The Birds of Blanes
My son and I are on a bench by the Plaça Mare de Déu del Vilar, in the shade of two Iberian pines whose canopies have become entangled beyond separation. The dilapidated building before us once housed Antiguo Hogar del Producto, a bar Roberto Bolaño frequented during his first years in town, but it’s boarded up, fenced off, its caulk split and curling from years of salt and sun. The colonnade of arcade arches that borders the plaza serves as a sort of Mediterranean Stonehenge to mark the sea, the shore and the avenue that runs like the margin of a page parallel to the town of Blanes.
Just when we’re about to get up and head to the final stop on the Bolaño route – his former apartment on Calle Aurora – a pigeon drops from one of the gutters of the building and lands in front of us, pecking at a half-open bag of potato chips, and my son breaks in laughter. We stay, both of us fond of the clueless way pigeons move, abrupt, mechanical, and somewhat aloof, as if they are caught between knowing and not knowing, without any desire to resolve it.
Through one of the arches, I watch the light scatter across the sea surface. It begins as a bright emerald near the Sa Palomera promontory, where the Costa Brava begins, then fans outward like a sword – glittering and wild. I follow it southeast, across the span of open water that laps the Gaza shore just the same.
Nearly two million people have been displaced there. I try to focus on the light, on the foam churned up by the lazy tide that just lies there, and then I fix my gaze back at the pigeon, as if its fidgeting body might shrink the world back to the size of this square, but nothing holds. Bachelard wrote that water remembers and dreams, that it holds nothing back. But I fear no memory – political, poetical, judicial, historical or spiritual – could contain the despair on that other shore, lives so opposed to mine I can barely hold them in thought.
Then the pigeon tips the bag over, scattering potato chips across the tiles. More pigeons emerge from the abandoned building: from gaps between roof tiles where they must have nested, through the shattered bathroom window, even from the chimney, which leans into the air like a thumbtack in a corkboard.
My son breaks in rapture, runs at the birds now flocking around the empty bag to scare them off. Some fly off, circle the square briefly like torn bits of shadow, and then land again to resume the feast. Across the avenue, I recall, is where Bolaño’s most famous short story takes place – a single, uninterrupted sentence about a man detoxing on that beach. I wonder what it means to follow language back to the place from which it has sprung, a place the author left behind long ago, a place that perhaps has never existed outside writing. Not a geographical location exactly, but the spirit of a place, a geography of a soul in despair.
If each fire is every fire, as Cormac McCarthy wrote, then each beach is every beach.
Watching a single kitesurfer loop above the waves, its neon-colored kite trailing from one bracketed arcade arch to another, I suppose I’ve forgotten as many times as I’ve remembered that things change and stay the same at once, that they’re not opposites but two aspects of the same movement forwards. And maybe being here isn’t so much about learning something new, but about learning the same things, over and over again.
A shadow falls across the tiles and begins to grow. Before I can register what’s happening, a seagull drops from the sky and drives its beak into the neck of one of the pigeons.
The other birds scatter but the gull stays, stabbing at the convulsing bird until it lies still. Then it tears into the flesh, opening wounds like complicated flowers, and a trace of iron mixes with the smell of sea, fried garlic, and cooking oil.
I stare, stunned. My son is on the other side of the plaza unaware, busy chasing a flock of pigeons that have landed there. My first impulse is to protect him and conceal what happened, so I lift him onto my shoulders and begin walking.
As we pass the bench in front of the primary school where Bolaño once waited for his son, and the avenue where he strolled many afternoons, I now and then touch the rough bark of a tree, or the dry twigs of a hedge, just to give myself the answer of a texture. Day begins to gather itself in. I intuitively quicken my stride toward the apartment, in the direction of the botanical garden, where the coastline hardens and fills with stones that will wear down too, into pebbles, and then into sand so fine you could fall asleep in it.
Later, when my son sleeps in the bedroom, I wash the plates, listening to the bass pulsing from the club by the shore. I stack the plates into the rack mounted above the sink. No need to dry them: the bottom of the cabinet is open, so the water drips directly into the basin. When I’m done, I listen for a while to the water dripping into the basin, like rain, and when the rhythm becomes a slow drip, drip, drip, I open the fridge and take a beer and step onto the balcony.
In the dim balcony light, I open my book of Bolaño essays. One of them, I can’t read, was published unfinished, after his death. It’s about returning to Chile for the first time, after decades of exile.
As I read, I feel the melancholy of dislocation and return, and not in any particular turn of phrase, but suffused through the language itself. I smile at the passages of his son discovering how to approach automatic doors without triggering them. To make himself invisible. It’s a trick, but there’s a kind of cunning in it too, the sly intelligence of a thief slipping by unnoticed.
I put the book on the table, and watch a few moths spiral around the light. Their persistent circling reminds me of the final stanza of Wislawa Szymborska’s Conversation With A Stone – a poem about the desire for knowledge of something that won’t admit you:
I knock at the stone’s front door. / “It’s only me, let me come in.” / “I don’t have a door,” says the stone.
Maybe that’s why Bolaños unfinished work feels more alive than his finished novels. It keeps a door ajar. Not wide open, but enough to feel a presence on the other side.
I turn off the balcony light and, as my eyes adjust to the darkness, I catch a sliver of sea on the opposite side of the street, through the gap between the restaurant where we earlier bought a takeaway rotisserie chicken and the apartment building, black and barely visible. A nightclub has fired up a massive spotlight, sending above the coast a great silver cylinder that glitters with the confetti of confused gulls. From the dark void, rubies and emeralds come sparkling back off the navigational buoy at the port.
As I watch the arcs described by the gulls in the light, it strikes me that instead of the sun being gone, there might as well be a second one now – an enormous black sun that fills the sky with darkness. But the sea below lies even darker, which makes sense, because anyone will tell you: if anything, a reflecting surface is always an exaggeration.