Surprising Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was always difficult. From a very early age, the Chilean was clear that he would be a writer, to the point of dropping out at the age of fourteen to be able to dedicate himself fully to his dream. It didn't matter that in his early years he barely had financial means or that his first books didn't sell as much as expected. He knew that his moment would come and he waited patiently, but not with his arms folded, but doing the two things that brought him the most happiness: reading and using his pen. “I did it compulsively. When he wasn't reading, he began to write, and like this all the time, he alternated it. His conversations also used to be about books and he always encouraged me to read authors like André Breton, Jack Kerouac or Julio Cortázar and his Hopscotch. In the few breaks that he took, he allowed himself to go play table football ”, he explains to La Vanguardia, one of the close friends of the author of Nocturno de Chile during his first years in Barcelona. The also writer, together with some people from his closest circle, have agreed to speak with La Vanguardia on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the death of this intellectual who marked an entire generation and who still leaves his mark among readers today.
“When someone asks me about him, I always say that he was a samurai of literature and that he lived like a monk, with a mattress on the floor of his tiny studio on Calle Tallers, where you had to go out to the bathroom to go to the bathroom. terrace. He barely ate and the little money he earned as a night watchman at a campsite in Castelldefels he spent on tobacco. But all this did not seem to matter to him. What's more, he sharpened her wits. One day he asked me to accompany him to Pedralbes. He missed me because he always said that he didn't want to move from the block that surrounded his house. We went there and he went into a broken phone booth. When that happened, until the company found out, you could call for free, so he took the opportunity to talk to DF, Chile and I imagine with some girlfriend that he would have around. Meanwhile, I waited for him outside, planted, although admired that he found out about these things without, in theory, never leaving the same four streets. He was a genius even for that ”.
Financial stability came to him from the hand of Jorge Herralde, his editor at Anagrama, who showed blind faith in this young man who had participated in an avant-garde movement in Mexico, infrarealism, together with the poet Mario Santiago Papasquiaro, who inspired the character by Ulises Lima in Los detectives salvajes, a work that would award him the Herralde and Rómulo Gallegos prizes. “He was a fantastic guy, he had no discipline whatsoever. He was a poet, a poet, very valuable, ”Bolaño said of what he considered his soulmate. But he was not the only one, because he was always surrounded by his own. To Mónica Maristain, the person who did her last interview, published days after her death in the Mexican edition of Playboy, she confessed that "three of my best friends are Ignacio Echevarría, Rodrigo Fresán and A. G. Porta." All of them, in addition to the also inseparable Bruno Montané, told this newspaper that for some time now they preferred not to participate in anything related to Bolaño. A decision that could have been made after the judicial comings and goings between some of the writer's friends and his widow, Carolina López, who also filed a lawsuit for the protection of honor and family privacy against Carmen Pérez de Vega for stating that she had a sentimental relationship with the writer during his last six years of life, something that the judge did recognize although he sentenced Pérez de Vega for violating privacy. "I consider that I already said everything I had to say and write," Fresán apologizes.
Maristain, on the other hand, did want to remember from his home in Mexico the long conversations they often had with Roberto by email. “I asked him for a story for Playboy magazine, which he was co-directing at the time, and he reproached me for not going to pay him. But as a result of these messages we gained confidence and we wondered about our day, in addition to giving us advice about life and money.
The journalist assures that "we all miss him" Of course, he admits that "I have not read nor will I read the posthumous works. I will always continue to read him, but in Anagrama”. In 2016, the work of the author of Estrella distante made the leap from this publisher – the one that published practically all of his books – to Alfaguara after Carolina López's "loss of confidence" in Herralde. "I found out that he signed a contract with my previous agency for which both of them charged commissions from the translation contracts," the writer's wife confessed to this newspaper.
In one stamp or another, Dunia Gras, professor of Latin American literature at the University of Barcelona (UB), believes that “everyone should read it. I remember when Nazi Literature in America first came into my hands, I was shocked. Thanks to a mutual friend, Javier Cercas, I got his phone number and called him. He had already won the Herralde prize and I told him that I imagined that he would be involved with the promotion. He told me no and he invited me to his house to meet. From that moment on, a friendship arose that allowed me to interact with other writers around him, such as Fresán or Juan Villoro. It was a real privilege and I lived it as if I was joining the best team in the Champions League, ”says the academic, who nostalgically recalls her phone calls. “I enjoyed calling her friends. Sometimes, he would impersonate someone else or ask you to simultaneously watch a movie with him from a distance. One day he encouraged me to put on Grease. I was in Granollers and he was in Blanes and we discussed all the footage. He was a die-hard Rizzo fan.”
Over the years, many have brought his figure closer to the public, such as the filmmaker Ricardo House with his documentary trilogy La batalla futura. “I investigated about him when I realized that many Chilean creators used Mexico as a springboard. Later I found out that when we were both young we both met at the meetings that were held at the house of the writer Poli Délano, in Mexico. I accompanied my father, the engineer and poet Herman House, and he went because he wanted to learn from thinking and literary minds. It is likely that there he already imagined everything that was to come ”.
