Roberto Bolano

Illness and Freedom


Writing about illness, especially if one is gravely ill, can be torture.  Writing about illness if one is not only gravely ill but also a hypochondriac is an act of masochism or desperation.  But it can also be a liberating act.  It's tempting -- I know it's an evil temptation -- but all the same it is tempting to exercise the tyranny of the ill for a few minutes, like those little old ladies you meet in hospital waiting rooms, who launch into an explanation of the clinical or medical or pharmacological aspects of their life, instead of explaining the political or sexual or work-related aspects.  Little old ladies who give the impression that they have transcended good and evil, and look for all the world like they know their Nietzsche, and not just Nietzsche, but Kant and Hegel and Schilling too, not to mention their closest philosophical relative: Ortega y Gassett.  They could be his sisters, or rather his cronies, although actually they're more like the philosopher's clones.  The resemblance is so striking that sometimes (as I reach the limits of my desperation) it occurs to me that Ortega y Gasset's paradise, or his hell -- depending on the gaze but above all the sensibility of the observer -- is to be found in hospital waiting rooms: a paradise in which thousands of duplicates of Ortega y Gasset live out the various episodes of their lives.  But I mustn't wander too far from what I really wanted to talk about, which, in fact, was freedom, a kind of liberation: writing badly, speaking badly, holding forth about plate tectonics in the middle of a reptile's dinner party -- it's so liberating and so richly deserved -- offering myself up to the compassion of strangers and then dishing out insults at random, spitting as I talk, passing out indiscriminately, becoming a nightmare for the friends I don't deserve, milking a cow and pouring the milk over its head, as Nicanor Parra says in a magnificent and mysterious line.



trns. by Chris Andrews


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