Literature + Sickness by Roberto Bolaño (Excerpts)

Literature + Sickness = Sickness
by Roberto Bolaño


This essay by Bolaño, first published in 2003 in El gaucho insufrible by Anagrama, clearly shows Bolaño knew himself to be a dying man, and he did indeed die, of liver failure, in 2003 at the age of fifty. It is a sad Last Testament from a writer of prodigious and self-destructive talent.


For my friend and hepatologist, Victor Vargas



Sickness and Literature


No wonder the lecturer beats about the bush. Take the following case. The speaker is going to talk about sickness. There are all of ten people in the theater. Each of them waits there with a dignified expectation worthy of a better subject. The lecture is scheduled for seven or eight in the evening. Nobody’s eaten a thing. So when seven o’clock comes round (or eight, or nine) everyone is sitting there with their cell-phones turned off. It’s a pleasure to speak to people with such good manners. Nevertheless, the lecturer doesn’t show up, and finally one of the organizers of the event announces that he can’t come: at the very last moment he’s fallen grievously ill.


Sickness and Freedom


To write about sickness, especially if one is gravely ill, can be a torment. Writing about sickness, if one is not only gravely ill but also a hypochondriac, is an act of masochism or desperation. But it can also be liberating. To impose, even if it’s just for a few minutes, the tyranny of illness—like those little old ladies one runs into in the lobby of the emergency room, who devote themselves to detailing the clinical, medical or pharmacological parts of their lives rather than discuss the political, sexual or working parts—is tempting, diabolically tempting, but a temptation nonetheless. These little old ladies look well beyond good and evil; they look like they know all about Nietzsche, and not just Nietzsche but Kant and Hegel and Schelling as well, not to mention Ortega y Gasset, to whom those writers seem more than sisters, confidants. Really more than confidants, clones of Ortega y Gasset. So much so that I sometimes think (in my desperation) that in these waiting rooms one finds the paradise of Ortega y Gasset, or his hell, depending on how one looks at it and the sensibility with which one looks and listens. A paradise in which Ortega y Gasset, duplicated by the thousands, lives our lives and our circumstances. However, let’s not lose sight of freedom: in reality I was thinking rather more about the good fortune of liberation. To write badly, to talk badly, to go on at length about tectonic phenomena in the middle of a reptilian dinner. How liberating it is and how well-deserving do I feel when, having hurled insults left, right and center, spitting as I talk, I take up compassion and undiscriminatingly, I lose myself in the nightmares of my random companions: sorting out a cow and milking her by the head as Nicanor Parra says in a verse both magnificent and mysterious.


Sickness and Tests


The time has come to get back to the enormous elevator, the biggest I’ve seen in my whole life, an elevator that can accommodate a shepherd with a small flock of sheep or a rancher with two mad cows and a nurse with two empty gurneys, an elevator in which I was literally debating between trying to get that short little doctor, a tiny Japanese doll, to make love to me, or at least try to, and the dead certain likelihood that I would burst into tears, right there and then, like Alice in Wonderland, and flood the elevator not with blood, as in Kubrick’s The Shining, but tears. But good manners, which are never to be neglected and seldom get in the way, in moments like this are definitely a hindrance, so that in no time at all the little Japanese doctor and I were locked away in a tiny cubicle with a window from which one could see the back part of the hospital. There we underwent a few odd tests which to me seemed just exactly the same sort one takes in any Sunday paper. Of course, I geared myself up to do them well, as if to demonstrate to her that my doctor was wrong, a vain effort, for though she ran her tests impeccably, the little Japanese doctor remained utterly impassive, without even a hint of an encouraging smile. Once in a while, while she prepared a fresh test, we talked. I asked her about the chances of a successful liver transplant. Good chances, she said. What percentage? I asked. Sixty percent, she replied. Shit! I said, that’s not much. In politics it’s an absolute majority, she said. One of the tests, maybe the simplest, really impressed me. It consisted of keeping my hands extended vertically for a few seconds, fingers on top, their palms facing her while I contemplated their backs. I asked her what the hell this test was all about. She said that, given the advanced stage of my disease, I wouldn’t be able to keep my fingers up straight. Sure enough, inevitably they bent toward her. I think I said, Vaya por Dios! Maybe I laughed. The fact is that ever since then, I repeat that test wherever I am. I raise my fingers before my eyes, backs facing me, and spend a few seconds studying my knuckles, my nails, the calluses that form on each phalanx. I don’t know what I’ll do the day they don’t stay steady; I only know what I won’t do. Mallarmé wrote that the roll of the dice will never abolish chance. Nonetheless, one has to go on rolling the dice every day, just as I check my upright fingers every day.