That would be Monsieur Pierre Pain, a middle-aged veteran of the First World War, his lungs seared at Verdun, now scratching out a threadbare existence in Paris by virtue of a modest government pension. In a bachelor’s dusty, jumbled room, he occupies himself by studying the occult. He has gained a minor reputation for the exotic practices of acupuncture and mesmerism, the art of hypnosis.
In April 1938, a beautiful widow with whom Pain is shyly in love comes to him with an urgent request. Her friend’s husband, a Peruvian poet named Vallejo, appears on the verge of hiccuping himself to death from an undiagnosed illness. This, of course, is the same César Vallejo who will one day be famous as perhaps the greatest Latin American poet, but here he is merely one of the first of the failed revolutionary writer-heroes — anonymous, exiled and suffering — who will become the prime movers of Bolaño’s later fiction. The mystique of the down-at-the-heels author always quickens Bolaño’s imagination. What novelist has ever shown more love for writers as characters?
Pain accompanies the widow to the hospital, where his initial attempt to resurrect Vallejo is scoffed at by a French doctor: “I’ve never had much time for charlatans, personally.” Embarrassed in front of the object of his affections, Monsieur Pain retreats. That night, two enigmatic Spaniards who have been shadowing him all day offer him an envelope of cash if he will refuse to treat Vallejo. Pain’s services having already been refused, he sees no harm in accepting the bribe.
Of course, he is summoned again to Vallejo’s bedside, where he attempts to mesmerize the dying poet. At this point, the narrative, already a surrealist’s attic of unlikely juxtapositions, turns even more dreamlike. The expectations of a conventional mystery are thwarted at every turn. Confrontations between principals fizzle. Ominous, possibly gratuitous, figures pop up in stairwells, bars, cafes, movie houses, only to vanish until their obituaries appear at the story’s end in a style that foreshadows Bolaño’s novel “Nazi Literature in the Americas.” Gestures are ambiguous. Unease rules. Trails go cold. Inertia often seems the only course.
At what may or may not be a climactic moment, Pain observes a courtyard drama from a hospital window, then finds a bed and falls asleep. He can’t decipher anything. The world stuns him with its illegibility. This is the novel as Max Ernst or de Chirico might have written it.
The prevailing architecture of “Monsieur Pain” is the labyrinth — the hospital, city streets, a nightclub connected to a warehouse all imprison the protagonist in mazes through which he frantically rushes, only to end up face to face with no monster greater than himself.
Or maybe not. There are genuinely bad guys at large in this novel, villains of exquisite sensibility, as interested in the esoteric as Monsieur Pain. In Bolaño’s fiction, the poets, victims of coups and revolutions, are obsessed with power, naturally enough; and the powerful, more oddly, are obsessed with poetry. In one novel, a priest who doubles as a critic is called upon to discuss literature with Pinochet. In another, an air force pilot who tortures dissidents also sky-writes poetry (“Death is love”) over Chile after the 1973 coup.
Monsieur Pain has reason to suspect that agents loyal to Franco in the Spanish Civil War are trying to assassinate Vallejo, a supporter of the Republican cause. He trails a Spaniard on a serpentine jaunt through Paris. They end up in a movie theater, where, much to Pain’s surprise, the Spaniard leads him to a certain Monsieur Pleumeur-Bodou, fellow mesmerist and former colleague. The men retire to a bar. They argue. Pleumeur-Bodou reveals that he works for Franco, using hypnosis to interrogate prisoners. Angered, Pain claims that he has a gun. “Fire then, you dog,” his rival taunts him. Pain flees into the rain. He returns to the hospital, only to discover that Vallejo is gone.
Bolaño aspired to be a writer of the fantastic, like Philip K. Dick, because he believed the fantastic to be more realistic than realism. It is instructive to compare his work in this respect with that of García Márquez, the colossus who had already spread his enormous wings over Latin American literature as Bolaño’s generation came of age. The jungle fecundity of García Márquez’s imagination is so grand that it devours the reality of his generals and patriarchs, mythologizing their brutality so that they come to seem mere specimens of the marvelous, as safely removed in time as Babylonian tyrants, their menace as antique as the cuneiform on clay tablets.
By contrast, the evil in “Monsieur Pain” feels ominously real, despite the fact that Bolaño hardly enunciates its presence. The novel melds existential anxiety to political terror in a measure peculiar to Bolaño — imagine the protagonist of Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart” if he were being interrogated by the secret police on suspicion of having hidden subversives behind his wall. Readers know, as the characters of “Monsieur Pain” do not, that Paris in 1938 is a city of sleepwalkers, that a darkness soon comes its way. It is Bolaño’s great gift to make us feel the dimensions of this darkness even when we cannot see exactly what it hides.
Funmi Tofowomo Okelola
-In the absence of greatness, mediocrity thrives.