Roberto Bolano Read Free Page B

another, whom they called The Boss, sat down. The beatings and threats of rape and death resumed. A patrol car passed nearby with its flashers on. The men dumped González Rodríguez on the street. He filed a police report and went to see a doctor, who prescribed painkillers and bed rest. On June 18, his article “Police Are Fingered as Accomplices [in Juárez]” appeared in
Reforma
.
    For the next two months, González Rodríguez lived like a zombie, writing reviews, editing his section and going out with friends even as his vision clouded, his speech slurred and his memory disintegrated. Finally, on August 11, when he couldn’t even brew a cup of coffee in his own home, two friends from
Reforma
rushed him to a hospital, where he had emergency surgery to remove a life-threatening hematoma that was pressing on his brain.
    Against all expectations, he made a complete recovery, but the beating marked a turning point in his life. Before the attack, González Rodríguez had had problems with his home and cellphones—strange noises, deficiencies in service. After, he was often followed. His friend Paola Tinoco recalls that whenever she and González Rodríguez ate in a restaurant in the months following his surgery, they were watched by people wearing earphones. Terrified and helpless, the two took refuge in humor, telling each other absurd stories every time the strangers were present. One night, for example, they recited the lyrics to a popular children’s song called “The Ducky”:
    Ducky goes running and searching in her purse-y
    For pennies to feed her own little duckies
    Because she knows that when she gets back
    All the ducks will run up and ask
    What did you bring me, Mamá, quack quack?
    What did you bring me, quack quack?
    When González Rodríguez flew to Juárez in 1995 looking for a Hollywood-style serial killer, he recalls, “I had no idea what I was getting into.” Instead of Hannibal Lecter, he found a system of impunity that protected the worst criminals in Juárez, simply because they were ruthless and rich, a system that implicated the police and judicial institutions of the city, the state and the country. Once he drew these conclusions, there was no going back. “You’re in a hell,” he says, “that you don’t know why you’ve been chosen to live.” The heat incinerated many of his old illusions about accountability and justice, revealing Mexico’s black heart.
    The authorities, he believed, were deliberately trying to confuse and obscure the realities in Juárez, suggesting that the numbers were exaggerated, or that the murders were crimes of passion, or that the victims were prostitutes. He wanted to make a permanent record of his findings to contradict those stories, a record that wouldn’t be tossed out at week’s end.
THE PART ABOUT THE CORRESPONDENCE
    The year that González Rodríguez was first attacked, Bolaño had been working on his demented tangle formore than half a decade. Searching for information about Juárez, Bolaño e-mailed his friends in Mexico, asking more and more detailed questions about the murders. Finally, tired of these gruesome inquiries, his friends put him in touch with González Rodríguez, who, they said, knew more about the crimes than anyone in Mexico. Bolaño first e-mailed him around the time that González Rodríguez decided to write a nonfiction book about his investigation.
    In retrospect, it’s strange the two didn’t correspond earlier. They were roughly the same age: González Rodríguez was born in 1950, Bolaño in 1953. Both had been part of Mexico City’s counterculture in the 1970s: Bolaño tramping about town with the Infrarealist poets, González Rodríguez playing bass for a heavy-metal band called Grupo Enigma. Both began writing novels late and prided themselves on the integrity of their literary judgments. They had several friends in common: Jorge Herralde and the critic and novelist Juan Villoro. And in middle age both were consumed by