By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño Read Free Book Online

thinking, What a windbag, and graced me with a mocking smile. And he said that Don Salvador’s words seemed to have made quite an impression on me. Not a good thing. It’s good to love. It’s bad to be impressionable. All the while Farewell kept on walking. And then he said that the literature of heroism was vast. So vast that two people with diametrically opposed tastes and ideas could dip into it at random without any likelihood of hitting on the same thing. And then he fell silent, as if the effort of walking were killing him, and after a while he said: Jeepers I’m hungry, an expression I had never heard him use before and never heard him use again, and then he didn’t say a word until we were seated in a rather squalid restaurant, where, as he proceeded to wolf down a rich and varied Chilean repast, he told me the story of Heroes’ Hill or Heldenberg, a hill situated somewhere in Central Europe, perhaps in Austria or Hungary.
    Naïvely I imagined that the story Farewell was about to tell would have
    something to do with Jünger or with what, in a fit of enthusiasm, I had been saying about Jünger and the spaceship wrecked in the Cordillera, and the heroes setting out for immortality armed only with their writings. But what Farewell told me was the story of a shoemaker, a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Emperor, a merchant who had made a fortune importing shoes from somewhere and selling them somewhere else and then manufacturing shoes in Vienna to sell to the elegant inhabitants of Vienna and Budapest and Prague, and also to the elegant inhabitants of Sofia and Belgrade and Zagreb and Bucharest. An entrepreneur who had started with nothing, or maybe a precarious family business, which he had set on a firm footing and gradually built up, making the brand famous, for this manufacturer’s shoes were prized by all those who wore them both for their exquisite appearance and their remarkably comfortable feel, and that, after all, was the idea, to marry beauty and comfort, a brand of shoes, and boots (both high and ankle), even slippers and mules, that were extremely long-wearing and resistant, shoes that, in a word, you could be sure would never give out on you halfway from A to B, and you could also be sure, no small merit in a shoe, that they would not produce calluses or aggravate existing ones, and as those who have had occasion to visit a podiatrist know, this is no laughing matter, a brand of shoes, in short, that stood as a guarantee of elegance and comfort. And among the clients of the shoemaker in question, the shoemaker of Vienna, was the Austro-Hungarian Emperor himself, and the shoemaker was invited or managed to get himself invited to receptions, at some of which the Emperor was present, along with his ministers and the field marshals or generals of the Imperial army, a number of whom were bound to arrive wearing riding boots or shoes from the workshops of the shoemaker, with whom they deigned to exchange a few words, a few insignificant but always polite phrases, reserved and discreet, tinged with the gentle, almost imperceptible melancholy of autumn palaces, which, according to Farewell, was characteristically Austro-Hungarian, while the Russians, for example, endured a winter-palace melancholy, and the Spaniards, although here I feel he was stretching the analogy somewhat, were afflicted with the melancholy of summer palaces and raging fires, and the shoemaker,
    encouraged, some say, by those marks of respect, or driven, according to others, by the needs of his disturbed psyche, began to cherish an idea that had
    germinated in his mind, and when, after careful cultivation, this idea was ready, he did not hesitate to propose it to the Emperor himself, although to gain an audience he had to mobilize every one of his military and political connections, as well as his acquaintances at the Imperial court. And when all the strings had been pulled, the doors began to open and the shoemaker crossed thresholds and