MARCH 9, 2010
2666 (Part III) [see Part I | Part II]

The part about Saint Valentine

At first I thought the radio was on but it wasn't. Regardless of the source I was suddenly awake with mild sinus pressure and this phrase embossing the scalloped edge of consciousness—if you don't have one, then everybody is your Valentine—the morning's Hallmark card. It was actually more a voiceover, like Gaff speaking overhead while Deckard is looking at a tiny origami crane towards the end of Blade Runner. I groped about for my spectacles. They were wrapped in the sheets along with a paperback of Speed and a long silver chain with an Ethiopian cross.

So it was Valentine's Day and I had no valentine. I mean of my own or as close to ones own as one gets. Yet it occurred to me that my waking voiceover had its truth. When you don't have one, everyone is potentially your valentine. I decided to keep this gem to myself lest I be obliged to spend the day pasting hearts of lace to red construction paper to send out into the whole of the world.

I slipped my moccasins on and shuffled into the bathroom in an agitated condition. Salt clung to my lashes making it difficult to greet the day and the lenses of my specs were milky with fingerprints. Pressing a hot washcloth against my lids, I counted to ten then splashed cold water on my face. I rifled through a pile of shirts neatly folded on a low Senufo daybed, worn and re-worn shirts of the gone and my own holy t-shirts washed into weightlessness. The bed, carved from a single block of hardwood with four tapering legs and a sloping headrest, once served a young tribesman, the son of a diviner. I tried sleeping on it, but found it disconcertingly narrow, so I laid my clothes on it instead.

After minimal deliberation I chose a red buffalo check flannel. It seemed good for Valentine's Day. It was kind of big, so I figured my son must have left it behind. I picked up my dungarees off the floor and shook out the socks. I quickly laced my boots, donned my pea coat and headed to my café, sloshing through the remnants of yesterday's snowfall. I noticed the pocket was torn on the left side of my coat and made a mental note to mend it. My ears were cold as I left my watch cap behind. I really needed a coffee. I felt a bit hung over, though not from alcohol, but from spending half the night roaming through the polluted labyrinth of the internet, looking for god knows what.

I was still mulling over the valentine equation as I crossed Sixth Avenue. The Malinke speak of another angle. You know one thing and don't know the other things. I wondered which idea was the more positive. One thing is one thing. Nothing is everything. I definitely needed coffee.

Sitting in the café waiting for my brown toast and olive oil I noticed that salt was forming on my lashes again. I wondered if it was from staring at the computer until three am. I watched an episode of Fringe and then got lost in a series of twists and turns that ultimately came up short. I was looking for a clue to where Bolaño lived and died. The café he may have frequented. The more tired I got the more obsessive and fruitless the search. Looking for small things and where they could be found. A coat he wore, his desk, corrected typescripts, a coffee mug, something touched by his hand, a second-class relic, something Bolaño.

These things, these relics, are alive in the fists of memory. We search for them in close-up as we search for our own hands in a dream. What you know of me, the writer whispers, is yet a sliver, like a silverfish, an elongate, nocturnal insect that dines on books, silk, coffee grounds or hair. Or the most minute of minnows darting through the florescent algae of a contaminated stream. We see it in the form of a flash but we miss the true propulsion, the eggs within. We see so little.

In the end I figured the most sacred thing Bolaño touched with his hand had to be the heads of his children. But I'm not curious about his children. It's not within me to track down an actual live human. Then again what is a dead writer? Is he not human? Aren't the beings we chase down in our mind more than human?

It seemed the best thing to do was to get some work in or around Blanes. The place I never went to, when he was alive, and where I should have and didn't. I mean, there is no guarantee I would have been welcomed, but at least I could have gone and left a message, harmonicas for his children, a gardenia for his wife. Instead I must be content to one of those people paying posthumous homage from a paper bag, offering some Pedro Three Vines into the earth, a wilted flower, or a burned out prayer for a burned out writer.

In the morning I had more coffee than usual, skipped through the valentine experience and made some lists. I got yet another coffee to go, and went and woke up my laptop. In another time I would have spent the day in the library stalking the aisles like a lowly detective, sniffing out a few references, a handful of images or some obscure piece of a self projecting puzzle. Instead I opened the machine and read carefully what had already been written, an important piece by Francisco Goldman in The New York Review of Books and a moving review of 2666 by Jonathan Lethem in the Times.

Then I searched out the town of Blanes and find an aerial view of a fishing village. I send a missive to my English booking agent: need to go to Spain, need to be standing in the shadow of Blanes. Any work there for me?

Mr.Wooliscroft immediately answers telegram style. "In process of lining up Spanish festivals".

Fate will leave you amputee yet may also whistle in your favor. He later adds that I might be intrigued by the fact that one of the dates he is working on is in Sant Feliu de Guixols near Girona in Catalunya. It is a lovely seaside holiday town that happens to be twenty-five miles along the coast from Blanes. Do I wish to accept the job? Make it so, I command, expounding on the beauteous symmetry of opportunity and desire.

With the future in place I had to undergo the task of rereading 2666. I had originally read it very fast, speeding through the digressions and skipping most of the part about the crimes. I had the need to get on with it, get to the end so I could begin again slowly. Only then could I relax and take it all in, pausing to let the cinematic aspects unfurl.

But I didn't begin at the beginning the second time around. I drank excessive amounts of coffee and began at Part 4 because that's the section I really ripped through—endless descriptions of the victims—slight build long black hair raped tortured decomposed unclaimed girls. I didn't feel like carting around the big book again so I finally got the slip cased three-volume paperback set, each with a different cover. The crimes volume has a Cy Twombly scribbled beneath red numbers and I am writing on the blank pages at the end of it. I forgot my notebook or rather didn't bring it, as I came to my café to drink coffee and read, not write. And I have, as I promised, read it meticulously this time. Crime scenes shot with white flash. Grainy newsreels. Broken charm bracelets. Broken skulls. Stained cardboard boxes holding bits of compromised evidence, skirts and blouses of the dead.

But the thing about reading Bolaño is that he makes you want to write. And, if there is nothing to report, at least spew. But that's all I am writing, the blanks are filled. It's taken too long to write this already. Since I began I have been to Detroit, Chicago and London. I have visited my husband's grave, my birthplace, been to the Royal Premiere of Tim Burton's wondrous Alice in Wonderland and contemplated the death of Mark Linkous. Time to end this installment and begin another. Time to pick up volume one with the cover of Gustav Moreau's Jupiter and Semele on the cover and truly begin again at the beginning.

Today is March 9th. The anniversary of the death of Robert Mapplethorpe and also of the day I met Fred Sonic Smith, my future husband, in Detroit. They are both dead but feel quite present as I continue to move through life. They were both my valentines. And in truth I am really not without. There are the smiles and nods of strangers, the secret hearts of old friends. Now I must finish this so I can dress and go out for coffee. It is 8:27 in the morning and time to pick up my dungarees off the floor and shake out the socks and greet the world.

As a postscript I must note that the Chronography of 354 does not even list a Saint Valentine. But surely there was one, or perhaps several. Some believe they came down through the ages, humble priests all named Valentine and beheaded for their faith. Each one offering a rose to a murdered girl.