A Little Lumpen Novelita: A Life You Never Quite Chose

Part of: The Deep Reader

Reading Note: A Little Lumpen Novelita by Roberto Bolaño

How do you leave a life you never quite meant to enter?

You can remember the separate decisions. Someone needed a place to sleep. There was a spare room.

They helped around the house, and it seemed reasonable to let them stay. What is harder to locate is the moment when these arrangements became a life with obligations of its own. Leaving now means hurting someone, losing something important, or admitting what you have agreed to.

In Roberto Bolaño’s A Little Lumpen Novelita, Bianca and her younger brother lose their parents in a car accident. Their pension is inadequate, they drift out of school, and they find poorly paid work. Then two men her brother knows move into the apartment.

Eventually, they recruit her into a scheme to rob a wealthy former film star. Each stage supplies the conditions for the next. Reading it, I felt an author arranging a fate, sometimes almost too visibly, until the small practical reasons for continuing made that fate seem horribly plausible.

Bianca tells us at the beginning that she is now married and a mother. We therefore know she has a life beyond the one she is describing. That knowledge offers little protection while we read.

She has to take us through the days when she could imagine almost nothing ahead, and Bolaño gives those days a peculiar, exhausting light: after the accident, night seems to stop existing.

Closing her eyes cannot make it dark.

Spoiler notice: This reading note discusses the novel in full, including its ending.

The men who wash the dishes

When her brother proposes that his friends stay, Bianca says there is no room. He points out that they can use their parents’ bedroom. Her answer arrives in two short sentences: “He was right, there was room. The men slept there.”

The first sentence accepts a calculation of space.

The second installs the men. Nothing in between allows Bianca to consider what it means to have strangers sleeping where her parents slept, or what authority either sibling has to refuse the other.

Death has left a vacancy, and her brother has found a use for it. The speed of her account makes the arrangement feel settled before its emotional cost can be discussed.

The men make themselves helpful. They clean the kitchen, prepare dinner, and attend to household details that even her considerate father sometimes neglected. On their first departure, Bianca checks the apartment for theft and finds nothing missing.

These are reasons to trust them, small enough to be convincing. Bolaño lets their reliability establish itself through the things a tired person would notice on coming home from work.

Their return brings a more disturbing intimacy. They become her lovers; she is sometimes uncertain which one has entered her room. Meanwhile, her brother grows attached to them. The men stay home while the siblings work, yet dinner is ready and the apartment is spotless. Bianca recognizes something false in their cheerfulness. She also benefits from what they do. Both perceptions can survive the same evening.

The novella’s atmosphere becomes increasingly powerful. The prospect of violence inhabits the household’s apparently workable arrangements.

We start feeling the violence, we see it developing among the people eating together. Their courtesy makes it harder to find a decisive occasion for refusal.

Bianca’s account repeatedly gathers evenings and weeks into routines. The men are there when she gets home; the food is ready; the television is on.

Such passages carry us past opportunities for a conversation that never happens. When they begin promising that their luck will change, the promise gets the same familiarity aura as the dinner. Her brother believes them. Bianca wonders what they are prepared to do.

By the time they have a specific plan, their company has become part of the siblings’ survival. The future they offer contains a beach house, a restaurant, a gym: different versions of an escape everyone can picture. Bianca’s part is described as “only the tiniest sacrifice.”

The diminutive does practical work, making the cost to her sound negligible beside the pleasures they will share.

A future hidden in a safe

The man Bianca is sent to visit is Maciste, a former bodybuilder and film star who lives in a large, neglected house. His blindness surprises her; the men have not told her. They have left her to discover the actual person who must fit their plan.

Before she meets him, she waits in darkness and feels calmer than she has for a long time. Since her parents’ death, the brightness of night has denied her a familiar boundary to the day. Inside this stranger’s house, darkness finally encloses her. We feel the relief before we know whether the place is safe. Bolaño has made an ordinary condition of sight strange enough that entering a threatening house can feel like rest.

Maciste pays her for their encounters. He also makes sandwiches, talks to her, and permits a kind of company she begins to want for itself. The neglected rooms offer alternatives to the apartment where everyone is waiting for her to produce money.

Bolaño delays telling us precisely what she is seeking there. Only after we have spent time with the man and moved through his house does the safe become explicit. The criminal purpose catches up with an attachment already developing in the telling.

Soon Bianca doubts that the safe exists. She suspects her brother’s friends have invented it. The doubt is followed by another search.

Chapter XIV opens: “Still, I kept looking for the safe.”

That small word still carries her through the failure of her own reasoning. She can distrust the story that brought her here and continue acting on it.

Searching gives each visit a task, a reason to open another room or move another painting. In the same time, it postpones the moment when she would have to say why she wants to return.

An earlier reading in The Mookse and the Gripes connects the security Bianca finds here with her need to preserve an ulterior motive. That connection becomes uncomfortable in the repeated searches.

Bianca knows that nobody would prevent her from continuing the visits without a robbery in view; the payments would remain very useful. What frightens her is continuing without the excuse. The crime supplies a way of staying close to Maciste without having to understand what that closeness means to her.

This changes the force of the promised future. At home, the men imagine the life their money will buy.

In Maciste’s house, Bianca imagines outings and a companionship that might release her from her other obligations. Each projected life helps her endure the current arrangement. Each gives her a reason to repeat it tomorrow. Her thoughts spend so much time ahead of her that the present begins to feel absorbed into the future.

Bolaño gives us within the searches increasingly tactile perspectives.

Paintings are moved, walls examined, rugs lifted.

Behind pictures, the less-faded wallpaper exposes patches of what the room used to look like. The house seems alive in its deterioration. Its surfaces give Bianca things to investigate while the object supposedly justifying the investigation grows less credible.

The longer she looks, the more thoroughly she inhabits the place.

I would not call this beautiful in the usual admiring sense. Its power lies in how little distance it allows between dependence, tenderness, calculation, and fear.

Even Bianca’s care for an ill Maciste gives her another chance to search while he sleeps. Affection enters the same routine as the theft. Neither feeling, however good or bad, conveniently clears the other away.

When the program ends

Bianca eventually concludes that there is no safe. We have her certainty, reached after another long search, rather than an independent view of everything Maciste owns.

The novel has kept us close enough to her that we can see how ending the search is something she must do with the knowledge she has.

She tells the men a different story. The safe exists, she says, but reaching the money will require them to torture its immensely strong owner. Her account makes explicit the violence their scheme has allowed them to leave to the imagination. They are shaken by the prospect. The plan becomes less attractive once they have to picture carrying it out themselves.

On her last visit to Maciste, she leaves his envelope of money behind. Then she goes home and tells the men to leave when their television program finishes.

The deadline is almost comically modest after all those projected new lives. It is also something everyone in the room can clearly understand.

Until now, television has accompanied evenings that blur into one another. Bianca takes the end of this particular show and makes it the end of their stay.

She repeats her demand, waits for the program to finish, and turns off the television. After warning the men that she may stop at the police station, she goes out with her brother. When they return, the men have gone.

Earlier, the narration could settle a change of life between a spare room and the sentence announcing its new occupants. Now it slows down to let Bianca insist. Her brother says he hopes never to see the men again, then shuts himself in his room and cries.

Night returns too.

After the men leave, “night was really night.” Bianca can once again experience darkness outside Maciste’s house. The change grants her a world with an evening in it, an interval her grief had seemed to abolish.

She spends the following days watching the news, afraid she will see Maciste murdered and the men identified as his killers. The novel does not report that murder.

The book leaves her imagining a consequence she cannot control. In thr beginning, the opening has already assured us that she will have another life; the ending preserves what it cost to begin leaving this one.

She has sent the men away.

She still has to live through the night.

Continue with The Third Reich, where a diary struggles to account for another life drifting toward danger, or explore the Bolaño reading map.

Sources

Roberto Bolaño, A Little Lumpen Novelita, translated by Natasha Wimmer (New Directions, 2014; originally published in Spanish in 2002). Quotations follow Wimmer’s translation. The passages discussed are chiefly in chapters I, III–V, VIII–XVI; the short quotations appear in chapters III, VIII, XIV, and XVI. Chapter references are used because pagination varies by edition.

Trevor Berrett, “Roberto Bolaño: A Little Lumpen Novelita,” The Mookse and the Gripes, September 16, 2014. His account of Bianca’s security in Maciste’s house and her need for an ulterior motive informs the discussion of why she keeps searching.