Surprising Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was always difficult. From a very early age, the Chilean was clear that he would be a writer, to the point of abandoning his studies at the age of 14 in order to devote himself fully to his dream. It was so much that in the first years he barely had financial means or that the first books did not sell as much as expected. He knew his moment would come and waited patiently, but not with folded arms, but doing the two things that brought him the most joy: reading and using the pen. “He did it compulsively. When he wasn’t reading, he began to write, and so the whole time, he was alternating. His conversations also tended to be about books and he always encouraged me to read authors such as André Breton, Jack Kerouac or Julio Cortázar and his Rayuela. In the few breaks he took, he allowed himself to go play football”, explains La Vanguardia, one of the close friends of the author of Nocturno de Chile during his first years in Barcelona. The writer, along with some people from his closest circle, have agreed to speak with La Vanguardia on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the death of this intellectual who marked an entire generation.
“When someone asks me about him, I always say that he was a samurai of literature and that he lived like a monk, with a mattress on the floor of his tiny studio on Carrer Tallers, where to go to the bathroom you had to go out onto the terrace. He barely ate and the little money he earned as a night watchman at a campsite in Castelldefels was spent on tobacco. But all this seemed to bother him so much. What’s more, it sharpened his wit. One day he asked me to accompany him to Pedralbes. It surprised me because he always said he didn’t want to move from the block that surrounded his house. We went there and entered a damaged phone booth. When this happened, until the company realized it, you could call for free, so he took the opportunity to talk to DF, Chile and I imagine that he would have some girlfriend. Meanwhile, I waited outside, planted, although in awe that he found out about these things without, in theory, ever moving from the same four streets. He was a genius even for that.”
Financial stability came to him thanks to Jorge Herralde, his publisher at Anagrama, who showed that he had blind faith in that young man who had participated in an avant-garde movement in Mexico, infrarealism, alongside the poet Mario Santiago Papasquiaro, who inspired the character of Ulises Lima in Los detectives salvajes, a work that would award him the Herralde and Rómulo Gallegos awards. “He was a fantastic guy, he had no discipline. He was a poet-poet, very valuable”, said Bolaño about who he considered his soulmate. But he was not the only one, as he was always surrounded by his own. To Mónica Maristain, the person who gave her the last interview, published days after she died in the Mexican edition of Playboy, confessed to her that “three of my best friends are Ignacio Echevarría, Rodrigo Fresán and A. G. Porta”. All of them, in addition to the also inseparable Bruno Montané, advanced to this newspaper that for some time they prefer not to participate in anything related to Bolaño. A decision that could have been taken after the judicial back and forth between some friendships of the writer and his widow, Carolina López, who also filed a lawsuit for the protection of honor and family privacy against Carmen Pérez de Vega to claim that he had maintained a romantic relationship with the writer during the last six years of his life, a fact that the judge recognized but condemned Pérez de Vega for assault on privacy. “I consider that I have already said everything I had to say and write”, Fresán apologized by mail.
Maristain, on the other hand, did want to remember from his home in Mexico the long conversations he often had with Bolaño by email. “I asked him for a story for Playboy magazine, which at the time he was co-directing, and he scolded me for not paying him. But as a result of these messages we gained confidence and asked each other about our day, as well as giving each other advice about life and money”.
The journalist assures that “we all miss him”. Of course, he acknowledges that “I have not read and will not read the posthumous works. I will always continue to read it, but in Anagrama”. In 2016, the work of the author of Estrella distante made the leap from this publishing house – which published almost all of his books – to Alfaguara after Carolina López en Herralde’s “loss of trust”. “I found out that he signed a contract with my previous agency by which they both received commissions from translation contracts,” the writer’s wife confesses to this newspaper.
In one way or another, Dunia Gras, professor of Spanish-American literature at the University of Barcelona (UB), believes that “everyone should read it. I remember that when Nazi literature in America first came into my hands I was shocked. Thanks to a mutual friend, Javier Cercas, I got his phone and called him. He had already won the Herralde award and I told him that I imagined he must be busy with the promotion. He told me no and invited me to his house to meet. From that moment on, a friendship emerged that allowed me to relate to other writers around him, such as Fresán or Juan Villoro. It was quite a privilege and I lived it as if I was joining the best team in the Champions League”, says the academic, who remembers her calls with nostalgia. “He had fun calling his friends. Sometimes he would pretend to be someone else or ask you to watch a movie with him from a distance. One day he encouraged me to put on Grease. I was in Granollers and he was in Blanes and we commented on all the footage. He was an unconditional fan of Rizzo”.
Over the years, there are many who have brought his figure closer to the public, such as filmmaker Ricardo House with the documentary trilogy La batalla futura. “I researched him when I realized that many Chilean creators used Mexico as a springboard. Later I found out that as young people we had both met at the writer Poli Délano’s house in Mexico. I accompanied my father, the engineer and poet Herman House, and he went there because he wanted to learn from thinking and literary minds. It is likely that he already imagined everything that was to come. He always had everything very clear”, he concludes.
