A Little Lumpen Novelita by Roberto Bolaño Read Free Book Online Page A

bed with a reinforced frame custom-built to support the weight of its owner. Otherwise, the room had a monastic air, of spaciousness and poverty.
    Then there were two bathrooms, the big one where I showered and a small one where the last cleaning woman had piled the tools of her trade — a couple of buckets, a mop, several bottles of bleach — before leaving for good, sick of the blind man.
    Past the windowed room was the gym where Maciste seemed to spend most of his time, pedaling on a stationary bike or lifting weights, his mind elsewhere, or, more frequently, lying indolently on a long wooden bench in his black robe and sunglasses with a white towel around his neck, thinking about his glory years or maybe — hopefully — thinking about nothing, his mind blank.
    Next to the gym was the reading room or library (that’s what he called it), in which there wasn’t a single book. There were two oil paintings, though. One of them was of Maciste, half-naked, accepting the world bodybuilding championship belt. The other was of Maciste sitting in that very library, behind an oak table that was still there, wearing a suit and tie and with a faint smile on his face, as if he were laughing at the painter and everyone who would ever look at the painting, as if behind everything that surrounded him there was a secret and only he knew it.
    Between the two paintings there was a niche holding an icon of St. Pietrino of the Seychelles.
    “St. Pietrino of the Seychelles? The Seychelle islands?”
    “Yes,” said Maciste.
    “He went so far away — who is this St. Pietrino?”
    “A saint.”
    “Yes, but what kind of saint? I’ve never heard of him. It must be a joke.”
    “No, it isn’t a joke,” said Maciste. “He’s a modern-day Roman saint who was born in Santa Loreto, like me, and one day he went to preach in the Seychelles, that’s all.”
    Since I didn’t feel like arguing, I let it go and walked around the house some more. There was no safe anywhere to be seen. I looked for it many times, but I could never find it.

XII

 
    Sometimes, while I was looking for the safe and going from room to room, moving things and putting them back again, I would hear — or rather sense — the presence of Maciste, in his black bathrobe or naked, moving through the darkness of the house following the sound of my footsteps, the almost imperceptible noises I made, until suddenly he would grab me from behind, wrapping me in a bear hug, no matter how careful I tried to be, no matter how stealthy my movements.
    And then, when I was in his arms and he was bearing me off through the darkness, or when I was under him or next to him, in the bed or in the gym, every inch of my body slathered with lotion, I would give thanks that I hadn’t found the safe, at least not yet.
    And sometimes I imagined sleeping there every night, with Maciste, and I imagined hiring a woman to do the cleaning (because in my dreams I didn’t intend to be his slave), and convincing him to go out every once in a while, maybe not to the movies but for a walk, like two normal people or two people who pretend to be normal and by pretending actually are normal or become normal, and I saw myself calling a taxi once a week, on Fridays maybe, to come and pick us up and take us to a nice restaurant where we would have a leisurely dinner, with conversation about all kinds of things, or to take us downtown, where I would buy clothes for him at one of those stores for big men, and then clothes for me, and I even imagined myself going to the movies with Maciste, and describing what was on the screen, the way companions of the blind are supposed to.
    But the reality is that I hardly ever slept at his house, and also that after dreaming for a while about our life together I would start to wonder where the hell that safe could be.
    Late at night, when I got home and my brother and his friends were half-awake, we argued about it. The Bolognan was getting impatient, he said we’d