A Little Lumpen Novelita by Roberto Bolaño Read Free Book Online

really clean. The bathtub was huge and
instead of a shower curtain it had glass doors, like the kind you see in some movies, doors that Maciste had gotten specially installed, in addition to handrails on the walls that he didn’t need, since he moved around the house like someone who could see.
    Next to the bathtub there was a little stall with a high-pressure cold-water shower that Maciste called a Norwegian shower. It had a glass door too.
    While I showered, Maciste sometimes sat on a wooden stool in the bathroom and ate his sandwiches. We talked about all kinds of things. About my parents’ accident and how the loss had affected me (his parents were dead too). About recent movies that I had seen (he’d seen his last movie fifteen years ago). About things that happened next door.
    The truth is, I didn’t have much to say to him.
    When I opened the glass door and saw him eating, it gave me a funny feeling — it was like he was someone else, and I was someone else too, and I didn’t like it.
    Then I would ask him questions, because the silence he was used to was more than I could stand. So I learned his real name, Giovanni Dellacroce, though
real
only stands for a different kind of unreality, a less random, more fleshed-out unreality, and I learned the exact dates, from before I was born, when he had been crowned Mr. Italy and then Mr. Europe and finally Mr. Universe, which was the first time an Italian had won the world bodybuilding championship, at a competition held in Las Vegas, and I also learned that he’d been to all the great cities of Europe and America (the exact dates: year, month, day), and that he’d been the friend of politicians and famous artists, of movie actresses and soccer players on the national team or for Rome, and that he’d worked on lots of movies, among them the three or four (he was precise about the number, but I’ve forgotten it) in which he played Maciste, and that sometimes he’d been the good guy and other times, in the end, the bad guy, because that’s how it goes, he said, in the beginning you’re almost always the good guy and in the end you’re always the bad guy.
    Other times I tried to go off on my own in the house.
    “I’m going to take a walk around your castle,” I would say, and hurry off, before he could object or say no.
    The house had two floors and it was the biggest house I’d ever seen from the inside (it still is). It was so big that it seemed rooted in the earth. On the second floor there were at least four or five empty rooms. On the first floor was the living room, which Maciste used occasionally, mostly to take naps, and the dining room, which had become a kind of passageway or labyrinth where furniture from other rooms was piled up, cots and mattresses, electric heaters, chairs and tables, wardrobes full of cobwebs, and where there were stacks of old sports or movie magazines. Everything was organized in some way that Maciste never explained to me, though it wasn’t hard to figure out that the room’s main purpose was to clear obstacles and hazards from other parts of the house.
    Then there was the kitchen, which I’ve already described, and a full bathroom with broken mirrors and a huge gouge in the bathtub. There was also a windowed room that led to the big, crowded foyer, full of useless curtains, and a terrace that led to the back garden and the walls of the neighboring houses. To either side the buildings looked normal, but in back, the houses with entrances on Via degli Scipioni were as silent as Maciste’s, no sound of television or radio or children’s voices or adults calling to children or to each other. Once I heard the chirp of a cell phone, but only once.
    On the second floor, besides the empty rooms, was Maciste’s room, big, with its shutters always closed. There was a full-length mirror abandoned in a corner, which Maciste must once have used for daily self-evaluations and possibly also to make love with movie actresses, and a huge