It is not entirely clear what he will do when he has
completed his project, but Lauro is certain that, for now, he must do what Bolaño’s
nameless character in Distant Star
finally did: he will embark on a self-imposed two-step apprenticeship of
seclusion and reading. In Kolob — or,
really, outside it, in the most remote place he can reasonably be — seclusion is not difficult, but books are a challenge. Books
are heavy, fragile, irresistible to rodents, prone to mildew, and there is no
nearby place to buy them. Also, Lauro has very little money, because he is a wetback
and he walked out of Mexico three years ago penniless and, as the gringos would
whine, without recourse. But he has worked hard at all the menial jobs in
Kolob: washing dishes at the Be Merry; cutting, hauling, splitting, and
stacking firewood for Gladys, bless her heart, and giving her the most painful
Spanish lessons —had he been that slow with English? No, probably not—; moving
whatever handlines that ox Kade doesn’t have time to move; branding for Ferral;
bucking bales for Diamond, and fixing their fragile and complicated swather;
clearing ditches for the Christiansens; up early to collect eggs for Rosy, and
late to bed, such as it is, alone, after getting old Vera Lyman’s woodstove
stoked for the night. And so, dashing all day every day on his bicycle from job
to job, from one end of the valley to the other, all the time avoiding that pinche Sheriff —truly a small-town
Carlos Weider, with his buzzcut and his mustache and his .45 automatic and his
wall-like coptalk designed to hide the violence in his heart—he has, by now,
amassed almost $3,000, and he is, now, right now, with Fox in Sandman’s sweet
rig on their way to Salt Lake City to get books. Many books. He has the money
in his pockets and he is studying his list, making a few changes, but content
with what he believes will take him a year to read out there in the desert away
from all the people. He has called ahead to the local, independent bookstore to
special-order the books in Spanish, and, as it turns out, almost everything he
wants in English, too, for his list transcends the current literary fiction the
bookstore carries, and runs to the Boom, and the High Moderns, and to the classics,
mostly titles never in stock in cities as small as Salt Lake. Cervantes, in
Spanish, of course, and in English, and Harold Bloom’s Modern Critical
Interpretations, which is quite expensive; several Bolaños; Cortazar; Borges;
Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, which had only just reached Mexico by the time
of Lauro’s exile; Patrick Leigh Fermor; and the Faulkners he dreads but which
he will push through with the English skills he’s developed so assiduously
these last 1,000 nights in Kolob. He has opted to avoid theory. He will take
the books raw. It is crucial to the project that he submit to the books
unassisted. The nameless character in Distant Star had to “commune with the
master works”: Bolaño had him submit to the reading methods of one Raoul Delorme
—Lauro is not sure there ever was a Delorme, or if Bolaño invented the French
ex-Legionnaire— who had his band of “barbaric writers” perform certain, shall
we say “biological”, acts to —or with— the great books: one had to defecate on
the pages of Stendhal, blow one’s nose on Hugo, masturbate over Gautier, and in
many other ways deface or degrade the great books. Partly because of how hard
Lauro has worked for these books, but mostly because he believes Bolaño meant
us to understand these acts of degradation as metaphorical, Lauro has chosen
not to shit, sneeze, ejaculate, vomit, bleed, or urinate on them, but he has
committed fully, with all his longing and certainty, to read them all, with
complete concentration, until he understands. He will haul his $3,000 stack of
books deep into the desert, into the necessary seclusion, and he will read
every word, pen in hand, for a year. He will deface them only with underlinings
and marginalia. He will do this in defiance of Mexico, too weak to defend him
and his family from the thugs; and he will do this in defiance of the United
States of America, too strong and smug to honor his learning and his exquisite
sensitivity. He fears it is perhaps a grand conceit, but he will do this not
just for himself, but for poor disenfranchised people everywhere. He will do it
to subvert the empire. He will emerge after this seclusion with a new wisdom. Bolaño
— or Delorme, who knows?— called it ""real familiarity" with and "real assimilation" of" literature.
And
then, perhaps, he will write. This is a vague notion, like a small puff of cloud
on the very horizon of his future, but he feels excitement, as though the cloud
were charged with electricity, charging more all the time, anticipating an ecstasy
of lightning.
But for
now that excitement is faint. He can barely find it in himself buried in all
the more pressing worries. Finding food will require many hours, and drought
this coming summer could end the project entirely. And there is the possibility
that his other big project in the desert will be discovered, that someone will
find him out there up to his neck in the verdant evidence. And the pleasure of
contemplating a year of uninterrupted reading is tainted by the memory he can’t
escape, that night now three years gone when the Zetas came and burned them
out. Most of these books he is now on his way to buy he has owned before, in
his old life, and all that was taken, so he is not just stepping into a future of
new understanding. He is also going back to the ruins of the family house
outside Querétaro to pick through the crumbled adobes to find some remnant of
his old life. He is going to read his way back to his birthright.
