Amulet by Roberto Bolaño: The Bathroom That Keeps Returning

Part of: The Deep Reader

Reading Note: Amulet by Roberto Bolaño

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

Auxilio Lacouture survives by staying in a bathroom. An Uruguayan living precariously in Mexico City, devoted to its poets and accustomed to helping them with whatever she can, she is reading at the university when the army occupies the campus in September 1968. She hides in the women's bathroom in the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature. Outside are soldiers; inside are a book, water, toilet paper, and a woman who gradually loses count of the days. Much of Amulet takes place elsewhere, among friends, poets, lovers, and the younger people Auxilio calls her children. The bathroom keeps interrupting them.

What unsettled me most was how easily Bolaño could withdraw the world I had begun to inhabit. After an adventure in a hotel, Auxilio returns to the streets of Mexico City, pleased for a moment to accept ordinary life. Her voice becomes small; she has had enough of adventures. In Chris Andrews's translation, the moment ends with: “Then the everyday began to expand like a soap bubble gone crazy, and popped.”

The next paragraph begins: “I was back in the women's bathroom on the fourth floor of the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature and it was September 1968 and I was thinking about the adventures of Remedios Varo.”

Between those sentences, a city disappears. The bubble first enlarges the everyday until it cannot hold its shape, and its sudden collapse leaves us with an almost administrative precision: bathroom, floor, faculty, date. The repeated “and” carries us through the coordinates without allowing a pause to ask how we got here. Auxilio does not prepare us for a recollection. She tells us where she is, and the sentence makes that place present again.

She eventually leaves the bathroom. Bolaño makes that departure explicit. What persists is its power to take over the telling of her life, including the years after her release. We can follow Auxilio down a street, sit with her in a café, or watch her enter someone else's home and still find ourselves returned to the tiles. The confinement acquires its force through these repeated losses of our bearings.

The years inside the room

Auxilio's first defense is practical: remain silent, stay hidden, read. Even reading changes under the pressure outside. She rushes through Pedro Garfias's poetry so quickly that she can no longer make sense of it. A book is present, but the conditions that let language become poetry are failing. Later, she recites what she remembers and writes on squares of toilet paper. The room permits these scraps of continuity while exposing how little she has to sustain them.

As hunger and solitude deepen, past and future enter the same account. In the third chapter she thinks about her missing front teeth, although in September 1968 she still has them all. Their loss belongs to later years of poverty, of lacking the money, inclination, or time to see a dentist. The future arrives as an injury to a body sitting here intact. It brings the embarrassment of a changed face and the well-meaning friends who will offer to buy her dentures.

That small bodily discrepancy makes the disordered years more intimate than a general declaration about memory could. Auxilio can see the impossibility and continue speaking through it. The older woman telling the story has already lost the teeth; the younger woman trapped in the stall has yet to lose them. Both ages occupy her voice, and neither can keep the other out for long.

Near the end, chronology briefly asserts itself. After remembering the young poet Arturo Belano's later life, Auxilio returns to the account of her confinement and says:

“But I couldn't think about Arturo Belano, because I hadn't met him yet.”

This seems interesting because it comes from the same voice that has carried him so freely through the bathroom. Auxilio knows the difference between what she could have known then and what she knows while telling us now. We feel the instability more sharply when she acknowledges that distinction herself.

Her imagined visit to Remedios Varo moves with similar freedom. Auxilio first tells us that she never met the painter, gives a reason, then supplies another version of the year and goes to her house. Soon the bathroom's moonlight and tiles enter the visit. Varo's words seem to reverberate against the tiles while Auxilio stands before a covered painting. A friendly encounter acquires the acoustics of confinement, and the landscape Varo reveals anticipates the vast valley of the final vision. An impossible meeting becomes tender and frightening through the coexistence of places that should remain separate.

I enjoyed the literary talk and the circles of poets. They are part of Bolaño's pleasure for me: the loyalties, the foolishness, the young people taking poetry seriously enough to look ridiculous. Auxilio's affection gives those conversations their warmth, even when she cannot follow the younger poets' private slang. Their language can exclude her without extinguishing her love for them. When she recalls them during an imagined descent through snow, the failed conversation leads her back to walking alone. The gatherings offer company, but they cannot keep her there.

A rescue within reach

For me, Amulet belongs in the middle of Bolaño's work. I place The Savage Detectives, 2666, Nazi Literature in the Americas, and Distant Star above it, and I enjoyed A Little Lumpen Novelita somewhat more. I found its atmosphere eerie, and the violence felt embedded in the story. In Amulet, I often felt it pressing from outside, as history: an army beyond the bathroom door, a catastrophe beyond the ordinary exchanges of literary life.

The hotel episode complicates that impression. Auxilio accompanies Arturo and Ernesto to confront the man called the King of the Rent Boys. The danger becomes immediate, and the power to hurt someone belongs to a man in the room. Ernesto's insistence that he is a poet and has the right to sleep with whomever he chooses means little to the King. Literary identity offers no reliable protection here. Auxilio carries a knife and places it in Arturo's hand; their intervention ends with the removal of Juan de Dios, the sick young man at the back of the room.

Bolaño interrupts this urgent encounter with a strange recession of space. As Ernesto sits beside the boy, Auxilio sees the bed and the back of the room seem to sail away from the building. The person they need to reach becomes momentarily distant, carried off into a landscape she is watching. Yet the scene continues. The group gets him dressed and takes him away, and later helps him find work. When Auxilio sees him again, he says he is doing well.

This rescue gives the final vision its painful measure. Auxilio has helped someone through danger; the book has allowed a vulnerable body to be reached. The same woman will later hold out her hands toward a whole generation moving beyond her reach. Scale changes what her care can accomplish.

It is after the hotel adventure that ordinary life swells and pops. The placement makes the return to the bathroom especially disturbing. Something has been done; someone has been helped; Auxilio might reasonably hope to settle back into the city. Her account cannot preserve that relief. A successful intervention and the return of confinement remain adjacent, each limiting what we might conclude from the other.

What can still be heard

The physical release arrives with voices in the corridor. Lupita opens the bathroom door, Auxilio faints, and she wakes in Professor Rius's office among familiar people. Relief immediately becomes difficulty in speaking: urged to tell what happened, she cannot give a coherent account. Her story subsequently circulates through the city, acquiring other protagonists. The woman from Uruguay becomes a medical student or a secretary; in some versions, she becomes a man. Survival has given her a story that other people can tell while losing the person who lived it.

The final pages give her another kind of persistence. Above a valley, Auxilio sees young people marching toward an abyss. She tries to reach them with her hands and her voice. Her shout fails to carry, and she lacks the strength to descend. Their song travels the distance her body cannot.

In the long sentence that follows, Bolaño repeatedly returns to hearing. Auxilio heard them then and hears them still; the march advances toward death while the voice telling us about it continues listening. Eventually she can only stand and listen to the last breath, “because, although they were swallowed by the abyss, the song remained in the air of the valley”. The sentence carries their disappearance into the continuing air, leaving Auxilio with something she can perceive after she can no longer see or help its singers.

Even this remainder grows faint. The following paragraph brings the song close to an echo of nothingness. Its pace nevertheless retains the courage and generosity of the young people, and Auxilio insists on their desire and pleasure as well as their sacrifice.

Her attention keeps returning to lives with appetites, affections, and bodies, just as her memories of poets kept returning to people she had fed, watched, worried about, and loved.

I find Amulet most moving at that reduced volume. Auxilio comes out of the bathroom, but the telling keeps carrying her back; she lives to hear a song whose singers she cannot save. At the end, the amulet is entrusted to a listener who can barely hear it. We have spent the novel learning how easily her world can vanish. The faintness of what remains makes us listen more closely.

Continue with Bolaño's poetry inside his novels, or see the Bolaño reading map to choose your next book.

Sources

Roberto Bolaño, Amulet, translated by Chris Andrews (New Directions, 2006), especially chapters 2–3, 8–9, and 14. Quotations follow Andrews's translation; chapter references are used because pagination varies by edition. Publisher's sample and edition credits.

UNAM's historical chronology, 1960–1969, entry for September 18, 1968: the army's occupation of the university campus.