When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps his purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

…behind the ramparts of the Louvre
Freud has dredged the river and, grinning horribly,
waves his garbage in a glare of electricity,
Taxis,
Taxis,
Taxis,
They moan and yell and squeak
Like a thousand tom-cats in rut.
The whores like lions are seeking their meat from God :
An English padre tilts with the Moulin Rouge…

The above is an extract. For a complete PDF download of the original 1920 edition, published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, you should visit the Hope Mirrlees on the Web site.

Late Ripeness by Czeslaw Milosz

Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year,
I felt a door opening in me and I entered
the clarity of early morning.

One after another my former lives were departing,
like ships, together with their sorrow.

And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas
assigned to my brush came closer,
ready now to be described better than they were before.

I was not separated from people,
grief and pity joined us.
We forget – I kept saying – that we are all children of the King.

For where we come from there is no division
into Yes and No, into is, was, and will be.

We were miserable, we used no more than a hundredth part
of the gift we received for our long journey.

Moments from yesterday and from centuries ago -
a sword blow, the painting of eyelashes before a mirror
of polished metal, a lethal musket shot, a caravel
staving its hull against a reef – they dwell in us,
waiting for a fulfillment.

I knew, always, that I would be a worker in the vineyard,
as are all men and women living at the same time,
whether they are aware of it or not.

A Conversation with Poet Laureate W. S. Merwin from The Kenyon Review on Vimeo.

Everything promised him to me:
the fading amber edge of the sky,
and the sweet dreams of Christmas,
and the wind at Easter, loud with bells,

and the red shoots of the grapevine,
and waterfalls in the park,
and two large dragonflies
on the rusty iron fencepost.

And I could only believe
that he would be mine
as I walked along the high slopes,
the path of burning stones.

——-

Like a white stone in a deep well
one memory lies inside me.
I cannot and will not fight against it:
it is joy and it is pain.

It seems to me that anyone who looks into my eyes will notice it immediately,
becoming sadder and more pensive
than someone listening to a melancholy tale.

I remember how the gods turned people
into things, not killing their consciousness.
And now, to keep those glorious sorrows alive,
you have turned into my memory of you.

I started thinking about the teeth I had lost, although at the time, in September 1968, I still had all my teeth, which is odd, to say the least, even on reflection. Nevertheless I thought about them, those four front teeth I lost one by one over the years because I didn’t have the money of the inclination or the time to go to the dentist. And it was strange to be thinking about my teeth, because in a sense I didn’t care that I had lost the four most important teeth in a woman’s mouth, and yet in another sense their loss had left a deep wound in my being, a burning wound that was necessary and unnecessary, absurd. Even now when I think about it, I still can’t understand. Anyway, I lost my teeth in Mexico, where I had lost so many other things and although from time to time friendly or at least well-meaning voices would say to me, Get some dentures, Auxilio, we’ll take up a collection to buy you some, Auxilio, I always knew that the gap would go on gaping to the end like a wound, and I didn’t pay them much attention, although I didn’t refuse outright.

The loss gave rise to a new habit. From then on, whenever I talked or laughed, I covered my depleted mouth with the palm of my hand, a gesture that, as I soon discovered, was taken up and imitated in certain circles. I lost my teeth but not my discretion, my tact, my sense of propriety. The Empress Josephine, it is said, had enormous black cavities in her back teeth, but that did not diminish her charm by one iota. She covered her mouth with a handkerchief or a fan. In my lowlier station as a denizen of Mexico DF, that skyward and subterranean city, I placed the palm of my hand before my lips and laughed and spoke freely throughout the long Mexican nights. For those who made my acquaintance at the time, I must have seemed like a conspirator or some strange creature, half Shulamite, half albino bat. But that didn’t matter to me. There’s Auxilio, said the poets, and there I was, sitting at the table of a novelist with delirium tremens, or of a suicidal journalist, laughing and talking, whispering and gossiping, and no one could say: I have seen the wounded mouth of the woman from Uruguay, I have seen the bare gums of the only person who stayed in the university when it was occupied by the riot police in September 1968. They could say: Auxilio talks like a conspirator, bending close and covering her mouth. They could say: Auxilio looks you in the eyes when she speaks. They could say (with a laugh): How is it that Auxilio who is constantly fiddling with a book or a glass of tequila, always manages to raise one hand to her mouth, in that spontaneous, natural-seeming way? What’s the secret of her prodigious dexterity? Now, since I’m not planning to take that secret to the grave (where there’s no point taking anything), I’ll tell you, my friends: it’s all in the nerves. The nerves that tense and relax as you approach the edges of companionship and love. The razor-sharp edges of companionship and love.

Amulet is a slim book but a major achievement. Auxilio Lacouture, a Uruguayan living illegally in Mexico, finds herself in the bathroom during the Mexican army’s occupation of the National University of Mexico in the days preceding the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre. As the only person still on campus, she hides in the women’s loo with a book of poems. As the violence escalates outside, poetry and memory supply her with nourishment and become her sole connection with the world.

Lacouture is a great character. She is in no sense spunky or brash, and, missing her front teeth, is not too attractive. Nor is she young. But neither is she a victim, and Bolaño never falls into the trap of sentimentalizing her. She is an extraordinarily ordinary woman scooped up by cicumstances way beyond her control.

An amulet is an object that protects a person from trouble. Some Carlist soldiers wore a medal of the Sacred Heart of Jesus with the inscription ¡Detente bala! (“Stop, bullet!”). For Auxilio Lacouture the amulet of her generation is a song of courage and desire.

Throughout, Bolaño’s prose is spare and beautiful, and he evokes atmosphere through memory and poetry. Whatever it is that our heroine is trying to say, is is always about recall rather than predicament, even when she recalls events in the distant future.

The ending of the novel is disappointing. Bolaño deals with real life and fiction hand in hand and after all bis striving he can only hand us back to these twin monsters. He’s not going to lie to us, not intentionally, anyway; we have what we have, we have lost whatever it cost us along the way. And it’s not all pain, and it’s important to remember that, there is pleasure along the way, too.

The city center was old, with three- or four-story buildings and arcaded plazas in a state of neglect and young office workers in shirt-sleeves and Indian women with bundles on their backs hurrying down cobblestoned streets, and they saw streetwalkers and young thugs loitering on the corners. Mexican types straight out of a black-and-white movie. Toward the east were the middle- and upper-class neighbourhoods. There they saw streets with carefully pruned trees and public playgrounds and shopping centers. The university was there, too. To the north were abandoned factories and sheds and a street of bars and souvenir shops and small hotels, where it was said no one ever slept, and further out there were more poor neighbourhoods, though they were less crowded, and vacant lots out of which every so often there rose a school. To the south they discovered rail lines and slum soccer fields surrounded by shacks, and they even watched a match, without getting out of the car, between a team of the terminally ill and a team of starving to death, and there were two highways that led out of the city, and a gully that had become a garbage dump, and neighbourhoods that had grown up lame or mutilated or blind, and sometimes, in the distance, the sillhouettes of industrial warehouses, the horizon of the maquiladoras.

The city, like all cities, was endless. If you continued east, say, there came a moment when the middle-class neighbourhoods ended and the slums began, like a reflection of what happened in the west but jumbled up, with a rougher orography: hills, valleys, the remains of old ranches, dry riverbeds, all of which went some way toward preventing overcrowding. To the north they saw a fence that separated the United States from Mexico and they gazed past it at the Arizona desert, this time getting out of the car. In the west they circled a couple of industrial parks that were in their turn being surrounded by slums.

They were convinced the city was growing by the second. On the far edge of Santa Teresa, they saw flocks of black vultures, watchful, walking through barren fields, birds that here were called turkey vultures, and also turkey buzzards. Where there were vultures, they noted, there were no other birds. They drank tequila and beer and ate tacos at a motel on the Santa Teresa-Caborca highway, at outdoor tables with a view. The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower.

This is a remarkable book by any standards, and I’m so glad I wasn’t put off by its 900 pages, and took the time to read it.

Bolaño actually presents us with five separate novels and, with the exception of the last one, they can all be read without reference to the others.

2666 opens with a novel about four European literary critics, academics, who specialize in the work of a fictional German novelist, Benno von Archimboldi. Archimboldi, rumoured to be a future recipient of the Nobel Prize, is an evasive and reclusive writer who stays well away from the public eye. In fact, none of the critics who pursue him in this novel manage to track him down in person, though they seek him in several different countries, even traveling to a boom town in Mexico in their quest.

Bolaño’s subjects are writers and violence, and staying in the border town of Santa Teresa, we are introduced to Amalfitano, a professor of philosophy and literature at the local university. This text is quite different to the opening novel of the quintet, with an overt feeling of magical realism about it; Amalfitano leaves a book of geometry hanging on a clothesline in his back yard, and we slowly become aware that he is slipping into insanity. We also learn something about Amalfitano’s first wife, who ran off after a mad Spanish poet.

The third part of 2666 is entitled, The Part About Fate, and follows an American reporter, Oscar Fate, who is sent to cover a boxing match in Santa Teresa. There have been clues in the two preceding books, but in this one we are very aware that there are lots of cases of sexually-violated and murdered young women, their bodies found regularly in deserted parking lots, isolated ravines, abandoned buildings and the surrounding desert. The narrative throughout is that of hardboiled noir.

The Part About the Crimes, the fourth part of 2666, is a tour-de-force, one inexhaustible list of the hundreds of women and girls who are butchered in and around Santa Teresa. One of the characters in this section introduces us to the concept of gynophobia, which is fear of women. Bolaño describes the discovery of each body in forensic, even clinical terms, in some cases drifting over to the more hard-edged tone of the crime-novelist. As the body-count builds, and with no solution or hint of closure in sight, we begin to glimpse the extent of the deep misogyny which pervades our society and culture. Though a handful of these horrific crimes are ‘solved’, most are shelved with little or no investigation taking place.

The final section, The Part About Archimboldi, ties everything together. We finally meet the German writer, follow him through his childhood and his time as a soldier in the second world war, witness the surrealistic horror of the twentieth century through his eyes as well as taking in his relationship to beauty and solitude. And we finally understand how all the other sections of 2666 relate to each other.

It is, of course, impossible to describe this novel; to understand it and what it is about there is no substitute for reading the book. So much of its greatness is in the language and in the bravado of the telling. Bolaño is a poet and his prose is always drifting, like the smoke from a cigarette; it weaves patterns in your mind and carries on working in the same way whether the book is in your hand or not. I believe it is going to stay with me for a long, long time.

Roberto Bolaño was born 28 April 1953 in Santiago, Chile and he died 15 July 2003 in Blanes, Spain. 2666 was his final statement.