I often get the feeling that Roberto Bolaño was forgotten by the reading and critical community faster than he deserved. After his death in 2003 in a hospital bed of Barcelona, a wave of unpublished manuscripts, interviews with his ex-partner, close and remote friends, and even people who were his neighbors in the small tourist town of Blanes in La Costa Brava, in Catalonia, circulated with such speed and abundance that it didn’t take long before all forms of gossip and anecdotes about his daily routines overshadowed his impressionist and post-modern literary work.

He was born in Santiago de Chile, spent part of his youth in Mexico City, entered the United States through illegal channels, and constantly yearned for gaining literary recognition in Spain, where he was for a long time an undocumented part-time worker until a woman saw in his eyes a man with the potential to become a good father, despite the fact that his writing ambitions made him smoke like a camel and stayed up the entire night writing and rewriting his novels and short stories, often until the first lights of the new day entered his poor writer’s room.

Bolaño wasn’t a bohemian or post-modern bohemian in the fashion of the highly canonized European and American authors that spent the night in brothels, drinking and experimenting with drugs until forgetting their names or falling in a bed that wasn’t yours. And even though he joined a few times, and only for short periods, writing workshops, he had nothing in common with those candid MFAs that fear a blank page or the corrosive comments of his/her peers. Despite this fact, any studious and unrepentant MFA student would benefit from two of Bolaño’s writing principles: 1) If you write short stories, don’t focus only on one at a time, write them in sets of six or eights: think about writing a short story collection, not only a story tailored for a specific magazine, and 2) Read and read Borges again or any blind author that comes to your mind that was able to make visible the infinite.

While Bolaño himself wasn’t at all like Borges and his work comes from quite different personal anxieties, Bolaño was able not only to make visible the infinite, but he was also able to map it in a world that while collapsing was also making tangible and visible that we all were about to enter a new reality where unity and multiplicity were both the origin of estrangement; a reality that was going to surrender to the subtleties and configurations forged by fiction through centuries of molding imagination and freedom as the path of entry to a new form of understanding our unique and precarious role in this planetary cosmos.

It could be the reflection in the mirror that Auxilio Lacouture (the main character of Amulet) saw in the bathrooms of the School of Philosophy and Letters of the National University of Mexico. Or the soccer stadium in Santiago de Chile crowded with political dissidents under Pinochet’s bloody regime narrated in Distant Star. Or the searching of Bolaño himself of his son Lautaro in the chaotic and dormant streets of Amsterdam featured in The Secret of Evil. Or the impossible novel of García Madero from The Savage Detectives. Or even the disgust that a young Roman girl experiences each time that she touches Maciste in A Little Lumpen Novelita. Or the devilish description that Bolaño renders of the undocumented Mexicans working in the kitchens of California included in Nazi Literature in the Americas.

As a corollary, once when walking by the wall windows of the formerly famous Café Habana, where Fidel Castro and Che Guevara met to discuss their biopolitical futures, and García Márquez (among other writers of his generation) used to gather for a vivid conversation while drinking Cuban coffee, I saw Roberto Bolaño drinking tea and looking at the same Bucareli Avenue that constantly appears in The Savage Detectives.

A few years later, while attempting to complete my doctoral dissertation at UNC-Chapel Hill, I began exchanging a frequent correspondence with an Argentinian literary friend: Sole Lofredo, from Buenos Aires and Livornian grandparents, who compelled me to write an experimental micro novella, Resquebrajadura/Cracking: deformed and mutilated, this story, where I mention the episode that I narrated above, among other episodes related to the many cracks that haunt those who, like Bolaño, at some point of their life were able to look at Hell without fear or any kind of expectations.