A Little Lumpen Novelita by Roberto Bolaño

 
    Now I’m a mother and a married woman, but not long ago I led a life of crime. My brother and I had been orphaned. Somehow that justified everything. We didn’t have anyone. And it all happened overnight.
    Our parents died in a car accident on the first vacation they took without us, on a highway near Naples, I think, or some other horrible southern highway. Our car was a yellow Fiat, a used car, but it looked like new. After the accident it was just a tangle of gray steel. When I saw it at the police yard with the other wrecked cars, I asked my brother about the color.
    “Wasn’t it yellow?”
    My brother said yes, of course it had been yellow, but that was before. Before the accident. Collisions warp color or warp the way we see color. I didn’t know what he meant by that. I asked him. He said: Light . . . color . . . everything. Poor guy, I thought, he’s taking it harder than me.
    That night we slept at a hotel and the next day we took the train back to Rome, with what was left of our parents. We were escorted by a social worker, or a counselor, or a psychologist, I don’t know, my brother asked her what she was and I didn’t hear the answer because I was looking out the window.
    The only people at the burial were an aunt, my mother’s sister, along with her horrible daughters. I stared at my aunt the entire time (which wasn’t long) and more than once I thought I caught a half-smile on her lips, or sometimes a whole smile, and then I knew (though actually I’d known all along) that my brother and I were alone in the world. The ceremony was brief. Outside the cemetery we kissed our aunt and cousins and that was the last we saw of them. As we were walking to the nearest metro station I said to my brother that my aunt had smiled — meaning that she might as well have come right out and laughed — as the coffins were slid into their niches. He said that he had noticed it too.
    After that, the days were different. Or the passing of the days. Or the thing that joins one day and the next but at the same time marks the boundary between them. Suddenly the night stopped existing and everything was constant sun and light. At first I thought it was exhaustion, or the shock of our parents’ sudden disappearance, but when I told my brother about it he said that he had noticed the same thing. Sun and light and an explosion of windows.
    I began to think that we were going to die.
    But our life followed the same patterns as it had before our parents’ death. Each morning we went to school. We talked to the people we thought of as friends. We did our schoolwork. Not much, but some. After we filled out a few simple forms, our father’s pension was transferred to us. We thought we were going to get more and we filed a complaint. One morning, in front of a bureaucrat who was trying to explain that my father had earned X amount of money while he was alive and why we were due less than half of that after his death, my brother started to cry. He swore at the clerk and I had to drag him out of the office. It isn’t fair, he yelled. It’s the law, I heard the clerk say, sounding sorry for us.
    I looked for work. Each morning I bought the newspaper and read the Help Wanted columns in the schoolyard, underlining whatever looked interesting. In the afternoon, after eating any old thing, I left the house and didn’t come back until I had stopped at each place. The listings, whether they spelled it out or not, were mostly for escorts, but I’m no prostitute. I used to lead a life of crime, but I was never a prostitute.
    One day I found a job at a salon. I washed hair. I didn’t do any cutting, but I watched how the other girls did it and I prepared for the future. My brother said that it was stupid to work, that we could live happily on the pension we got from the government, on the income of our orphanhood. Orphanhood, ridiculous word. We started to add things up. We really could get by, but only by going without almost