Robert Bolaño: Among the Horses

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[untitled]: photo by ...storrao..., 17 March 2014

 

I dreamed of a woman with no mouth, says the man in bed.  I couldn’t help smiling.  The piston forces the images up again.  Look, he tells her, I know another story that’s just as sad.  He’s a writer who lives on the edge of town.  He makes a living working at a riding school.  He’s never asked for much, all he needs is a room and time to read.  But one day he meets a girl who lives in another city and he falls in love.  They decide to get married.  The girl will come to live with him.  The first problem arises: finding a place big enough for the two of them.  The second problem is where to get the money to pay for it.  Then one thing leads to another: a job with a steady income (at the stables he works on commission, plus room, board, and a small monthly stipend), getting his papers in order, registering with social security, etc.  But for now, he needs money to get to the city where his fianceé lives.  A friend suggests the possibility of writing articles for a magazine.  He calculates that the first four would pay for the bus trip there and back and maybe a few days at a cheap hotel.  He writes his girlfriend to tell her he’s coming.  But he can’t finish a single article.  He spends the evenings sitting outdoors at the bar of the riding school where he works, trying to write, but he can’t.  Nothing comes out, as they say in common parlance.  The man realizes that he’s finished.  All he writes are short crime stories.  The trip recedes from his future, is lost, and he remains listless, inert, going automatically about his work among the horses.

Robert Bolaño (1953-2002): Among the Horses, from Antwerp, 1980; first published in Spanish as Amberes, 2002; English translation by Natasha Wimmer, 2010

to all those distant places close to the heart: photo by ...storrao..., 16 February 2014