The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño Page B

horror movie. Then Luscious Skin came in, kissed María on the cheek (I looked the other way, at a wall covered in prints of women or women's dreams), and started to talk to us. Why I don't know, maybe because I was shy, but while they talked (Luscious Skin was a regular at the dance school; he spoke María's language), I gradually tuned out, turning inward, and started to think about all the strange things I had experienced that morning at the Fonts'.
    At first everything went smoothly. I sat down to breakfast with the family. Mrs. Font greeted me with a pleasant good morning. Jorgito didn't even glance at me (he was half asleep). The maid, when she arrived, waved in a friendly way. So far so good, and in fact for a moment I even thought I might be able to live in María's little house for the rest of my life. But then Quim appeared, and just the sight of him gave me the shivers. He looked as if he hadn't slept all night, as if he'd just emerged from a torture chamber or an executioners' den, his hair was a mess, his eyes were red, he hadn't shaved (or showered), and the backs of his hands were spotted with something that looked like iodine, his fingers stained with ink. Of course, he didn't greet me, although I said good morning to him as warmly as I could. His wife and daughters ignored him. After a few minutes, I ignored him too. His breakfast was much more frugal than ours: he swallowed two cups of black coffee and then he smoked a wrinkled cigarette that he pulled from his pocket instead of a pack, watching us in the strangest way, as if he were defying us but at the same time didn't see us. Finished with breakfast, he got up and asked me to follow him, saying that he wanted to have a word with me.
    I looked at María, I looked at Angélica, and since nothing in their faces told me to say no, I followed.
    It was the first time I had been in Quim Font's study, and I was surprised by the size of the room, which was much smaller than any of the other rooms in the house. There were photographs and plans tacked to the walls or scattered around any which way on the floor. A drafting table and a stool were the only furniture and they took up more than half the space. The study smelled like tobacco and sweat.
    "I've been working all night," said Quim. "I couldn't sleep a wink."
    "Oh, really?" I said, thinking that now I was in for it, that Quim must have heard me come by the night before, that he had seen María and me through the study's one little window, and now I was going to get it.
    "Yes, look at my hands," he said.
    He held his two hands at chest height. They were trembling considerably.
    "On a project?" I said affably, looking at the papers spread out on the table.
    "No," said Quim, "on a magazine. A magazine that's coming out soon."
    I don't know why, but I immediately thought (or knew, as if he had told me so himself) that he meant the visceral realist magazine.
    "I'm going to show them, everyone who's against me, yes, sir," he said.
    I went over to the table and studied the diagrams and drawings, leafing slowly through the rough stack of papers. The mock-up for the magazine was a chaos of geometric figures and randomly scribbled names or letters. It was obvious that poor Mr. Font was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
    "What do you think?"
    "Extremely interesting," I said.
    "Those jackasses will learn what the avant-garde is now, won't they? And that's even without the poems, see? This is where all of your poems will go."
    The space he showed me was full of lines, lines mimicking writing, but also little drawings, like when someone swears in the comics: snakes, bombs, knives, skulls, crossbones, little mushroom clouds. The rest of each page was a compendium of Quim Font's extravagant ideas about graphic design.
    "Look, this is the magazine's logo."
    A snake (which might have been smiling but more likely was writhing in a spasm of pain) was biting its tail with a hungry, agonized expression, its eyes fixed like