Bolaño in Girona: A Friendship

I have written about this before, but I want to tell the story again. It happened, I figure, around 1981 or ’82, outside the doors of the Bistrot, a bar in the historic center of Girona, Spain. I was walking up to the university with my classmate Xavier Coromina when he stopped to say hi to a guy who was a bit older than us, looked like a hippie peddler, and had a Latin American accent, Mexican or Argentine or Chilean (back then I was unable to distinguish one from the other). They talked. At some point Coromina asked the guy how things were going with the novel he was writing. He made a skeptical face and answered: “It’s going, it’s going, but who knows where it’s really headed.” That was it, and the phrase remained etched in my mind, maybe because, although secretly I wanted to be a writer, at nineteen I had yet to summon up the courage to admit it, and I was impressed by how naturally that guy—the first real or pretend novelist I’d ever crossed paths with in my life—spoke of his projected novel. Of course, I was sure I would never hear of him again, that he would never be a proper novelist or would only be one of so many Latin American novelists of his generation, thwarted by displacement, bohemianism, and poverty, but seven or eight years later, while I was writing my second novel in the United States, I included a scene in which one character asks another how his doctoral thesis is going, and the other one answers, “It’s going, it’s going, but who knows where it’s really headed.”