary history.  None of the Visceral Realists are represented in the “famous Zarco anthology.”  By contrast, the lost poet, Cesarea Tinajera, still resides in the living memory of several of the characters in the book, notably the great poet Octavio Paz and, of course, the scrivener Amadeo Salvatierra.  The irony is that Belano and Lima wrote many poems.  Cesarea Tinajera’s work survives in the form of a single cryptogram, a collage of emojis (as we would say today) – it’s a stretch to call her one surviving work “Sion”, a wordless pictogram, a poem at all.  We must imagine the strange, initially hostile, minuet between Paz and Lima in the Hundido Park as the counterpart of the choreographed duel between Belano and Inaki Eschevarne on the beach.  In both cases, the implication is that both Belano and Lima’s efforts have been for nought and that the world is in the process of completely forgetting them.  More is known about the lost poetess, Cesarea Tinajera, than about Ulises Lima.

4.

It’s worth noting that the duel between Inaki Eschevana and Belano includes diction and imagery that invokes Jorge Luis Borges’ knife-fights in many of the Argentine writer’s short stories, particularly those that are described in his early collection Dr. Brodie’s Report.  When the swords are unveiled, the blades gleam with a sinister light.  This is a motif exploited by Borges in his narratives (derived incidentally from Borges’ readings in Old English particularly the lethal glistening of the swords in the Finnsburh fragment).  In several stories, Borges’ argues that the knives themselves are thirsty for human blood, that they want combat, and that their will, as instruments of death, overcomes the will of the combatants forcing men to fight to the death over trivial quarrels.  This mock-heroic view of dueling underpins the episode in The Savage Detectives.   

Borges argues that the esthetic effect that he seeks to achieve in his stories is to suggest “the imminence of revelation” that is, however, always deferred.  (See Borges’ essay “The Wall and the Book.”) Although Borges traveled to Chile to receive a literary award from mi general Augusto Pinochet, Bolano revered the Argentine writer.  The manner in which Bolano suggests that a riddle is about to be solved or some mystery deciphered and, then, reneges on that promise, I think, materializes Borges’ ideas about delaying the “imminent revelation.”         

5.

Among some, The Savage Detectives is reputed to be misogynistic.  Guadalupe Ochoa, the real life model for Xochitl Garcia in the book, reported to El Pais that she was writing her own novel about the Visceral Realists as a response to the supposed misogyny in Bolano’s book.  These aspersions cast on The Savage Detectives merely establish that many of its critics haven’t succeeded in reading the entire novel and, in fact, seem to have given up on the book a few pages into the testimonios sections.  It is hard to see any trace of misogyny in the last testimonio involving Belano’s life in Europe.  This is the section narrated by the female bodybuilder Maria Teresa Solsana Ribot (pp. 541-557).  

Belano is living in Magrat (the Catalan word means “Reluctantly”) on the Costa Brava about 45 miles northeast of Barcelona.  His landlady, Solsana Ribot, works as a barmaid in a tavern called La Sirena.  She is champion bodybuilder, intensely committed to exercise and healthy living, although it’s also evident that she has some bad habits of her own.  Solsana Ribot is a figure completely unlike the neurotic and self-aggrandizing poets that usually associate with Belano.  Like Xochitl Garcia, she is kind, generous, and pragmatic.  The books that she reads are about body building and self-help.  She is fascinated by Belano but admits not understanding him.  At several points in the narrative, Solsana Ribot wants to make Belano her boyfriend, but her commonsense, it seems, prohibits the relationship – he’s obviously unhealthy and physically weak and, of course, not her type.  Ordinarily, she fancies male musclemen, also champions in various bodybuilding competitions in which she participates, and, as the section ends, we see her attempting to make love to a burly bouncer at a local tavern, Juanma Pacheco.  The sexual encounter fails because poor Juanma’s muscles “were flabby since he hadn’t been to the gym for so long.”  Solsana Ribot is relentlessly cheerful and optimistic.  Like Belano, she is imagined as a rescuer – she denounces Belano’s current love-interest, the “Andalusian girl”, for putting her devoted boyfriend on a train leaving Barcelona (where the girl apparently lives) when Belano has a temperature of 104 degrees.  (Solsana Ribot says that she wouldn’t treat even an enemy in this way and we, certainly, have the sense that she is honest about this.)  We know nothing about “the Andalusian girl” except that she is fickle and mistreats Belano.  

Solsana Ribot seems modeled on the American female bodybuilder, Lisa Lyon.  Lyon enjoyed brief notoriety in the eighties when she was photographed by the fashionista Helmut Newton, the decadent Joel-Peter Witkin (who at that time was working on pictures of cadavers at a Mexico City morgue), and, then, Robert Mapplethorpe who was obsessed by her, made hundreds of pictures and seems to have been her boyfriend. Although there is something a bit freakish about the notion of a female bodybuilder, a concept that exposes male anxieties about women’s strength and bodily autonomy, Solsana Ribot (like Lisa Lyon) doesn’t regard herself as monstrous in any way – in fact, she is a model for healthy self-esteem (albeit, it seems, with a taste for rough sex).  Obviously, Bolano intends her as figure of nurturing and powerful femininity and she offers the sickly Belano a last opportunity to live a relatively normal bourgeois life.  (The paradox that Bolano exposes in this section is that the muscular and unusual Solsana Ribot, in fact, exemplifies something like normality.)  Solsana Ribot offers to lend Belano money and encourages him to abandon his doomed passion for the mysterious “Andalusian Girl”.  She says that Belano should find a woman who will take care of him and devote himself to raising his little boy.  In fact, it seems that she is tempted to assume this role herself but knows that it won’t work out.  Belano is obsessed with his unrequited love for the Andalusian Girl and rejects her advice.  (The sobriquet “Andalusian Girl” reminds us of Bunuel and Dali’s first surrealist film, the silent 1929 Andalusian Dog; in fact, the movie’s title Un chien Andalou with the addition of an “ne” reads Un chienne Andalou – that is, the “female Andalusian Dog” or the “Andalusian Bitch”, another term that Solsana Ribot uses with respect to Belano’s demanding and cruel girlfriend.)  Solsana Ribot, an icon for female power, can’t save Belano – he gives her a few books to read (she doesn’t read them) and she goes with him to the “station” from which he departs, apparently, for Africa.  

Solsana Ribot encourages Belano’s work as a novelist.  She points out that writing (and visiting his son) seem to be the only things that really interest him.  And, so, she argues that Belano should settle down and pursue these activities.  But there is a dark side to novel-writing, an obsessive quality to Belano’s work that Solsano Ribot fears.  Belano and the lady bodybuilder discuss Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, a film about a deranged novelist.  In particular, Solsano Ribot cites one of the more frightening scenes in the movie, the revelation that Jack Torrance’s perpetual typing has resulted in only a single sentence endlessly repeated across hundreds of pages: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”  In a passage at the end of her testimony alluding to The Shining, Solsano Ribot takes a peek at Belano’s manuscript, a text that she doesn’t understand and so, following Bolano’s practice of not revealing key elements in the narrative, she can’t or doesn’t describe.  Whether Belano is suffering from the homicidal “writer’s block” that animates Jack Torrance’s mayhem is unclear.  

The idea of a “writer’s block” is central to Mallarme’s “Sea Breeze”, a poem that begins with the expression: “Sad flesh.  And I’ve read all the books...”  Belano recites this poem to Solsano Ribot.  She’s impressed and wants him to write it down.  Mallarme’s poem imagines a young man on a seagoing vessel.  The text references “the lamp’s Sahara / On empty paper...” – that is, an inability to write based on what Mallarme calls “ennui”.  “Sea Breeze” seems to depict Rimbaud on his voyage away from Europe to Africa and prefigures Belano’s adventures in 1995 in Rwanda and Liberia.  In her pragmatic way, Solsano Ribot regards the poem about the “sad flesh” as beautiful, but pernicious nonsense.  She says that no one can read all the books in the world or “fuck all the women”. This stuff is narcissistic poison she warns and, later, when the histrionic Belano brings up the “Andalusian Girl” again, she talks to him “about life’s responsibilities, the things I believed in and clung to in order to keep breathing” (586).  It’s not enough: the next day, Solsano Ribot sees Belano’s suitcase packed – he is ready to leave for Africa.  

The opposite of the aridity of “writer’s block” is fluidity of communication.  Under Solsano Ribot’s benign aegis, Belano has a revelatory dream.  In this dream, Belano sees himself as dragging a telecommunications cable into the sea – the cable is said to be many miles long and its placement in the ocean, presumably, to facilitate transmission is a herculean task, but one that the dreamer accomplishes without effort.  (He is assisted by a little brother, a figure that Solsano Ribot interprets as Belano’s son.)  The two figures are dressed in Arabian robes and wear curved scimitars in their belts, possibly a reference to Belano’s duel.  There is said to be a glacier comprised of sand in Sicily.  The sand-glacier falls as a sort of avalanche but no one is harmed.  This complex of images suggests the thousand-and-one tales of the Arabian Nights, that is, an endlessly regenerating narrative, transmitted across the oceans to the whole world – Belano imagines the thread of communication as connecting Sicily and Indonesia. The desert, meaning, I think, the aridity of flagging inspiration (or writer’s block), is the inverse of the watery fluency of writing suggested by the telecommunications cable.  Solsano Ribot interprets the dream as auspicious – it means “your luck is about to change, things will start going your way.”

5.

Like his namesake, Arturo (“Arthur”) Rimbaud, Arturo Belano travels to various conflict zones in Africa.  (Rimbaud, after his disastrous homosexual affair with Verlaine, went to Africa from Aden in Yemen.  He spent the last half of his life running guns and trading in the Horn of Africa before dying at age 37 of bone cancer in the seaport town of Marseilles.)  Rimbaud is identified directly as a precursor and model for the European adventurers depicted in Jacobo Urenda’s narrative (558 to 583): Urenda, an Argentine photojournalist says “My generation overdosed on Marx and Rimbaud” (560).  Urenda meets Belano in Kigali (Rwanda) where the Chilean writer is working as free-lance journalist.  Belano confesses to Urenda that he is hoping to find his death in Africa.  Like Rimbaud, he has gone into the wilderness to perish.  But, as always, there are contradictions and paradoxes in play – notwithstanding, Belano’s ambition to die in Africa, he attends closely to his health and, in fact, faithfully takes a variety of medications for his many ailments – he has ulcerative colitis, a bile gland that is sclerotic, and a number of other potentially deadly conditions.  Urenda is drawn to Belano who retains the magnetism and charisma that has attracted people to him throughout the book.  When Urenda returns to Paris, he buys medications to send to Belano that would otherwise be difficult to access in central Africa – Belano is working in the Congo and other dangerous parts of the continent.  (Curiously, Urenda discusses Belano with his Parisian wife, someone named Simone, a character who seems to know about Belano’s personality – many critics think that Simone is Simone Darrieux, one of Belano’s girlfriend in Mexico City and later Paris, a practitioner of mild forms of SM; another echo from earlier in the novel is the fact that one of people sending lifesaving medication to Belano is his adversary in the duel, Inaki Eschevarne.)  On several occasions, Urenda leaves Africa for rest and relaxation in Paris and, each time, expects that he will never see Belano again.  But on his returns to Africa, on several occasions, he encounters Belano.  Belano seems to be rallying. Although emaciated, he seems healthy and his mood is improved – he no longer is seeking death.

We last see Belano in a tour-de-force episode set during the Liberian civil war.  Belano has left traces of his presence in Monrovia, the capitol of Liberia, and is believed to be covering the conflict somewhere in the interior.  Urenda makes an ill-fated excursion to some small villages where fighting is occurring only about twenty miles away the capitol.  A colleague, the Italian Luigi, is shot dead by a sniper and Urenda takes refuge in a mostly abandoned village in the combat zone.  In this place, he encounter Belano who emerges from the jungle with a famous Spanish war photographer named Emilio Lopez Lobo, a “living legend” among the correspondents – we are told that he is to photojournalists what Don DeLillo is to writers.   Belano immediately recognizes Urenda and two men talk.  Lopez Lobo, mourning the death of his small son, has now assumed Belano’s role – that is, he is courting death as an end to his grief.  Belano, on the other hand, now seems determined to live.  The group hiding in the village, known as Brownsville, agree to divide into two parties.  One party will hike to the main road in the hope of reaching Monrovia alive – Urenda, not anxious to perish in this hellhole, plans to travel with this group of refugees.  Belano and Lopez Lobo decide to accompany some of the child soldiers toward the front-lines where there is fighting between the forces of General Kensey (one of the rebel leaders) and the 19-year-old General Lebon, a soldier loyal to the regime of Charles Taylor, the president of Liberia.  It seems obvious that the mission to the front lines will prove to be fatal.  But Belano, who has now conceived a strong desire to live, decides to accompany Lopez Lobo to express his solidarity with the mourning photojournalist – Belano “wasn’t going to let him die alone” (580).  At dawn, Urenda starts walking toward the road to Monrovia with a group of women and other civilians.  He sees Belano marching out of the village with Lopez Lobo with a look of utter terror and “fierce happiness” on his face.  This is the last time anyone sees Belano.  Urenda escapes to the capitol and leaves Liberia never to return.  Belano’s association with the “child soldiers” – “they’re all fucking kids...they kill each other like they’re playing” (581), should remind us of the youthful enthusiasm and ardor of the boyish Visceral Realists and, even, Juan Garcia Madera, the youngest of that group.  Poetry is a kind of play; now, the play has become lethal.  

There are several things to notice about this passage in the book, an effective and suspenseful adventure tale that is like something by Joseph Conrad (some of the effects mirror Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”) or Graham Greene.  First, Belano is now associated with photojournalists – he is no longer accompanied by a platoon of poets or writers.  The word has given way to pictures – just as Cesarea Tinajera’s poems seem to be composed of pictograms and not words.  The novel exposes skepticism about the function of literature; there’s only so much that words can accomplish when confronted with the “horror of the world”, something that Urenda tells us that “Latin Americans are less affected by” than others – presumably due to the history of brutal repression in the “Southern Cone”.  Second, the scenes in Liberia remind us that a man’s death has meaning only if he intends to live – Belano’s fatal decision to accompany Lopez Lobo to his doom so that the grief stricken man “will not die alone” is a last gesture of solidarity; Belano doesn’t want to die – he wants to live but his role as a rescuer (the man who brought the child out of the Devil’s Mouth) casts him as someone who will die to help a friend.  This is a quixotic, hopeless gesture, something imagined from a Peckinpah film like The Wild Bunch (clearly an influence on Belano) and shows us a courageous side to Latin American machismo.   

The episode in Liberia climaxes with a long vigil in a stinking shack in Brownsville.  The scene parodies and invokes Christ’s agony in Gethsemene.  For the war photographer, Urenda, despair has reached a pitch that is beyond words.  Hearing people speaking in the hovel, Urenda declares that the Babel of tongues disgusts him: “all languages seemed detestable to me just then” (576).  But we must attend to the qualifier “just then”. Gradually, language reconstitutes itself and establishes meaning in the world.  First, Urenda hears strings of names, fragments of speech, as he listens to Belano and Lopez Lobo speaking.  The dark shack becomes a labyrinth, at first, meaningless, but, then, organized according to a narration.  (Like Amadeo Salvatierra who is drunk and loses his way in his own small apartment, Urenda gets lost in the small shack; he can’t find his way.  This is an evocation of the aimless wandering that characterizes so much of the book, the notion of being hopelessly lost like the 500,000 Galicians in the dark forest at the end of Xose Lendoira’s story – all “are lost and alone” despite being part of a multitude; it is “Mexicans lost in Mexico”.)  Gradually, a story emerges in the darkness.  The story is about the successful life of Lopez Lobo with sex, fame, a happy marriage, and many friends.  But this life is destroyed by the death of the great cameraman’s son.  His wife divorces him and he leaves the urn of ashes, the remains of his little boy, in a New York subway.  This loss drives Lopez Lobo into the wilderness of Africa where he is now seeking death.  The narrative, like all of the stories in the novel, emerges out of desperation and sorrow – but it is a story that gives meaning to Lopez Lobo’s life and the death that he desires.  We make sense of the world by telling stories about it.  Lopez Lobo’s story is persuasive and induces Belano, who desires to live, to die by his side.   

6.

The final chapter in the Testimonios, 26 (pp. 584 - 588) foregrounds issues as to periphery and center.  Simply put, we are all central to our own stories, but peripheral to the concerns of other people.  The fundamental feature of human life is dramatized in the last section of the “Savage Detectives” part of the novel.  

If Mexico City, Barcelona, and Paris are central locations in the novel, certainly, Pachuco, the capital of the east-central State of Hidalgo is peripheral.  Interest in the Visceral Realists, who are being rapidly forgotten in the nineties, has migrated to the unlikely venue of the University of Pachuco, a provincial place remote from the prestigious UNAM in Mexico City.  Professor Ernesto Garcia Grajales claims to be the “only expert on the visceral realists in Mexico.”  He provides a brisk update as to current status of members of the movement in December 1996.  (See 584 - 585).  He says “(a)bout Arturo Belano I know nothing.”  His interlocutor asks him about Juan Garcia Madero.  He’s never heard of him.  By this point in the novel, this revelation is not shocking.  We have read through about 440 pages of testimony about the Visceral Realists and their precursors, the Stridentists.  No one has mentioned Garcia Madero.  The narrator of the first and last sections of the book, an intensely realized character, has vanished from history without a trace.  He isn’t even peripheral to the stories about Belano and Lima as understood by Garcia Grajales. 

There’s a faintly comical quality to Professor Grajales’ remarks.  Pachuco is known for its silver mines and mountains, not its poets – although Grajales claims that there is a great Pachuco poet (Manuel Gerez Garabito) whom the professor praises to his interlocutor.  So far as I can ascertain, the poet Garabito is as fictional as the University of Pachuco (the actual school in town is the State University of Hidalgo).  The name “Pachuco” also tints the interview with a faint absurdity.  A “pachuco” is a zoot-suiter, the Mexican gangsters who entertained the public with their garish and ridiculous garb in the early forties.  (Octavio Paz wrote an important essay on the Pachuco called “The Pachuco and Other Extremes” – it’s part of his famous 1973 book on Mexican culture, The Labyrinth of Solitude).  The Pachuco was a phenomenon of the North – the fad originated in El Paso on the Sonoran border but, then, spread to Los Angeles where there were “zoot suit” riots.  The zoot suitors parodied Anglo fashion, caricaturing it to an extreme degree.  Accordingly, there are absurdist overtones to Grajales’ earnest sponsorship of the mostly forgotten Visceral Realists.  

The section ends with the valedictory interview with Amadeo Salvatierra concluding as it began in January 1976.  (It’s the interview with Salvatierra that motivates the quixotic search for Cesarea Tinajera that is the subject of the short final part of the book – the return of the diarist Juan Garcia Madero.)  Salvatierra laments that “like so many Mexicans, I gave up poetry.”  No one reads poetry anymore the old man says.  Lima is apparently still “scanning the only poem by Cesarea Tinajera that existed in Mexico” – that is, the pictogram text of “Sion” in Caborca.  Belano has fallen asleep. (Amadeo doesn’t distinguish between the “two boys” and, probably, doesn’t even know their names; the identification of the characters here is my conjecture although based on evidence about how Belano speaks.)   Imagery associated with the uncanny and supernatural accompanies Belano here as it has throughout the book.  Somehow, Belano, although asleep is talking, although his speech “could have been a laugh, a gurgle or a purr or maybe he was about to choke.”  Belano affirms that the search for Cesarea Tinajera will be “for Mexico, for Latin America, for the Third World...”, an ambitious claim that the rest of this section of the novel has wholly, and brutally, refuted. (Belano also admits the quest may be for the benefit of their “girlfriends.”)  Belano is invested with eerie imagery – he seems to be “breathing with his bones”, a comment that reminds us of the paintings of “ossuaries” (or collections of bones) made by the painter Guillem Pina, who serves as a second for Belano in the duel.  (See p. 500).  Already in January 1976, the Visceral Realists are dead and gone – reduced to skeletal remains.  In a sense, Belano is speaking posthumously, from the stance of one who is already departed. 

This passage, like the last paragraph in Madero’s account of the escape from Mexico City at 139 draws the reader’s attention to a window.  (On New Year’s Eve during the siege by Alberto, the pimp, the back window of the Impala frames “all the sadness of the world concentrated” in the enraged pimp.)  Wan light is seeping through the window in Salvatierra’s apartment and the chilly light intervenes between the old man and the two boys – they seem to be apparitions from the “North Pole.”  Salvatierra tells us that the boys haven’t migrated to the North Pole, rather the cold light of that zone of ice and snow and death has somehow infiltrated Mexico City.  Salvatierra asks if the boys are cold and, then, poses the rhetorical question: Is it worth it?  Belano (who is the sleeping man) answers with the enigmatic response Simonel.  What does this mean?  A little later in the book, Belano uses the word “simon”, street argot for “yes” – this is at p. 596, when Lupe quizzes Lima, Belano, and Garcia Madero on street slang as they are driving through the Sonoran desert.  Simon means something like “Si, man” (or “right on!) and is an affirmative statement.  But this isn’t exactly what the somnambulant Belano says.  Instead, he uses an odd expression “Simonel”.  At page 587, Salvatierra asks the sleeper if he is a ventriloquist – to some extent, all poets or those who recite poetry are ventriloquists.  But the sleeper responds “no” or “maybe in the negative”.  Salvatierra records variants of the negative that the speaker may have used – nel, nelson, and nelazo provision defined as “no,” “no, sir” and “not a chance.”  So what has the sleeping Belano answered to the question Is it really worth it? -- something like “yes and no” or “yes but, maybe, no.”  

And, on this curiously ambiguous note, the middle section of the novel ends.  Salvatierra goes to the window and opens it; he turns off the lights in the room.  The window signifies the frame (or perspective) that the novel employs in making its meanings.  In fact, the frame, I would argue, is a structure that is equated to the novel.  We will see what happens to the frame of the window, and the framework of the novel, on the final pages of the book.