Roberto Bolaño: Amulet

[Daniel del Real]

There is a special charm in Bolaño’s narrative that I can hardly express the true joy that I feel when reading him. His figure of an eternal stroller, a globe-trotter searching for poetry and a place to manifest his presence is the romantic figure that all we love literature always thought at least for one moment. Leave everything and turn ourselves to the arms of art, barely surviving but with the feeling of true self discovery in our hearts.

In this story, Bolaño takes a look to Mexico in the crucial year of 1968 (year of the UNAM students revolt and the posterior slaughter by the Mexican Army in the Three Cultures Plaza at Tlatelolco) under the inquisitive look of Uruguayan poet Auxilio Lacouture, who has been in Mexico coexisting with the groups of young poets in the cafes and restaurants of Mexico City for the last three years, where she entitled herself as the Mother of Mexicans young poets. She also helps cleaning the house of exile Spanish poets León Felipe and Pedro Garfias just for the pleasure staying near them. On the contrary, she is not an exile, she first traveled to Buenos Aires and then to Mexico. The reason, she had the need to travel, that’s it.
In Mexico City, she meets Arturo Belano, the unforgettable Chilean character from the Savage Detectives. Auxilio narrates how she met Belano, and tells the story of him when he was younger, before Belano’s history is developed in the Savage Detectives. She also creates the possibility to have visited Spanish painter Remedios Varos, something that did not happen because Auxilio arrived into Mexico years later than Varos died. The poet Lilian Serpas, who had sex with Ernesto Che Guevara and she finally calls the real mother of poetry, and the gloomy night she spends with her son Carlos Coffeen Serpas are two remarkable characters also appearing in this story.

All of these situations happening in a bathroom of the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy in UNAM where she spent more than fifteen days hidding from the Mexican Army who entered the University and took many people into jail. Present, past and future gets mixed into Auxilio’s mind, creating an impressive universe of fiction and reality blending together Mexican reality.

Another Bolaño’s novel, another masterpiece. As simple as that.