On this episode Peter Orner and Yvette Benavides discuss the story “Gómez Palacio” by Roberto Bolaño.
This is a story selected by Peter Orner for this episode. It’s a curious choice — but not altogether surprising as it seems to be a favorite story for the legions of aficionados of Bolaño’s stories.
For many of us, the favorite Bolaño story is any one that we happen to be reading.
In “Gómez Palacio” an unnamed protagonist is far from home in the country of Mexico — specifically the town of Gómez Palacio where he is staying briefly to conduct workshops with a handful of students — none of whom he is terribly impressed with.
A friend named Montero is mentioned — but we don’t know a lot about him, except that he works for the arts council that helped the main character find this gig. And we can also assume that he is someone who sort of understands the protagonist’s temperament.
A character we do see is the director of the arts council. She is described candidly as "plump" and in other ways that are not so flattering — if only a little tactless.
But this is the way the protagonist surmises everyone — including his young charges.
The director picks up the writer every single morning in a boat of a sky-blue car.
They sit together and have coffee, and she tells him that her husband does not seem to understand the life of the writer.
His perspective is how sad everything seems. He thinks that he is “confusing sense with sensitivity.”
The writer has trouble sleeping. He has nightmares.
He includes odd details about being very thirsty –and the ways that keeps him awake. His solution is to drink water, but then having to get up to go to the bathroom becomes a problem, too. Everything is kind of awful for him.
But think about this: How is it that if things were so awful when he was 23 — all these small moments of things he considers with disdain — why have they become such deep memories, recalled with yes, a tactlessness — but wrapped around a wistfulness, too, and a beauty that he finally gives over in a very particular way to Gómez Palacio.
