CLOCKWISE FROM BOTTOM CENTER, A. G. PORTA; LAUTARO BOLAÑO; ROBERTO BOLAÑO; JOEL G. MORERA; CAROLINA LÓPEZ; CERCAS; CERCAS’S SON, RAÚL; AND THE PUBLISHER OF QUADERNS CREMA, JAUME VALLCORBA, IN BARCELONA, 2000. Photograph courtesy of Javier Cercas.

I have written about this before, but I want to tell the story again. It happened, I figure, around 1981 or ’82, outside the doors of the Bistrot, a bar in the historic center of Girona, Spain. I was walking up to the university with my classmate Xavier Coromina when he stopped to say hi to a guy who was a bit older than us, looked like a hippie peddler, and had a Latin American accent, Mexican or Argentine or Chilean (back then I was unable to distinguish one from the other). They talked. At some point Coromina asked the guy how things were going with the novel he was writing. He made a skeptical face and answered: “It’s going, it’s going, but who knows where it’s really headed.” That was it, and the phrase remained etched in my mind, maybe because, although secretly I wanted to be a writer, at nineteen I had yet to summon up the courage to admit it, and I was impressed by how naturally that guy—the first real or pretend novelist I’d ever crossed paths with in my life—spoke of his projected novel. Of course, I was sure I would never hear of him again, that he would never be a proper novelist or would only be one of so many Latin American novelists of his generation, thwarted by displacement, bohemianism, and poverty, but seven or eight years later, while I was writing my second novel in the United States, I included a scene in which one character asks another how his doctoral thesis is going, and the other one answers, “It’s going, it’s going, but who knows where it’s really headed.”

Time passes, and now the gap is not seven or eight years but fifteen or sixteen. We are in December of 1997. I’m living in Barcelona, but I’ve gone to Girona to write an article for El País about an exhibition of work by a childhood friend, David Sanmiguel. At the same time as the opening, in Llibreria 22—right across the street from the art gallery—Ponç Puigdevall is presenting the book Last Evenings on Earth, by Roberto Bolaño. By now, Bolaño has in quick succession published Nazi Literature in the Americas and Distant Star, and his name is beginning to resonate in certain literary circles. But I, who am totally outside these circles despite having published three novels, have not yet read him, and have heard of him only from Enrique Vila-Matas, who is a mutual friend. Before the exhibition opens, I have a coffee with Bolaño and Puigdevall. Bolaño tells me he lives in Blanes, that all he does is write, that he makes a living—“a very modest one,” he emphasizes—through literature. Suddenly, while listening to him talk, I have a hunch. I ask Bolaño if he was living in Girona in the early eighties; he says he was. I ask him if he knew Xavier Coromina; he says yes. Then I tell him of our fleeting encounter outside the Bistrot and, once inside the Llibreria 22, I show him the passage in my second novel where a character says his thesis is going, but who knows where it’s really headed. Bolaño laughs; I laugh too. Read More