Antwerp

20. SYNOPSIS. THE WIND: "Synopsis. The hunchback in the woods near the campground and the tennis courts and the riding school. In Barcelona a South American is dying in a foul-smelling room. Police dragnets. Cops who fuck nameless girls. The English writer talks to the hunchback in the woods. Death throes and an asshole from South America, on the road. Five or six waiters return to the hotel along a deserted beach. Stirrings of fall. The wind whips up sand and buries them." 29

//Characters to look out for: The Author, The Foreigner, and The Nameless Girl. Caps mine. Also interesting: nowhere else is Bolano so openly interested in spectatorship and the image.//

"I wrote this book for myself, and even that I can't be sure of... I wrote this book for the ghosts, who, because they're outside of time, are the only ones with time. After the last rereading (just now), I realize that time isn't the only thing that matters, time isn't the only source of terror. Pleasure can be terrifying too, and so can courage." - ix

"I think it was my last year in Barcelona. The scorn I felt for so-called official literature was great, though only a little greater than my scorn for marginal literature. But I believed in literature: or rather, I didn't believe in arrivisme or opportunism or the whispering of sycophants. I did believe in vain gestures, I did believe in fate. I didn't have children yet. I was still reading more poetry than prose." - x

"I didn't think I was going to live past thirty-five. I was happy. Then came 1981, and before I knew it, everything had changed." - xi

Epigraph, Pascal: "When I consider the brief span of my life absorbed into the eternity which comes before and after - memoria hospitis unius diei praetereuntis - the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there: there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who put me here? By whose command and act were this place and time allotted to me?"

Other epigraph, David O. Selznick: "Once photographed, life here is ended. It is almost symbolic of Hollywood. Tara has no rooms inside. It was just a facade." - 3

1. FACADE: "My darling, wherever you are: it's too late, forget the gesture that never came." -3

2. THE FULLNESS OF THE WIND: "Twin highways flung across the evening, when everything seems to indicate that memory and finer feelings are kaput, like the rental car of a tourist who unknowingly ventures into war zones and never returns, at least not by car, a man who speeds down highways strung across a zone that his mind refuses to accept as a barrier..." - 4

7. THE NILE: "Sophie Podolski killed herself years ago... She would've been twenty-seven now, like me... Egyptian designs on the ceiling, the workers slowly approach, dusty fields, it's the end of April and they're paid in heroin... all the literary shit gradually falling by the wayside - poetry journals, limited editions, the whole dreary joke behind me now... The boss pays in heroin and the farm workers snort it in the furrows, on blankets, under scrawled palm trees that someone edits away... A Belgian girl who wrote like a star... 'She would have been twenty-seven now, like me'..." - 10

8. CLEANING UTENSILS: "When you think about it, we're not allotted much time here on Earth to make lives for ourselves: I mean, to scrape something together, get married, wait for death.... The men talk about dead small-time crooks, the price of housing on the coast, extra paychecks. One day I'll die of cancer. Cleaning utensils begin to levitate in her head... The two two of them wept like characters from different movies projected on the same screen. Red scene of bodies turning on the gas... Choose just one of these phrases: "I escaped torture" ... "An unknown hotel" ... "No more roads" ...

9. A MONKEY: "I wish those miserable people in the windows would turn out the lights and go to sleep. Who was the first human being to look out a window? (Applause.) People are tired, it wouldn't surprise me if one of these days they greeted us with a hail of bullets. I guess a monkey. I can't string two words together. I can't express myself coherently or write what I want. I should probably give up and go away, isn't that what Teresa of Avila did? (Applause and laughter.) A monkey looking out a putrid window, watching the daylight fade... The sergeant didn't seem to hear him, sunk in contemplation of the dark windows from which people were watching the spectacle." 12

10. THERE WAS NOTHING: "There are no police stations, no hospitals, nothing. At least there's nothing money can buy. "We act on instantaneous impulses" .... "This is the kind of thing that destroys the unconscious, and then we'll be left hanging" ... "Remember that joke about the bullfighter who steps out into the ring and there's no bull, no ring, nothing?" ... The policemen drank anarchic breezes. Someone started to clap." 14

11. AMONG THE HORSES - all of it. 15

12. THE INSTRUCTIONS: "Nowhere did it what I should be doing there." 17

13. THE BAR: "The Roman bridges are our fate now, thinks the author as the images still shine, not too distant, like towns that the car gradually leaves behind. (But in this case the man isn't moving.) 'I've made a count of airheads and severed heads' ... "There are definitely more severed heads" ... "Although in eternity it's hard to tell them apart" ... Shit dripped from the sentences at breast heights... stories about cops chasing immigrants. Nothing shocking, really, people upset because they were out of work, etc. These are the stories I have to tell you." 18

14. SHE HAD RED HAIR: "She closed her eyes when someone told her he had dreamed of a corridor of women with no mouths; then she walked away towards the woods... The policeman moved away without saying goodbye. In the dark, she took off her pants in the bedroom. She tried to decide on a corner, the hairs rising on the backs of her arms, and for a few moments she didn't move. The girl had witnessed a rape and the sergeant thought she could serve as a witness. But really he was after something else. He put his cards on the table. Fade to black. In a leap, he was standing on the bed. Through the dirty windows, you could see the stars. I remember it was a cold, clear night.... She looked out the window and smiled. The sergeant said she didn't have to talk if she didn't want to. 'My links to the Body are almost nonexistent, especially from their own point of view.' " 19-20

17. INTERVAL OF SILENCE: "Through the window, the sergeant watched the trains go by; it was so crowded there were even passengers on the roof. There are no people in them, he said... In a small photo, black and white like all the rest, you can see the beach and a scrap of sea. Pretty fuzzy. There's something written in the sand. Maybe it's a name, maybe not, it might just be the photographer's footsteps." 24-5

18. THEY TALK BUT THEIR WORDS DON'T REGISTER: "It's absurd to see an enchanted princess in every girl who walks by. What do you think you are, a troubadour? ... Green wood, for burning witches, said the old man, his lips hardly moving. The point is, there are all kinds of pretty girls in bed at this moment with technocrats and executives... Close-up of a Mexican girl reading. She's blonde, with a long nose and narrow lips. She looks up, turns toward the camera, smiles: streets damp after the rain of August, September, in a Mexico City that doesn't exist anymore... A man, thirty, sitting in a red armchair, watches her come in. He's dark haired and smiles at her. They talk but their words don't register on the soundtrack. Anyway, they must be saying things like how was your day, I'm tired, there's an avocado sandwich in the kitchen, thanks, thanks, a beer in the refrigerator .. The two of them are lying in bed. Small white flashes of lightning. Entwined and still, they look like exhausted children. Though they have no reason to be tired. The camera zooms out. Give me all the information in the world.... He's a bastard but he knows how to feign tenderness. He's a bastard but the hand on her side is gentle. Her face is buried between the pillow and her lover's neck. The camera zooms in: impassive faces that somehow, without intending to, shut you out. The author stares for a long time at the plaster masks, then covers his face. Fade to black... Empty images follow one after the other: the reservoir and the woods, the cabin with a fire in the hearth, the lover in a red robe, the girl who turns and smiles at you. There's nothing diabolic about any of it." 27

"A girl heads away, walking her motorcycle down toward the end of the boulevard. If she keeps on in the same direction, she'll reach the sea. Soon she'll reach the sea." 27

19. ROMANCE NOVEL: "I was silent for a moment and then I asked whether he really thought Roberto Bolano had helped the hunchback just because years ago he was in love with a Mexican girl and the hunchback was Mexican too. Yes, said the guitarist, it sounds like a cheap romance novel, but I don't know how else to explain it, I mean in those days Bolano wasn't overflowing with solidarity or desperation, two good reasons to help the Mexican. But nostalgia, on the other hand..." 28

[Insert scan of pages 30-1.]

23. PERFECTION, all of it. (La Vita Nuova?)

24. FOOTSTEPS ON THE STAIRS: "The place in his memory that's labeled //immediate past// is furnished with mattresses scarcely touched by light. Gray mattresses with red and blue stripes in something that looks like a hallway or an overly long waiting room. In any case, his memory is frozen in //immediate past// like a faceless man in a dentist's chair... the light bounces off the center of //immediate past//, something that's neither a screen nor attempts to offer images. Memory slowly dictates soundless sentences. //Fleeing together// long ago became //living together// and thus the integrity of the gesture was lost; the shine of //immediate past//.... Was there really a hunchback who wrote happy poems? (Someone applauds.)" 33

25. TWENTY-SEVEN: "The only possible scene is the one with the man on the path through the woods, running. Someone blinks a blue bedroom. Now he's twenty-seven and he gets on a bus.... The scene is a close-up of the man with his forehead resting on the window. The rest is tiny passageways that hardly ever lead anywhere." 35

26. AN EXTRA SILENCE: "The fuzzy images of the hunchback and the policeman begin to retreat in opposite directions. The scene is black and liquid. In the space without memory a freshly shaven man with short hair appears. He's notable for his pallor and slowness. A voice says that the South American didn't die. (It's to be assumed that the figure who replaces the mist-hunchback and the mist-policeman is the South American.) ...The screen splits down the middle, vertically. The South American walks along a deserted street. He recognizes the author and keeps walking. The screen recomposes itself as if it's just stopped raining... thin spirals of smoke rise from some chimneys... the reservoir... makeshift latrines... a farmworker bends over the black earth. He's carrying a package wrapped in yellowed newspaper. The blurry heads of the hunchback and the policeman disappear." 36

27. OCCASIONALLY IT SHOOK: "The nameless girl spread her legs under the sheets. A policeman can watch any way he wants, he's already overcome all the risks of the gaze. What I mean is, the drawer holds fear and photographs and men who can never be found, as well as papers. So the cop turned out the light and unzipped his fly... he thought that the fingers went in and out with no adornment, no literary rhetoric to give them any other sense than a couple of thick fingers buried in the ass of a nameless girl. The words came to a stop in the middle of a metro station. There was no one there. The policeman blinked. I guess the risk of the gaze was partly overcome by the exercise of his profession... She's smoking a cigarette. The policeman, the fake policeman, appears in a pair of green pajamas. From the hallway he calls her, asks her to come with him. She turns her head toward the door. There's no one there. She opens a kitchen drawer. Something gleams. She closes the door." 37

30. THE MEDIC: "All I can come up with are stray sentences, he said, maybe because reality seems to me like a swarm of stray sentences. Desolation must be something like that, said the hunchback." 42

29. A WHITE HANDKERCHIEF: "The cop kneels by the body: with a dejected gesture, he covers his eyes with his left hand. A flock of starlings rise. They circle over the policeman's head and then disappear. The policeman goes through the dead man's pockets and piles what he finds on a white handkerchief that he's spread out on the grass. Dark green gras that seems to want to swallow up the white square. Maybe it's the dark old papers that the cop sets on the handkerchief that make me think this way.... a police car... two cops get out... one... heads toward where the old cop is crouched... a while later and ambulance appears..." 43

32. CALLE TALLERS: "He wore a long shabby trench coat... in other words, the screen flashed the word //unusual// to make him appear. "I'd like to have a word with you in private," he'd say. Under the trench coat there's nothing, perhaps the faint whiff of a hunchback lost in contemplation of the Jewish girl, of trashed apartments on Calle Tallers... of heroes of winters that gradually fade into the past. He removed his coat, took her by the shoulders, and then hit her. Her dress dropped in slow motion onto her fur coat... He rubbed his flaccid penis on her buttocks. Carelessly he glanced to one side: rain was sliding down the window. The screen flashes the word "nerve." Then "grove." Then "deserted." Then the door closes." 45 (The Unsolved Mystery. Antwerp has an extra dose of screen-image-record-film-spectator type stuff. Investigate.)

33. THE REDHEAD: "She was eighteen and she was mixed up in the drug trade. Back then I saw her all the time but if I had to make a police sketch of her now, I don't think I could. I know she had an aquiline nose, and for a few months she was a redhead... The cop would get her down on all fours and kneel by the outlet. She was eighteen and once every two weeks she went to bed with a cop from the Narcotics Squad... The vibrator was dead but he'd rigged it to work on electric current... She was a sweet girl and she didn't try to avoid certain obligations: I mean sometimes she might try to cheer you up or loan you money. The cop had a huge dick, at least three inches longer than the dildo, and he hardly ever fucked her with it. I guess that's how he liked it. He stared with teary eyes at his erect cock. She watched him from the bed ... She smoked Camel Lights and maybe at some point she imagined that the furniture in the room and even her lover were empty things that she had to invest with meaning... ...and she was doing all right, she even opened a checking account and bought a motorcycle. It may seem strange but I never wanted to sleep with her. Someone applauds from a dark corner... She was just a sad girl, I think, lost now among the multitudes. Loneliness is an aspect of natural human egotism. One day the person you love will say she doesn't love you and you won't understand. It happened to me. I would've liked her to tell me how to endure her absence. She didn't say anything. Only the inventors survive. In my dream a skinny old bum comes up to the policeman to ask for a light. When the policeman reaches into his pocket for a lighter the bum sticks him with a knife. The cop falls without a sound. (I'm sitting very still in my room in Distrito V, all that moves is my arm to raise a cigarette to my lips. Now it's her turn to be lost... The redhead walks her motorcycle away down a tree-lined street..." 48

34. LAUNCH RAMPS: "It's a scene of squares, nothing else. They sit on the screen all day, like a still photograph. It gets dark. In the distance there's a cluster of houses with smoke beginning to trickle down from the chimneys. The houses are in a valley surrounded by brown hills. The squares grow damp... From their edges seeps a kind of cartilaginous sweat... We can see the article: in a suburb of Barcelona there's a playground as dangerous as a minefield. In one of the photographs that accompany the story, a slide is visibly a few yards from an abyss; two children with goosebumps wave from the top of the slide. Back to the squares. The surface has changed into something that vaguely reminds us, like Rorschach blots, of offices in a police station. From the desks a drooling man, breathing with difficulty, stares at the squares, trying to recognize the houses, the hills, the footsteps of the workman fading into the brown and sepia darkness. Now the squares flicker. A plainclothes policeman walks down a narrow, deserted hallway. He opens a door. Before him spreads a landscape of launch ramps. The policeman's footsteps echo in the silent yard. The door closes." 49

35. A HOSPITAL: "'Destroy your stray phrases.' I didn't understand what she meant until much later. Doubt was cast on my honesty, my reliability: they said I slept while I was on guard duty. Really, they were after someone else and I happened to show up at the wrong time. The girl weighs 60 pounds now and she probably won't leave the hospital alive. (Someone applauds. The hallway is full of people who open their mouths without a sound.) A girl I knew? I don't remember anyone with that face, I said. On the screen there's a street, a drunk kid is about to cross, a bus appears... a panting cop in civilian clothes, his features like mine if I'd overdosed on cortisone. (The one person who applauded closes his eyes now. In his mind something takes shape, something that might be a hospital if the meaning of life were different. In one of the rooms the girl is in bed. The curtains are open and light spills into the room.) 'Destroy your stray phrases' ... 'A policeman climbs the stairs' ... 'In his gaze there is no hunchback, no Jewish girl, no traitor' ... 'But we can still insist' ..." 50

36. PEOPLE WALKING AWAY: "Nothing lasts, the purely loving gestures of children tumble into the void... The hunchback is your guiding light... And did I do everything? ... (Miles from here people are applauding, and that's why I feel such despair.) ... Each morning the Andalusian laughed uproariously when he read the paper." 51

37 . THREE YEARS: "The only rule that exists is a redheaded girl watching us from the end of the fence. Bruno understood this the same way I did, he just cared about different things... The author said: "I can't be pessimistic or optimistic, everything is determined by the beat of hope that manifests itself in what we call reality." I can't be a science fiction writer because my innocence is mostly gone and I'm not crazy yet... Hands in the in the process of geometric fragmentation: writing that's stolen away just as love, friendship, and the recurring backyards of nightmares are stolen away... Sometimes I get the sense that it's all 'internal'... Maybe that's why I lived alone and did nothing for three years... (The man hardly ever washed, he didn't need a typewriter, all he had to do was sit in that shabby armchair for things to flee of their own accord)..." 52

38. THE GUN TO HIS MOUTH: "Screen of blond hair... hunchback... draws... tact or courtesy... a kind face... I write to understand stillness, not to please... Whether it's art or a five-minute adventure of a boy running up some stairs. "My departure escaped the author's eye." ... I suppose all the movies I've seen will be worth nothing to me when I die. Wrong. They'll be worth something, believe me. Don't stop going to the movies... I have long had this war inside me, which is why it doesn't affect me internally, wrote Klee. Was it in Mexico City that I saw the hunchback for the first time? ... In the center of the black curtain there's a red circle..." 53

39. BIG SILVER WAVES: "The only soundtrack was the dry obsessive coughing of someone we could never see... His camera is in some evidence locker now and maybe no one's though to develop the film... The smile of a tech from the Homicide Squad keeps watch over these scenes. Fat cheeks drenched in sweat. There's nothing in the photographs. (A stifled attempt at applause.) Nothing we can see. "Call someone, do something" ... "A fucking cough echoing across the beach" ... "Faces, stray scenes, kaput" ..." 55

40. THE MOTORCYCLISTS: "Imagine the situation: the nameless girl hiding on the landing... a man of about forty whispers, in a confessional tone, that he, too, is being chased by Colan Yar. The brown-and-black opening shot vanishes almost instantly, giving way to a deep panorama - stores with multi-colored roofs.... Dreaming of colan yar, police cars parked in front of a smoldering building, twenty-year-old criminals? "All the shit in the world," or: "A campground should be the closes thing to Purgatory," etc. ... guillotine mouth ... The guardia civil and tabloid photographers, or maybe just tourists whose hobby is taking pictures of dead bodies. Gawkers and children. It isn't Paradise, but it's close... On the walls I saw furious whales, an incomprehensible alphabet." 57

41. THE BUM: "I remember one night at the Merida train station. My girlfriend was asleep in her sleeping back and I was keeping watch with a knife in the pocket of my jacket. I didn't feel like reading. Anyway ... Phrases appeared, I mean, I never closed my eyes or made an effort to think, the phrases just appeared, literally, like glowing ads in the middle of the empty waiting room... The phrases appeared like news on an electronic ticker. The bum's shoes stood next to his head. Sometimes my girlfriend shifted... I wondered whether the bum was dangerous... Phrases. I clutched the knife, still in my pocket, and waited fro the next phrase. In the distance, I heard the whistle of a train and the ticking of the station clock. I'm saved, I thought... My girlfriend breathed. The bum offered me cognac from a bottle he had in his bag. We talked for a few minutes and then we were quiet until morning." 58-9

42. CLEAR WATER ALONG THE WAY: "What's yet to come. The wind in the trees. Everything is a projection of a forlorn kid... Someone is running in the woods. You can't see his face. Just his back. Pure violence. (In this scene the author appears with his hands on his hips watching something offscreen.) ... "The poetic way of saying you no longer love back streets lit up by patrol cars." 60

43. LIKE A WALTZ: "I dream of faces that open their mouths and can't speak."

44. NEVER ALONE AGAIN: (All of it) 62

47. THERE ARE NO RULES: "I laughed at her despondence... All writing on the edge hides a white mask. That's all. There's always a fucking mask. The rest: poor Bolano writing at a pit stop... "Police cars with their radios on: useless information raining down on them from all the neighborhoods they pass through." :Anonymous letters, subtle threats, the real wait. "My dear, now I live in a tourist town, the people are tan, it's sunny every day, etc." There are no rules. ("Tell that stupid Arnold Bennet that all his rules about plot only apply to novels that are copies of other novels.") And so on and so on. I, too, am fleeing Colan Yar... Everything drove me toward this place, this vacant lot where nothing beautiful remains to be said ... "At least you're with beautiful girls" ... "I'd say the only beautiful thing here is the language" ... "I mean it in the most literal way" ... (Applause.)" 66

48. LA PAVA ROADSIDE BAR OF CASTELLDEFELS: "The Italian girl said she was going back to Milan to work, even if it made her sick. I don't know if she was quoting Pavese or she really didn't feel like going back... The scene breaks up geometrically. We see a deserted beach at eight o'clock, tall orange clouds; in the distance a group of five people walk away from the observer in Indian file. The wind lifts a curtain of sand and covers them." 67

49. ANTWERP: (All of it) "Pigs howling in the middle of the highway, wounded or rushing away from the smashed-up truck" 68

50. SUMMER: "There's a secret sickness called Lisa. Like all sicknesses, it's miserable and it comes on at night... In the weave of a mysterious language whose words signify without exception that the foreigner "isn't well." And somehow I would like her to know that the foreigner is "struggling," "in strange lands," "without much chance of writing epic poetry," "without much chance of anything." The sickness takes me to strange and frozen bathrooms where the plumbing works according to an unexpected mechanism.... The writer is a dirty man, with his shirt sleeves rolled up and his short hair wet with sweat, hauling barrels of garbage. He's also a waiter who watches himself filming as he walks along a deserted beach, on his way back to the hotel... The sickness is to sit at the base of the lighthouse staring into nothing. The lighthouse is back, the sea is black, the writer's jacket is also black." 69

51. YOU CAN'T GO BACK: "You can't go back. This world of cops and robbers and foreigners without papers is too powerful for you. Powerful means it's comfortable, a featherweight world, without entropy, a world you know and from which you're never able to remove yourself. Like a tattoo. In exchange, however, you'd get back your native land, and the laws that protect you, and the right to meet a very beautiful girl with a dumb voice..." 70

52. MONTY ALEXANDER: "That's the way it is, he says, a slight sense of failure that keeps growing stronger and stronger and the body gets used to it. You can't escape the void, just as you can't help crossing streets if you live in a city, with the added annoyance that sometimes the street is endlessly wide, the buildings look like warehouses out of gangster movies, and some people choose the worst moments to thing about their mothers. "Gangesters" equals "mothers." At the golden hour, nobody remembers the hunchback... Maybe "warehouses" equals "mothers," a wide margin of error is permissible when you're dealing with super-impositions. All thought is registered on the path through the woods along which the foreigner walked back and forth. If you saw him from above you'd think he was a solitary ant. Flash of doubt: there's always another and that the camera doesn't see. What poems lack is characters who lie in wait for the reader. "Warehouses," "gangsters," "mothers," "forever." ... A group of waiters moving away from the eye. (But the eye envisions "warehouses," not "waiters.) The wind lifts soft curtains of sand. From here, it looks like they'll try to come back.

53. WORKING-CLASS NEIGHBORHOODS: "The nameless girl wanders the working-class neighborhoods of Barcelona... All of this paranoia, she thought. She's eighteen but she doesn't exist, she was born in an industrial city of France and her name is Rosario or Maria Dolores, but she can't exist because I'm still here... Eighteen years old, so far away. She goes back into the bathroom. Girl kaput." 74

54. THE ELEMENTS: "Movies under the pines... spectators watch the screen and slap and mosquitoes... a yellow face... asks: are you, too, being chased by Colan Yar? ... Colan Yar, of course, and plaques faintly lit by the moon... "Colan Yar after me, right on my heels" ... In the movie one of the actors said "we're being chased by a volcano." ... Chased by the Nagas, diabolical warriors in black leather helmets, worshipers of the volcano, maybe priests, not warriors; in any case, soon wiped out... Five figures flee through a valley in flames. An Armada icebreaker waiting for them at 20:30 hours, not a minute later. The captain: "If we stay, we won't be able to get out later." The captain's hair is completely white and he's wearing a blue winter uniform. He enunciates slowly: "We won't be able to get out." I glanced away from the screen. From the distance the tennis court lights made it look like a secret airfield. Back there, the person fleeing Colan Yar writes a letter sitting on a bench outside. Secret airfield. Mirrors. Other elements.

55. NAGAS: "Movies in the woods? ... The nameless girl disappeared as meekly as the first time I saw her. I walked forward unafraid, leaving faint footprints in the dust. It was midnight and I saw police cars pulled over on the highway. I didn't answer Mara's last letter. The girl walked back to her tent and no one could say whether she'd come out or not. The next morning she was gone. "I've written all I can." ... On the screen, the Nagas appear. Spectators and a cloud of mosquitoes. I glanced to the right: distant lights of the tennis courts. I felt like falling asleep right there. These are the elements: "impassivity," "perseverance," "blond hair." The next morning she was no longer in her tent. Along the death-doomed European highways her parents' car glides. On the way to Lyon, Geneva, Bruges? On the way to Antwerp? ... But I'm safe here, he said, the killer didn't recognize me and he's gone. Black-and-white scene of a man who heads into the woods after the screening. Final images of adults napping as a strange car moves to encounter a greater brightness.

56. POSTSCRIPT: "Of what is lost, irretrievably lost, all I wish to recover is the daily availability of my writing, lines capable of grasping me by the hair and lifting me up when I'm at the end of my strength. (Significant, said the foreigner.) Odes to the human and the divine. Let my writings be like the verses by Leopardi that Daniel Biga recited on a Nordic bridge to gird himself with courage. BARCELONA 1980" 78

I guess something good did come out of the 80s. Ironically, the lines preceding "significant, said the foreigner" are quoted at the back of the translation in my possession.