In which we ponder the question: Why, in 2666, does Roberto Bolaño link the Santa Teresa murders and the vanished German writer, Benno von Archimboldi?
No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them, thinks Oscar Fate, and wonders where he had heard this. The frightened Mexico City reporter, terrified she will be killed for writing about the Santa Teresa slayings? Or the giant fucking albino German, imprisoned for the crimes?
No one pays attention, but they affect everything and everybody. They are the gravitational center of Bolaño’s book, a singularity, unobservable in their truest nature, at the moment of their commission; like a black hole, they are visible only through their effects on the world around them, and through the debris they leave behind. Mutilated corpses, visions of pain and suffering, copycats and conflicting theories. A city that twists itself in psychological knots not only to assimilate the events, but to render them horrifyingly mundane.
If Santa Teresa alone was the sum of 2666, the novel might be an explication of Bolaño’s original reference, in Amulet: “a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else.” But instead, twin threads tie the novel’s parts together: the murders, and the mysterious German writer, Archimboldi, whose nephew is ultimately accused of the crimes, and whose presence in Santa Teresa is felt but never seen.
* * *
Late in the final part, already withdrawn from society, his wife dead, his legend growing, Archimboldi meets a French essayist who tells him of a home, a refuge, for vanished European writers. They travel there together and find the other writers watching television, playing petanque and drinking wine, collapsing at the dinner table (though in truth the writers are not writers at all, or at least not in the sense imagined; Archimboldi discovers he has been brought to a sanatorium, and these are ordinary people, simply old or crazy). The essayist lives in a small room with only a single element of personality displayed, an apple on a plate, which at night, when the lights are out, “smells as strongly as Rimbaud’s Voyelles.” Yet it too, like everything, will collapse in the end, the old man explains. “Everything collapses in pain, he says. “All eloquence springs from pain.”
The old man’s apple, the knowledge or wisdom of the writer: Everything collapses in pain, and from this tragedy can be constructed something beautiful, eloquence, art, perhaps even an illusion of meaning. But this construction is no more permanent than its source. It too, like everything, collapses. This doesn’t mean that art is futile; indeed, without it there might be only pain. Nor does it eliminate or justify the original pain. It is only part of a cyclical process of creation and recreation, a temporary aestheticization of the experiences of life.
Writers vanish – perhaps because they understand this process too well? Or because they remember what society has tried so hard to forget, and this makes it impossible to live a life in public? Archimboldi keeps in touch with only a single person, the Baroness, the wife of his publisher (who becomes his publisher), who has never read a word he has written. She presses him to come back to Germany, to reappear, to speak to journalists. “In my worst nightmares,” he tells her. If he returns, people will ask him questions, ask him to explain, ask him for answers. But he doesn’t have answers, knows (as they don’t) that isn’t the point. He has given them his books, and that is all he has.
* * *
Archimboldi is a Prussian, born of an age to be drafted into the Nazi army. In Germany, fighting across the Soviet Union, reading the journals of a vanished Jewish writer, finally murdering a hapless Nazi functionary who had ordered hundreds of Jews killed because he could think of nothing else to do with them; across all this stretch of 20th century history, he is able to witness atrocity, to be in it but not of it. He walks through firefights, his commander says, as if he wasn’t there or the quarrel wasn’t with him, and nobody can hit him despite his height. He watches, and rarely even goes so far as to judge. He sees pain, and from it comes eloquence, but the price is his own identity. He loses his name, and then he vanishes from the world, leaving only his books behind, and an idea of himself, his nephew’s dream, a giant rescuer who never quite arrives.
Women vanish, killed in terrible ways. Writers vanish, Archimboldi vanishes, perhaps because the knowledge gained in transmuting experience into eloquence, and seeing this collapse back into pain, is too much to share.
* * *
Bolaño left notes that indicated his belief in a “hidden center” beneath the “physical center” of the novel. We as readers can’t see the killings as they happen, or the pain and terror of the murdered women. We can’t read Archimboldi’s books, or even (with a few minor exceptions) discern their subjects. Even Archimboldi himself, though we follow the external course of his life and see the objects of much of his thought (the sea, Ansky’s journals, his half-mad wife), remains largely mysterious to us.
What we see are the effects of these things on the world, the way that unseen experiences become part of the texture of others’ lives. In Santa Teresa, we see the police and residents cope with increasingly unforgettable horror, see the twisting of society that takes place as the reality of unimaginable pain slips slowly past people’s defenses, and colors their everyday thoughts. For the critics of the first, almost innocent, portion of the novel, the truth of Archimboldi’s life is unknowable, but they too are changed by the process of probing this blank spot, of chasing him finally to a place which has nothing to do with his biography, and everything to do with who he is.
No one in this novel experiences true revelation, in the sense of understanding even so much as their own private corner of the world. Flashes of illumination are fragmentary, hallucinatory or dreamlike. Even Archimboldi, confronted with the essayist’s apple, fails to understand the old man’s words. Understanding entails a reference to meaning, and the cycle of pain, its rebirth in eloquence and re-collapse into pain has no external meaning beyond its own existence. Art can never justify pain, can never serve as an apologia for something as terrible as the Santa Teresa murders, or the killing of hundreds (or tens of millions) of Jews on the edge of a Polish village, or even the crucifixion of a megalomaniac, horse-hung Romanian general. Archimboldi can only offer a dream of rescue, not the reality.
But without Archimboldi, without the eloquence, we have only Santa Teresa. And that is a thought more horrible than its alternative.