Arturo Belano Across Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction
This essay discusses plot turns in The Savage Detectives, Amulet, and several of Bolaño’s shorter works.
In the preface to Distant Star, Roberto Bolaño credits a fellow Chilean named Arturo B. with telling him the story of a poet and military pilot, then helping him write it again. Arturo is described as suicida en África, a man who took his life in Africa.
His death fits inside the sentence that identifies him as the source of a book. The novel then begins in an unnamed first person, which the preface invites us to hear as Arturo’s. [1]
When The Savage Detectives appeared two years later, readers met a photographer who overhears Arturo Belano telling another man that he once went to Africa wanting to die. Jacobo Urenda hears their exchange in fragments. When the men leave the next morning, he has trouble accounting for what Belano does.
Belano, a Chilean poet and Bolaño’s recurring fictional double, has by then lived in Mexico and Spain. Over the years he’s been both the person who goes looking and the person others have to look for. The change becomes clearest when Belano, who once left Mexico City in search of a poet, boards a plane in search of his own son. [2]
A Name on a Knife
In “The Grub,” Belano remembers spending his mornings in the Alameda in Mexico City, reading and watching a man who always sat on the same bench in a straw hat. We get the boy’s full name from an inscription. The actress Jaqueline Andere, whom he meets near a film shoot in the park, signs his copy of Camus’s The Fall for Arturo Belano. The man on the bench, whom he calls the Grub, gives him a knife with the word Caborca on its bone handle. The next morning the man is gone. Two days later, at the man’s boardinghouse, Belano learns that he has gone north. [3]
As the Grub talks, the names of Sonoran towns accumulate in the boy’s account. Among them is Villaviciosa, whose prospects the boy has discussed with his father.
Years later, in The Savage Detectives, Belano and the Mexican poet Ulises Lima, leaders of the visceral realists, look for Cesárea Tinajero, who had left the capital decades earlier. They claim her as a predecessor. A former colleague of Cesárea’s remembers another knife marked Caborca. The word also names the magazine in which Cesárea’s poem appeared and the town where Belano buys the knife he eventually uses. The inscription on the Grub’s gift belongs to the handle. In the schoolteacher’s memory it is the blade that carries the word. The echo sends us from a park bench to the home of a poet who left Mexico City long before Belano came into town. [2]
The Story Auxilio Tells
In Amulet, Auxilio Lacouture remembers Belano as the youngest poet in her circle.
What she still remembers from the lost novel he wrote at seventeen is how hard he was trying. After the 1973 coup in Chile, he comes back to Mexico City in January 1974 and barely goes out. He has told Auxilio that he spent eight days in prison. His friends get the story from her while he is still at home, and by the time he shows up at the Café Quito, they see him differently.
Auxilio admits to borrowing the colors of epic poetry. Ernesto San Epifanio, who keeps asking to hear the story again, is especially susceptible to the figure taking shape in her retellings. [4]
When Ernesto asks for help, the hero Auxilio has been describing has to enter a hotel and deal with a pimp.
This time she follows him. When she hears him speak about a sick boy at the back of the room, she catches something her earlier stories had passed over. His Chilean accent has come back. Even as he seems to lose his nerve, he stays and tells the man they are taking the boy with them. The return from Chile, which had given the poets a chance to imagine him in prison, comes through now as a change you could hear in his speech.
Another story of the detention, “Detectives,” gives the telling to two Chilean policemen. From their conversation we hear about a prisoner who had no soap, toothbrush, or blanket and had once been a boy they knew at school. [3][4]
The Search in Sonora
Juan García Madero, the seventeen-year-old diarist of The Savage Detectives, can record where Belano directs the car, when he suggests going home, and even how his hands shake when García Madero leans over to ask for a cigarette.
He can also record the moment Cesárea Tinajero tells him and Lupe to stay in the car. By then the poets’ search and Lupe’s escape from Alberto, her pimp, have brought all four people to the same stretch of road. Cesárea gets out and joins the struggle. García Madero has already begun telling us which parts of the confrontation he is guessing at. When he hears a shot, he ducks. [2]
We learn who dies and we hear Belano say that finding Cesárea has brought about her death. His judgment falls on the search itself, even as García Madero keeps reconsidering what he saw of the shooting.
When the two groups part, Belano and Lima take the bodies and leave the car they have been traveling in to García Madero and Lupe. The diarist can imagine his friends digging a grave and getting away. Their later lives reach us through the strangers, friends, and former lovers whose accounts Bolaño has placed before this last stretch of the diary. We have already watched other people try to make sense of the men who drove away. [2]
Belano occasionally gets a turn telling those stories. In “Enrique Martín,” set in Spain, he gives his own name over the phone to a dead poet’s former partner, who struggles at first to place him. He runs out of coins and the line goes dead. Later Belano opens the parcel Enrique left him, expecting a map or some clue to his death. He finds poems, all in the styles of other Spanish poets. At the end of the story, Belano lists the poets whose voices he recognizes in the parcel. Miguel Hernández, León Felipe, Blas de Otero, and Gabriel Celaya all come through those pages. Belano spends the night awake. The story ends with him thinking that it is his turn to flee. [5]
The Man Leaving Brownsville
When the Argentine photographer Jacobo Urenda meets Belano at a fax counter in Luanda, Belano is working as a reporter and keeping careful track of the medication he needs. He also talks as though his life matters very little to him. Urenda has to hold these facts together. When they meet again in Kigali, Belano can laugh at the idea of the death he once went looking for. He still lacks the money to get back to Catalonia. [2]
In Brownsville, Liberia, Urenda listens in the dark as Belano talks with Emilio López Lobo, a Spanish photographer whose young son has died. The question Urenda hears perfectly is why Belano wanted to die. The answer he has to guess. Much later, he can make out Belano reducing his account each time he tells it to López Lobo, until all that remains is that he had wanted to die and had changed his mind.
At dawn Belano leaves with the soldiers because López Lobo is going with them. When Urenda asks him why, he says, “So he won’t be alone.” Urenda wants some other answer. His account can give us the two men crossing the clearing and his own unsuccessful inquiries afterward. Distant Star assigns Arturo B. a death in an appositive. Urenda spends the better part of two weeks trying to learn what happened to Belano. [2]
A Book on the Ground
“Photographs” finds Belano sitting in an abandoned village in Liberia with a thick anthology of poetry in French between his legs. He starts by treating the book’s presence as a miracle. Then he remembers whom it contains. It includes African poets, so of course a reader, poet, or bookseller might have carried a copy to Africa.
The extraordinary thing is that this copy should have turned up in this village. The long run of clauses lets him revise his first thought while he turns the pages. Here and there the third-person account slips into the words Belano is thinking, and a face in a photograph seems to address him or perhaps the reader who owned the book before him. [6]
In “Last Evenings on Earth,” the young man called B carries a book of French surrealist poetry on a trip to Acapulco with his father. He keeps coming back to the photograph of Gui Rosey and to the question of what happened to him. The initial leaves B’s relationship to Belano open, even as the books in their hands make the resemblance hard to miss. [7]
Raquel Bra Núñez reads “Photographs” as a continuation of Urenda’s account and sees Belano close to death. [8] The two scenes share a country and leave their order open. “Photographs” gives Belano one destination. When he gets up to walk west toward the coast, he takes the anthology with him. [6]
Lima’s Door and the Flight to Berlin
In “The Old Man of the Mountain,” the young Belano tells Lima that William Burroughs has died. Lima pales, asks when, and two days later comes back with proof that Burroughs is alive. In the posthumous collection where that scene appears, Bolaño also sends a forty-six-year-old Belano back to Mexico as an invited writer. He knows that Lima is dead. Twice he goes to the building where Lima lived and presses the bell anyway. What he hopes to hear is as ordinary as the approach of footsteps. [9]
Three young men in the apartment next door know Belano’s name and have trouble believing it belongs to the stranger on the landing. They tell him Lima was hit by a mysterious black Impala. An Impala carried the two poets out of Mexico City in The Savage Detectives. Here the car comes back in a story others tell about Lima. The three call themselves his last disciples. Soon Belano is sitting motionless while they play him a record by their own band. [9]
In his note to the first edition of 2666, Ignacio Echevarría quotes two of Bolaño’s working notes.
One assigns the narration to Belano. The other, marked for the ending, gives him a farewell signed with his name. The novel proper ends with another traveler, Archimboldi, leaving for Mexico. The signature survives among the papers that describe the making of the book.
Where Distant Star starts by naming Arturo as someone who supplied a story, 2666 leaves the possibility that we have been listening to him for hundreds of pages and only learn his name afterward. [10]
The opening of Cowboy Graves gives us a boy named Arturo on the way to Mexico with his mother. He is fifteen and reads an airport manual while they wait to leave. [11]
In “The Days of Chaos,” the airport belongs to the father’s side of the story. The fragment dates its opening three times. It is 2005, two years after Bolaño’s death, and Belano is over fifty. His fifteen-year-old son Gerónimo has taken his first trip without either parent. The group has come back from Berlin except for Gerónimo and Félix, whom Belano has known since Félix was five. [9]
Decades earlier in Mexico City, Belano had gone to a boardinghouse after the man in the straw hat failed to appear. This time he is the parent who has to go and ask. He lands at three in the morning. From the taxi he can see occasional fires. From the same window, the city looks almost asleep. [9]
Sources
[1] Roberto Bolaño, Distant Star (Estrella distante, 1996), preface and chapter 1. Preface excerpt at the National Library of Chile.
[2] Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives (Los detectives salvajes, 1998), translated by Natasha Wimmer. Part II, Amadeo Salvatierra’s and Jacobo Urenda’s testimony. Part III, January 16, 26, 29, and 31 and February 1, 4, and 6. Character and timeline guide.
[3] Roberto Bolaño, “The Grub” (“El gusano”) and “Detectives,” in Llamadas telefónicas (1997). Original collection.
[4] Roberto Bolaño, Amulet (Amuleto, 1999), translated by Chris Andrews, chapters 4 and 7–8. Amulet reading note.
[5] Roberto Bolaño, “Enrique Martín,” in Llamadas telefónicas (1997), collected in English in Last Evenings on Earth. Spanish text.
[6] Roberto Bolaño, “Photographs” (“Fotos”), in Putas asesinas (2001), translated by Chris Andrews in The Return. Library catalog entry.
[7] Roberto Bolaño, “Last Evenings on Earth,” translated by Chris Andrews. The New Yorker.
[8] Raquel Bra Núñez, “Personajes transversales de ficción en la narrativa de Roberto Bolaño,” PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, 19, nos. 1–2, published in 2024. Journal article.
[9] Roberto Bolaño, “The Old Man of the Mountain,” “Death of Ulises,” and “The Days of Chaos,” in The Secret of Evil (El secreto del mal, 2007), translated by Chris Andrews and Natasha Wimmer. Collection and edition.
[10] Ignacio Echevarría, “Note to the First Edition,” in Roberto Bolaño, 2666, translated by Natasha Wimmer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).
[11] Roberto Bolaño, Cowboy Graves, translated by Natasha Wimmer (2021), opening of the title novella. Publisher excerpt at Literary Hub.
Comments