The Savage Detectives: Complete Character, Narrator, and Timeline Guide

Part of: The Deep Reader

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Full-spoiler guide: This map follows the novel through its final diary entry and identifies deaths, later appearances, and unresolved fates. It is designed for readers who are already inside the book or returning to it.

The novel begins on November 2, 1975, with Juan García Madero announcing that he has been invited to join the visceral realists. He is seventeen, studying law against his wishes, and newly entranced by Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima. Over the next two months, his diary opens the movement from inside: a poetry workshop gives way to the bars of Bucareli, Lima's rooftop room, the Font house, parties, rivalries, stolen books, sex, friendship, and the first rumors of Cesárea Tinajero. What looks at first like a young poet's initiation gradually becomes an escape story.

Lupe's danger changes the stakes. María Font's friend is trying to leave Alberto, the pimp who controls and abuses her. Quim Font helps hide her; the Font house becomes a refuge and then a besieged house. On New Year's Eve, Belano and Lima are ready to travel north in search of Cesárea, while Lupe needs to get out of Mexico City. García Madero joins the Impala almost at the instant it escapes. The literary quest and the flight from Alberto now occupy the same car.

Part II breaks that intimacy. García Madero's diary vanishes, and the novel fills with other people's voices while withholding the two men at its center. Belano and Lima reach us through ex-lovers, friends, rivals, employers, and strangers—people who misunderstand them, people who love them, and people who need them to mean something. García Madero, meanwhile, survives in Part II only as a name a late chronicler refuses to recognize.

That refusal arrives in Pachuca in December 1996. Ernesto García Grajales remembers where several visceral realists ended up, says who still writes, and declares that García Madero never belonged to the movement. By then we have watched Belano and Lima recruit García, seen him at the meetings, and followed his diary all the way to Cesárea Tinajero. Grajales's confidence cannot erase the much longer record we have read.

A witness may remember a room, a quarrel, a smell, a journey, or the last time they saw somebody with startling precision and still misunderstand the larger life around it. A person may be central to one memory and absent from another person's history. Hearing that someone died is not the same as watching it happen. When somebody vanishes after a final sighting, we should not pretend to know the rest.

This map follows who appears and how the novel lets us know them. García Madero's diary sits beside Part II's voices; firsthand encounters sit beside letters, rumors, and stories passed through other people. The missing voices are part of the design, and the unanswered fates remain unanswered.

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How to use this guide

If you are reading Part II for the first time, keep three questions beside each entry:

1. Where and when is this person speaking? The bold header dates the act of testimony, not necessarily the event remembered.

2. What earlier time does the testimony reopen? A speaker in 1994 may be describing 1977, or a speaker in January 1976 may reach back to the 1920s.

3. How much could this witness really know? A direct encounter, an embedded letter, a rumor, a dream, and a hostile guess do not carry the same weight.

Some episodes are scenes García Madero records himself. Others reach us through a Part II speaker's memory, a letter, a rumor, an official account, or somebody else's story. When the voices clash—or when the novel simply stops—the contradiction remains open.

How the three-part timeline works

The book is easy to misremember as a straight journey interrupted by interviews. Its structure is stranger and more exact. Reading order and event order diverge, and Part II contains a second split between the date of speaking and the date being remembered.

The novel has a page clock, a continuous diary clock, and a Part II testimony clock; the date in a witness header is not automatically the date of the event remembered.

Reading order	Narrating form	Present of narration	Main work
Part I: “Mexicans Lost in Mexico (1975)”	Juan García Madero's dated diary	November 2–December 31, 1975	Recruitment, the visceral-realist circle, Lupe's danger, and the escape from Mexico City
Part II: “The Savage Detectives (1976–1996)”	First-person accounts by friends, lovers, rivals, employers, and strangers	January 1976–December 1996	The group is reconstructed through other people's memories; Belano and Lima disperse across Mexico, Europe, Israel, Central America, and Africa
Part III: “The Sonora Desert (1976)”	García Madero's dated diary resumes	January 1–February 15, 1976	The search for Cesárea, the roadside confrontation, the split of the four travelers, and the final window drawings

The cleanest chronological spine is therefore Part I → Part III → most of Part II, but even that formula needs a warning. The Amadeo Salvatierra conversation is dated only “January 1976” and returns from the opening to the close of Part II. In that conversation Belano and Lima are still preparing to find Cesárea, while García Madero dates the departure from Mexico City to December 31. The text gives no narrower date, so the seam remains visible.

Part II also refuses to identify the person collecting the testimonies. The speakers answer, remember, correct, digress, and sometimes appear to respond to prompts, so a listening situation is implied. But the novel never turns that listener into a stable named character. “The interviewer” is a useful grammatical convenience, not a solved identity.

The chronological spine

Period	What happens	How we hear about it
1920s–1930	Cesárea Tinajero participates in a northern avant-garde network, edits the only known issue of Caborca, publishes “Sión,” works around General Diego Carvajal, leaves Mexico City, and moves north.	Amadeo remembers it half a century later, drunk but holding the magazine itself; people disagree over where Cesárea belonged.
Around 1970–1974	Belano's Mexican adolescence, the Lee Harvey Oswald magazine circle, his return from Chile, and the formation of visceral realism emerge through Perla Avilés, Laura Jáuregui, and others.	Multiple Part II testimonies; chronology and motive vary by witness.
Nov.–Dec. 1975	García Madero joins; the Font house becomes the group's social center; Lupe seeks protection from Alberto; Belano, Lima, Lupe, and Madero flee north in Quim Font's Impala.	Direct diary scenes.
Jan.–Feb. 1976	The four search Sonora's archives and towns for Cesárea; Alberto and an armed associate catch them; Cesárea is shot after shielding Lima; Belano kills Alberto; the travelers separate.	Direct diary scenes, with later actions reported but not all witnessed.
1976–1980	The Mexico City circle begins to fragment. Quim Font is institutionalized. Belano and Lima reappear after Sonora and leave for Europe; their routes divide through Barcelona, Paris, Israel, and Vienna.	Part II testimony by family, friends, hosts, lovers, and acquaintances.
1981–1987	Lima returns to Mexico, attempts a revival, travels to Nicaragua, disappears, and returns with an opaque river story. The surviving circle works, separates, parents children, and abandons or revises its old identities.	Direct testimony mixed with letters, official reports, and Lima's embedded account.
Late 1980s–1994; some event dates unstated	Belano's European literary life becomes more visible but no more stable; witnesses remember work, illness, danger, friendships, estrangements, and his sword challenge to a critic.	The voices are widely scattered, and several episodes rest on only one witness who supplies relative time rather than a calendar date.
Before September / October 1995; exact dates unstated	Felipe Müller recalls Belano's airport departure before his September testimony; Clara Cabeza recalls Lima meeting Octavio Paz before her October testimony.	These are limits supplied by the testimony dates, not dates the novel gives to the events themselves.
Liberia sequence beginning in April, year unstated; recalled in June 1996	Urenda last sees Belano leave Brownsville with Emilio López Lobo and soldiers on a column bound toward Thomas Creek.	Urenda dates only his arrival in Monrovia to April; he supplies no event year or separate date for the last sighting.
December 1996	García Grajales reports Lima alive in Mexico City and gives his imperfect account of where the old circle ended up.	Lima's whereabouts come only from Grajales's claimed recent visit.

Part I: From the poetry workshop to the northbound Impala

Part I gives the movement its only sustained present tense. Before later witnesses turn Belano and Lima into memory, García Madero follows them through a Mexico City that still feels immediate, funny, erotic, and full of possible lives. These are the turns that carry his diary from invitation to flight.

November 2–3 — The invitation. García Madero recalls the hostile visit Belano and Lima make to Julio César Álamo's workshop, hears Lima read, and follows both poets to a bar on Calle Bucareli. By dawn they have asked him to join their “gang.” Cesárea Tinajero enters his diary as a half-heard name attached to a vanished earlier avant-garde and the Sonora desert.

November 4–13 — Learning the city by looking for the poets. Belano and Lima immediately disappear from García Madero's view, so he waits for them in the Encrucijada Veracruzana and begins roaming the city they have opened to him. Once he finds them again, Lima's rooftop room and Café Quito bring Rafael Barrios, Jacinto Requena, Felipe Müller, Pancho Rodríguez, and the history of the Lee Harvey Oswald magazine into focus. Law school recedes while reading, writing, cafés, and companionship take over his days.

November 14–22 — The movement acquires rooms and bodies. The Font house on Calle Colima becomes García Madero's second home. Through María and Angélica Font, Quim, Jorgito, Ernesto San Epifanio, Luscious Skin, Laura Jáuregui, Sofía Gálvez, and the crowd at Catalina O'Hara's party, the “gang” becomes a social world rather than a slogan. García Madero's poetic education and sexual education proceed together. María introduces him to Lupe on November 16, and Alberto's violence first enters the circle as something the others discuss before they have to confront it.

November 29–December 13 — Two searches begin to cross. Belano and Lima hunt for Cesárea's lost papers in archives and used bookstores. García Madero searches for the missing founders through Mexico City's bookstores and keeps moving between poetry, Rosario, the Fonts, and Lupe. After Lupe decides she wants to stop working afternoons and go to school, Quim hides her at the Hotel Media Luna. By the time Belano and Lima reappear on December 13, the literary search and the danger around Lupe are already drawing the same people together.

By December 30 — The Font house is a refuge under siege. A few days before García Madero returns, Alberto has found Lupe at the hotel. She and Quim have made it back to Calle Colima, but the police offer no protection; Alberto's companion appears to be connected to them, or the officers have been paid. The family gathers Lupe inside while Alberto and his allies wait outside. The house that had held poems, parties, money, jealousy, and hospitality now has to hold fear.

December 31 — The two plots enter one car. Belano and Lima arrive with their northbound search in mind. The adults decide that taking Lupe with them will break the siege, and Quim lends them his white Impala. As the Impala leaves, Alberto's Camaro returns. García Madero opens the gate, knocks Alberto down, sees Lupe open the rear door, and gets in. Part I ends with Belano, Lima, Lupe, and García Madero heading north out of Mexico City.

Part I therefore has two engines: García Madero wants admission to a poetic life, and Lupe wants release from a violent one. The Font house briefly holds those desires together. The final page makes their collision literal—the car leaving to find Cesárea meets the car returning for Lupe—and the choice to climb into the Impala carries García Madero's diary into Part III.

Main characters at a glance

Character	Who they are	How we meet them	Where the novel leaves them
Juan García Madero	Seventeen-year-old law student, apprentice poet, new visceral realist, and companion on the Sonora search	Sole diarist of Parts I and III; denied by the late “expert” roll call	His diary continues through February 15, 1976; he and Lupe leave Villaviciosa together on February 9, after which the entries no longer name their participants; the novel gives no later account of him
Arturo Belano	Chilean cofounder, organizer, Cesárea seeker, and later itinerant writer	Never narrates a Part II passage; assembled from García's diary and other people's memories	Last seen alive during the Liberia sequence that begins with Urenda's April arrival, year unstated: Belano leaves Brownsville with Emilio López Lobo and soldiers toward Thomas Creek; Urenda recounts this in June 1996, and what follows is unknown
Ulises Lima	Mexican cofounder, radical inward pole of the movement, seeker, drifter, and failed reviver	Never narrates a Part II passage; reconstructed from many witnesses	Reported alive in Mexico City in December 1996; his last fully staged appearance comes in Clara Cabeza's October 1995 testimony, which recalls an undated meeting with Octavio Paz
Lupe	Young sex worker escaping Alberto; practical fourth traveler; García's eventual partner	Appears only through García Madero's diary, including her own embedded life story	Alive with García Madero when they leave Villaviciosa on February 9, 1976; the February 10–15 entries do not name their participants, and the novel gives no later account of her
Cesárea Tinajero	Lost 1920s poet, editor of Caborca, author of “Sión,” and object of the search	Rebuilt through Amadeo, documents, route witnesses, and the final diary encounter; never narrates	Shot and killed on February 1, 1976, while shielding Lima; burial proposed by Belano but not witnessed by García
Amadeo Salvatierra	Keeper of Caborca and bridge between the 1920s and 1970s avant-gardes	Returns throughout Part II to the same long January 1976 conversation	Alive in his Mexico City apartment at the end of that conversation; the novel gives no later glimpse
Joaquín “Quim” Font	Patron, father, lender of the Impala, and the movement's unruly aesthetic theorist	Directly seen by García; speaks repeatedly in Part II, often from institutions	Back at Calle Colima in August 1987, working as a draftsman and reporting an uncertain “ghost Impala”

Juan García Madero

García Madero is the book's most sustained first-person presence and its greatest archival absence. He begins as a workshop outsider who wants admission to a poetic world. Within two months he has been recruited, initiated into the Font household, drawn toward María and Rosario, involved in Lupe's escape, and placed in the car carrying the founders toward their lost predecessor.

His diary gives the Sonora journey continuity that Part II denies to every life. Yet proximity is not omniscience. García is seventeen, self-dramatizing, erotically distracted, obsessed with poetic terminology, and often excluded from decisions Belano and Lima make between themselves. As danger grows, García notices more of what survival requires, though the formal riddles and notebook games never leave the diary. On February 8 he decides not to mail his notebooks, and on February 9 he leaves Villaviciosa with Lupe. His diary continues through February 15, but the final six entries no longer name their participants or tell us what happens afterward.

The late denial of his membership should remain a contradiction, not a puzzle to be solved by cancelling one source. García Grajales has institutional confidence; García Madero has the long record. Their mismatch shows how a group's history can lose the person who preserved it for the reader.

Arturo Belano

Belano is a protagonist who never gets to tell his own story. Others remember his arrival in Mexico, romances, organizing energy, debts, loyalties, writing, disappearances, illnesses, and appetite for danger. Without his voice, their many accounts can never settle into an authorized autobiography.

In the 1975–76 diary, he is Lima's cofounder and tactical partner, García's recruiter, one of Lupe's protectors, and the most explicit driver of the Cesárea search. During the February 1 struggle he stabs Alberto. He and Lima then take the Camaro and the three bodies, while García and Lupe keep the Impala. Later witnesses place him in Barcelona, on precarious European routes, in a sword challenge with the critic Iñaki Echevarne, and finally in Africa.

Jacobo Urenda last sees him alive outside Brownsville, Liberia, running after Emilio López Lobo and a column of soldiers bound toward Thomas Creek. Urenda does not know what follows, so neither do we. The last firm image is Belano disappearing with them into the underbrush.

Ulises Lima

Lima is denied a speaking turn too. In the diary he is Belano's cofounder, García's recruiter, and the other seeker of Cesárea. In the testimonies he becomes a body moving through poverty and other people's rooms: reading, walking, writing in margins, falling silent, unexpectedly speaking, disappearing, and returning.

His later route runs through Paris, an unreciprocated attachment to Claudia in Israel, Vienna, Mexico, and Nicaragua. The Managua disappearance is especially resistant to mapping. Friends can describe the delegation and the search; Lima later offers a river story that cannot be converted into a reliable itinerary. In a testimony dated October 1995, Clara Cabeza recalls his undated private meeting with Octavio Paz. In December 1996 García Grajales says he has recently visited Lima in Mexico City. That is the last we hear of Lima, and it comes through García Grajales rather than from Lima himself.

Lupe

Lupe enters as the person most immediately endangered by the literary circle's games. Alberto has controlled and abused her, and she understands his likely pursuit better than the poets do. María offers friendship and shelter; the Font house becomes a temporary refuge; the Impala escape turns Lupe from the object of a rescue into one of the journey's most practically alert participants.

Because García Madero is the only narrator who records her, his desire can distort the frame. Her own speech within the diary complicates it. She predicts danger, tests García, refuses an easy return to Mexico City, and remains beside him after the roadside deaths. At the Hotel Media Luna, Susana Alejandra Torres is strongly implied to be Lupe's cover name; García explicitly rejects the separate entry for Guadalupe Martínez as Lupe. Neither name settles who she was outside García's diary, and Part II gives no later account of her.

Cesárea Tinajero

Before the travelers find Cesárea, they find paper: Amadeo's copy of Caborca, the poem “Sión,” directories, newspaper traces, employment stories, a bullfighter's grave, and memories whose details do not quite agree. The route gradually replaces a metropolitan legend with a woman who has worked—as stenographer, probable speechwriter, teacher, factory worker, herb seller, and washerwoman—far from the history that is beginning to mythologize her.

Her relation to Stridentism remains contested. Amadeo remembers her participation and possesses the artifact; Manuel Maples Arce is reported to deny that she was a Stridentist. Neither claim should erase the other. Nor should the boat reading of “Sión,” produced inside the Amadeo conversation, be elevated into the poem's final authorial meaning.

The search ends by destroying the person it meant to recover. Cesárea throws herself onto the roadside struggle and is shot while shielding Lima. Belano and Lima say they will take and bury the bodies, but García does not witness a burial. Her notebooks remain, and García reads them, but they survive as fragments—not as the “complete works” the young poets hoped to find.

The Mexico City social field

The Mexico City circle is easiest to see in three rings. Belano and Lima organize the movement; García Madero enters it as the diarist; the Font household gives it a social and material base. Around them, poets, lovers, rivals, defectors, and protectors continually redraw who counts as “inside.” Lupe and Alberto belong to a different economy of danger that the literary group cannot keep outside its rooms.

A selective map of the relationships that admit García Madero, make the Font house a social and protective center, connect the founders to Cesárea, and drive the four travelers north.

In words: Belano and Lima are cofounders and García Madero's recruiters. Quim Font provides space, money, food, and the Impala; María and Angélica connect the founders to a wider circle of poets, lovers, and friends. María shelters Lupe, whose abusive pursuer Alberto forces the northbound escape. The core poetry network includes Rafael Barrios, Felipe Müller, Jacinto Requena, Xóchitl García, the Rodríguez brothers, Luscious Skin, and Ernesto San Epifanio. Laura Jáuregui links the prehistory of the movement to Belano's intimate life and later repudiates both. Amadeo Salvatierra links Belano and Lima backward to Cesárea Tinajero and the 1920s visceral realists.

The Font family

Character	Place in the circle	What to keep straight	Where the novel leaves them
Joaquín “Quim” Font	Architect, patron, father, and lender of the Impala; his voice keeps returning in Part II	His aesthetic judgments can be exact even when his perceptions become unstable; the book does not ask us to choose “lucid” or “mad” for every sentence	Home at Calle Colima in August 1987, working as a draftsman and reporting a car that may exist only in his perception
María Font	Poet, painter, dancer, social center, Lupe's friend and protector	Male witnesses frequently sexualize her; when she speaks for herself, she shows work, judgment, and survival after the group fragments	Reported alive in Mexico City in 1996, writing but not publishing; this comes from García Grajales
Angélica Font	Poet and prizewinner; Ernesto's intimate friend and caregiver	Rivalry distorts several judgments of her poetry; her account of Ernesto's decline is the decisive one	Reported to have published a second collection by 1996
Jorgito Font	Younger Font sibling and witness to the house siege	He never narrates. The Lola living with him in 1987 is not safely the same Lola living with Lima in another testimony	At Calle Colima in August 1987, working and living in the garden house
María Cristina (“Mrs. Font”)	Mother and household authority	Her resistance responds to the danger the poets have brought into the house; later news comes through Quim	Reported remarried and away by August 1987; later life unresolved

The 1970s visceral realists and close circle

Character	Place in the circle	What they reveal	What remains uncertain
Rafael Barrios	Core poet; Barbara Patterson's partner	Carries the movement's magazines, readings, experiments, and political self-image into later testimony	García Grajales says he disappeared in the United States and does not know whether he is alive
Barbara Patterson	Participant-observer whose combative voice keeps returning	Her mutually correcting accounts with Rafael expose how literary memory survives inside relationship conflict	Her anger shapes the telling, but it does not make every observed detail false
Felipe Müller	Chilean participant and Belano's closest early friend	Receives Belano in Barcelona, formally leaves the movement, and last sees him at the airport in an episode recounted in September 1995; the event date is unstated	Leaving the movement does not end the friendship; the 1996 domestic update is secondhand
Jacinto Requena	Poet, Xóchitl's partner, and key Lima witness	Refuses an anthology that excludes Lima, joins the Nicaragua search, and receives Lima's later river story	The river comes from Lima's own story and cannot be mapped literally
Xóchitl García	Poet, worker, mother, and post-movement journalist	Makes the private cost of Lima's disappearance and the economics of survival visible	Some of what we hear about her later career comes from García Grajales's imperfect 1996 roll call
Pancho Rodríguez	Street-level participant; Angélica's former partner	Fights Lima during the failed revival	Reported dead by 1996 with no supplied circumstances
Moctezuma Rodríguez	Pancho's brother and group participant	Remains within the social field after the founders disperse	Reported in politics by 1996; that is all the novel tells us
Norberto	Youngest of the Rodríguez brothers, more peripheral to the group	His place among the three brothers helps define the social edge of the circle	The novel gives no later account of him
Luscious Skin	Poet whose loyalties and relationships place him near the circle's emotional center	Lima accepts him; Belano distrusts him; a later report says he is killed in a police raid and Julita identifies the body	Luscious Skin is the only name the novel gives him; Julita's identification is more direct than the police version of the raid
Ernesto San Epifanio	Poet, wit, and central member	After an aneurysm and surgery, he becomes severely impaired and dies under Angélica's care	The novel gives no exact date for his death
Laura Jáuregui	Belano's former partner and witness to the movement's formation	Links Lee Harvey Oswald to visceral realism and argues that the new movement began partly as Belano's courtship gesture	She knew Belano intimately, but this remains her reading of why the movement began
Luis Sebastián Rosado	Poet, critic, and lover of Luscious Skin	His recurring memories span literary hierarchy, sexual networks, rumor, and Luscious Skin's fate	He is often drunk or remote from key events, and some of what he knows reaches him through others
Perla Avilés	Belano's high-school friend	Her memories give the richest account of his Mexican adolescence and early literary hunger	Retrospective dates and routes are sometimes impressionistic
Auxilio Lacouture	Self-styled “mother of Mexican poetry” and witness to Belano's return from Chile	Turns his adolescence, 1973 journey, arrest, and altered return into a generational legend	She repeatedly admits uncertainty about dates

Belonging in this field is never just a membership list. Love, housing, money, sex, rivalry, publication, and the ability to survive one another determine who can still speak for the movement years later. García Grajales's 1996 roll call shows what an institutional memory keeps—and how confidently it can forget the boy whose diary carried us there.

Belano and Lima: parallel timeline, 1976–1996

Belano and Lima share the movement's beginning and the flight into Sonora, but the years carry them in different directions. Lima repeatedly disappears and returns to Mexico City; Belano keeps moving outward, and the witnesses follow him only as far as Africa. The time markers below belong to the remembered action whenever the novel supplies them. When it does not, the table says so and gives the later testimony date separately.

Event period	Arturo Belano	Ulises Lima	Where the trail breaks
After Sonora–May 1977	Returns to Mexico City dirty and exhausted; later reaches Barcelona and stays with his ill mother	Returns to Mexico City; announces a projected move to Paris	María Font and Felipe Müller; the Impala is not seen on their return and remains unaccounted for
Summer 1977	Lives in Barcelona, works as a campground night watchman, shelters John for two nights, and becomes involved with Mary Watson	Lives in severe poverty in Paris, walks and reads compulsively, and plans to reach Israel	Mary never names the watchman Belano; other accounts make the identification. Lima's money sources and exact movements are partly unknown
October 1978	Finds Lima on the French Mediterranean coast and gets him work on the fishing boat Isobel	Earns money from an exceptional catch and leaves by train for Paris and a flight to Tel Aviv	Alain Lebert sees the reunion and departure; his feeling that it may be their last meeting cannot tell us either man's fate
1979–May 1980	No securely dated sighting in this interval	Moves through Tel Aviv and other Israeli locations, jail in Beersheba, Jerusalem, Vienna, and expulsion from Austria toward France	Bolzman sees only part of the Israeli period; several later movements reach him through letters or postcards, while Künst mixes observed events with fantasies
By February 1981	—	Back in Mexico City; tries and fails to revive visceral realism; fights Pancho Rodríguez	María Font witnesses the local aftermath but does not give an exact return date
1982	—	Joins a Mexican delegation to Managua, disappears from the hotel, and is left behind	“Disappears” means from the delegation; no witness sees where he goes
September 11, 1983	Seen by Abel Romero at Victor's Café in Paris	Still absent from the Mexico circle	Romero gives Belano an exact date; Lima's absence from this circle tells us nothing about his location
By September 1985	—	Has returned to Mexico, lives in a Colonia Guerrero tenement, and tells Jacinto Requena of a river between Mexico and Central America	The return is directly witnessed; the river account cannot be used as a literal map
Before December 1988; exact event date unstated	Works as a dishwasher in Barcelona	—	Andrés Ramírez recalls the job in December 1988 but does not date it
Undated sequence; later search in the 1980s	Encounters Xosé Lendoiro at a campground near Castroverde and appears at Lendoiro's Barcelona law office two years later	—	Lendoiro supplies relative intervals for the encounters and dates only his later search for Belano to the 1980s
1994	Seriously ill; challenges Iñaki Echevarne to a sword duel on the Catalan coast; says he intends to go to Africa	—	Several people witness the duel; Belano's announced destination does not show that he reached it
Before September 1995; exact event date unstated	Felipe Müller remembers Belano at Barcelona airport, waiting for the flight Müller says would carry him away from Spain “forever”	—	The September 1995 testimony does not date the airport scene or name Belano's destination
Before December 1995; exact event date unstated	María Teresa Solsona Ribot remembers Belano leaving Malgrat after saying that he planned to go to Africa	—	She accompanies him only to the local station; the text does not prove that this is the same departure Müller remembers
Date unstated; recalled in October 1995	—	Meets Octavio Paz privately in Parque Hundido and calls himself the second-to-last visceral realist in Mexico	Clara Cabeza sees the meeting but cannot hear the conversation; her testimony date is not the event date
Liberia sequence beginning in April, year unstated; recalled in June 1996	Urenda last watches Belano leave Brownsville with Emilio López Lobo and soldiers on a column bound toward Thomas Creek	—	Urenda dates only his arrival in Monrovia to April; Belano disappears beyond his sight in the underbrush
December 1996	—	García Grajales says Lima is alive in Mexico City and that he recently visited him	Lima reaches us only through Grajales, who is demonstrably wrong about García Madero

Part II brings Lima back to the city where the movement began. Belano's last witness can follow him only as far as Liberia. Neither man tells us what became of him; each remains in somebody else's last glimpse.

The Sonora search: route, clues, and outcome

The travelers do not follow one clean road: documents produce witnesses, witnesses produce addresses, several traces fail, and Alberto's parallel pursuit catches the search only after Cesárea has been found.

The route is an investigation before it is a geography. On January 4 the group tests Caborca, the name of Cesárea's little magazine, as a place-name and finds nothing. A January 7 search in Santa Teresa yields a 1928 newspaper item naming “Cesárea Tinaja [sic]” with the bullfighter Pepe Avellaneda. The next day a death report points toward Agua Prieta, while Jesús Pintado directs the group to the retired bullfighter Jesús Ortiz Pacheco.

Ortiz remembers Cesárea with Avellaneda. After a failed cemetery search, Andrés González Ahumada locates a grave marked “José Avellaneda Tinajero.” The inscription tells us exactly what was written on the stone. It does not tell us whether Cesárea and Avellaneda married, were related, or used the shared surname another way.

A Nogales obituary then calls Avellaneda's companion a teacher in El Cubo. Local witnesses remember Cesárea, and an official teacher register gives a 1930–36 posting sequence: El Cubo, Hermosillo, Pitiquito, Bábaco, Santa Teresa. The paper trail breaks at the intermediate postings. Pitiquito yields nothing; Bábaco and Sahuaripa records cannot be recovered. Those are failed searches, not proof of absence.

Back in Santa Teresa, Flora Castañeda provides the decisive living link. She remembers Cesárea's teaching and factory work, notebooks, plans, fears, and later herb stall. Cesárea had said she lived sometimes in Villaviciosa and sometimes in El Palito, Arizona. The travelers choose Villaviciosa; El Palito is never tested. After getting lost, they enter Villaviciosa on January 31 and find Cesárea at the east-side washing troughs.

The pursuit running beside the clues

Date	Search position	Signs of Alberto's pursuit
Dec. 31–Jan. 2	The Impala leaves Mexico City and heads north	Lupe expects Alberto to follow; unidentified lights appear behind the car
Jan. 13	The travelers are already in the northern search	Quim reports by telephone that Alberto threatened him into giving up their destination
Jan. 20	Nogales and the El Cubo lead	García and Lupe identify Alberto's Camaro; the companion looks police-associated
Jan. 24	Hermosillo teacher records	Alberto and the armed companion reappear
Jan. 30	Santa Teresa, before the final Villaviciosa leg	Alberto grabs Belano; the companion draws a gun; the four escape
Jan. 31–Feb. 1	Road outside Villaviciosa, after Cesárea has been found	The pursuers stop all five travelers and the fatal struggle begins

What happens in the February 1 confrontation

Person	What happens	Where each person is left
Cesárea Tinajero	Throws herself onto the struggle and shields Lima; the armed policeman shoots her in the chest	Dead; García directly distinguishes her as dead
Arturo Belano	Fights Alberto and stabs him	Alive; takes the Camaro with Lima and the three bodies
Ulises Lima	Tackles and struggles with the policeman; injures his arm	Alive; leaves with Belano
Alberto	Attacks the travelers	Motionless and treated as a body after Belano stabs him
Alberto's unnamed companion	Shoots Cesárea and struggles with Lima	Abdominally wounded and dying when loaded into the Camaro; no separate death scene
Juan García Madero	Witnesses the fight, takes the gun, and helps load the bodies	Alive; keeps the Impala with Lupe
Lupe	Survives the confrontation	Alive; stays with García, who later gives her half of their share of the remaining money

Belano and Lima turn west in the Camaro with Cesárea, Alberto, and the mortally wounded policeman. They say the bodies will be buried, but García does not witness a burial. García and Lupe return to Villaviciosa, stay in Cesárea's house, and read the notebooks left there. They leave again on February 9. The February 10–12 entries list place names without telling us enough to reconstruct every stop, road, direction, or companion. The final entries turn to drawings of windows, and the last drawing receives no answer.

The route ends twice. The search succeeds when the travelers find Cesárea; the attempt to protect Lupe fails when Cesárea is drawn into Alberto's violence. Afterward the novel tells us who leaves in which car, who is dead or dying, and what García and Lupe find in Cesárea's house. It never shows the burial, their final destination, or Belano and Lima's next road.

Other people along the search

The voice-by-voice appendix includes every Part II speaker. These shorter profiles turn to the non-speaking figures who lead the search for Cesárea, shape the Sonora pursuit, or remain beside Belano at the edge of Africa.

The 1920s antecedent network

Character	Place in the story	What we know	What remains uncertain
Amadeo Salvatierra	Public scribe, former poet, and keeper of the sole known Caborca	He knew Cesárea, keeps the magazine, and gives Belano and Lima the decisive northern lead	He is remembering across half a century, while drinking, and some of what he knows came from other people
Manuel Maples Arce	Senior avant-garde poet	He receives the young poets, answers written questions, gives Belano books, and waits for a return that never comes	His reported denial does not settle whether Cesárea belonged among the Stridentists
Germán List Arzubide	Poet from Cesárea's old circle	Directs Belano and Lima to Amadeo	We hear his directions through Amadeo rather than from List himself
Arqueles Vela	Older avant-garde associate	Retains part of the historical network around Maples and Amadeo	The novel gives us only fragments of what he knew about Cesárea
Encarnación Guzmán	Cesárea's close ally in Amadeo's memory	Her exclusion or mistreatment helps explain Cesárea's break from the metropolitan circle	We know they were close; the novel does not define that bond as sexual or familial
Pablito Lezcano	Friend, contributor, and translator around Caborca	His work shows that Caborca was made by a circle rather than by Cesárea alone	The novel gives no later account of him
General Diego Carvajal	Cesárea's employer and political patron	Employs her as stenographer/secretary; she is reported to have shaped his speeches	The claim comes through testimony; the novel shows no surviving speech or document that proves it
José “Pepe” Avellaneda	Bullfighter, Cesárea's companion, and first major Sonora clue	A newspaper item and several witnesses connect them; his grave is found at Agua Prieta	“Avellaneda Tinajero” on the stone suggests a bond but does not prove marriage or kinship

Danger and the Sonora route

Character	Place on the Sonora route	What they add	Where their trail ends
Alberto	Lupe's pimp and abuser; armed pursuer	Threatens her at the Hotel Media Luna, besieges the Font house, follows the Impala, and attacks on February 1	Belano kills him with a knife; the novel says little about him beyond his violent control of Lupe
Alberto's unnamed companion	Policeman and armed pursuer who converts the confrontation into a shooting	Shoots Cesárea during his struggle with Lima and suffers an abdominal gunshot	Loaded into the Camaro while dying; no separate death scene, name, or exact rank
Jesús Pintado	First living lead after the archive search	Directs the travelers from the Avellaneda clue to Jesús Ortiz Pacheco	Alive at the January 8 encounter; the novel gives no later account of him
Jesús Ortiz Pacheco	Retired bullfighter and oral historian	Remembers Avellaneda and Cesárea and advances the route	His description of their relationship is testimony, not the couple's own account
Andrés González Ahumada	Cemetery guide	Leads the travelers to Avellaneda's grave and its inscription	He can show them the stone and its location, but not verify stories he did not witness
Horacio Guerra	Santa Teresa literature authority and archive contact	Belano and Lima meet him as the university literature authority during their archive search; his interest fades when they describe Cesárea's scant avant-garde work	The diarists' comparison of him to Octavio Paz is characterization, not identity
Flora Castañeda	Cesárea's former colleague/friend and decisive final guide	Supplies her teaching and factory work, notebooks, plans, fears, herb-selling, and Villaviciosa location	Flora saw some things herself and repeats others that Cesárea told her

The final African route

Character	Connection to Belano	What Urenda's story tells us	What remains unknown
Jacobo Urenda	Journalist, friend, and final direct witness	Encounters Belano in Luanda, travels through the war zone, and sees him leave with López Lobo's column	What happens after the separation
Emilio López Lobo	Endangered photographer Belano chooses not to leave alone	Travels with soldiers into the Liberian interior, accompanied by Belano	His later fate and Belano's

Historical counterparts and their limits

Bolaño turns lived literary history into fictional pressure. In a 2000 interview he accepted Arturo Belano as an alter ego only “in a certain sense”: some events were his, some were not, and the invented figure included both desired and avoided selves. In the same interview he identified Ulises Lima as a fictional transposition of Mario Santiago Papasquiaro. He drew the two figures differently, and neither identification lets us turn fiction back into biography.

The movement works the same way. Bolaño identified Infrarealism—the anarchic Mexican poetry movement he helped found with Mario Santiago in 1974 or 1975—as the historical basis of visceral realism. He later mythologized it as essentially a two-person enterprise. The surviving archive is wider: the Universidad Diego Portales record for the 1977 magazine Correspondencia infra names Bolaño, Mario Santiago, and Bruno Montané as producers and records work by numerous contributors. Visceral realism is a fictional transformation of Infrarealism, not the same group under another name.

Fictional figure or group	Historical basis	Why the connection is made	Where the comparison stops
Arturo Belano	Roberto Bolaño	Bolaño called Belano an alter ego “in a certain sense”	A partial alter ego, not a biographical duplicate; fictional acts and fates remain fictional.
Ulises Lima	Mario Santiago Papasquiaro	Bolaño named Santiago when asked about Lima	A fictional transposition; the novel's complete route is not Santiago's documentary biography.
Visceral realism	Infrarealism	Bolaño named the movement; its surviving magazine archive supplies the wider circle	A deliberate fictional reconstruction, not an exhaustive membership key.
Luscious Skin	Jorge Hernández “Piel Divina”	Hernández says Bolaño drew the character from him and retained his nickname	He insists that the character is fiction, not a copy of his life.
Joaquín “Quim” Font	Architect Manolo Larrosa	In Acevedo-Zapata's interview, Hernández names Larrosa, remembers his house as open to the poets, and confirms that he spent time in psychiatric care	The novel's speeches and full Font-family plot are not a documentary account.
Felipe Müller	Bruno Montané	Acevedo-Zapata identifies Montané as Müller; later reporting based on interviews with Montané gives the same correspondence	A historical model does not make Müller's route and testimony documentary biography.
Rafael Barrios	Rubén Medina	Acevedo-Zapata identifies Medina as Barrios; the same pairing appears in an El País profile that interviews Medina	The match does not make every detail of Barrios's relationship, testimony, or later life biographical.
Roberto Rosas	José Rosas Ribeyro	Acevedo-Zapata identifies Rosas Ribeyro as Rosas in a note to the interview	The Paris testimony remains a fictional scene.
María Font	Mara Larrosa	Acevedo-Zapata identifies Larrosa as María Font; Hernández's recollections place her in the same Infrarealist circle	The Font-family story is not a record of the Larrosa family.
Xóchitl García	Guadalupe “Pita” Ochoa	Acevedo-Zapata's note identifies Pita Ochoa as Xóchitl, and Ochoa has been interviewed under that identification	Ochoa's life is not interchangeable with Xóchitl's plot; Geles Lebrija is a separate Infrarealist.
Julio César Álamo	Juan Bañuelos	Acevedo-Zapata notes the pairing; accounts of the UNAM workshop identify Bañuelos as the teacher Bolaño recast as Álamo	The workshop confrontation is a fictional reconstruction, not a transcript.

Two tempting identifications remain unproven. A scholarly note links García Madero with the younger Infrarealist Juan Esteban Harrington chiefly through age and first name—too little for a secure match. The sources cited here do not identify a single real-life model for Cesárea Tinajero; her Stridentist circle, work history, poem, northern route, and death belong to the novel.

That distance matters. Real names and remembered people supplied the social grain; selection, montage, folded time, and redistributed voices made the novel.

How to read Part II without losing the thread

Part II becomes easier to follow when you keep its two clocks in view: the date of the testimony and the date of the life being remembered.

1. Read the bold header twice. On the first pass, notice whose voice you have entered. On the second, separate the place and date of telling from the event being remembered. Mary Watson speaks in London in May 1978 but mainly recalls the summer of 1977 in France and Spain. Jacobo Urenda speaks in 1996 and reconstructs an African route that has already changed countries and levels of knowledge.

2. Follow the returning strands. Amadeo's long conversation carries Cesárea and the 1920s archive. Joaquín Font carries the damaged memory of the Mexico City circle. Lima's strand moves through Paris, Israel, Vienna, Mexico, and Nicaragua. Belano's moves through Barcelona and Europe toward the final African testimony. Other entries intersect, resist, or redirect those strands.

3. Do not sort narrators into simply “reliable” or “unreliable.” A hostile speaker may remember a location exactly. A loving speaker may misread a motive. Someone whose perception is failing may still tell us exactly who entered the room. Ask what the person could know firsthand and where report or inference begins.

4. Use physical objects as anchors. Caborca, “Sión,” the Impala, Cesárea's notebooks, letters and postcards, hospital rooms, borrowed books, and Belano's sword challenge to a critic keep a route visible when interpretation starts to float. An object may pass between witnesses even when the lives around it do not cohere.

5. Treat repeated names as changed encounters, not redundant information. The second or fifth appearance of a speaker often matters because time has altered the witness. Rafael and Barbara's separate accounts, for example, show the movement surviving as a dispute inside a relationship. Amadeo's frame changes less in clock time but accumulates the fatigue, alcohol, omissions, and conviction of a single long night.

6. Let minor literary names pass unless they change the route. The novel is crowded with poets, writers, editors, critics, and artists. Stop for a name when that person speaks, supplies a clue, changes a relationship, or redirects a journey; otherwise keep moving.

7. Stop where the novel stops. García Madero's diary continues through February 15, 1976; Lupe is last explicitly present with him on February 9, and the remaining entries do not name their participants. Belano is alive when Urenda last sees him leave Brownsville with López Lobo and the soldiers. Lima is reported alive in Mexico City in December 1996. Those are the last positions the book gives us.

One anomaly is especially useful. Most testimonies appear to face an unidentified listener, perhaps more than one. Andrés Ramírez, however, repeatedly addresses Belano by name. That makes a single globe-traveling interviewer hard to sustain. We can feel a listener behind Part II, but the novel never gives that listener a face.

Frequently asked questions

How many narrators are in The Savage Detectives?

The clearest answer is 54 named first-person voices: García Madero in Parts I and III, and 53 different speakers in Part II. Those fifty-three voices occupy 96 separate passages because fourteen people return more than once. Other totals usually arise when people and their separate appearances are counted as though they were the same thing.

Who narrates Part II?

Fifty-three named witnesses do. Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima are the central subjects but never speak in Part II in their own names. All fifty-three appear in the appendix below, in the order the novel gives them.

Who is interviewing the witnesses?

The novel never supplies a stable identity. The speech implies one or more listeners, but their words and identifying marks are largely erased. Andrés Ramírez appears to address Belano directly, which also argues against treating every entry as the work of one hidden interviewer.

Was Juan García Madero really a visceral realist?

Parts I and III show Belano and Lima recruiting him and García participating in the group. Ernesto García Grajales denies his membership in December 1996 and does not recognize the name. The denial belongs to the novel's broken memory; it does not erase what García's diary has already shown.

Does García Madero die at the end?

The novel does not say so. His diary continues through February 15, 1976. Lupe is last explicitly present with him on February 9, and the final six entries do not name their participants. The novel gives no answer to the final broken-edged window. It leaves García Madero's fate open.

What happens to Lupe?

She survives the February 1 confrontation and leaves Villaviciosa with García Madero on February 9. The February 10–15 entries do not name their participants, and Part II gives no later account of her.

Who kills Cesárea Tinajero?

During the February 1 roadside struggle, Cesárea throws herself over the fighters and Alberto's armed associate—the policeman—shoots her in the chest. Belano stabs Alberto; Lima tackles the gunman. Cesárea dies. Belano and Lima later say they will take and bury the three bodies, but García Madero does not witness the burial.

What happens to Arturo Belano?

In a testimony dated June 1996, Jacobo Urenda recalls a Liberia sequence that begins with his arrival in Monrovia in April, the year unstated. He last sees Belano leave Brownsville with soldiers and Emilio López Lobo on a column bound toward Thomas Creek; Urenda does not see what happens afterward.

What happens to Ulises Lima?

His last fully staged encounter comes in Clara Cabeza's October 1995 testimony, which recalls an undated private conversation with Octavio Paz. In December 1996 García Grajales reports that Lima is alive in Mexico City and that he has visited him. That is the novel's last report of Lima, although it comes from a witness who is wrong about García Madero.

Is Cesárea Tinajero a real poet?

She is a fictional character situated among fictionalized and historical avant-garde figures. The sources cited here do not identify a single real-life poet as her model.

What does “Sión” mean?

Belano and Lima add imagined sails to the three drawn lines and interpret a boat passing from calm toward destruction. That is their reading in Amadeo's apartment; the novel leaves room for others.

What is outside the final window?

No answer is given. The final three diary entries vary the question; the first two drawings receive answers inside the scene, while the last broken-edged square does not. The novel leaves all of these possibilities open: death, escape, the desert, the future.

Appendix: The voices of Part II, in reading order

The list below follows every change of speaker in Part II. Its numbers are navigation aids: Bolaño numbers the twenty-six larger divisions, not the individual voices within them. Across those divisions, fifty-three people speak in ninety-six separate passages because fourteen return more than once. Each heading marks the moment of speaking, which may be years away from the event remembered.

The voices that return

Fourteen voices return. Amadeo's thirteen passages belong to one January 1976 conversation threaded through the whole section; Joaquín Font's eight returns form the other major strand.

Speaker	Times heard	Part II divisions
Amadeo Salvatierra	13	1; 2; 3; 5; 6; 8; 9; 11; 16; 17; 19; 21; 26
Joaquín “Quim” Font	8	3; 5; 6; 9; 11; 16; 17; 18
Luis Sebastián Rosado	5	1; 2; 9; 15; 16
Felipe Müller	4	6; 8; 19; 23
Jacinto Requena	4	3; 9; 15; 17
Barbara Patterson	3	3; 13; 15
Laura Jáuregui	3	1; 2; 5
Rafael Barrios	3	6; 13; 15
Simone Darrieux	3	7
Xóchitl García	3	15; 16; 17
Angélica Font	2	2; 9
Lisandro Morales	2	5; 11
María Font	2	3; 12
Perla Avilés	2	1; 2

Part II, voice by voice

Part II, division 1

#	Who speaks—and from where	What they remember	What this voice brings into view	What remains uncertain
1	Amadeo Salvatierra Calle República de Venezuela, near the Palacio de la Inquisición, Mexico City DF; January 1976	January 1976; immediate interview scene Amadeo Salvatierra's apartment, Calle República de Venezuela, Mexico City	Two young poets arrive at Amadeo's apartment, where the search for Cesárea's surviving trace begins.	Amadeo does not consistently distinguish which young poet says or does each thing.
2	Perla Avilés Calle Leonardo da Vinci, Colonia Mixcoac, Mexico City DF; January 1976	1970; with a later trip to Tlaxcala Mexico City neighborhoods; road to Tlaxcala	Belano arrived in Mexico at about fifteen; he was solitary, poor, a weak student, a voracious writer-reader, and imagined buried pyramids	Perla's dates and routes are retrospective and sometimes impressionistic
3	Laura Jáuregui Tlalpan, Mexico City DF; January 1976	1973-1975, before January 1976 Mexico City	Laura links the Lee Harvey Oswald magazine circle to the later group and says visceral realism began partly as Belano's courtship gesture.	Lima's civil name is recalled only as "Alfredo something or other"; Laura disputes the movement's seriousness
4	Fabio Ernesto Logiacomo editorial offices of the magazine La Chispa, Calle Independencia and Luis Moya, Mexico City DF; March 1976	November 1975 Mexico City: offices of La Chispa; Chapultepec and nearby streets	The young poets appoint themselves critics of the literary establishment, attack its institutions, and reveal sharply different political histories.	The recorder fails, leaving only Logiacomo's subjective impressions of the night.
5	Luis Sebastián Rosado La Rama Dorada coffee shop, Colonia Coyoacán, Mexico City DF; April 1976	December 1975 La Rama Dorada, Coyoacán; Priapo's, Tepito, Mexico City	Lima recites Rimbaud, the group turns combative, and an indistinct story surfaces about ‘Rimbaud and some war.’	Rosado explicitly does not know which war; he is drunk and another witness corrects several details
6	Alberto Moore Calle Pitágoras, Colonia Narvarte, Mexico City DF; April 1976	December 1975; nested Rimbaud episode circa 1871 and Mexican episode in 1865 Priapo's, Tepito, Mexico City; nested Villaviciosa/Santa Teresa, Sonora; Rimbaud's route from Charleville toward Paris, France	Moore locates the bar and repeats Lima's claim that Rimbaud's rapist caporal had belonged to a French detachment captured and largely killed at Villaviciosa in 1865.	This is Lima's story as Moore remembers it; the passage supplies no historical support for the connection, and Moore's corrections clash with Rosado's account.
7	Carlos Monsiváis walking along Calle Madero, near Sanborn's, Mexico City DF; May 1976	Late 1975 or early 1976; exact visit date unstated Mexico City	The supposed ambush shrinks into a poorer, stranger encounter: argumentative anti-Paz poets, and a review Lima promises but never delivers.	Brief recollection; date and exact setting are not supplied

Part II, division 2

#	Who speaks—and from where	What they remember	What this voice brings into view	What remains uncertain
8	Amadeo Salvatierra Calle República de Venezuela, near the Palacio de la Inquisición, Mexico City DF; January 1976	January 1976; immediate interview, recalling the youths' recent investigation Amadeo's apartment; reported interviews across Mexico City	Cesárea emerges as the only woman linked to the earlier visceral realists, and Amadeo as the surviving person who can lead the search toward her.	The lead comes through a chain of old memories, and no larger body of Cesárea's work has yet been found.
9	Perla Avilés Calle Leonardo da Vinci, Colonia Mixcoac, Mexico City DF; May 1976	1970 and the early 1970s, including 1973 Mexico City; Tlaxcala; Chile and wider Latin America by report	Belano's literary loyalties are intense enough to leave him in tears after an argument over Neruda and Parra; Perla also remembers his journey to Chile around the coup.	Some events come through Belano's sister; Perla signals imperfect recall
10	Luscious Skin in a rooftop room on Calle Tepeji, Mexico City DF; May 1976	1975-1976 Calle Tepeji and other Mexico City locations	Lima accepts Luscious Skin while Belano distrusts him; around them we glimpse the group's bohemian economy and Belano's ‘André Breton of the Third World’ aura.	Luscious Skin is the only name he gives; resentment toward Belano and his own boastfulness shape the portrait.
11	Laura Jáuregui Tlalpan, Mexico City DF; May 1976	1973-1975 Mexico City	For Laura, visceral realism belonged to an adolescent courtship fantasy rather than a movement built to last.	Laura is looking back polemically at a movement she now rejects.
12	Luis Sebastián Rosado lawn party with lights in the grass at the Moores' house, more than twenty people, Colonia Las Lomas, Mexico City DF; July 1976	1976, before July testimony; exact date unstated Mexico City, including Emilito Laguna's studio	A rumor circulates about an unnamed discovery that could overturn Spanish-language poetry; the party also reveals another corner of the group's sexual life.	The "something" is never named or connected to Sonora in this testimony; Luscious Skin exaggerates and Rosado reports pillow talk
13	Angélica Font Calle Colima, Colonia Condesa, Mexico City DF; July 1976	1975-1976 Mexico City; Sonora by report	Angélica says Belano and Lima went north and remembers the local circle splintering through expulsions and broken relationships.	Angélica gives only a broad chronology and did not witness the journey north.

Part II, division 3

#	Who speaks—and from where	What they remember	What this voice brings into view	What remains uncertain
14	Manuel Maples Arce walking along the Calzada del Cerro, Chapultepec Park, Mexico City DF; August 1976	1975 or early 1976; exact date unstated Manuel Maples Arce's Mexico City home	Maples Arce and Belano discuss stridentism; Belano leaves a written question list, receives answers and two books, and never returns; Maples concludes these poets were meant to be orphans	The companions and the questions' contents are unnamed; Cesárea is not mentioned in this testimony
15	Barbara Patterson in a room at the Hotel Los Claveles, Avenida Niño Perdido and Juan de Dios Peza, Mexico City DF; September 1976	Same Maples Arce visit, 1975 or early 1976 Mexico City	Barbara names herself, Belano, Barrios, and Requena as the visitors to Maples Arce; elsewhere she sketches Lima, María, and a group she expects to vanish.	Barbara's anger and her conflicts with the group shape every judgment.
16	Amadeo Salvatierra Calle República de Venezuela, near the Palacio de la Inquisición, Mexico City DF; January 1976	January 1976; recalling the youths' recent interviews Amadeo's apartment; Mexico City interviews by report	Old memories lead from Stridentism to the 1920s visceral realists and finally to Amadeo.	Every step in the chain depends on an old and imprecise memory.
17	Joaquín “Quim” Font Calle Colima, Colonia Condesa, Mexico City DF; October 1976	1974-1975, before founders leave Mexico City	Belano is outward, disciplined, and social; Lima inward, radical, and prone to writing in stolen books before assembling long poems	Joaquín turns close observation into a broad contrast and cannot show how either man assembled every poem.
18	Jacinto Requena Café Quito, Calle Bucareli, Mexico City DF; November 1976	1975-1976 and aftermath Mexico City; Sonora and Europe by report	Jacinto remembers the founders' daily circle, their suspicious absences, the journey north, and their later departure for Europe; Belano also flirts with Xóchitl.	Jacinto is guessing about the provisions and motives, and the later destinations reach him through others.
19	María Font Calle Colima, Colonia Condesa, Mexico City DF; December 1976	Late 1975 to late 1976 Mexico City, especially Café Quito; Sonora and Europe by report	Belano and Lima reappear dirty and exhausted with an unnamed man in white, then announce Lima will go to Paris and Belano to Spain; the Impala is absent and unaccounted for	María only thinks about the missing Impala and never sees it; its fate and the identity of the man in white remain unresolved

Part II, division 4

#	Who speaks—and from where	What they remember	What this voice brings into view	What remains uncertain
20	Auxilio Lacouture Faculty of Literature, UNAM, Mexico City DF; December 1976	1965?-1976, especially 1968, 1970, and 1973 UNAM and Mexico City; Chile by report	Belano was about sixteen or seventeen when she met him, went to Chile in 1973, was arrested after the coup, and returned changed before joining Lima	Auxilio explicitly admits uncertain dates and turns experience into legend

Part II, division 5

#	Who speaks—and from where	What they remember	What this voice brings into view	What remains uncertain
21	Amadeo Salvatierra Calle República de Venezuela, near the Palacio de la Inquisición, Mexico City DF; January 1976	January 1976; immediate interview Amadeo's apartment, Mexico City	Amadeo moves from memory to the surviving copy of Caborca that contains Cesárea's poem.	The magazine is physically present in the room, but nothing here tells us what else Cesárea may have written.
22	Joaquín “Quim” Font El Reposo Mental Health Clinic, Camino Desierto de los Leones, on the outskirts of Mexico City DF; January 1977	Before January 1977; broad literary reflection Mexico City and El Reposo clinic	Joaquín imagines Belano and Lima as seekers of desperate literature and folds them, his daughters, and Laura Damián into the story of his collapse.	The passage is metaphorical and gives no firm chronology; the links among Belano, Lima, his daughters, and Laura Damián remain Joaquín's interpretation.
23	Joaquín Vázquez Amaral walking on a university campus in the American Midwest; February 1977	1975 Mexico City, at a presentation of Pound's Cantos translation	Belano's companions are courteous but independent: they discuss Pound and insist on paying their share.	Amaral names only Belano; the companions, including two women, are unnamed, so Lima's presence cannot be asserted from this testimony
24	Lisandro Morales Calle Comercio, in front of Jardín Morelos, Colonia Escandón, Mexico City DF; March 1977	March 1977, immediately before Belano's departure for Europe Mexico City	Vargas Pardo pressures Morales to sign a no-advance contract for Belano's book before Belano leaves for Europe two days later	Belano is not shown being coerced; Morales is openly hostile and superstitiously calls him bad luck
25	Laura Jáuregui Tlalpan, Mexico City DF; March 1977	March 1977, shortly before Belano's European departure Tlalpan, Mexico City	Laura thinks Belano says he has been in Sonora and Arizona, but is unsure; she records his prediction of death and their violent final rupture	Both commit violence; Laura's account is a former lover's recollection, and she is explicitly unsure whether Belano said he had been in Sonora and Arizona

Part II, division 6

#	Who speaks—and from where	What they remember	What this voice brings into view	What remains uncertain
26	Rafael Barrios Café Quito, Calle Bucareli, Mexico City DF; May 1977	1976-1977 Mexico City	The movement survives briefly through magazines, readings, and experiments before the post-founder phase runs down.	Rafael gives few dates and is looking back on the period as a failure.
27	Joaquín “Quim” Font El Reposo Mental Health Clinic, Camino Desierto de los Leones, on the outskirts of Mexico City DF; March 1977	Before March 1977 Mexico City and El Reposo clinic	The dead young poet becomes one of the pressure points where Joaquín's literary memory and private grief meet.	Joaquín does not date these memories or name the dead young poet here.
28	Amadeo Salvatierra Calle República de Venezuela, near the Palacio de la Inquisición, Mexico City DF; January 1976	January 1976; object shown while recalling the 1920s Amadeo's apartment; 1920s Mexico City	Names gather around Cesárea and the earlier movement in the surviving pages Amadeo keeps.	Amadeo warns that names and spellings may reflect printer errors or failing memory
29	Felipe Müller Bar Céntrico, Calle Tallers, Barcelona; May 1977	1976-1977 Barcelona; earlier Mexico City via letters	Felipe remembers his mother's hyperthyroidism, the scholarship and treatment that helped her, and Belano's arrival after she improved.	Some causal links and Mexico events come through correspondence

Part II, division 7

#	Who speaks—and from where	What they remember	What this voice brings into view	What remains uncertain
30	Simone Darrieux Rue des Petites Écuries, Paris; July 1977	Early-mid 1970s in Mexico; 1977 in Paris Mexico City; Paris	Belano identifies as Chilean and is deeply interested in French literature; Lima arrives in Paris, walks and reads, and plans to go to Israel for a friend	Dates of the Mexico affair are broad; Simone does not claim Belano longed to live in France
31	Hipólito Garcés Avenue Marcel Proust, Paris; August 1977	1977 Paris	Lima's Paris life contracts around hunger, books, and his withdrawal from an exploitative relationship.	Garcés sees Lima's poverty and withdrawal firsthand, but his account of the relationship is shaped by fear and his own exploitation of Lima.
32	Roberto Rosas Rue de Passy, Paris; September 1977	1977 Paris, Rue de Passy and literary circles	Lima seeks young French poets, visits Bulteau, says he is not well, and leaves for Barcelona	Exact dates and reasons are uncertain
33	Simone Darrieux Rue des Petites Écuries, Paris; September 1977	1977 Paris	He survives on occasional cleaning work, claims to have found money, and plans Israel	She does not know the source of the money or full plan
34	Sofía Pellegrini sitting in the Jardins du Trocadero, Paris; September 1977	1977 Paris, especially Rue des Eaux and Trocadéro	Against the joke that Lima is the ‘Christ of Rue des Eaux,’ Sofía remembers an act of silent compassion.	Sofía offers a brief personal impression and no exact date.
35	Simone Darrieux Rue des Petites Écuries, Paris; September 1977	1977 Paris, Rue des Petites Écuries	He reads and writes even in the shower, reinforcing the portrait of compulsive marginal composition	A small domestic observation only
36	Michel Bulteau Rue de Téhéran, Paris; January 1978	Late 1977 or January 1978 Paris streets near Rue de Téhéran	The Sonora search returns as a cryptic story told on a Paris street.	Bulteau does not name the story's figures; landscape and facts remain allegorical

Part II, division 8

#	Who speaks—and from where	What they remember	What this voice brings into view	What remains uncertain
37	Amadeo Salvatierra Calle República de Venezuela, near the Palacio de la Inquisición, Mexico City DF; January 1976	January 1976; with dream-memory of the 1920s Amadeo's apartment; dreamed Mexico City	Amadeo imagines Cesárea walking through the 1920s city, showing how memory becomes vision	He cannot reliably distinguish dream from recollection or which youth did what
38	Felipe Müller Bar Céntrico, Calle Tallers, Barcelona; January 1978	1977 Barcelona and Paris	Belano works as a campground night watchman; Felipe and others may have renounced the movement by letter	Felipe does not make clear exactly who renounced the movement or when.
39	Mary Watson Sutherland Place, London; May 1978	Summer 1977 France and Spain: Port-Vendres, Barcelona, Planèzes and road route	Mary remembers the campground, her affair with the unnamed watchman, his two nights sheltering John, the knife confrontation with Hans, and his later drunken attack on Hugh followed by an apology.	Mary never names the watchman; other voices are what connect the figure to Belano.
40	Alain Lebert Bar Chez Raoul, Port-Vendres, France; December 1978	1978 Port-Vendres and the Mediterranean coast of France	Belano finds him and gets him work on the fishing boat Isobel; an exceptional catch gives Lima money for Israel	Belano predicts it may be their last meeting; Lebert cannot know later outcomes

Part II, division 9

#	Who speaks—and from where	What they remember	What this voice brings into view	What remains uncertain
41	Amadeo Salvatierra Calle República de Venezuela, near the Palacio de la Inquisición, Mexico City DF; January 1976	January 1976; reading a 1920s magazine and recalling 1920s conflict Amadeo's apartment; Mexico City literary circle	The magazine gathers contributors and translations around Cesárea; Amadeo also remembers her defending Encarnación's right to speak against Maples Arce and others.	The surviving issue is incomplete, and the motives in the quarrel come from Amadeo's recollection.
42	Joaquín “Quim” Font El Reposo Mental Health Clinic, Camino Desierto de los Leones, on the outskirts of Mexico City DF; March 1979	1978-1979 El Reposo clinic, outskirts of Mexico City	Joaquín's recognition deteriorates even as his connection with the Damián family persists.	Joaquín often fails to recognize the visitor; the uncertainty concerns recognition, not every detail of the encounter.
43	Jacinto Requena Café Quito, Calle Bucareli, Mexico City DF; March 1979	1976-1979 Mexico City	Jacinto refuses a place in the anthology when Lima is excluded, preserving a loyalty the movement itself has nearly lost.	Jacinto leaves some names and exact dates unspecified.
44	Luis Sebastián Rosado a dark office, Colonia Coyoacán, Mexico City DF; March 1979	Late 1970s Mexico City	Rosado covertly lobbies for Luscious Skin; when Luscious learns that the other visceral realists, especially Lima, are excluded, he says it is better if he is not included either	Luscious Skin's final refusal expresses solidarity; Rosado is elitist, personally invested, and unsure whether Ernesto was excluded
45	Angélica Font Calle Colima, Colonia Condesa, Mexico City DF; April 1979	Late 1977-April 1979; exact death date unstated Mexico City hospitals and funeral	Angélica follows Ernesto San Epifanio through illness, surgery, severe impairment, and death after the founders have gone.	Belano and Lima barely enter this memory, and Angélica gives no exact date for Ernesto's death.

Part II, division 10

#	Who speaks—and from where	What they remember	What this voice brings into view	What remains uncertain
46	Norman Bolzman sitting on a bench in Edith Wolfson Park, Tel Aviv; October 1979	February–later in 1979 Tel Aviv, kibbutz/Eilat, and Vienna by report	Lima's unreturned love, poverty, failed work, letters, return with Heimito, and flight to Vienna pass through Norman's jealous account.	Norman is jealous and many later movements reach him secondhand

Part II, division 11

#	Who speaks—and from where	What they remember	What this voice brings into view	What remains uncertain
47	Amadeo Salvatierra Calle República de Venezuela, near the Palacio de la Inquisición, Mexico City DF; January 1976	1920s, recalled in January 1976 Mexico City	Cesárea worked as Carvajal's secretary/ghostwriter, danced with Amadeo, and remained apart from the stridentist center	Amadeo is reaching back half a century and signals his own uncertainty.
48	Lisandro Morales pulquería La Saeta Mexicana, near La Villa, Mexico City DF; January 1980	1976-late 1970s Mexico City publishing world	The anthology appears after Belano has left Mexico.	Morales's belief that Belano is a ‘jinx’ is superstition after the fact.
49	Joaquín “Quim” Font El Reposo Mental Health Clinic, Camino Desierto de los Leones, on the outskirts of Mexico City DF; April 1980	Late 1970s-April 1980 El Reposo clinic; Mexico City by report	The prize has ended, and Álvaro Damián has died by suicide.	Joaquín hears both developments from others and sometimes loses track of the people around him.

Part II, division 12

#	Who speaks—and from where	What they remember	What this voice brings into view	What remains uncertain
50	Heimito Künst in bed in his attic apartment on the Stuckgasse, Vienna; May 1980	1979-1980 Israel and Vienna	Lima reaches Vienna, is arrested after violent episodes, expelled, and barred from Austria until 1984 before returning to France	Heimito directly witnesses parts of Lima's Vienna period, but mundane events mix with fantasies and his account cannot securely reconstruct every episode.
51	María Font Calle Montes, near the Monumento a la Revolución, Mexico City DF; February 1981	Circa 1980-February 1981 Mexico City, Calle Montes and Colonia Guerrero circles	Back in Mexico, Lima tells María about his travels, visits the Rodríguez brothers, fights Pancho, and tries unsuccessfully to revive the movement by himself.	Lima's return is embedded in María's account of her own affairs; she gives no exact return date, and Requena sees Lima behaving erratically.

Part II, division 13

#	Who speaks—and from where	What they remember	What this voice brings into view	What remains uncertain
52	Rafael Barrios sitting in his living room, Jackson Street, San Diego, California; March 1981	1970s-1981, broad retrospective Mexico City and San Diego	For Rafael, the movement was an intervention in politics and daily life as much as a school of poetry.	The comparison is metaphorical and gives no sequence of dated events.
53	Barbara Patterson in her kitchen, Jackson Street, San Diego, California; March 1981	1970s, recalled in 1981 Mexico City and San Diego	Years later, the old label still survives inside Barbara and Rafael's domestic arguments.	Barbara's hostility shapes the comedy, and the episode involving Cuba is only partly told.
54	José “Zopilote” Colina Café Quito, Avenida Bucareli, Mexico City DF; March 1981	1975 El Nacional offices and a Mexico City café	A literary genealogy turns comic while Belano and Lima laugh together.	Colina hears the laughter but cannot know what Belano and Lima said or intended.
55	Verónica Volkow with a female friend and two male friends, International Departures, Mexico City DF airport; April 1981	1975 and May/June 1976 Mexico City, El Nacional area and outside a movie theater	Volkow remembers Belano looking drugged and Lima reading or writing while a third young poet speaks to her.	Volkow is unsure that the third poet was Pérez Camarga and gives only approximate dates.
56	Alfonso Pérez Camarga Calle Toledo, Mexico City DF; June 1981	Circa 1975-1976 Mexico City artists' and architects' circles	Pérez Camarga remembers the sale of marijuana and mushrooms and the poets' contact with affluent cultural circles.	The sexual anecdote reaches Pérez Camarga through somebody else, and he is openly dismissive of the poets.

Part II, division 14

#	Who speaks—and from where	What they remember	What this voice brings into view	What remains uncertain
57	Hugo Montero having a beer at the bar La Mala Senda, Calle Pensador Mexicano, Mexico City DF; May 1982	January 1982 Managua, Nicaragua	Lima disappears from the Mexican delegation in Managua, and the official search fails to find him.	No witness knows where Lima went; Montero's employment fears shape the account

Part II, division 15

#	Who speaks—and from where	What they remember	What this voice brings into view	What remains uncertain
58	Jacinto Requena Café Quito, Calle Bucareli, Mexico City; July 1982	January 1982 and immediate aftermath Mexico City; Managua by report	Jacinto hears that Lima has vanished from the delegation and that Montero expects to lose his job over it.	Jacinto has no firsthand knowledge of Lima's movements in Nicaragua and never learns whether Montero lost his job.
59	Xóchitl García Calle Montes, near the Monumento a la Revolución, Mexico City DF; July 1982	1982 Mexico City, Calle Montes and Lima family home	Lima's disappearance reaches the people left in Mexico as fear, waiting, and domestic strain.	Xóchitl's story ends before Lima's mother's response.
60	Rafael Barrios in the bathroom of his house, Jackson Street, San Diego, California; September 1982	1982 San Diego; Mexico City by telephone and report	From San Diego, Rafael hears of Lima's mother confronting officials at Bellas Artes.	Rafael hears the story from San Diego and can only speculate about Lima's decision.
61	Barbara Patterson in the kitchen of her house, Jackson Street, San Diego, California; October 1982	1982 San Diego	The founders' absence has settled into Barbara and Rafael's depression and inactivity.	Barbara can describe only life in San Diego, not Lima's location.
62	Luis Sebastián Rosado a dark office, Calle Cravioto, Colonia Coyoacán, Mexico City DF; March 1983	1982-1983 Mexico City; Sonora/Cesárea episode by rumor	A chain of rumor links Lima's later disappearance to danger surrounding the search for Cesárea.	The story passes from María to Joaquín to Luscious Skin to Rosado, changing hands at every step.

Part II, division 16

#	Who speaks—and from where	What they remember	What this voice brings into view	What remains uncertain
63	Amadeo Salvatierra Calle República de Venezuela, near the Palacio de la Inquisición, Mexico City DF; January 1976	1920s-1930, recalled January 1976 Mexico City; Stridentopolis/Xalapa by literary history	Cesárea's story reaches Stridentopolis, while Carvajal is said to have died in a 1930 brothel shootout.	Most of this reaches Amadeo through List Arzubide, and Amadeo admits that he is unsure of parts of it.
64	Joaquín “Quim” Font psychiatric hospital La Fortaleza, Tlalnepantla, Mexico City; March 1983	1982-1983 La Fortaleza psychiatric hospital, Tlalnepantla; Managua by report	Lima's disappearance enters the clinic as rumor: an unidentified inmate tells Joaquín before his daughter does.	Joaquín admits that he lies to his daughter about where he heard the news; the inmate Chucho is never securely identified.
65	Xóchitl García Calle Montes, near the Monumento a la Revolución, Mexico City DF; January 1984	1983-January 1984 Mexico City	The surviving circle becomes the subject: work, friendship, and life after the movement.	Xóchitl is describing the friends who remained, not adding to Belano's, Lima's, or Cesárea's route.
66	Luis Sebastián Rosado a dark study, Calle Cravioto, Colonia Coyoacán, Mexico City DF; February 1984	Before February 1984 Tlalnepantla drug house; Mexico City by report	Luscious Skin's death reaches Rosado through a police story and a failed official identification; his civil name remains unknown.	Rosado did not witness the raid, the police story may be wrong, and Luscious Skin's civil name is still unknown.

Part II, division 17

#	Who speaks—and from where	What they remember	What this voice brings into view	What remains uncertain
67	Jacinto Requena Café Quito, Calle Bucareli, Mexico City DF; September 1985	Circa 1984, two years after Managua; reported September 1985 Mexico City, Colonia Guerrero; allegorical river route through Mexico/Central America	Lima is back in Mexico, living with Lola and her child, selling marijuana, and telling Jacinto a river story that cannot be mapped literally.	Jacinto gives no exact return date, and Lima's river cannot be followed as a literal route.
68	Joaquín “Quim” Font psychiatric hospital La Fortaleza, Tlalnepantla, Mexico City DF; September 1985	September 1985 earthquake period Mexico City and La Fortaleza	His daughter first says tentatively that no friends died "as far as I know" and later insists none died; Joaquín refuses the answer and believes more than one friend must have died	His daughter's two formulations and Joaquín's refusal to accept them remain unresolved; the passage does not identify any dead friend.
69	Xóchitl García Calle Montes, near the Monumento a la Revolución, Mexico City DF; January 1986	1984-January 1986 Mexico City	The old affiliation survives as both a professional stigma and a bond between friends.	This is Xóchitl's story of work and friendship; it does not locate the founders.
70	Amadeo Salvatierra Calle República de Venezuela, near the Palacio de la Inquisición, Mexico City DF; January 1976	January 1976; first encounter with the 1920s poem Amadeo's apartment, Mexico City	They encounter "Sión"; one says he saw it in a dream during a childhood fever, and they call it a joke covering something more serious without yet decoding it	At this point the poem has not yet been given its later boat-and-navigation reading, and Amadeo still cannot tell which young poet is speaking.

Part II, division 18

#	Who speaks—and from where	What they remember	What this voice brings into view	What remains uncertain
71	Joaquín “Quim” Font Calle Colima, Colonia Condesa, Mexico City DF; August 1987	August 1987; with 1976 car memory Calle Colima, Mexico City	In Joaquín's late vision, the missing Impala and Cesárea return together.	Joaquín immediately sees that the car has no driver and acknowledges that the vision may be madness; the Impala's fate remains unknown.
72	Andrés Ramírez Bar El Cuerno de Oro, Calle Avenir, Barcelona; December 1988	1975-1988, with Belano employment at an unstated later date Chile, sea passage, France, and Barcelona	Belano worked as his dishwasher, read constantly, endured hard times, and left with wages and a bonus	Ramírez tells a long story of his own life without dating Belano's period of employment exactly.
73	Abel Romero Café L'Alsatien, Rue de Vaugirard, near the Luxembourg Gardens, Paris; September 1989	11 September 1983 Victor's Café, Paris	Abel places Belano at Victor's Café on September 11, 1983, where they discuss random and purposeful evil.	Abel gives us one short scene and little sense of where Belano came from or went next.

Part II, division 19

#	Who speaks—and from where	What they remember	What this voice brings into view	What remains uncertain
74	Amadeo Salvatierra Calle República de Venezuela, near the Palacio de la Inquisición, Mexico City DF; January 1976	January 1976; analysis of 1920s poem Amadeo's apartment, Mexico City	They decode the three panels as calm, waves, and storm and read "Sión" as hiding navegación	The young poets call it a joke covering something serious, but the reading remains their conjecture.
75	Edith Oster sitting on a bench in the Alameda, Mexico City DF; May 1990	1976-circa 1980s; dates confessed uncertain Mexico City, Barcelona, Rome, and hospitals	Edith thinks Belano and Lima's friendship was over; Lima confesses love/loneliness; Belano and Edith cohabit then break; later Belano asks after her and fears she is dead	Edith calls the friendship over, but neither man does; her dates are uncertain, and several later moments reach her through other people.
76	Felipe Müller sitting on a bench in Plaza Martorell, Barcelona; October 1991	October 1991 testimony; nested speculative-fiction time unstated Plaza Martorell, Barcelona; nested fictional locations unstated	Belano's taste for science fiction appears through a story of love and death endlessly cloned.	Felipe cannot decide whether the story is Belano's or Theodore Sturgeon's; it may tell us about Belano's taste, not his life.

Part II, division 20

#	Who speaks—and from where	What they remember	What this voice brings into view	What remains uncertain
77	Xosé Lendoiro Terme di Traiano, Rome; October 1992	A summer, then two years later; calendar years unstated, followed by a search during the 1980s Castroverde, Lugo; Barcelona; Ampurdán by failed search	Belano descends Devil's Mouth and rescues Elifaz; later writes law-journal reviews and has an affair before disappearing from Lendoiro's life	The years are missing, and Lendoiro filters Belano through jealousy and his own dramatic self-portrait.

Part II, division 21

#	Who speaks—and from where	What they remember	What this voice brings into view	What remains uncertain
78	Daniel Grossman sitting on a bench in the Alameda, Mexico City DF; February 1993	February 1979 remembered via Norman; then months before February 1993 Tel Aviv by memory; Puerto Ángel, road to Puebla, and Mexico City	Norman says Lima cried or made sounds at night in Tel Aviv; later an unnamed former partner says Lima became like a father to her son and began using drugs after first only selling them	The woman is unnamed, Norman is guessing, and reports from Mexico City disagree about Lima.
79	Amadeo Salvatierra Calle República de Venezuela, near the Palacio de la Inquisición, Mexico City DF; January 1976	1920s, especially Cesárea's final days in Mexico City; recalled January 1976 Mexico City and Sonora by declared destination	After friends' weddings, Cesárea quits Carvajal, says she was always a visceral realist, and leaves for her native Sonora with no job or relatives waiting	Amadeo has never been to Sonora and dramatizes the parting; exact year is unstated

Part II, division 22

#	Who speaks—and from where	What they remember	What this voice brings into view	What remains uncertain
80	Susana Puig Calle Josep Tarradellas, Calella de Mar, Catalonia; June 1994	Circa 1994, immediately before Belano's Africa departure; exact dates unstated Catalan coast: hospital, Calella/nearby coastal towns, and cove near Los Calamares Felices	Susana remembers Belano's illnesses, son and former wife, their affair, his plan for Tanzania, and her distant view of what may be a duel.	Susana recognizes only Belano and cannot tell whether the distant objects are swords; later voices name Echevarne, Piña, Planells, and Monistrol.
81	Guillem Piña Calle Gaspar Pujol, Andratx, Mallorca; June 1994	1977, then circa 1994 Barcelona; Maresme coast near Sant Pol de Mar	Belano reappears after years, reports repeated hospitalization, fears a review, challenges Echevarne, duels with sabers, and holds a ticket to Dar es Salaam	Piña leaves the years between 1977 and the reunion vague and can only guess what Echevarne's review will say.
82	Jaume Planells Bar Salambó, Calle Torrijos, Barcelona; June 1994	Circa June 1994 Barcelona to beach near Sant Pol de Mar	Planells recognizes real swords, the two seconds, the onlooker on the hill, and a fight in which Echevarne and Belano stop short of grave injury.	Planells admits that his memory is blurred and sometimes assigns motives he could not know.

Part II, division 23

At the Madrid Book Fair, the novel briefly turns away from the founders and lets the literary establishment expose itself through ambition, cowardice, vanity, and compromise.

#	Who speaks—and from where	What they remember	What this voice brings into view	What remains uncertain
83	Iñaki Echevarne Bar Giardinetto, Calle Granada del Penedés, Barcelona; July 1994	No remembered event; July 1994 meditation Bar Giardinetto, Barcelona	Echevarne turns away from plot and imagines a chain of deaths—from the work, to criticism, to its readers.	This is a meditation on literature and readership rather than an episode from Belano's or Lima's route.
84	Aurelio Baca Feria del Libro, Madrid; July 1994	No remembered event; July 1994 self-assessment Feria del Libro, Madrid	Baca measures the limits of his own political courage and calls the result a ‘tragicomedy.’	Baca is judging himself rather than recalling a separate scene.
85	Pere Ordóñez Feria del Libro, Madrid; July 1994	Past-to-present literary history, no discrete event Feria del Libro, Madrid	Ordóñez contrasts an older ideal of renunciation with the ambition and vulgarity he sees around him.	Ordóñez is judging the literary world rather than recalling one discrete scene.
86	Julio Martínez Morales Feria del Libro, Madrid; July 1994	No discrete remembered date Feria del Libro, Madrid	Martínez Morales offers a cryptic indictment of literary mafia and complicity.	The South American remains unnamed, and the passage never states that he is Belano.
87	Pablo del Valle Feria del Libro, Madrid; July 1994	Years before July 1994 through present Madrid	Del Valle admits that he used and abandoned the woman who supported him after he won a prize.	Del Valle's confession belongs to the Book Fair chorus rather than the founders' itinerary.
88	Marco Antonio Palacios Feria del Libro, Madrid; July 1994	Ages 17-24, ending July 1994 Madrid	Palacios explains how ingratiation, ideological posturing, and calculation advanced his career.	Palacios speaks openly in his own interest; the founders remain outside his story.
89	Hernando García León Feria del Libro, Madrid; July 1994	Circa 1993-1994 Spain, Nepal, Rome airport, Orejuela de Arganda	García León claims that dreams commanded his new book and carried him toward worldwide recognition.	The dream is deliberately grandiose; the founders remain outside his story.
90	Pelayo Barrendoaín Feria del Libro, Madrid; July 1994	July 1994 Feria del Libro, Madrid	Barrendoaín turns fame, madness, and the appetite of readers into a bitter private reckoning.	The passage is metaphorical and gives us no scene involving Belano, Lima, or Cesárea.
91	Felipe Müller Bar Céntrico, Calle Tallers, Barcelona; September 1995	Before September 1995, at Belano's departure from Spain Barcelona airport; nested Peru, Cuba, Paris, Lima, New York	Felipe remembers Belano comparing two Latin American writers destroyed by revolutionary history before leaving Spain ‘forever.’	Felipe forgets names, is unsure of some nationalities, and is repeating a story Belano told him.

Part II, division 24

#	Who speaks—and from where	What they remember	What this voice brings into view	What remains uncertain
92	Clara Cabeza Parque Hundido, Mexico City DF; October 1995	Three consecutive mornings; calendar date and year unstated; recalled in October 1995 Parque Hundido, Mexico City	Clara watches Lima and Octavio Paz meet in Parque Hundido; Lima calls himself the second-to-last visceral realist in Mexico, and Paz recognizes Cesárea's old movement.	Clara cannot hear the conversation, and Paz's kidnapping anecdote reaches further back in time.
93	María Teresa Solsona Ribot Jordi's Gym, Calle Josep Tarradellas, Malgrat, Catalonia; December 1995	Before December 1995; exact dates unstated Malgrat, Arenys de Mar, Barcelona, and Andalusia by Belano's report	Teresa remembers Belano's disciplined writing, fragile health, devotion to his son, obsessive lost love, packed departure, and farewell at the station.	Teresa never places Belano in a hospital; she is repeating his account of the Andalusian relationship, and neither the dates nor the woman's identity is clear.

Part II, division 25

#	Who speaks—and from where	What they remember	What this voice brings into view	What remains uncertain
94	Jacobo Urenda Rue du Cherche-Midi, Paris; June 1996	Luanda, then months later Kigali, then a Liberia sequence beginning with Urenda's April arrival, year unstated; recalled in June 1996 Angola; Rwanda; Zaire route; Liberia, especially Monrovia, Black Creek, Brownsville, Brewerville	Urenda follows Belano from Luanda across a changing African war zone and last sees him leave Brownsville with Emilio López Lobo and young soldiers on a column bound toward Thomas Creek.	Urenda marks the route imprecisely and openly finds parts of it hard to believe; he loses sight of Belano after Brownsville, and later reports do not agree.

Part II, division 26

#	Who speaks—and from where	What they remember	What this voice brings into view	What remains uncertain
95	Ernesto García Grajales Universidad de Pachuca, Pachuca, Mexico; December 1996	December 1996 with retrospective 1970s-1990s summary Pachuca and Mexico City by recent visit	Grajales says Lima is still living in Mexico City, knows nothing of Belano's whereabouts, recounts several members' fates, and denies that Juan García Madero ever belonged.	Grajales calls himself an expert, but he never met Belano and flatly contradicts the diary about García Madero.
96	Amadeo Salvatierra Calle Venezuela, near the Palacio de la Inquisición, Mexico City; January 1976	January 1976; with decades after Cesárea's departure recalled Amadeo's apartment and Plaza Santo Domingo, Mexico City	Belano and Lima vow to find Cesárea and what they imagine as her complete works, for themselves and for the future they have attached to her.	Amadeo is exhausted and drunk, cannot always tell who speaks, and hears one of the young poets talking in his sleep.

Further reading

• For my personal reading of the novel—its poetry and failure, the end of youth, and why it became my favorite Bolaño—read The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño: Review—Why It Became My Favorite Bolaño Novel.

• For another large Bolaño map, see the complete 2666 character guide.

• For where to go next with Bolaño, follow the complete Bolaño reading path.

What the witnesses leave behind

Part II surrounds Belano and Lima with other people's voices but never gives either man a speaking turn of his own. García Madero, meanwhile, gives us the novel's only continuous record and is later erased from the movement's history. The boy who tells us most becomes the person its self-appointed historian cannot even place.

No one disappears in quite the same way. Cesárea vanishes from literary memory but leaves behind Caborca, notebooks, a route through Sonora, and people who remember her. Belano and Lima are remembered everywhere but cannot answer any of those memories. García Madero writes his way across the book and then drops out of the group's story; Lupe sets the escape in motion and vanishes from every later account.

The word “detective” names three searches at once: Belano and Lima search for Cesárea; the witnesses reconstruct Belano and Lima; the reader joins fragments no single speaker can possess. The novel is exact about the last points it gives us. Cesárea dies on February 1. Belano is last seen leaving Brownsville toward Thomas Creek. Lima is last reported in Mexico City. García and Lupe leave Villaviciosa before the diary stops naming its travelers.

We know where each of them was last seen, and then the testimony closes. The map ends where García Madero's final window does: at an opening with no answer written beneath it.

Sources

• Primary editions: Anagrama's Spanish-language edition and Picador's English translation by Natasha Wimmer.

• Historical correspondences and their limits: Dunia Gras Miravet's interview with Bolaño; Carmen Boullosa's BOMB interview; Universidad Diego Portales, Correspondencia infra archive record; Luis Alejandro Acevedo-Zapata's interview with Jorge Hernández; Alejandro Santos Cid and Gonzalo Moncloa Allison's profile of the Infrarealists; and the historical account of Juan Bañuelos's UNAM workshop.

• On the testimonial center and its absent listener: Patricia Espinosa H., “El centro como ausencia”, and Mario Rodríguez, “Oír y no leer a Bolaño”.

• On the collective form: David Kurnick, The Savage Detectives Reread.