By Day in Katowice
A daytrip to a mining city in Polish Silesia, photography with the Olympus XZ-2 camera, and a look at Roberto Bolaño’s ‘By Night in Chile.’
It’s nine fifty-five in the morning and I’m standing on the platform at the main station in Bielsko-Biala, waiting for the delayed train to Katowice. It’s a sunny day, or promises to be one, although since this is Poland in October nobody’s taking any chances — myself included — and we’re all wrapped up warm. Eventually the train rolls into the station; I’m mildly disappointed, as it’s one of the line’s new vehicles, not the classic compartment style train I prefer. The aesthetics once inside are particularly lacking. It’s an example of what I call Spartan Modernism — probably the wrong words but I’m sure of none other — since the train’s interior is well-finished and at the same time under-finished. The seats, arranged in pairs or fours, lack tables either of the standalone or the drop-down variety. There’s a plastic hook on which I can hang my coat, and the overhead racks look sturdy enough, but when you consider that I’ve now described everything to be seen on the train — except the domino chain of large screen televisions, broadcasting silent adverts, hanging from the ceiling — you can understand why I miss the old-fashioned locomotives.
We pull out of the station and slowly start on our way to Katowice. The trains in Poland are being modernised, or, as evidenced by the maps of the Czech Republic that some adorn on their windows, the trains are being borrowed; but the tracks are not, and our top speed is limited. That’s not much of a problem for me. I’ve long held that train travel is one of the great luxuries in life, provided you’re not in any rush to get to where you’re going. Today our languid pace gives me more time to think about my intentions for the day.
I used to be a real traveller. In the last fifteen or so years I’ve visited something like forty-five countries, but since moving to Bielsko I’ve hardly been anywhere. That’ll all change next January when I head off to Vietnam. But the past three years have worn away my sense of self-reliance, if not my sense of adventure, and I’m worried that I’ll be rusty enough in Vietnam to miss out on some of its attractions. Hence my journey to Katowice: to remind myself what it is to be left to my own devices for a day.
That’s the first reason. Allied to that is a small part of my preparations for travelling. Whilst I’ve not gone far lately, I have at least explored one thing: the world of photography. And such an exploration has been wonderful, though it has left me with a lot of expensive, not to mention cumbersome, equipment that I’m now thinking twice about taking with me. The alternative? Olympus’s neat little XZ-2, but the big question of course is if it’ll be sufficient for the kind of photography I like.
And finally, as if it was really necessary to have a third objective, I wanted to re-read and review Roberto Bolaño’s excellent novella, ‘By Night in Chile.’
The narrator of this story is a priest with the apposite name of Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix. He says, “I am dying now, but I still have many things to say.” Later he says, “My silences are immaculate.” It is good, nay necessary, for Bolaño to point out these two aspects because much of what follows is about speaking and holding oneself silent, and the consequences of choosing the wrong tactic at the wrong time. Lacroix then suggests that “life is a succession of misunderstandings.” Maybe. But life is also a succession of odd coincidences, events that mean nothing and yet seem to beg us to consider them more deeply. For example, sitting on the train I now notice that I am wearing trousers of the same burgundy hue as the young lady across from me. I did not notice this fact soon enough, and it would be rude of me to move now, especially since I have no pretext; and as if she has been in some uncertain way injured by my choice of clothes, she is very carefully choosing only to look out of the window, never in my direction.
The train crawls through the Czechowice-Dziedzice stations, marked North and South. I have never been to Czechowice, and nobody recommends that I do, yet I feel it pulling me. A brief look at the Google Images results for the town suggests that it as unremarkable as any other of the little industrial towns dotted around Silesia, but I do look forward to one day seeing it for myself.
My sense of curiosity is in marked contrast to that of Lacroix, though that is not to suggest that the priest, poet, and critic lacks curiosity; more that his is bounded, hemmed in, by fear of doing — especially saying — something wrong. When he meets the noted critic Farewell, he describes his appearance but stops short of giving us everything. Farewell, he says, is wearing “a tie-pin bearing insignia I did not wish to interpret but whose meaning by no means escaped me.” That’s as may be, but it would have been good to have my own ideas on the matter confirmed. I know that South America was something of a safe haven for the Nazis after the fall of the Reich, but whether that is applicable information here I can’t tell.
Soon Lacroix is invited to Farewell’s country estate, and here he meets Pablo Neruda:
“There was Neruda reciting verses to the moon, addressing the minerals of the earth, and the stars, whose nature we can only know by intuition.”
We then pass through Tychy (pronounced somewhere close to ‘tee-hee’, a sound you would not express if you saw the state of the station), proud home to one of the principal Polish beers, Tyskie, and a city that, like Czechowice, does not fare well on Google Images. Judging by the station alone it has all the charm of a World War Two movie set. The landscape is a patchwork of greys and browns, and all the other colours have been sucked down to their level. The trees are bare and there are puddles of muddy water dotted here and there, and the citizenry patiently waiting for their train seem beset with a melancholy one imagines has sprung from the dreariness around them.
The area beyond Tychy is forested, and is quite pleasant if one is supposed only to look at it and not traipse through its muddy interior, forever haunted by the thought of a false step and getting home a dirty mess. Lacroix too is having trouble in a forest, though his belongs to the Chilean estate of the critic. Lacroix gets lost. He stumbles across a group of labourers, country folk that he has no way of communicating with even though he is a priest and they are keen to have their confessions heard. His dislike for them seeps from him like sweat:
“The women were ugly and their words were incoherent. The silent man was ugly and his stillness was incoherent. The men who were walking away were ugly and their zigzag paths were incoherent.”
I can’t say the same about the Polish, not by a long way. They are, however, a fairly homogenous bunch, and even here in Katowice, which city I have now reached, they look all of a sort. There are a few Turks in the new shopping centre, one of whom is marching around with a massive pair of luminous white DJ headphones on, and I do pass a young Japanese man who, as if unaware of the stereotype, has both a DSLR and a bicycle.
Katowice is undergoing a transformation. When I first moved to Poland I visited the city and was struck by its drabness. It has never been a city to attract tourists in the way that Krakow has. It’s a mining city. The countryside all around is beset with mines like a face with acne and there’s even an old tower in the centre that recalls that history. The train station was, and in places still is, a monolithic structure, the kind of massive paean to Communism and the working man that can still be seen here and there across the country. Attached to it now is a shopping centre, a paean to something quite contrary.
It is now that I take out my camera and start looking for interesting things to photograph. What interests me most is the dichotomous nature of modern Katowice, that clash of the modern and the classical, of the glass and concrete against the peeling plaster and crumbling stone, of the new service-led industries and the kind of work that the previous generation would have been more comfortable with.
It’s amazing how many new cafes and restaurants have opened since I was last here. The prices are sneaking up, as they always do, especially when a location changes hands and replaces old wooden chairs with something from IKEA. No more black coffee sold cheap: now it’s all about deluxe lattes and bubble tea that can be sold at twice the price. The chains are all here too, Costa Coffee (still branded Coffee Heaven), Starbucks, So! Coffee; but also there are plenty of independents, and that gives me hope, and whilst they’re not pulling in the punters as readily as the competition, they seem to be doing enough to keep open.
I look down the side alleys and into courtyards, away from the streets that have received the most attention. There is graffiti everywhere, much of it highly artistic, though the predominant portion is simple, inelegant tagging. Sometimes it is both at once, a beautiful rendering scarred by somebody’s street name.
I stop for a while outside the University of Silesia library, a fine sandstone and glass structure that looks good today but might be an embarrassment in twenty years. I like it for its harmony; so many of the older buildings in the centre of Katowice are built of red brick, and here we have, for a change, something that isn’t simply concrete and glass. In the distance behind it is a stark reminder of where Katowice was before this journey into the twenty-first century, the tower blocks of some depressing osiedle dominating the skyline.
So far I have been pleased with my camera’s performance. At first I struggled to get a good shot of anything but the architecture of the city, or other stationary elements. With my big Canon I like to go out on the streets with a long, fast lens, and capture people as they go about their daily business. The focussing system on the Olympus is good, and with practice maybe I’ll get closer to what I can do with other tools, but for today I can’t get quite the same pictures as I want. I have to change my approach. It takes me a while to get used to using the screen and not the viewfinder (since there isn’t one on the Olympus), and this seems unnatural. All cameras, big and small, should have an optical viewfinder: I feel closer to the photograph I want to make when I can feel the camera pressed up against my cheek. Having said that, the way that I can select a focus point with a touch of the screen is revelatory, and points to the future of photographic equipment. How long will it be before this is a standard feature of high-end professional shooters?
The dynamic range the camera is capable of capturing also appears, at this early stage, to be very reasonable, and since I’m shooting in RAW I know that when I get my files into Lightroom I’ll have an extra stop or so to play with. Speaking of editing, I’m not so totally worried about the pictures straight out of the camera. I need the Olympus to be capable of great things, but the great things themselves will be achieved later. The pictures are not as impressively sharp as I want them to be, but I know that when I get home I can run them through the Topaz software I have plugged in to Photoshop, and this combined with some Instagram-esque filters in Lightroom should render my images the way I have intended — and as I have displayed them here.
What I’m most interested about is how the camera behaves itself, and so far I’m more pleased with it than I should be about something that I can slip into my pocket. The lens is fast — it opens up to f1.8, which is a massive improvement over most compacts. It shoots in RAW, as I mentioned before, and has a good frames-per-second count. I always use the burst mode, though this can be a problem when I give the camera to my mother-in-law to take a photo and get the camera back with twenty of the same image, but when I’m on the street it means that the decisive moment, so to speak, is the one I choose out of a sequence of five or six. Also, I needn’t worry so much about camera shake when I press the shutter — if there is any on the first shot, it should be gone by the second because my finger hasn’t moved, and so therefore neither has the camera.
There are other features I haven’t used before today, that now I see the value of. There’s an integrated Neutral Density filter; I wondered when I’d ever want to use it, and now here’s an outdoor fountain that I want to take a picture of. It’s too bright outside to make a long exposure viable; selecting one of half a second yields an almost entirely white image, but this is easily fixed by turning the ND filter on, and suddenly I can get motion blur whenever I want. It’s a smart inclusion in what is adding up to be a brilliant package.
I continue exploring the streets. I sometimes wish I had a wider lens, to get a sense of scale around some of the larger buildings, and in the next moment I wish I had a longer lens to squeeze the world down into nothing to show the variety of buildings that all inhabit the same space. With the small zoom that I’ve got I can still do something, and with cropping still to come, the results are going to be more than acceptable.
I find a street stall selling old paperbacks. I ask if they have any books in English, and they have one: ‘Sports Nutrition For Bulking Up’ it is called. The shelves are bowing under the weight of all the other titles, and there are so many in boxes and stacked haphazardly on a table that searching for a specific title must be a futile quest.
I walk through one housing estate and into another. The change is dramatic between the two. The first is modern, with the usual heavy reliance on glass and concrete, and the bottom floor of one of the buildings is given over to a bank. After this I reach another mini-estate, this one formed of an enormous single block of flats, probably ten or fifteen storeys high, and a good sixty flats across. It is an imposing edifice, though the bottom floor here speaks more of twenty years ago: a florist’s, a baker’s, a bicycle repair shop. It’s as if, faced by a building so out of proportion to the inhabitants, every step has been taken to make it seem more human. I wonder what the corollary is for those who live in the new concrete and glass jungle.
Beyond all of this comes the theatre, inside of which I find a bookshop/ café/ exhibition space that looks like it caters for the nascent generation of hipsters that is sprouting all over Poland. There are many English language books here, including an enormous Taschen edition of the photographs of Dennis Hopper, and a carousel loaded with expensive books of philosophy. I go outside, cross the tram tracks and then take a photo looking back at the café, a young man standing outside leaning on a railing and smoking. Later, when I inspect the photo on my laptop I see that it’s possible to make out the titles on some of the books on that carousel, even from ten metres away. The resolution of modern cameras is something to behold.
And then we come to the crowning jewel of Katowice architecture. Its name is Spodek, the Polish word for saucer, and that is precisely what it looks like. Built in 1971, it is still the largest indoor arena in all of Poland, and has played host to most indoor sports, and also a tournament called ‘The Masters of Dirt’. Concerts are held here from time to time; in 1997 Chumbawumba played here — imagine that.
It is grotesque and magnificent at the same time, and it must have been received with much the same awe and wonder that modern stadia are received — which makes you wonder what we will think of such constructions thirty years from now. I spend longer taking photos here than anywhere else, trying out different combinations of foreground interest, like an old man walking along, and the war memorial, and then the fountain, and then I wait for a tram to pass, and since it looks like a tram from the seventies might, I feel as if I have stepped back in time. Such moments are a common occurrence in Poland.
Soon I find myself heading back towards the heaving centre of the city. It’s kicking out time and the streets are thronged with office workers heading for a quick look around the shops on their way home, or they’re working the afternoon/evening shift at those same shops themselves. I dart into a café, sadly, I admit, one of the chains, but they have such enticing armchairs that I can’t help myself.
I open my Bolaño and now Lacroix is being told the story of the Guatemalan painter in Paris in the early forties, and how he was visited by an obsequious Chilean diplomat (though obsequious to those in power, not to the painter), and by Ernst Jünger, who wrote ‘Storm of Steel’ based on his experiences in the First World War, and who during the Second did in fact visit many of the artists based in Paris at the time.
Bolaño is very talented at mixing in the real with the imaginary. He does a tidy job of it, you could say. He leaves you with much to ponder over, as is the case with Jünger, who comes across in somewhat less than a positive light in the book, sounding egotistical and arrogant. But there is a humanity that shines through, that can be glimpsed in moments such as when he is leaving the Guatemalan’s shabby flat, and he appears to show concern for the painter’s future. This is part of what makes Bolaño so compelling: his characters are fully realised, be they of his own creation, or provided by history. You don’t know if you should like them or not, much as you don’t in real life know immediately how much you should like or dislike anybody you meet. Even Lacroix, the narrator and arguable protagonist, is hard to like absolutely. At no stage in the book did I feel like I wanted him to come out on top, but at the same time his earnestness does something to recommend him. Farewell is a similar presence: you can never relax around him, as Lacroix discovers when he finds the critic’s hand on his belt — and later on his buttocks — and yet he is always there, a character who recurs and who provides a commentary on Lacroix’s life and on Chile throughout the book. Even Pinochet, when he later makes an appearance, is allowed to be human.
But back to the Guatemalan. The Chilean diplomat pays him a visit now and again, bringing him food lifted from the larder back at the embassy; when he delivers his parcel, he never receives a thank you. He loans the painter one of his own books, but when he returns he finds that the painter has not touched it, as evidenced by the dust gathering on the cover. The diplomat and Jünger are both marked by their loquaciousness, the painter by his silence. The Guatemalan is overcome with melancholy and spends his time ignoring his visitors, instead looking forever out of his window and over the city, a witness to its collapse. The tale foreshadows the fascist takeover of Santiago, as does the later episode of the falcons, but that is yet to come.
For all the sadness of the Guatemalan painter, I envied him his perch. The café I have chosen is a pleasant enough one, but the view leaves much to be desired. All I see are the shoppers trundling by, carrying bags marked with the names of the shops they have been to. It’s horrible to consider that in the name of environmentalism they have been made to pay to become walking adverts for these brands.
I wonder what is happening to Katowice, and to Poland. I liked how it used to be; for all its grime and destitution it had a kind of honourable spirit, and whilst there was little of note in the city, what there was did look like it could support and in turn be supported by the populace. And now? I wonder who all these shops are for, and these new apartment blocks as well. We have many like them in Bielsko, and they’re all half-empty. They cost so much in excess of what anyone can pay without burying themselves under a mountain of debt. And there have been so many loans agencies springing up in the last five years as well — it leads me to think that here is another subprime disaster waiting to happen.
Then I consider all that I have seen of the city today. The phrase ‘on the brink of tomorrow’ springs to mind, I don’t know where from or why, because it’s peculiarly inappropriate. If anything, Katowice is a city on the brink of today, if by today I mean the rampant commercialism that is so prevalent in the rest of the Western world, and if by today I mean the economic hardships brought on by the credit crunch. It’s not being felt here as much as in the UK, but then I’ve always felt as if Poland was perhaps ten years behind the UK and the USA in the first place. But if it’s so easy to predict what’s going to happen, how can the crisis be prevented?
I return to Bolaño; Lacroix is so taken with the story of Jünger that he waxes lyrical to Farewell, who then admonishes him with another story. Farewell’s advice to his seminarian friend is something I ought to bear in mind, as should we all: “It’s good to love. It’s bad to be impressionable.” The first time I read Bolaño’s ‘2666’ my own writing became suddenly afflicted with run on sentences, sentences that, like in ‘By Night In Chile’, have a habit of stretching to several pages at a time, but in my own case they didn’t work and I ended up cutting so much of my story I had to start again. I should have been content to love Bolaño’s work, not try to copy it.
I head reluctantly towards the station. I’m enjoying myself too much to say goodbye just yet, so I hang around the station and its attendant shopping centre for a while looking for good photo opportunities. I score a couple, mostly static subjects as I’m still not quite there with the speed of the camera. My best bet might be to go all manual, to focus that way; there’s a clever little lever by the lens on the Olympus that lets you switch to manual focus, and when you spin the focus wheel on the lens itself the screen zooms in to help you get an accurate fix. This is incredibly useful when the camera is set to macro — without it I’d never get a decently in-focus image of a flower or an insect or anything like that. It’s yet another useful feature that’s helping me fall in love with this piece of kit.
The light is the best it’s been all day, but there aren’t many trains home so I need to make a decision: do I stay or do I go? It’s an easy call to make: my daughter and my wife are both waiting for me, and the sentimentalist within me wants to go home and relate my stories to them. I buy a ticket and go up to the platform to see what’s in store for me; and lo and behold, it’s one of the older generation of locomotives, complete with compartmentalised carriages.
I find a compartment that’s not too busy; they can hold eight people, but are only comfortable up to the fourth occupant, and in this case that turns out to be me. Soon we’re joined by another, but he’s sitting across from me, so I still have some space to lay out my bag and notebook ready for the return journey.
They’re an interesting bunch, my fellow passengers. The gentleman by the door is snoozing, his mouth slightly agape, and he has his legs stretched out before him, one foot hooked over the other. He can’t have been the first person in, or he would have been sitting by the window; he is instead an inconvenience to me, since I’d much prefer to be up and about from time to time taking more photos, but the Englishman in me says I ought not to disturb him. I do, twice, and for the sake of a handful more exposures on the Olympus, and surprisingly I feel very little guilt about it.
The fellow next to him is more interesting. As soon as the train lurches forward to begin its journey, he pulls out a laptop and some headphones and starts watching something with a dazzling intensity. He makes a face like somebody sucking on a lemon, or like the bearded bad guy in Superman 2 (the one who never spoke, not Terence Stamp) about to blow ice cream into somebody’s face.
Stuck in the corners nearest the window are two women who you can no longer say are young, exactly, though neither are they very old. They must think though that they’re still practically teenagers, as they sit there chatting, their legs curled up beneath them. The one across from me has taken to biting the end of a lock of hair; the one on my side smells of coconut oil.
Everybody in the compartment is content to ignore me, which suits me fine. It’s a rare thing to strike up a conversation with another commuter, though this is a rule that I fear not to generalise — it may just be something about me.
Lacroix has admitted to being a member of Opus Dei. If that sounds trite, remember that Bolaño’s book predates Dan Brown’s by three years (‘By Night In Chile’ appeared first in Spanish in 2000, and then in 2003, the same year as ‘The Da Vinci Code’, it was translated into English). He has also admitted to being bored of his work, something I can readily sympathise with. “My boredom had taken on a fierce intensity. And my exhaustion had grown in proportion.”
He is approached by two mysterious gentlemen, Messrs Raef and Etah. Their first proposal, of sending Lacroix to Europe to see how the churches there are maintained, is welcomed by the priest, though he has his suspicions about their motives, as well he might given their anagrammatic names.
Here comes one of the most interesting — and most allegorical — episodes in the book. The priest travels to Europe, and even by the time he reaches these distant shores he feels revitalised. (I am to visit Vietnam for much the same reason; you could argue that the same gentlemen whispered the idea into my ear). He discovers that the main obstacle to maintaining religious properties is pigeon shit, and that the chosen remedy is remarkably simple: the priest at each site has learnt the art of falconry, and has trained their bird of prey to hunt down and destroy all the pigeons.
The message is clearer on the second reading than the first: Bolaño is one of those writers who rewards repeat visits. I didn’t pick up on the significance of the falcons the first time I read the book, instead focussing on the story the allegory is wrapped up in; but this time it was laid bare. The falcons represent fascism, they represent ‘might is right’, they represent the military solution to every problem. But there’s more to it than that. Later in the story Lacroix will have a dream of being watched by one of the falcons he meets on his travels, and he feels oppressed even though the falcon does no more than simply observe him. The steely gaze is enough. The priest who had cared for this particular falcon is the only one who thinks twice about the plan to rid the churches of pigeons, saying that, after all, pigeons are God’s creatures too.
As I pass through Tychy once again, I read about how Allende is elected. Lacroix and Farewell are devastated by the news. Farewell’s estate is confiscated by the state. Chaos descends on the country. Bolaño’s prose here is magnificent; his approach is highly original. Lacroix retreats into the Greek classics, and we are treated to a long list of the books he reads in the ensuing period, the list interrupted from time to time to report that ties to Cuba have been secured, that first one of Allende’s men and then another has been assassinated, that Allende has been to the United Nations, that there are food shortages and protests in support of and against the president. Then comes the coup. “Peace at last,” Lacroix says to himself.
I’m getting closer to Bielsko. My wife calls and asks how far away I am, to see if it would make sense to come to the station to meet me, but I’m not yet past Czechowice so we make other arrangements. I get up and take a photo through the window of the countryside speeding by. It’s massively blurred, as I intended it to be, but it gives a sense I hope of the quality of the landscape. It’s also another opportunity for me to be thankful of the ND filter, and to be thankful of the Olympus’s diminutive dimensions. I tried the same shot with my last Canon some years ago and nearly had the lens smack against a passing pillar.
Raef and Etah reappear, and now their conversation with Lacroix sounds more like an interrogation. The want the priest, a noted liberal in the artistic community and therefore a suspected Communist (which he isn’t), to teach the higher military orders about Marx and Engels. Pinochet too will be there.
When the priest meets Pinochet they talk for a while, and Pinochet looks to convince Lacroix of his intellectualism, and of Allende’s anti-intellectualism. He then places his hand on Lacroix’s knee, and the allegory of the falcons recommends itself once again.
Eventually my train reaches its destination. It’s the final stop and slowly everyone alights from the carriages. At the front some engineers are disconnecting the locomotive so it can be moved to the front of the procession, ready to make the return journey I imagine. I call my wife to see where she is, and then head towards the park to find her and my daughter. The park is a good choice. The weather is fine even though the night is drawing close, and there will be park benches adequate to my needs.
Lacroix is torn. He feels he has betrayed some higher ideal by agreeing to lecture Pinochet and his military cabinet about Marxism, even though he had no choice. He lets his secret slip to Farewell one evening, and his friend betrays him, or not — it’s not clear. Either way the gossip starts to circulate that Lacroix has been giving these lessons; it’s possible that the rumours were leaked by those who had ordered him to keep silent, since this news was sure to discredit him. What follows is a surprise:
“So I sat down beside the telephone and waited for my friends or my former friends to call, or Mr Etah, Mr Raef and Perez Latouche, to reproach me for being indiscreet, or anonymous callers with axes to grind, or the ecclesiastical authorities ringing to find out just how much truth and how much fabrication there was in the rumours that had spread through Santiago’s literary and artistic circles, if not beyond, but no one called. At first I thought this silence was the result of a concerted decision to ostracize me. Then, to my astonishment, I realized that nobody gave a damn. The country was populated by hieratic figures, heading implacably towards an unfamiliar, grey horizon, where one could barely glimpse a few rays of light, flashes of lightning and clouds of smoke. What lay there? We did not know.”
I don’t manage to finish the book whilst we’re at the park. I do an hour or so later, speeding faster through the conclusion than I ought to have done. Towards the end Lacroix returns to Farewell’s estate to see what has become of it. He regrets his decision immediately. The world has changed. He begins striking up conversations with the random people he meets:
“Sometimes I come across farmers speaking another language. I stop them. I ask them how things are on the land. But they tell me they don’t work on the land. They tell me they work in factories or building sites in the city, they have never worked on the land.”
Katowice is in the same situation. It was once a city of miners, of petty bureaucrats, and people scraping by, just looking to survive the system. It was right for them all to look towards something better. But is modern Katowice something better, or is it simply something shinier? Who is it all for? The miners will live where they have done until they have all passed on, but none I imagine will ever make a home for themselves in one of the new developments. But what of this generation? The price of a newly-built flat is in some cases double what one of the older flats costs. Could a sales assistant at H&M ever afford that? Or the manager at the McDonald’s or the Burger King or the KFC in the shopping centre? Could a teacher? And what will happen to the bank managers who can afford a deposit on their salary — what will happen to them when there are no more customers left looking for a loan they can’t afford?
For all its shininess I can’t help thinking that, like the Chile of the seventies and eighties, the future looks grim.
Or does it? I can’t help myself: I want to end this account on a positive note. After all, I’m feeling positively positive right now. I love my little camera. It has its shortcomings, but none so great that I can’t work around them. All of the images I’ve used to illustrate this article were taken on the same day, and though I am no judge of my own abilities as a photographer, I think that they are at least decent images. I also had a fine time exploring streets I had never explored before, and I wore myself out very merrily looking to see where eventual dead-end led. Even the train journey, unexceptional though it was, brought me some pleasure.
And as for the Bolaño, it filled me with a whole other world for the entire time I was reading it. It’s a strange little book in many ways: it lasts only 130 pages, and they’re generously spaced into the bargain; it’s also composed of only two paragraphs, and this detail I’ve often wondered about. It could be seen as an anti-browser measure taken by the author; I don’t know about you, but I like to stop reading at the end of the first paragraph on a new page, so that when I place my bookmark there I’ll know where to return to. Sometimes I had to read a further two pages just to get to the end of the sentence, and I often lost my place because I couldn’t remember where I’d reached last time. Perhaps Bolaño simply wanted his readers to give this book their undivided attention, to read it from start to finish and not dip in and out.
But if I assume that everything Bolaño has done in the book he has done on purpose, then I must accept that there is some purpose to the book being only two paragraphs long. The whole story is related to us by a narrator who believes himself firstly to be on his death bed, and secondly to be under attack from the accusations of a ‘wizened youth’ — who it is obvious from the outset is some aspect of the narrator himself; if this is one long monologue, and we could almost consider Lacroix to be raving at the time, it makes sense for Bolaño to use a single paragraph. After all, we are taught that every paragraph should contain one idea, and perhaps that’s all this paragraph does contain: the one idea about Chile’s recent past, its present, and its predicted future.
The main thing is that Bolaño’s book is good enough that I want to think about the reasons he made these decisions. In ‘2666’ and the part about the murders, I felt overwhelmed by the number of deaths he relates to us, and yet the cumulative effect was to feel the oppression of the women in Santa Teresa/Ciudad Juarez and the horror they must have felt running the risk of violent murder every single day. No other method could have achieved such a result. I still need to think through the implications of the single paragraph, but doing so will keep the whole of Lacroix’s story fresh in my mind, and that’s no bad thing.
