Jim

Jim

by Roberto Bolaño

Like everybody else, I once had a friend named Jim. I’d never seen a sadder American. I’ve seen a lot of desperate men. But never one as sad as Jim. 

One time he went to Peru on a trip that should have lasted six months at least, but two months later there he was again. 

The Mexican street kids used to ask him, What is poetry made of, Jim? And Jim would listen to them, and stare at the clouds, and then he would vomit. Lexicon, eloquence, the quest for Truth. Epiphany. 

In Central America Jim was mugged several times. Which was odd because he’s been a Marine & a Vietnam vet. 

[ No more fighting, Jim used to say. I’m a poet now, search for the extraordinary, trying to express it in ordinary, everyday words? So you think there are ordinary, everyday words? I think there are, Jim used to say. ]

His wife was a Chicana poet, who every so often threatened to leave him. 

[ He showed me a photo of her. She wasn’t especially pretty. her face betrayed suffering, & under the suffering, a simmering rage. I imagined her in an apartment in San Fransisco or a house in Los Angeles, with the windows shut & the curtains open, sitting at a table, eating a slice of bread & a bowl of green soup. Jim liked dark women, apparently. History’s secret women, Jim used to say, without elaborating.]

Once I saw him watching the fire-swallowers on the streets of Mexico City. I saw him from behind & didn’t say hello, but it was clearly Jim. The ragged hair, the dirty white shirt, the back hunched as if it still felt the weight of a rucksack & of fear. His red neck, a neck that somehow suggested or summoned up a lynching on the countryside — a landscape in black & white, without billboards or gas station lights — a countryside as the countryside should be: endless vacant lots without remedy, one expanse of idle land blurring into the next, bricked- or boarded-up rooms from which we’d escaped, standing there, awaiting our return. 

Jim had his hands in his pockets. The fire-eater was waving his torch, laughing fiercely. With his blackened face he was ageless: he could have been thirty-five or fifteen. He wasn’t wearing a shirt & a vertical scar rose from his navel to his breastbone. Every so often he filled his mouth with flammable liquid & spat out a long snake of fire. People stopped to watch & then went on their way, except for Jim, who stood motionless on the edge of the sidewalk, as if he expected something more from the fire-swallower, a tenth signal after having deciphered the usual nine, or as if in the fire-swallower’s sooty face he’d spotted the face of an old friend, or of someone he had killed. For a long time I stood watching him. Jim, not the fire-eater. At the time I was eighteen or nineteen & I thought I was immortal. If I had known that I wasn’t, I would have turned around & gotten the fuck out of there. After a while I got tired of looking at Jim’s back & the fire-eater’s grimaces. So I went up to him & called his name. 

Jim…, He didn’t seem to hear me. When he finally turned around I saw that his face was covered in sweat. He seemed feverish & it took him awhile to realize who I even was: he nodded at me & turned back toward the fire-swallower. Standing beside him, I realized Jim was crying. He probably did have a fever too. At the same time, I discovered — something that surprised me less at the time than it does now — that the fire-eater was working exclusively for Jim, as if all the other passersby on that corner of Mexico City simply didn’t exist. Occasionally the flames came within reach of where we were standing. 

What are you waiting for, I said, you wanna get barbecued in the middle of the street? A stupid, thoughtless thing to say, but then it hit me: that’s exactly what Jim was waiting for. 

“Fuck me, voodoo me; Fuck me, spellbound” was the chorus, I seem to remember, of a song that was popular that year in some of the funkier dive bars, & its refrain that went: Chingado, hechizado (Fuck me, voodoo me; Fuck me, spellbound). That was Jim: fucked up & spellbound. Mexico’s spell had him under some voodoo curse & now he was looking his demons right in the face. 

Let’s get out of here, I said. I also asked him whether he was high, or sick. He shook his head. The fire-eater was staring at us. Then, with his cheeks puffed out like Aeolus, god of the wind, he came toward us. I knew it wasn’t wind we’d be getting a face full of. Let’s go!, I said, & yanked Jim away from that fatal edge of the sidewalk. 

We went off down the street, toward Reforma, & after a few blocks we parted ways. Jim didn’t open his mouth the entire time. I never saw him again.