A Chilean poet born in 1914, Nicanor Parra greatly influenced Bolaño’s poetry and early fiction writings. Considered modernist, Parra’s language resembles the much later work of the American Beat poets. Bolaño considered him “the best living Spanish language poet.” A collection of his work Anti-poems: How to Look Better & Feel Great is available in English.
III. “POSITIONS ARE POSITIONS AND SEX IS SEX”. INTERVIEW BY ELISEO ÁLVAREZ
FIRST PUBLISHED IN TURIA,
BARCELONA, JUNE 2005
ELISEO ÁLVAREZ: Did your parents influence your love of literature, books?
ROBERTO BOLAÑO: No. In terms of genealogy, the truth is I come from two families: one that dragged with it 500 years of constant and rigorous illiteracy and the other, maternal, that dragged with it 300 years of laziness, just as constant and as rigorous. In that sense I’m the black sheep of the family. I suppose that they would have preferred any other thing. The truth is I’m fifty years old and knowing what I know now I wouldn’t want my child to be a writer either. That isn’t to say I would want him to continue with 500 more years of illiteracy, but why not 300 more years of laziness? It’s quite hard to be a writer, although, let’s not exaggerate. My mother read some books, and my father read Westerns occasionally. He read those little novels that are made to keep in your back pocket, because there was no television. My mother did read more, but if I had formed my mother’s tastes I’d be a Marcelo Serrano- or Isabel Allende-type today. On the other hand, that wouldn’t be so bad because I wouldn’t have known the troubles of a writer but I would have known sweet millions, which seen with perspective is not a bad exit.
Chilean author Marcela Serrano (b. 1951) is a standard bearer of new Latin American fiction. Her major works include Nosotras que nos queremos tanto (1991) and Para que no me olvides (1994). Her translated works include Antigua and My Life Before (2001).
Perhaps the most famous female Chilean author, Isabel Allende (b. 1942) is an extremely prolific part of the magical realism movement. Bolaño considered her work “bad, but it’s alive. It’s anemic, like many Latin American authors, but it’s alive.” Her major works have been translated into English and include The House of Spirits (1982) and Paula (1995).
EA: It would be ideal to get a mix of both.
RB: I think a good mix is very difficult to obtain, especially for people of my generation, because we were very radical and we believed the sooner we got to the limit the better, and that’s how it went for us.
EA: How did you discover reading?
RB: Surely because I was a very sensible kid, a very sensible adolescent. My father was a courier. He was also a professional heavyweight boxing champion in southern Chile. The only thing fit to do before that man was to be stronger than him — otherwise it was to opt for homosexuality. If he had depended on me, I would have opted for homosexuality, which seems to me a magnificent aesthetic escape, but it wouldn’t have been natural. I’m heterosexual. So all that was left was film and books, and from childhood I dedicated myself to watching lots of film and reading lots of books basically and, evidently, trying to kill my father. Of course my father has always loved me very much, like all fathers. Now my son intends to kill me. I’ll be the first to tell him: Kill me, son. Here is my neck. It’s like the joke about the Jewish mother: In a fit of madness, the son cuts off his mother’s head, flees, then stumbles, and while he’s stumbling — with his mother’s head still in his arms — the head says, “Son, are you all right?” A father’s love for his son is similar. I suppose that within his brutality and his courage — he is a very courageous man — my father loved me as I love my son. In the end, one could talk for hours about the relationship between a father and a son. The only clear thing is that a father has to be willing to be spat upon by his son as many times as the son wishes to do it. Even still the father will not have paid a tenth of what he owes because the son never asked to be born. If you brought him into this world, the least you can do is put up with whatever insult he wants to offer.
EA: Do you agree with those who say that a child leaving the house is life’s happiest and most dramatic moment?
RB: I don’t agree with that. If it were up to me, I’d live to 100 and always protect my child. I don’t think reason has anything to do with parent-children relationships, not at all. Perhaps from the perspective of a child, reason does impose itself, but from the perspective of a parent, it’s very difficult to impose reason. One acts viscerally, in accordance with accumulation of fear and anguish. For example, when I was not yet a father, it was very difficult to injure me. I thought that I had finally acquired a type of invulnerability. But that all changed the moment my older child was born; that is to say, all of the fears and terrors I experienced as an adolescent re-emerged and duplicated, multiplied themselves by 100. See, I can put up with them myself, but I do not want my child to have to go through them. It’s frightening, and now I have a daughter besides. I won’t say anymore. I’ll start to cry. The only explanation I could give would be to start to cry. It’s beyond the beyond.
EA: Your family left for Mexico when you were fifteen-years old. Why?
RB: Basically, my mother had been to Mexico a couple of times and was familiar with the country and she convinced my father. My mother has always been an anxious person. She convinced my father that the best thing to do was to leave Chile and to go to Mexico. My parents were always separating and getting back together. Their relationship was stormy throughout my childhood and in a way Mexico was a small paradise, a place where they could start over. It was fun for them at first, although no fun at all for me. On the first day of school in Mexico, some guy challenged me to a fight just because I happened to be Chilean; we hadn’t said a word to each other. He was a Mexican kid who didn’t know how to fight very well and was short besides. I was certain that with two punches I could knock him to the ground, but I realized that if I knocked him down all the others would come after me and that’s when I got smart: I grasped the situation in the act, and I directed the fight to a tie. I came off very well and he made good friends with me and no one ever wanted to fight me again. It was like a baptism in Aztec thought, quite disagreeable, but I realized where the shots were heading and the underlying message of the fight.
EA: Mexico was as dynamic as Chile was on its way to being when you arrived.
RB: Mexico was of a different dynamism. Look, in that era, Mexico City had 14 million inhabitants and it was a separate planet, it was the city where everything was possible. For me, because I came from a small town in Chile, a southern town besides, I exchanged a small town for a metropolis. I was never a resident of Santiago; I was born in Santiago, but I never lived in Santiago. I knew Santiago only from visiting.
EA: What were the strongest differences? The ones that cost you the most to get used to.
RB: Very few. Mexicans are really very hospitable. Since I was only fifteen-years old, I quickly Mexicanized myself. I felt totally Mexican. I never felt like a stranger in Mexico, except for that first day in school. There wasn’t anything I had trouble getting used to.