Officer of the Rats

translated from Roberto Bolaño's El policía de las ratas

My name is José, though those that know me call me Pepe, and others, generally those that do not know me well or have an easy rapport with me, call me Pepe el Tira. Pepe is a nickname that’s affectionate, friendly, cordial, which doesn’t bring me down or build me up greatly, a nickname that expresses a certain tender respect, if you will allow me the expression, instead of a cold, distant respect. After comes the other name, the alias, the hump I drag behind me without griping, without taking offence, to a certain measure because most never—almost never—use it in my presence. Pepe el Tira, which is like some arbitrary mixing of affection and fear, fond wishes and offenses in the same dark sack. Where does the word Tira come from? From tyrannical, tyrant, one who does whatever he wishes without having to answer to anyone for his actions, who enjoys, in a word, impunity. What is a tira? A tira is, to my people, a cop. And they call me Pepe el Tira because I am, precisely, a cop, a profession just like any other, but which few are willing to enter. If had known what I know now when I entered the force, I probably wouldn’t have been willing to enter it either. What was it that drove me to become an officer? Many times, more lately, I have asked myself this question, and I have never come up with a convincing answer.

I was probably stupider in my youth than others. Perhaps there was a romantic slight (but I can’t bring myself to remember having been in love at that time). Perhaps it was just my fate—since I found myself to be different from the others I sought a solitary vocation that would allow me to pass my time in absolute solitude but would, at the same time, carry certain practical aspects and not constitute a burden on my people.

What was certain was that a policeman was needed, and I introduced myself, and the top brass, after looking me over, didn’t hesitate even a minute before giving me the job. One of them, maybe all, although taking care not to comment on the fact, knew beforehand that I was one of the nephews of the singer Josefina. My siblings and my cousins, the rest of the nieces and nephews, never excelled at anything and were happy. I too, in my own way, was happy, but in me the relation to Josefina was noticeable, it wasn’t in vain they named me after her. Perhaps this influenced the chiefs in their decision of giving me the job. Perhaps not and I was the only one who came forward the first day. Perhaps they didn’t expect anyone else to present themselves and they feared that, if they put me off, I would change my mind. The truth is I don’t know what to think. The only certainty is that they made me an officer and from day one I dedicated myself to roving the sewers, at times through the primary ones—through which water was running—other times through the secondary ones—where there are tunnels that my town had dug without stopping, tunnels that serve as access to other food sources, or that serve solely as an escape, a way to connect the mazes that, seen superficially, don’t go anywhere, but without a doubt have direction, that form a part of the framework my people use to move about and survive.

At times, partly because it was my responsibility and partly because I had grown bored, I left the primary and secondary sewers and entered the dead sewer works, an area in which only our scouts or those involved in some risky business enterprise would travel, most of the time alone, although on occasion they travel accompanied by their families, by their obedient offspring. There was, as a general rule, nothing down there, with the exception of some terrifying sounds, but at times, as I cautiously covered these inhospitable spaces, I would come across the cadaver of a scout or the cadaver of a developer or the cadaver of their dear children. In the beginning, when I still was inexperienced, these discoveries startled me, they reworked me to the point that I stopped seeming like myself. What I did then was gather the body, take it out of the dead sewers, and carry it to the advanced police post, though here there was never anyone. I proceeded to determine, as well as I could, through my own means the cause of death. Later I went to seek out the forensic specialist and he, if he was in a good mood, got dressed or changed his clothes, picked up his satchel, and accompanied me back to the post. Once there, I left him alone with the cadaver or cadavers and left. As a rule, policemen of my town don’t return to the scene of the crime. Rather they attempt, vainly, to mingle with our colleagues, go about their duties, snatch a bit of conversation, but I was different. It didn’t upset me to return to inspect the crime scene, search for details that had slipped my notice, replicate the steps that the poor victims took, or sniff out and study, with great care, the direction in which they were fleeing.

After a few hours, I returned to the post and there would find, affixed to the wall, the note from the specialist. Causes of death: slitting of the throat, expired from exsanguination, lacerations in the paws, broken necks, my species never surrenders without a fight, without struggling to the last breath. The killer would be a carnivore lost in the sewers, a snake, at times a blind alligator. To pursue them was pointless: they were probably going to die of starvation in a short time.

Whenever I took a break, I sought the company of the other policemen. I met one, very old and thinned out by age and by our work, who in his time had known my aunt and who liked to talk about her. Nobody understood Josefina, but everyone loved her or pretended to love her and she was happy with this or pretended to be. Those words, like many others that the old officer uttered, made no sense to me. I have never understood music, an art that we engage in rarely, if ever at all. In reality, we don’t practice and, for this reason, don’t understand hardly any type of art. At times a rat appears that paints, let’s say for instance, or a rat that writes and recites poetry. As a rule we don’t ridicule them. In fact quite the opposite, we pity them, because we know that their lives are doomed to solitude. Why solitude? Well because in our town art and contemplation are disciplines we can’t practice and the exceptions, the oddities, are scarce. And if, for example, a poet or some vulgar orator comes up, it is most likely that the next poet or orator will not be born until the following generation, so the poet finds himself deprived of maybe the only one who could appreciate his effort. And I don’t want to say that our people don’t linger during the commotion of their daily lives and listen to the poet and even applaud him or take up an offering so that the orator could be permitted to live without working. The opposite, we do everything within our power, which is not much, to provide the exception the impression of understanding and interest, sine we know that he is, basically, a being in need of attention. But after a time, like a house of cards, all these simulations collapse. We live as a community and a community only needs daily labor, the constant utilization of every one of its members to an end that displaces individual desires but is, however, the only thing that guarantees our continued existence as individuals.

Of all the artists we have had, or at least of all those that still remain—like skeletal question marks—in our memory, the greatest, without a doubt, was my aunt Josefina. Great to the degree that what she demanded of us was immense; her greatness so immeasurable, to the degree that the people of my town submitted or pretended to submit to all her whims.

The old officer liked to talk about her, but his recollections, it didn’t take long to realize, were as flimsy as rolling papers. At times he said that Josefina was fat and tyrannical, a person with whom a relationship required extreme patience or an extreme degree of sacrifice, two virtues that converge at more than just one point and are hardly scarce among us. Other times, instead, he said that Josefina was a shadow whom he, then a youth recently admitted to the police force, had glimpsed only fleetingly. A trembling shadow, capable of eerie shrieks that constituted, at the time, her entire repertoire, that—I will not say it drove them to insanity—but yes, plunged into extreme sadness certain followers, rats and mice whom we no longer remember, that were perhaps the only ones who caught a glimpse of anything in the musical art of my aunt. What? They probably never even knew what themselves. Something, anything, a yearning pool. Perhaps something similar to wanting to eat or needing to fuck or the desire to sleep that at times overcomes us, as beings that work endlessly need to sleep from time to time, above all in winter, when the temperature drops, as they say the leaves drop from the trees in the outside world, and our frozen bodies demand a warm corner next to the bodies of our companions, a den heated by our coats, the familiar movements, familiar sounds—neither vile or noble—that comfort us at night, or at least what our basic senses denote as night.

Sleep and warmth are the principal inconveniences of being an officer. The police are accustomed to sleeping alone, in improvised burrows, at times in unknown territories. Of course, whenever we can, we try to break with this custom. Some times we nestle together in our own burrows, officer with officer, everyone silent, everyone with their eyes closed and their ears and noses alert. It does not happen often, but at times it is possible. Other times we walk into the bedrooms of those who, for one reason or another, live on the border of the perimeter. They, since there is nothing else to do, naturally accept our company. Sometimes we wish them goodnight, before dropping, exhausted, into tranquil, restorative sleep. Other times we only grunt our name, since the people know who we are and no one fears our presence. They receive us well. They don’t fuss over us or show any joy, but they don’t throw us out of their dens. At times, someone, with their voice still frozen with sleep, says Pepe el Tira, and I respond, yes, yes, good night. After only a few hours, however, while most folks still sleep, I wake myself and return to work; the labors of an officer never come to an end, so our sleep schedules inevitably must conform to our incessant activity. Making the rounds in the sewers, otherwise, is a task that requires a maximum of concentration. Generally we don’t see anyone, don’t cross paths with a soul, we can follow the principal routes and the secondary routes, and advance into the tunnels that our own workers had constructed but which are now abandoned, and during the entire course we don’t run into a single living creature.

Yeah, we pick up shadows, sounds, discarded objects in the water, distant screams. At first, when they’re young, these sounds keep an officer in a constantly startled state. As time passes, however, one becomes accustomed to them and even though we try to keep ourselves alert, we lose our fears, or we incorporate them into the daily routine, which is basically to say we lose them. Some officers even sleep in the dead sewers. I never met any of them, but older officers would tell stories in which an officer, an officer from another era certainly, if he was tired, would go to bed right there in a dead sewer. How much is truth and how much is jest in these stories? Disregard it. The way things are at the moment no officer would dare sleep there. The dead sewers are places that, for one reason or another have been forgotten. The workers that dig tunnels, when they hit upon a dead sewer, block off the tunnel. The sewage there, they say, flows drop by drop, needless to say that the putrefaction is unbearable. It can be stated that our village only utilizes the dead sewers for fleeing from one zone to another. But the fastest way of accessing the sewers is swimming, but to swim near such a place involves more danger than we normally accept.

It was in a dead sewer that my investigation started. A group of ours, a group of settlers who with the passage of time had procreated and established themselves a little way off from the perimeter, sought me out and informed me that the little girl of one of their older rats had disappeared. While one half of the group worked, the other half put itself to the search for the youth, who was named Elisa and who, according to her friends and family, was incredibly attractive and strong, in addition to possessing an alert mind. I didn’t know with any certainty what constitutes an alert mind. Vaguely I associated it with happiness, though not with curiosity. That day I was tired and after examining the vicinity in the company of one of her relatives, I supposed that poor Elisa had been a victim of some predator prowling around the outskirts of the new colony. I searched for traces of the predator. I only came across old tracks that indicated that across this spot, before the settlement arrived, other animals had passed through.

Finally I discovered a trace of fresh blood. I told Elisa’s relative to return to the den—from there I would continue on alone. The trail of blood had a curious irregularity: although it ended next to one of the canals, it reappeared a couple yards farther down (on occasion many yards farther down), but not on the opposite side of the canal, as would have been natural, rather on the same side from which it had submerged. If the predator hadn’t been attempting to cross the canal, why did it go under so many times? The trail, on the other hand, was insignificant, meaning Elisa’s attempts at protecting herself from the predator, whoever this was, seemed to have been talked up at first. After a short time I arrived at my dead sewer.

The Secret Miracle

The night of the fourteenth of March of 1939, in one of the departments of the Zeltnergasse of Prague, Jaromir Hladík, author of the unfinished tragedy Los Enemigos, of a Defense of Eternity, and a study of the subtle Jewish influences on Jakob Boehme, dreamed about a long chess match. It wasn’t disputed between two individuals, but instead between two illustrious families; the match had been tabled many centuries ago; no one was able to name the forgotten prize, but there were murmurs that it was enormous and perhaps infinite; the pieces and the table were in a secret tower; Jaromir (in his dream) was the eldest son of one of the competing families; the clocks proclaimed the hour of the unrelenting game; the dreamer ran along the sands of a rainy desert and was not able to remember the shapes of the pieces or the laws of the game. At this point, he woke up. The roar of the rain and of the terrible clocks ceased. A unanimous, measured sound, cut by some commanding voices, rose from the Zeltnergasse. It was dawn, the armored vanguard of the Third Reich was entering Prague.

On the nineteenth, the authorities received a denouncement; the same day, at dusk, Jaromir Hladík was arrested. He was directed to a white, aseptic prison, on the opposite bank of the Moldau. He couldn’t dispute a single one of the charges of the Gestapo: his mother’s maiden name was Jaroslavski, his blood was Jewish, his study on Boehme was Judaic, his signature was present on protest against Anschluss. In 1928, he had translated the Sepher Yezirah for the publishing house Herman Barsdorf; their lavish catalogue of this house had exaggerated the commercial renown of the translator; that catalogue was leafed through by Julius Rothe, one of the officers in whose hands lay Hladík’s fortune. There was no man that would question him; two or three words in Gothic letters would be sufficient for Julius Rothe to establish the importance of Hladík and arrange for him to be condemned to death, pour encourager les autres. The date of the execution was set as the twenty-ninth of March, at nine A.M. The delay (whose importance the reader will later appreciate) owed to the administrative desire of operating impersonally and methodically, like the vegetation and the planets.

The first feeling Hladík experienced was of pure terror. He thought that they could not frighten him off with the gallows, decapitation, or the slitting of his throat, but to be executed by rifle was intolerable. In vain he repeated to himself that the pure, plain act of dying was the most terrifying, not the physical circumstances. But he didn’t tire of imagining those circumstances: absurdly he tried to exhaust all the variations. He anticipated infinitely the process, from the sleepless dawn until the mysterious shooting. Before the day predetermined by Julius Rothe, he had died hundreds of deaths, on patios whose forms and angles consumed the whole of geometry, machine-gunned by various soldiers, of changing amounts, that at times finished him from afar; others, from very near. He confronted with a certain fright (perhaps also with a certain courage) those imagined executions; each simulation lasted only a few seconds; the circle closed, Jaromir perpetually returned to the tremulous meditation of his death. Later he reflected that the reality does not usually coincide with the expectations; with a perverse logic he concluded that to forecast a circumstantial detail is to stop it from happening. Loyal to this weak magic, he invented, so that they would not happen, atrocious flourishes; naturally, he stopped fearing that these flourishes could be prophetic. In the night, he miserably attempted to affirm in some way the fleeting substance of time. He knew that it was rushing onwards towards the dawn of the twenty-ninth; he reasoned out loud: Now I am in the night of the twenty-second; as long as this night lasts (and the seven more) I am invulnerable, I am immortal. He thought that the dreamlike nights were deep, dark fonts of water in which he could submerge himself. At times, he longed with impatience for the definitive execution, which would deliver him, for better or worse, from his vain task of imagining. The twenty-eighth, when the final sunset shimmered through the high bars, he divined from all these abject considerations the image of his drama Los Enemigos.

Hladík had passed forty years of age. Outside of a few friendships and a great many daily routines, the problematic exercise of literature is all that constituted his life; like every writer, he measured the virtues of others by what they had carried to fruition, and asked that they judge him by the things he had dreamed or planned. All the books he had sent to print now demanded from him a complex repentance. In his examination of the work of Boehme, of Abnesra, and of Flood, he had operated in plain application; in his translation of the Sepher Yezirah, with negligence, fatigue, and conjecture. Judged less deficient, perhaps, was the Vindication of Eternity: the first volume chronicling the various eternities that Man had envisioned, from the immovable Parmenidean One up to the modifiable past of Hinton; the second negates (with Francis Bradley) that all the happenings in the universe come to compose a temporal series. It argues that the permutation of all possible human experiences is not infinite and that one single “repetition” is enough to show that time is a fallacy…Unfortunately, they are no less fallacious the arguments used to demonstrate this fallacy; Hladak used to run through them with a certain disdainful perplexity. He also had redacted a series of expressionist poems; these, to the confusion of the poet, figured in an anthology in 1924 and there would be no later anthology that didn’t inherit them. With his drama in verse Los Enemigos, Hladík wanted to redeem himself from his mistaken and listless past (Hladík had always preferred verse, because it refused to allow its readers to forget unreality, which is a condition of the art).

The drama observed the unities of time, of place, and of action; taking place in Hradcany, in the library of the baron of Römerstadt, in one of the last afternoons of the nineteenth century. In the first scene of the first act, a stranger visits Römerstadt (a clock shows seven in the evening, a flash of the setting sun glorifies the glass windows, the air carries a captive and recognizable tune of Hungarian music). After this visit others follow; Römerstadt does not know the people that impose upon him, but he has the uncomfortable impression of having seen them before, perhaps in a dream. They all praise him exaggeratedly, but it is evident—at first to the audience, and later to the baron—that they are secretly enemies, conspirators in his ruin. Römerstadt manages to deflect or elude their complex intrigues; in the dialogue, they allude to his fiancée, Julia of Weidenau, and to one Jaroslav Kubin, that at one time interfered in their courtship. This Kubin, now, has gone mad and believes himself to be Römerstadt...The dangers intensify. Römerstadt, at the end of the second act, is seen in the course of killing a conspirator. The third act begins, the last. Gradually incoherencies develop: actors return that had seemed to have been already discarded in the plot; returning, for an instant, is the man killed by Römerstadt. Someone makes a note that dusk has not yet fallen: the clock reads seven, in the high windows the westward sun shimmers, the air carries the captive Hungarian music. The first interlocutor appears and repeats the words he uttered in the first scene of the first act. Römerstadt speaks without surprise; the spectator now understands that Römerstadt is the miserable Jaroslave Kubin. The drama has never occurred: it is the circuitous deliriousness that Kubin endlessly lives and relives.

Hladík never asked himself if that tragicomedy of errors was admirable or trivial, sloppily constructed or rigidly structured. In the plot sketched out he saw the most apt invention for playing down his defects and exercising his felicities, the possibility of rescuing (in a symbolic manner) the foundation of his life. He had already finished the first act and one of the scenes of the third; the metered character of the work allowed him to continuously examine it, revising the hexameters, without the manuscript in sight. He felt that two acts were still missing and very soon he was going to die. He spoke to God in the darkness. If by some manner I exist, if I am not one of your repetitions or aberrations, I exist as the author of Los Enemigos. In order to carry to completion this drama, that can justify me and justify you, I need one more year. Grant me those days, You in Whom are all the centuries and all of time. It was the last night, the most terrible, but after ten minutes sleep inundated him like a dark flood of water.

Towards dawn, he dreamed that he was concealed in one of the naves of the library of Clementinum. A librarian in black glasses asked him: What do you seek? Hladík replied: I seek God. The librarian told him: God is in one of the letters of one of the pages of one of the four hundred thousand tomes of Clementinum. My forefathers and the forefathers of my forefathers have searched for this letter; seeking it has left me blind. He took off the glasses and Hladík saw his eyes, which were dead. A patron entered to return an atlas. This atlas is useless, he said, and it was given to Hladík. He opened it at random. He saw a map of India, dizzying and hazy. Abruptly confident, he touched one of the tiniest letters. An omnipresent voice said to him: The time for your work has been granted. Then Hladík awoke.

He remembered that the dreams of men belonged to God and that Maimonides had written that the words in a dream were sacred, when they were distinct and clear and it couldn’t be seen who had said them. He dressed; two soldiers entered in the cell and ordered that he follow them.

From the other side of the door, Hladík had envisioned a labyrinth of galleries, staircases, and pavilions. The reality was less luxurious: they descended to a rear patio by one single steel staircase. Various soldiers—some with their uniforms unbuttoned—were examined a motorcycle and discussing it. The sargent looked at his watch: it was 8:44. He had to wait until it was nine. Hladík, feeling more insignificant than damned, sat himself on a pile of firewood. He noticed that the eyes of the soldiers avoided his. As a way to pass the time, the sargent handed him a cigarette. Hladík had never smoked; he accepted it out of courtesy or humility. Lighting it, he saw that his hands were trembling. The day had become cloudy; the soldiers spoke in a low voice as if he was already dead. Vainly, he tried to remember the woman whose he had pictured as Julia of Weidenau...

The firing squad was formed, was told to stand to attention. Hladík, standing against the wall of the prison, waited for the shots. Someone voiced a concern that the wall would be mackled by the blood, so it was ordered that the accused would advance a few paces. Absurdly, Hladík thought of the preliminary flashbulb pops of photographers. A heavy drop of rain brushed one of Hladík‘s temples and rolled slowly down his cheek; the sargent shouted the final order.

The physical universe was stopped.

The rifles were trained on Hladík, but the men that were going to kill him were motionless. The arm of the sargent sustained an unfinished gesture. Over a tile of the patio, a bee cast a fixed shadow. The wind had ceased, as in a painting. Hladík tested a shout, a single syllable, the turn of a hand. He understood that he was paralyzed. Not even the faintest sound of the impeded world could reach him. He thought I am in hell, I am dead. He thought I am crazy. He thought time has been stopped. Later he reflected that in such a case, his thoughts would have also stopped. He wanted to test this: he recited (without moving his lips) the mysterious fourth eclogue of Virgil. He imaged that the now remote soldiers were sharing his anguish: he longed to communicate with them. It surprised him to not feel any fatigue or the vertigo of his long motionlessness.

After an indeterminate amount of time, he slept. He awoke to the world that continued deaf and immovable. On his cheek remained the drop of water; on the patio, the shadow of the bee; the smoke of the cigarette that he had tossed away had not finished dispersing. Another “day“ passed before Hladík understood.

A whole year is what he had petitioned God in order to finish his work: one year is what His omnipotence had granted. God had engineered a secret miracle: German lead could have killed him, at the determined hour, but in his mind a year would transpire between the order and the execution of the order. From perplexity he passed to stupor, from stupor to resignation, from resignation to sudden gratitude.

No other document was available to him other than his memory; the shaping of each hexameter he added imposed a rigorousness that would not have been expected by those who had ventured into and forgotten his evanescent and vague paragraphs. He didn’t work for posterity nor even for God, about whose literary preference little is known. Meticulously, motionlessly, secretly, he forged, in time, his great invisible labyrinth. Three times he remade the third act. He erased any symbol that was too obvious: the repeated peals of the bell, the music. No detail was too small to be ignored. He omitted, abridged, amplified, in some cases, he opted for the rudimentary choice. He began to love the patio, the prison; out of one of the faces opposite his he shaped his conception of Römerstadt’s character. He discovered that the arduous cacophonies that had so disturbed Flaubert were mere visual superstitions: troubles and weaknesses of the written word, not the aural word...He had come to finish his drama: he had not failed to resolve even one single epithet. Then he felt it; the drop of water slid down his cheek. He began to scream in sheer madness, he moved his head, the four-fold shot cut him down.

Jaromir Hladík died on the twenty-ninth of March, at 9:02 in the morning.

Objective of Para Llevar

For those of you who haven't heard, a short introduction for this blog and its goals. Currently, the state of publishing in the United States is such that only about three to five percent of all published literature is translated foreign literature. Obviously, the Garcia Marquez and the Roberto Bolano get exposed to American audiences, but for the most part, great masses of good literary fiction and non-fiction go without notice. Part of that is because of the gargantuan size of American authorship, which eclipses the body of translated work. Part of it is the popularity of English works abroad, meaning more translators focus on English to Spanish than Spanish to English.

But as a way to discover more Spanish writers and expose them to the United States, I started Para Llevar (which is the equivalent of "take-out" in Spanish) as a place to publish translated short stories, poetry, and essays.

Thanks.