CLARA

ROBERTO BOLAÑO | FROM:SPANISH
CLARA
Translated by : Chris Andrews
Image: Maurizio Di Iorio
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INTRODUCTION BY UZI WEIL
You never can tell, when reading a story by Roberto Bolano, what it’s actually about. Take this story for example. Ostensibly, it’s about Clara. Its title is “Clara”. It has a protagonist named Clara whose melancholy story fills its few pages.
But that actually isn’t the case. The protagonist is in fact the narrator and he tells us about Clara from his own, very egocentric perspective. Then again, he has a lot to tell us, about Clara. On the other side – or is this actually a third side, how many sides have we accumulated? – everything he tells us about her remains a sort of mystery, to him and to us. So maybe the story is not about him or her but about the inability to truly know another person? Or perhaps it’s a confession about his own personal inability to know someone else; that is, that it’s a story of alienation and loneliness that celebrate their victory in the midst of the one experience that should be able to overcome them – love. And maybe it’s actually about writing, about the inability to tell a “true” story, even if you are the writer, narrator and protagonist in one.
You never can tell, when reading a story by Roberto Bolano, what it’s actually about. Maybe because he himself doesn’t know, but lives in peace with – no, celebrates! – that unknowingness. Maybe that is why I admire him so much.
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She had big breasts, slim legs and blue eyes. That’s how I like to remember her. I don’t know why I fell madly in love with her, but I did, and for a start, I mean for the first days, the first hours, it all went fine; then Clara returned to the city where she lived in the south of Spain (she’d been on vacation in Barcelona), and everything started to fall apart.
One night I dreamed of an angel: I walked into a huge, empty bar and saw him sitting in a corner with his elbows on the table and a cup of milky coffee in front of him. She’s the love of your life, he said, looking up at me, and the force of his gaze, the fire in his eyes, threw me right across the room. I started shouting, Waiter, waiter, then opened my eyes, and escaped from that miserable dream. Other nights I didn’t dream of anyone, but woke up in tears. Meanwhile, Clara and I were writing to each other. Her letters were brief. Hi, how are you, it’s raining, I love you, bye. At first those letters scared me. It’s all over, I thought. Nevertheless, after inspecting them more carefully, I reached the conclusion that her epistolary concision was motivated by a desire to avoid grammatical errors. Clara was proud. She couldn’t write well, and she didn’t want to let it show, even if it meant hurting me by seeming cold.
She was eighteen at the time. She had left high school and was studying music at a private academy and drawing with a retired landscape painter, but she wasn’t all that interested in music, or in painting, really: she liked it, but couldn’t get passionate about it. One day I received a letter informing me, in her usual terse fashion, that she was going to take part in a beauty contest. My response, which filled three double-sided pages, was an extravagant paean to her calm beauty, the sweetness of her eyes, the perfection of her figure, etc. The letter was a triumph of bad taste, and when I had finished it, I wondered whether or not I should send it, but in the end I did.
A few weeks went by before I heard from her. I could have called, but I didn’t want to intrude and also at the time I was broke. Clara came second in the contest and was depressed for a week. Surprisingly, she sent me a telegram, which read: SECOND PLACE. STOP. GOT YOUR LETTER.STOP. COME AND SEE ME. The stops were written out.
A week later, I took a train bound for the city where she lived, the first one leaving that day. Before that, of course—I mean after the telegram—we had spoken on the phone, and I had heard the story of the beauty contest a number of times. It had made a big impact on Clara, apparently. So I packed my bags and, as soon as I could, got on a train, and very early the next morning, there I was, in that unfamiliar city. I arrived at Clara’s apartment at nine-thirty, after having a coffee at the station and smoking a few cigarettes to kill some time. A fat woman with messy hair opened the door, and when I said I had come to see Clara, she looked at me as if I were a lamb on its way to the slaughterhouse. For a few minutes (which seemed extraordinarily long at the time, and thinking the whole thing over, later on, I realized that, in fact, they were), I sat in the living room and waited for her, a living room that seemed welcoming, for no special reason, overly cluttered, but welcoming and full of light. When Clara made her entrance it was like the apparition of a goddess. I know it was a stupid thing to think—and is a stupid thing to say—but that’s how it was.
The following days were pleasant and unpleasant. We saw a lot of movies, almost one a day; we made love (I was the first guy Clara had slept with, which seemed incidental or anecdotal, but in the end it would cost me dearly); we walked around; I met Clara’s friends; we went to two horrific parties; and I asked her to come and live with me in Barcelona. Of course, at that stage, I knew what her answer would be. A month later, I took a night train back to Barcelona; I remember it was a terrible trip.
Soon after that, Clara explained in a letter, the longest one she ever sent me, why she couldn’t go on: I was putting her under intolerable pressure (by suggesting that we live together); it was all over. After that we talked three or four times on the phone. I think I also wrote her a letter containing insults and declarations of love. Once when I was traveling to Morocco, I called her from the hotel where I was staying, in Algeciras, and that time we were able to have a civilized conversation. At least she thought it was civilized. Or I did.
Years later Clara told me about the parts of her life I had missed out on. And then, years after that, both she and some of her friends told me her life story all over again, starting from the beginning or from the point where we split up—it didn’t make any difference to them (I was a very minor character, after all), or to me, really, although that wasn’t so easy to admit. Predictably, not long after the end of our engagement (I know “engagement” is hyperbolic, but it’s the best word I can find), Clara got married, and the lucky man was, logically enough, one of the friends I met on my first trip to her city.