Distant Star - Opening

I

I saw Carlos Wieder for the first time in 1971, or perhaps in 1972, when Salvador Allende was President of Chile.

At that stage Wieder was calling himself Alberto Ruiz-Tagle and occasionally attended Juan Stein's poetry workshop in Concepcion, the so-called capital of the South.

"What star falls unseen?"
WILLIAM FAULKNER

For Victoria Avalos and Lautaro Bolaño

Copyright 1996 by Roberto Bolaño and Editorial Anagrama
Translation copyright 2004 by Chris Andrews

Published by arrangement with the Harvill Press, Random House UK, London.

This edition has been translated with the financial assistance of the Spanish Direccion General del Libro y Bibliotecas, Ministerio de Cultura.

Originally published by Edditorial Anagrama as Estrella distante in 1996

Manufactured in the United States of America.
New Directions books are printed on acid-free paper.
First published as a New Directions Paperbook (NDP993) in 2004.



New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation,
80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011

Marks Of Identity - pg. 254

"I would like to see Lives Without Aim published in the same collection as The Old Man and the Sea."
"Do you like William Faulkner/'
"He's a fraud. My favorite writers are Maugham and Vicki Baum."
"Are you familiar with Sartre's work?"
"My wife thumbed through one of his books and she says he writes about filth."
"And Kafka?"
"I've never read him."
"What do you think of Robbe-Grillet."
"Who did you say?"
"Are you follower of the nouveau roman?"
"Neither my wife nor I can handle French. Spanish is more than enough for us."
"How long did it take you to write your last novel?"
"Eight days."
"Do you rewrite."
"Never, What's gained in niceties is lost in a lack of spontaneity."
"What narrative technique do you prefer?"
"Technique is another fraud. Cervantes didn't know anything about theories when he wrote Don Quixote."
"Are you working on something new?"
"Yes. I have in mind a novel about the battle of the generations, between fathers and sons, and I'm going to set it in Harlem."
"Oh, you've been to the United States?"
"No, this is the first time I've ever been out of Spain."
"Do you like Paris?"

Song #36

The high ones die, die. They die. You look up and who's there?
--Easy, easy, Mr Bones. I is on your side.
I smell your grief.
--I sent my grief away. I cannot care
forever. With them all again & again I died
and cried, and I have to live.

--Now there you exaggerate, Sah. We hafta die.
That is our `pointed task. Love & die.
--Yes; that makes sense.
But what makes sense between, then? What if I
roiling & babbling & braining, brood on why and
just sat on the fence?

--I doubts you did or do. De choice is lost.
--It's fool's gold. But I go in for that.
The boy & the bear
looked at each other. Man all is tossed
& lost with groin-wounds by the grand bulls, cat.
William Faulkner's where?

(Frost being still around)

Jameson on Bookclub 2007

A shot of Jameson can make you stronger. It heals the internal abrasions, cellular distortions, quiet desperations. I had a shot with Freddy at the bar and said something really obnoxious and narcissistic to him. Elizabeth and Ed were working at the bar. I gave Blood Meridian to Elizabeth to give it to Jeremy. Jeremy had left The Road on the rack above the taps, with a piece of paper inside it. No one had read the book, well except me and Freddy and Dain. Every one else was just there to show up to have a good time and that we did. I tried Emily's wine and did find some sort of chocolate notes going on which was kind of surprising. It was not bad. hey ordered it without knowing much about the it from the wine list. Danielle insisted about the importance of family, folks and other such themes. I tried not to get into an argument. it was definitely a weird night. Brett could not show up which sucked. He was the fourth person of the book club who actually did finish up the book. We did have a brief discussion on the book because Freddy wanted to. We ended up at Shaggy's later that night where I ran into Dana/Lindsey duo. It turned out it was Dana's birthday so I bought her a shot. She was pretty far gone by that time and thus ended our another anonymous midsummer evening at the main street of this town. On a second thought, we made a trek to the diner where we played Bob Dylan at a jukebox for old time's sake. Like a rolling stone...

William Faulkner, Sufjan Stevens

"are you writing from the heart?"

Absalom, Absalom! - Closing Sentence

"" "I dont hate it," Quentin said, quickly, at once, immediately; "I dont hate it," he said. I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!"

Absalom, Absalom! - pg. 361

""Wait. Listen. I'm not trying to be funny, smart. I just want to understand it if I can and I dont know how to say it better. Because it's something my people haven't got. Or if we have got it, it all happened long ago across the water and so now there aint anything to look at every day to remind us of it. We dont live among defeated grandfathers and freed slaves (or have I got it backward and was it your folks that are free and the niggers that lost?) and bullets in the dining room table and such, to be always reminding us to never forget. What is it? something you live and breathe in like air? a kind of vacuum filled with wraithlike and indomitable anger and pride and glory at and in happenings that occurred and ceased fifty years ago? a kind of entailed birthright father and son and father and son of never forgiving General Sherman, so that forevermore as long as your children's children produce children you wont be anything but a descendant of a long line of colonels killed in Pickett's charge at Manassas?"
"Gettysburg, " Quentin said. "You cant understand it. You would have to be born there.""

Absalom, Absalom! - pg. 322

"Because why not? Because listen. What was it the old dame, the Aunt Rosa, told you about how there are some things that just have to be whether they are or not, have to be a damn sight more than some other things that maybe are and it dont matter a damn whether they are or not? That was it. He just didn't have time yet. Jesus, he must have known it would be. Like that lawyer thought, he wasn't a fool; the trouble was, he wasn't the kind of not-fool the lawyer thought he would be. He must have known it was going to happen. It would be like you passed that sherbet and maybe you knew you would even reach the sideboard and the whiskey, yet you knew that tomorrow morning you would want that sherbet, then you reached the whiskey and you knew you wanted that sherbet now; maybe you didn't even go to the sideboard, maybe you even looked back at that champagne on the supper table among the dirty haviland and the crumpled damask, and all of a sudden you knew you didn't want to go back there even. It would be no question of choosing, having to choose between the champagne or whiskey and the sherbet, but all of a sudden (it would be spring then, in that country where had never spent a spring before and you said North Mississippi is a little harder country than Louisiana, with dogwood and violets and the early scentless flowers but the earth and the nights still a little cold and the hard tight sticky buds like young girl's nipples on alder and Judas trees and beech and maple and even something young in the cedars like he never saw before) you find that you don't want anything but that sherbet and that you haven;t been wanting anything else but that and you have been wanting that pretty hard for sometime - besides knowing that that sherbet is there for you to take. Not just for anybody to take but for you to take, knowing just from looking at that cup that it would be like a flower that, if any other hand reached for it, it would have thorns on it but not for your hand; and him not used to that since all the other cups that had been willing and easy for him to take up hadn't contained sherbet but champagne or at least kitchen wine. And more than that. There was the knowing what he suspected might be so, or not knowing if it was so or not. And who to say if it wasn't maybe the possibility of incest, because who (without a sister: I dont know about the others) has been in love and not discovered the vain evanescence of the fleshly encounter; who has not had to realize that when the brief is all done you must retreat from both love and pleasure, gather up your own rubbish and refuse - the hats and pants and shoes which you drag through the world - and retreat since the gods condone and practise these and the dreamy immeasurable coupling which floats oblivious above the trameling and harried instant, the:was-not:is:was: is a perquisite only of balloony and weightless elephants and whales: but maybe if there were sin too maybe you would not be permitted to escape, uncouple, return. - Aint that right?"

[current mood: speechless]

Absalom, Absalom! - pg. 313

"(showed it to him who not only had no visible father but had found himself to be, even in infancy, enclosed by an unsleeping cabal bent apparently on teaching him that he had never had a father, that his mother had emerged from a sojourn in limbo, from that state of blessed amnesia in which the weak senses can take refuge from godless dark forces and powers which weak human flesh cannot stand, to wake pregnant, shrieking and screaming and thrashing, not against the ruthless agony of labor but in protest against the outrage of her swelling loins; that he had been fathered on her not through that natural process but had been blotted onto and out of her body by the old infernal immortal male principle of all unbridled terror and darkness)"

Absalom, Absalom! - pg. 298

"... he not even knowing that all kids didn't have fathers too and that getting snatched every day or so from whatever harmless pursuit in which you were not bothering anybody or even thinking about them, by someone because that someone was bigger than you, stronger than you, and being held for a minute or five minutes under a kind of busted water pipe of incomprehensible fury and fierce yearning and vindictiveness and jealous rage was part of childhood which all mothers of children had received in turn from their mothers and from their mothers in turn from that Porto Rico or Haiti or wherever it was we all came from but none of us ever lived in. So that when he grew up and had children he would have to pass it on too (and maybe deciding then and there that that it was too much trouble and bother and that he would not have any children or at least hoped he would not) and hence no man had a father, no one personal Porto Rico or Haiti, but all mother faces which ever bred swooping down at those almost calculable moments out of some obscure ancient general affronting and outraging which the actual living articulate meat had not even suffered but merely inherited; all boy flesh that walked and breathed stemming from that one ambiguous eluded dark featherhead and so bothered perennial and ubiquitous everywhere under the sun..."

Absalom, Absalom! - pg. 295

"It did not matter to them (Quentin and Shreve) anyway, who could without moving, as free now of flesh as the father who decreed and forbade, the son who denied and repudiated, the lover who acquiesced, the beloved who was not bereaved, and with no tedious transition from hearth and garden to saddle, who could be already clattering over the frozen ruts of that December night and that Christmas dawn. that day of peace and cheer, of holly and goodwill and logs on the hearth; not two of them there and then either but four of them riding the two horses through the iron darkness, and that not mattering either: what faces and what names they called themselves and were called by so long as the blood coursed - the blood, the immortal brief recent intransient blood which could hold honor above slothy unregret and love above fat and easy shame."

Absalom, Absalom! - pg. 289

"And Father said he must have realized then that it would not be much after dark when it would happen; that he must have sat there and sensed, felt them gathering with the horses and dogs and guns - the curious and the vengeful - men of Sutpen's own kind, who used to eat at his table with him back when he (Wash) had yet to approach nearer the house than the scuppernong arbor - men who had led the way, shown the other and lesser ones how to fight in battles, who might also possess signed papers from the generals saying that they were among the first and foremost of the brave - who had galloped also in the old days arrogant and proud on the fine horses about the fine plantations - symbol also of admiration and hope, instruments too of despair and grief; these it was whom he was expected to run from and it seeming to him probably that he had no less to run from than he had to run to; that if he ran he would be fleeing merely one set of bragging and evil shadows for another; since they (men) were all of a kind throughout all of earth which he knew, and he old, too old to run far even if he were to run who could never escape them, no matter how much or how far he ran; a man past sixty could not expect to run that far, far enough to escape beyond the boundaries of earth where such men lived, set the order and the rule of living: and Father said that maybe for the first time in his life he began to comprehend how it had been possible for Yankees or any other army to have whipped them - the gallant, the proud, the brave; the acknowledged and chosen best among them all to bear the courage and honor and pride."

Absalom, Absalom! - pg. 280

""No," Shreve said; "you wait. Let me play a while now. Now, Wash. Him (the demon) standing there with the horse, the saddled charger, the sheathed saber, the gray waiting to be laid peaceful away among the moths and all lost save dishonor: then the voice of the faithful grave-digger who opened the play and would close it, coming out of the wings like Shakespeare's very self: 'Well, Kernel, they mought have whupped us but they aint kilt us yit, air they?' - " This was not flippancy either. It too was just that protective coloring of levity behind which the youthful shame of being moved hid itself, out of which Quentin also spoke, the reason for Quentin's sullen bemusement, the (on both their parts) flipness, the strained clowning: the two of them, whether they knew it or not, in the cold room (it was quite cold now) dedicated to that best of ratiocination which after all was a good deal like Sutpen's morality and Miss Coldfield's demonizing - this room not only dedicated to it but set aside for it and suitably so since it would be here above any other place that it (the logic and the morality) could do the least amount of harm - the two of them back to back as though at the last ditch, saying No to Quentin's Mississippi shade who in life had acted and reacted to the minimum of logic and morality, who dying had escaped it completely, who dead remained not only indifferent but impervious to it, somehow a thousand times more potent and alive."

Absalom, Absalom! - pg. 278

"Well, Kernel they kilt us but they aint whupped us yet, air they?"

Wash Jones

Absalom, Absalom! - pg. 275

"He left for Virginia that night. Grandfather said how he went to the window and watched him ride across the square on the gaunt black stallion, erect in his faded gray, the hat with its broken plume cocked a little yet not quite so much as the beaver of the old days, as if (Grandfather said) even with his martial rank and prerogatives he did not quite swagger like he used to do, not because he was chastened by misfortune or spent or even war-wearied but as though even while riding he was still bemused in that state in which he struggled to hold clear and free above a maelstorm of unpredictable and unreasoning human beings, not his head for breath and not so much his fifty years of effort and striving to establish a posterity, but his code of logic and morality, his formula and recipe of fact and deduction whose balanced sum and product declined, refused to swim or even float."

Absalom, Absalom! - pg. 271

"... seeing if Grandfather could discover that mistake which he believed was the sole cause of his problem, sitting there in his worn and shabby uniform, with his worn gauntlets and faded sash and (he would have had the plume by all means. He might have had to discard his saber, but he would have had the plume) the plume in his hat broken and frayed and soiled, with his horse saddled and waiting in the street below and a thousand miles to ride to find his regiment, yet he sitting there on the one afternoon of his leave as though he had a thousand of them, as if there were no haste nor urgency anywhere under the sun and that when he departed he had no further to go than the twelve miles out to Sutpen's Hundred and a thousand days or maybe even years of monotony and rich peace, and he, even after he would become dead, still there, watching the fine grandsons and great-grandsons springing as far as eye could reach; he still, even though dead in the earth, that same fine figure of a man that Wash Jones called him, but not now. Now fog-bound by his own private embattlement of personal morality: that picayune splitting of abstract hairs while (Grandfather said) Rome vanished and Jericho crumbled, that this would be right if or that would be wrong but of slowing blood and stiffening bones and arteries that Father says men resort to in senility who while young and supple and strong reacted to a single simple Yes and a single simple No as instantaneous and complete and unthinking as the snapping on and off of electricity, sititng there and talking and now Grandfather not knowing what he was talking about because now Grandfather..."

Absalom, Absalom! - pg. 25x

"But Quentin did not continue at once - the flat, curiously dead voice, the downcast face, the relaxed body not stirring except to breathe; the two of them not moving except to breathe, both young, both born within the same year: the one in Alberta, the other in Mississippi; born half a continent apart yet joined, connected after a fashion in a sort of geographical transubstantiation by the Continental Trough, that River which runs not only through the physical land of which it is the geological umbilical, not only runs through the spiritual lives of the beings within its scope, but is very Environment itself which laughs at degrees of latitude and temperature, though some of these beings, like Shreve, have never seen it - "

Absalom, Absalom! - pg. 25x

"...high mortality was concomitant with the money and the sheen on the dollars was not from gold but from blood - a spot of earth which might have been created and set aside by Heaven itself, Grandfather said, as a theater for violence and injustice and bloodshed and all the satanic lusts of human greed and cruelty, for the last despairing fury of all the pariah-interdict and all the doomed - a little island set in a smiling and fury-lurked and incredible indigo sea, which was the halfway point between what we call the jungle and what we call civilization, halfway between the dark inscrutable continent from which the black blood, the black bones and flesh and thinking and remembering and hopes and desires, was ravished by violence, and the cold known land to which it was doomed, the civilized land and people which had expelled some of its own blood and thinking and desires that had become too crass to be faced and borne longer, and set it homeless and desperate on the lonely ocean - a little lost island in a latitude which would require ten thousand years of equatorial heritage to bear its climate, a soil manured with black blood from two hundred years of oppression and exploitation until it sprang with an incredible paradox of peaceful greenery and crimson flowers and sugar cane sapling size and three times the height of a man and a little bulkier of course but valuable pound for pound almost with silver ore, as if nature held a balance and kept a book and offered a recompense for the torn limbs and outraged hearts even if man did not, the planting of nature and man too watered not only by the wasted blood but breathed over by the winds in which the doomed ships had fled in vain, out of which the last tatter of sail had sunk into the blue sea, along which the last vain despairing cry of woman or child had blown away - the planting of men too; the yet intact bones and brains in which the old unsleeping blood that had vanished into the earth they trod still cried out for vengeance."

Absalom, Absalom! - pg. 149

"... who was not spying, hiding, but waiting, watching, for no reward, no thanks, who did not love him in the sense we mean it because there is no love of that sort without hope; who (if it were love) loved with that sort beyond the compass of glib books: that love which gives up what it never had - that pony's modicum which is the donor's all yet whose infinitesimal weight adds nothing to the substance of the loved - yet I gave it. And not to him, to her; it was as though I said to her, 'Here take this too. You cannot love him as he should be loved, and though he will no more feel this giving's weight than he would ever know its lack, yet there may come some moment in your married lives when he will find this atom's particle as you might find a cramped small pallid hidden shoot in a familiar flower bed and pause and say, "Where did this come from?"; you need only answer, "I don't know."' And then I went back home and stayed five years, heard an echoed shot, ran up a nightmare flight of stairs, and found -"

Absalom, Absalom! - pg. 145

"four years younger than Judith, four years later than Judith's moment which only virgins know; when the entire delicate spirit's bent is one anonymous climaxless epicene and unravished nuptial - not that widowed and nightly violation by the inescapable and scornful dead which is the need of twenty and thirty and forty, but a world filled with living marriage like the light and air which she breathes. But it was no summer of a virgin's itching discontent; no summer's caesarean lack which should have torn me, dead flesh or even embryo, from the living: or else, by friction's ravishing of the male-furrowed meat, also weaponed and panoplied as a man instead of hollow woman."