I bring this story to you with little knowledge of, but with intent to familiarize myself further with, its subject: Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño, known best for The Savage Detectives and 2666. Author Javier Cercas told the story of his final encounter with Bolaño, who died in 2003, in the Paris Review this week.
Cercas first met Bolaño in the ’80s. One of Cercas’s classmates spotted Bolaño on the street and asked him how writing was going, to which Bolaño responded, “It’s going, it’s going, but who knows where it’s really headed.” That phrase eventually found its way into one of Cercas’s novels, and when Cercas happened upon Bolaño nearly 16 years later, he showed Bolaño “the passage in my second novel where a character says his thesis is going, but who knows where it’s really headed. Bolaño laughs; I laugh too.”
Thus began a short, intense friendship, Cercas writes:
We saw each other often, in Barcelona or in Girona or in Blanes, in public places or at my house or at his house or at friends’ houses, alone or with our families or with A. G. Porta or Vila-Matas and their wives. That said, we talked on the phone much more often than we saw each other. And how we talked on the phone, God Almighty! At first, when I still lived in Barcelona, we spoke only occasionally, but when I moved back to Girona, we called each other daily. The truth is we seemed like boyfriends. Our phone calls were normally nocturnal, conversations that went on for hours and were mostly about literature, or the literary life, which for Bolaño was almost as interesting as literature, inasmuch as it was the fuel for his own literature.
The pair stopped talking one day, Cercas says: “Nobody was to blame, or if somebody was, it was me, or rather the cause was simply what Jaime Gil de Biedma calls ‘the writer’s brittleness.’ The truth is that Bolaño and I stopped speaking to each other.” Two years later, in 2003, Cercas’s wife mentioned Bolaño randomly in conversation, and spoke of him “the way she always had, almost as if he were a member of the family.” Cercas “realized how totally absurd our rift was,” called his friend, and met him at a bar that night. After a long evening, Bolaño suggested to his friend that he spend the night. Cercas declined. That was the last time he saw Bolaño, who died a couple of days later. Ever since, Cercas has regretted, he writes, “not having kept [Bolaño] company in his sorrow to the end.”
How absurd are most of the rifts that keep us away from loved ones? How often do we wish for someone’s company — or to have been in someone’s company at the end of their lives? Cercas and Bolaño’s friendship strikes me as one that transcended the fickleness of time and emotion. It was a joy to read about.