By PEDRO PENNYCOOK*
“Leaves are scattered all over the table, while a barricade of books rubs against the wall in the background. It is a claustrophobic image.”
She asked me whose photo it was.
The apartment was barely twenty square meters in size. Calling it an apartment was perhaps in itself an architectural affront, something of a sarcastic jab at someone who shared a nationality with Niemeyer’s infinite spatiality. When I came to sign the lease, the landlady informed me that the walls were to remain intact, but I was free to redecorate the rest as I wished. She reminded me that smoking was not allowed inside the apartment either. I looked at her a little in disbelief, trying to maintain the seriousness of someone who was desperate for a fixed roof and could not afford to lose the deal, and nodded. Apart from the lampshade thrown in one corner of the living room, there was nothing to redecorate there. It must have been a form of irony – Americans could make good jokes from time to time, I thought.
For the first five months I lived there, that lamp was the only piece of furniture that filled the space. It was irresistible to call it furniture. It probably made me happy to think that at least I had something to call my own, even if its fate was much more that of an orphan abandoned by the previous tenants, who didn't bother to throw it in the trash. Since I wasn't exactly young either, and we were now sharing the same roof, I thought we weren't in a position to judge each other. We could both establish a solidarity, adopt each other, and abandon the imaginary seriousness of original ownership. The lamp worked, and that was enough.
Obviously the first task would be to find a way to circumvent the purity of the walls. Now that winter had arrived, and it was no longer possible to obey topographical restrictions in order to satisfy the desire to smoke, the door to microtransgressions was more open. Hanging a few pictures could not be more annoying than stagnant smoke stains, after all.
He must have been at the end of his life. The clothes he was wearing suggested that it was winter. What’s more, that it was a winter that the house’s heating could only combat with intermittent blows, meticulously calculated among the other household bills. Knowing that he lived in Spain, it wouldn’t be absurd to think that the possibility of a heater was a dispensable luxury, compensated by slightly heavier clothes inside the house. Half-closed eyes, an empty coffee cup, a full ashtray. Leaves are scattered all over the corners of the table, while a barricade of books rubs against the wall in the background. It’s a claustrophobic image.
He must have already achieved fame, however, which adds an extra voltage to the enigmatic character of that winter in which he allowed himself to be photographed. He was already Roberto Bolaño – or even just Bolaño, at least for some more attentive people. The fame of a writer is measured by the inverse order in which names are needed to identify him, of course. How to answer him, then? Just 'Roberto' would suggest an almost profane intimacy, 'Bolaño' might not mean anything to him. Putting the two together, therefore, shouldn't help much. It was the only photo I dared to hang on the wall. It was, who knows, the reverse sarcasm against the redecoration that my landlord had informed me about. So I preferred to ignore his question, afraid that what I answered might give him away.
He once said in an interview that, in his early twenties, he had locked himself away in a Mexican backwater to try to extract his first collection of poems from there. A poetic way of reminding us of the financial conditions he was in at the time. And that, as his old-age photo testifies, it must have accustomed him to frugality even when money was no longer a pressing problem. He sent those poems to Chile, infesting the mailboxes of his favorite writers until he received a reply. When they replied to me, they didn't know that they had very likely saved my life – that was how he decided to end the story.
I told her that it was family. It was someone from the family, someone I miss very much. She then looked at the photo again and smiled.
* Peter Pennycook is a master's student in philosophy at the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE).
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