Cowboy Graves: Three Novellas

By Roberto Bolaño and Natasha Wimmer

One more journey to the universe of Roberto Bolaño, an essential voice of contemporary Latin American literature

Cowboy Graves is an unexpected treasure from the vault of a revolutionary talent. Roberto Bolaño's boundless imagination and seemingly inexhaustible gift for shaping the chaos of his reality into fiction is unmistakable in these three novellas. In "Cowboy Graves," Arturo Belano--Bolaño's alter ego--returns to Chile after the coup to fight with his comrades for socialism. "French Comedy of Horrors" takes the reader to French Guiana on the night after an eclipse where a seventeen year old answers a pay phone and finds himself recruited into the Clandestine Surrealist Group, a secret society of artists based in the sewers of Paris. And in "Fatherland," a young poet reckons with the fascist overthrow of his country, as the woman he is obsessed with disappears in the ensuing violence and a Third Reich fighter plane mysteriously writes her poetry in the sky overhead.

These three fiercely original tales bear the signatures of Bolaño's extraordinary body of work, echoing the strange characters and uncanny scenes of his triumphs, while deepening our reverence for his gifts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Release date: Feb 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9780735222892

Roberto Bolaño

Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City, where he was a founder of the Infrarealist poetry movement. His first full-length novel, The Savage Detectives, received the Herralde Prize and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize when it appeared in 1998. Roberto Bolaño died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty.

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Cover for Cowboy Graves

PENGUIN BOOKS

COWBOY GRAVES

Roberto Bolaño (1953–2003) was born in Santiago, Chile, and later lived in Mexico and Spain. A poet and novelist, he has been acclaimed as by far the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time (Los Angeles Times), and as the real thing and the rarest (Susan Sontag). Among his many prizes are the Premio Rómulo Gallegos, the Premio Herralde de Novela, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is widely considered to be the greatest Latin American writer of his generation. His books include The Savage Detectives, 2666, The Spirit of Science Fiction, By Night in Chile, Distant Star, Last Evenings on Earth, and The Romantic Dogs.

Also by Roberto Bolaño

The Spirit of Science Fiction

A Little Lumpen Novelita

The Unknown University

Woes of the True Policeman

The Secret of Evil

The Third Reich

Tres

The Insufferable Gaucho

The Return

Antwerp

Monsieur Pain

The Skating Rink

2666

The Romantic Dogs

Nazi Literature in the Americas

The Savage Detectives

Last Evenings on Earth

Amulet

Distant Star

By Night in Chile

Book Title, Cowboy Graves: Three Novellas, Author, Roberto Bolaño; translated by Natasha Wimmer, Imprint, Penguin Press

PENGUIN BOOKS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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Originally published in Spanish as Sepulcros de vaqueros by Alfaguara, Madrid, 2017

First published in the United States of America by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2021

Published in Penguin Books 2022

Copyright © 2017 by the heirs of Roberto Bolaño

Translation copyright © 2021 by Penguin Random House

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

Perpetual Motion by Juan Antonio Masoliver Ródenas was originally published in Spanish as Movimiento perpetuo in Sepulcros de vaqueros by Roberto Bolaño (Alfaguara: Madrid, 2017), copyright © 2017 by Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, S.A.U. English translation copyright © 2021 by Penguin Random House LLC. Translated by permission of Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, S.A.U.

ISBN 9780735222908 (paperback)

the library of congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Names: Bolaño, Roberto, 1953–2003, author. | Wimmer, Natasha, translator.

Title: Cowboy graves : three novellas / Roberto Bolaño ; translated by Natasha Wimmer.

Other titles: Prose works. Selections. English

Description: New York : Penguin Press, 2021. | Originally published in Spanish as Sepulcros de vaqueros by Alfaguara, Madrid.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020022795 (print) | LCCN 2020022796 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735222885 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735222892 (ebook)

Classification: LCC PQ8098.12.O38 A6 2021 (print) | LCC PQ8098.12.O38 (ebook) | DDC 863/.64—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022795

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022796

Cover design: Na Kim

Cover photograph: In the end the book will save itself, 2018. Bas van Wieringen

Designed By Amanda Dewey

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

pid_prh_6.0_148340210_c0_r0

CONTENTS

Cowboy Graves

French Comedy of Horrors

Fatherland

Afterword: Perpetual Motion by Juan Antonio Masoliver Ródenas

A Note on the Text

COWBOY GRAVES

1.

The Airport

My name is Arturo and the first time I saw an airport was in 1968. It was November or December, maybe the end of October. I was fifteen then and I didn’t know whether I was Chilean or Mexican and I didn’t care much either way. We were going to Mexico to live with my father.

We tried to leave twice. The first time we didn’t make it and the second time we did. The first time, as my mother and sister were talking to my grandmother and two or three other people I’ve forgotten, a stranger came up and gave me a book. I know that I saw his face—I scanned the whole length of him because he was so tall—and he smiled and made a motion (at no point did he say a word), inviting me to accept his unexpected gift. I’ve forgotten his face, too. He had bright eyes (though sometimes I see him wearing dark glasses that hide not just his eyes but most of his face) and smooth skin, tight around the ears, immaculately shaved. Then he was gone, and I remember sitting on one of the suitcases and reading the book. It was an international public airport manual. From it, I learned that an airport has hangars that are rented to different airlines for storage and maintenance; passenger terminals connected by air bridges to plane parking areas; a meteorological office; a control tower usually at least one hundred feet tall; emergency services located in special units on the landing field and controlled by the tower; a wind sock (which is a visual guide for gauging wind direction—when horizontal, it indicates that the wind speed is twenty-five to thirty knots); a flight operations building containing the main flight planning offices; a cargo center; shops; restaurants; and a police headquarters where it wouldn’t be uncommon to run into an Interpol agent or two. Then we said goodbye to the people who had come to see us off and we got in the boarding line. I had the book in the pocket of my jacket. Then a voice said my mother’s name over a loudspeaker. I think the whole airport heard it. The line stopped and the passengers looked around, searching for the woman who had been called. I looked around too, searching, but I knew who to search for so I looked straight at my mother, and to this day, as I write this, I’m ashamed of having done that. My mother’s reaction, meanwhile, was odd: she pretended not to know what was going on and she looked around too, as if searching for the same person everyone else was, but not as eagerly as the other passengers on the Santiago–Lima–Quito–Mexico City flight. For a second, I thought that she would get away with it, that if she didn’t accept the inevitable then the inevitable wouldn’t happen, that so long as she kept moving toward the plane, ignoring the call of the loudspeaker, the voice would stop searching or keep searching even as we were on our way to Mexico. Then the voice called her name again, and this time it called my sister’s name too (my sister turned pale and then red as a tomato) and mine. In the distance, behind glass, I think I saw my grandmother, looking distressed or flushed, waving and pointing for some reason to the watch on her left wrist, as if to say that we had just enough time or that our time had run out. Then two Interpol agents appeared and asked us none too nicely to follow them. A few seconds before, my mother had said keep calm, kids, and when we had to follow the policemen she repeated it, while demanding to know what was going on (apparently addressing the policemen who were escorting us but actually speaking to nobody in particular), and saying they’d better not delay us because we were going to miss our flight. That was my mother.

My mother was Chilean and my father was Mexican and I was born in Chile and I had lived there all my life. Moving from our house in Chile to my father’s house may have terrified me more than I was prepared to admit. Also, I was leaving without having done a lot of the things I wanted to do. I tried to see Nicanor Parra before I left. I tried to make love with Mónica Vargas. I remember it now and it makes me grit my teeth, or maybe I just remember myself and I see myself gritting my teeth. In those days planes were dangerous and at the same time a great adventure, real travel, but I had no opinion on the subject. None of my teachers had flown on a plane. Nor had any of my classmates. Some had made love for the first time, but none had flown. My mother used to say that Mexico was a wonderful country. Up until then, we had always lived in small provincial capitals in the south of Chile. Santiago, where we spent a few days before flying, seemed to me a metropolis of dreams and nightmares. Wait till you see Mexico City, said my mother. Sometimes I imitated the way Mexicans talked, I imitated the way my father talked (though I could hardly remember his voice), and the way people in Mexican movies talked. I imitated Enrique Guzmán and Miguel Aceves Mejía. My mother and my sister laughed and that was how we spent some long winter afternoons, though by the end I never thought it was as funny as it had been at first and I would slip away without telling anyone where I was going. I liked to go out walking in the country. Once I had a horse. Its name was Ruckus. My father sent the money to buy it. I can’t remember where we lived then, maybe Osorno, maybe outside of Llanquihue. I remember that we had a yard with a shack used as a workshop by the former tenant and later fixed up as a kind of stable for my horse. We had chickens, two geese, and a dog, Duke, who became fast friends with Ruckus. In any case, whenever I went out riding, my mother or Celestina would say: take Duke, he’ll protect you and he’ll protect your horse. For a long time (almost my whole life) I didn’t know what they meant or I misunderstood them. Duke was a big dog, but even so he was smaller than me and much smaller than my horse. He was the size of a German shepherd (though he certainly wasn’t a purebred), white with light brown spots and floppy ears. Sometimes he vanished for days and then I was strictly forbidden to go out riding. Three or five days later, at most, he would come back skinnier than ever, with cowlike eyes, so thirsty he could drink half a bucket of water. A little while ago, during a nighttime bombing raid that ended up not amounting to much, I dreamed about Duke and Ruckus. Both of them were dead and I knew it. Duke, Ruckus, I called, come here and get in bed with me, there’s plenty of room. In my dream (I realized this immediately, without waking up), I was putting on a Chilean accent just as I had once put on the accent from Mexican movies. But I didn’t care. I just wanted my dog and my horse to come into my room of their own accord and spend the night with me.

My mother was a beautiful woman. She read a lot. When I was ten, I believed that she had read more than anyone else in our town, wherever that was, though actually she never had more than fifty books and what she really liked were astrology or fashion magazines. She bought books by mail, and I think that’s how Nicanor Parra’s Poems and Antipoems turned up at our house, or at least I can’t see any other way it could’ve gotten there. I guess whoever packed up the books for my mother put it in by mistake. At our house the only poet anybody ever read was Pablo Neruda, so I kept the Parra book for myself. My mother used to recite Neruda’s twenty love poems (before or after my Mexican impersonations) and sometimes the three of us ended up crying and other times—only a few, I admit—the blood rose to my face and I yelled and escaped out the window, feeling sick and ready to vomit. My mother, I remember, read like a Uruguayan poet I had heard once on the radio. The poet’s name was Alcira Soust Scaffo, and just like me trying to imitate the way Mexicans talked, my mother tried to imitate the voice of Madame Soust Scaffo, which could swoop in a heartbeat from shrill peaks of despair to velvety depths. On a few horrific nights, my sister did a Marisol imitation, so as not to be left out. Sometimes I think about Chile and I think that all Chileans, at least those of us who are alive and who were more or less conscious in the sixties, deep down wanted to be impersonators. I remember a comedian who became famous for impersonating Batman and Robin. I remember that I collected Batman and Robin comics and I thought his impersonations were crude and sacrilegious, but I still laughed, and later I changed my mind and I didn’t think they were so crude and sacrilegious anymore, just sad. One

Reviews for Cowboy Graves

[vive_livre · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

From the start, let's just call these fragments. Released posthumously, writing having family resemblances to other Bolaño work. Should they have been released? Sure, why not. I found "Cowboy Graves" to be a fine piece of writing. I really enjoyed it. The second novella "French Comedy Of Horrors" was slight, but amusing. "Fatherland" a series of fragments returning to his familiar themes but a bit too disjointed to be satisfying. Even his unreleased material is worth reading. That's saying something.

[snash_44 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Confusing disjointed stories of poets in Chile and Mexico. The lack of a clear plot is purposeful.

[soylentgreen23 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I loved this book. From the first page, I loved this book, and the love didn't end until the very last sentence, and it will carry on beyond that. I was not expecting this. I loved 2666 - more passionately, sure, but should that be a surprise? - and I have loved many other Bolanos in the years since, but there have been disappointments as well, Bolano books that should have stayed on the notepaper on which they were scrawled. I'm looking at you, True Policeman. I had my worries when I set out on this latest adventure with the Chilean, but those first pages reassured me, and there are some real highlights here. The unfinished ant-alien sci-fi; the surrealists being led into the sewers of Paris... these tales and others will stay with me for a long time.

[berthirsch · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Book Review, Cowboy Graves by Roberto Bolano

In 2007 I opened Savage Detectives and became a huge fan of Roberto Bolano. Before that I had read a stray story here and there, but Detectives exploded with echoes of Kerouac and Kesey. Since then, I have devoured 2666, Amulet, and Between Parentheses. With his untimely death his estate and publishers have released a steady diet of found pieces, many of which have not lived up to the brilliance of those earlier works. How fabulous that with Cowboy Graves I have rediscovered the magic of Bolano.

Here are three novellas that cover familiar territory to those who have read through Bolano’s work. We follow the young poet as he discovers the world. He struggles to differentiate himself from family and friends finding his way via a love of poetry as he travels from Chile to Mexico and back again to Chile.

In Mexico we see the high school student cutting classes to spend his mornings in bookstores and his afternoons watching films and searching out sex. A young spirit his eyes wide open to experience the world around him. He befriends ‘The Grub” an older inhabitant whom he sees daily on a park bench in the Alameda of central Mexico City (this section, first appeared in Last Evenings on Earth, yet placing it here as part of Cowboy Graves works seamlessly). The Grub, a mysterious tragic figure, a fellow native of the protagonist’s father’s hometown in Sonora where cowboys die on the open range. In Cowboy Graves we learn more about Bolano’s upbringing, his relationship to his parents, early education, and poetic influences. He continuously sites both Nicanor Parra and Pablo Neruda as literary forefathers and heroes. On a boat trip to Chile, “I want to be a revolutionary”, he meets a burlesque performer, Dora, another older female he seeks knowledge from, “she smelled spicy, a combination of Italian food and perfume”.

What I admire most about Bolano’s work is that the poet is seen as a hero for culture and truth. He celebrates the poetic spirit as undying and vital. His characters continuously live within the poet’s skin, experiencing both the highs and lows of human experience.

In the 2nd novella, French Comedy of Horrors, Arturo Belano, receives a call from nowhere; walking home after a late-night party he stops to pick up a ringing call from a public phone booth, a voice on the other end asking if he is a poet and, though unpublished, the young man says, “yes I am a poet”. Summoned to Paris by the founder of the Surrealist Group of Clandestinity, Andre Breton, he joins a cadre of young surrealists living underground where they are supported by black veiled widows of famous Surrealist artists. It is well known that when Breton was sent to Mexico City by the French government he said, “I don’t know why I came here. Mexico is the most surrealist country in the world”.

The third novella, Fatherland, is the best of the three. In a series of 20 vignettes, Arturo returns to Chile as Pinochet steals power from the budding Socialist movement. Activists, artists, and their young followers form the cadre of revolution. He meets a young woman, Patricia, a beauty who guides the young poet, still innocent and naive yet a willing student eager to serve the effort.
The most intriguing character is Victor Diaz who becomes Juan Cherniaskovski, a photographer who carries his projector and slides in a traveling exhibition. The first show highlights a trip to India where holy men and eunuchs share the stage. He later isolates himself, writing poetry and saving a prostitute from her pimps. Sailing for Europe he dedicates himself to saving children from a system of organ harvesting. This brief episode is reminiscent of Bolano’s grand opus 2666: “beggar children, homeless children, are the most common source of raw material.”

Commenting on how people ignore what is happening, Bolano sites another great poet, WH Auden: “about suffering they were never wrong/the Old Masters: how well they understood/its human position; how it takes place/while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along” …

“The silence…is almost total. Every so often there’s a bit of news, not in the papers or on television, but in magazines, like stories about flying saucers. We know it exists, but the reality is so awful that we’d rather pretend we don’t. That’s human progress…Meanwhile business prospers and the Siquerios sun rises and falls like a mad mandrill. The witches touch up their warts with French makeup. The child hunters play cards and fondle their privates like degenerate Narcissuses, fathers and brothers to us all. Diaz…falls in love with an adolescent prostitute and embraces the Terror. His formula is expressed as the curtain falls: if paradise, in order to be Paradise, is fertile soil for a vast hell, the duty of the Poet is to turn Paradise into Hell. Victor Diaz and Jesus Christ set fire to the palm trees.”

Roberto Bolano’s manifesto for poets and artists. His body of work, a testament to his poetic and imaginative powers. He is a grand master. His estate, editors, publishers, and the translation by Natasha Wimmer (who also translated both Savage Detectives and 2666), together have pulled a rabbit out of the hat.

Bolano’s fans have been patiently waiting for another masterpiece; we are happy to have been rewarded with Cowboy Graves.

[hemlokgang · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

These novellas leave much to be desired. I absolutely loved Bolaño's "2666", so had high expectations for this trio of novellas. I did not like the meandering style and did not find the author's prose anywhere near as engaging as in "2666". As is the case of much of Bolaño's writings, this trio have been published posthumously. I think whomever decides what to do with his works should be a little more discerning.

[browner56 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Roberto Bolaño died in 2003 at age 50, bringing to an apparent end his astonishing career as a novelist and a poet. I say “apparent” because it is simply amazing how prolific the author has been since his premature passing! With Cowboy Graves, we get another of his (mostly) original works, this time almost two decades after his death. Packaged as a collection of three separate novellas—although one is really more of a longish short story—the volume reads like a collection of unfinished sketches of characters who have been placed in extraordinary circumstances. If there is a common theme connecting the three parts, it would involve living during a time of revolution or social upheaval. However, looking for such connections risks missing the point; as always, the real joy in reading Bolaño’s fiction lies is savoring the stories-within-the-story that he created.

The first novella, which gives the book its title, is divided into four lengthy vignettes and tells the story of Arturo Belano, who will become one of the Visceral Realist poets at the center of the author’s great The Savage Detectives. Loosely autobiographical, the story covers Arturo’s boyhood in southern Chile before moving to Mexico, where he drops out of school to pursue left-wing causes which, in turn, takes him back to Santiago around the time of the Pinochet coup. According to the very informative Afterword written by Spanish literary critic Juan Masoliver Ródenas, the story was written less than ten years before the author’s passing.

‘French Comedy of Horrors’ is the second work and it comes the closest to being a traditional linear narrative. The story involves a young college student in French Guiana who, after watching a solar eclipse with his mentor and some colleagues, takes a long walk home by an unfamiliar route. Along the way he answers a ringing phone at a public booth and gets a strange request from an unknown man asking him to come to Paris to join an underground surrealist group that operates out of the city’s sewer system. The tale of how the Clandestine Surrealist Group was formed is itself a tribute to the French surrealist movement, which influenced Bolaño’s own work. Masoliver Ródenas dates this novella, which has no real ending to speak of, as one of the last things the author wrote in 2002-03.

‘Fatherland’ is the final novella in the book. It is also set in Chile at the time of the coup and it is told from the perspective of a 20-year old Rigoberto Belano, who seems for the most part to be identical to the Arturo Belano character that appears in ‘Cowboy Graves’ (and some of the author’s other work). The story is laid out in about twenty brief sections that vary considerably in style—they involve police reports, a funeral oration, recollected dreams, as well as straightforward storytelling—and jump around quite a bit in both time and location. At the heart of the tale is the heart-breaking loss of one of the protagonist’s first loves. The novella, which also ends with no real resolution, was written in the early-to-mid 1990s.

I enjoyed reading this volume, mainly for the electric way that Bolaño had in a telling a story, especially those “interior” tales that seem to come out of nowhere within a larger narrative arc. However, reading Cowboy Graves was also something of a nostalgia trip for this fan, given the frequent embedded allusions to some of the author’s more celebrated works (e.g., 2666, By Night in Chile, Last Evenings on Earth). Also, the very fragmentary and disjoint nature of the fiction it contains—“puzzle pieces”, in Masoliver Ródenas’ words—make it a book that you might have to be a Bolaño completionist to really appreciate. Readers new to this remarkable writer should begin their journey elsewhere.